The Responses of the Lubavitcher Rebbe to the Holocaust: A Study of His Letters, Talks and Teachings

I propose historically interpreting and contextually evaluating the innovativeness of the responses to the Holocaust of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 1902-1994, ("the Rebbe"), one of the 20th Century's most important Jewish thinkers, through his letters, talks and teachings.

Unlike other ultra-orthodox Holocaust-responding thinkers who tended to be inward-looking, the Rebbe, who led the Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidic movement between 1950 and 1994, positioned himself as a universalist in the outward-facing public sphere, particularly in the North American, Russian and Israeli contexts. On the topic of the Holocaust ("Shoah" in Hebrew), he remained, however, profoundly indebted to the language and thought-world of Jewish tradition as manifested in Chabad culture (e.g. Loewenthal, 2020).

The Rebbe's pronouncements are infused with the language of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic texts, the post-Talmudic discourse on Jewish Law (halakhah) against the background of the spirituality, philosophy and textual analysis that motivates it, and the centuries-old world of Jewish mysticism.

This poses unique challenges and opportunities for a renewed academic understanding of Jewish responses to the Holocaust, with wider implications for how tradition-bound cultures innovate in the face of catastrophic events. First, the Rebbe's discourse is allusive, shying away from negativity (e.g., using "the opposite of life" when referring to "death"), requiring contextualized, but methodologically reflective and theoretically justified, "translation" into an academic language of concepts.

Second, on occasion, his way of relating to the pre-war Jewish world, without being obviously "nostalgic", minimises the significance of the Holocaust as a unique historical event. This elusive positioning which appears to reflect an original idea of what constitutes "history" is among the most important, but entirely unresearched, Jewish religious responses to the Holocaust.

Third, the Rebbe's possible encounter as a young man with Continental existentialist thought in Berlin and Paris, may have prepared him to move beyond traditional conceptualisations of unjust suffering - an important topic from the Hebrew Bible's figure of Job onwards - into arguably new dimensions, another so far untapped research topic.

I will treat the Rebbe's thought as a case study for the wider phenomenon of subtle historical changes which traditional conceptualisations can undergo when confronted with traumatic manifestations of European modernity, or the consequences of industrial-scale violence. This is in explicit comparison with already "modernised" forms of traditional discourse, such as non-orthodox Jewish "Holocaust Theologies", a label reflecting Christian-background and Eurocentric categories of thought whose appropriateness will be interrogated in my research.