Introduction:
Main point: Whatever else it is, and for whatever purposes we research and teach the Holocaust, some part of that work is about scholarship – by which I mean the systematic study of the subject in an academic setting, with the same rules of scholarship as we would devote to the Renaissance, the French Revolution, or the First World War.

I come to this discussion as a professional historian and the dean of a large graduate school, the University of Toronto, in Canada, and I want to tell you how I look at this subject and understand the passage from the archives to the classroom.

First of all, a personal observation: When I studied history at the University of Toronto, and then at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, there was no Holocaust – no term "Holocaust," no films, practically no literature, no courses, no subject.

Now: hundreds of courses, a vast historical literature, journals, well-defined academic specialization in several disciplines, research institutes, university chairs, e-mail discussion groups, more conferences than I can attend, films, books, media attention
contrary to widespread view, there's lots of disagreement, even among specialists, about the best approach and wider objectives of Holocaust education at all levels: What should be the balance of the universal/particular? To what degree should professional historians be defining lessons? What is the place of survivor testimony? What attention should there be to the sensibilities of Jews, non-Jews, other victim groups? Let me suggest one approach to some answers.

That involves, as one of my old professors once put it defining the goal of all scholarly activity, "getting it right ". "Getting it right" means framing questions to which we don't know the answers, wide-ranging reading, seeing documents in their original form, learning foreign languages, and studying the socio-cultural idioms of particular contexts. More often than not, it means visits to dreary, ill-appointed archives, sifting seemingly worthless paper for hours on end. And it requires plenty of Sitzfleisch. It is the same recipe one would apply for the Renaissance, the French Revolution, or the First World War.

In the few minutes remaining, I want to indicate why, despite this workmanlike admonition, scientific research and study of the Holocaust is the necessary underpinning of what goes on in the classroom.
Let me illustrate this with four questions that are frequently asked about Holocaust history:

1. Why academic history? Isn't memory more important – i.e. the voices of survivors?
Getting it right sometimes involves occasionally questioning the recollections of Holocaust survivors (although almost invariably there are other survivors who remember things differently), and collective memory – disputing received wisdom, pitting book learning against cherished or widely respected testimonies.

On survivors: For obvious reasons, we defer to those who have suffered and survived – and so we should in listening to people recount their own traumatic experiences. For the historian, it becomes highly problematic when the anguish and suffering of the victim becomes a warrant for historical analysis and wide-ranging generalization. For while experts in their own pain, survivors have to struggle like the rest of us to understand the bigger picture. To achieve a balanced, objective view, they frequently must lift aside a mountain of emotion; and it is hardly surprising that many do care or dare to do so. I would be the last to say that they should try. My point, however, is that memory is no substitute for objective, professional, scientific historical inquiry.

"Memory may be mighty," the Columbia historian and author of an important memoir Fritz Stern has recently said, "yet it can also be inaccurate. It keeps us on our toes, but it brings us only to the threshold of historical understanding."

Historians are necessary, therefore, and for at least two reasons we are sure to have more recourse to them in the future. First, historians become increasingly important, as the ranks of survivors grow thinner. In a few decades, it is often pointed out, those who have first-hand recollections of these events will be no more, and historians will become the principal custodians of individual accounts of the Holocaust. Second, memory itself grows faint, at least in some cases, and needs constant verification. Primo Levi, the cultivated Italian Jew who endured a year in Auschwitz, was very preoccupied with this issue both for himself and others. "Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument," he wrote in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved. "The memories that lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features." Levi worried about how memory, when "evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense." Memory, he felt, had constantly to be tested, analyzed, probed – something he did with his own memories, doubtless at great personal cost.

2. Don't we know enough already? Isn't this preoccupation just morbid curiosity?
Leave aside the deepest questions: How could people do it? How could others allow them to do it? May I suggest that these questions ultimately fall outside the historian's province, for the answers – if answers there are – are tied up with our understanding of humanity itself and its capacities for good and evil.

Much more important for historians, and much more the meat and drink of Holocaust research and teaching, are garden-variety questions, asked all the time by historians, but which for the Holocaust are of extraordinary import because we are, after all, talking about the murder of millions of people: Who decided? How were decisions reached? Who acted? Who reacted? When? How? What did people know? How did they find out? How did one place differ from another? What alternatives were there?

Addressing these questions requires some measure of objectivity, which brings us to perhaps the most important methodological challenge the historian of the Holocaust. Among the least appreciated attributes of the historian these days, objectivity is nevertheless what we insist upon in many other aspects of life. There are many appropriate ways to respond to murder, but if we are speaking about an investigating officer, a coroner, or a judge, for example, we feel that their task requires them to keep an open mind about the evidence they assess and a capacity to weigh evidence fairly and dispassionately. When it comes to serious illness of someone close to us, we can respond appropriately as friend, parent, spouse or whatever, but we have quite different expectations when it comes to the physician making the diagnosis. Indeed, with medicine, as with the practice of law or many other professional activities, we usually feel that too intimate a relationship would interfere with sound discharge of professional responsibilities. Simply put, we feel that practitioners such as these carry out their responsibilities best when they act as professionals.

My plea is for the professionalization of Holocaust education.

3. Why the Holocaust? Why not an amalgam of all genocides?
First of all, I have nothing whatever against the study of genocides.
However, the effort to eliminate an entire people, set as a major objective by a highly-developed industrial society and carried out on a European-wide scale, eventually using the most up-to-date technology, is now widely seen to be unprecedented, not only for Western Civilization but for humanity itself. In the past, peoples have constantly been cruel to one another, have tormented others in various ways, have fantasized horribly about what might happen to their enemies, and have carried out extensive massacres. But there were always limits – imposed by technology, humane sensibilities, common sense, rational calculations of self-interest, religious scruples, geography, or military capacity. During the Second World War mankind crossed a new threshold. Nazi Germany managed to ignore virtually all of these constraints, and operated without historic limits, until crushed by military defeat.

In his recent book, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Saul Friedländer observes that if anything interest in the subject is if anything greater than some decades ago – and this despite the fact that the Third Reich is not, as it once was, part of the shared memory of historians and their audience: "It could be," he writes, "that in our century of genocide and mass criminality . . . the extermination of the Jews of Europe is perceived by many as the ultimate standard of evil, against which all degrees of evil may be measured."

Certainly as a result of our understanding of these events, we have a different sense of human capacities for evil than we did before. Some, particularly Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazis but who miraculously survived, draw the bleakest conclusions of all. "Every day anew I lose my trust in the world," wrote Jean Améry, not long before his suicide. Others think that a warning is all one can deduce. Primo Levi's message was: "It can happen, and it can happen everywhere." Levi too ended his life, but while he lived he argued that reflecting on the Holocaust might help prevent another catastrophe.

Whatever one's view, the Holocaust has become a major reference point for our time, an inescapable part of our cultural landscape – constantly kept in view for one's judgment about the state of the world as might be the case, say, for the French Revolution or the First World War.

4. What about the widespread disagreement over major interpretative issues?
Holocaust history is like all history: it must constantly be rewritten, if it is not to vanish from public perceptions or lose the significance we want ascribed to it. Here again, Holocaust history poses special challenges. In his Reflections on Nazism, Saul Friedländer dwells upon the difficulty historians and others have in finding the right words to discuss the massacre of European Jewry. Friedländer is disturbed by the continuing fascination with Nazism, evident particularly in films and literature. This is part of the problem of how we communicate things that are deeply disturbing, but also strange to us and difficult to grasp emotionally. Historians neutralize horror, he seems to say; and he is concerned with expression that "normalizes, smoothes and neutralizes our vision of the past." Does scholarly discourse anaesthetize in this way? Friedländer knows there is no easy answer. "There should be no misunderstanding about what I am trying to say: The historian cannot work in any other way, and historical studies have to be pursued along the accepted lines. The events described are what is unusual, not the historians' work. We have reached the limit of our means of expression."

There is no alternative, I conclude, but to keep at it. Historians of the Holocaust are called upon to provide one kind of explanation, and their preoccupation is not only the intractable material they work with, but also a public that is constantly renewing itself, coming forward with new layers of experience, new interests, and new unfamiliarity. Diaries and memoirs of survivors reflect a widely shared obsession of those who went through the Holocaust: "How will what happened to us be understood?" "Could a postwar world possibly grasp what we went through?" Imagine how those victims might understand the generation that now looks back on their agonies. The gap grows wider, and with it the challenge to the historians and everyone else.

To all of those concerned to see knowledge about the Holocaust extended, I think I can provide some reassurance. The Holocaust has become history, has entered into the academic historical canon, with all of its strengths and weaknesses. This means debate and disagreement, but also research, new questions, and new ways of looking at old problems. It means historians of many backgrounds are applying themselves to the task, many of whom share concerns I articulate here that they "get it right." This is the way, in our culture, that historical understanding is preserved and advanced. It seems plain now that after the shock of the postwar era the Holocaust has become history. And that is the best guarantee we have that it will be remembered.