The Holocaust (Heb., shoʾah), the willed destruction of European Jewry and the intended complete eradication of world Jewry by the Nazi regime, casts its shadow over all Jewish realities in the post-Holocaust era. The nature of this event, and the particularity and peculiarity of its assault against Jewish life and Jewish dignity, force a fundamental reexamination of all inherited Jewish norms, not the least of which are Judaism's traditional theological foundations. This is not to assert that these classical assumptions will necessarily change or prove inadequate to the test, but only that they must again be asked to answer age-old questions of theodicy.

To grasp the challenge of the Holocaust one must understand the unique racial/Manichaean Weltanschauung of Nazism and the role of the Jew in it. For Hitler and his Reich, anti-Semitism and the struggle against world Jewry were not only...