Shoah
/ˈʃəʊə
/noun (the Shoah)
Another term for the Holocaust (see holocaust).The terrible history of anti-Semitism began, the soil in which eventually the Nazi attempt at genocide in the Shoah or Holocaust took root....
- In both the Rwandan genocide and the Shoah, a state-supported set of organizations committed a centrally coordinated series of actions that were intended to destroy an entire group of people.
- Culpability for the Shoah - and for genocide more generally - is indeed two-fold, encompassing both individual and group murder.
Origin
Modern Hebrew, literally 'catastrophe'.
holocaust from Middle English:
A holocaust was originally a sacrificial offering burned completely on an altar, from Greek holokauston, from holos ‘whole’ and kaustos ‘burned’. From the 18th century it could also mean ‘a great slaughter or massacre’, and this is the sense most widely known today. The Holocaust was the mass murder of more than 6 million Jews and other persecuted groups under the German Nazi regime between 1941 and 1945. The term was introduced by historians during the 1950s, but as early as 1942 newspapers were referring to the killing of Jews by the Germans as ‘a holocaust’. The Hebrew equivalent is sō'āh or Shoah, literally ‘catastrophe’, which is sometimes used in English.