Babylonian Exile

Babylonian Exile 
also called Babylonian Captivity.

The forced detention of Jews in Babylonia following the latter's conquest of the kingdom of Judah in 598/7 and 587/6 BC. The exile formally ended in 538 BC, when the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the Great, gave the Jews permission to return to Palestine. Historians agree that several deportations took place (each the result of uprisings in Palestine), that not all Jews were forced to leave their homeland, that returning Jews left Babylonia at various times, and that some Jews chose to remain in Babylonia—thus constituting the first of numerous Jewish communities living permanently in the Diaspora (q.v.).

Many scholars cite 597 BC as the date of the first deportation, for in that year King Jehoiachin was deposed and apparently sent into exile with his family, his court, and thousands of workers. Others say the first deportation followed the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar in 586; if so, the Jews were held in Babylonian captivity for 48 years. Among those who accept a tradition (Jeremiah 29:10) that the exile lasted 70 years, some choose the dates 608 to 538, others 586 to about 516 (the year when the rebuilt Temple was dedicated in Jerusalem).

Although the Jews suffered greatly and faced powerful cultural pressures in a foreign land, they maintained their national spirit and religious identity. Elders supervised the Jewish communities, and Ezekiel was one of several prophets who kept alive the hope of one day returning home. This was possibly also the period when synagogues were first established, for the Jews observed the Sabbath and religious holidays, practiced circumcision, and substituted prayers for former ritual sacrifices in the Temple. The degree to which the Jews looked upon Cyrus the Great as their benefactor and a servant of their God is reflected at several points in the Hebrew Bible, e.g., at Isaiah 45:1–3, where he is actually called God's
anointed.

Holocaust

Introduction

Hebrew Shoʾah , Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”)

Holocaust the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.” The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program—the extermination camps—the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.

Nazi anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-Semitism. As early as 1919, Adolf Hitler had written, “Rational anti-Semitism, however, must lead to systematic legal opposition.…Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”; 1925–27), Hitler further developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. To this the Nazis added a further dimension: racial anti-Semitism. Nazi racial ideology characterized the Jews as Untermenschen (German: “subhumans”). The Nazis portrayed Jews as a race and not a religious group. Religious anti-Semitism could be resolved by conversion, political anti-Semitism by expulsion. Ultimately, the logic of Nazi racial anti-Semitism led to annihilation.

When Hitler came to power legally on January 30, 1933, as the head of a coalition government, his first objective was to consolidate power and to eliminate political opposition. The assault against the Jews began on April 1 with a boycott of Jewish businesses. A week later the Nazis dismissed Jews from the civil service, and by the end of the month, the participation of Jews in German schools was restricted by a quota. On May 10, thousands of Nazi students, together with many professors, stormed university libraries and bookstores in 30 cities throughout Germany to remove tens of thousands of books written by non-Aryans and those opposed to Nazi ideology. The books were tossed into bonfires in an effort to cleanse German culture of “un-Germanic” writings. A century earlier, Heinrich Heine—a German poet of Jewish origin—had said, “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.” In Nazi Germany, the time between the burning of Jewish books and the burning of Jews was eight years.

As discrimination against Jews increased, German law required a legal definition of a Jew and an Aryan. Promulgated at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nürnberg on September 15, 1935, the Nürnberg Laws—the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Law of the Reich Citizen—became the centerpiece of anti-Jewish legislation and a precedent for defining and categorizing Jews in all German-controlled lands. Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and citizens of “German or kindred blood” were prohibited. Only “racial” Germans were entitled to civil and political rights. Jews were reduced to subjects of the state. The Nürnberg Laws formally divided Germans and Jews, yet neither the word German nor the word Jew was defined. That task was left to the bureaucracy. Two basic categories were established in November: Jews—those with at least three Jewish grandparents—and Mischlinge (“mongrels,” or “mixed breeds”)—people with one or two Jewish grandparents. Thus, the definition of a Jew was primarily based not on the identity an individual affirmed or the religion he practiced but on his ancestry. Categorization was the first stage of destruction.

Responding with alarm to Hitler's rise, the Jewish community sought to defend their rights as Germans. For those Jews who felt themselves fully German and who had patriotically fought in World War I, the Nazification of German society was especially painful. Zionist activity intensified. “Wear it with pride,” journalist Robert Wildest wrote in 1933 of the Jewish identity the Nazis had so stigmatized. Martin Buber led an effort at Jewish adult education, preparing the community for the long journey ahead. Rabbi Leo Baeck circulated a prayer for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in 1935 that instructed Jews how to behave: “We bow down before God; we stand erect before man.” Yet while few, if any, could foresee its eventual outcome, the Jewish condition was increasingly perilous and expected to get worse.

By the late 1930s there was a desperate search for countries of refuge. Those who could get visas and qualify under stringent quotas emigrated to the United States. Many went to Palestine, where the small Jewish community was willing to receive refugees. Still others sought refuge in neighbouring European countries. Most countries, however, were unwilling to receive large numbers of refugees.

Responding to domestic pressures to act on behalf of Jewish refugees, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened, but did not attend, the Évian Conference on resettlement, in Évian-les-Bains, France, in July 1938. In his invitation to government leaders, Roosevelt specified that they would not have to change laws or spend government funds; only philanthropic funds would be used for resettlement. The result was that little was attempted, and less accomplished.

From Kristallnacht to the “final solution”

On the evening of November 9, 1938, carefully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence “erupted” throughout the Reich, which since March had included Austria. Over the next 48 hours rioters burned or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked and broke the windows of more than 7,500 businesses. The Nazis arrested some 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 and sent them to concentration camps. Police stood by as the violence—often the action of neighbours, not strangers—occurred. Firemen were present not to protect the synagogues but to ensure that the flames did not spread to adjacent “Aryan” property. The pogrom was given a quaint name: Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night,” or “Night of Broken Glass”). In its aftermath, Jews lost the illusion that they had a future in Germany.

On November 12, 1938, Field Marshall Hermann Göring convened a meeting of Nazi officials to discuss the damage to the German economy from pogroms. The Jewish community was fined one billion Reichsmarks. Moreover, Jews were made responsible for cleaning up the damage. German Jews, but not foreign Jews, were barred from collecting insurance. In addition, Jews were soon denied entry to theatres, forced to travel in separate compartments on trains, and excluded from German schools. These new restrictions were added to earlier prohibitions, such as those barring Jews from earning university degrees, from owning businesses, or from practicing law or medicine in the service of non-Jews. The Nazis would continue to confiscate Jewish property in a program called “Aryanization.” Göring concluded the November meeting with a note of irony: “I would not like to be a Jew in Germany!”

Non-Jewish victims of Nazism

While Jews were the primary victims of Nazism as it evolved and were central to Nazi racial ideology, other groups were victimized as well—some for what they did, some for what they refused to do, and some for what they were.

Political dissidents, trade unionists, and Social Democrats were among the first to be arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Under the Weimar government, centuries-old prohibitions against homosexuality had been overlooked, but this tolerance ended violently when the SA (Storm Troopers) began raiding gay bars in 1933. Homosexual intent became just cause for prosecution. The Nazis arrested German and Austrian male homosexuals—there was no systematic persecution of lesbians—and interned them in concentration camps, where they were forced to wear special yellow armbands and later pink triangles. Jehovah's Witnesses were a problem for the Nazis because they refused to swear allegiance to the state, register for the draft, or utter the words “Heil Hitler.” As a result the Nazis imprisoned many of the roughly 20,000 Witnesses in Germany. The Nazis also singled out the Roma (Gypsies). They were the only other group that the Nazis systematically killed in gas chambers alongside the Jews.

In 1939 the Germans initiated the T4 Program—framed euphemistically as a “euthanasia” program—for the murder of mentally retarded, physically disabled, and emotionally disturbed Germans who departed from the Nazi ideal of Aryan supremacy. The Nazis pioneered the use of gas chambers and mass crematoria under this program.

Following the invasion of Poland, German occupation policy especially targeted the Jews but also brutalized non-Jewish Poles. In pursuit of Lebensraum (“living space”), Germany sought systematically to destroy Polish society and nationhood. The Nazis killed Polish priests and politicians, decimated the Polish leadership, and kidnapped the children of the Polish elite, who were raised as “voluntary Aryans” by their new German “parents.” Many Poles were also forced to perform hard labour on survival diets, deprived of property and uprooted, and interned in concentration camps.

Nazi expansion and the formation of ghettos

Paradoxically, at the same time that Germany tried to rid itself of its Jews via forced emigration, its territorial expansions kept bringing more Jews under its control. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and the Sudetenland (now in the Czech Republic) in September 1938. It established control over the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) in March 1939. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the “Jewish question” became urgent. When the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union was complete, more than two million more Jews had come under German control. For a time, the Nazis considered shipping the Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. But as the seas became a war zone and the resources required for such a massive deportation scarce, they discarded the plan as impractical.

On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the establishment of the Judenräte (“Jewish Councils”), comprising up to 24 men—rabbis and Jewish leaders. Heydrich's order made these councils personally responsible in “the literal sense of the term” for carrying out German orders. When the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest of German-occupied Poland's 400 ghettos, in the fall of 1940, the Jews—then 30 percent of Warsaw's population—were forced into 2.4 percent of the city's area. The ghetto's population reached a density of over 200,000 persons per square mile (77,000 per square km) and 9.2 per room. Disease, malnutrition, hunger, and poverty took their toll even before the first bullet was fired.

For the German rulers, the ghetto was a temporary measure, a holding pen for the Jewish population until a policy on its fate could be established and implemented. For the Jews, ghetto life was the situation under which they thought they would be forced to live until the end of the war. They aimed to make life bearable, even under the most trying circumstances. When the Nazis prohibited schools, they opened clandestine schools. When the Nazis banned religious life, it persisted in hiding. The Jews used humour as a means of defiance, so too song. They resorted to arms only late in the Nazi assault.

Historians differ on the date of the decision to murder Jews systematically, the so-called “final solution to the Jewish question.” There is debate about whether there was one central decision or a series of regional decisions in response to local conditions; but in either case, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, its former ally, in June of 1941, the Nazis began the systematic killing of Jews.

The Einsatzgruppen

Entering conquered Soviet territories alongside the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) were 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”), special mobile killing units. Their task was to murder Jews, Soviet commissars, and Roma in the areas conquered by the army. Alone or with the help of local police, native anti-Semitic populations, and accompanying Axis troops, the Einsatzgruppen would enter a town, round up their victims, herd them to the outskirts of the town, and shoot them. They killed Jews in family units. Just outside Kiev, Ukraine, in the valley of Baby Yar, an Einsatzgruppe killed 33,771 Jews on September 28–29, 1941. In the Rumbula Forest outside the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, 25,000–28,000 Jews died on November 30 and December 8–9. Beginning in the summer of 1941, Einsatzgruppen killed more than 70,000 Jews at Ponary, outside Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania. They slaughtered 9,000 Jews, half of them children, at the Ninth Fort adjacent to Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania, on October 28.

The mass shootings continued unabated, with a first wave and then a second. When the killing ended in the face of a Soviet counteroffensive, special units returned to dig up the dead and burn their bodies to destroy the evidence of the crimes. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed more than one million people, most of whom were Jews.

Historians are divided about the motivations of the members of Einsatzgruppen. Christopher Browning describes them as ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances in which conformity, peer pressure, careerism, obedience to orders, and group solidarity gradually overcame moral inhibitions. Daniel Goldhagen sees them as “willing executioners,” sharing Hitler's vision of genocidal anti-Semitism and finding their tasks unpleasant but necessary. Both concur that no Einsatzgruppe member faced punishment if he asked to be excused. Individuals had a choice whether to participate or not. Almost all chose to become killers.

The extermination camps

On January 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference at a lakeside villa in a Berlin suburb to organize the “final solution to the Jewish question.” Around the table were 15 men representing government agencies necessary to implement so bold and sweeping a policy. The language of the meeting was clear, but the meeting notes were circumspect: “Another possible solution to the [Jewish] question has now taken the place of emigration, i.e., evacuation to the east.…Practical experience is already being collected which is of the greatest importance in the relation to the future final solution of the Jewish question.” Participants understood “evacuation to the east” to mean deportation to killing centres.

In early 1942 the Nazis built extermination camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec in Poland. The death camps were to be the essential instrument of the “final solution.” The Einsatzgruppen had traveled to kill their victims. With the extermination camps, the process was reversed. The victims traveled by train, often in cattle cars, to their killers. The extermination camps became factories producing corpses, effectively and efficiently, at minimal physical and psychological cost to German personnel. Assisted by Ukrainian and Latvian collaborators and prisoners of war, a few Germans could kill tens of thousands of prisoners each month. At Chelmno, the first of the extermination camps, the Nazis used mobile gas vans. Elsewhere, they built permanent gas chambers linked to the crematoria where bodies were burned. Carbon monoxide was the gas of choice at most camps. Zyklon-B, an especially lethal killing agent, was employed primarily at Auschwitz and later at other camps.

Auschwitz, perhaps the most notorious and lethal of the concentration camps, was actually three camps in one: a prison camp (Auschwitz I), an extermination camp (Auschwitz II–Birkenau), and a slave-labour camp (Auschwitz III–Buna-Monowitz). Upon arrival, Jewish prisoners faced what was called a Selektion. A German doctor presided over the selection of pregnant women, young children, the elderly, handicapped, sick, and infirm for immediate death in the gas chambers. As necessary, the Germans selected able-bodied prisoners for forced labour in the factories adjacent to Auschwitz where one German company, IG Farben, invested 700,000 million Reichsmarks in 1942 alone to take advantage of forced labour. Deprived of adequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, these prisoners were literally worked to death. Periodically, they would face another Selektion. The Nazis would transfer those unable to work to the gas chambers of Birkenau.

While the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek used inmates for slave labour to support the German war effort, the extermination camps at Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor had one task alone: killing. At Treblinka, a staff of 120, of whom only 30 were SS (the Nazi paramilitary corps), killed some 750,000 to 900,000 Jews during the camp's 17 months of operation. At Belzec, German records detail a staff of 104, including about 20 SS, who killed some 600,000 Jews in less than 10 months. At Sobibor, they murdered about 250,000. These camps began operation during the spring and summer of 1942, when the ghettos of German-occupied Poland were filled with Jews. Once they had completed their missions—murder by gassing, or “resettlement in the east,” to use the language of the Wannsee protocols—the Nazis closed the camps. There were six extermination camps, all in German-occupied Poland, among the thousands of concentration and slave-labour camps throughout German-occupied Europe.

The impact of the Holocaust varied from region to region, and from year to year in the 21 countries that were directly affected. Nowhere was the Holocaust more intense and sudden than in Hungary. What took place over several years in Germany occurred over 16 weeks in Hungary. Entering the war as a German ally, Hungary had persecuted its Jews but not permitted their deportation. After Germany invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, this situation changed dramatically. By mid-April the Nazis had confined Jews to ghettos. On May 15, deportations began, and over the next 55 days, the Nazis deported some 438,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz on 147 trains.

Policies differed widely among Germany's Balkan allies. In Romania it was primarily the Romanians themselves who slaughtered the country's Jews. Toward the end of the war, however, when the defeat of Germany was all but certain, the Romanian government found more value in living Jews who could be held for ransom or used as leverage with the West. Bulgaria permitted the deportation of Jews from neighbouring Thrace and Macedonia, but government leaders faced stiff opposition to the deportation of native Bulgarian Jews.

German-occupied Denmark rescued most of its own Jews by spiriting them to Sweden by sea in October 1943. This was possible partly because the German presence in Denmark was relatively small. Moreover, while anti-Semitism in the general population of many other countries led to collaboration with the Germans, Jews were an integrated part of Danish culture. Under these unique circumstances, Danish humanitarianism flourished.

In France, Jews under Fascist Italian occupation in the southeast fared better than the Jews of Vichy France, where collaborationist French authorities and police provided essential support to the understaffed German forces. The Jews in those parts of France under direct German occupation fared the worst. Although allied with Germany, the Italians did not participate in the Holocaust until Germany occupied northern Italy after the overthrow of the Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini.

Throughout German-occupied territory the situation of Jews was desperate. They had meagre resources and few allies and faced impossible choices. A few people came to their rescue, often at the risk of their own lives. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944, in an effort to save Hungary's sole remaining Jewish community. Over the next six months, he worked with other neutral diplomats, the Vatican, and Jews themselves to prevent the deportation of these last Jews. Elsewhere, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French Huguenot village, became a haven for 5,000 Jews. In Poland, where it was illegal to aid Jews and where such action was punishable by death, the Zegota (Council for Aid to Jews) rescued a similar number of Jewish men, women, and children. Financed by the Polish government in exile and involving a wide range of clandestine political organizations, the Zegota provided hiding places, financial support, and forged identity documents.

Some Germans, even some Nazis, dissented from the murder of the Jews and came to their aid. The most famous was Oskar Schindler, a Nazi businessman, who had set up operations using involuntary labour in German-occupied Poland in order to profit from the war. Eventually, he moved to protect his Jewish workers from deportation to extermination camps. In all occupied countries, there were individuals who came to the rescue of Jews, offering a place to hide, some food, or shelter for days, weeks, or even for the duration of the war. Most of the rescuers did not see their actions as heroic but felt bound to the Jews by a common sense of humanity. Israel later recognized rescuers with honorary citizenship and commemoration at Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the Holocaust.

Jewish resistance

It is often asked why Jews did not make greater attempts at resistance. Principally they had no access to arms and were surrounded by native anti-Semitic populations who collaborated with the Nazis or condoned the elimination of the Jews. In essence the Jews stood alone against a German war machine zealously determined to carry out the “final solution.” Moreover, the Nazis went to great lengths to disguise their ultimate plans. Because of the German policy of collective reprisal, Jews in the ghettos often hesitated to resist. This changed when the Germans ordered the final liquidation of the ghettos, and residents recognized the imminence of their death.

Jews resisted in the forests, in the ghettos, and even in the death camps. They fought alone and alongside resistance groups in France, Yugoslavia, and Russia. As a rule, full-scale uprisings occurred only at the end, when Jews realized the inevitability of impending death. On April 19, 1943, nine months after the massive deportations of Warsaw's Jews to Treblinka had begun, the Jewish resistance, led by 24-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, mounted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Vilna partisan leader Abba Kovner, recognizing the full intent of Nazi policy toward the Jews, called for resistance in December 1941 and organized an armed force that fought the Germans in September 1943. In March of that year, a resistance group led by Willem Arondeus, a homosexual artist and author, bombed a population registry in Amsterdam to destroy the records of Jews and others sought by the Nazis. At Treblinka and Sobibor uprisings occurred just as the extermination camps were being dismantled and their remaining prisoners were soon to be killed. This was also true at Auschwitz, where the Sonderkommando (“Special Commando”), the prisoner unit that worked in the vicinity of the gas chambers, destroyed a crematorium just as the killing was coming to an end in 1944.

By the winter of 1944–45, with Allied armies closing in, desperate SS officials tried frantically to evacuate the camps and conceal what had taken place. They wanted no eyewitnesses remaining. Prisoners were moved westward, forced to march toward the heartland of Germany. There were over 50 different marches from Nazi concentration and extermination camps during this final winter of Nazi domination, some covering hundreds of miles. The prisoners were given little or no food and water, and almost no time to rest or take care of bodily needs. Those who paused or fell behind were shot. In January 1945, just hours before the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz, the Nazis marched some 60,000 prisoners to Wodzisław and put them on freight trains to the camps at Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen. Nearly one in four died en route.

In April and May of 1945, American and British forces en route to military targets entered the concentration camps in the west and caught a glimpse of what had occurred. Even though tens of thousands of prisoners had perished, these camps were far from the most deadly. Still, even for the battle-weary soldiers who thought they had already seen the worst, the sights and smells and the emaciated survivors they encountered left an indelible impression. At Dachau they came upon 28 railway cars stuffed with dead bodies. Conditions were so horrendous at Bergen-Belsen that some 28,000 inmates died after they were freed, and the entire camp had to be burned to prevent the spread of typhus. Allied soldiers had to perform tasks for which they were ill-trained: to heal the sick, comfort the bereaved, and bury the dead. As for the victims, liberation was not a moment of exultation. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, recalled, “Everything was unreal. Unlikely as in a dream. Only later—and for some it was very much later or never—was liberation actually liberating.”

The Allies, who had early and accurate information on the murder of the Jews, made no special military efforts to rescue them or to bomb the camps or the railroad tracks leading to them. (See Sidebar: Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed?) They felt that only after victory could something be done about the Jewish situation. Warnings were issued, condemnations were made, plans proceeded to try the guilty after the war, but no concrete action was undertaken specifically to halt the genocide. An internal memo to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., from his general counsel in January 1944 characterized U.S. State Department policy as “acquiescence to the murder of the European Jews.” In response Morgenthau helped spur the creation of the War Refugee Board, which made a late and limited effort to rescue endangered Jews, mainly through diplomacy and subterfuge.

The aftermath

Although the Germans killed victims from several groups, the Holocaust is primarily associated with the murder of the Jews. Only the Jews were targeted for total annihilation, and their elimination was central to Hitler's vision of the “New Germany.” The intensity of the Nazi campaign against the Jews continued unabated to the very end of the war and at points even took priority over German military efforts.

When the war ended, Allied armies found between seven and nine million displaced persons living outside their own countries. More than six million people returned to their native lands, but more than one million refused repatriation. Some had collaborated with the Nazis and feared retaliation. Others feared persecution under the new communist regimes. For the Jews, the situation was different. They had no homes to return to. Their communities had been shattered, their homes destroyed or occupied by strangers, and their families decimated and dispersed. First came the often long and difficult physical recuperation from starvation and malnutrition, then the search for loved ones lost or missing, and finally the question of the future.

Many Jews lived in displaced-persons camps. At first they were forced to dwell among their killers because the Allies did not differentiate on the basis of religion, merely by nationality. Their presence on European soil and the absence of a country willing to receive them increased the pressure on Britain to resolve the issue of a Jewish homeland in British-administered Palestine. Both well-publicized and clandestine efforts were made to bring Jews to Palestine. In fact, it was not until after the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the liberalization of American immigration laws in 1948 and 1949 (allowing the admission of refugees from Europe) that the problem of finding homes for the survivors was solved.

Upon liberating the camps, many Allied units were so shocked by what they saw that they meted out spontaneous punishment to some of the remaining SS personnel. Others were arrested and held for trial. The most famous of the postwar trials occurred in 1945–46 at Nürnberg, the former site of Nazi Party rallies. There, the International Military Tribunal tried 22 major Nazi officials for war crimes, crimes against the peace, and a new category of crimes: crimes against humanity. This new category encompassed “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population…persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds…whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of the country where perpetrated.” After the first trials, 185 defendants were divided into 12 groups, including physicians responsible for medical experimentation (but not so-called euthanasia), judges who preserved the facade of legality for Nazi crimes, Einsatzgruppe leaders, commandants of concentration camps, German generals, and business leaders who profited from slave labour. The defendants made up, however, a miniscule fraction of those who had perpetrated the crimes. In the eyes of many, their trials were a desperate, inadequate, but necessary effort to restore a semblance of justice in the aftermath of so great a crime. The Nürnberg trials established the precedent, later enshrined by international convention, that crimes against humanity are punishable by an international tribunal.

Over the ensuing half-century, additional trials further documented the nature of the crimes and had a public as well as a judicial impact. The 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, who supervised the deportations of Jews to the death camps, not only brought him to justice but made a new generation of Israelis keenly aware of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, between 1963 and 1976 increased the German public's knowledge of the killing and its pervasiveness. The trials in France of Klaus Barbie (1987) and Maurice Papon (1996–98) and the revelations of Franƈois Mitterrand in 1994 concerning his indifference toward Vichy France's anti-Jewish policy called into question the notion of French resistance and forced the French to deal with the issue of collaboration. These trials also became precedents as world leaders considered responses to other crimes against humanity in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda.

The defeat of Nazi Germany left a bitter legacy for the German leadership and people. Germans had committed crimes in the name of the German people. German culture and the German leadership—political, intellectual, social, and religious—had participated or been complicit in the Nazi crimes or been ineffective in opposing them. In an effort to rehabilitate the good name of the German people, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) firmly established a democracy that protected the human rights of all its citizens and made financial reparations to the Jewish people in an agreement passed by parliament in 1953. West German democratic leaders made special efforts to achieve friendly relations with Israel. In the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the communist leaders attempted to absolve their population of responsibility for the crimes, portraying themselves as the victims of the Nazis, and Nazism as a manifestation of capitalism. The first gesture of the postcommunist parliament of East Germany, however, was an apology to the Jewish people. At one of its first meetings in the newly renovated Reichstag building in 1999, the German parliament voted to erect a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. The first state visitor to Berlin after its reestablishment as capital of a united Germany was Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the history of the Holocaust continued to be unsettling. The Swiss government and its bankers had to confront their role as bankers to the Nazis and in recycling gold and valuables taken from the victims. Under the leadership of German prime minister Gerhard Schröder, German corporations and the German government established a fund to compensate Jews and non-Jews who worked in German slave labour and forced labour programs during the war. Insurance companies were negotiating over claims from descendants of policyholders killed during the war—claims that the companies denied immediately after the war by imposing prohibitive conditions, such as the presentation of a death certificate specifying the time and place of death of the insured. In several eastern European countries, negotiations addressed Jewish property that the Nazis had confiscated during the war but that could not be returned under the region's communist governments. Artworks stolen during the war and later sold on the basis of dubious records were the subject of legal struggles to secure their return to the original owners or to their heirs. The German government continued to pay reparations—first awarded in 1953—to individual Jews and the Jewish people to acknowledge responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of the German people.

Artistic responses to the Holocaust

Artists the world over and camp survivors themselves have responded to the Holocaust through art. The very existence of Holocaust art can, however, create a sense of unease. Critic Irving Howe has asked, “Can imaginative literature represent in any profound or illuminating way the meanings of the Holocaust? Is ‘the debris of our misery' (as one survivor described it) a proper or manageable subject for stories and novels? Are there not perhaps extreme situations beyond the reach of art?” Similarly, philosopher Theodore Adorno has commented that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Yet poetry has been written—moving poetry that seeks to come to terms with the tragedy even in the German language—in works by Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, among others. Gripping work dealing with the horror, pain, and loss of the Holocaust has appeared in every literary genre and in music, film, painting, and sculpture.

Survivors of the Holocaust have produced powerful works that record or reflect on their experiences. Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (originally in Dutch, 1947), Eli Wiesel's Night (originally in Yiddish, 1956), and works by Primo Levi are some of the most memorable in the field of literature. Paintings and drawings by survivors Samuel Bak, Alice Lok Cahana, and David Olère document the horrors that they experienced in ghettos and death camps. Holocaust survivors have also composed a wide variety of music, including street songs, which gave voice to life in the ghetto; resistance songs, such as Hirsh Glik's “Song of the Partisans” (composed and first performed 1943, published 1953); and classical compositions, such as Quartet for the End of Time (first performed 1941) by Olivier Messiaen and the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder der Tod dankt ab (first performed 1943; “The Emperor of Atlantis or Death Abdicates”) by Victor Ullman.

Artists of all kinds, regardless of any firsthand experience with the Holocaust, have sought to grapple with this tragedy. George Segal's memorial sculpture, Holocaust, is but one notable example. Visual art in response to the Holocaust includes paintings by Holocaust refugees Marc Chagall and George Grosz and the illustrated story Maus (published in installments 1980–85) by Art Spiegelman, the son of a survivor. Notable musical responses to the Holocaust include Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw (first performed 1947), Dmitri Shostakovich's 13th Symphony (first performed 1962), which used the text of the poem “Baby Yar” (1961) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and works by composers Charles Davidson, Michael Horvitz, and Oskar Morawetz.

Film, too, has been a prime medium for dealing with the Holocaust. Shortly after World War II, several eastern European filmmakers, including Aleksander Ford, Wanda Jakubowska, and Alfred Radok, attempted to capture the experience of Holocaust victims. Some of the most influential films since then include The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), directed by George Stevens; Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1970, The Garden of the Finzi Continis), directed by Vittorio De Sica; the nine-hour documentary Shoah (1985), directed by Claude Lanzmann; Au Revoir les Enfants (1987, Goodbye, Children), directed by Louis Malle; Schindler's List (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg; La Vita è Bella (1997; Life Is Beautiful), directed by Roberto Benigni; and Bent (1997), directed by Sean Mathias and based on Martin Sherman's 1979 play about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.

Conclusion

Today the Holocaust is viewed as the emblematic manifestation of absolute evil. Its revelation of the depths of human nature and the power of malevolent social and governmental structures has made it an essential topic of ethical discourse in fields as diverse as law, medicine, religion, government, and the military.

Many survivors report they heard a final plea from those who were killed: “Remember! Do not let the world forget.” To this responsibility to those they left behind, survivors have added a plea of their own: “Never again.” Never for the Jewish people. Never for any people. They hope that remembrance of the Holocaust can prevent its recurrence. In part because of their efforts, interest in the event has increased rather than diminished with the passage of time and in fact Holocaust Remembrance days are observed each year in many countries. More than half a century after the Holocaust, institutions, memorials, and museums continue to be built and films and educational curricula created to document and teach the history of the Holocaust to future generations.

Additional Reading

General references and histories

Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vol. (1990, reissued 4 vol. in 2, 1995), is a comprehensive and authoritative reference work. A useful reference on the geographic extent of the Holocaust is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust (1996). Michael Berenbaum (ed.), Witness to the Holocaust (1997), contains 94 basic documents on 21 major themes, from the Nazi rise to power to the Nürnberg trials. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust In History (1987, reissued 1989), offers insights on a variety of historical debates surrounding the Holocaust. Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993) is a non-technical, illustrated history of the Holocaust. Other general histories of the Holocaust include Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (1986); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. and definitive ed., 3 vol. (1985); Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–45 (1990; originally published in Hebrew, 1987); and Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–39 (1997), the first of two planned volumes.

The perpetrators

For first-hand accounts of the Holocaust from the viewpoint of perpetrators and bystanders, see Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess (eds.), “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, trans. from German (1991; also published as “Those Were the Days”: The Holocaust through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders, 1993). Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust (1979, reprinted 1984), presents a sociological account of genocide and the social forces that make it possible. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), is a controversial work exploring the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. For an account of the human impact of the killing process in one Einsatzgruppe, see Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992, reissued 1998). Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (1995), traces the development of genocidal policies and techniques in the Nazi T4 Program. Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness (1974, reprinted 1991), offers a chilling account of prison interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka and a product of the German T4 camps. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986), explores the role and psychology of Nazi physicians. Biographies of Nazi architects of the Holocaust include Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (1991), and Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, completely rev. ed. (1962, reissued 1995), also published in an abridged ed. with the same title (1971, reissued 1991). John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (1997), is less a biography of Hitler and more a review of the way in which historians have treated him.

The victims

Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Council in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (1972, reissued 1996), describes the dilemma facing the Jewish Councils in the ghettos in their efforts to reconcile Jewish needs with Nazi demands. For an account of ghetto life and Jewish resistance to German aggression, see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, 10th anniversary ed. (1986, reissued 1990). Yisrael Gutman (Israel Gutman) and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (1994, reissued 1998), a collection of essays, considers Auschwitz in context, each of its victim groups, and the inner life of both perpetrators and victims. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976, reissued 1980), considers the experience of extermination camp inmates from a psychological viewpoint. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991) explores the power of Holocaust survivors' testimonies and memories of their experience. Important firsthand accounts by Holocaust survivors include Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1959; originally published in Italian, 1947; also published as Survival in Auschwitz, 1961, reissued 1996), and Elie Wiesel, Night (1960, reissued 1986; originally published in Yiddish, 1956).

Special topics

Edited volumes containing essays on different aspects of the Holocaust include John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), The Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (1989), on religious and philosophical issues related to the Holocaust; Lawrence L. Langer (ed.), Art from the Ashes (1995), presenting art and literature on the Holocaust; Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (eds.), Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (1993), on the issue of gender and women's experience of the Holocaust. Works on U.S. government policy on the Holocaust include Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945, expanded and updated ed. (1980), a careful historical review; and David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (1984, reissued 1998), a more critical indictment. Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (1999); and Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflection on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000), deal with what some people see as the commercialization of Holocaust remembrance.

Zoroastrianism

I was collecting information(history) about Pre-Indians(Aryan's) who is basically people from central Asia, who later settled  in northern part of India, but when i reading about them, i noticed some strange word Zoroastrianism, and then i red about Zoroastrian's, were many of them have no information about them, so i thought of sharing it, so it took nearly 10day's for me to write this article. if you have time and interest read else don't coz it's dry for some of them.........

Zoroastrian 

Zoroastrianism
The ancient pre-Islamic religion of Iran that survives there in isolated areas and, more prosperously, in India, where the descendants of Zoroastrian Iranian (Persian) immigrants are known as Parsis, or Parsees. In India the religion is called Parsiism.
Founded by the Iranian prophet and reformer Zoroaster in the 6th century BC, the religion contains both monotheistic and dualistic features. It influenced the other major Western religons—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The ancient Greeks saw in Zoroastrianism the archetype of the dualistic view of the world and of man's destiny. Zoroaster was supposed to have instructed Pythagoras in Babylon and to have inspired the Chaldean doctrines of astrology and magic. It is likely that Zoroastrianism influenced the development of Judaism and the birth of Christianity.
The Christians, following a Jewish tradition, identified Zoroaster with Ezekiel, Nimrod, Seth, Balaam, and Baruch, and even, through the latter, with Christ himself. On the other hand, Zoroaster, as the presumed founder of astrology and magic, could be considered the arch-heretic. In more recent times the study of Zoroastrianism has played a decisive part in reconstructing the religion and social structure of the Indo-European peoples.
Though Zoroastrianism was never, even in the thinking of its founder, as aggressively monotheistic as, for instance, Judaism or Islām, it does represent an original attempt at unifying under the worship of one supreme god a polytheistic religion comparable to those of the ancient Greeks, Latins, Indians, and other early peoples.

History
Pre-Zoroastrian Iranian religion
The religion of Iran before the time of Zoroaster is not directly accessible, for there are no reliable sources more ancient than the prophet himself. It has to be studied indirectly on the basis of later documents and by a comparative approach. The language of Iran is closely akin to that of northern India, and hence the people of the two lands probably had common ancestors—the Indo-Iranians, or Aryans. The religion of the latter has been reconstructed by means of common elements contained in the sacred books of Iran and India: mainly the Avesta and the Vedas. Both collections exhibit the same kind of polytheism, with many of the same gods, notably the Indian Mitra (the Iranian Mithra), the cult of fire, sacrifice by means of a sacred liquor (soma in India, in Iran haoma), and other parallels. There is, moreover, a list of Aryan gods in a treaty concluded about 1380 BC between the Hittite emperor and the king of Mitanni. The list includes Mitra and Varuṇa, Indra, and the two Nāsatyas. All of these gods also are found in the Vedas, but only the first one in the Avesta, except that Indra and Nāñhaithya appear in the Avesta as demons; Varuṇa may have survived under another name. Important changes, then, must have taken place on the Iranian side, not all of which can be attributed to the prophet.
The Indo-Iranians appear to have distinguished, from among their gods, the daiva (Indo-Iranian and Old Persian equivalent of Avestan daeva and Sanskrit deva, related to the Latin deus), meaning “heavenly,” and the asura, a special class with occult powers. This situation was reflected in Vedic India; later on, asura came to signify, in Sanskrit, a kind of demon, because of the baleful aspect of the asura's invisible power. In Iran the evolution must have been different: the ahuras were extolled, to the exclusion of the daevas, who were reduced to the rank of demons.

The reformation of Zoroaster
Zoroaster (Zarathushtra) was a priest of a certain ahura (Avestan equivalent of Sanskrit asura) with the epithet mazdā, “wise,” whom Zoroaster mentions once in his hymns with “the [other] ahuras.” Similarly, Darius I (522–486) and his successors worshipped Auramazda (Ahura Mazdā) “and the other gods who exist” or “Ahura Mazdā, the greatest god.” The two historically related facts are evidently parallel: on both sides the rudiments of monotheism are present, though in a more elaborate form with the prophet Zoroaster.
It has not yet been possible to place Zoroaster's hymns, the Gāthās, in their historical context. Not a single place or person mentioned in them is known from any other source. Vishtāspa, the prophet's protector, can only be the namesake of the father of Darius, the Achaemenid king. All that may safely be said is that Zoroaster lived somewhere in eastern Iran, far from the civilized world of western Asia, before Iran became unified under Cyrus II the Great. If the Achaemenids ever heard of him, they did not see fit to mention his name in their inscriptions nor did they allude to the beings who surrounded the great god and were later to be called the amesha spentas, or “bounteous immortals”—an essential feature of Zoroaster's doctrine.
Religion under the Achaemenids was in the hands of the Magi, whom Herodotus describes as a Median tribe with special customs, such as exposing the dead, fighting evil animals, and interpreting dreams. Again, the historical connection with Zoroaster—whom Herodotus also ignores—is a hazy one. It is not known when Zoroaster's doctrine reached western Iran, but it must have been before the time of Aristotle (384–322), who alludes to its dualism.
Darius, when he seized power in 522, had to fight a usurper, Gaumata the Magian, who pretended to be Bardiya, the son of Cyrus the Great and brother of the king Cambyses. This Magian had destroyed cultic shrines, āyadanas, which Darius restored. One possible explanation of these events is that Gaumata had adopted Zoroastrianism, a doctrine that relied on the allegiance of the common people, and therefore destroyed temples or altars to deities of the nobility. Darius, who owed his throne to the support of some noblemen, could not help favouring their cult, although he adopted Auramazda as a means of unifying his empire.
Xerxes, successor to Darius, mentioned in one of his inscriptions how at a certain (unnamed) place he substituted the worship of Auramazda for that of the daivas, which does not mean he opposed the daeva cult as such, as a true Zoroastrian would have done, but only that he eradicated somewhere—probably in Babylon—the cult of deities alien to the religion of the ahuras. It points to a change of attitude, compared with Cyrus' tolerance of alien religions, such as the Babylonian or the Jewish religions.
From Artaxerxes II (404–359/358) onward, the inscriptions mention, besides Auramazda, Mithra and the goddess Anahita (Anahit), which proves only a change of emphasis, not the appearance of new deities.

The Arsacid period
In consequence of Alexander's conquest, the Iranian religion was almost totally submerged by the wave of Hellenism. At Susa, for instance, which had been one of the capital cities of the Achaemenids but where the religion of Auramazda was not indigenous, the coinage of the Seleucid and Arsacid periods does not represent a single Iranian deity.
Then the Iranian religion gradually emerged again. In Commagene in the middle of the 1st century BC, gods bear combinations of Greek and Iranian names: Zeus Oromazdes, Apollo Mithra, Helios Hermes, Artagnes Herakles Ares. The first proof of the use of a Zoroastrian calendar, implying the official recognition of Zoroastrianism, is found some 40 years earlier at Nisa (near modern Ashkhabad in Soviet Turkmenistan). By then some form of orthodoxy must have been established in which Auramazda and the entities (powers surrounding him) adjoin other gods such as Mithra, the Sun, and the Moon.
In Persis (modern Fars), from the beginning of the Christian Era to the advent of the Sāsānians (early 3rd century AD), any allusion to the fire cult disappears. The coins seem to indicate, in not showing the fire altar, that the prince had lost interest in the Iranian religion.

The Sasanian period
With Ardashīr, the future founder of the Sāsānian dynasty, the situation was different; and this may suggest that his religious zeal—as a hereditary priest of Staxr (Istaxr)—may have helped him seize power in his native province, even before he started attacking his Arsacid suzerain, Artabanus V.
Two persons are recorded, in different sources, as helping to establish Zoroastrianism under the first Sāsānians: Kartēr and Tansar. Whereas Kartēr is known through contemporary inscriptions, most of which were written by himself, Tansar (or Tosar) is only remembered in later books. The latter tell us that Tansar, an ehrpat, or theologian, undertook the task, under Ardashīr's command, of collecting the sacred texts and fixing the canon. Kartēr, who was already active under Ardashīr I but more so under Shāpūr and his successors, recounted his brilliant career, which reflects the birth of a hierarchy. He was still an ehrpat under Shāpūr, as he restored the “Mazdean religion . . . in the land of non-Iran reached by the horses and men of the king of kings.” Under Hormizd he was made “magupat of Ormazd,” a term apparently created for him and meaning “chief of the Magians of Auramazda.” Under Bahrām I (AD 273–276), Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, who had enjoyed a degree of tolerance under the two preceding kings, was sacrificed to the interests of Zoroastrianism and died in prison. Bahrām II named Kartēr “Saviour of the Soul of Bahrām,” elevated him to the rank of the “grandees of the realm,” and gave him the additional titles of “judge of the empire,” “master of rites,” and “ruler of the fire of Anahit-Ardashīr at Staxr and of Anahit the Dame.” Promoted to the apex of his career, Kartēr persecuted “Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Nasoreans [Judeo-Christians?], Christians, Maktaks [Mandeans, Manichaeans?], and Zandīks [Mazdean heretics].” Narses (293–302), who began his struggle for power when Bahrām II was still on the throne, seems to have recovered the title of chief of the Staxr temple that his predecessor and adversary had surrendered to Kartēr. Under Shāpūr II, the high priest Aturpāt, at a council summoned to fix the text of the Avesta, proved the truth of his doctrine by submitting to the ordeal of molten metal poured on his breast and was victorious over all kinds of sectarians and heretics.
Under Bahrām V (420–438), presumably, the title magupatān magupat (chief magus of the chief magi) was created. Under Qobād (or Kavādh; 488–496 and 498/499–531), Iran traversed its gravest social and religious crisis under the impact of Mazdak. This reformer, whose doctrines were partly inspired by those of Mani, was granted an interview by Qobād—as Shāpūr I had received Mani a long time before, but with a more decisive success. Perhaps the King hoped that by abolishing property and the family he would reign over a docile mass. The Mazdakites favoured the abolition of all social inequalities, chiefly of private property, the main cause of all hatred. Everything was to be held in common, including women. These views directly threatened the rich as well as the Mazdean clergy, who soon understood this. Qobād was dethroned and replaced by his brother Jāmāsp. After two years in exile, Qobād recovered his throne, but he had been cured of his egalitarian views and decided to liquidate the Mazdakites.
Khosrow I continued the work of his father, Qobād, and thus the Mazdakite upheaval made way for a strong state and an established Mazdean Church. The religious books give Khosrow the unique title of Anōsharvan, “with the immortal soul,” probably for having crushed Mazdakism and for enabling the “good religion” to triumph.
Khosrow II (590/591–628) married a Christian woman and may have been a Christian himself. He was superstitious and dabbled in astrology.

Post-Islāmic Iranian Zoroastrianism
Islām won a decisive victory at al-Qādisīyah in 635 over the armies of Yazdegerd III, the last Sāsānid. Islām, in principle, tolerated the ancient religion, but conversions by persuasion or force were massive in many provinces. Zoroastrianism fomented rebellion and brought persecutions upon itself. There were pockets of survival, notably in Persis, the ancient centre of the Achaemenian and Sāsānian empires. Books were produced to save the essentials of the religion from a threatened disaster. The disaster did occur but exactly why and how is not known. Zoroastrians, called Gabars by the Muslims, survived in Iran as a persecuted minority in small enclaves at Yazd and Kerman.

The Parsis in India
From the 10th century onward, groups of Zoroastrians emigrated to India, where they found asylum in Gujarāt. Their connection with their coreligionists in Iran seems to have been almost totally broken until the end of the 15th century. Reestablished in 1477, the connection was kept up chiefly in the form of an exchange of letters until 1768. Under British rule, the Parsis, who previously had been humble agriculturists, started to enrich themselves through commerce, then through industry. They became a most prosperous and “modern” community, centred in Bombay. Formerly they had adopted the language (Gujarati) and the dress of their Hindu milieu. Later they adopted British customs, British dress, the education of girls, and the abolition of child marriage. In their enterprises as well as in their charities they followed the example of the West. From the 19th century on, they were able to help their less favoured brethren in Iran, either through gifts or through intervention with the government.
They also adapted themselves to their Indian culture by minimizing what was repugnant to the Hindus, namely, blood sacrifice; and they surrendered to some extent to the vogue of astrology and to theosophy. On the other hand, ever since they were attacked by Christian missionaries for their dualism, they have been emphasizing the monotheistic aspect of their doctrine.

Beliefs and mythology
Only the hymns, or Gāthās, are attributable to Zoroaster. They are written in various metres and in a dialect different from the rest of the Avesta, except for seven chapters, chiefly in prose, that appear to have been composed shortly after the prophet's demise. All these texts are embedded in the Yasna, which is one of the main divisions of the Avesta and is recited by the priests during the ceremony of the same name, meaning “sacrifice.” The Visp-rat (“All the Judges”) is a Yasna augmented here and there by additional invocations and offerings to the ratus (lords) of the different classes of beings. The Vidēvdāt, or Vendidad (“Law Rejecting the Daevas”), consists of two introductory sections recounting how the law was given to man, followed by 18 sections of rules. The Siroza enumerates the deities presiding over the 30 days of the month. The Yashts (hymns) are each addressed to one of 21 deities such as Mithra, Anahita, or Verethraghna. The Hadhoxt Nask (“Section Containing Sayings”) describes the fate of the soul after death. The Khūrda Avesta, or Small Avesta, is made up of minor texts.
The Avesta is, therefore, a collection of texts compiled in successive stages until it was completed under the Sāsānians. It was then about four times larger than what has survived. A summary of its 21 books, or Nasks (of which only one is preserved as such in the Vidēvdāt), is given in one of the main treatises written during the brief Zoroastrian renascence under Islām in the 9th century; the Dēnkart, the “Acts of the Religion.” It is written in Pahlavi, the language of the Sāsānians.
Other works in Pahlavi include, besides a translation and commentary on the Avesta, the Bundahishn (“Primal Creation”), a cosmology. Most Pahlavi books are anonymous, such as Mēnōk-i Khrat (“Spirit of Wisdom”), a lucid summary of a doctrine based on reason, and the Book of Artāy Virāf, which describes Virāf's descent into the netherworld as well as heaven and hell and the pleasures and pains awaiting the virtuous and the wicked. There are also a few signed works, such as those of the two brothers Zātspram and Mānushchihr, or Mardān-Farrukh's Shkand-Gumānīk Vichār (“Final Dispelling of Doubts”), an apology of the Mazdean religion directed against Manichaeism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islām.
Finally, there are Zoroastrian books written in Persian, either in verse or in prose. The latter include the correspondence exchanged between Zoroastrians of Iran and India and the treatise entitled ʾOlemā-ye Islām (“The Doctors of Islām”), with decidedly Zurvanite tendencies.

God
Zoroaster's silence on Mithra is not easy to interpret. Since this god was closely associated with Varuṇa in India and with Varuṇa's likely substitute in Iran, Zoroaster can hardly have ignored one-half of this divine pair without a definite purpose. Otherwise, it might be presumed that Mithra was included in the formula “Mazdā and the [other] ahuras”; however, Mithra is called in the Later Avesta (non-Gāthic) an ahura; so is Apām Napāt, a fire or brightness in the waters, corresponding to the Vedic Apām Napāt. As for Verethraghna (the entity or spirit of victory), it seems that since he took over the function of Indra, who was a daeva, he could not be called an ahura; but in order to mark his belonging to the world of ahuras he was called ahuradāta, “created by an ahura.”
It is in the framework of the religion of the ahuras, hostile to the cult of the daevas, that Zoroaster's message should be understood. He emphasized the central importance of his god, the wise Ahura, by portraying him with an escort of entities, the powers of all the other gods, in an array against the forces of evil.
The moral dualism expressed in the opposition Asha–Druj (truth–falsehood) goes back at least to Indo-Iranian times, for the Veda knows it too, as ṛta-druh, although the contrast is not as sharply defined as in the Avesta. Between these two principles, the Twin Spirits made an ominous choice, the Bounteous One becoming in thoughts, words, and deeds a partisan of Asha, ashavan, while the other became dregvant, partisan of the Druj. After them it was the daevas' turn; they all chose wrongly. Ever since, the daevas have tried to corrupt man's choice also.
To the army of the ashavans, headed by the Bounteous Spirit, was counterposed the host of the dregvants, under the Destructive Spirit, Angra Mainyu. Each combatant faced his exact counterpart: the Good Mind opposing the Bad Mind and Aramaiti being countered by Taromaiti.
In this battle, the whole material universe is, through the entities, potentially enrolled, the Bounteous Spirit being the patron of man, Asha of fire, the Good Mind of the Ox, the Dominion of the metals, Aramaiti of the earth, Integrity and Immortality of the waters and plants. Moreover, since the entities are at once divine and human (because both the spiritual and material qualities of man partake of divine), everyone faithful to the wise Ahura can commune with him.
After Zoroaster, considerable changes occurred in the theology he had professed. The entities were reduced to mere deities, which were even separated into male and female. Never again were their names used to designate human faculties. This is probably a consequence of the resurgence of the ancient gods.
It is not known to what extent Zoroaster's system was meant to be exclusively the cult of Ahura Mazdā. In the Later Avesta all the gods he had ignored emerged again, such as Mithra, Airyaman (whom he had replaced by Sraosha), Anahita, Apām Napāt, Verethraghna, and Vayu. This vast pantheon, still nominally headed by Ahura Mazdā, is similar to the compromise that Darius, according to the interpretation cited above, made between the cult of Auramazda and that of the gods of the nobility.
Not only did Zoroaster's theology thus lose its exclusive position, but an internal change also modified its equilibrium and even threatened its very essence. The Bounteous Spirit was almost completely reabsorbed into Ahura Mazdā. Whereas in a Yasht the two Spirits fought each other, in the Vidēvdāt Ahura Mazdā and the Destructive Spirit opposed each other by creating, respectively, the good and the bad things. This profoundly affected Zoroaster's system, for Ahura Mazdā could no longer be the father of the Twin Spirits; he now faced, on equal terms so to speak, a sort of antigod. This alteration probably dates back at least to the 4th century BC, for Aristotle said in the Peri philosophias (“On Philosophy”) that the Magi preached the existence of two principles, Oromasdes and Areimanios.

Cosmogony
In the cosmogony as expounded in the Bundahishn, Ormazd (Ahura Mazdā) and Ahriman are separated by the void. They seem to have existed from all eternity, when Ahriman's invidious attack initiates the whole process of creation. The question of their origin is ignored, but it was implied, ever since Ormazd had taken the place of his Bounteous Spirit in the struggle against the Destructive Spirit. Since Ahura Mazdā could no longer be the father of the two adversaries, the question of their origin was inevitable.
A solution was provided by Zurvanism; it is Zurvān (Time) who is the father of Ormazd and Ahriman. But this solution upset the very essence of Mazdaism and was therefore condemned as heretical. Zurvanism was widely accepted, however, perhaps even prevalent, in Sāsānian times. Traces of it are found in Mazdean orthodoxy, some features of which cannot otherwise be explained.
In Mazdean orthodoxy, when Ormazd created the material world, he first produced from Infinite Light a form of fire, out of which all things were to be born. This form of fire is “bright, white, round, and visible from afar.” Gayōmart, the Primal Man, was also conceived as spherical, in the image of the sky. Mānushchihr writes that “Ormazd, the lord of all things, produced from Infinite Light a form of fire whose name was that of Ormazd and whose light was that of fire.” This phrase can be accounted for only as a clumsy adaptation of a Zurvanite text that must have said, in effect, that Zurvān created Ormazd.
The Mazdean quaternity can hardly be explained except as an adaptation of the Zurvanite one. The latter is attested in several texts citing, besides Zurvān, three other names given as those of separate gods but that must be hypostases (essences) of the first one, also called in Manichaeism the god with four faces. Among the various forms under which the Zurvanite quaternity manifested itself, the one associating Zurvān with Light, Power, and Wisdom seems to be the origin of the Mazdean quaternity. Ormazd, in the Bundahishn, has three other names, namely Time, Space, and Religion. To obtain this quaternity, it was sufficient to replace Zurvān by Time, Light by Space, Wisdom by Religion, and Power by Ormazd and to put the latter at the end of the series.
The Mazdean quaternity is reflected in the calendar at Nisa in 90 BC. The Zurvanite speculation that preceded it probably dates back to the first centuries of the Arsacid period and thus was born in the wake of Hellenism and in connection with the spread of astrology.

Cosmology
In order to vanquish Ahriman, Ormazd created the world as a battlefield. He knew that this fight would be limited in time—it would last 9,000 years—and he offered Ahriman a pact to that effect. After they had created their respective material creations, Ahriman's first attack was defeated by Ormazd with the help of the Ahuna Vairya prayer (the most sacred Zoroastrian prayer), and he lay prostrate for another period of 3,000 years, the second in a total of four. He was then stirred up by the prostitute (Primal Woman) and went back to the attack, this time in the material universe. He killed the Primal Bull, whose marrow gave birth to the plants and whose semen was collected and purified in the moon, whence it would produce the useful animals. Ahriman then killed Gayōmart, the Primal Man, whose body produced the metals and whose semen was preserved and purified in the sun. A part of it would produce the rhubarb from which the first human couple would be born.
The first human couple were perverted by Ahriman, and it is only with the advent of Zoroaster, after 3,000 years, that Ahriman's supremacy came to an end. Ormazd and Ahriman then fight on equal terms until Ormazd, at the end of the last 3,000 years, finally will triumph.

Concepts of man
The idea of man as a microcosm, already illustrated in the cosmogony, is further developed in the Bundahishn .
As a result of the aggressor's attack, man is mortal. But he does not die altogether. There are five immortal parts in him: ahu (“life”), daēnā (“religion”), baodah (“knowledge”), urvan (“soul”), and fravashi (“preexistent souls”). The latter term seems literally to mean “preeminent hero.” The conception that caused this term to be applied to the “manes” (spirits) or pitarah of Iran is that of a defensive, protective power that continues to emanate from a chief even after death. This originally aristocratic notion seems to have been vulgarized in the same way as, in Greece, any dead person came to be considered a hero, or, in Egypt, an Osiris. Zoroaster ignored the fravashi, but he was familiar with the daēnā. The latter term meant “religion” in both its objective and subjective senses.
Indian and Iranian beliefs in the afterlife have many features in common, probably dating back to the Indo-Iranian period: a feminine encounter, a bridge with dogs watching it, a heavenly journey. In the ancient Indian texts, the Upaniṣads, the soul is welcomed in heaven by 500 apsaras (cloud maidens). In Iran the soul meets his own religion (daēnā) in the form of a beautiful damsel if he has lived justly; otherwise, he meets a hideous hag.
Either before this encounter or after, according to the various texts, the soul must cross a bridge. This, with the young girl and the gods, is attested in India in the Yajurveda and the Upaniṣads. In the Gāthās it is called the Bridge of the Requiter. It leads the good souls to paradise, but the bad ones fall into hell.
The soul has also to undergo a judgment; it appears before Mithra and his two companions, Sraosha and Rashnu. Finally it ascends through successive stages representing respectively his good thoughts (the stars), good words (the moon), and good deeds (the sun) to the paradise (of infinite lights). In the Veda it is said only that the sojourn of the good deed is beyond the path of the sun. In paradise the soul is led by Vohu Manah, the Good Mind, to the golden throneof Ormazd.
Hell also has, symmetrically, four levels. And there is, for the souls whose good actions exactly balance their evil ones, an intermediate place.

Eschatology
Zoroaster used to invoke saviours who, like the dawns of new days, would come to the world. He hoped himself to be one of them. After his death, the belief in coming saviours developed. Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) was expected to return, if not personally, at least in the form of his three sons who would be born, at intervals of a thousand years, from his semen. The last of these saviours, Astvat-ereta, or justice incarnate, was also simply called the Saviour (Saoshyans).
Only in the Pahlavi books is this theme systematically developed. It is dominated by the idea of a final return to the initial state of things. The first human couple had at first fed on water, then on plants, on milk, and at last on meat. The people in the last millennia will, at the advent of the three successive saviours, abstain in the reverse order from meat, milk, and plants to keep finally only water. The primeval combatants also have their counterparts at the end of time. The dragon that was killed in order to liberate the imprisoned waters will appear again at the resurrection to be killed by another hero. In the last great struggle, the host of good and the host of evil will vie with each other, and each soldier of Ormazd will defeat and kill his own special adversary. This will restore the state of peace that had prevailed initially. The wicked will then submit to an ordeal of molten metal and fire. Fire and Airyaman will cause the metals of the mountains to melt and to flow down as a river of fire. The whole of resuscitated mankind must traverse it; it will burn only the wicked, whereas to the just it will be as sweet as warm milk. The suffering of the wicked will last only three days, however, after which all mankind will enjoy much happiness. On the flattened earth (for the metal will fill in all the valleys), men and women, henceforth shadowless since they are sinless, will taste the bliss of family life. Hell will be sealed forever, and Ahriman will be either powerless or annihilated.

Practices and institutions
Although Herodotus wrote that the Persians had no temples, some have been found, in the shape of terraces or towers or square rooms. Chahārtāq s (sacred buildings with four gates or doors) are scattered over most of Iran. Permanent altars exist from the Sāsānian period and are depicted on coins with a burning fire.
The Farnbag, Gushnasp, and Burzen-Mihr fires were connected, respectively, with the priests, the warriors, and the farmers. The Farnbag fire was at first in Khwārezm, until in the 6th century BC, according to tradition, Vishtāspa, Zoroaster's protector, transported it to Kabulistan; then Khosrow in the 6th century AD transported it to the ancient sanctuary of Kariyan in Fars. The latter, however, has not yet been identified. The Gushnasp fire, located at Shiz, was the ancient fire of the Magi (in Media), but it came to be the symbol of the monarchic and religious unity. The Burzen-Mihr fire never ranked as high as the other two because the peasants, unlike the kings and the clergy, never possessed any sovereignty. Besides these individual designations, the fires were classified according to two categories: the Adurān, village fires; and the Varhrān, provincial and royal fires.

Priesthood
The Magians, though not originally Zoroastrian, apparently became acquainted with the prophet's teachings not later than the 4th century BC. They had the monopoly on religion at the Achaemenian court. The term magus was still used in the Arsacid period. Thereafter, under the Sāsānians, a hierarchy developed, with the creation of the magupat, or chief of magi, and of its superlative magupatān magupat (coined on the model of shāhanshāh, “king of kings”). The ehrpat, originally a religious teacher, was especially entrusted with the care of the fire. The modern equivalent of the word, herbad or ervad, designates a priest of the lower degree, who in the more important ceremonies only acts as the assistant priest. Above him is the mobed. Ranked above all of these functionaries is the dastūr, a kind of bishop, who directs and administers one or more important temples. Priesthood is hereditary, but all priests have to go through one or more ceremonies of investiture over and above those practiced by all the faithful.

Ceremonies
All young Parsis must be initiated when they reach the age of seven (in India) or 10 (in Persia). They receive the shirt (sadre) and the girdle (kusti), which they are to wear their whole life.
There are three types of purification, in order of increasing importance: the padyab, or ablution; the nahn, or bath; and the bareshnum, a complicated ritual performed at special places with the participation of a dog—whose left ear is touched by the candidate and whose gaze puts the evil spirits to flight—and lasting several days.
Penance entails reciting the patet, the firm resolve not to sin again, and the confession of sins to a dastūr or to an ordinary priest if a dastūr is not obtainable.
The chief ceremony, the Yasna, essentially a sacrifice of haoma (the sacred liquor), is celebrated before the sacred fire with recitation of large parts of the Avesta. There also are offerings of bread and milk and, formerly, of meat or animal fat.
The sacred fire must be kept burning continually and has to be fed at least five times a day. Prayers also are recited five times a day. The founding of a new fire involves a very elaborate ceremony. There are also rites for purification and for regeneration of a fire.

Burial rites
After death, a dog is brought before the corpse; it should preferably be a “four-eyed” dog (i.e., it should have a spot above each eye, as this is said to increase the efficacy of its look). The rite is repeated five times a day. After the first one, fire is brought into the room where it is kept burning until three days after the removal of the corpse to the Tower of Silence. The removal must be done during the daytime.
The interior of the Tower of Silence is built in three concentric circles, one each for men, women, and children. The corpses are exposed there naked. The vultures do not take long—an hour or two at the most—to strip the flesh off the bones, and these, dried by the sun, are later swept into the central well. Formerly the bones were kept in an ossuary, the astodān, to preserve them from rain and animals. The morning of the fourth day is marked by the most solemn observance in the death ritual, for it is then that the departed soul reaches the next world and appears before the deities who are to pass judgment over it.

Festivals
Festivals, in which worship is an essential part, are characteristic aspects of Zoroastrianism, a faith that enjoins on man the pleasant duty of being happy. The principal festivals in the Parsi year are the six seasonal festivals, Gahānbārs, and the days in memory of the dead at year's end. Also, each day of the month and each of the 12 months of the year is dedicated to a deity. The day named after the month is the great feast day of that particular deity.
The New Year festival, Nōrūz, is the most joyous and beautiful of Zoroastrian feasts, a spring festival in honour of Rapithwin, the personification of noonday and summer. The festival to Mithra, or Mehragān, was traditionally an autumn one, as honoured as the spring feast of Nōrūz.

Ethics
The precepts of Mazdean ethics focus upon the maintenance of life and the fight against evil. In order to maintain life one must earn one's living by means of cattle raising and agriculture, and one must procreate. To fight against evil is to combat the demons and whatever beings, men or animals, belong to them. The two points of view seem to coincide, considering that the forces of evil are the forces of death: good is opposed to evil as light is to darkness, as life is to nonlife. The life precepts can be transposed into fight precepts; for instance, eating and drinking are interpreted by Zātspram as a struggle against the she-demon Āz, “Concupiscence.” The two points of view, however, are also contradictory: how can man fight the forces of evil without suppressing certain lives, such as baleful animals? The second viewpoint prevails: Iran ignores, even in theory, the universal respect of life that is preached by Buddhism or that justifies the vegetarian diet of Brahmanic India.
Social reasons (e.g., the desire to maintain family privileges) apparently explain the development of consanguineous marriage, an acute form of endogamy.
Future life should be determined by the balance of the good and evil deeds, words, and thoughts of the whole life. This principle, however, is tempered to allow for human weakness. All faults do not have to be registered or weighed forever on the scales. There are two means of effacing them: confession and the transfer of supererogatory merits (the equivalent of the Roman Catholic “Treasury of Merits” of Christ and the saints). The latter is the justification for the prayers and ceremonies for the departed.

Iconography
There is no Zoroastrian art. Be it in the Achaemenid, Arsacid, or Sāsānian period, Iranian art was predominantly royal. Only one god is represented during the first period: Auramazda, as a winged disk hovering above the king. It is known, however, that Artaxerxes II introduced statues of Anahita into her temples, after the Greek fashion. In the Arsacid period, Greek models also served for the representations of Iranian gods ordered by the kings on reliefs or coins. In the Sāsānian period, deities were represented only in the giving of the royal investiture, as is the case with Ormazd and Anahita at Naqsh-e Rostam, or Ormazd and Mithra at Taq-e Bostan. The frequency of the bullman in Achaemenid and Sāsānid iconography may be due to the obviously royal character of this personage: on seals he wears a crown, and the Pahlavi text calls him Gopatshāh, “King of Gopat.”

Relation to other religions
The debt of Israel to its Eastern neighbours in religious matters is easy to demonstrate on a few precise points of minor importance but less so in other more important points, such as dualism, angelology, and eschatology.
Isaiah 40–48 offers striking parallels with the Gāthā 44:3–5, as has been shown by Morton Smith. Besides the common procedure of rhetorical questions, there is the notion of a god who has created the world and, notably, light and darkness. The very idea of a creator god may be common to all of the western part of the Semitic world. But the notion that God created light and darkness appears in both prophets. It is true that Zoroaster associates light and darkness only to waking and sleep and that no Iranian text says that God created good and evil. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition, in Isaiah, of light–darkness with good–evil sounds remarkably Iranian.
After the exile, the traditional hope in a messiah-king of the House of David who would reestablish Israel as an independent nation and make it triumph over all enemies gave way gradually to a concept at once more universal and more moral. The salvation of Israel was still essential, but it had to come about in the framework of a general renewal; the appearance of a saviour would mean the end of this world and the birth of a new creation; his judgment of Israel would become a general judgment, dividing mankind into good and evil. This new concept, at once universal and ethical, recalls Iran so strongly that many scholars attribute it to the influence of that country. John R. Hinnells has seen this influence especially in the saviour's defeat of the demons, his gathering of men for the judgment scene, his raising of the dead, and his administration of the judgment. The occasion of this influence, according to Hinnells, may be found in the contacts between the Jews and the Parthians that were initiated in the 2nd century BC but that reached a climax in the middle of the 1st century BC.
Although Pythagoras cannot have been a pupil of Zoroaster, there are striking similarities of doctrine between Iran and Greece. Anaximander's world picture corresponds to that of the Avesta. Heracleitus seems to have been impressed, in Ephesus, by the practices of the Magi, if not by their theory on the fiery nature of the soul. This would account for the emergence, in 5th-century Greece, of the belief in the heavenly fate of the soul.
The search for an Iranian background to Gnosticism must be placed in a new perspective if the recent view that Gnosticism is really a Christian heresy is accepted.

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A wide-ranging introductory study is found in Cyrus R. Pangborn, Zoroastrianism: A Beleaguered Faith (1982). Other studies include Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism (1975– ), A Persian Stronghold of Zoroastrianism (1977, reprinted 1989), Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979, reissued 1986), and Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour (1992); Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, “Zoroastrian Religion,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, part 2 (1983), chapter 23, pp. 866–906; and S.A. Nigosian, The Zoroastrian Faith: Tradition and Modern Research (1993). James Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vol. (1908–26, reissued 1962); and Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vol. (1987), contain many articles on Zoroastrianism. Geo Widengren, Die Religionen Irans (1965), is comprehensive. Mary Boyce (ed. and trans.), Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism (1984), is a compilation of translations.

Texts covering specific aspects of Zoroastrianism are J.R. Hinnells, “Zoroastrian Saviour Imagery and Its Influence on the New Testament,” in Numen, 16:161–185 (December 1969); Stanley Insler, The Gāthās of Zarathustra (1975); Simone Pétrement, “Sur le problème du gnosticisme,” in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 85:145–177 (April–June 1980); P. Lecoq, “Ahura Mazdā ou Khvarnah,” in Acta Iranica, 23:301–326 (1984); and Jamsheed K. Choksy, Purity and Pollution in Zoroastrianism: Triumph Over Evil (1989), examining the Zoroastrian ritual of purity throughout history. Works dealing specifically with the Parsis of India include Eckehard Kulke, The Parsees in India: A Minority as Agent of Social Change (1974), which studies their history in the 19th and 20th centuries; and Jer D. Randeria, The Parsi Mind: A Zoroastrian Asset to Culture (1993).