"When Jewish children hide in a protected room and their anguished parents pray...."
Trauma, the Holocaust...and epigenetics
I have been strict about not using the word ‘Shoah’ in any context other than the Holocaust. When Jewish children hide in a protected room and their anguished parents pray that they won’t cry, so that the marauders won’t come in and set the house on fire, it’s a Shoah.
“Shoah" is the Hebrew word for “Holocaust,” which is itself derived from a Greek word meaning “burnt offering.” It is simultaneously appropriate and wholly inadequate to the task of describing what happened to Israel on the morning of 10/7.
Even now, Israelis struggle to wrap their minds around the scope and scale of the tragedy, much as Americans did after the 9/11 attacks. There’s no language and even less frame of reference for adequately describing what took place, much less for trying to understand it. The sheer horror of what occured that morning is not something decent and moral people can easily process.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Women, children and older adults hiding in safe rooms gunned down mercilessly. Homes set ablaze with terrified residents still inside them. Children, some bound, forced into a room and slaughtered. Jews, helpless.
For many Israelis and Jews around the world, the horrors committed by Hamas militants during their stunning onslaught on southern Israeli communities is triggering painful memories of a calamity of a far greater scale: the Holocaust.
Long seen as a catastrophe so horrific nothing else should be compared to it, Israelis are now drawing direct parallels between the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe eight decades ago and their most recent tragedy, underscoring how traumatic the attack has been for a country that rose from the ashes of World War II and was created as a safe haven for Jews.
Jews have always been careful when using the term “Holocaust” because of the weight it carries- six million murdered Jews. It’s not a term to be bandied about lightly, so the word is rightfully reserved for discussions of the terrible period when so many Jews were murdered by the Third Reich.
A few short years ago, using “Holocaust” to describe an attack by Hamas or other radical terror groups might have been shouted down as cheapening the memory of those six million murdered during WWII.
Now, though, the label seems much more appropriate.
For many Israelis, the attacks of 10/7 have dredged up fears long and deeply buried. And somehow, “Holocaust” is foremost in the minds and on the tips of tongues of many in the Jewish state.
That has begun to erode in recent years — with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluding to the Nazis when talking about Iran and its nuclear program and protesters on rival sides of the political aisle calling each other “Nazis.” Still, such incidents remain rare and often draw criticism.
But the horrors of the Oct. 7 Hamas assault, which killed at least 1,300 Israelis, have tapped into Israel’s deepest fears and revived memories of the Jews’ greatest trauma.
Hundreds of militants stormed across the border, catching the country and its vaunted military off guard on a major Jewish holiday. They attacked sleepy farming villages, slaughtering terrified residents.
The militants killed at least 260 revelers at a music festival, with survivors telling harrowing stories of methodical massacres.
Dozens were dragged away as hostages on motorcycles and golf carts. Some of the dead and captured were Holocaust survivors.
“This is a massacre. This is a pogrom,” said Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv, leader of forces that cleared one of the besieged villages, referring to historic massacres of European Jews.
The Holocaust was a genocide conducted against European Jews by Nazi Germany. Israel was conceived in large part as a haven for those Jews who wanted a safe place away from the persecution they feared they might still face after the end of WWII.
As such, Israel made protecting Jews worldwide part of its raison d’etre. Jews- inside and outside the country- see Israel as a refuge and the country’s strong army as a symbol of protection from forces that would persecute Jews again. This is why Israel has taken in Jewish diasporas from all over the world.
10/7 was, thankfully, not comparable in scale to the Holocaust. Still, it was the largest mass slaughter of Jews since then, and with the Holocaust burned into the national psyche, that Israelis made the connection is understandable.
The national connection with the Holocaust set me thinking about something I heard mentioned by Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC last week- epigenetics. This is the theory that trauma can be inherited and passed down from generation to generation. The conversation was, in this case, specific to Holocaust survivors.
Certainly, Holocaust survivors would seem candidates for this theory, given the horrible, unimaginable trauma these folks lived through. If anyone could demonstrate the validity of epigenetics, this group would seem to be a perfect collection of Patients Zero.
In mid-October [2018], researchers in California published a study of Civil War prisoners that came to a remarkable conclusion. Male children of abused war prisoners were about 10 percent more likely to die than their peers were in any given year after middle age, the study reported.
The findings, the authors concluded, supported an “epigenetic explanation.” The idea is that trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which then is passed down to subsequent generations. The mark doesn’t directly damage the gene; there’s no mutation. Instead it alters the mechanism by which the gene is converted into functioning proteins, or expressed. The alteration isn’t genetic. It’s epigenetic.
The field of epigenetics gained momentum about a decade ago, when scientists reported that children who were exposed in the womb to the Dutch Hunger Winter, a period of famine toward the end of World War II, carried a particular chemical mark, or epigenetic signature, on one of their genes. The researchers later linked that finding to differences in the children’s health later in life, including higher-than-average body mass.
The excitement since then has only intensified, generating more studies — of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, of victims of poverty — that hint at the heritability of trauma. If these studies hold up, they would suggest that we inherit some trace of our parents’ and even grandparents’ experience, particularly their suffering, which in turn modifies our own day-to-day health — and perhaps our children’s, too.
It’s an interesting theory that, in some minds, is being advanced on some less-than-extraordinary science. In the case of the study of Civil War prisoners and the Dutch children, causation vs. correlation is yet to be worked out.
But many scientists are criticizing those in the field of epigenetics for getting ahead of themselves- a case of not applying sufficient scientific rigor.
[T]he work has touched off a bitter dispute among researchers that could stunt the enterprise in its infancy. Critics contend that the biology implied by such studies simply is not plausible. Epigenetics researchers counter that their evidence is solid, even if the biology is not worked out.
“These are, in fact, extraordinary claims, and they are being advanced on less than ordinary evidence,” said Kevin Mitchell, an associate professor of genetics and neurology at Trinity College, Dublin. “This is a malady in modern science: the more extraordinary and sensational and apparently revolutionary the claim, the lower the bar for the evidence on which it is based, when the opposite should be true.”
However, those within the field of epigenetics say the critique is premature. They know it’s early, and so they’re not making broad, sweeping claims- merely observations. They know it will take further research to solidify what they’ve learned and that additional research may not support their work- such is the nature of scientific research.
Still, the broad framework of what researchers have learned has produced exciting ideas worth investigating. As many have said, the evidence is sound, even if the biology is not yet settled.
What researchers have found thus far can’t be rejected out of hand. The explanation will be a tougher nut to crack, but for now, there are at least theories that can be extrapolated from what the research has shown.
And the question of how epigenetics works is fascinating.
The debate centers on genetics and biology. Direct effects are one thing: when a pregnant woman drinks heavily, it can cause fetal alcohol syndrome. This happens because stress on a pregnant mother’s body is shared to some extent with the fetus, in this case interfering directly with the normal developmental program in utero.
But no one can explain exactly how, say, changes in brain cells caused by abuse could be communicated to fully formed sperm or egg cells before conception. And that’s just the first challenge. After conception, when sperm meets egg, a natural process of cleansing, or “rebooting,” occurs, stripping away most chemical marks on the genes. Finally, as the fertilized egg grows and develops, a symphony of genetic reshuffling occurs, as cells specialize into brain cells, skin cells, and the rest. How does a signature of trauma survive all of that?
When the explanation is rolled out, some theories tend to fry the synapses in my History-major brain. I ain’t that smart, y’all. When the conversation turns to RNA, epididymis, and testicular cells, my ADD brain tends to check out for warmer climes.
Still, the idea that trauma could be transmitted genetically is pretty radical. If the trauma from the Holocaust is still present generations later in Jews from Israel, what does that say about how humanity might react to present trauma?
The idea that we carry some biological trace of our ancestors’ pain has a strong emotional appeal. It resonates with the feelings that arise when one views images of famine, war or slavery. And it seems to buttress psychodynamic narratives about trauma, and how its legacy can reverberate through families and down the ages. But for now, and for many scientists, the research in epigenetics falls well short of demonstrating that past human cruelties affect our physiology today, in any predictable or consistent way.
Stories of trauma are passed down from generation to generation. That sort of oral history is well-known. In places like Israel and other parts of the Jewish diaspora, keeping that memory alive is a cherished part of cultural tradition. But, the idea that such trauma can be passed along on a biological level is relatively new, radical, and unproven.
That said, some of the research along these lines has yielded exciting results, albeit in relatively small sample sizes. While these results still need further testing to be confirmed, they raise some unusual questions.
Currently, yes, “the research in epigenetics falls well short of demonstrating that past human cruelties affect our physiology today, in any predictable or consistent way.” It’s a young field that’s unearthed more questions than it’s been able to answer. Still, the fact that researchers think there might be a connection between trauma and biology, that trauma might be an inheritable trait to whatever degree, is fascinating.
I sincerely hope that the study of epigenetics will cease to be necessary very shortly. However, I can’t confidently make that statement, knowing humanity for what it is. If there’s one thing we do, it’s devising new and ever more effective ways to traumatize and kill one another.
Perhaps someday, that will change, but I doubt very much I will live to see that day.
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