The Heritage of 5703

In “The Heritage of 5703” (Heb., “Yerushat taf-shin-gimel”), Zalman Shazar writes that the year 1943 was the gravest in Jewish history, eclipsing earlier years of Jewish suffering such as 1492 (the expulsion from Spain), 1648 (the Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres in Eastern Europe), and the ravaging pogroms of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Hebrew year 5703 corresponds to 1942–1943, when news of the mass murder of European Jewry was becoming public. Writing from British Mandate Palestine, Shazar places the Holocaust within a long chain of Jewish persecutions, using traditional Jewish dating and historical references to connect present suffering with earlier disasters in Jewish memory.