The bloods of Abel cry out from the ground
When the memory of crimes demands something more than emotion: a responsible lucidity and an inner transformation of each one of us.
Article disponible en françaisPresences · The age on trial · 11 min
Reading what our age is putting to the test within us and within our civilisations.
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The siren that fractures time
Every year, at the same hour, a siren crosses Israel from one end to the other. Cars stop in the middle of the roads. Pedestrians freeze on the pavements. Conversations die away. For two minutes, the entire country stands, not in a silence that is the absence of sound, but in its exact opposite: an absolute presence, a listening stretched towards what can no longer speak. I experience this from within a particular inheritance, which I do not need to name in full for it to be heard. Yet the singularity of such a transmitted wound finds its full meaning, I deeply believe, only when it becomes a beacon raised above the other darknesses of the world. That is why this ritual does not seem to me to belong to the Jewish people alone. It concerns humanity as a whole — or rather, it should concern it, if it finally consented to hear what the siren says to each of us, wherever we live and whatever memory we have inherited.
Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Shoah and of Heroism, commemorates the extermination of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime between 1941 and 1945. This reality is irreducible, named, quantified, documented with a bureaucratic precision that the executioners themselves supplied, doubtless without realising that they were compiling their own indictment file for eternity. Yet this day carries, beyond its national and religious dimension, an appeal addressed to every human conscience: why does man kill man because he is the Other? And how far can he go in that direction? The Shoah has inscribed the answer to these two questions in concrete and ash, to such an extent that the whole history of collective violence, both before and after it, must now be read in its terrifying light.
Auschwitz, or modernity turned against itself
It would be convenient, and profoundly false, to classify the Shoah among eruptions of primitive barbarity, as though the SS had been cavemen armed with clubs. The truth is exactly the reverse, and it is precisely this truth that makes the Shoah unbearable to contemplate in its full dimension: it is the most sophisticated product of modern Western civilisation. The trains that carried the deportees to the camps ran according to timetables optimised by engineers; the gas chambers were designed by qualified architects; the lists of names were kept by scrupulous civil servants; the racial ideology that legitimised the extermination was formulated by doctors of philosophy and university professors. What the Shoah revealed with inescapable clarity is that technical rationality, the bureaucracy of the modern State and scientific thought can, when severed from any ethical and spiritual compass, become the most effective instruments ever produced for the extermination of human beings.
Auschwitz is therefore not a regression to the animal. It is a perversion of the human by itself, at the most advanced stage of its organisational capacities. This distinction is not academic. It means that the danger does not come from a humanity that is insufficiently developed, but on the contrary from a highly developed humanity that has dissociated intelligence from conscience. And every age carries within itself the seeds of this dissociation, including our own, with its targeting algorithms, its real-time rhetorics of dehumanisation on social networks, and its States increasingly tempted, in their governance, by fear of the foreigner and surveillance of the average citizen.
From Cain to Auschwitz: a genealogy of massacre
Yet the story does not begin in 1933. It begins in the very first days, where the Torah itself placed the first act of violence: in a field, between two brothers, under the gaze of a God who asks Cain, the murderer of Abel: “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s bloods cries out to Me from the ground.” (Genesis 4, 10). The Hebrew text is striking in its precision: dəmê, the bloods, in the plural – as though Abel’s body contained not a single blood, but all the future bloods of all the victims that Cain and his descendants would spill over the centuries. Rashi, one of the greatest commentators on the Torah, notes that the text indeed says “the bloods” in order to teach that whoever kills a single human being is as though he had destroyed an entire world, and conversely, that every life saved is worth an entire world. In this sense, Abel is not one victim among others. He is the name borne, in sacred memory, by every victim of collective violence from prehistory to the present day.
The list of these bloods is long. Cain is older than all our civilisations, and the question that the Torah raises is not a pious metaphor, it is an anthropology. We must find the courage to go through a brief enumeration without turning away our eyes. From the Neolithic period, the mass graves of Talheim, Asparn-Schletz or Schöneck-Kilianstädten, dated between 5000 and 7000 years before our era, bear witness that the collective and methodical massacre of an entire community is not a modern invention. The Assyrians exterminated the populations of Mesopotamia with an implacable method that already stunned their contemporaries. The Mongol conquests annihilated entire civilisations from Central Asia to Persia. The colonisation of the Americas was accompanied by a demographic collapse that some historians estimate at eighty per cent of the indigenous Amerindian populations, a proportion that exceeds anything the twentieth century produced. The transatlantic slave trade deported twelve million human beings, torn from their African lands, from their names, from their languages, from their humanity.
In the twentieth century, the Shoah was itself preceded by two tragedies. Between 1904 and 1908, the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia were exterminated by the German colonial army with a method and an ideology that made it the first laboratory of modern genocide and a direct foreshadowing of what was to come. Then, in 1915, during the genocide of the Armenians, Turkey pushed this logic of extermination a step further, with a troubling administrative precision: the designation of a population, dispossession, deportation, extermination — a protocol that the Nazis then had only to industrialise. After 1945, the list continued, as though humanity had stubbornly refused to learn anything. Let us name the Cambodian people massacred by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, the Bengalis of East Pakistan in 1971, the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, between five hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand dead in a hundred days, under the indifferent gaze of a world that the survivors have never been able to forgive, then the Yezidis in 2014… The list is not closed and it is still lengthening today.
Each of these massacres has followed the same fundamental architecture: someone first decided that the Other was not fully human. That his life was worth less, that his blood flowed for a reason, that his disappearance was necessary or at least tolerable. And once this decision had been taken inwardly, in the heart of an individual, in the ideology of a group, in the law of a State, the mechanism set itself in motion, with the terrifying docility that mechanisms always display. The Shoah is the moment when that mechanism reached its maximum speed and power, when the process of dehumanisation encountered industrial machinery and total political will. It is the climax, not because the other massacres matter less, but because it is the one that rendered the question absolutely impossible to evade: how far can humanity go in the destruction of its own flesh?
We are all Cain in potential
This is the disturbing claim, the one that neither moral comfort nor clear conscience can easily accept, and it is precisely for that reason that it must be voiced without trembling: there is no race, no nation, no religion, no civilisation that has demonstrated a definitive immunity against collective violence. Nazi Germany is not a monstrous exception that appeared from nowhere in the concert of nations. It is the result of an accumulation of political choices, complicit silences, stoked resentments, instrumentalised fears, and the designation of a scapegoat deemed responsible for every ill, a process that any society can undergo if it lets its spiritual and ethical guard drop sufficiently. Hannah Arendt, with her now famous phrase about the “banality of evil”, was saying nothing else: ordinary executioners are not monsters different from us in nature; they are ordinary men who consented, step by step, to monstrous acts because social, ideological and institutional pressure had rendered those acts normal.
This does not mean that we are all guilty of the Shoah, nor that all moral positions are equivalent. It means something far more demanding. We all carry, somewhere in our psychic structures and in our collective inheritances, the seeds of what Cain accomplished in the first field in history. The jealousy of what belongs to the Other. The resentment before difference. The fear of the foreigner erected into a principle of government. The contempt for the weak, dressed up in discourse about natural selection or meritocratic competition. Indifference to the suffering of a group we have not chosen to recognise as our neighbour. It is these seeds that Yom HaShoah invites us to look at directly, not in order to lash ourselves in vain, but to accomplish the work that the Jewish tradition calls teshuvah — the return, the conversion, the turning back of oneself towards what one knows to be right.
Cutting the inner roots before the violence ripens
Teshuvah does not mean regret. Regret, on its own, is a comfortable emotion that can be experienced without changing anything. Teshuvah means to return, to return to what one is at the deepest level, before the layers of fear, ideology and tribal conditioning that have covered over the original conscience. In Jewish thought, human beings are capable of teshuvah at any moment, because the divine image within them, the tselem Elokim, can never be utterly destroyed, only obscured. Yet authentic teshuvah demands an honest inventory. What have I done with the Other in my own life? Which Other have I dehumanised, even in the silence of my thoughts? To which rhetoric of rejection have I applauded because it seemed legitimate to me, because it targeted those I did not like, because it protected what I wanted to protect?
This question is not abstract. In our contemporary societies, crossed by migratory crises, surges of identitarian nationalisms, and algorithms that confine each group within its own reality facing its own enemy, it is burning in its relevance. To remember the Shoah without carrying out this inner inventory is to honour the dead with our lips while reconstituting in our hearts the conditions of their murder. It is spiritual complacency in its most dangerous form: the form that wraps itself in the cloak of commemoration in order to avoid transformation.
Reciting names: a liturgy for all the Abels
That is why, on this day, I would like to suggest a symbolic gesture that goes beyond the sole framework of Yom HaShoah, without in any way denying it. Imagine a silent liturgy in which, after the six torches lit for the six million murdered Jews, other flames would be kindled: one for the one and a half million Armenians of 1915, one for the eight hundred thousand Tutsis of 1994, one for the two million Cambodians under Pol Pot, one for the millions of enslaved people drowned in the Atlantic whose names are engraved on no memorial, one for the indigenous peoples of the Americas whose civilisations have been reduced to legends in their own lands, one for the Yezidis, for the Uyghurs, for all those whose collective suffering has not yet found an official name in the calendar of world memory.
This gesture is not a dilution. It is an amplification, the recognition that the bloods of Abel cry out from all lands, in all languages, that God hears all these cries with the same shattering attention, and that our responsibility as living human beings is to become the bearers of these names that no one else can any longer pronounce. To recite the names in full awareness is the most radical act of resistance against forgetfulness, which is itself the second death of the victims. And it is at the same time an act of collective teshuvah: in naming our victims, those of our nation, our civilisation, our group, we acknowledge the share of Cain that produced them, we choose to remain silent no longer and truly to change.
What all these martyrs of inhumanity still demand of us
In a few moments, the siren will fall silent. The cars will start up again. Conversations will resume. And if nothing has been transformed within us during those two minutes, if we have simply endured the ritual as one endures a shower before coming back into the dry, then we will have betrayed both the dead and the living. For the dead of the Shoah, like all the Abels of history, are not asking us for tears. They ask something more difficult and more costly: they ask us to become men and women who refuse, in their daily lives and in their collective choices, to allow the roots of rejection, contempt and dehumanisation to germinate within and around them, whose outcome, carried through to its extreme conclusion, always bears, in the end, the same name: Auschwitz.
Zakhor — remember. But remember in order to change.
— On the occasion of Yom HaShoah 5786 / 2026.
© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël
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