Like sheep to the slaughter

Presbyterian theologian Albert Barnes wrote, "the fact that [Jesus] did not open his mouth in complaint was therefore the more remarkable, and made the merit of his sufferings the greater".

[10][11] The inversion of the phrase was revived by Jewish self-defense leagues in the Russian Empire in the wake of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, although it remained rare compared to other imagery of victimization.

Zalman Shazar, later the third president of Israel, argued against negotiating with the British Mandatory Palestine authorities because "The brothers of the Tel Hai heroes will not be led as sheep to slaughter.

[16] During the Holocaust, Abba Kovner was the first to use the phrase as a call for action in a 1 January 1942 pamphlet[10] in which he argued that "Hitler is plotting the annihilation of European Jewry".

[18][19] In a speech Kovner gave to members of the Palmach after arriving in Israel in October 1945, he explained that his phrase had not meant that Holocaust victims had gone "like sheep to the slaughter" and attributed that interpretation to non-Jews, such as a Soviet partisan commissar.

[21] In the Kraków Ghetto, Dolek Liebeskind said, "For three lines in history that will be written about the youth who fought and did not go like sheep to the slaughter it is even worth dying.

Ringelblum asked, "why have we allowed ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter", and concluded that Jews were ashamed and disgraced because their "docility" did not save their lives.

[28] Israeli historian Yechiam Weitz argues that the "sheep to slaughter" trope "insinuat[es] that millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust did not measure up" and, if they had fought back, Jewish national honor would have been preserved.

[29] Feldman describes the myth as deriving from traditional European antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as "the dishonorable antithesis of all the 'virile' qualities deemed necessary by modern nationalism".

[33] Disturbed by this, Kovner said in 1947 that one who had not witnessed the events of the Holocaust could not use the phrase appropriately; "like sheep to the slaughter" meant something different in Israel than it had in the Vilna Ghetto in 1942.

[35] He attempted to educate Israelis about Nazi crimes,[36] "assumed the role of defense attorney for the dead and the living Jewish people", and called many survivors as witnesses.

The Labor Zionist writer Haim Guri wrote: We should ask forgiveness from countless numbers for having judged them in our hearts... We often generalized categorically and arbitrarily that these poor souls [went to their deaths] "as sheep to the slaughter."

Because Nazi propaganda films were often the only source of footage, their use in postwar documentaries supported the idea of Jewish passivity, as did the iconic Warsaw Ghetto boy photograph.

[38] In 1946, survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote the bestselling book Man's Search for Meaning, based on his own experiences, in which he claimed that a positive attitude was essential to surviving the camps.

[43] Although she criticized Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner for asking survivors why they had not resisted,[43][44] she also described Jews as obeying Nazi orders with "submissive meekness" and "arriving on time at the transportation points, walking under their own power to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot", a characterization American Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt found "disturbing".

[48] Daniel Goldhagen criticized the "maddening, oft-heard phrase 'like sheep to slaughter'" as a "misconception" in his blurb for the 1994 book Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The entry on Jewish resistance in Eastern Europe in the 2001 The Holocaust Encyclopedia opens by debunking the "false assumptions" behind questions such as "Why did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter?

[17] According to Holocaust historian Peter Hayes, "nothing in the literature on the Shoah is more unseemly than the blame cast by some writers on an almost completely unarmed, isolated, terrified, tortured, and enervated people for allegedly failing to respond adequately".

"[52] Rabbi Emil Fackenheim wrote that "the loose talk about 'sheep to slaughter' and 'collaborationist' Judenräte" is caused by willful ignorance of the facts of the Holocaust because "it is more comfortable to blame the victim".

[11] Rabbi Bernard Rosenberg writes that to understand the fallacy of the "sheep to the slaughter" myth, one must consider the lived experience of survivors who had no opportunity to fight back against their oppressors.

[55] Orthodox Rabbi and author Shmuley Boteach calls the phrase a "double insult to the martyred six million" because it both accuses them of cowardice and blames them for their fate.