Shoah is the Hebrew word for catastrophic ruin and unmitigated disaster. It appears in Psalm 35 as an imprecation against enemies: “Let ruin come upon them unawares!” It’s also used in Zephaniah and elsewhere to describe the desolation brought by divine judgment and in Proverbs for the inevitable ruin brought by the ways of the wicked.
The Camp of the Saints, the controversial and until now fugitive novel by Jean Raspail (retranslated and republished by Vauban Books), is a story of shoah. As Nathan Pinkoski observed in his assessment of The Camp of the Saints (“Spiritual Death of the West,” May 2023), ruin and loss were the novelist’s preoccupations. In other books, Raspail imagined the moral and spiritual experience of cultural destruction and desolation. In The Camp of the Saints, he imagines something different. He depicts the more complex and terrifying fate of self-destruction and self-chosen destitution.
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