Like sheep to the slaughter

Lore & Background

The phrase appears in Isaiah 53:7, where a virtuous servant is murdered without protest, and in Psalm 44:22, where martyrdom is presented favorably. Jewish liturgy uses it in the Tachanun prayer. In Christianity, it was interpreted as the virtue of meekness, related to Jesus as the Lamb of God. The inverse—calling for resistance rather than passivity—is more commonly traced to Abba Kovner's 1942 pamphlet, not the 10th-century Josippon. This inversion was revived by Jewish self-defense leagues after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.

Reader's Guide

During the Holocaust, Abba Kovner used the phrase in a 1 January 1942 pamphlet to urge Jews in the Vilna Ghetto to resist, arguing that Hitler planned the annihilation of European Jewry. After the war, in Israel, some stigmatized Holocaust survivors as having gone "like sheep to the slaughter," while armed resistance was glorified. This myth, which has become less prominent over time, is frequently criticized by historians, theologians, and survivors as a form of victim blaming. The phrase remains a contested symbol of Jewish passivity versus resistance.

Did You Know?

• The Hebrew phrase in the Bible, "like sheep to be slaughtered" (כְּצֹאן טִבְחָה), is distinct from the later variant "like sheep to (the) slaughter" (כצאן לטבח).
• George Washington's use of the phrase in 1783 to warn against removing freedom of speech is unverified and likely incorrect.
• Abba Kovner later said his phrase had not meant that Holocaust victims went "like sheep to the slaughter," attributing that interpretation to non-Jews.

Religious Roots and Theological Ambiguity

The phrase finds its deepest roots in the Hebrew Bible, where it carries a tone of reverence rather than condemnation. In Isaiah 53, a righteous servant is led to death in silence, and that silence is praised as a mark of integrity. Psalm 44 similarly frames the killing of the faithful as a noble sacrifice, declaring that the persecuted are killed "all the day" for God's sake. This language became woven into Jewish daily worship through the Tachanun prayer, recited on Mondays and Thursdays, where the congregation acknowledges being regarded as "the sheep led to slaughter" while pleading not to be forgotten by God. Christianity inherited the image and read it as a portrait of meekness, with Jesus symbolized as the Lamb of God who did not protest his crucifixion. Theologian Albert Barnes saw Isaiah 53 as prophetic typology fulfilled in Christ's life. Yet Rabbi Abraham Heschel noted a complicating ambiguity: Isaiah himself protests God's punishment of the Jewish people, suggesting the servant's silence does not simply endorse passive suffering.

Secular Inversion and the Rise of Jewish Self-Defense

Contrary to common assumption, the phrase's most politically charged variant was not the biblical original but an inversion coined in the 10th-century Jewish history Josippon, where the Maccabean leader Mattathias urged his followers to die fighting rather than "as sheep led to slaughter." The image resurfaced when George Washington, in 1783, warned that without free speech, Americans could be "led, like sheep, to the Slaughter." The phrase's most consequential revival came after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in the Russian Empire, when Jewish self-defense leagues adopted the inverted formulation as a rallying cry. The New York Times described pogrom victims as "slaughtered like sheep," while Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner had his protagonist in Around the Point explicitly reject the comparison. By 1910, the Josippon variant had become more common. In 1920, future Israeli president Zalman Shazar invoked it to argue against negotiation with British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, declaring that the "brothers of the Tel Hai heroes will not be led as sheep to slaughter." The 1911 memorial book Yizkor attributed the phrase to Ya'akov Plotkin, a Jewish self-defense leader in Ukraine, and scholar Yael Feldman identifies this as the probable source for Abba Kovner's later wartime language.

Abba Kovner and the Call to Resist

On January 1, 1942, Abba Kovner published a pamphlet in the Vilna Ghetto that would become one of the most iconic acts of Jewish resistance rhetoric during the Holocaust. He declared that "Hitler is plotting the annihilation of European Jewry" and issued a thundering command: "We will not be led like sheep to slaughter." Acknowledging the overwhelming weakness of ghetto inhabitants, Kovner nonetheless insisted that the only answer to murder was revolt, urging his readers to "die fighting like free men" rather than live at the mercy of their killers. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer later observed that Kovner's aim was not to describe victims as passive but to "cause a rebellion against the very use of that term." In a 1945 speech to Palmach members in Palestine, Kovner clarified that his phrase had never meant that Holocaust victims had gone passively to their deaths; he attributed that reading to non-Jews, including a Soviet partisan commissar. He also noted the broader human reality of the inability to fight back, saying "All and everyone did go like this," a remark that extended the observation beyond Jews to Soviet prisoners of war and others.

Postwar Myth and the Burden of Victim Blaming

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the phrase took on a darker, accusatory meaning in postwar Israel. Some voices used it to demonize Holocaust survivors, implying they had gone passively to their deaths while armed resistance was glorified as the only honorable response. The phrase came to carry the implication that Jews had not tried to save their own lives and were therefore partly responsible for their own suffering and death. This narrative, which framed survival as a moral failing and resistance as the sole virtue, has been widely criticized by historians, theologians, and survivors themselves as a form of victim blaming. The irony is particularly sharp given the religious origins of the phrase, where silence before slaughter was a mark of divine favor, and given Kovner's own later insistence that he never intended to describe victims as passive. Over time, the "sheep" myth has become less prominent in public discourse, yet its legacy persists as a reminder of how language born in prayer and rebellion can be twisted into a weapon against those who suffered.

Gallery