The Rabbinical Exaggeration or ‘Guzma’ is a common device employed by jewish religious writers and authorities; both past and present and finds common utilization in the Babylonian Talmud for example. (1) Its origins lie in the unusual and exaggerated tales told by rabbinical authorities in the Mishnah and Gemara to make a specific point: so, if say Maimonides had been speaking to Nachmanides they might use a Guzma to make a point of scale.

However, when using the guzma historically jewish religious writers and authorities have been conscious of the possibility that an exaggeration could be taken as reality rather than how it was actually intended to be understood. To combat this the rabbinical authorities used a system of absolute absurdity: so that everything said in divrei gumza (lit. ’tall tales’) was so absurd that only the ignorant would take it literally. (2)

Now the method used by jewish religious writers and authorities to express the scale of a Shoah event - and bear in mind the term is much older and has seen much more use than its single modern usage (i.e. in regards to the ‘Holocaust’) may imply to most people - is to multiply the number of Israelites the Mishnah lists as having coming out of Egypt (i.e. approximately 600,000) to give a sense of how much worse an event is or large something in relation to the Exodus. (3)

The Origin of the ‘6 Million Jews’ Figure A Case of Lost in Translation

Karl Radl, 2023