# 147 / Editorial
What is it between Jews and Europe? Who can still say, or call oneself, ‘European Jew’, as if the relationship of belonging went without saying? “Isn’t ‘European Jewry’ first and foremost what was destroyed by the Shoah? Jews devoured by Europe. Then, eventually, Jews reintegrated by a Europe ballasted by the weight of the crime. There is nothing simple about these two terms. This is why, in the full title of the magazine, we have chosen to present this relationship in the form of a juxtaposition, ” Jews, Europe “, thus underlining its problematic nature, and betting that, if there was a history between the Jews and Europe, it would continue to be written in the 21st century. The essays by Jacques Ehrenfreund and Danny Trom that we are publishing this week address, each in their own way, this issue as it has been updated by ‘the first post-Shoah pogrom’. For although 7 October did not take place on European soil, its echoes resonate with the unfinished history of hatred of the Jews and reopen the question of their future in Europe. In a way, we could say that October 7th also took place between the Jews and Europe, at the precise point that makes it possible to perpetuate their link, while reminding us of what necessarily distorts it. In this sense, the event raised the burning question of how Europe and the Jews relate to their shared history. For Jacques Ehrenfreund, the inability, if not the refusal, to situate October 7th in the history of anti-Semitism and pogroms is the symptom of a crisis in European historical consciousness which, believing its history of particularistic conflicts to have been overcome, deludes itself with the promise of universal reconciliation. But in the face of this Christian conception of history, Danny Trom reminds us of the particular structure of Jewish events, in which the ordeal is part of a series that resists being overcome. The Jews, then, resist universalist preaching: worse still, they particularise themselves in a state that does not hesitate to wage war to guarantee their survival. The critical moment we are living through therefore reveals a divide around which a profound mutual incomprehension is building. And with each passing day, we need to be a little more flexible in order to keep up with the great gap of the European Jew dillemma.
