History

Pogrom is the term by which the memory of persecution in Eastern Europe has found its way into Jewish memory. But when did it appear, and how was it used? For this text, Elena Guritanu delved into the dictionaries of the last two centuries, in order to trace the history of this term which, because it designates an undeniable horror, has itself been the object of omissions and denials.

Méssaouda is an Arab-Jewish great-grandmother who has just passed on. Yossef Murciano, her great-grandson, remembers her history, her humor, her language, and, above all, the memory of a lack of understanding. In this text, the distant descendant recalls his strange familiarity with Moroccan Jewish culture, in which he has been immersed all his life, without ever really knowing it.

In one of Omer Bartov’s latest books Tales from the Bonderlands. Making und Unmaking the Galician Past (Yale University Press, 2022) he writes about an almost forgotten “end of the world” – that of a Galicia where Jews, Poles and Ukrainians lived side by side – whose memory the historian seeks to narrate from its tales and legends. Boris Czerny provides a critical account, noting that Bartov’s nostalgia for this lost Eden-like land is matched by a mistrust of the way in which Jews have taken over another “end of the world”, which would appear to have turned them into “bullies”.

In February, we published a text by Gabriel Abensour lamenting the lukewarmness of Franco-Judaism and its disarray due to the neglect of its spiritual heritage, particularly its Sephardic one. David Haziza responds here, in the form of a “moderate and amicable critique”. While he agrees with Abensour’s observation of a loss of the vital forces of Judaism, he doesn’t attribute it to a colonial disdain for Sephardism, but rather to an attempt to make Judaism modern and presentable.

What ideological resources do supporters of the binational solution draw on, at a time when cohabitation between Israelis and Palestinians seems more compromised than ever? Denis Charbit offers us his critical review of Shlomo Sand’s latest book, Two people for one State? Rereading the history of Zionism (Seuil). Born from within Zionist thought, Charbit nevertheless warns us against the deception of turning this perspective against the Zionist project as such.

How should we view the divide between those in Israel who put the destruction of Hamas before any consideration of the hostages’ fate, and those who, on the contrary, are ready to negotiate their rescue at any price? In this text, Noémie Issan-Benchimol analyzes the coordinates of the debate in terms of cultural and religious ethos. While Jewish tradition sees hostage redeeming as a communal obligation, a significant part of religious Zionism is reviving a Roman ethos of civic honor, which scorns weakness and territorializes fraternity. Can fraternity, specific to the diaspora, continue to inform the politics of a state?

How can we explain the convergence, apparently so spontaneous on American campuses, between anti-racism and anti-Zionism? Following the radicalization of the civil rights movement, Christian Voller traces the genesis of the link between Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine. His story takes us through Brooklyn, where the encounter between Black people and traditionalist Jews sometimes took the form of a gang war.

Carlo Ginzburg’s historical work has shed new light on the Jewish condition, making it possible to consider them in their minority, marginal dimension, alongside the witches and lepers persecuted by the Inquisition. In this interview with Avishag Zafrani, the renowned scholar discusses the subjective determinations that led him to approach the history of persecution from the point of view of the victims, and how this approach challenges the practice and position of the historian.

On 10 February 1944, Anni and Fritz Finaly, Austrian refugees who had arrived in France six years earlier, entrusted their sons to the Sisters. Four days later, they were arrested by the Gestapo. Deported to Auschwitz, they never returned. Aged 2 and 3, Robert and Gérard were entrusted to the care of a devout Catholic, Antoinette Brun, who became their guardian. When the children’s family wanted them back, Miss Brun refused – on the grounds that they had been baptised. Philosopher Jean-Michel Rey looks back at this “Finaly affair”, which hit the headlines in the early 1950s, and at the violence of a gesture of erasure that people thought could be legitimised by recourse to Catholic theology alone.