This week K. tells you the story of books that made history. The first and most recent, ‘Vichy and the Jews’, shook up the historiography of the 1980s and gradually made its mark on French national memory. The falsifiers of history like Zemmour, who are trying to erase Vichy’s complicity in the Nazi extermination policy, never lose an opportunity to recall, as if there were grounds for illegitimacy, the North American origin of its authors, the historians Robert Paxton and Michaël R. Marrus. But what is less well known is that the impetus of this important work came from a French editor: Roger Errera. A State Councillor, Roger Errera was also the founder and director, at Calmann-Lévy, of the important collection ‘Diaspora’. In a retrospective, Bruno Karsenti uncovers the tension in his life and draws a portrait of Roger Errera that shows the model of an exemplary political attitude for the Jews of the Diaspora after the Holocaust. In the second text of the week, Robert Paxton himself recounts his meeting with Roger Errera, the stakes involved in the commissioning of what became ‘Vichy and the Jews’, and the difficulties he faced during the ten years of hard work that enabled its publication.
The second book, which is being discussed this week, is older, but also marks a break with the past. With Daniel Deronda, the famous George Eliot, author of ‘Middlemarch’, wrote in 1876 a novel which became a crown jewel of British literature. The book stands out in Victorian literature for its empathy with the Jews and its pro-Zionist sentiments. Journalist Josh Glancy sheds light through Daniel Deronda on the modern history of Jewish integration in England and on one of the European routes for the spread of the Zionist ideal.
