About Pierre Nora: French narrative and Jewish recitation

To keep the memory alive of the great historian Pierre Nora, who passed away on Monday, June 2, alive, we are republishing a text by Danny Trom—originally published in La France en récits—which explores the echoes between Nora’s Rethinking France project and Yerushalmi’s Zakhor. Two fundamentally different, even opposing, approaches to memory, yet both addressing the question of Jewish emancipation in the modern nation and what remains of their historical consciousness when the Republic fails to keep its promises.

 

 

 

A collective narrative reflects, more or less faithfully, the memory of a group, beyond the individual memories of its members. In retrospect, the coincidence in the 1980s of Pierre Nora’s Rethinking France (original: Lieux de Mémoire [ET: Place of Memory]) project and the publication in French of Yosef H. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor evokes a collision. On the one hand, there is a collective memory inscribed in chronicles, monuments, landscapes, works, institutions, and events; on the other, a ritualized collective memory, the recitation of what is recorded in tradition. On the one hand, the enthusiastic identification of the markers that punctuate and guide a collective epic; on the other, the monotonous repetition of the same. The two projects recognized each other, but initially in their absolute antinomy, as if two universes were looking at each other with astonishment.

For this collision to occur, in the minds of their authors and readers, something had to be undone. What had imperceptibly unraveled, or at least loosened, was the knot binding republican France to the Jews. This bond was the result of a powerful synchronizing movement that emerged from the Enlightenment, which pushed the Jews, a host people who had until then lived on the margins of their host countries, to slip into the mainstream and take their place there. Political modernity precipitated this movement, which culminated in the emancipation of the Jews proclaimed by the Great Revolution. The Jews, who had certainly been present on French soil since time immemorial, expelled in the Middle Ages, then tolerated in limited numbers and finally readmitted, were now dissolving as “Jewish nations” to enter, one by one, into the body of the French nation, into the Republic. This transaction—the dissolution of separate corporations, each with their privileges and servitudes inherited from the past, in exchange for full citizenship granted individually to each Jew—was initially hesitant but was finally officially agreed and enacted by both sides.

The revolutionary work maintains, strictly speaking, a conflictual relationship with all memory. In short, its only narrative is that of its own triumph. The Revolution ushered in a new beginning from which memories of lineage, dynastic narratives, those of the monarchy and the aristocracy, were banished, and with them all the corporatist and territorial attachments from which it sought to liberate the people who had become a nation. From this point of view, the price of modernity for the Jews was both very high and fairly moderate. High, because Jews had to renounce their understanding of themselves as a political body dispersed “among the nations” in order to be ready to enter the modern nation; this price was weighed up and then accepted by the majority, sometimes with mistrust, often and increasingly with enthusiasm. Moderate because they had to give up a few odd habits, or at least pretend to do so, but unencumbered by a glorious past and attached only to their own nation, whose status was still fragile and dependent on the goodwill of the authorities, Jews slipped smoothly into a political system whose coordinates were traced by principles and abstractions with which they could identify.

The political price was paid in full, without much regret, while the social benefits were obvious. When the synchronization was complete, the Jews were fully aligned with the Republic. Their story would be that of the advent of the Republic and the triumph of republican principles. The synchronization then amounted to a fusion. This is why it could be described as a reverse messianism: the foreign country, traditionally a place of alienation, became, with the Revolution, not only hospitable—there were others—but the very place of liberation for the Jews. The sudden emancipation of the Jews of France then reverberated throughout Europe, even in the most remote Jewish villages in the East. In France, a second revolution, discreet and internal to the Jewish world, was thus grafted onto the first, which had come from outside. The figure of the Israelite (the French emancipated Jew) emerged from this. Sometimes, Israelite dynasties of servants of the republican state were born.

When the synchronization was complete, the alignment of the Jews with the Republic was complete. Their story would be that of the advent of the Republic and the triumph of republican principles. The synchronization then amounted to a fusion.

Even with the Republic definitively consolidated, the split between ancient memories and the republican adventure was never pushed to the breaking point. This is the lesson to be learned from Rethinking France, which we do not know exactly whether it is an effort to consolidate the pillars on which today’s France rests or an inventory before a feared liquidation. But this project certainly teaches us that the French historical narrative has never ceased to return and that the Revolution—itself reintegrated into a broader framework—has never ceased to give way to the narratives that made up the glorious history of a France whose origins or driving force are constantly being sought. The Republic, in short, is firmly rooted in France and built on the French language. This is why the monumental historiographical project that is Rethinking France was able to be exported abroad and produce versions adapted to other nations, with some reworking. What Yerushalmi’s Zakhor meant at the time was the impossibility of transposing the project to the Jews, since their ritualized memory, transmitted through liturgy, prevented memory and history from splitting. This indistinction applies to the Jewish fact in general, Yerushalmi shows, and therefore in principle also as a circumscribed fact, internally to France. Thus, Rethinking France confronts the non-place of Jewish memory, while Jewish recitation, disembodied, has survived, without apparent contradiction, in mutual indifference to the rich, carnal, colorful, and ramified French narratives

Having become Israelites, French Jews were therefore unable to separate and stratify, like other subgroups, a national memory and family memories that were now clearly subordinate. Does this mean that two national memories were to coexist for Jews? The depoliticization of Jews and their concomitant repoliticization in the political body of the nation seemed to have decided in favor of a complete substitution. Yet something persisted of the Jewish “national” memory, and with it the trace of the collective that had nevertheless been dissolved. The Jewish paradigm, in fact, divided Jews internally. Ritual, although privatized, sometimes confined to the inner self, sometimes even buried in vague memories of what once existed, continued to refer to a collective that had been abolished or deactivated but nevertheless remained untouched by political modernity. For memory, in its specifically Jewish form, does not draw on the historical world or manifest itself through the narration of events that take place in it. No historical event, not even a revolution that offers everyone, all together, a chance to start over, can reach it. Its own regime of historicity, that of a non-territorialized people, an exiled people that does not erect monuments—monuments of which Rethinking France is the expression and reflexive extension—endures.

With this Jewish memory, it is not a topography that emerges, nor are we dealing with the spatial and temporal coordinates of a memory, in the way that Halbwachs uses the Gospels to trace a topography in the background of the narratives: it is the eternal contemporaneity of a past that has remained active here, albeit latent. This past does not refer to some distant event, the reality of which is generally doubted, but to a scenario featuring characters, essentially Israel (in the traditional sense) in contention with the world. Ritual does not produce a set of reference points intended to project themselves into an ongoing epic, but conveys the injunction to remember something that does not have the substance of an event. The internal division among the Israelites certainly opened the door to a process of substituting narratives, which effectively led to complete adherence to the French historical narrative reworked around the revolutionary moment, but even within this process, the injunction to remember, the heart of the Jewish mechanism described by Yerushalmi, continued to resonate.

Memory, in its specifically Jewish form, does not draw on the historical world or manifest itself through the narration of events that take place in it. No historical event, not even a revolution that offers everyone, all together, a chance to start over, can reach it.

Zakhor, “remember,” commands tradition sternly, with an exclamation mark – but remember what exactly? This command appears numerous times in the Scriptures, but two main sets of content emerge from liturgical practice.

First, remember the covenant and the exodus, “remember that you were a slave in Egypt” (Deut. 5:15) before God himself freed you. The injunction here serves as a reassurance of the covenant and God’s promise of liberation that flows from it—God is also asked, in return, to remember this, so that the future may be a confirmation of the covenant. The emancipation of the Jews could here be perfectly translated in terms of liberation from Egypt, from servitude.

Then, “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way, how he attacked you” (Deut. 25:17): the memory here is that of the enmity that arose in exile, which amalgamates this tribe called Amalek, who attacked Israel by surprise in the desert, and Haman, the character who, in the Book of Esther, became Prime Minister of the King of Persia and set out to destroy the Jews. The rabbinic commentary specifies with regard to “zakhor” that Haman, reminiscent of Amalek, came only to serve as a reminder or signal to all generations (zekher le-dorot) of the unexpected emergence of radical hostility in exile. Here, emancipation seemed to render the injunction obsolete, since with the Republic, the sovereign people were now considered rational, capable of self-government, immune to the evil passions of the past, a people with whom the Jews had amalgamated and therefore no longer constituted a threat to them, as they were now indistinguishable from them.

It is no exaggeration to consider that the two injunctions, which until then had been imbued with an intensity commensurate with the condition of exile, were then emptied of their substance. They carried and nourished a field of tension—hope for liberation from exile and protection in exile—that the era seemed to have relegated to an obscure past. It is therefore understandable why these injunctions, temporarily deactivated—persisting in the form of a fossilized liturgy—were revived as soon as Emancipation failed to deliver on its promises. For the injunction to remember does not refer to any event in the historical past, but to a virtuality of the present. The hope for liberation was then measured against the failure of Emancipation. The injunction inevitably took on the colors of hope once again, looking toward the future. And the injunction to remember the danger regained its most current power.

‘To remember’ is an activity, teaches the Midrash: not only to hold on to, but to retain, to avoid forgetting, to keep something materially present that would otherwise be swallowed up by oblivion. This is so that we are not taken by surprise when the threat arises.

Regarding Deut. 25:17-19, the Midrash questions the curious repetition of the injunction concerning Amalek: why does verse 17 begin with “remember” (zekhor), while verse 19 ends with “do not forget” (lo tishkakh)? This repetition, which seems superfluous, notes the traditional commentary, is also found in Genesis 40:23, concerning Joseph, but this time within the same verse: “Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember (lo zakhar) Joseph, he forgot him (va-yishkakhéhou).” Every day, explains the Midrash, the chief butler was determined to speak to Pharaoh about Joseph, determined to do so at dinner, then at nightfall, but each time the angel came and disturbed him (disturbed his memory). Every day he tied a knot to remember, and every day the angel came and untied it. “To remember,” teaches the Midrash, is an activity, as in the French expression faire un nœud dans son mouchoir (to tie a knot in one’s handkerchief). Such is the lesson of the repetition of the injunction: “to remember” anticipates the risk of forgetting. Zakhor, remember, certainly means to keep in mind, to bear in mind, but it adds something else, namely a mnemonic device: not only to hold on to, but to retain, to avoid forgetting, to keep something materially present that would otherwise be swallowed up by oblivion. This is so as not to be taken by surprise when the threat arises. The recitation contains no historical narrative, but rather a historical awareness of a virtuality, like a prefigurative knowledge carried in liturgical repetition. If there is a Jewish narrative, it is recitation, internalized, incorporated quotation, which fixes attention on the present moment when crisis strikes. This repetition, rooted in current events, is therefore oriented toward the future, since it is based on existential uncertainty and concerns “all generations” (all eras).

By breaking with linear history to make way for the historical present, the Rethinking France project imperceptibly, perhaps secretly, approaches this scheme, since the historical present emerges as soon as there is uncertainty about the future. P. Nora proposes to revive the French historical past by updating its sedimented deposits, anchoring them in the present of the national memory. One might guess that he recognized an affinity with the author of Zakhor, a shared anxiety in the face of the looming crisis. Certainly, for Nora, the past points to the facts of the present, it signals itself in the present—this is the very definition of a monument—but for Yerushalmi it is a field of tension, available in a typological form, which, like a prefiguring threat, always returns to the present. It returns, one might say, in the way that the symptom of “déjà vu” manifests itself, that disturbing feeling of having already experienced what one is currently experiencing, like a reminder of what is happening in the present moment.^[1] It returns like a memory of the threatening present. It is therefore easy to understand why zakhor, in its rabbinical sense, remained imperative beyond Emancipation, whose regressions and failures accumulated until the collapse of the Republic and the state antisemitism that characterized the Vichy regime with its criminal consequences. The knot in which memory is somehow held captive was meant to serve as a reminder, a call to vigilance, and yet the Jews were taken by surprise. Pierre Vidal-Naquet attributed this lack of preparation to the Jews’ loss of connection with the source of the warning contained in the injunction to remember the potential emergence of radical enmity in the form of Amalek/Haman.^[2] This leads to a paradox: it is precisely at the moment when the Jews lost this connection with the traditional injunction that the latter resurfaced in the form of a diagnosis of its failure.^[3]

As we can see, it is by no means a Jewish national narrative that is surreptitiously resurfacing in the French narrative that would have covered it up—the traditional injunction being fundamentally achronic. It is the failures of Emancipation and the shortcomings of the Republic that are here retranslated into the traditional form of an injunction that spans historical time. The injunction that the era reactivates does not give rise to any alternative narrative, but insinuates an anxious inflection into the common narrative, so that today we are not quite sure how to refer to Jews—Israelites, citizens of the Jewish faith, French Jews, or Jews of France. Since hostility towards Jews did not come solely from society, but was taken up by the state and translated into public policy, a gap has widened between Jews and their fellow citizens—a gap that raises the question of whether it is a breach that time will eventually heal or whether it will widen to the point of causing a lasting separation. This desynchronization therefore produces less a diffraction of narratives than a disjunction of historical consciousness that colors the common narrative and now distinguishes French Jews from other citizens, perhaps in an increasingly obvious way in the current climate of hostility.

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Danny Trom

An initial version of this text first appeared in La France en récits, edited by Yves Charles Zarka, Puf, 2020.