Abstract: À partir des années 1990 s’impose la conviction que le recul du racisme et de l’antisémitisme résultera de la connaissance des tragédies du passé auxquelles ces idéologies ont conduit. Trente ans plus tard, le constat est sans appel : le racisme peine à reculer, l’antisémitisme connaît une nouvelle vigueur et l’extrême droite xénophobe accumule les succès électoraux. Il devient donc impérieux d’interroger une pédagogie par la mémoire des événements tragiques (Shoah, esclavage « négrier », colonisation) qui n’est plus au diapason d’une société et d’une jeunesse en profonde mutation.
Alors que les mémoires sont devenues des vecteurs de confrontations identitaires, que l’antisémitisme contemporain puise à des matrices ignorées des programmes scolaires (islam et antisionisme) et que la recherche historique récente a enrichi et renouvelé les savoirs, le récit historique doit être profondément repensé.
Cet essai suggère de transmettre l’histoire des racismes et des antisémitismes, non plus en partant de leurs conséquences les plus tragiques, mais par l’analyse de leur fabrique, de leurs mythes constitutifs et des stratégies de leur permanence, en privilégiant le temps long et la démarche comparative, sans éluder ni le rôle des religions, ni les sources extra-européennes du racisme et de l’antisémitisme.
Abstract: Les Juifs ont souvent été accusés de pratiquer le « meurtre rituel » : de la judéophobie antique à l’antisionisme radical d’aujourd’hui, en passant par l’antisémitisme racial moderne, cette accusation mensongère s’est traduite par des légendes qui n’ont cessé de susciter des mobilisations politiques et des violences meurtrières (émeutes sanglantes, pogromes, attentats terroristes). Ces récits de meurtres, qui stimulent la haine, permettent la criminalisation d’un peuple tout entier : les Juifs. Un peuple imaginé comme étant constitué d’assassins potentiels. La haine des Juifs n’a certainement rien inventé de pire.
Pierre-André Taguieff, à travers l’analyse de nombreux exemples, montre que cette accusation n’a cessé, au cours de l’histoire, d’être reformulée dans des contextes très différents, et qu’elle est la matrice d’un enseignement de la haine destiné à susciter de l’indignation. En se diffusant massivement sur Internet, ces récits diffamatoires préparent le passage au « tout est permis » contre les Juifs, et ainsi justifient les actions les plus violentes contre eux. L’examen critique de ces récits offre au lecteur les moyens de démonter les mensonges d’une propagande judéophobe qui s’est globalisée.Les Juifs ont souvent été accusés de pratiquer le « meurtre rituel » : de la judéophobie antique à l’antisionisme radical d’aujourd’hui, en passant par l’antisémitisme racial moderne, cette accusation mensongère s’est traduite par des légendes qui n’ont cessé de susciter des mobilisations politiques et des violences meurtrières (émeutes sanglantes, pogromes, attentats terroristes). Ces récits de meurtres, qui stimulent la haine, permettent la criminalisation d’un peuple tout entier : les Juifs. Un peuple imaginé comme étant constitué d’assassins potentiels. La haine des Juifs n’a certainement rien inventé de pire.
Pierre-André Taguieff, à travers l’analyse de nombreux exemples, montre que cette accusation n’a cessé, au cours de l’histoire, d’être reformulée dans des contextes très différents, et qu’elle est la matrice d’un enseignement de la haine destiné à susciter de l’indignation. En se diffusant massivement sur Internet, ces récits diffamatoires préparent le passage au « tout est permis » contre les Juifs, et ainsi justifient les actions les plus violentes contre eux. L’examen critique de ces récits offre au lecteur les moyens de démonter les mensonges d’une propagande judéophobe qui s’est globalisée.
Abstract: This chapter seeks to analyse the entanglement of exclusionist ideas in antisemitic and anti-feminist thought in Poland and Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It will consider discriminatory politics, practices, and violence against women, Jews, and other groups that were perceived as ‘Other’, drawing on cases from Germany, Poland, and Hungary in a comparative approach. Since connections between exclusion, sexuality, and violence during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are currently undergoing reinterpretation, the chapter will also examine developments and examples of anti-gender ideology and right-wing populism in contemporary Poland and Europe and discuss the dangers such shared forms of ressentiment pose to democracy.
Abstract: En dépit d'une ancienne présence sur le territoire de la France, les Juifs, parmi les diverses populations assemblées dans la construction historique de la nation française, semblent n'avoir pas été, pendant longtemps, considérés comme un élément constitutif du groupe national. La recherche se propose d'examiner cette dissonance entre la mémoire nationale et l'histoire, à travers ce que l'Ecole, pièce essentielle d'un dispositif de transmission, a retenu des Juifs dans l'histoire enseignée depuis plus d'un siècle, et qui se trouve à présent conservé dans les manuels scolaires. Ceux-ci, en effet, sans avoir été conçus pour cet usage, témoignent des termes dans lesquels une société élabore son passé historique et souhaite le transmettre aux générations ultérieures, dans une forme où se mêlent une préoccupation d'éducation civique et une volonté de diffusion de la connaissance. Des débuts de la Troisième république à nos jours, les manuels permettent d'observer quelle sorte de représentation des Juifs la mémoire historique de la France, modelée par une conception puissamment unitaire, a pu élaborer ; comment et selon quels mécanismes ces images perdurent, s'effacent ou se modifient. Les Juifs de l'histoire de France apparaissent alors étroitement liés à l'idée même de nation.
Abstract: In several of Sjón’s works, there is a preoccupation with the Second World War, especially the issues and ideologies at stake in the run-up to the conflict and in its aftermath. This is evident, for instance, in his trilogy CoDex 1962 and in his most recent novel Korngult hár, grá augu (Red Milk). The issues addressed in these texts are, for instance, the fate of the Jewish immigrant in Iceland, and the peculiar circumstances of the rise of neo-Nazism in post-war Iceland. The memory of the war in Iceland is in many ways at odds with the narratives established elsewhere in Europe. The particular circumstances of the country—occupied by allied forces from 1940 onwards, with its concomitant incursion of modernity, urbanisation, and creation of wealth in what had historically been a very poor country—have greatly influenced how the war is memorialised, or more to the point rather, not memorialised in Iceland. This chapter looks at how Sjón’s novels engage with the ruling national narrative and go against that memory by telling an alternative history of the war, focussing on transnational and marginalised histories and cultures that historically have been ignored in Icelandic cultural memory.
Abstract: In recent years, the fate of the Jews in Bulgaria during the Second World War has aroused the research interest of humanities scholars from various disciplines, with a number of studies published (see e.g., and many of the following cited (Avramov 2012. “Спасение” и падение. Микроикономика на държавния антисемитизъм в България, 1940–1944 [“Rescue” and fall. Microeconomics of State Anti-semitism in Bulgaria, 1940–1944]. Sofia: Sofia University “St. Kl. Ohridski; Daneva 2013; Krsteva 2015; Koleva 2017)). Many rely on research on the construction of memory. At the same time, fewer research efforts seem to have focused on how the topic has become politicized in the years since 1989 (see e.g. Benatov 2013. “Debating the Fate of Bulgarian Jews during World War II.” In Bringing the Dark Past to Light the Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, edited by John-Paul Himka, and Joanna Beata Michlic, 108–31. University of Nebraska Press; Ragaru 2020. Et les Juifs bulgaresfurent sauvе…Une histoire des savoirs sur la Shoah en Bulgarie. Paris: Science Po). The aim of this paper is to offer precisely this perspective on the topic of non/rescue, and in the last ten years. Politicization has traditionally been understood as the process of attributing salience to an issue of public interest through various channels such as political discourse and media, and in the presence of the multiple and diverse opinions associated with it (deWilde, Pieter. 2011. “No polity for old politics? A framework for analyzing the politicization of European integration.” Journal of European Integration 33 (5): 559–75; de Wilde, Pieter, Anna Leupold, and Henning Schmidtke. 2016. “Introduction: the differentiated politicisation of European governance.” West European Politics 39 (1): 3–22). In some texts on the politicization of the migration crisis in Bulgaria in the years since 2012, the author shows how a topic can be politicized in the absence of political debate and in the context of a dominant populist understanding, multiplied by various power actors – politicians, institutions, media and intellectuals (see e.g. Otova, Ildiko, and Evelina Staykova. 2022. Migration and Populism in Bulgaria. London: Routledge). For the purposes of this paper, by politicization the author will understand the blurring of ideological differences of interpretations of who the savior is in a populist consensus around the construction of the rescue narrative
for foreign policy use, but mostly as a nation-building narrative. The focus of this article is on the last ten years, in which the political interpretations and actions surrounding the commemoration of the 70th in 2013 and 75th in 2018 and the 80th anniversary in 2023 of the events surrounding the so-called rescue of Bulgarian Jews are particularly interesting. It is during these last years that populism has become the norm for the political scene in Bulgaria. Populism is not the obvious entrance to the topic, but it is the political framework within which the politicization of the topic of the rescue is developing, and a possible theoretical entrance. Populism became a persistent part of Bulgarian political life more than a decade after the beginning of the democratic changes of 1989. There are several key factors involved in this process-exhaustion of the cleavages of the transition period, but especially the transformation of party politics into symbolic ones (Otova, Ildiko, and Evelina Staykova. 2022. Migration and Populism in Bulgaria. London: Routledge). Symbolic politics deal more with emotions and less with ratio and facts; they build narratives that are often nationally affirming. The article does not claim to be exhaustive, especially in its presentation of historical facts. The limits of this rather political science approach are many. On the other hand, however, it adds to the research effort with a missing glimpse into the interpretations of the no/rescue theme and could open the field for further in-depth research.
Abstract: In the last decades, witness to the Shoa has taken on various forms, from story-telling, to trial depositions and evidence collection, from negotiations for compensations, to "second-generation" accounts. Over the years, what used to be a first-hand narrative, the story of what had been actually seen and felt, has become the account of what have been heard. Since witness to the Shoa, in its various forms, has come to be considered as fundamental "evidence" of the tragedy, second-hands accounts may prove fragile documents to this end. What, therefore, are witness narratives? Are they merely legal documents? How do they stand as historical documents? Will Shoa narratives still have a future while witnesses slowly dwindle and disappear?
Abstract: Modern Greek historiography has rendered Salonican Jews invisible in the national historical narrative, while those occasional works appearing in the past decades have treated them as a coherent and isolated community. In the 1970s and 1980s, a leftist historiography challenged the nationalist narrative but replaced it with a methodological ethnocentrism. The “new Greek history” was almost exclusively preoccupied with state formation, failed modernization, class structure, and the impact of the West, neglecting various religious, gender, and ethnic internal “others.” Only in the 1990s did the politics of identity and memory provide a space for the emergence of an interest in Greek-Jewish history. However, reliance on the homogenizing and static concept of community (borrowed from Greek historiography) and the absence of bottom-up, sociohistorical works still result in the exclusion of Salonican Jewry from the historiographical mainstream. The Greek-Jewish historiography of Salonica shares many of the negative features of Greek historiography, and both should turn to a systematic and multidimensional study of crossings and interrelations between axes of difference.
Abstract: Als Ezer Weismann, der israelische Staatspräsident, Anfang des Jahres 1996 Deutschland besuchte, erregte er mit seiner Äußerung Aufsehen, er könne nicht begreifen, daß Juden noch immer in Deutschland leben wollten. Ignatz Bubis, der damalige Vorsitzende des Zentralrats der Juden in Deutschland, der sich dezidiert als ein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens versteht, widersprach. - Wie sieht ein Jude der 68er Generation sein Leben in der Bundesrepublik? Micha Brumlik ist in der Bundesrepublik aufgewachsen, hier hat er sich politisch und publizistisch eingemischt. In seiner eindrücklichen Schilderung jüdischen Lebens in Deutschland nach dem Krieg beleuchtet er die neuerdings wieder viel diskutierte Frage, was jüdische Identität heute ausmacht. Dabei streift er nicht nur die Schmerzzonen deutsch-jüdischen Erinnerns der letzten Jahre, die mit den Namen Börneplatz, Fassbinder-Affäre, Bitburg und dem Holocaust-Mahnmal verbunden sind, er geht auch weiter zurück, erinnert sich der eigenen Kindheit in den fünfziger Jahren, um die Grundlagen eines jüdischen Selbstverständnisses freizulegen, das von der Fluchterfahrung der Eltern vor den Nazis bestimmt war. Zur Nachkriegsgeschichte gehört wesentlich auch das politisch empfindliche Verhältnis der Bundesrepublik zum Staat Israel. Micha Brumlik hat dort einige Zeit studiert und in einem Kibbuz gelebt. Er fragt nach dem Verhältnis eines nicht orthodox lebenden Juden zur Religion, denkt über den Zionismus und verschiedene Spielarten des Antizionismus nach, nimmt eine Neubewertung seines Engagements für die politische Linke vor - und kommt zu der Einsicht, daß er immer wieder zwischen allen Stühlen gelandet ist, landen mußte. In Brumliks Verknüpfung von erzählendem Rückblick und politischer Analyse wird nicht nur die Geschichte der Bundesrepublik auf besonders scharfsichtige Weise kenntlich. Hier zeigt sich auch, daß ein Leben als Jude in Deutschland - allen Anfeindungen, Sozialisationsbrüchen und Spannungen zum Trotz - ein starkes Selbstverständnis provozieren kann, das mit extremen Widersprüchen produktiv umgeht
Abstract: In the late nineteenth century the great European project of nation-building was set in motion. It was meant to end in a Europe of unified nation-states, each with its own language, history, traditions and a people undivided in its loyalty. The local or ‘merely ethnic’ communities would be effaced, subsumed into the homogeneous nation. Assimilation was the means whereby outsiders would become insiders, strangers would become citizens.
The Second World War, and the Holocaust, brought this project to its end, laying bare the contradiction at its heart. Outsiders could not be assimilated since their loyalty was, by definition, always voluntary and therefore always seen as untrustworthy. As the historical epitome of the European outsider, Jews accordingly remained suspect despite all their ingenious efforts to assimilate. They experienced first-hand the ambivalence of the assimilatory drive, which was, from their point of view, to become like everyone else, and, from their hosts’ point of view, to deepen belonging by emphasizing difference.
Nowhere were the challenges and miseries of this process more pronounced than in the demographically complex nations of East-Central Europ. With the disappearance of Eastern European Jewry, the drama of Jewish assimilation came to an end.
In post-war Europe Jewish assimilation has, with the demise of the crusading spirit of nationalism, dissolved into a mundane and generalized show of conformity that runs alongside postmodernity’s emphasis on a seemingly infinite variety of privatized identities and choices. The sting has been taken out of Jewish assimilation, not because it was achieved, but because the life-and-death pressures to homogenize are no longer there.
Those few generations of European Jews who were forced to wrestle with the contradictions of assimilation were arguably the pioneers of the postmodern condition, making visible the ambiguities that mark contemporary existence for all Europeans. It is this that counts as the Jews’ most profound contribution to contemporary European culture.
Abstract: What is meant by ""Jewish Spain""? The term itself encompasses a series of historical contradictions. No single part of Spain has ever been entirely Jewish. Yet discourses about Jews informed debates on Spanish identity formation long after their 1492 expulsion. The Mediterranean world witnessed a renewed interest in Spanish-speaking Jews in the twentieth century, and it has grappled with shifting attitudes on what it meant to be Jewish and Spanish throughout the century.
At the heart of this book are explorations of the contradictions that appear in different forms of cultural memory: literary texts, memoirs, oral histories, biographies, films, and heritage tourism packages. Tabea Alexa Linhard identifies depictions of the difficulties Jews faced in Spain and Northern Morocco in years past as integral to the survival strategies of Spanish Jews, who used them to make sense of the confusing and harrowing circumstances of the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist repression, and World War Two.
Jewish Spain takes its place among other works on Muslims, Christians, and Jews by providing a comprehensive analysis of Jewish culture and presence in twentieth-century Spain, reminding us that it is impossible to understand and articulate what Spain was, is, and will be without taking into account both "Muslim Spain" and "Jewish Spain.""
