Abstract: Lorsqu’un tribunal allemand à Cologne décida que l’ablation du prépuce pour motif religieux relève de coups et blessures volontaires, il ne pensait pas faire de politique. Lorsque les porte-parole des Juifs en Allemagne s’indignèrent que cette décision revienne en somme à bannir les juifs du pays, éclata un scandale politique national aux proportions mondiales. La chancelière Angela Merkel, rapporte-t-on, réagit en disant « Je ne veux pas que l’Allemagne soit le seul pays au monde dans lequel les Juifs ne peuvent pratiquer leurs rites. Sinon on passerait pour une nation de guignols ». En réalité ce n’est pas le ridicule que l’Allemagne craignait, c’était qu’après avoir tenté d’éradiquer les Juifs d’Europe, avec un certain succès, elle affiche une inhospitalité foncière à l’égard des Juifs. Mais il n’est pas fortuit que ce soit précisément en Allemagne que les droits de l’homme, les droits les plus individuels, soient scrupuleusement approfondis jusqu’à une conclusion politiquement intenable.
Le tribunal de Cologne, en pénalisant la berit milah, ne fait pas de politique, il protège l’intégrité physique de la personne et déclenche pourtant un scandale politique et des réactions en chaîne qui poussèrent le législateur allemand à amender dans l’urgence cette embarrassante décision. Et les juifs, lorsqu’ils circoncisent, que font-ils exactement ? Les anthropologues ont échafaudés un ensemble d’hypothèses sur la fonction de la circoncision. Les réponses varient selon le groupe étudié, mais souvent se chevauchent…
Abstract: Si l’on considère à deux ans de distance le débat sur la circoncision qui a secoué l’Allemagne en 2012, et du point de vue d’un combattant juif alors focalisé uniquement sur la circoncision juive de garçons, ma conclusion est que la circoncision a perdu son innocence. Certes, il y a toujours eu des livres de Juifs et des articles de non-Juifs pour s’en prendre à la circoncision ; et certes, il y eut de nombreuses discussions sur certaines pratiques, comme la Metzitza bePeh, la succion du sang par le mohel qui exécute la circoncision, par exemple quant à savoir si l’usage d’une paille en verre devait être rendu obligatoire – et malgré tout, la circoncision était un acte qui semblait aller de soi. Et quiconque souhaitait y renoncer pour son fils y renonçait.
Or, avec le débat sur la circoncision, qui a eu lieu dans une Europe centrale qui considère la religion avec méfiance dès qu’elle poursuit des buts autres que thérapeutiques, les choses ont changé d’un coup. Au prétexte des complications qui survinrent lors de la circoncision d’un garçon musulman, circoncision qui n’avait pour ainsi dire rien à avoir avec une berit milah (considérant l’âge du garçon, le lieu, les participants et les conditions de l’acte) – la circoncision a été prise dans une spirale de légitimations, qui n’avait pour ainsi dire rien à voir avec le rapport que la majorité des juifs entretiennent à l’égard de cette tradition, ou, pour employer ici le terme religieux, de cette mitsvah.
Abstract: Partons d’un constat, qui est à l’origine de notre volonté – avec Danielle Cohen-Levinas – d’organiser ce colloque pour le penser collectivement : en juin 2012, un jugement de la cour d’appel de Cologne déclarait la circoncision d’un enfant pour des raisons religieuses constitutive d’atteinte à l’intégrité corporelle. Cette pratique très ancienne et commune au judaïsme et à l’islam était dès lors interdite dans toute l’Allemagne. Quelques semaines plus tard, l’Autriche et les hôpitaux universitaires de certains cantons suisses décidaient à leur tour d’un moratoire sur les circoncisions rituelles. Dans cette Allemagne repentante depuis des décennies, les Juifs se sont retrouvés de manière inattendue et soudaine au cœur d’une polémique puissante qui les renvoyait, aux côtés des musulmans, à une pratique décrétée mutilatrice, archaïque, voire barbare. Ce rituel, fondamental au point que son interdiction rendait impossible la présence juive en Allemagne, selon le Zentralrat der Juden, semblait contredire et bafouer des valeurs essentielles de la République fédérale. Ce débat s’est élargi, puisqu’en octobre 2013 c’est le Conseil de l’Europe qui publiait un avis préconisant de légiférer dans le sens d’une limitation, voire d’une interdiction de la circoncision rituelle à l’échelle du continent. L’affaire est sérieuse, une incompatibilité entre l’Europe et ses minorités juive et musulmane est explicitement énoncée, ce fait est sans précédent depuis la fin du nazisme.
Abstract: There is consensus that experiences gained during immigration have an impact on health status. However, studies comparing health-related outcomes in homogeneous groups of immigrants living in different host countries are rare. In a sample of Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in two different host countries, Germany and Israel, possible predictors of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and satisfaction with life (SWL) were examined. In total, 359 Jewish immigrants from the FSU living in Germany (n = 180) and Israel (n = 179) completed the questionnaire measuring immigration-related and sociodemographic characteristics. HRQoL was assessed via Short Form Health Survey Version 2 (SF-12v2), and SWL via Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). Hierarchical linear regression models were applied for analyzing immigration-related and sociodemographic predictors of HRQoL and SWL. Participants living in Israel scored higher on HRQoL, and no differences were found concerning SWL ratings. However, no direct influences of the host country were detected by predicting HRQoL and SWL scores. In both subgroups, immigration-related factors such as perceived discrimination or level of integration were found as significant predictors. In the face of different immigration waves in the host countries, Germany and Israel, the results display similarities rather than differences between the groups concerning the sociodemographic and immigration-related predictors on HRQoL and SWL. The findings using cross-cultural analysis level underscore the need of much more detailed future research on this issue.
Abstract: Tekst stanowi analizę zdarzeń, które miały miejsce między 31 grudnia 2016 a 6 stycznia 2017: „afery” w warszawskiej Cafe Foksal i jej następstw oraz dziejących się równolegle ataków na bar Prince Kebab w Ełku. Zdarzeń o charakterze lokalnym, a wielu powiedziałoby także: marginalnym. Moim celem nie jest przypisywanie im wielkiego znaczenia. Traktuję je natomiast jako symptomatyczne case study, na przykładzie którego widać funkcjonowanie antysemityzmu w polskiej kulturze dzisiaj i – co może bardziej istotne – blokady, na jakie napotyka jego problematyzowanie. Te pozornie nieistotne zdarzenia z przełomu 2016–2017 znakomicie pokazują, na jakie warunki muszą przystać Żydzi i inne jednostki postrzegane jako nie-polskie, by zapewnić sobie względne bezpieczeństwo. Omawiam te zdarzenia jako swoisty spektakl, podczas którego określone podmioty wchodziły w wybrane lub w jedyne dostępne im role (sprawcy, ofiary, świadka, rozjemcy). Proponuję także, by na zdarzenia te spojrzeć przez pryzmat wybranych elementów polskiej historii.
Abstract: In the last decade there has been widely shared discomfort about the way Muslim minority Germans engage with the Holocaust. They are accused of not showing empathy towards its Jewish victims and, as a result, of not being able to learn the necessary lessons from this massive crime. By focusing on instances in which the emotional reactions of Muslim minority Germans towards the Holocaust are judged as not empathetic enough and morally wrong, this article explores how Holocaust education and contemporary understandings of empathy, in teaching about the worst manifestation of racism in history, can also at times be a mechanism to exclude minorities from the German/European moral makeup and the fold of national belonging. Expanding from Edmund Husserl’s embodied approach to empathy to a socially situated approach, via the process of paarung, allows us to reinterpret expressions of fear and envy, currently seen as failed empathy, as instances of intersubjective connections at work. In my reinterpretation of Husserl’s ideas, the process of paarung that enables empathy to happen is not abstract, but pairs particular experiences happening at particular times and places under particular circumstances to individuals of certain social standing and cultural influences. An analogy can be made to shoes. Anyone has the capacity to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes. Nevertheless, the emotional reactions the experience triggers in each person will be shaped by individual past experiences and social positioning. Hence, grandchildren of workers who arrived in Germany after World War II to rebuild the country resist an ethnicized Holocaust memory and engage with it keenly through their own subject positions.
Abstract: The article analyses the longstanding ambition of the nationalist elite in Serbia to have the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Sajmište in Belgrade transformed into a ‘Serbian Yad Vashem’, i.e. a memorial to Serbian victims of genocide in the Independent State of Croatia and the suffering of Serbs in the Ustasha-run concentration camp Jasenovac in Croatia. By deconstructing various assumptions about the historical link between Sajmište and Jasenovac which have been used to justify this initiative, the chapter draws attention to the tradition of manipulation of the history of the two camps in Serbia. It also shows that the origins of the contentious interpretation of the history of Sajmište, lie, in part, in the ‘memory wars’ between Serbian and Croatian nationalists who, in the 1990s, skilfully manipulated the history of both Sajmište and Jasenovac, all in the context of mutual accusations of ‘genocidal tendencies’, complicity in the Holocaust and antisemitism. Therefore, debates about Sajmište and its links with Jasenovac should be seen as yet another example of the interdependence between Serbian and Croatian nationalist discourses, which, over the past three decades have resisted attempts to forge a historically grounded culture of remembrance of the victims of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Also, through the story of the memorialisation of Sajmište, the chapter points to the lasting effect which events of the 1990s have had on historical memory in Serbia, especially in relation to the Holocaust, and other crimes perpetrated in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945.
Abstract: Chamamos-lhes Anousim (pl. de Anous, que significa forçado ou coagido em hebraico), também conhecidos como marranos, conversos, tornadiços, Povo da Nação, Cristãos-Novos ou Judeus àqueles que permaneceram em Portugal e Espanha e praticaram o seu Judaísmo em segredo, ou deixaram a Península Ibérica devido à Expulsão (1497) e à Inquisição (1536-1821), muitos tendo continuado a praticar livremente o Judaísmo na diáspora. Sabemos, no entanto, que os judeus ou cristãos-novos que permaneceram em solo lusitano, adotaram e mantiveram várias estratégias discretas ou ocultas para resistir à conversão forçada até ao presente. Também sabemos de muitos portugueses que insistem numa identificação com a matriz judaica e de um esforço paralelo e sem precedentes para recuperar o que resta dos vestígios da memória dessa cultura judaica em Portugal. Assiste-se a uma intensa atividade revivalista em torno do património cultural judaico no país. O que não sabemos é em que medida tais processos identitários e materialidades e imaterialidades mnemónicas judaicas persistem hoje na esfera pública e privada, e como esses traços culturais coexistem com a fabricação nacional de património, nos seus diversos aspetos materiais e discursivos. O estudo foca-se nestes últimos, pela via etnográfica
Abstract: The analysis of survivors’ testimonies was unable to enter history-writing for many decades after the shoah. If nevertheless it was, the testimonies served only as illustrations of the personal experience of victims in the Grand Narrative of historians. However, in the past 20 years, parallel to the opening of digital oral history archives, these testimonies became regular sources of mainstream historical research. Moreover, the memory culture of the Shoah has fundamentally changed in the Western world after 1989. From the perspective of paper, the most relevant changes were a widespread appearance of the concept (cultural, social, historical) of trauma in public history, and the digital turn in testimony collections.It is a commonplace in psychological and sociological research on Holocaust testimonies and other ego-documents that in the case of large digital collections specific analytical methods need to be used. However, Holocaust historians dealing with these sources have hardly applied such methods. My paper proposes specific sociological techniques of using personal accounts in history-writing (such as the intuitive analysis of testimonies by accumulating and testing data; qualitative approaches and quantifying the data of big qualitative collections). It also discusses the historical usage of large testimony collections with the help of current case studies of the Holocaust in Hungary
Abstract: In this paper, we explore antisemitism in contemporary Hungary. After briefly introducing
the different types of antisemitism, we show the results of a quantitative survey carried out
in 2017 on a nationally representative sample. Next, we present the research we conducted
on the articles related to Jews from the far-right site Kuruc.info. Our corpus contained
2,289 articles from the period between February 28, 2016, and March 20, 2019. To identify
latent topics in the text, we employed one of the methods of Natural Language Processing
(NLP), namely topic modeling using the LDA method. We extracted fifteen topics. We found
that racial antisemitism, unmeasurable by survey research, is overtly present in the discourse of Kuruc.info. Moreover, we identified topics that were connected to other types of antisemitism.
Abstract: Eastern European EU accession candidates have used memorial museums and installed new permanent exhibitions to communicate with “Europe” in view of the Holocaust's “universalization” and “Europeanization.” One group demands that “Europe” acknowledge its suffering under Communism, while the other group tries to demonstrate its compatibility with Europe by invoking “Europe” in their exhibition texts and publications and referencing western Holocaust museums in their aesthetics. This article focuses on two countries from each group: Latvia and Lithuania, which highlight their victimhood under “double occupation,” on the one hand; and the current successor states of the “Slovak Republic” and the “Independent State of Croatia,” two Nazi satellite states, on the other. I begin by analysing how the terms “Holocaust,” “genocide,” and “mass violence” are used in the respective Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak and Croatian memorial museums. I argue that both groups share an awkwardness in dealing with the term “Holocaust,” and a tendency to present “our” victims with the help of individual stories and private photographs designed to evoke empathy, while presenting “their” victims – Jews and, even more so, Roma – with the help of often humiliating photos shot by the perpetrators. I then show that the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s – in contrast to the peaceful transitions in the other countries – had a distinctive effect on debates concerning the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence. Moving beyond the realm of museum analysis, I pinpoint the broader cultural phenomenon of Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks portraying themselves as “the new Jews,” before focusing specifically on the new permanent exhibition at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial, which I discuss as a best practice example for the universalization of the Holocaust.
