In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

On October 2, 1997, the Socialist government of France, headed by Lionel Jospin, opened the archives of the period of the Vichy regime to historians with the following explanation: “It is the duty of the Republic to perpetuate the memory of the events which took place in our country between 1940 and 1945. Historical research is in this respect essential. The works and the publications of historians provide an effective weapon with which to struggle against forgetfulness, distortions of history, and the alteration of memory . They thus help permit the recollection of the period to remain vivid and truthful.”1 In the context of French postmodernism this statement may appear to express naive faith in the objectivity of the historian. But given the widely divergent paths of historical inquiry and popular memory in the modern period in France, historical writing has become a matter of critical importance: witness the “Assassins of Memory,” as Pierre Vidal-Naquet has characterized the Holocaust-denial industry, which is, or has been, as active in France as in Orange County.2 The recent exposure of the tortured history of the Vichy era through serious historical inquiry and a series of highly publicized trials has displaced carefully constructed myths and forced the French nation to come to grips with its elusive and troubled past. JeanFran çois Lyotard, who has characterized belief in the external reality of history as “referentialist credulity bordering on stupidity,” refuses to consign historical inquiry with regard to Vichy and the Shoah to the realm of fictive construction. On the contrary, “History as science,” he says, “can resist the forgetting lodged in edifying history, prevent it from ‘telling stories,’ . . . critique the inevitable illusion whose victim is consciousness. . . .”3 No group has had a greater interest in pushing forward this process of “critiquing the inevitable illusion” than France’s Jewish population, today between 500,000 and 600,000 strong, animated by a new vitality and directly concerned in 7 Remaking Jewish Identity in France Irwin Wall 164 the face of Holocaust-deniers and Vichy apologists alike to establish some version of historical “truth” as the basis for popular memory.4 Forcing France to come to terms with its wartime past has been a victory of sorts for French Jews, but a costly one. It has arguably contributed to the centrality of Vichy and the Holocaust or Shoah to Jewish self-consciousness, and memorializing the Holocaust is in itself a frail reed upon which to hang the prospects for a meaningful Jewish identity. Bernard Wasserstein has recently termed it a “necrophilic obsession” through which “European Jews have succumbed to a potentially destructive sickness.”5 Israeli historian Evyatar Friesel deplores the proliferation of Holocaust monuments and museums . The Holocaust’s “acid consequences,” he warns, “continue to gnaw away at the foundations of the Jewish people.”6 The problem is similar for the other pole of contemporary Jewish identity , in France as elsewhere: solidarity with and the defense of the State of Israel . The dilemma facing French Jewry since the Revolution of 1789 has been that of a community trying to affirm its specificity in a society whose Jacobin tradition has seemed to demand complete assimilation and uniformity . Israel offers a paradoxical solution to this dilemma, according to Shmuel Trigano, who has termed Zionism and the infatuation with Israel “the most rigorous and effective rationalization of the structural ambivalence of Jewish life in France: the only way for the Jews to exist in France is to be elsewhere.”7 Lobbying for Israel, “being elsewhere,” is the most acceptable way for French Jews to affirm themselves in the French body politic, since France’s policies toward the Jewish state are no longer as critical to its survival as they once were. The danger in unconditional support for Israel for diaspora Jews, however, is its dependence on the popular perception of the validity and justice of Israeli policy, increasingly problematic since the accession of the Likud party to power in 1977. More serious is the apparent inability of Israeli society to resist polarization between religious and secular Jews. All this makes ever more cogent the question of whether a political myth, in this case Zionism, can or should function as the basis of a religious and cultural identity, any more than commemoration of a historic victimization like the Holocaust. The question I want to ask in what follows is, given the unsatisfactory nature of the Holocaust and Israel as sources of meaningful identity for French Jews...

Share