On the Margins of French Historiography: Once Again, the History of the Jews

On the Margins of French Historiography ON THE MARGINS OF FRENCH HISTORIOGRAPHY: ONCE AGAIN, THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS by Sylvie Anne Goldberg Sylvie Anne Goldberg divides her time teaching history at the :Ecole des Hautes Etudes (School for Higher Studies) in Paris and at the Centre Marc Bloch of the DeutschFranzosisches Forschungszentrum fUr Sozialwissenschaften (Franco-German Center for Research in the Social Sciences) in Berlin. Her scholarly achievements include a major study recently translated into English (Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- Through Nineteenth-Century Prague [trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996 [orig. ed. 1989)))) and editorship of the French version of Zborowski's and Herzog's Life Is with People (Olam: dans Ie shtetl d'Europe centrale avant la Shoah [Paris: Pion, 1992)). 47 The difficulty of presenting the field of Jewish studies in Francel would appear no greater than that inherent in any survey of a changing and multifaceted object, which takes on different aspects depending on how it is approached. In addition to that rather ordinary difficulty, one must add problems stemming from the disciplinary illegitimacy to which the French university has long consigned the history of the Jews. Studies of the subject tend to be treated as obscure resurgences of a remote 'In this article, I draw heavily upon my preface to the special issue of Annales: Histoires, Scieru:es Sociales 49 (1994), pp. 1019-29, on the topic "Histoire juive, histoire des juifs: d'autres approches." 48 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 past. The present emergence of this field could easily be seen either as a consequence of the use of specialized historiography to underpin general historical approaches or as the result of the gradual shift of interest in the last decades from universal history (concerned with entire continents , climatic zones, civilizations, and mass movements) to micro-history (focusing on aggregates of neglected, unknown individuals, involuntarily swept up into the "course of events"). Can this double difficulty nonetheless be overcome in an attempt to survey the field? Does the development of historiographic research on ever more circumscribed objects necessarily call for analyses focusing on the margins of historiography? Can such analyses help us judge the trends towards fragmentation in contemporary society, still yearning for homogeneity even as it helplessly watches the re-emergence and proliferation of national and ethnic movements driven by concerns long thought irrelevant? Can these marginal developments also aid in understanding a society that witnesses daily increases in the number of outcasts and pariahs of all sorts, even though our civilization is founded on ideas stemming from Enlightenment philosophy, which had foregrounded the role and function of the state and the rights and duties of citizens? Faced with this set of problems, can we consider the history of the Jews as exemplary? To see their past as the paradigm of successful "insertion" and "assimilation" into Western society means largely disregarding that in nearly every time and place Jews have occupied the paradoxical position Simmel assigned to strangers, as those who find themselves someplace in order, precisely, to be accused of coming from elsewhere.2 The simultaneous nearness and distance of the Jews have made them eternal outcasts and second-class citizens. In France, certainly not the least of the particularities of studies about Jews regards periodization. Indeed, there is now a great abundance of works on the Vichy regime and the deportation and extermination of the Jews.3 But how many in the academy realize that France was the setting for the finest flowering of medieval Judaism? That Jews the 2Kurt H. Wolff, ed., "The Stranger," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe: Free Press, 1950), pp. 402-08. Yrhough inaugurated in the United States, studies on the genocide are clearly the object of great interest in present-day France. In this regard, see Lucette Valensi, "Presence du passe, lenteur de l'histoire: Vichy, l'occupation, les ]uifS," in Annales: EcorlOmies , Societes, Civilisations 48 (1993), pp. 491-500. On the Margins ofFrench Historiography 49 world over study their religious heritage through the scholarly interpretations and limpid explications of a vintner who died in the Champagne region, at the dawn of the...