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29 2 : words deliVered on The oCCasion oF reCeiVing an honorary doCToraTe FroM The ÉCole PraTique des hauTes ÉTudes The Sorbonne, Paris, January 14, 2002. This short speech afforded Yosef Yerushalmi the opportunity to reflect on his connection to the language and culture of France. He recalled his first teacher of French as a boy, as well as his wide reading of French literature in college, where he served as president of the Yeshiva College French Club. Yerushalmi also gave voice to his admiration for the French tradition of Jewish studies and its scholars, for example, I. S. Révah, whose workon Marranos he often quoted in lectures and seminars. Yerushalmi also expressed esteem for notable French historians in fields other than his own, from Marc Bloch to Pierre Nora, whose multivolume Les lieux de mémoire appeared in 1984, the same year that Zakhor appeared in French (in Éric Vigne’s translation). It was in that same period that Yerushalmi began to go to France regularly. During his visit in 1984, he met Nora, and the two discussed the affinities in their respective work on the formation of collective memory, an area of research in which the two scholars would gain international acclaim. In the second half of his remarks, Yerushalmi reflected on the malleability of history. He noted the irony in the fact that the very city, Paris, in which rabbinic literature was now the subject of serious academic study was where the Talmud was consigned to flame in 1242, on the very site where brutal executions later took place during the Terror. That swing of the historical pendulum reminded Yerushalmi that history, like life, is open. Yerushalmi followed on that point by addressing the utility of historical knowledge . History served as an antidote to both excessive despair and excessive hope by navigating between the poles of apocalypse and utopia. This realization led Yerushalmi to conclude that history was contingent and open-ended, resulting not in “ultimate knowledge” but rather “unexpected turns and byways”—exactly the stuff of the historian’s craft and delight. This is for me above all an occasion for gratitude and I have many to thank. I had the good fortune to study with great masters in Jewish and other fields, prodigious scholars who guided me while allowing me to become myself. But it seems to me more appropriate today to focus on 30 | self-reflecTIon my relation to France. I will begin with Lillian Krotky, an unforgettable teacher in an obscure Jewish school in New York who never received an “honoris causa,” but who, when I was ten years old, introduced us with love and passion to the French language, and taught us to sing the “Marseillaise ” as fervently as though we were storming the barricades.Thanks also to the stern teacher in my high school who forced us to memorize a French poem every week (out of all of Baudelaire he chose “L’Albatros,” no doubt because he thought this “Fleur” contained no “Mal” that could corrupt us). In college I read history for pleasure, but my field of study was comparative literature—English, Hebrew, German, and of course—French. My professors, less charismatic than Mlle. Krotky, at least exposed me systematically to texts from the Chanson de Roland through Albert Camus. When, still a student in New York, I met the young Israeli pianist who would soon become my wife and fill my life with music, not the least of her attractions was her knowledge of French (our son has by now surpassed both of us), and it was she who revealed to me the profundities of Debussy’s Préludes, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, and so much else. Yet I confess that even now I am not entirely secure in speaking French, and, while I accept that my spoken Portuguese in Lisbon is far from perfect , only in Paris do I feel that if I make a verbal slip I have committed a sin. No one can imagine the anxiety I felt before I taught my first seminar in French at 54 Boulevard Raspail, nor my embarrassment when, after a lecture in Geneva, a Parisian friend said to me: “C’était vraiment beau. Mais—qu’est-ce que c’est les ‘zazards’”? (That was really good. But what is “zazards”?) It took me a moment to realize that at one point I had said “lesazards” instead of “le[s] hazards.” Other nuances are not grammatical but cultural. Outside...

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