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Yerushalmi in a French Key: (French) History and (French) Memory

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Page 1: Yerushalmi in a French Key: (French) History and (French) Memory

Jewish History © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014DOI 10.1007/s10835-014-9202-5

Yerushalmi in a French Key: (French) History and (French)Memory

SYLVIE ANNE GOLDBERGÉcole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Centre de recherches historiques,Centre d’études juives, Paris, FranceE-mail: [email protected]

Abstract This article explores the reception of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in France in light ofthe many and diverse reactions his books and lectures engendered at major conferences andmeetings. It describes how the American scholar became one of the leading figures amongFrench intellectuals after the first translation of his book Zakhor in 1984 and his first lecture atthe École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1987, which resulted in a series of annuallectures over the next ten years. Following the readings of Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, PierreVidal-Naquet, and François Furet, among other intellectuals, the eminent standing achievedby Yerushalmi coincided with a special “moment.” At a time when doubt was cast on the tes-timonies of living witnesses and when the words of Holocaust deniers and of members of theFrench Resistance were treated on equal terms, the politics of memory challenged the statusof history and historians. This paper aims to recover the atmosphere of these past decades andto elucidate how Yerushalmi’s name has become inseparable from the issues linked with thedebates about history and memory.

Keywords Memory · Forgetting · Hope · Jacques Derrida · Paul Ricœur · Pierre Nora

The reception of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s works in France has probablysurpassed his publisher’s highest expectations: his name has become insep-arable from the issues linked with memory and history. Yet the enthusiasmsurrounding him may have been aroused less by his writings on the historyof the Jews than by their convergence with the controversy that broke outin France in the 1980s and 1990s about the role of historians in the publicsphere. No matter what his intention was, as a “Jewish historian” speakingto a broader audience he helped legitimize in the academic arena a Jewishapproach to history and to the fragile workings of memory in general. Thisarticle will try to outline these two facets of Yerushalmi’s reception in France.

Welcome to Paris

The French translation of Zakhor was published in 1984 by EditionsLa Découverte, outside the circle of the major French publishing hou-

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ses.1 The book might have remained confined to the restricted readershipof initiates in Jewish studies, but it soon attracted the attention of the me-dia. It was immediately greeted in the press as “important” and “funda-mental.” The newspaper Libération published a laudatory review by PierreVidal-Naquet, with the straightforward subtitle revealing the tone of thecomments: “Four Short Chapters, Four Key Questions.”2 Over the fol-lowing months, more reviews followed. Pierre Chaunu, one of the greatFrench historians of the time, praised the book eloquently in Le Figaroand L’Aurore, two daily newspapers with large circulations.3 Yet in Jan-uary 1985, in the columns of L’Arche—the monthly magazine of the Jew-ish community—Antoine Spire attacked it fiercely, describing the book as“dangerous.” His objection was that Zakhor could serve the revisionist argu-ments aired by Robert Faurisson, who had claimed in Le Monde in 1978–79 that the Nazi gas chambers did not exist and was eventually convictedof Holocaust denial. Furthermore, Spire contended that Yerushalmi’s the-sis was biased by “a certain North American positivism that gargles butdoes not digest scientific history.”4 Two months later, L’Arche published acollection of responses in its “Letters to the Editor” section that featuredthe reactions of leading personalities such as Elie Wiesel, Yerushalmi’s ed-itor and translator Eric Vigne, and Alex Derczanski, along with criticismswritten by readers supportive of Spire’s concerns that Yerushalmi’s bookmight help sustain the dangerous proliferation of revisionist historical distor-tions.5

1Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Histoire juive et mémoire juive, trans. Eric Vigne (Paris,1984).2Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Zakhor, Souviens-toi: Yoseph Yerushalmi a écrit ‘Zakhor’; Quatrebrefs chapitres, quatre questions essentielles, et une analyse passionnante des rapports entrel’histoire et la mémoire dans la tradition juive,” Libération, October 29, 1984.3Pierre Chaunu, “Histoire et mémoire juive,” Le Figaro, January 26, 1985, and “Sortir duGhetto,” L’Aurore, March 2, 1985.4Antoine Spire, “Les Juifs ont-ils une histoire?” L’Arche: Le mensuel du judaïsme français,January 1985. Spire’s harsh criticism was the following: “How can one avoid detecting inY. H. Yerushalmi’s thesis the influence of a certain North American positivism that garglesbut does not digest scientific history, such that what passes for serious work is merely a seriesof conjectures that mixes up memories and documents to arrive at a reconstruction whoseobjectivity strains credulity?”5“Les lecteurs ont le dernier mot,” L’Arche: Le mensuel du judaïsme français, March 1985.Spire’s fear that revisionists might make use of Zakhor turned out to be well founded:Yerushalmi’s argument that the common image of the Holocaust was shaped more by nov-elists than by the work of historians (Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, repr. ed.[Seattle, 1996], 98) was quoted on the back cover of a revisionist book. For Yerushalmi’s rec-ollection of the incident, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Transmettrel’histoire juive: Entretiens avec Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Itinéraires du savoir (Paris, 2012), 84–85.

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During these few months, Yerushalmi’s stature in the French landscapeunderwent a dramatic change: an American historian, foreign and unknown,became a leading figure among French intellectuals. That year, the topic ofthe Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française (CIJLF) happenedto be “Mémoire et histoire” (Memory and history); invited to participate,Yerushalmi delivered what remains one of his most beautiful and movingtexts: “Un champ à Anathoth: Vers une histoire de l’espoir juif” (A field inAnathoth: Toward a history of Jewish hope).6 Taking advantage of his stayin Paris, he also gave a presentation about Zakhor on the premises of theesteemed periodical Esprit and participated in a roundtable on Panorama,then the flagship radio program of France Culture.7

Yerushalmi’s French adventures, already well underway in 1984, acceler-ated on his return to France in 1987, when he was invited to participate in aprestigious symposium at the Abbey of Royaumont on the theme “Usages del’Oubli” (Uses of forgetting). There he presented his “Réflexions sur l’oubli”and met his alter ego in the field of memory, Pierre Nora.8 The same year,he delivered his first series of lectures at the École des Hautes Études en Sci-ences Sociales through the initiative of François Furet. He regularly filledthe classroom. Over the next decade, Yerushalmi would come to Paris everyyear, and indeed his work occupied a truly important place on the stage ofthe French intelligentsia. While the publication of the French translation ofhis magnum opus, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, in 1987 generatedlittle debate and probably garnered a limited readership, it gave Furet the op-portunity to publish an interview with Yerushalmi in the prestigious weeklyNouvel Observateur.9

On the other hand, Yerushalmi’s book Freud’s Moses, published in Frenchin 1993, aroused a host of reactions and also prompted a new reading, not of

6Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Vers une histoire de l’espoir juif,” Esprit, nos. 104–5 (1985), 24–38, and “Un champ à Anathoth: Vers une histoire de l’espoir juif,” in Mémoire et histoire:Données et débats; Actes du XXVe Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, ed.Jean Halpérin and Georges Lévitte (Paris, 1986), 91–107.7Other participants in the roundtable included Emmanuel Le Roy-Ladurie, Jean Delumeau,Antoine Spire, and Jacquot Grunewald. Panorama, France Culture, December 11, 1984.8Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Réflexions sur l’oubli,” in Usages de l’oubli: Contributions deYosef H. Yerushalmi, Nicole Loraux, Hans Mommsen, Jean-Claude Milner, Gianni Vattimo auColloque de Royaumont (Paris, 1988), 7–21, published in English as “Postscript: Reflectionson Forgetting,” in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, repr. ed. (New York, 1989),105–17.9Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, De la cour d’Espagne au Ghetto Italien: Isaac Cardoso et lemarranisme au XVIIe siècle, trans. Alexis Nouss (Paris, 1987), and “De la Cour au Ghetto:François Furet a interviewé Yosef Yerushalmi historien du judaïsme,” Le Nouvel Observateur,September 4–6, 1987.

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Freud, but of Zakhor.10 While the main thesis of Zakhor had already reachedthe headlines a decade earlier, the discussion now went in a very differentdirection, mainly guided by psychoanalysts. A special issue of Libérationlisting the “sixty books of the year” reprinted a long and laudatory arti-cle by the psychoanalyst and historian of psychoanalysis Élisabeth Roudi-nesco in which she explained that Yerushalmi’s reading of Freud’s Moses andMonotheism rested on a method derived from the biblical concept of history,a method that combined oblivion and remembrance into a single narrative.11

However, another psychoanalyst, Denise Weill, took offense that an academiccould have dared to “reduce psychoanalysis to a Jewish science”; her ar-gument was that Jewish identity cannot be an analytical concept, since—asFreud had posited—the psyche is transcultural.12 The worst dismissal camefrom Marie Moscovici, who in La Quinzaine Littéraire articulated her disap-pointment with a pen dipped in bitterness:

When, in 1984, Eric Vigne provided us with the translation of thebook by Y. H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, histoire juive et mémoire juive(La Découverte), the welcome among historians and those inter-ested in Judaism was a warm one. Stimulated by the enthusiasticaccount of Vidal-Naquet, as a psychoanalyst I, too, commented onthis book to report what I saw then as unrecognized convergenceswith Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism. . . . One inevitablywonders what the aim, raison d’être and upshot are of such abook. What contribution does it offer to history, to psychoanal-ysis, even to Judaism itself? What does one achieve by reducinga theory entirely to its author’s personal history, which is highlymisinterpreted, and above all by attaching a body of thought, onethat is moreover fundamentally atheistic, to a known religion andtradition, in particular when, like any grand theory, it breaks itsmoorings, but without denying its sources and origins?13

It was through Jacques Derrida’s reading of the book that the interactionbetween Yerushalmi and French intellectuals reached a higher level. The two

10Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Le Moïse de Freud: Judaïsme terminable et interminable, trans.Jacqueline Carnaud (Paris, 1993).11Élisabeth Roudinesco, “Totem et Talmud: Yoseph Hayim Yerushalmi, Le Moïse de Freud,judaïsme terminable et interminable,” Libération, April 30, 1993, reprinted in “Les 60 livresde l’année,” Hors-Série, Libération, March 1994.12Denise Weill, review of Le Moïse de Freud, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Lectures: Actua-lités de la bibliothèque, Société de psychanalyse de Paris 6 (1994): 47–49.13Marie Moscovici, “Une occasion manquée (ou bien: ‘il n’y a qu’un seul dieu et nous n’ycroyons pas’): Joseph [sic] Hayim Yerushalmi, Le Moïse de Freud, Judaïsme terminable etinterminable,” La Quinzaine Littéraire, June 16, 1993. See Yerushalmi’s comment on thiscriticism in Yerushalmi and Goldberg, Transmettre l’histoire juive, 93–94.

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were scheduled to meet in London in June 1994 at the symposium “Mem-ory: The Question of Archives” organized by the International Society forthe History of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis at the Freud Museum. Immedi-ately upon landing in London, Yerushalmi was felled by a case of the flu thatprevented him from leaving his room and participating in the meeting in per-son; his paper had to be read by another participant. Yerushalmi later said thathe did not know Derrida would devote his own lecture to the interpretationof his Freud’s Moses.14

The publication of Derrida’s response to the work in Mal d’Archivegranted Yerushalmi’s reception a dimension that went far beyond his work.Reading Freud’s Moses in the light of Zakhor, Derrida offered an elaborationcentered on the notions of memory, trace, forgetfulness, resurgence, archives,and encoding, all entangled in a pattern of historical recurrence. Taking themonologue Yerushalmi held with Freud in the last section of his book andanalyzing it point by point, Derrida denied its value as a historiographical actand claimed instead that Yerushalmi was entering the realm of the Freudianheritage:

What confirms or demonstrates a certain truth of Freud’s Moses isnot Freud’s book, or the arguments deployed there with more orless pertinence. It is not the contents of this “historical novel”; it israther the scene of reading it provokes and in which the reader isinscribed in advance. For example in a fictive monologue which,in reading, contesting, or in calling to Freud, repeats in an exem-plary fashion the logic of the event whose specter was describedand whose structure was “performed” by the historical novel. TheFreud of this Freud’s Moses is indeed Yerushalmi’s Moses. Thestrange result of this performative repetition . . . is that the inter-pretation of the archive (here, for example, Yerushalmi’s book)can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namelya given inheritance, by inscribing itself into it, that is to say byopening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place init. . . . Yerushalmi’s book, including its fictive monologue, hence-forth belongs to the corpus of Freud (and of Moses, etc.), whosename it also carries.15

Derrida pursued the comparison by analogy in the pages that followed.Stating that there is only one point about which Yerushalmi proves himself

14See the story of the incident, and of their friendship, in Yerushalmi and Goldberg, Trans-mettre l’histoire juive, 98.15Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago,1996), 67–68 (Derrida’s italics), and Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne (Paris, 1995),108.

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“intractable: the future to come,” he invoked Walter Benjamin’s Theses on thePhilosophy of History, deciphering with precision the point in the monologuein which Yerushalmi identified the mise en abyme of the principle of the threedoors of the future. He writes:

The third door is also the first. . . . Yerushalmi clearly marks thatif Judaism is terminable, Jewishness is interminable. It can sur-vive Judaism. It can survive it as a heritage, which is to say, ina sense, not without archive. . . . For Yerushalmi, there is indeeda determining and irreducible essence of Jewishness: it is alreadygiven and does not await the future. And this essence of Jewish-ness should not be mistaken as merging with Judaism, or withreligion, or even with the belief of God. Now the Jewishness thatdoes not await the future is precisely the waiting for the future, theopening of a relation to the future, the experience of the future.16

To be sure, Derrida was correct to mention Benjamin’s angel hoveringover Yerushalmi’s thought: some passages from Zakhor really do seem tocarry Benjamin’s spirit. But one might wonder whether the message theyconvey to readers is the one communicated by the Angel of History. Derridapointed out the irreducible Jewishness emanating from all of Yerushalmi’swritings. But does this contention give voice to the amazement shared bythose who are bewildered by the fact that Jews—whatever sense the termcovers—remain Jewish even in modernity, despite the ravages of the cen-turies, despite the heaps of ruins, despite the passage of history, despite theirdejudaization, and, perhaps most importantly, despite their obliviousness ofJewish tradition?

In Derrida’s exchanges with Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . . : Dialogue,Derrida stated more clearly how he read Zakhor. He wondered whether thedistinction Yerushalmi drew between “Jewishness” and “Judaism” should beunderstood as an implicit admission of a potential renunciation of Judaism.“Not out of infidelity to Judaism,” he added, but rather as a desire for “fi-delity to Jewishness, which is marked by two fundamental vocations: theexperience of the promise (future) and the injunction of memory.”17 Thusprojecting his own reading of Yerushalmi’s monologue with Freud, Derridacontended that this is an unjustified assertion of a specific Jewish character,since every culture, whatever it may be, would claim these two fundamental

16Derrida, Archive Fever, 72, and Mal d’archive, 115.17Jacques Derrida and Élisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue with Eli-sabeth Roudinesco, trans. Jeff Fort, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, 2004), 188, andDe quoi demain . . . : Dialogue (Paris, 2001), 304–5.

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traits: “This celebration of a ‘Jewish specificity’ (to do for memory, the fu-ture, the anticipation of psychoanalysis, etc.) seems very debatable to me inits content.”18

In fact, it was precisely the transferability of the supports of mem-ory to any society that aroused the philosopher Paul Ricœur’s interest inYerushalmi’s work. In La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Ricœur opened thechapter devoted to Yerushalmi with these words: “Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’sbook has the virtue, displayed by many works written by Jewish thinkers, ofproviding access to a universal problem through the exception constitutedby the singularity of Jewish existence. This is the case with the tension thatspans the century between Jewish memory and the writing of history, his-toriography.”19 Then, he adds: “It is this singularity that seems to me to berevealing with respect to the resistance that any and all memory can opposeto this treatment.”20

By the time Ricœur’s volume about memory, history, and oblivion ap-peared in 2000, the mood of French intellectuals had changed, for they nowfelt quite “saturated” by the assaults of memory. The previous two decadeshad been marked by the irruption of disputes over conflicting memories andhistories in the public arena: the trial of Maurice Papon, denials of the Holo-caust, controversies about collaboration vs. resistance and about Heidegger’scommitment to Nazism. Caught between a rock and a hard place, historianswere summoned to appear before the Court of History and asked to awardmedals or, conversely, to dismiss witnesses (or even the courts). This also en-couraged Carlo Ginzburg to state in his The Judge and the Historian that thetrial is the only true case of “historiographical experimentation.”21 Ricœur’sbook should be placed in a wider context. He advocated putting an end tothe “abuses” of memories developed into a national burden and mandatoryduties, which were in his view contrary to what a “fair” memory should be:a delicate balance between living testimony of wounded memories and dis-tanced historiography. In one sense, Ricœur was pleading against the appli-cation of the judicial notion of imprescriptibility to what is unforgivable and,by reference to the ethics of Vladimir Jankélévitch, he was indeed promoting

18Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 189.19Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Lon-don, 2004), 397, and La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris, 2000), 517–18.20Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 398, and La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 517–18.21Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-CenturyMiscarriage of Justice, trans. Antony Shugaar (London, 1999), 18; he quotes the phrase “his-toriographical experimentation” from Luigi Ferajioli, Diritto e ragione, Teoria del garantismopenale (Bari, 1989), 32.

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forgiveness or, in other words, the historical value of forgetting that HannahArendt expounded.22

The Parisian intellectual world of the twentieth century granted specialimportance to the discussions held among philosophers, psychoanalysts, andhistorians within their closed circles. This media coverage may fall withinone of the famous “French exceptions” that allow a public spotlight to beshone upon some “mandarins” whose discussions might be seen elsewhere asbelonging only to the academic sphere. Thus the multiple reactions arousedby the reading of Yerushalmi’s books gained him full credentials on theParisian stage. Cited in almost all the works dealing to varying degrees withhistory and memory, whether related to the Holocaust or to historiography,the previously unknown New York professor now became the unavoidablereference.23 He had thus entered, probably without even noticing it, the arenaof the “great thinkers” about modernity. It is well known, and he made no se-cret of it, how much he, the “little Jewish boy from the Bronx,” enjoyed talk-ing with Pierre Nora (who once wrote to him in a letter that they felt “likebrothers”), with Ricœur, and with Derrida. He was even more pleased whenRoudinesco asked him to feature in her movie about Freud and the history ofpsychoanalysis.24

In Performance

As the historian Nancy Green recalled during the tribute organized at theMusée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme in April 2011 in Paris, the FrenchYerushalmi “moment” must be situated in a broader and more general con-text: the revival of Jewish studies in France and the awakening of ethnic stud-ies in the United States.25 However, it seems to me that beyond this worthy

22Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Imprescriptible (Paris, 1986); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condi-tion, trans. Margaret Canovan (Chicago, 1958).23In the periodical Esprit alone, Yerushalmi was quoted twenty-nine times between 1983 and2008.24See Yerushalmi’s mention of Nora’s Lieux de mémoire in the preface to Zakhor: Jewish His-tory and Jewish Memory, repr. ed. (New York, 1989), xxix. See also the quotation from Nora’sletter to Yerushalmi, September 11, 1987, in François Dosse, Pierre Nora: Homo Historicus(Paris 2011), 310, 618 nn. 35–36. And see Yerushalmi’s letter to Ricœur, February 17, 2001,published in F. Dosse, Paul Ricœur, Les sens d’une vie (Paris, 1997), 668–69, and quotedin Nicolas Weill, “Paul Ricœur, Yosef Yerushalmi,” Critique 763 (2010): 1009–25. The filmSigmund Freud: L’invention de la psychanalyse was directed by Roudinesco in collaborationwith Élisabeth Kapnist (Paris: France 3/ARTE, 1997).25Nancy L. Green, “ Un Américain à Paris: Yosef Yerushalmi à l’EHESS,” in L’Histoire et lamémoire de l’histoire: Hommage à Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. Sylvie Anne Goldberg (Paris,2012), 99–106.

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observation, the intensity of his reception is witness to the fact that this “mo-ment” coincided with a cultural climate particularly conducive to ponderingthe problems he was raising. The thoughtful welcome French intellectualsaccorded Yerushalmi suggests that his work echoed diffuse expectations. Anevocation of the atmosphere as well as of the contents of two major lectureshe gave in France, at the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue françaisein Paris and at the Abbey of Royaumont, sheds light on this point.

Inaugurated in 1957 under the leadership of Edmond Fleg and Leon Al-gazi, the CIJLF was founded with the intention of bringing back to Judaismthe numerous Jews who had distanced themselves from it during or after theSecond World War.26 It sought to reestablish a Jewish identity that would beconsistent with history, involved in the public sphere, and deeply anchored inthe Jewish tradition.27 Conceived as a forum for reflection on Jewishness inmodern times, the CIJLF gathered a diverse array of speakers ranging frompolitical and scientific personalities such as Raymond Aron and Henri At-lan to prominent figures of the Jewish community, including Vladimir Rabiand Léon Ashkenazi.28 Within the French Jewish landscape, the CIJLF re-mains associated with the name of the philosopher and Talmudist EmmanuelLevinas, whose annual “Talmudic Lessons” were major sources of inspira-tion for generations of French Jewish intellectuals. In the 1980s, the CIJLFbecame a well-known institution and a forum for philosophers and psycho-analysts (not all of whom were Jewish), open-minded rabbis and membersof the clergy. The theme chosen for the conference to which Yerushalmi wasinvited in early December 1984, “Mémoire et histoire,” was one of the burn-ing questions of the day.29 The wave of Holocaust denial hitting the media

26Edmond Fleg (1874–1963), born in Switzerland, was an essayist, poet, dramatist, novelist,and intellectual. As an assimilated young boy during the Dreyfus Affair, he suddenly discov-ered his Jewishness and later published Pourquoi je suis juif? (Paris, 1927). He was a leadingfigure of the Amitié judeo-chrétienne and an active member of the Alliance Israelite Uni-verselle. Léon Algazi (1890–1971), born in Romania, was a rabbi and musician in Paris. Hespecialized in Hebrew liturgy and became a renowned teacher of ancient Jewish music and aconductor at the Great Synagogue La Victoire.27David Kessler, “Vingt-cinq colloques,” in Halpérin and Lévitte, Mémoire et Histoire, 179–87; Perrine Simon-Nahoum, “Penser le judaïsme: Retour sur les Colloques des intellectuelsjuifs de langue française (1957–2000),” Archives Juives 38, no. 1 (2005): 79–106.28Vladimir Rabinovitch (1906–81), born in Vilna, was a judge and a writer, renowned as apolemicist and critic. Léon Ashkenazi, known as Manitou (1922–96), born in Algiers from afamily of rabbis and Kabbalists, was an inspiring rabbi and philosopher who contributed tothe field of interreligious discourse and served as the principal of the Orsay Jewish school.Involved in the Jewish community, he became president of the Jewish Students Organizationand the Jewish Scouts Movement and founder of the Center of Academic Jewish Studies.29In a private conversation recently, Eric Vigne told me that the organizers first invited ElieWiesel, but his demands were excessive. Yerushalmi was the second choice.

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was seen as a revealing indicator of an ongoing reappraisal of Jews’ stand-ing in the social and public sphere, if not in history. After an opening “Bib-lical Lesson” by Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, a panel discussion entitled “TheHolocaust in Memory and History” set the general tone of the conference.The panel assembled the Dominican priest Bernard Dupuy, the philosopherElisabeth de Fontenay, the film director Claude Lanzmann, and the Jewishcommunity leader Henri Bulawko, president of the Veterans Association ofthe Resistance and Deportation. After the panel came successive lectures byYerushalmi, Alain Finkielkraut, Shmuel Trigano, and Marc Ferro. A “Talmu-dic Lesson” by Emmanuel Levinas concluded the proceedings.

Yerushalmi’s lecture, a reflection on Jewish hope, somehow reversed thetwo terms in the title of the conference and never touched on the question ofthe Holocaust other than to use it as a chronological yardstick (“a generationafter the Holocaust”) or as a rhetorical device (“Let there be no mistake, theauthor of this lament is not a survivor of 1945”).30 He begins by evokingJeremiah 32: Jerusalem is besieged, the prophet imprisoned, and the JudahiteKing and his people deported to Babylon. Then comes the story of the sale ofa field located at Anathoth belonging to Hanamel, ending with the prophecy:“Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land” (Jer.32:15). Making the most of the irony that Jeremiah is buying a field in anarea abandoned to the enemy (“And You have said to me, O Lord God, ‘Buythe field for money, and take witnesses’! Yet the city has been given into thehand of the Chaldeans”; Jer. 32:25), Yerushalmi intended to discard the ideathat “Jewish hope” is reducible solely to the expectation of the Messiah andRedemption. Rather, the phenomenology of hope lies within Jewish historyitself and can be apprehended only as the opposite of defeat: “any historyof Jewish hope should first overcome two major obstacles that make up onesingle enemy: our condescension toward the Jewish past.” The first of theseobstacles is the assumption that Jews in the past were more naive and morepious than those of the present and as true believers in God assuredly hadready-made answers for the sufferings inflicted by history. The second is theway the past has been envisioned: “For we [one generation after the Holo-caust] endorse the axiom that the historical events that our ancestors experi-enced remain incommensurate with those we had to undergo in this century.Our fathers did not know, they could not have known, the terror of the historythat we have endured.”31

Listening to such an introduction, the audience had no inkling of whatwould follow. Instead of offering a description of signs of hope identifi-able throughout Jewish history, Yerushalmi began to recall the outbreaks of

30Yerushalmi, “Un champ à Anathoth,” 94, 97.31Yerushalmi, “Un champ à Anathoth,” 94.

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despair that have plagued Jewish history: “You cannot write the history ofJewish hope without writing the parallel history of Jewish despair. . . . Onlythen can we begin to glimpse that Jewish hope is not a historical ‘given’. . .but a historical ‘problem.’ ”32 How can one identify the signs of Jewish de-spair? Primarily through the phenomenon of renunciation. For Yerushalmi,those who “fell on the road” in the course of history, not those who fell atthe hands of their enemies and persecutors, form the innumerable multitudewho “despaired of a Jewish future.”33 Unlike those who wanted to quit, theothers—like Ibn Verga and Samuel Usque in the sixteenth century—opted,instead, for the attitude of Job: stay in the Jewish camp, despite everything,despite the evil designs of a God who imposes trials to deter them.

To anyone who imagined that it was easier for those who had faith inGod to face the terrors of history, Yerushalmi demonstrated that it was not.On the contrary—insofar as the God of Israel is the God of history, it is justas difficult, if not more so, for a believer to confront the implacability ofhis silence, his abysmal withdrawal from history. Yerushalmi mentioned thereuse, in a liturgical poem ( piyyut) written after the first Crusade, of the an-cient midrash that puns on the Hebrew words elim (gods) and ilmim (muteones): “Mi kamokha ba-‘ilmim Adonay” (Who is equal to you among themute, O God?).34 He quoted an anonymous and tragic chronicler of the ex-pulsion from Spain: “The voice of God came out of compassion to destroy,to kill, to extinguish the entire house of Israel. . . . He is coming to destroyus until no one survives. . . . The Lord . . . has abandoned me and becomemy enemy.”35 Even more, he emphasized the lament of Eliezer bar Nathan,written at the end of the eleventh century: “You, O God, You have certainlyabandoned us to oblivion. Already over a thousand years of pain and moans. . . We hoped that the time would come for healing, and instead, look at thehorror.”36 Yerushalmi illustrated here what Zakhor had already contended:that the present of the Jews can be understood as an infinite repetition of thepast.

Thus Yerushalmi invited an audience of French Jews, most of whom prob-ably felt themselves to be in the world not of practice and ritual but of Freud’s

32Ibid.; Yerushalmi’s emphasis.33Ibid.34Mekhilta Beshalah, Massekhta de-Shirata, 8, quoted in Yerushalmi, “Un champ àAnathoth,” 97. He quotes the piyyut by Isaac bar Shalom from A. M. Habermann, ed., GezerotAshkenaz ve-Tsarfat (Jerusalem, 1946), 113.35Yerushalmi, “Un champ à Anathoth,” 98; he quotes the anonymous chronicler from JosephHacker, “Chroniqot hadashot ‘al gerush ha-yehudim mi-sefarad, sibbotav ve-toza’otav,” inSefer Ziqqaron le Yitzhak Baer, ed. Haim Beinart et al. (Jerusalem, 1981), 223–27.36Yerushalmi, “Un champ à Anathoth,” 99; he quotes the lament of Eliezer bar Nathan fromHabermann, Gezerot, 82.

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“godless Jews,” to consider the long tradition carved by history: Jews havemarked all these centuries with their songs of abandonment addressed to asilent or dead God. He told them, in other words, that you who are sitting hereare not that different from your fathers. You, too, belong to this long chainof tradition forged by the absence of divine intervention. Yet Yerushalmi’smessage was not limited to this exhortation. He went on to ask: “Why shoulda history of hope rely only on the general hope of restoration rather than,for example, on the efforts displayed by survivors to rebuild a devastatedcommunity?”37 His listeners could only be profoundly moved at hearing themessage implicit in his words: you who are gathered here will write the pagesof this history of hope. His conclusion struck the final blow: “Why, finally,a history of hope? To relieve our loneliness! To understand that we are notthe first ones who have experienced despair and for whom hope would be agracious gift. To understand that we are not necessarily the last ones. Andthat this might perhaps be a tiny first step toward hope itself.”38

In this sense, Derrida’s later claim that Yerushalmi had implicitly ac-knowledged that he was ready to renounce Judaism and embrace Jewishnessinstead was not really out of place. For surely at this colloquium Yerushalmihad somehow turned himself into a messenger from a long tradition of de-spair and devastation. And by trying to identify what hope looked like, hehad put the ball back in the court of those who felt desperate or alone, therebyopening up to them a new horizon of belonging, albeit one outside the fourcubits of Judaism. And it is also in this context that one must understand thespirit of Yerushalmi’s statement to Pierre Nora, which the latter reported inan interview with the daily La Croix: “You are the best of the Jews I know.”39

In June 1987, Yerushalmi attended his second major conference in France,the Colloque de Royaumont organized by the Editions du Seuil to bringtogether the most prominent intellectuals, philosophers, and historians spe-cializing in ancient, modern, and contemporary history. Yerushalmi’s fellowlecturers included Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Nora, Jean-Claude Milner, HansMommsen, Gianni Vattimo, Nicole Loraux, and Henri Rousso. A huge crowd

37Yerushalmi, “Un champ à Anathoth,” 102.38Ibid., 107.39The anecdote goes as follows: “What then does it mean for him [P. Nora] to be Jew-ish? ‘Both nothing and everything,’ he replied frankly. Nothing? ‘I’m not married to aJewish woman; my son is not concerned about Israel; my own generation,’ he concludes,‘lived with the idea that it would lead to something in Israel. Now I know that it willnot be the case.’ Everything? ‘It is the historian Joseph Yerushalmi who told me “you arethe best of the Jews I know” when quoting my work on memory in the preface to hisbook Zakhor (history of Jewish memory).’ ” Marie-Françoise Masson, “Pierre Nora, unemémoire d’historien,” La Croix, April 23, 2010, http://www.la-croix.com/Culture/Actualite/Pierre-Nora-une-memoire-d-historien-_NG_-2010-04-23-550424.

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of listeners came from Paris and elsewhere to attend what was supposed tobe an academic event and a social occasion. Introducing his paper, for whichhe confessed he had not found a satisfactory title, with a “Prélude en valsehésitation,” he was clearly less at ease at Royaumont than at the CIJLF.40

Was it because of the theme, “Usages de l’oubli,” perhaps less inspiring than“Memory and History”? Was it the panel of prestigious fellow orators thatintimidated him? Or anxiety about the reception of what he was about topresent? Probably all of the above.

Yet Yerushalmi was an outstanding speaker, endowed with a singularcharisma, and despite his apparent hesitations he quickly had the audience inhis pocket. Juggling Jewish texts with literary references well known to all,his talk was clear, comprehensible, and universal. He began his lecture by“waltzing” around the idea that there are two acknowledged forms of pathol-ogy related to memory: its total absence, amnesia, and the impossibility offorgetting, hypermnesia. He then insisted on the difference between the func-tions of memory and recollection: the first, mneme, is essentially continuousand unbroken, while the second, anamnesis, recalls what has been forgot-ten; this latter involves an act, the act of remembering. His demonstrationrested precisely on the active side of the dialectical process of transmissionand reception. Yerushalmi asserted that the collective memory (of a people)is a constructed memory forged entirely through the intermediary of a “pastactively. . . transmitted,” which means that the contents of this “memory” arestill accepted and considered meaningful in the present. Oblivion or forget-ting occurs when this past is no longer meaningful to a new generation andis rejected or simply not transmitted. He claimed: “What we call ‘forgetting’in a collective sense occurs when human groups fail—whether purposely orpassively, out of rebellion, indifference, or indolence, or as the result of somedisruptive historical catastrophe—to transmit what they know of the past totheir posterity.”41

Yerushalmi was perfectly aware of the fact that Zakhor fixed the Jews’relationship to memory into a kind of pattern that developed into a paradigmin the academic world and a commonplace beyond that world. He thereforeused the opportunity of the conference to turn this “Jewish model” into amore general one, valuable for all types of communities: no one should everthink that the Jews, who were given the commandment to “remember,” arevirtuosos of memory. They have, instead, established remembrance as a normin the halakhah. And just as the Law defines the limits of memory, so itdefines the contours of oblivion. It is worth quoting the whole paragraph inwhich Yerushalmi explains this:

40“Prelude in a Tentative Mode” in the English version. Yerushalmi, “Reflections on Forget-ting,” 105.41Ibid., 109.

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Our texts are paradigmatic, I submit, because the issues they raisetranscend their Jewish contexts, because the phenomenology ofcollective memory and forgetting is essentially the same for allsocial groups, though the details may vary widely. For any peoplethere are certain fundamental elements of the past—historical ormythic, often a fusion of both—that become “Torah,” be it oral orwritten, a teaching that is canonical, shared, commanding consen-sus; and only insofar as this “Torah” becomes “tradition” does itsurvive. Every group, every people has its halakhah, for halakhahis not “Law,” nomos, in the Alexandrian, let alone the Paulinesense. The Hebrew noun derives from halakh, “to walk,” henceHalakhah—the Path on which one walks, the Way, the “Tao”—thecomplex of rites and beliefs that gives a people its sense of identityand purpose. Only those moments out of the past are transmittedthat are felt to be formative or exemplary for the halakhah of apeople as it is lived in the present; the rest of “history” falls, onemight almost say literally by the “wayside.”42

But if what is left behind is permanently lost, then how is one to understandthat it is still possible to “rediscover” unknown elements from a bygone era,which are thus restored by way of a “renaissance” or a “reformation” in thepresent? The answer is simple: by the same process we now describe as a“reinvention” of the past. When an element of the past is accommodated tothe present time, the fact that it has been picked out gives it a new shape.As Yerushalmi explained at Royaumont, because modern historiography is aradically new venture, even the elements it retrieves from the past belong toa recreated “lost past” that has no link to the one that is felt to have been lost,for collective memory is not concerned with historiography. Therefore, “theproblem . . .—how much to remember and how much to forget—can neverbe answered from within the discipline itself,” since it is not the task of thehistorian to determine collective memory.43

Eager to disclose his discomfort with the conference’s theme, Yerushalmiintroduced a beautiful quotation by Nietzsche: “We must know the right timeto forget as well as the right time to remember, and instinctively see whenit is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically. This is the pointthat the reader is asked to consider: that the unhistorical and the historical areequally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a systemof culture.”44 But perhaps what he wanted to convey to his audience was not

42Ibid., 113.43Ibid., 114.44Friedrich Nietzsche, “Von Nützen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in Werke indrei Bänden, ed. K. Schlachta (Munich, 1966), 1:214, quoted in Yerushalmi, “Reflections onForgetting,” 107.

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essentially about the position of the professional historian facing the choicebetween the historical and the unhistorical. In the “Dissonant Epilogue” tohis paper, he openly expressed his irritation with the task assigned him. “Canyou imagine such a conference in Prague, or in Santiago de Chile?” he won-dered publicly.45 These two cities were not mentioned by chance. Everyonecould visualize the whole picture: in 1987, when Prague was still under thedomination of Soviet troops, and with the vivid memory of the 1968 invasion,could one ask such a question? Or in Santiago, where the terror of Pinochet’sregime of repression was still raging? Could such a question be raised undera dictatorial regime?

Did he mean that considering the “Uses of Forgetting” was the privilegeonly of those who benefited from freedom of expression? Perhaps. But ap-parently letting go of that thread, he instead pronounced a virulent diatribe,which sounded like a credo. No, claims Yerushalmi, this has nothing to dowith collective memory:

The essential dignity of the historical vocation remains, and itsmoral imperative seems to me now more urgent than ever. For inthe world in which we live it is no longer merely a question ofthe decay of collective memory and the declining consciousnessof the past, but of the aggressive rape of whatever memory re-mains, the deliberate distortion of the historical record, the inven-tion of mythological past in the service of the powers of darkness.Against the agents of oblivion, the shredders of documents, the as-sassins of memory, the revisers of encyclopedias, the conspiratorsof silence, against those who, in Kundera’s wonderful image, canairbrush a man out of a photograph so that nothing is left of himbut his hat—only the historian, with the austere passion for fact,proof, evidence, which are central to his vocation, can effectivelystand guard.46

To those who might not have immediately grasped the meaning of his words,Yerushalmi added that if he had to choose between “too much” and “too lit-tle,” he would deliberately opt for the “overflow.” And he then pleaded forthe accumulation of facts, evidence, and traces—which may still in due timecome to bear witness to the reality of past events, or to the true existence ofindividuals who once lived. Furthermore, since the symposium held at Ro-yaumont took place against the backdrop of the memory of the Jewish chil-dren deported from Yzieux and at the time when the trial of Klaus Barbie,

45Yerushalmi, “Reflections on Forgetting,” 115.46Ibid., 116.

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known as the “butcher of Lyon,” was being held in France, Yerushalmi him-self departed from the pseudoneutrality of the historian by asking publicly,by way of conclusion, if the antonym of the word “oblivion” should not be“justice.”47

It goes without saying that the most significant aspect of this lecture wasthe way it was anchored to current events. There was nothing here to surprisethose who had often heard Yerushalmi revive old texts with the consummateskill of a talented storyteller: he knew how to empathize with his audienceand to make them understand (or believe they understand) for a brief momentthat as long as they agreed to consider it with empathy, history was not merelyan “echo of a dead past.”48 Perhaps had he been facing a different audience,his words would not have reached their target so effectively. But those whowere present were either historians engaged in the work of memory or atten-tive followers of its development. French and German memories of WorldWar II peered at one another through Mommsen and Rousso, while the Hel-lenist Nicole Loraux questioned the meaning and use of the word “amnesty”when the shadow of politics falls upon it. Shortly after the conference, PierreVidal-Naquet, for whom claiming for memory its rightful place was a dailystruggle and the fragility of the truth a painful awareness, borrowed fromYerushalmi the formula assassins de la mémoire and turned it into a titlefor his collection of articles about revisionism.49 At a time when doubt wascast on the testimonies of living witnesses, when the words of Holocaust de-niers and of members of the Resistance were given the same weight, when,as Vidal-Naquet said in an interview, the investigative procedures of histori-ans and judges converged, Yerushalmi was offering the historical enterprisea legitimacy that could not have been more welcome.50 But he added anotherdimension to it: forgetting could also be understood as a means of pacifica-tion. He reminded his listeners that if there is no memory without forgetting,then perhaps forgetting is not always in vain and might have the value of anexorcism, as Marc Ferro later highlighted.51

47Ibid., 117 (emphasis in original).48Yerushalmi, The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the “Shebet Yehuda,”Hebrew Union College Annual Supplements, no. 1 (Cincinnati, 1976), xi.49Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Assassins de la mémoire: Un Eichmann de papier et autres textessur le révisionnisme (Paris, 1987), and Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of theHolocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York, 1993).50Philippe Mangeot and Isabelle Saint-Saëns, with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “La vérité del’indicatif,” Vacarme 17 (2001), http://www.vacarme.org/article205.51Marc Ferro, “Les oublis de l’Histoire,” in “Mémoire et oubli,” special issue, Communi-cations 49 (1989): 57–66. This special issue could serve as an exemplary illustration of theinfluence of Yerushalmi’s Royaumont lecture upon his listeners. That influence permeates theintroduction by Nicole Lapierre, 5–10.

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The ravages of time have not spared Yerushalmi’s legacy in France. As of-ten happens to those who are quoted so much that their message is ultimatelyabsorbed into the spirit of the age, it is now quite rare for those of a younggeneration to discern Yerushalmi’s singular contribution to the study of con-temporary history. There is some irony in the fact that Yerushalmi, who cher-ished a particular love for Ecclesiastes, preferred to quote Nietzsche to renderQohelet’s message “A time to keep, and a time to throw away” (Eccles. 3:6).It was probably not in innocence that he chose a much less clearly theologi-cal tenor for his lecture, which placed the individual at the heart of the act ofremembering and forgetting: “We must know the right time to forget as wellas the right time to remember.”52 Yerushalmi, who dreamed of being remem-bered only as a footnote, achieved much more: he succeeded in bequeathingto posterity a body of thought that surpasses his mere persona.53

Acknowledgements Special thanks to my friends and colleagues Lois Dubin and MarinaRustow for their skilled and generous editing of this article.

52Nietzsche, “Von Nützen und Nachteil,” 1:214.53Yerushalmi’s wish was relayed to me by his wife, Ophra Yerushalmi, in a friendly conver-sation held during the conference organized in Yerushalmi’s memory at the Musée d’Art etd’Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris, April 3, 2011. The papers presented at the conference arepublished in Goldberg, L’histoire et la mémoire de l’histoire.