JEWISH PLURALISM AND FRENCH HOMOGENEITY

The background for Nataf's pedagogical innovation, and in fact many intra-Jewish discussions of the Holocaust, is a crisis over what exactly it might mean to be a French or European Jew. This is a problem that dates back to at least the French Revolution and appeared in a variety of guises throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It revolved around two central issues: the coherence and “representability” of Jewishness itself vis-à-vis a state that modeled “religion” around Catholicism, and the subordination of Jewish belonging to French national identity.Footnote ⁴ The latest round of these new/old questions about French Jewishness and Jewish Frenchness can be tied to French decolonization of North Africa. In the decades following the Second World War, as the French North African Empire crumbled, France became the preferred destination for almost all Algerian Jews and many Moroccan and Tunisian Jews. By the mid-1960s, such migration had more than doubled the postwar French Jewish population (Bensimon and Della Pergola Reference Bensimon and Pergola1984) and laid the groundwork for decades of disputes over communal leadership positions, prayer spaces, forms of religiosity, and politics (e.g., Arkin Reference Arkin2014; Davidson Reference Davidson2015; Poirier Reference Poirier1998; Podselver Reference Podselver1986). By the early 2000s, a study funded by the Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU), the major Jewish philanthropic organization in France, estimated the total Jewish population in France at 500,000–575,000 people. For the first time since the 1960s, while slightly more than half of Jewish heads of household were still foreign-born, the majority of the total French Jewish population hailed from Metropolitan France (Cohen Reference Cohen2002). But while French Jews in the early 2000s were increasingly French, there are indications that they were also increasingly ethnically identified and divided. A 1988 demographic survey sponsored by the Fonds Social Juif Unifié found that 50 percent of Jews interviewed identified themselves as “Sephardi,” 34 percent as “Ashkenazi” and 16 percent as “neither” (ibid.: 12). In a 2002 follow-up study, the number of Sephardim jumped to 70 percent; the number of Ashkenazim dropped to 24 percent, and 6 percent claimed to be both Sephardi and Ashkenazi (ibid.). In the years that separated the two studies, “neither” disappeared as a category, suggesting increased ethnic identification within Jewishness.

At the same time that “Ashkenazi”/“Sephardi” distinctions seemed to became more important to French Jews, the question of the “Europeanness” of Jews in France also became more urgent. This urgency came about indirectly, through turn-of-the-century French and European public engagement with the “Muslim question.” In the 1980s, under the socialist government of François Mitterrand, France had briefly experimented with the ethno-cultural pluralization of the public sphere, an experiment that the hard right quickly appropriated in its attempts to justify excluding France's former colonial populations through reference to essential cultural differences (e.g., Silverstein Reference Silverstein2004; Taguieff Reference Taguieff2001). By the late 1990s and the early 2000s, faced with the specter of a global Islamic revival both the left and the right had firmly rejected multiculturalism as a model for French pluralism and instead started seeking to define and defend various understandings of core “French” identity. Thus the first decade of the 2000s saw raucous public debates about laïcité [secularism] and its role in creating a framework for everyday French life, as well as government-sponsored discussions about the contours and content of French national identity. All sorts of vastly divergent positions were taken during these debates (Bowen Reference Bowen2007), only some of which were explicitly anti-Muslim. But regardless of the complexity of these political positions, framing the conversation around the (im)possibility of Frenchness for Muslim “immigrants” born and raised in France helped ethnicize the French Republic itself.

If the ethnicization of the Republic worked to exclude “Muslims,” here understood in Naomi Davidson's terms as racialized bearers of incommensurable religious differences (Reference Davidson2012), it did so in ways that potentially threatened French Jews. As many scholars have noted, French public discourse about Muslims slipped constantly between religion and other geographical and cultural markers, namely Maghrebi origin and “Arab” ethno-cultural features (e.g., Fernando Reference Fernando2014; Hargreaves Reference Hargreaves1995; Tetreault Reference Tetreault2015; Silverstein Reference Silverstein2004). This slippage has allowed Islam and Muslims to be continuously ascribed extra-European origins and thus cultural realities, which were then used as explanations for supposed Muslim inassimilability (see Asad Reference Asad2003). I have argued elsewhere that focusing on “extra-European” origins and attributes as a “problem” has the potential to threaten (some) Jews’ Frenchness (Arkin Reference Arkin2014). Over the past three decades, Jews of North African origin have become increasingly visible in ways that mirror religious, political, and cultural developments among Muslims of North African origin (Benayoun Reference Benayoun1993; Podselver Reference Podselver1986). As a result, by the early 2000s, the division of French Jewry into “Ashkenazim” and “Sephardim,” meaning “Europeans” and “North Africans,” threatened to become more than just a fraught intra-Jewish issue. In a context where French Jews could be read as foreigners, the division of French Jewry into “Europeans” and “North Africans” was viewed by some as markedly pernicious and problematic (see Trigano Reference Trigano2003). And this is precisely the context in which some Jewish elites began rethinking the temporal and geographical frame of the Holocaust.

THE “EUROPEAN” HOLOCAUST AND FRENCH SEPHARDIM

Before delving into Nataf in the mid-2000s, I am going to flesh out some of the ways that French Jews have talked to each other about the Holocaust over the past thirty or so years. At least since the 1980s, the Holocaust has been a discursive site at which public battles around Jewish unity and difference have been fought.Footnote ⁵ Given the significance of Holocaust experience for defining Europe as a cultural and political project (Bunzl Reference Bunzl2004; Reference Bunzl2007; Judt Reference Judt1992) as well as European Jewishness, North African Jews’ relationship to it is both important and problematic. In everyday talk and in public discourse North African Jews have both connected themselves to and distanced themselves from what, for better or for worse, is typically imagined as a “European” event. “European” Jews have, in turn, often reacted angrily to all these attempts to situate North African Jews vis-à-vis the Shoah. Here I will analyze a few examples of these fraught intra-Jewish debates by drawing on newspaper accounts that pit “Ashkenazim” against “Sephardim” in a battle to define the Holocaust in temporal, geographical, and religious terms.

In August 2000, Ovadia Yossef, the former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel and head of the right-wing Sephardi religious party Shas, made headlines in the French Jewish (and non-Jewish) press. Yossef had given a Sabbath sermon in which he explained that those who had been killed during the Shoah harbored the reincarnated spirits of the Jews who had helped build the golden calf (Agence France Presse 2000). This particular and deeply controversial theodicy has roots in medieval mystic Jewish thought about transmigration and reincarnation of especially sinful souls. It also is part of a long-standing attempt to explain the Holocaust within a Jewish theodicy that emphasizes divine punishment as a reaction to Jewish sin.Footnote ⁶ But the comment sparked intense anger and discussion in Israel as part of an ethnicized reconfiguration of political and religious authority, one that pitted establishment Ashkenazim against second- and third-generation Mizrachim and Sephardim (Yablonka Reference Yablonka2009). And it had similar repercussions in France. The French media immediately connected the Shas leaders’ comments to those that had been made by French Chief Rabbi Joseph Sitruk three years earlier in interviews with journalists (Sitruk Reference Sitruk1997; Ternisien Reference Ternisien2000). In those interviews, Sitruk tried to distance himself from a theology linking the Holocaust to divine punishment, while also engaging with many of the premises of that theology, notably reincarnation and the terrible sin of Jewish assimilation in the nineteenth century (see Farhi 2000, quoted in Mopsik and Krygier Reference Mopsik and Krygier2014: n.p.). Summing up his ambivalent position, Sitruk said: “For our wise men, the explanation of the Holocaust resembles that of the smoker who is dying of cancer because he did not take care of his health. To follow the metaphor, I would tell you that Israel cannot die quietly in bed when Israel is no longer Israel” (ibid.).

Yossef's comments therefore renewed public attention to Sitruk's theodicy and resulted in some public tensions between more liberal French rabbis—notably the Parisian reform Rabbi Daniel Farhi and the Parisian Massorti rabbi Rivon Krygier—and Sitruk (Mopsik and Krygier Reference Mopsik and Krygier2014; Ternisien Reference Ternisien2000). But the objections to Yossef and Sitruk were not simply theological. Sitruk, it should be noted, was only the second North African Jew to hold the position of French Chief Rabbi, and he, like Ovadia Yossef, was associated with an inflexible, anti-intellectual, and not very textually informed form of orthodoxy. The angry letters that followed the Yossef/Sitruk controversy therefore became an occasion for recriminations rooted not only in religious differences, but also in supposedly essential differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. In a letter to the editor of the religious newspaper Actualité Juive about the controversy, Yvan Haggiag noted that Rabbis Yossef and Sitruk had simply told the “truth,” which was that God punished Jews who did not observe all His mitzvoth [commandments] and keep themselves “different” (Haggiag Reference Haggiag2000: 4). Another Actualité Juive reader, Eric Jarville, reframed Haggiag's religious/non-religious divide as an ethno-historical gap between Sephardim and Ashkenazim: “As a practicing Ashkenazi Jew, I deny all my Sephardi brothers the right to comment, evaluate, weigh, and most importantly judge this tragic part of our history. It is clear that only the Sephardi fringe allows itself to weigh in on the un-nameable, having no or very little familial experience (Salonica Jews excepted) with this black period. So pity on this issue, my Sephardi brothers, even more so if you think of yourself as religious: be silent, silent!” (Jarville Reference Jarville2000: 4). This incident was not the first time that religious theodicy around the Holocaust had become a topic of both secular and “Ashkenazi” displeasure. Ten years earlier, Charles Szlakmann, a contributor to Actualité Juive, had noted with concern Yiddish language activist Richard Marienstras’ admonition that Sephardim not talk about the Shoah “because it is in very bad taste for people whose communities were spared … to give lessons about Judaism” (Reference Szlakmann1990: 11). In other words, Marienstras clearly thought “Sephardim” who knew nothing about the Holocaust should keep their self-righteous theodicy to themselves.

What is going on in these bitter arguments over the Holocaust? And what, if anything, does it have to do with the relationship between historicity and the contours of Jewish community and belonging? Marienstras and Jarville certainly seem to have understood Yossef, Sitruk, and Haggiag's accounts as narrowing the scope of both the Holocaust and of Jewishness by writing some (mostly Sephardi) Jews out of the genocide on the grounds of their stricter piety and adherence to divine law. Indeed, instead of seeing the horrible hand of historical contingency behind the events of the Shoah, the rabbis seemed to see differential merit and divinely allocated retribution. Marienstras and Jarville, in turn, read this account of differential merit and retribution as a story about ontologically different kinds of Jews. They presumed that the rabbis saw differential divine favor mapping onto a European/North African divide, one that followed a division between religious and non-religious. And while Marienstras and Jarville denounced such a reading of divine favor, they themselves divided Jewishness along precisely those same lines, presuming that knowledge, authority, and even the right to speak about a major event in Jewish history came with seemingly continuous and heritable experience (Wright Reference Wright2015) in relation to an exclusively European Holocaust. But while Marienstras and Jarville's presumption that a European/North African divide motivated both the rabbis’ theology and its total illegitimacy, the rabbis comments were in fact more complex than such a reading suggests.

The anger and incomprehension that Marienstras and Jarville brought to this conversation about theology and the Holocaust highlights an epistemic clash between their own understandings of Jewish temporality and locality and those invoked by the rabbis (Yerushalami Reference Yerushalami1996). For the rabbis just quoted, history does not appear to be a series of events connected by cause and effect in linear time. This rejection of linear cause and effect is most clear within a mystical framework of reincarnation, where sins committed by others hundreds if not thousands of years before result in devastating forms of divine retribution in the modern world. Punishing Jews who worshipped the golden calf by reincarnating them as Holocaust victims requires what Benedict Anderson, following Walter Benjamin, has called a “messianic” realm of simultaneity: “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” that is alien to linear and causal conceptions of history (Anderson Reference Anderson2006: 24). Even Sitruk's less mystical version of the Holocaust—in which God punishes (some) Jews collectively for sins committed (by others) in their lifetimes—conjures up relations of cause and effect that do not operate in a flat linear framework. Instead, Sitruk may be suggesting that contemporary Jewish experiences can only be made sense of through cyclical time—an endless cycle of sin, punishment, and redemption that requires the hidden but all-important hand of the timeless divine (Spiegel Reference Spiegel2002; Yerushalami Reference Yerushalami1996). As a result, despite their differences, Yossef and Sitruk's stories rely on an appeal to a transcendent and perhaps even ahistorical/atemporal realm of divine will and justice—a kind of messianic time-outside-of-time and causality.

These messianic historicities conjure up forms of Jewish unity that Marienstras and Jareville may have found incomprehensible and perhaps unimaginable. In the 1970s and 1980s, Marienstras was one of the most famous French advocates for what he called “diasporic” forms of Jewish identity, meaning non-state oriented, transnational and yet highly localized forms of Jewish difference. Marienstras argued that it was precisely these deeply local differences that allowed for Jewish survival by ensuring that Jews were not everywhere subjected to the same assimilatory pressures (Reference Marienstras1975: 15). Although Marienstras insisted that Jewish diasporas must “recognize one another among themselves” (ibid.: 16), his portrait of Jewish diaspora was rooted almost exclusively in an European imaginary and temporality, most notably Yiddish culture and the Holocaust. Marienstras’ writings thus produce somewhat incommensurable local Jewishnesses (Marienstras Reference Marienstras1975; Reference Marienstras2007). This is certainly evident in his understanding of conservative theological explanations of Holocaust as unwanted “Sephardi”—read North African—meddling in a sociocultural world from which they are historically and geographically excluded. For Marienstras and Jarville, the irreducibly local dimensions of Jewish experiences are embedded in linear historical continuities and are emphasized above and beyond transcendent Jewish unity. Moreover, such assumptions about geography and linear continuity do not just highlight preexisting fault lines; they actually help produce them. The linking of conservative theological grappling with the Holocaust to “Sephardi” difference turns a universal Jewish problem—one that has long plagued both Ashkenazi and Sephardi religious thinkers—into a sign of ethnic and geographical distinction.

In contrast, for the rabbis, Jewish peoplehood does not lie in local specificities that must, somehow, be connected to one another across the differential (national, cultural) effects of causal relations playing out in linear time. Rather, Jewishness seems not only to transcend differences in geography, culture, and degree of religious observance, but also to be transhistorical. Again, this is clearest in the argument for reincarnation. Otherwise, how could the same “souls” who sacrificed to the golden calf also have suffered and died during the Holocaust? It also applies to narratives of collective punishment where the specific identity of the sinner is less significant than his or her membership in a translocal and transhistorical community. And while this kind of logic does make some Jewish bodies differentially bear the burden of both individual and collective Jewish sin, they can only do so as Jews whose relationship to the divine is supposed to be the same as that of all other Jews. Put very simply, you cannot be punished for breaking a contract that was never yours to begin with. What Marienstras and Jarville read as the transformation of linear historical accident into ethnically distinctive Jewish merit was actually in many ways an insistence on Jewish identity that exists outside the realm of empirical difference. Jews are connected to other Jews first and foremost as Jews, and only secondarily as specific kinds of Jews in specific times and places. From this perspective, “ethnic” (Sephardi and Ashkenazi), geographical (North African and European), and civilizational (European and Arab) differences between groups of Jews are less important than an ideal of transcendent Jewish unity.

This first example juxtaposes certain religious understandings of time and history with the “empty, homogenous time” and linear historicity associated with modern secularity (Anderson Reference Anderson2006). But not only religious Jews embraced messianic narratives; messianic historicity in Holocaust narratives comes in fully secularized versions, which clash just as dramatically with linear historical perspectives. According to Joan Wolf, by the 1980s many French Jews from North Africa had come to understand the relationship between their experiences and those of European Jews through analogy, particularly by comparing North African Jews’ postcolonial experiences to those of European Jews during the Holocaust (Reference Wolf2004: 31). Some of my own research has turned up a few examples of such understandings. In April 1983, the Jewish women's cultural magazine Coopération Feminine ran an issue on Jewish women's experiences in France. It included a letter that discussed the elective affinity North African Jews saw between their experiences of dispossession and exile and European Jews’ denationalization and deportation during the Second World War. For those articulating this kind of position, North African Jews’ connection to the Holocaust was not direct, but shared Jewishness produced different yet comparable historical experiences, including uprooting and banishment. Jewishness was a privileged cause for a particular set of isomorphic effects, particularly suffering, displacement, and exile. Like the messianic stories rooted in the transhistorical unity of all Jews, these narratives also cannot be understood in linear historical time. Instead, they require vertical reasoning into a transcendent realm of simultaneity. But here this transcendent realm is secularized as something like the universal “national” condition of Jews in exile.

Not surprisingly, the extension of the Holocaust to North African Jews through elective affinity elicited a backlash. In the same issue of Coopération Feminine, Jacqueline Atlas denounced any comparison between North African exile and Holocaust experience, observing that North African Jews had a “choice” between France and Israel while Jews during the Holocaust had no choices (Reference Atlas1983: 11). Anne Sinclair, a well-known Jewish journalist and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors added: “It's certain that for people who experienced deportation, the problems of a [North African] woman arriving in Sarcelles [a peri-urban neighborhood with public housing built for the influx of French refugees after decolonization] seem irrelevant” (Reference Sinclair1983: 12). Here, once again, we see the attempt to locate Jewish unity in a transcendent realm called into question through an insistence on the differential effects (if not causes) of European and North African Jewish suffering. In a purely linear and horizontal reckoning of cause-and-effect, there is no space for contemporary Sephardim and Ashkenazim to share the Holocaust as part of their constitutive experiences as either European or French Jews.

None of the examples just cited contain the tropes that I heard most during my fieldwork in the mid-2000s. Although I was not interviewing people about the Holocaust, in a period of anxiety about increased anti-Semitism it came up in everyday settings and conversations. In those contexts, there seemed to be a new configuration of the same opposition tracked through my previous examples: a transcendent appeal to unity of Jewish experience (messianism) juxtaposed with a linear historical critique. Let me illustrate this with one particularly dramatic example.

In February 2005, I attended a talk given by Yves Azéroual, a journalist, author, and former editor of the Jewish magazine Tribune Juive, at the Paris Centre Communautaire, a Jewish community center in the heart of the city. Unlike most Jewish organizations in France, community centers are one of the few places where you can find a diverse Jewish public, including the secular and the religious, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, working class and bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁷ Azéroual's talk was about negative depictions of Israel in the French media; but he wanted to make clear “entre nous” [amongst ourselves, meaning within a Jewish context] that not every negative depiction was a result of anti-Semitism, whether on the part of journalists, the French state, or the larger French public: “The friends of Israel are numerous. I hear Jews in the community tell me all the time that Chirac [then center-right President of France] is anti-Semitic, that everyone is anti-Semitic, that Jews are alone in the world, that journalists are corrupt. It's simply not true. There are some journalists who are militants [radicals], who are probably paid to defend Palestine. But this is not typical. Most people are just ignorant.”

This frustrated some audience members, whose perceptions Azéroual had just dismissed as feeling rather than reality. Among them, a distraught middle-aged woman with a thick North African accent, asked: “Do you really think they are not all against us? It's all we see.” Another audience member seconded her sentiment: “This must be the same as it was at the time of the Nazis; the same kind of mise en scène [theatrical display] of Jewish evil.” A few minutes later, the first audience member returned to the Holocaust theme, exploding: “I feel like we are going to be eaten by them [the anti-Semitic French]. It's another Shoah that is getting underway.”

This outburst immediately resulted in both Azéroual and the evening's moderator giving the audience a lecture, again “entre nous,” on their profound “misunderstanding” of history. Azéroual began by asking/telling the middle-aged woman: “Please tell us that you do not really believe that.” When she responded that she absolutely did believe what she had said, the moderator took over: “What do you think is going on right now that is like the Shoah?” The woman, at that point flustered and visibly embarrassed, misinterpreted the question and assumed that she was being quizzed on her historical knowledge of the Holocaust. “I didn't live it,” she cried defensively, throwing her hands up in the air, “I don't know. All I know is that Jews were killed all over Europe for being Jews!” Another female audience member offered a sotto voce amen chorus, mumbling: “Anti-Semitism is growing in France!” Calmly and didactically, the moderator spoke again:

This uncomfortable exchange has many of the elements of the conflicts recounted above. But in the fraught context of post-2000s France, there is also an added emphasis for both Azéroual and the moderator on the relationship between Holocaust narratives and contemporary Jewish Frenchness. For the audience, and most particularly the flustered woman who was reliving the Holocaust in contemporary France, the Holocaust had become unmoored. From this perspective, the Shoah is not a defined historical event, circumscribed geographically and temporally linked to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Instead, it is continuously unfolding, embedded in the universal and transhistorical problem of violent anti-Semitism. For a number of distressed audience members, then, the temporal and sociological differences between Europe in the 1930s and the early 2000s were far less relevant than what Veena Das has called the “unfinished” past—a past that “can suddenly press upon the world with the same insistence and obstinacy with which the real creates holes in the symbolic” (Reference Das2007: 134).

By linking all Jews to a visceral experience of the Holocaust, this “unfinished” past seems to function as a secular version of messianism. Walter Benjamin famously described this kind of historicity through his description of the “Angel of History.” He writes: “The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet…” (Reference Benjamin and Redmond1974: ix). This is precisely what the woman at the community center saw: an on-going calamity that was neither past nor present, but both simultaneously. To quote Benjamin again, this is a “here-and-now” form of historicity that fits very uncomfortably with the “empty, homogenous time” of linear historical narratives (ibid.). It is also a mode of understanding the Holocaust that makes both temporal and geographical borders irrelevant. As a result, Sephardi/Ashkenazi or North African/European differences appear to be far less important than a Jewish/non-Jewish divide that unifies Jews historically and geographically, while alienating them from the nation-states in which they happen to be living. Thus the flustered woman's conviction that “we” [the Jews] are going to be eaten by an unspecified “them”; this “them” without an antecedent could have referred to the non-Jewish French, the European population more generally, or even to a wider world that seemed for many in France to have turned its back on the Jews and Israel.

But also once again, this mode of narrating Jewish unity through a messianic historicity was countered by a linear historical argument. Note that Azéroual and the moderator immediately lectured the audience on “misunderstanding” history. In their didactic response, both made a concerted attempt to counter the audience members’ temporally unmoored understanding of the Holocaust with a cause-and-effect, and therefore supposedly more “rational,” temporality and narrative. The speaker and moderator re-embedded the Holocaust in a particular sociological context, if not historical moment, by insisting that a crucial feature of the Holocaust was state involvement in, rather than opposition to, anti-Semitic activities. That the twenty-first-century French state immediately condemned anti-Semitic acts differentiated contemporary Parisian Jews’ experiences with anti-Semitism from those of the 1930s. So for Azéroual and the moderator, there was a clear sociological as well as temporal divide between the present experienced by all French Jews and the past.

This re-grounding of the Holocaust in a specific time and context had the effect of re-nationalizing French Jewry. If the Holocaust both signified and produced Jewish de-nationalization all over Europe, Azéroual and the moderator insisted on the Frenchness of contemporary French Jews by aligning contemporary Jewish interests with those of the state. Thus the moderator listed all the ways in which the French state and government had worked to combat anti-Semitism over the previous few years, work he said was designed to prove to skeptical Jews how much they really were a part of normative French national imaginaries. The thrust of the talk itself—which focused on the ways in which journalists and French intellectuals were often anti-Israel out of ignorance rather than anti-Semitism—highlighted political and cultural similarities across the Jewish/(post)Christian divide in France. Parrying the audience's sense of the abject position of Jews in France, the moderator noted: “I can say this because we are entre nous, it is easier to be a Jew than an Arab in France. We may need to condemn the way that certain young beur [an old slang term for Arab] behave, but the government itself is irreproachable.” Both Azéroual and the moderator were working to re-ground the Holocaust sociologically and temporally in order to convince their audience of their Frenchness.

But the price of this Frenchness was in fact a set of divisions within French Jewry, divisions that threatened to exclude some Jews from the national framework itself. Recall the speaker who thought Jews were going to be “eaten” by the anti-Semitic French. She became flustered when asked to give historical details to back up her sense of an impending Shoah, and in her confusion she ultimately excluded herself both generationally (she was too young) and geographically (she was not in Europe) from the Holocaust narrative itself—“I don't know [what happened]; I wasn't there.” The way the speaker and the moderator responded—with a didactic lecture presenting the “facts” of the case—created an epistemological gap between their forms of authoritative historical knowledge and the irrational “feelings” of the audience.

This epistemological divide not only literally shamed the audience into silence, but it also mapped uncomfortably onto the ethnicized division of French Jewry. The division between “intellectual” and “emotional” Jews is a trope that was and still is used to explain the relationship between European and North African Jews, (see Arkin Reference Arkin2014). It was evoked by many of my Sephardi informants themselves in its moral mirror image form; they contrasted their emotional joie de vivre with the hyper-rational, cold affect that they associated with “Ashkenazim.” It was even reproduced in some Jewish institutional spaces; in the mid-2000s, the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris housed exhibits that linked Ashkenazim to male textual study and Sephardim to opulent women's dress. Azéroual was himself not old enough to have survived the Holocaust and, if his last name is any indication, may not hail from a “European” family. But in that moment he could easily have been understood as instantiating an “Ashkenazi” or European mode of authority. This mode of authority relies on dates, strict chronology, and textual sources and opposes the affective and personal authority of temporally unmoored, oral, and self-consciously subjectivist history (see Goody Reference Goody1977; Goody and Watt Reference Goody, Watt and Goody1968; Ong Reference Ong1982; Shryock Reference Shryock1997). Out of their audience's sense of collective victimization grounded in a messianic historicity, Azéroual and the moderator produced visceral experiences of difference tied to an Orientalist divide (Said Reference Said1978), one that both pressured Jews to think and act like French nationals and Europeans while also implicitly questioning their capacity to be appropriately French and European.Footnote ⁸

TEACHING A NORTH AFRICAN SHOAH?

The impasse with which the Parisian community center interchange ends calls for a solution, one that cannot be found in either messianic or linear historical narratives. Why? By the beginning of the Second Intifada, messianic approaches based either on an “unmoored” or metaphorical Holocaust had become politically untenable, particularly for Jewish elites. The community center vignette viscerally illustrates how an “unmoored” Holocaust raises the question of Jewish “Frenchness” and belonging at a moment when many Jewish elites were working hard to naturalize Jewish Frenchness. The non-linear, analogic reasoning many North African Jews used to write themselves into the “European” Holocaust was even more politically problematic. Such arguments have the potential to undermine the Holocaust's uniqueness as well as its Jewishness by suggesting that other events at other moments in time produce isomorphic communities of suffering. This kind of extension of the Holocaust has long been intolerable to some French Jews. As Wolf notes (Reference Wolf2004), in the 1980s many Holocaust survivors were appalled when young French Jews used the Holocaust as a symbolic way to create anti-racist coalitions dedicated to combating all forms of structural marginality and victimization.Footnote ⁹ But by the early 2000s such metaphoric uses of the Holocaust had also become geopolitically problematic, perhaps in unprecedented ways. At the turn of the millennium, the Holocaust had (once again) become a major discursive weapon in French public discourse. The Holocaust as a metaphorical morality play pitting victim against aggressor, weak against strong, and good against bad had become a sign of and model for thinking about injustice in all sorts of public representations, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (e.g., Morin, Naïr, and Sallenave Reference Morin, Naïr and Sallenave2002). Linking Israeli actions against Palestinians and the Palestinian territories to the Holocaust had become a virtually everyday occurrence in French media. Here I offer just one strikingly controversial and searing example: France 2's footage of the 2000 fatal shooting of the Palestinian child Muhammed al-Dura, a scene that was widely likened to the iconic Holocaust image of the Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto with his hands in the air.Footnote ¹⁰ Few news reports have provoked such bitter contestation, resulting in lawsuits against the reporting journalist, Charles Enderlin, and multiple attempts to prove that France 2's footage was doctored or manufactured (e.g., Bensoussan Reference Bensoussan2003). It will probably never be clear what happened in the Dura case. Twelve years after the incident, French courts were still hearing defamation suits from both sides (Agence France Presse 2012). The case, however, highlights the stakes of linking violence in Israel-Palestine to the Holocaust for Jewish supporters of Israel and their critics. Given how important and common it had become in French society to use the Holocaust as a way of thinking about power, conflict, and culpability, even Jewish attempts to turn the Holocaust into a kind of experiential metaphor could be a dangerous cultural and political tool.

In addition, the idea that the displacement of Jews from decolonizing Middle Eastern and North African contexts resonated with World War II Jewish experience was being dismantled through international Zionist efforts. Such metaphors opened up the possibility that Palestinian exile in the wake of Israeli statehood could be likened to Jewish experiences at the hands of the Nazis, making the equation of Zionism with Nazism possible and potentially compelling. Instead, Zionist groups were reframing North African Jewish and Palestine exile as equivalent. In 2002, the group Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) was formed in order to lobby for the official recognition of 850,000 Arab Jewish refugees, a move imagined as a prelude to including Arab Jewish losses in any future peace settlement. That same year, the World Jewish Congress hosted a series of conferences dedicated to raising awareness of Arab Jewish expulsion. In 2006, JJAC launched a world-wide campaign to register and recognize Arab states’ role in human rights abuses against and dispossession of Arab Jews (Rettig Reference Rettig2006). On 30 November 2014, Israel observed its first-ever national remembrance of Jewish expulsion from Arab lands (Aderet Reference Aderet2014). Rather than opening up the problematic possibility of elective affinity between the Holocaust and other moments of violence and dispossession, these alternative comparisons were intended to neutralize Palestinian claims about the “right of return,” as well as to relativize accusations of Israeli “ethnic cleansing.”

If both “unmoored” and metaphorical Holocausts rooted in messianic historicities were politically unthinkable for Jewish elites, linear accounts of the “European” Holocaust were perhaps increasingly intolerable to many North African Jews. We saw the silence and humiliation of the community center audience during the “history lesson” provided by Azéroual and the moderator. Twenty-something business school student Adrien, whose parents were born in North Africa, explained in the mid-2000s:

In a less nuanced version offered by a Jewish day school parent from Algeria, “Hitler did not ask Jews whether they were Ashkenazi or Sephardi! He just killed them!”

This push-back against long-standing exclusivist, “European” Jewish narratives might have become more pronounced during the early 2000s because of a collective Jewish sense of what Algerian-born Shmuel Trigano has called the “denationalization” of French Jews, and especially North African Jews. Writing in 2003, he noted:

In a context in which Jews felt like both their citizenship and nationality were being questioned and perhaps cheapened, being excluded from the European Jewishness produced by the Holocaust became even more intolerable.

This is where Nataf and his explicitly pedagogical historicity come in. Over the last ten years, French publishers have released a flurry of books telling the “untold” or “unknown” or “little known” story of the Holocaust in North Africa. These include everything from country-specific accounts of work camps and living conditions for North African Jews during World War II (e.g., Allali Reference Allali2014; Bel-Ange Reference Bel-Ange2006; Borgel Reference Borgel2007; F. Gasquet Reference Gasquet2006; Nataf Reference Nataf2012; Oliel Reference Oliel2005), to much more general accounts of pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish sentiment in “Arab” lands (e.g., Bensoussan Reference Bensoussan2012). Additionally, North African Jewish experiences during World War II have recently become the grounds for institution-building, community center lecturers, educational programming, film screenings, museum exhibits, and memorialization in France. Nataf's commemoration of the Tunis rafle, as well as its growing importance in the French Jewish landscape, is one prominent example. For the sixtieth anniversary of the round-up, the commemoration was paired with a museum exhibit, a colloquium held at the Sorbonne, and a ceremony in Paris’ 4th arrondissement city hall. But the Tunis rafle is not the only such example. In February 2005, following France-wide commemorations of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Tunisian-born medical doctor André Nahum gave a talk at a Parisian-area Jewish community center entitled: “L’étrange destin de Young Perez champion du monde de boxe, Tunis 1911—Auschwitz 1945” (The strange destiny of Young Perez, world boxing champion, born 1911 in Tunis and deceased 1945 in Auschwitz). In 2006, with the aid of the Claims Conference—an organization dedicated to securing reparations for Holocaust victims—the Centre de documentation du Judaïsme d'Afrique du nord pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale opened its doors. That same year, as part of a Parisian celebration of Sephardi culture, Norbert Bel Ange gave a lecture at city hall in the 3rd arrondissement on his book Quand Vichy internait ses soldats juifs d'Algerie, 1941–1943. In 2010, Arte aired le Maghreb sous la croix gamée, a film based on Robert Satloff's popular book Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands (Reference Satloff2006), which argues that North Africa, like Europe, was a place where “righteous” Arab non-Jews took serious risks in order to help save Jews from Nazi barbarism. In late 2013 and early 2014, two different French Jewish organizations screened Antoine Casuboloi Ferro's documentary “Les Juifs d'Afrique du nord pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” and hosted discussions with Société d'histoire des juifs de Tunisie President Claude Nataf. And in 2015, for the first time, the Alliance Israélite Universelle's university-level public education program, called the Institut Universitaire Elie Wiesel, hosted a conference cycle on North African Jews during the Second World War. The program included historians like Georges Bensoussan, who has written extensively on Middle Eastern and North African popular and political support for Nazism.

This significant cultural activity suggests that, in the last ten years, French Jewish institutions have worked hard to “remind” the French public, and especially French Jews, that North Africa Jewry experienced Vichy discrimination, German occupation, and in rarer cases, deportation and death. But often these reminders are not just about Vichy discrimination and German occupation; sometimes they point to an extension of the Final Solution itself into North Africa.Footnote ¹¹ Claude Nataf has himself embraced what could be called the “matter of time” thesis, a phrase I have taken from a 2002 Israeli documentary of that name. In the film, complex and sometimes contradictory accounts from historians and North African eye witnesses are used to argue that “the Holocaust was not just the Holocaust of Jews in Europe; it was the Holocaust of all Jewry” (JMT Films 2002). Nataf's work largely confirms such an account. In the 2006 preface to a Tunisian survivor's account, Nataf wrote: “The experiences suffered by the Jews of Tunisia clarify the Nazi intention to annihilate the totality of the Jewish people,” adding that new historical work shows “that if the Nazis had won on the battlefield, they intended to kill the majority of the Jewish youth held in [Tunisian] camps by firing squad before moving into Algeria” (Borgel Reference Borgel2007: 19–20). Similarly, the Francophone Jewish Tunisian website, Harissa.com, cites the British historian Martin Gilbert's reinterpretation of the famous Wannsee Conference numbers (the Nazi estimate of the total European Jewish population slated for extermination). Whereas some historians (e.g., Chouraqui Reference Chouraqui1985: 428) see the seven hundred thousand estimate for unoccupied France as evidence of Nazi paranoia and delusion, Gilbert insists on the number's empirical validity by suggesting that it must have included the Jews in France's North African possessions (estimated at around five hundred thousand) (Reference Gilbertn.d.; Reference Gilbert1993). And Georges Bensoussan (Reference Bensoussan2012) has depicted North Africa as another Poland, with a deeply anti-Semitic population ready and perhaps willing to be Hitler's executioners. Drawing heavily on the thesis presented by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers in Nazi Palestine (Reference Mallmann and Cüppers2010), Bensoussan argues that the Nazi SS leader in Tunisia, Colonel Rauff, was part of a twenty-four-man advance team charged with recruiting local Muslims to help exterminate Tunisian (and then North African) Jews (Reference Bensoussan2012: 610; Mallmann and Cüppers Reference Mallmann and Cüppers2010: 123–25). For Bensoussan, again following Cüppers and Mallmann, long-standing popular anti-Semitism among “Arabs” all over North Africa combined with Nazi propaganda created the perfect conditions for just such recruitment.

As with the messianic and linear historical accounts, it is the historicity of these new pedagogical narratives that interests me. Many Holocaust scholars, even those like Daniel Goldhagen (Reference Goldhagen1997) who problematically conflate Germanness with anti-Semitism, think genocide is the historical contingency that must somehow be explained. But for some contemporary French Jewish intellectuals, it is the absence of a Jewish genocide in North Africa that requires historical elucidation. We have already seen Nataf's insistence that but for the quick Allied victory in Tunisia, all Tunisian Jews would have been killed in a Shoah par balles (by bullets). Bensoussan similarly suggests that the Moroccan Sultan's desire to remain autonomous stoked his resistance to Vichy's anti-Jewish laws and that Egyptians did not massacre Jews en masse because the leaders of the Egyptian nationalist movement knew Hitler talked out of both sides of his mouth (Bensoussan Reference Bensoussan2012: 597, 622). Robert Assaraf, another popular writer, comes to an entirely different conclusion from Bensoussan about the Moroccan Sultan's relationship to his Jewish subjects, but nonetheless offers an identical account of a nearly missed Shoah: “If the [Germans] did not succeed [in implementing the Final Solution] in Morocco, it was perhaps in part because there was not enough time. The necessity of not too directly attacking a Sultan committed to saving his Jewish subjects, [and] the absence of favorable public opinion for extreme measures forced Protectorate authorities to tread softly and mark time. As the threat became more and more immanent, the America debarkation saved Moroccan Jews from the Holocaust” (Reference Assaraf2005: 421).

There is precedent for these kinds of accounts, particularly given that some North African Jewish communities were aware of what was happening to their European co-religionists during the war (see Yablonka Reference Yablonka2009: 97; Saraf Reference Saraf1988). But while these more recent French accounts are styled as a “lost” or silenced history, they do not fit the standard mold of history. In contrast to messianic accounts, the Holocaust here does refer to a specific set of historically and sociologically grounded events narrated in linear time. And yet this new popular historiography is full of counterfactuals styled as historical truth. It is obviously impossible to know if, everything else being different, Egyptians, Moroccans, and Tunisians would have participated in the genocide of local Jews. These accounts thus read as thwarted teleology rather than as attempts to line-up necessary and sufficient causes. It seems as if the end game—global Jewish destruction—is programmed into the beginning of the story. This allows all Jews everywhere to have an exclusive, and yet global relationship to that destruction. So, not only were all Jews once victims of Nazi genocide, all Jews in France are equally the heirs to this specific, unprecedented, and unrepeatable moment of racialized violence.

This pedagogical approach may not reshape the way Parisian Jews talk about North Africa and the Holocaust, given that such a reshaping would entail much more than simply replacing one historical narrative with another. The sense of being “eaten” in a European world genocidally hostile to “Jews” is a complex, phenomenological experience with deep roots. And all three of these historicities—messianic, linear historical, and pedagogical—can and do coexist, albeit amidst considerable tension and contradiction. But whether or when the pedagogical approach impacts everyday narratives about the past, it has significant political effects.

Linear teleological narratives combine the expansive understanding of “Jewishness” posited by messianic accounts with the Eurocentric frame offered by linear accounts. How so? The barely missed North African Holocaust assumes Jewish sameness across a North African/European divide. In this framework, North African Jewish experiences are not analogous variants of the Holocaust, but part and parcel of its telos, a telos that was fortuitously, and highly contingently, stopped prior to its full unfolding. This effaces the significant historical and sociological differences between and among all kinds of Jews in France, not just between “Ashkenazim” and “Sephardim,” by insisting on Jewishness itself as the most socially and historically significant aspect of identity. There is no place here for Richard Marienstras’ emphasis on the interplay between sameness and difference among Jewish communities as the grounds for Jewish diasporic connections; instead, linear teleological narratives produce a necessarily impoverished Jewish homogeneity.

These narratives also situate Jewishness within the emerging framework of a “Judeo-Christian” Europe, one that is both implicitly and explicitly juxtaposed with the “Arab” world (see Huntington Reference Huntington2011). They do this in a number of complex and seemingly contradictory ways. In one sense, linear teleological accounts make the whole world “Europe” for Holocaust-era Jews. Public intellectuals like Nataf and Bensoussan assume that Eastern Europe populations are the model for understanding how “Arabs” all over North Africa and the Middle East would have responded to Nazi control and propaganda. As a result, this framework implies that, during the Second World War, Polish and Tunisian Jews were identically positioned vis-à-vis non-Jewish majorities. But this is no longer the case. Temporally re-grounding the Holocaust in a specific historical moment suggests that while Europe was anti-Semitic, it has since acknowledged its culpability and become more pluralist and tolerant (see Bunzl Reference Bunzl2003; Reference Bunzl2004). If Jews globally were victims of European history during the war, they are now part of that history. The same, however, cannot be said of those Arab Muslim contexts likened to Poland. Turning North Africa into Poland mutes the very well-documented and virulent European settler anti-Semitism that existed in places like Algeria (Abitbol Reference Abitbol and Tihanyi1989; Kalman Reference Kalman2013), while highlighting much less well-documented and seemingly timeless Arab hatred of Jews.

This kind of characterization of “Arab Muslim” civilization dovetails with an emergent French literature on contemporary forms of anti-Semitism. In contrast to mainstream French discourse that associates “Arabo-Muslim” anti-Semitism with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what are seen as Israeli abuses of power, some critical public intellectuals link post-2000s anti-Semitism with essential “Arab” or “Muslim” characteristics that long predate the creation of Israel. For example, Shmuel Trigano, reflecting on the past fifteen years of anti-Semitic incidents in Metropolitan France, has written: “Behind the pretext of Palestine, the religious [notably Islamic] motivations of the anti-Jewish violence remain misunderstood. It would cost French elites too much doctrinal and psychological effort to accept this fact, after such a long period of denial, for it overturns their erroneous prism of interpretation. The thesis that France faces an ‘imported conflict’ still reigns today—and it remains as false now as it was fourteen years ago at the time of the Second Intifada. We are in the same place” (Reference Trigano2015: n.p.).

Similar analyses highlighting the fundamental incompatibility between “Arab” or “Muslim” outlooks and those of both secular France and French Jews can be found in works about contemporary France by a range of French public intellectuals (Sibony Reference Sibony2003; Taguieff Reference Taguieff2002; Trigano Reference Trigano2003; Weinstock Reference Weinstock2004). In these historical and contemporary analyses, “Arabs” are transformed into unrepentant anti-Semites, not just anti-Zionists. If in the 1930s and early 1940s, the dominated anti-colonial/pro-nationalist populations of North Africa were baying for Jewish blood, it is Arab postcolonial states and politics that are the direct inheritors of Nazi ideologies. As a result, the real source of national and/or civilizational difference does not lie among Jews, or between European Jews and non-Jews, but between post-Holocaust Europe, now expanded to include all Jews, and the “Arabs” whose present politics, wherever they might be located, index unreformed Nazi sympathies. Thus Trigano asserts that contemporary “Arab Muslim” attacks on Jews or “people who look Jewish” “illustrate the disturbingly endemic character of this anti-Semitism, which has come from a universe that has remained foreign to fifty years of changes in Europe and which is redolent with archaic nineteenth-century images” (Reference Trigano2002: 1).