Historicity, peoplehood, and politics: Holocaust talk in 21st century France

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s on, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, disagreements that divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new narratives relied on a very different historicity—or way of reckoning time and causality—than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. And by reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, these pedagogical narratives offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing post-colonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” In addition, it highlights the role that historicity—not just history—plays in producing what might count as group “identity.”