Archives juives n°55/1

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/ Jews in France, Jews of France

/ After recalling the age-old Jewish presence and the emergence of Jewish history in France, Simon Schwarzfuchs retraces his own career as a historian. Born in Bischheim in 1927, he spent his childhood in Hoenheim. With the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939, he was evacuated with his family to Limoges, where he spent the war years. From 1942 to the spring of 1944, he was a student at the Petit séminaire israélite de Limoges (PSIL). After joining the Eclaireurs israélites de France (Marc Haguenau company), he took part in the battle for the Liberation of France. He left for Paris in October 1944 to pursue rabbinical and university studies. He received his rabbinical diploma in 1948 and graduated from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Religious Sciences Section) in 1951. After a period at the CNRS, he became a professor of Jewish history in Parisian Jewish schools. He obtained a scholarship and left for Dropsie College in Philadelphia in 1951. After receiving his PhD in 1953, he returned to France, where he was a lecturer at the EPHE. In 1964, he left for Israel where he became a lecturer in Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University, then a professor from 1968 onwards. In addition to elements of his biographical and academic career, the author evokes the institutions, journals and individuals who have marked the history of Jewish studies in France.

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/ Yiddish in the present: an interview with Rachel Ertel

/ Two Master’s students met with Rachel Ertel, a pioneer in the teaching and study of Yiddish in France, as part of a collective investigation into the institutionalization of Jewish studies in France under the direction of Laura Hobson Faure at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Born in 1939 in Belarus, Rachel Ertel arrived in Paris in 1948, where she lived with her family for several years in the “Toit familial,” a Jewish home on the rue Guy-Patin. She has a degree in English and wrote a thesis entitled “Aspects of the American Jewish Novel: Contribution to an Ethnology of Literature.” Professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Diderot, she taught American literature and Yiddish literature. She is also an essayist and Yiddish translator. Among other works, she translated and published Leïb Rochman’s masterpiece, À pas aveugles de par le monde (2012) into French. She is also the author of numerous reference works such as Le Shtetl, La bourgade juive de Pologne: de la tradition à la modernité (1982).

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/ The itinerary of a historian: from international relations to the history of the Shoah

/ André Kaspi, a recognized specialist in the history of international relations and the history of the United States, became interested in the history of the Jews of France during his formative years. In this text, he traces the main milestones of his interest in this field and discusses his contribution to the entry of this field of research into the academic world. In particular, he recalls his meeting with Georges Wellers, a former deportee and historian of the deportation at the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine. In 1979, the two men organized the first conference in France on the history of the Jews in France during the Second World War together. In parallel with his teaching and research activities on the history of the United States and international relations as a professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne as well as director of social and human sciences at the CNRS, André Kaspi has become increasingly involved in bringing to light the history of the Jews during the Shoah. In particular, he introduced Jewish history to the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 1993 with the creation of a seminar on the history of the Shoah. While promoting academic research through teaching and scientific publications, he has been called upon by public authorities and by a variety of institutions for his expertise on the history of the Jews under the Occupation.

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/ An American in Paris: an interview with Nancy Green

/Nancy L. Green, a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), spoke about her career as a historian during Laura Hobson Faure’s seminar, “Écrire l’histoire des juifs des mondes contemporains: débats et sources” (Writing the history of Jews in the contemporary worlds: debates and sources), at the Université Paris 1. The interview she gave on this occasion, the content of which is published in Archives juives, offers a Franco-American reflection on the emergence of Jewish studies in France and the writing of contemporary history.

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/ From the State to the State Jews

/In this text, Pierre Birnbaum, a recognized specialist in political sociology and more particularly in the sociology of the State, senior civil servants and elites, analyzes the stages that marked the gradual reorientation of his work towards the political history of the Jews in France from the end of the 1970s onward. The researcher indicates the reactions of surprise, even hostility, of a part of the academic world to this new orientation of his work. The author, who has worked as a teacher and researcher in both France and the United States, emphasizes the extent to which the study of the Jews has remained marginal in French universities, whether in history, sociology or political science. He notes the fragility of Jewish studies in France today.

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/ But you aren’t Jewish?: my journey into Jewish history in the 1970s

/In this article, the historian Catherine Nicault traces the path that led her to the history of the Jews. It was after a trip to Israel in 1972, where the young graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure found in the heat and aridity of the landscape a bit of her native Tunisia, that she decided to devote her master’s thesis to a monograph on the French-speaking kibbutz of Hanita. This was followed by a doctoral thesis on France, Zionism and Zionists from Theodor Herzl to 1914 under the direction of André Kaspi. Catherine Nicault describes not only the “quasi academic desert” that was France in the 1970s in the field of Jewish history, but also the astonishment that sometimes arose from the fact that she was non-Jewish. While pursuing a career as a specialist in international relations, Catherine Nicault has contributed, through various activities, to the development and institutionalization of Jewish history in France.

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/ An anthropological approach to the history of the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine: an interview with Freddy Raphael

/The Alsatian sociologist Freddy Raphael gave an interview in November 2020 to two Master’s students as part of a collective investigation into the institutionalization of Jewish studies in France under the direction of Laura Hobson Faure at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Born in 1936 in Colmar, Alsace, Freddy Raphael came from a Jewish family of modest means. During the Second World War, when his father was imprisoned in a camp for prisoners of war in Upper Silesia, he fled Alsace with his mother and went to the center of France, where he was hidden, at times, by Catholic clerics. Trained in English language studies, he became a professor of sociology at the Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg in 1967. He was the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences for fifteen years and, in addition, the scientific director of the Revue des Sciences sociales until 2016. He also directed the Sociology of European Culture laboratory. He has published numerous research works, mainly on the history and sociology of Judaism. In this interview, he discusses his biographical and academic career and his vision of transmission through teaching and research.

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/ A taste for history and Hebrew: an adventure for two

/Born into a Catholic family, Danielle Delmaire is a specialist in the history of Jewish communities in France and Jewish Catholic relations. Her interest in these fields of research was aroused during a vacation in Israel in 1966, after which she decided to live for two years in a kibbutz and to learn Hebrew while continuing her studies in history at the University of Lille. Upon her return to France in 1968, she enrolled in a Hebrew studies program at the same university, where she met Jean-Marie Delmaire, who played a major role in her life both professionally and personally. In this article, she looks back on their careers and their contribution to the development of the history of the Jews and Hebrew in France. Notably, for example, the historian recalls her husband’s efforts to develop Hebrew studies at the University of Lille. He created the Institute of the History of Religions (IHR), where the history of Jewish communities and Judaism is taught, in the early 1990s and founded the scholarly journal Tsafon, Revue d’études juives du Nord in 1990.

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