How are we to integrate the past into our present?
For we strive ceaselessly to give meaning to our past and our history, so that they may help us understand our present and build our future. And this work of “making sense” no doubt feeds a great part of our intellectual and artistic activities, mobilizing much of our psychic energy.
The dossier of this issue is titled “What do we do with our history?”, a question that has both an individual and a collective dimension.
Identifying with the history of the group to which one belongs is one of the ways in which each person lives out that belonging and takes on a shared past.
The Jewish people is an old people. It has had a long and varied history, made of transformations, mutations, migrations. And it is often difficult to make these diverse, sometimes contradictory legacies coexist. We must accommodate within our baggage Rabbi Akiva the sage, who was associated with the Bar Kokhba revolt, alongside the revolutionaries of the Yiddishland; the Kabbalah alongside the Marxist-Zionist teaching of Ber Borochov; Theodor Herzl and Sigmund Freud; Yeshayahou Leibovitz and Vladimir Jankélévitch, or Vladimir Rabi. And yet we lay claim to a common past, to a single identity, however many its facets.
The twentieth century was, for the Jews in particular, a century of political, social and civilizational upheavals, a century of voluntary or forced migrations. It was also a century of violence, of terror, of massacres and genocides, a century of destruction and reconstruction, marked above all by the perpetration of the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel.
On the collective scale, if this past is often difficult to reconstruct, it is because of the rupture in transmission that the great collective catastrophes bring about, because of the disappearance of witnesses, because of the policy of effacement pursued by a power bent on erasing it or rendering it inaccessible.
The Nazis tried to erase the traces of their crimes, as Stalin tried to erase his.
There is that well-known photograph from the early days of communism in the USSR, which originally shows Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army. Just as Stalin made the executors of his dirty work disappear — whether they were mere underlings or senior officials of the political police — so too he had Trotsky erased from that famous photograph, a symbolic murder, the beginning of a delegitimization that ended with Trotsky’s assassination by an agent of Stalin’s NKVD. For what was at stake for him was to be master of the present, but of the past as well.
When we move to the individual sphere, the history of our parents often sums up and embodies for us the transformations and events of the century. Our memory takes root in theirs. We build part of our identity through what they were able to transmit to us of their own lives, and it is also through taking charge of this past that we become not merely their children but their descendants.
In a first section, we attempt to approach the question of our relationship to history through literary writing, to see how a number of Jewish writers have borne witness to their often complex relationship to their history, and in particular to the dramatic history of the twentieth century.
In a second section, many of our contributors set out to show what use States and groups have made of history. This concerns the State of Israel, with the central place it gave to the myth of Masada. It can equally concern a group of Alsatian Jews who emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century, who wrote their history but obscured within it their relationship to the enslavement of Black people.
Sleight of hand and rewriting are often at work to conceal the history of the Gulag or of other twentieth-century genocides.
How to resist the constant temptation to rewrite History that besets those who hold power; how to build a cultural identity that takes root in the past without imprisoning us there — these are some of the questions we have tried to answer, or at least to raise —
Outside the dossier, we publish an essay on the philosopher Judith Butler’s critique of Zionism, a study of the Jews of France and the 2012 presidential election, as well as several literary texts.