What is one to do with one’s history when it finds no social space in which to express itself, and when one belongs to a minority group that has known exile? What means does such a singular group have at its disposal to make up for its “historiographical deficits” — deficits all the more significant given that other historical narratives prevail on the public stage and in the collective consciousness? Finally, what function can this production have, both with respect to the group itself and to the national collectivity?

In an attempt to answer these questions, we will analyze here the case of the writing of the past by Maghrebi Jewish authors who arrived in metropolitan France in the wake of the independences. We will first study the reasons for a certain silence that surrounds, even today, the historiography of North African Jews, and then turn to the modalities of non-scholarly history-writing. Finally, we will close our study with the functions of the literature of exile, in order to assess their workings as mechanisms of adjustment between a so-called minority group and the national collectivity.

On the historiographical “deficiencies” of the past of Jews from North Africa

The historiographical “deficiencies” in the history of Jews originating from North Africa must be set in relation to the historiography of their Ashkenazi co-religionists, which holds a preponderant place in the writing of the history of European Jews. Several factors contribute to this predominance: the anteriority and the creation of a genuine historiographical school of European Jews, then largely Ashkenazi; the emergence of a historiography of Maghrebi Jews driven by metropolitan Jews of Ashkenazi culture; and finally the weight of the history of the Nazi genocide within the history of European Jews after the Second World War — a weight that relegates to the background the history of Maghrebi Jews and their uprootings.

The writing of the history of European Jews begins in the mid-eighteenth century when, in 1743, Menahem Man Amelander, originally from the Netherlands, composes Sheyris Yisroel in Yiddish1. Even if academic standards were not equivalent to those of the contemporary era, the writing of the history of the Jews in Europe precedes, in the modern period, that of Maghrebi Jews — and by more than a century. Indeed, the Haskalah, the movement of Enlightenment and secularization within German Jewish circles in the second half of the eighteenth century, set itself the goal of spreading knowledge among co-religionists considered backward, first in Germany and then in other European countries. It stressed the necessity for Jews to know their history. Thus Naftali Zvi Wessely, in a call issued in 1782 for a new program of Jewish studies, insisted on the necessity of learning history. Even if history still served a religious purpose — a better knowledge of the Torah — these were the first steps of a historiographical current among Ashkenazi Jews.

This new choice in favor of the study of history found expression in the elaboration of a critical scientific method applied to Judaism, called the “science of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Leopold Zunz sketched out the program for the historical study of Jewish civilization, and in 1819, again at his initiative, the “Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews” came into being, equipped with its own journal, Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums. In 1822, Immanuel Wolf laid out the principles of this Wissenschaft in a work titled On the Concept of a Science of Judaism2.

It should be emphasized that the primary motivation behind this historical interest was emancipation. The need of the Jews to emerge from their condition as a dominated people appears inseparable from a process of heritage-making through the writing of history. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi underscores this:

“Jewish historiography arose suddenly out of the conjoined pressure of the two forces that singularized the abrupt exit of the Jews from their ghetto: assimilation from without, dissolution from within. The origin of this new spirit is not erudite curiosity but an ideology, one of the multiple responses to the crisis of Jewish emancipation and to the struggle waged to obtain it”3.

This same process would later be at work among metropolitan Israelites seeking to emancipate the Jews of North Africa.

For the historiography of Maghrebi Jews, which emerges in the 1860s, answered from its very birth to political expectations linked to the project of integrating Algerian Jews into French citizenship4. Inscribing their history within universal history was part of the project of the Israelites of France, eager to extend the gains of the Revolution to their co-religionists in order to “regenerate” them. It was therefore through this contribution of Ashkenazi Jews that the history of North African Jews developed — its first work, Les Juifs dans l’Afrique septentrionale (The Jews in Northern Africa) by Abraham Cahen, dating from 1867. The scholarly themes developed, such as that of the Jews as “intermediaries” between Europe and Africa, quickly became arguments in the political debate that pitted supporters and detractors of the Crémieux Decree against one another5. Given that the decree’s defenders were few in number, the history of Maghrebi Jews would above all be the affair of their European co-religionists. Among them were notably schoolteachers and founders of the Alliance israélite universelle, an institution created in 1860 by French Israelites to “reform” Maghrebi Jews6. Despite the quality of the work of some of these historians, the colonial period would lack landmark works comparable to those of certain great European historians. One would have to wait until the end of the colonial period to see the beginnings of a shift in the way North African Jews were viewed and the start of a more scholarly historiography — even if, as Colette Zytnicki notes, a “quasi-silence” still surrounds the historiography of North African Jews today.

To this is added the weight of the Nazi genocide as an essential element of present-day Jewish identity7 and of the history of the Jews of France and Europe. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi remarks, “the Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any other single event in Jewish history”8. Among the powerful vectors that drove the writing of the history of the genocide and its inscription in the public sphere, one must count the trials that took place in the wake of the Second World War. The appearances in court of Adolf Eichmann (1961), Klaus Barbie (1987), Paul Touvier (1994), and Maurice Papon (1997) revived the memory of the genocide. Research on the Vichy government brought to the fore the questions of State antisemitism during the Second World War and of the extermination of the Jews in France. The French publication of Robert O. Paxton’s work La France de Vichy, 1940-1944 (Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order) provoked a lively debate, and the year 1985 was marked by the release of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, the film that imposed that designation in France. In the same period, the memorial undertakings of Serge Klarsfeld fed and popularized this resurgence through the association of the Sons and Daughters of the Deported of France (Fils et Filles des déportés de France), of which he is the founder. Negationist statements and antisemitic attacks against individuals or community buildings mobilized historians and signaled the urgency of bringing the history of the genocide onto the national stage9. This found expression in the heritage-making of the memory of the genocide, from the erection of monuments and the laying of commemorative plaques to the creation of days dedicated to the memory of the event. But it was above all Jacques Chirac’s speech of July 16, 1995, on the fifty-third anniversary of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup (the July 1942 mass arrest of Jews in Paris), that served as a symbolic “reparation,” acknowledging “the responsibility of the French State.” The memory of the Shoah looms over the sphere of political discourse and symbolic decisions, including at the international level10. These events and statements carry a value of reparation for the victims of the Shoah and their descendants. The genocide has become an essential component of the history of the Jews of France, of Europe, and broadly at the international level, including for younger generations. But this predominance within the history of the Jews of France in a sense erases the exile and uprooting of the Jews of the lands of Islam by marginalizing their history.

Moreover, in this period, “the colonial phenomenon suffers from remaining under-analyzed or erased within the historian’s territory, as in the prevailing mood of the times”11. This deficit makes it all the more difficult for academia to take charge of the history of Maghrebi Jews from the former French territories.

It is in this context of a triple “deficit” — linked at once to the substantial past of Ashkenazi historiography, to the preponderant role of the Nazi genocide in Jewish historiography, and to a certain occultation of the colonial past in France — that literature objectively takes charge of the memory of the exile of the Jews of North Africa and develops as a substitute for a shared history12.

Between memory and history: writing as a process of appropriating the past

This process arises from the fact that literature “stands where experience has become the locus of the ‘phantom limb syndrome,’ of a phantom pain of history”13. Thus “the novel re-presents history”14, and through it an appropriation of the past takes place. To borrow Walter Benjamin’s words: “To do the work of a historian does not mean to know ‘how things really were.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”15. Régine Robin proposes for this type of narrative the term “memorial novel” (roman mémoriel), “by which an individual, a group, or a society thinks its past by modifying it, situating it, distorting it, inventing memories for itself, a glorious past, ancestors, filiations, genealogies — or, on the contrary, struggling for factual exactitude, for the restitution of the event or its resurrection”16. Bearing witness to a world in the process of disappearing thus seems to motivate — beyond its “therapeutic” dimension in the face of exile — most authors of Judeo-Maghrebi origin in France. We will not dwell here on the validity of this novelistic writing of history, for its historical dimension and its subjectivity are of course open to question.

Let us note by way of introduction a striking fact: this literary production of exile is earlier than the historiographical production in exile, with the exception of the pioneering works of André Chouraqui17. It also represents a larger volume in terms of the number of works published18. This literary preponderance can indeed be interpreted as an objective occupation of the historians’ terrain by writers, a way of compensating for a felt insufficiency of historical narrative. This hypothesis confirms the words of Claude Nataf, president and founder of the Société d’histoire des Juifs de Tunisie, when he affirms that “[…] literature preceded history. There was a literature during the colonial period and then there was a literature that Guy Dugas calls Judeo-Maghrebi literature of French expression, a literature that took shape in France or in Israel, which was a reconstruction of the past, embellished or, on the contrary, diminished — but literature preceded historical research in this need for memory”19.

This scholarly “lacuna” allows us to formulate a hypothesis concerning the historiographical function of literature. It is a twofold phenomenon: on the one hand, the taking-up of history as a source of inspiration, and on the other, the objective occupation by literature of the historians’ space, “deficient” at the very moment when the community is in want of identitarian recognition.

In this configuration, fictional writing would first be a form of response, in its own language, to the experience of the past. This ancient phenomenon in the history of literature was discussed recently on the occasion of the appearance of several fictional narratives drawing on history20. Through recourse to archival sources and to his own word as a witness, the writer is not only a transmitter of stories but also an entrepreneur of the writing of a history considered “forgotten” or “minored.” As Pierre Nora underscores, “novelists steeped in historical culture had seized upon extreme episodes, little explored by historians for lack of sources or judged to be of no consequence, in order to project their imagination onto them and explore their significations, always current”21. The writer therefore engages a twofold responsibility: that of the author before his own act of writing, but also before the reader who belongs to the same historicity as he does. This responsibility toward the trace of a collective history expresses itself even more strikingly when his historiographical narrative finds no social space in which to develop or, in any case, remains diminished in the face of the other narratives of the past taken up by the scholarly apparatus of research. As a more “supple” form of narration — because creative, innovative, in no need of scholarly validation, and not necessarily seeking to render elements of the past intelligible — literature thus allows, at certain moments, for the writing of history.

Metaphors of childhood, autobiographies… Literary modalities of the writing of history

Fictional or autobiographical, these writings place the past and the memory of the group in the foreground. As Anny Dayan-Rosenman remarks, “in these autobiographies of minority subjects, between whose pages an orphaned group rediscovers a barely bygone past, the status of the work changes. It is the testimony of a destiny whose memory, whose pain, reader and writer share. It becomes the trace or relic of a past or of a world whose nostalgia they share”22.

Many are the writers of Judeo-Maghrebi origin who take history as the material of their narratives. Marco Koskas, Nine Moati, Albert Memmi, Annie Goldmann, Colette Fellous, all of Tunisian origin; Albert Bensoussan, Jean-Luc Allouche, Rolland Doukhan, born in Algeria; Pol-Serge Kakon or Paule Darmon, natives of Morocco… So many authors whose writing draws its source from a distant past — with the concern to tell the “never-told” history — but also from a recent past, the one preceding and following decolonization.

In a philosophical tale, Albert Memmi thus stages the character of Jubaïr El-Mammi, a great historian of the Arab world and a literary avatar of the author, who, at the moment when his native land is invaded by Tamerlane’s army, draws up an “inventory of the past”23. This metaphor for the loss of the past of Maghrebi Jews at the moment of decolonization finds echoes in the narratives of other writers. Marco Koskas evokes it in his autofictional novel Je n’ai pas fermé l’œil de l’été (I Didn’t Sleep a Wink All Summer), where he refers to the Bizerte crisis and to the departures of the French and the Jews from Tunisia:

“Bizerte was a little piece of France, in the north of the country. Despite independence, it remained French. […] As long as Bizerte stayed French, the Jews clung to the country. It can’t be explained”24.

Serge Moati reconstructs the atmosphere that reigned in Tunis before independence in his novel Villa Jasmin:

“On June 1, 1955, the independence leader Bourguiba makes a triumphant return to Tunis. I remember the immense crowd and that man, on his white horse. He is reunited with the people whose hero he is. […] And yet this celebration is not ours. We discover a new Tunis: it is Arab. We are disappearing. On March 20, 1956, Tunisia becomes independent. It is the triumph of Bourguiba’s maneuvering genius and that of an intelligent and cultured people. For others, these days are less joyful. History sometimes forgets them. Later, they will be called, improperly, ‘Pieds-Noirs.’ All of us. A people from over there, torn from its land. The people of the French of 1881, but also the Jews, the Maltese, the Sicilians, the Spaniards, the Italians… The sorting will be done. Later”25.

This taking-up of history brings to light the specific history of the Jews of North Africa who, at the moment of exile, are lumped together, as Serge Moati underscores, under the “improper” label of “Pieds-Noirs.” Without amounting to the unveiling of a consciously occulted history, the writing of these authors illuminates the particular lived experience of the Jews of these countries. This process then makes it possible to complete the national memory insofar as it integrates the narratives of its cultural or religious minorities, indispensable components of French society. This literature, ahead of historiography, also makes it possible today to fill out the reasons for the departure of the Jews from the lands of the Maghreb. In their literary ways, these narratives introduce us to the feelings of insecurity in which the Jews were then steeped, torn between “French antisemitism and Arab mistrust,” as Albert Camus already noted in 1955.

But the writer, in the manner of an ethnologist and in order to preserve the trace of a world in the process of disappearing, may also strew his narrative with numerous evocations of Judeo-Maghrebi folklore, as does Pol-Serge Kakon, who recounts in Rica la Vida the itinerary of a Moroccan Jew interwoven with the history of the protectorate. In his novel, he has recourse to the memory of the traditional Shabbat:

“In the grip of the fever of preparing for Shabbat, the Jewish housewives fill their baskets while cursing the shopkeepers and hurrying along, making it known that they still have to knead the bread, simmer the Friday-evening fish, and above all prepare the dafina. Into the same big pot will nestle potatoes, pieces of shank, calf’s foot, chickpeas, a rice and meat and cinnamon loaf, wheat with red chili, eggs in their shells, and all of it in the spiced sauce, set in the oven, will simmer and caramelize over the wood fire for twenty-four hours, for the Saturday meal — a madness of flavors that haunts your taste buds a whole lifetime and beyond, from generation to generation, like a remorse”26.

In this literary production, marked by the past, childhood naturally holds an important place. A period bygone by definition for any adult being, but all the more an object of nostalgia in that it merges with the irretrievable places of tender age. Thus Nine Moati pays tribute to her mother in her narrative Mon enfant ma mère (My Child My Mother), in which the death of the mother symbolizes a loss of the land of origin, Tunisia, and where the birth of her daughter becomes a metaphor for her own rooting in metropolitan soil27. In a back-and-forth movement between childhood and the present moment, Albert Bensoussan gives free rein in his novels, including La Bréhaigne (The Barren Woman) and Frimaldjézar, to the nostalgia of the past and to questions about the trajectory of Algerian Jews uprooted to the metropole28. In La Bréhaigne, the author also reminds us of a multicultural society in the colonial era:

“Bab-el-Oued brought together all the races, all the tongues of the Nostre-Mer, the red-eyed Espagos who played ronda on the Place des Trois-Horloges, the Italos of Roma-Glace […], the Suifs of the rue des Suifs gathered around the synagogue on the rue de Dijon […], the Maltos of the Basseta […], and the proud natives, the Mazambes who held the top of the trade in colonial goods, spices and oasis fruits, the Kybales draped entirely in mountain dignity […], and even some Polonos who had survived successive ghettos, there were also Fromands, Frimais, Corsaires, Hargneux, Bouseux, Champagneux, Bretoneux, the fine cream of the shores of Frime: that was Bab-el-Oued, hence its name of Babel […]”29.

The novel Mémoire illettrée d’une fillette de l’Afrique du Nord (Illiterate Memory of a Little Girl from North Africa) by Katia Rubinstein, interspersed with press clippings of the period, retraces the itinerary of a little girl, Kadem, from childhood in the port district of Tunis to adolescence in the metropole30. In her narrative, the work on language serves to transcribe a multicultural reality (Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Italian, Maltese, French) and makes it possible to render the coexistence of different communities. Without exalting the memory of a harmonious life between Jews and other communities, these authors stand against an “idealized and uniform” national narrative31 constructed on the other shore of the Mediterranean, one that passes over in silence the presence of the Jews in this region.

In a different literary undertaking, Nine Moati stages three generations of Tunisian women32 and comments thus on her choice of a fiction with a strong historical dimension:

“[…] it also allowed me to recount part of the history of Tunisia, of the history of the Jews of Tunisia. And that is very important to me. I wrote Les Belles de Tunis (The Beauties of Tunis), which recounts three generations of Jewish women at the time of the French protectorate”33.

This concern to recount the history of Tunisian Jews, which intersects with that of European Jews, is found in nearly all the works of this author, who claims it as her own:

“[…] what I love is to recount great History with a capital ‘H’ told through thirty-six thousand little stories. I love to interweave the threads, and it is very important to me, first of all, to leave a trace of, for example, our life in Tunis […]. On my modest scale, I try to tell stories that, under the cover of grand novelistic narrative, also recount precise facts”34.

In this perspective, the work Filles de Mardochée (Daughters of Mordecai) by Annie Goldmann, which likewise retraces the history of three generations of women as an image of the emancipation of the Tunisian Jewish community, constitutes another example of the will to preserve a trace of the past, an exercise close to that of the historian. The writer expresses this in the very introduction:

“It simply appeared to me that a trace ought to be preserved, through a few particular existences, of the journey of one, then two, then three generations in a certain context: the Tunisia of the end of the nineteenth century and of the first half of the twentieth”35.

Annie Goldmann, for her part, reveals to us the emancipation of Tunisian Jewish women, which comes about through an unreserved adherence to French culture.

Beyond the history of a community, this narrative — like, moreover, those of many authors such as Serge Moati or Albert Bensoussan already cited — introduces the reader to the ins and outs of the mechanisms of integration into, or adaptation to, French society. This literature can be read as “a love letter addressed to France”36 and exalts the possibility of becoming French. A message not without interest in the contemporary era.

These few examples allow us to see in what way writers take charge of the writing of the past in order to make up for the deficiencies of the writing of history. For want of expression in another social space more legitimate in terms of official recognition — such as the world of research, or through public utterance — “the memory of the Jewish presence […] [as Benjamin Stora underscores with respect to the Jews of Algeria] is transmitted within the restricted circle of family intimacy”37. A past lived as diminished then becomes material to write. Literature, as a form of writing not subject to institutional validation as science is, allows for an unconstrained practice of recourse to the past. Through a creative gesture and through the reach of this word within the national collectivity, literature contributes to universalizing its contents38. But this universalization is also afforded to it insofar as it is available to all within the social space, by the mere fact of its inscription in the literary field. The literary field — literature understood as an institution — offers, through the diversity of its actors (more or less legitimate publishing houses, distribution circuits, consecrations through prizes, but also self-funded editions or self-publishing), a heterogeneous space allowing for the expression of the most diverse voices. Naturally, not all literary publications enjoy the same renown, which necessarily entails disparities in the capacity of these writings to carry a word, a history, a claim into the public sphere. For it is indeed an underlying or implicit claim that is at stake. This demand here emanates from a singular group belonging to the national collectivity and claiming its place as such. This demand is constructed at the very moment when modern political culture concentrates, as Charles Taylor notes, on the requirement of egalitarian recognition39 — including for minority groups. And the inscription of history within literature fulfills precisely this function of an implicit demand for the recognition of a singular past, made through its publication, in the editorial sense of the term (producing and distributing works) but also in the literal one (“making public”).

Historiographical function: a twofold process of heritage-making and legitimation

This literary putting-into-words of history therefore takes part in the heritage-making both of the group’s cultural production and of the past carried by that production. This heritage-making of the past thus appears as one of the means of legitimating a singular group, or one considered to be a minority. The notion of heritage-making refers, indeed, to the valorizing construction of heritage — here memorial or historical — and to a sociocultural process by which an object, an asset, or a territory is transformed into an object of heritage. The latter would be a material or immaterial asset that the collectivity has inherited and that ought to be preserved for the purpose of transmission. To borrow the historian François Hartog’s phrase, it is “the care of tombs and a valorization of the trace”40. For authors, to be published means bringing into the national heritage their production, and with it what that production carries and contributes to the national collectivity. Thus the collective memory and the past of a singular group that it contains become, through a literary formalization and thanks to the editorial act, material for heritage-making: the works are automatically inscribed in the heritage, since they become objects of collection and conservation by the institutions empowered by the State to receive legal deposit; through this process they gain in recognition, which reflects back upon the singular group that claims it. It is indeed a matter, as Michel Rautenberg underscores, of taking “the heritage object out of its societal context in order to inscribe it within another universe of meaning”41.

This symbolic recognition plays out on several levels, of which a mere publication and inclusion in the catalogue of the BnF (the Bibliothèque nationale de France) constitute only a first foundation. The recognition of the history of a minority or of a singular group considered peripheral, through its inclusion in the canon of national history, constitutes a more advanced example of the heritage-making of the past. The degree of memorial claim varies substantially here from one group to another.

In the case of the Jews of North Africa, few explicit claims for recognition exist, on account of their history being far less conflictual with the French State than is, for example, that of Black people demanding that the memory of slavery be recognized.

The historiographical function of literature would therefore be twofold: on the one hand, to carry elements of the past within the narrative by making them part of the heritage of the literary field; and on the other, to legitimate them at the moment when the actors of the academic or research field, as well as public opinion, marginalize the history of the minority group in question or are only just beginning to recognize its interest. The literary production of a minority group questions, by definition, the writing of the national narrative, for, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari underscore, minority writings are political insofar as they privilege collective value, leaving little room for an individuality subordinated to collective enunciation42. To recount the history of those who until then were not part of the country’s history thus appears indeed as a political act of claiming recognition and legitimacy. Consequently, thanks to the contribution of the writing of the past by a minority group, the national collectivity receives the history of this group and appropriates, even integrates, a new perspective on its own history, thereby allowing for variations of greater or lesser magnitude in its national narrative. This back-and-forth movement brings to light, more generally, what is at stake in the relations of a minority group within the national social space.

Notes

Bibliography

Literary narratives and novels cited

Albert Bensoussan, La Bréhaigne, Paris, Denoël, 1973; Frimaldjezar, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1976. Annie Goldmann, Filles de Mardochée. Histoire d’une émancipation, Paris, Denoël-Gonthier, 1979. Pol-Serge Kakon, Rica la Vida, Arles, Actes Sud, 1999. Marco Koskas, Je n’ai pas fermé l’œil de l’été, Paris, Julliard, 1996. Albert Memmi, Le Désert ou la vie et les aventures de Jabaïr Ouali El-Mammi, Paris, Gallimard, 1977. Nine Moati, Mon enfant ma mère, Paris, Stock, 1974. Nine Moati, Les Belles de Tunis, Paris, Seuil, 1983. Serge Moati, Villa Jasmin, Paris, Fayard, 2003. Katia Rubinstein, Mémoire illettrée d’une fillette de l’Afrique du Nord à l’époque coloniale, Paris, Stock, 1979.

Critical articles and works

Emmanuel Bouju, “Exercice des mémoires possibles et littérature ‘à-présent’. La transcription de l’histoire dans le roman contemporain,” Annales HSS, no. 2, March-April 2010, pp. 417-438. Emmanuel Bouju, La Transcription de l’histoire. Essai sur le roman européen à la fin du XXᵉ siècle, Rennes, PUR, 2006. Anny Dayan-Rosenman, “Écrivains juifs de langue française. Une écriture nouée à l’histoire,” in Denis Charbit (ed.), Les Intellectuels français et Israël, Paris, Éditions de l’éclat, 2009, pp. 65-80. Anny Dayan-Rosenman, “Mémoire, écriture, identité minoritaire,” in Jean-Jacques Becker and Annette Wieviorka (eds.), Les Juifs de France de la Révolution française à nos jours, Paris, Liana Levi, 1998, pp. 329-362. Guy Dugas, La Littérature judéo-maghrébine d’expression française. Entre Djéha et Cagayous, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1991. Ewa Maczka, “Mémoire retrouvée pour histoire oubliée. L’expression littéraire des Juifs originaires d’Afrique du Nord dans le contexte postcolonial,” Mouvements, 2011, special issue no. 1, pp. 45-54. Régine Robin, Le Roman mémoriel : de l’histoire à l’écriture du hors-lieu, Montreal, Le Préambule, 1989. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor, Histoire juive et mémoire juive, Paris, Gallimard, 2008. Colette Zytnicki, Les Juifs du Maghreb. Naissance d’une historiographie coloniale, Paris, PUPS, 2011.

  1. Juif depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu’à présent, pour servir de continuation à l’histoire de Joseph (The History of the Jews from Jesus Christ to the Present, to Serve as a Continuation to the History of Josephus), written between 1706 and 1711 by Jacques Basnage, is the first work on the history of the Jews in the modern era. It is, however, a work that emanates from a non-Jewish milieu.↩︎

  2. Among other representatives of the Wissenschaft, let us cite Leopold Zunz, Zacharias Frankel, Abraham Geiger, Salomon Munk and Moritz Steinschneider. One of the summits of this school is Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews), the multi-volume history published by Heinrich Graetz between 1853 and 1870. Traditionally, the era of the Wissenschaft is said to close with the creation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925. The early twentieth century still bears its mark. Fascinated by Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow published in German between 1925 and 1929 a monumental work in ten volumes, Weltgeschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (World History of the Jewish People).↩︎

  3. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Histoire juive et mémoire juive (Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory), Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 101. See also Max Wiener, “The Ideology of the Founders of Jewish Scientific Research,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, vol. 5, 1950, pp. 184-196; Nahum N. Glatzer, “The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Studies,” in A. Altmann (ed.), Studies in Nineteenth Century Jewish Intellectual History, Cambridge, Mass., 1964, pp. 27-45.↩︎

  4. See on this subject the first work, to our knowledge, dealing with the historiography of the Jews of North Africa: Colette Zytnicki, Les Juifs du Maghreb. Naissance d’une historiographie coloniale (The Jews of the Maghreb: The Birth of a Colonial Historiography), Paris, PUPS, 2011.↩︎

  5. The decree bearing the name of Adolphe Crémieux, promulgated in 1870, collectively granted French citizenship to the “indigenous Israelites of the departments of Algeria.”↩︎

  6. Let us cite on this point David Cazès who, within a political project, published in 1888 an Essai sur l’histoire des Israélites de Tunisie depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à l’établissement du protectorat de la France en Tunisie (Essay on the History of the Israelites of Tunisia from the Most Remote Times to the Establishment of the French Protectorate in Tunisia).↩︎

  7. Esther Benbassa, La Souffrance comme identité (Suffering as Identity), Paris, Hachette, 2010.↩︎

  8. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, op. cit., p. 114.↩︎

  9. In this context, the law of July 13, 1990, “tending to repress any racist, antisemitic or xenophobic act,” known as the Gayssot law, makes a criminal offense of the denial of “the existence of one or more crimes against humanity,” including genocide or deportation.↩︎

  10. The Council of Europe decided in 2002 to make January 27, the anniversary of the arrival of Soviet troops at Auschwitz, the “day of memory of the Holocaust and of the prevention of crimes against humanity”; the UN decided that the same day be dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi genocide.↩︎

  11. Daniel Rivet, “Le fait colonial et nous. Histoire d’un éloignement,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, no. 33, January-March 1992, pp. 127-128.↩︎

  12. See on this subject Anny Dayan-Rosenman, “Écrivains juifs de langue française. Une écriture nouée à l’histoire,” in Denis Charbit (ed.), Les Intellectuels français et Israël, Paris, Éditions de l’éclat, 2009, pp. 65-80; Guy Dugas, La Littérature judéo-maghrébine d’expression française. Entre Djéha et Cagayous, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1991; Ewa Maczka, “Mémoire retrouvée pour histoire oubliée. L’expression littéraire des Juifs originaires d’Afrique du Nord dans le contexte postcolonial,” Mouvements, 2011, special issue no. 1, pp. 45-54.↩︎

  13. Emmanuel Bouju, “Exercice des mémoires possibles et littérature ‘à-présent’. La transcription de l’histoire dans le roman contemporain,” Annales HSS, no. 2, March-April 2010, p. 430.↩︎

  14. Ibid., p. 437.↩︎

  15. Walter Benjamin, Œuvres III, trans. from the German by M. Gandillac, R. Rochlitz and P. Rusch, Paris, Gallimard, 2000 (1942), p. 431.↩︎

  16. Régine Robin, Le Roman mémoriel : de l’histoire à l’écriture du hors-lieu, Montreal, Le Préambule, 1989, p. 48.↩︎

  17. La condition juridique de l’Israélite marocain, Paris, Presses du livre français, 1950; Les juifs d’Afrique du Nord : marche vers l’Occident, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1952. While including these works in the general count, we have chosen to mention them here as exceptions. They are indeed works published in France, but their author was a historian living in Israel at the time of their publication.↩︎

  18. The proportion between the two is 85% to a little over 14%. This preponderance of literary production over that in the human and social sciences is not surprising in itself. Indeed, within the French publishing field since 1948, the quantitative supremacy of literary publications over scholarly ones is real, but it lies rather between 60% and 70%.↩︎

  19. Personal interview with Claude Nataf, February 16, 2011.↩︎

  20. It was notably the appearance of Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) (Paris, Gallimard, 2006) and Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski (Paris, Gallimard, 2009) that revived the debate, allowing us to nourish our reflection.↩︎

  21. Pierre Nora, “Histoire et roman : où passent les frontières ?,” Le Débat, no. 165, May-August 2011, p. 11.↩︎

  22. Anny Dayan-Rosenman, “Mémoire, écriture, identité minoritaire,” in Jean-Jacques Becker and Annette Wieviorka, Les Juifs de France de la Révolution française à nos jours, Paris, Liana Levi, 1998, p. 339.↩︎

  23. Albert Memmi, Le Désert ou la vie et les aventures de Jabaïr Ouali El-Mammi (The Desert, or the Life and Adventures of Jabaïr Ouali El-Mammi), Paris, Gallimard, 1977.↩︎

  24. Marco Koskas, Je n’ai pas fermé l’œil de l’été, Paris, Julliard, 1996, p. 161.↩︎

  25. Serge Moati, Villa Jasmin, Paris, Fayard, 2003, p. 377.↩︎

  26. Pol-Serge Kakon, Rica la Vida, Arles, Actes Sud, 1999, p. 123.↩︎

  27. Nine Moati, Mon enfant ma mère, Paris, Stock, 1974.↩︎

  28. Albert Bensoussan, La Bréhaigne, Paris, Denoël, 1973; Frimaldjezar, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1976.↩︎

  29. A. Bensoussan, La Bréhaigne, op. cit., pp. 139-140.↩︎

  30. Katia Rubinstein, Mémoire illettrée d’une fillette de l’Afrique du Nord à l’époque coloniale, Paris, Stock, 1979.↩︎

  31. Benjamin Stora, “Les Juifs d’Algérie et les ‘événements’ (1954-1962),” in Anne Hélène Hoog (ed.), Juifs d’Algérie, Paris, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme/Skira Flammarion, 2012, p. 170.↩︎

  32. Nine Moati, Les Belles de Tunis, Paris, Seuil, 1983.↩︎

  33. Personal interview with Nine Moati, March 23, 2010.↩︎

  34. Ibidem.↩︎

  35. Annie Goldmann, Filles de Mardochée. Histoire d’une émancipation, Paris, Denoël-Gonthier, 1979, p. 9.↩︎

  36. From the back-cover presentation of Ma France, a work by Georges Memmi, an author of Judeo-Tunisian origin. See: G. Memmi, Ma France, Paris, Safed Editions, 2005.↩︎

  37. B. Stora, “Les Juifs d’Algérie…,” op. cit., p. 170.↩︎

  38. Emmanuel Bouju, La Transcription de l’histoire. Essai sur le roman européen à la fin du XXᵉ siècle, Rennes, PUR, 2006, p. 16.↩︎

  39. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalisme. Différence et démocratie (Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”), Paris, Flammarion, 2009.↩︎

  40. François Hartog, “Patrimoine et histoire : les temps du patrimoine,” in Jean-Yves Andrieux (ed.), Patrimoine et société, Rennes, PUR, 1998, p. 4.↩︎

  41. Michel Rautenberg, “Comment s’inventent de nouveaux patrimoines : usages sociaux, pratiques institutionnelles et politiques publiques en Savoie,” Culture et Musées, no. 1, 2003, dossier “Nouveaux regards sur le patrimoine” (ed. Jean Davallon), p. 33.↩︎

  42. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature), Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1975.↩︎

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