Despite an attested Jewish presence on the territory of France since Antiquity, Judaism as a “fact of civilization” remains the great absentee of the national narrative. It is this gap that Les Juifs, une tache aveugle dans le récit national (The Jews, a Blind Spot in the National Narrative) explores — a book stemming from a colloquium organized in January 2019 for the twentieth anniversary of the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in collaboration with the “Nouvelle Gallia Judaica,” whose most salient results Paul Salmona, director of the mahJ, evokes here.1
“The Israelites, about 60,000 of them, received the rights of citizens”: the 1927 edition of the Malet et Isaac2 devotes one line to the emancipation of the Jews in 1791, and in the 1960 edition — the last of this textbook that was authoritative for half a century — this decision is no longer evoked save in a discreet footnote.3 In its dryness, the treatment of this major event sums up the way in which the Jewish presence appears today in the French national narrative.
Indeed, since the 19th century, despite an abundant historiographical corpus, the Jewish presence in France remains a “blind spot,” both in the history of our country and in the showcasing of its monumental and museographical heritage. To be sure, many researchers — historians, archaeologists, linguists, sociologists, curators, scholars, collectors, amateurs… — have devoted themselves to bringing to light and studying the vestiges and documents that illuminate this presence. But only rare syntheses — and still fewer school or university textbooks — mention it as a significant trait of the history of our country, or even evoke its salient moments, whether tragic (persecutions, autos-da-fé, despoliations, expulsions…) or favorable (authorizations of residence and worship, emancipation, integration, rescue…). Likewise, the important monumental heritage (medieval Jewish quarters, disused synagogues, cemeteries…) is often poorly maintained and rarely showcased, when it is not in total dereliction. Finally, the history of the Jews of France is absent from most museums.
This observation is all the more paradoxical in that, in a first temporal sequence, the Jewish presence in France lasted nearly fifteen centuries — from the Romanization of Narbonensis to the medieval expulsions. This paradox also holds in that, unlike England or Spain, France again welcomed Jewish communities from the 16th century onward on the Aquitaine coast and in Lorraine, despite the banishment of 1394, whose validity endured until the Revolution. Paradoxical also is the fact that the Emancipation in the 19th century offered possibilities of integration into the nation without equivalent in Europe. Finally, at the turn of the 20th century, the Dreyfus Affair played a major role in the political history of the Third Republic, contributing to the separation of Church and State, without however dispelling a particularly virulent political antisemitism. Despite this, the anti-Jewish policy of the Vichy government and the Shoah are the only events henceforth integrated into the national narrative.
Judaism, blind spot, national narrative
By “Judaism,” we mean the totality of facts of civilization linked to the Jewish presence: the individuals, the communities, their material culture, their habitat, their social practices, their modes of thought and their intellectual production, their rites and their religious practices. It is in an anthropological and not theological sense that we give this term.
The “blind spot” is the attachment of the optic nerve to the retina, a point that does not see. This expression here metaphorically designates the fact that the Jewish presence and its material, cultural, and patrimonial legacy are largely evaded in the history of France; we have preferred this term to that of “oblivion,” because the latter would imply prior knowledge; nor did we opt for “occultation,” because the word would refer to an explicit will.
By “national narrative,” we mean to evoke not the “national novel” — a mythified construction of history — but to designate an ensemble of historical facts on which researchers, and more generally the social body, have reached a consensus to describe in broad strokes the history of the country: not the sum of research on the Jews, but a “history of France” commonly accepted, founded on the popularization of scientific works, that structures school textbooks and that is found in syntheses intended for a broad public.
Genesis of a silence
Has the place of the Jews always been as elliptical as in the Malet et Isaac? The sources on the Jews in the Middle Ages are not lacking, notably in the archives of the Crown4 or in the royal chronicles under the Capetians.5 Thus the manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques de France up to 1321 is adorned with a miniature by the Master of Fauvel representing the expulsion of 1182: crowned, Philippe Auguste chases out, with index finger, the Jews identifiable by the yellow rouelle sewn onto their garments. The quality of the manuscript and the refinement of the miniature attest to the importance attached to this decision by the commissioners. The image reinforces the text and manifests royal power, for the expulsions from the kingdom constitute — as Juliette Sibon has shown6 — a gesture of political authority over the vassals as much as a decision with religious and economic motivations. And yet, one will look in vain for a reproduction of this image in a history textbook. This ellipsis of the anti-Jewish policy of the Capetians is paradoxical, for they were pioneers among European sovereigns in matters of expulsion (1182), well before Edward I of England (1290), Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon (1492), or João II of Portugal (1497). To evoke the Jews in the Middle Ages, the sources are not lacking, and one will find in the Chronicles the foundations of a “negative memory,” about which one will wonder why it has not been the object of a critical approach in the republican narrative. Be that as it may, the Jews of France are duly recorded — but the memory of their presence after the expulsions will durably fade.
How to explain that a decision so fundamental was evaded from the national narrative? When one confronts in history textbooks the omission of the last expulsion of the Jews from France in 1394 with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 — less than three centuries later — the difference is striking. Yet the two events have common traits: they are royal decisions concerning minority communities discriminated against on religious criteria, entailing massive emigration. Their demographic impact differs only in a ratio of one to two (or three), and they result in the dispersion of the populations concerned. They are nevertheless approached in radically different ways: the textbooks are silent on the discriminations suffered by the Jews, while they are prolix on the impact of the revocation and on the persecutions of the Huguenots. Let us hypothesize that, regarding the persecution of the Protestants, the republican school wanted to emphasize the absolutism of Louis XIV — emblematic of an Ancien Régime at its apogee, abhorred by the Republic — while, regarding the expulsion of the Jews, it eluded the anti-Judaism of the Capetians so as not to cast a shadow on their fundamental role in the construction of the kingdom, sketch of the modern nation. And as their conventional naming shows — Philippe Auguste (Philippe II), Saint Louis (Louis IX), and Philippe le Bel (Philippe IV) — the French sovereigns most intolerant toward the Jews are still today the object of an apologetic, even hagiographic treatment, which a highlighting of their anti-Jewish policy would have come to tarnish.
Yet Renaissance humanism, like Protestantism and, more generally, the Christian Hebraists who effect a return to the Hebrew sources of the Bible in the 16th century, do not ignore the medieval Jewish presence: thus mentions of this bygone past are found in the typographer Geoffroy Tory in the 16th century,7 in Louis Trincant (1571–1644?), the king’s prosecutor at the bailiwick of Loudun,8 or in the notes of Étienne Baluze (1630–1718),9 librarian to Colbert. However, as Patrick Cabanel emphasizes,10 French Protestants sought a precedent for the persecution that struck them after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes not in the history of the Jews of France but in the wandering of the Hebrews in the desert and in the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Yet the last expulsion from France — 1394 for the kingdom, 1501 for the county of Provence — was less than two centuries prior to the revocation, but already, in the collective consciousness, the Jews of medieval France had fallen into a form of oblivion. The “screen effect” of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain is probably one of the causes of the occultation of the importance of medieval French Judaism and is still at work in collective representations of the history of European Judaism.
A century and a half later, Jules Michelet (1798–1874) evokes the Jews of the Middle Ages in his Histoire de France (1867); but it is essentially, as Perrine Simon-Nahum emphasizes, “insofar as they are part of the people, […] never as actors in their own history. They are always somehow ‘acted upon,’ playthings of the powerful who, in turn, drive them out of their kingdoms or seek to win their good graces in order to benefit from their financial largesse.”11 By contrast, she recalls, one strangely finds no mention of the Emancipation (27 September 1791) in volume III of the Histoire de la Révolution française devoted to the Constituent Assembly: “If the Jews are the blind spot of the national narrative, it is also because the religious domain has remained until today, for reasons linked to the republican struggle, the black hole of French historiography.”12 We shall here make the hypothesis that this “secular bias” is still present and persists to this day in the Éducation nationale, to the detriment of the teaching of the Jewish fact beyond its religious aspects alone.
A blindness of the “Jews of the State”?
The case of Jules Isaac (1877–1963) is emblematic. In the textbook that he has overseen since the death of Albert Malet in the Artois in 1915, the Emancipation is barely touched upon. And if this Alsatian Jew turns to Judaism in the twilight of his life, it is not so much through the history of the Jews of France as through the scientific refutation of the foundations of Christian anti-Judaism, after his wife, daughter, and son-in-law were deported and murdered.13 As André Kaspi recalls, for this grandson of a trumpet-major of the Grande Armée, son of a career soldier, fervent patriot, wounded in 1917, “the Jews are part of the nation. It is impossible to set them apart, whether to exclude them or to exalt their role. They are French, like the Catholics, the Protestants, and the atheists.”14 His career is, moreover, exemplary of the careers of certain French Israelites within the State: after posts in Nice and Sens, he would be a professor at the prestigious Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, inspecteur général of public instruction, chair of the agrégation jury in 1939. His career is that of a “fou de la République” (Pierre Birnbaum) — one whose Israelite discretion and whose fidelity to the egalitarian and secular ideal of the nation render him indifferent to the specificities of the Jewish fact.
Marc Bloch (1886–1944) is also representative of this distance. Like Jules Isaac, issued from an Alsatian family that had chosen France after Sedan, co-founder of the Annales school, he was assassinated by the Gestapo in 1944. Although fully claiming his Jewishness in L’Étrange Défaite (Strange Defeat, 1940), in his work as a medievalist the historian “passes alongside the Jews, whose trace he must necessarily have found in the censuses and notarial registers.”15 But unlike Isaac, who was essentially a pedagogue before the war, it is in his scholarly works (Les Rois thaumaturges, Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française, La Société féodale…) that the Jewish fact is evaded. Peter Schöttler emphasizes, however, that the “predecessor [of Marc Bloch] at the Sorbonne, Henri Hauser, also a social historian and of Jewish origin, or […] their colleague at Rennes, Henri Sée […] barely published a few small articles or reading notes in the Revue des études juives, nothing more.”16
Figures of 20th-century historiography
Marc Bloch is perhaps the first of a succession of great medievalists, appreciated by a broad public, who essentially elude the history of the Jews of France in their works. Thus, Georges Duby (1919–1996) tackles medieval Judaism neither in Guerriers et paysans nor in L’An Mil. To be sure, it is not “his subject,” but it is nevertheless astonishing to observe that, if he alludes to the great Champenois Talmudist Rashi in Guerriers et paysans, it is solely as chronicler of textile innovations in Champagne, and without naming him: “Indeed, around the middle of the 11th century, a capital improvement had affected the manufacture of woolen cloth in Flanders (but also in Champagne, if one is to believe certain commentaries on the Talmud by a rabbi from Troyes [emphasis ours], who on this point is the most explicit written source).”17 As one can see, Rabbi Salomon ben Isaac the Frenchman — known as Rashi — is there only a source, in no way an object for the historian. What strikes one still more is that he is not named, as if he were an anonymous informant, while he is the most important commentator on the Bible and the Talmud of all time. Moreover, from the point of view of national history, his commentaries — through their translation of numerous Hebrew terms into Franco-Champenois — constitute among the oldest available sources on the langue d’oïl. Would Georges Duby have written “a bishop of Hippo inclined to confession” to designate Saint Augustine? Rashi, in this text, has no name, no “right of citizenship.” Yet Duby is not unaware of the research of his young colleagues on Judaism — as in the case of Joseph Shatzmiller (born 1936), whose thesis he supervised and whose Recherches sur la communauté juive de Manosque au Moyen Âge (1241–1329)18 he prefaced — published the same year as Guerriers et paysans — or the work of Danielle Iancu-Agou (born 1945), whose thesis he likewise supervised, defended in 1995, on Juifs et néophytes en Provence (1469–1525).19
As for Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), he devotes one page of his Civilisation de l’Occident médiéval — out of five hundred — to relations between Jews and Christians, but Judaism as a fact of civilization in Europe is absent from the work; this is, moreover, a recurring trait of “non-specialized historiography” — to treat of the Jews only in the conflictuality they arouse in spite of themselves, without addressing the sui generis characters of their cultures.20 And the final opus of this great medievalist, Hommes et femmes du Moyen Âge, which presents “one hundred and twelve portraits of men and women who lived and gave life to ten centuries of questioning, exchanges, and discoveries,”21 though it includes two eminent Muslims, Averroes and Saladin, does not count a single Jewish thinker. Now, Le Goff associated forty-three authors with this work: he therefore had no need to be a specialist himself in order to treat of Maimonides or Benjamin of Tudela. Curiously, the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1394 is mentioned in the chronology at the end of the volume — a paradoxical reminder of a presence that is never addressed in the work. We are dealing here with a cleaved consciousness, which mentions the expulsion in the chronology but without citing any Jew. To be sure, this is not a scientific book, representative of a state of knowledge or of the most recent research, but it reflects a certain state of representations. Now, with Le Goff as with Duby, it cannot be a matter of ignorance, since in his Saint Louis (1996)22 he treats of the burning of the Talmud in 1242–1244. By contrast, one can hypothesize that if he thinks of no Jewish personality, it is because for him Judaism is “out of field” of a Christian (and marginally Muslim) Middle Ages.
It is not a question here of devaluing the work of these two major historians, but of bringing to light a certain continuity of the ellipsis of Judaism, inscribing itself thereby in a French historiographical tradition. The prolongation of this “absence” is found in the following generation in the Lieux de mémoire, of which Pierre Nora was the editor from 1984 to 1992. In this sum of 5,600 pages bringing together more than a hundred authors, Judaism is approached only through the article “Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy et Copernic,” due to Pierre Birnbaum.23 As the title indicates, the Jewish presence in France is treated only from the premises of the Emancipation onward. And, in his liminal remarks, the author affirms that the Jews are “absent from the memory of the Kingdom, as from that of the Nation.” The formula is aberrant if one considers the hundreds of “rues aux Juifs” and other “rues de la Juiverie” that constitute so many “places of memory” of the Jewish presence in France in the Middle Ages (and in the modern era in Alsace and Lorraine). In his own way, this recognized specialist on the history of the Jews of France reproduces this “commonplace” that is the “non-place” of a Jewish presence from Antiquity to the Emancipation.
We could multiply the examples of an almost complete absence of the Jewish fact in the great syntheses on the French Middle Ages — for instance the volume on the medieval city of the Histoire de la France urbaine,24 Le Moyen Âge, first volume of L’Histoire culturelle de la France,25 or the “Quadrige” La France au Moyen Âge, du Ve au XVe siècle,26 reference university textbook — to cite just a few works.
Stirrings in publishing
What about today? Without claiming to grasp all of the most recent production, it is illuminating to evoke the “Histoire de France” collection published by éditions Belin under the direction of Joël Cornette from 2009 onward. Conceived on a chronological principle, these thirteen volumes constitute one of the most important editorial enterprises of recent decades and one of those “great series of national history that the French public has so cherished since the 19th century.”27 The three volumes on the Middle Ages of this collection leave a mixed feeling.28 Indeed, the Jews are mainly apprehended there through medieval anti-Judaism, without their communal organization, their culture, or their religious and philosophical activities — yet so fecund, both in northern France and in Provence or Languedoc — being developed. By contrast, a few formulations are of the order of ellipsis or litotes, when they are not simply oversights: thus the chronology of the volume Féodalités does not mention the expulsion of 1182, and that of L’Âge d’or capétien omits the burning of the Talmud in 1242–1244, but evokes in 1240 a “Debate between rabbis and theologians on the Talmud,”29 a euphemistic formulation to describe the trial that would lead to an unprecedented auto-da-fé in Paris. Finally and above all, the bibliographies of the three volumes, out of nearly a thousand titles, include none of the reference works on the Jews of France published over the past fifty years — leading one to think that the other works are so perfectly assimilated that there would be no need to refer to them.30
At the University and in the Éducation nationale
What history of the Jews of France is taught today at the University? The question is all the more central in that it conditions the training of teachers, but also that of heritage curators or archaeologists, and shapes collective representations through the knowledge transmitted to pupils in primary and secondary education. To evaluate the place of this field, Danielle Sansy conducted a survey of a thousand history teachers at the University: only 76 of them, from some thirty establishments, out of the 57 having a history department, responded. She notes that when the history of the Jews is addressed, “it is largely […] through courses in the history of religions,” but “from this history, Jewish societies as such are generally absent.”31 Suzanne Citron, in the 1990s, studying scholastic historiography, already observed there that “Judaism does not belong to the ‘national novel.’”32
High school teachers Christine Guimonnet and Alexandre Bande recall the observation made today by many specialists: “pupils and students, throughout their schooling, only very rarely cross paths with the history of the Jews; they essentially hear about Jews who died in the 20th century.”33 They propose to move beyond the exclusive and reductive link between Jews and the Shoah “in order to evoke living Jews, their history, their ways of life, their multiple contributions to entire swaths of European cultures, through philosophy, literature, politics, the arts, music, the sciences…” Only the Dreyfus Affair sometimes escapes oblivion; but there too, what can a pupil make of it (beyond the denial of justice) if he is unaware that Dreyfus — a deeply patriotic Alsatian Jew — had chosen a military career out of attachment to France?
Two elements emerge as constants of this blind spot: the preponderance of a “lachrymose history of Judaism” (Salo W. Baron) through whose prism pupils apprehend Judaism in the contemporary era only through persecution (the Affair and the Shoah), making the Jew a perpetual victim; and the “screen effect” produced by the reference to the expulsion from Spain in the all-too-rare cases when the Middle Ages is addressed. Moreover, it is striking to observe that the Emancipation is treated little or not at all, while it would constitute, alongside the abolition of slavery, one of the most remarkable examples of the conquests of the Revolution.
Shadows of the post-war
As one has seen in school instruction, the Shoah is henceforth the event par excellence of the history of the Jews — the only systematic exception to the silence of the national narrative, at least since Jacques Chirac’s speech commemorating, in 1995, the Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundup. Yet the Jewish specificity of the extermination did not impose itself from the start. Thus, Sylvie Lindeperg shows how the genesis of so fundamental a film for the diffusion of knowledge of the Shoah to a broad public — Nuit et Brouillard, directed by Alain Resnais and released in theatres in 1956 — makes an ellipsis of the word “Jew,” citing it only once: “The film proves slightly ahead of its time through the historical knowledge that the historian Olga Wormser, Resnais’s adviser and co-author of the script, infused into it. It is she who half-opened the narrative space of the film to the ‘Final Solution,’ before the poet Jean Cayrol closed the breach again by writing his commentary.”34 Indeed, Cayrol had lived at Mauthausen the experience of political deportees in the concentration camps, and not that of the Jews in the extermination camps. For the images, however, Resnais filmed at Auschwitz and Majdanek — which produces a schizophrenic film to our eyes today, but in conformity with the spirit of the time, which preferred the figure of the deportee-resister “arrested arms in hand” to that of the Jews “led like a flock to the slaughterhouse,” to paraphrase the commonplaces long in use, including in Jewish history.
To remain in collective representations — but it is principally what interests us here — this ellipsis is also heard in 1963 in the magnificent song by Jean Tenenbaum, known as Jean Ferrat (1930–2010), Nuit et brouillard, in which the word “Jew” is not pronounced. The singularity of the Shoah is there drowned in the struggle for freedom: “They simply wanted to live no longer on their knees.”35 Yet, as is known, the Jews and the Gypsies sent to the camps were not so for acts of resistance — as Ferrat’s verses explicitly signify — but simply because they were Jews or Gypsies. There too the Jewish component of the event is invisibilized, even if by an effect of projection the informed listener perceives the implicit reference to the genocide, conferring on this song a powerful vector role in popular culture. The omission is understandable in an “air of the time” devoted to the glory of the Resistance, notably in the Jewish communist circles to which the singer belonged, but also in the longer term of the ellipsis of the reference to the Jews in the national narrative.
Researchers have done away with these clichés by reconstituting the history of the Jewish resistance networks and the participation of Jews in the Free French as in the interior resistance; but for a long time “the resistance and the deportation” have, at least partially, occluded the “destruction of the Jews of France.” Pascal Ory recalls that it is “within the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC) that a French historiography of antisemitism under Vichy and the Occupation would be born,”36 from which would result the “memorial swing” of the end of the 1970s. While it is most often considered that the first works on the Shoah and Vichy were those of Raul Hilberg,37 Robert Paxton, and Michael Marrus,38 Ory retraces the pioneering work of Joseph Billig (1901–1994), Georges Wellers (1905–1991), and Léon Poliakov (1910–1997), as well as the role of Le Monde Juif, organ of the CDJC, in the diffusion of their research. He also recalls that these three researchers were not historians by training, and that, at the end of the 1970s, “no university professor was working in this field.” The swing occurs with the CDJC colloquium “The State, the Churches, and the Resistance Movements in the Face of the Persecution of the Jews during the Second World War,” conceived by Wellers and organized in 1979 by André Kaspi and Serge Klarsfeld — whose considerable work as militant and historian is well known. Nine years earlier, the colloquium “The Vichy Government and the National Revolution,” organized by the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, did not address Pétain’s anti-Jewish policy. One is thus struck to observe that historiographical work was elaborated on the periphery of the University — Kaspi teaches Franco-American relations, Klarsfeld is a lawyer… — and even in spite of it: thus Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), then president of the prestigious VIe section of the École pratique des hautes études, said to Léon Poliakov, a mere head of works, on 8 February 1965: “As long as you concern yourself with antisemitism, you will not advance with me!”39 Manifestly, in the author of La Méditerranée, this is not a matter of blind spot, but of voluntary blindness.
Historiography and patrimonial showcasing
Weaned by historiography, archaeological, patrimonial, and museum policies reflect the ignorance of Jewish history in numerous regions of France. There follows a form of invisibilization of patrimonies (museum collections, monuments, neighborhoods…) and a too-rare taking into account of archaeological deposits. Danièle Iancu-Agou40 shows, however, the progress of a work of identification and analysis of sources on the Jewish presence in works that prolong the Gallia Judaica, compiled and published by Heinrich Gross in 1897. Dictionaries of regional geography on Provence (2010),41 Alsace and Lorraine (2015),42 Lower Languedoc (2022)43 now form a base of knowledge allowing one to apprehend the landscape of medieval Judaism in these regions and should serve as a memento for any heritage official concerned not to omit the Jewish presence in his work of study, conservation, restoration, presentation, or mediation. However, this short list speaks well to the vast field remaining to be cleared in the rest of France.
In “The Difficult Emergence of an Archaeology of Judaism in France,” I retrace the milestones of the discipline since the modern era. Despite a marked interest in ancient and medieval epigraphy in the 19th century among the specialists of the “sciences of Judaism” and a diagnosis of the stakes of archaeology of medieval sites drawn up in 1975 by Gérard Nahon,44 Jewish archaeology remained until the 2010s a terra incognita for the official archaeological bodies. The result was an absence of training of archaeologists and a deficit in the taking into account of archaeological sites of Judaism. Yet archaeology today is characterized by the necessity of anticipating the putative presence of vestiges in order to prescribe their diagnosis, and then their excavation. Nevertheless, a few fortuitous discoveries in the 1970s and the development of preventive archaeology since the 1990s have demonstrated the richness of this field, bringing to light the impact, both scientific and public, of what Leroi-Gourhan called the “archives of the soil.” More recently, thanks to a colloquium organized by the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives at the mahJ in 2010,45 and to the publication of a book on the archaeology of Judaism in France from éditions La Découverte,46 the Conseil national de la recherche archéologique has inscribed a certain number of axes concerning the Jewish presence (ancient presence, neighborhoods, synagogues, cemeteries, internment camps…) within the national programming of research 2023–2028.
The museums of France were hardly better off than archaeology. Claire Decomps thus draws up an inventory of Jewish objects in museum collections in order to emphasize at once their modesty and the poor quality of their showcasing. Except in Alsace and Lorraine, where local collections are relatively numerous though often poorly or not at all displayed — and with the notable exception of the Basque Museum in Bayonne and the Judeo-Comtadin Museum in Cavaillon — the Jewish fact is practically absent from French museums, whether national institutions like the Louvre or the Mucem, or territorial ones like the Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux or the Musée d’Histoire de Marseille. And yet this is not always for lack of collections — for in certain museums emblematic pieces remain in storage. Finally, when it is addressed, “the history of the Jews is still […] too exclusively centered on a ritual approach or on antisemitism (the Dreyfus Affair and the Shoah), passing over the millennial implantation and the role of the Jews in French society.”47 In this rather restricted landscape one notes, however, the exhibition “Savants et croyants. Les Juifs en Europe du Nord au Moyen Âge,” organized by the Musée des Antiquités in Rouen in 2018,48 as well as the project of the Musée d’Aquitaine to account for the “Portuguese” community of Bordeaux in its permanent exhibition.
A poorly known built heritage
From the patrimonial point of view, Provence and Alsace furnish examples of the diversity of situations. At Cavaillon, in the early 20th century, it is a local family that becomes involved in acquiring and saving the buildings of the “carrière.” Its efforts are relayed in 1924 (more than 80 years after the Mérimée inventory) by a belated classification of the synagogue rebuilt in 1774, before the town acquired in 1952 the building left in dereliction, and the State and the town then took charge of its restoration in the 1980s. The town plans to enlarge the current Museum of Judeo-Comtadin Judaism — housed there since 1963 — by integrating the adjacent maison Jouve, and to make accessible the miqveh, whose state is disastrous.
At Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, whose museum possesses the unique known sacred ark for medieval France, the commune, by acquiring sixteen parcels of the old center, has engaged an important program of rehabilitation of the Jewish quarter. In the long term, it is the heart of the town that should see its Jewish past showcased.
An analogous approach is undertaken at Pernes-les-Fontaines in the Vaucluse, where a first miqveh was brought to light in the 1990s in the cellars of a 16th-century private mansion destined for transformation into social housing. Thanks to the vigilance of the municipality, the cabussadou (ritual bath in Provençal) of the Hôtel de Cheylus has been preserved and, more recently, two other miqvaot have been brought to light on the place de la juiverie and have been the object of patrimonial showcasing.
However, these three Provençal examples appear as exceptions: most of the worksites in the old Jewish quarters are conducted without “supervision of works” or archaeological diagnostics, as in the case of the refection of the floor of the courtyard of the Palais de Justice of Rouen in 1976, where a 12th-century Jewish monument was brought to light — and this fortuitously, even though the worksite was situated on the rue aux Juifs.
In 2020, the discovery — also fortuitous — of a medieval Jewish cemetery at Manosque, during the construction of a villa, also indicates an absence of taking into account of Jewish vestiges in the zoning of the archaeological map.
In Alsace finally, the safeguarding of Jewish heritage has been the work of associative actors — in particular the Société d’histoire des israélites d’Alsace et de Lorraine (today Société pour l’étude du judaïsme en Alsace-Lorraine) — at the origin of collections that led, as early as 1908, to the opening of a Jewish room at the Musée Alsacien in Strasbourg, and without which the rescue of the exceptional genizah (ritual deposit of writings bearing the name of God) discovered under the attic floor of the Dambach-la-Ville synagogue in 2012 could not have succeeded.49 For lack of available professional archaeologists, it was volunteers from this association who conducted this complex operation, under the direction of a curator made available by the Inventaire général.
A Spanish counter-example
To this blind spot, one might oppose the example of contemporary Spain. Very early on, liberal thinkers there emphasized the importance of the Jewish past of the peninsula — as with the deputy Emilio Castelar y Ripoll (1832–1899), future president of the government of the ephemeral First Republic, who on 12 April 1869 reckoned before the Cortes the losses entailed by the decree of the Alhambra: “so that by depriving us of the Jews you have deprived us of an infinity of names that would have been a glory for Spain.”50 A century and a half later, on 3 August 2015, the Spanish Parliament would vote the law granting nationality to Sephardim originating from Spain;51 on 30 November of the same year, King Felipe VI would salute this decision before a gathering of Jews of Spanish origin with a spectacular “¡Cuánto os hemos echado de menos!” (“How much we have missed you!”52).
A cluster of causes
Without claiming to exhaust the subject, one sees emerging a cluster of causes allowing one to explain this blind spot, that is justified neither by the physiognomy of Judaism in France in the medieval, modern, or contemporary eras, nor by the richness of archival sources, nor by the abundance of research on Judaism in France. Among these causes, one will have noted the screen effect constituted by the expulsion from Spain, the secular republican tradition, the “discretion” of Israelite historians on Jewish subjects, the valorization of the Resistance to the detriment of the Shoah in the post-war decades, a certain ghettoization of Jewish studies, and, finally, the weight of common representations about the Jews. Let us return, in conclusion, to these different causes.
The screen effect of the expulsion from Spain — and more globally the perception of an incomparably greater importance of Iberian Judaism — operates among historians as in the Jewish tradition, where the event is commemorated on Tisha b’Av, concomitantly with the destructions of the First and Second Temples. Yet the overestimation of the situation of Spanish Judaism compared to French Judaism results more from an ignorance of the richness of the latter than from an intrinsic superiority of Iberian Judaism — whether on the demographic, religious, or philosophical plane, as one sees with Rashi, the Tosafists, or the Ibn Tibbon family.
In France, the strong imprint of laïcité inhibits the apprehension, teaching, and study of the religious fact (and its social and cultural corollaries), as Régis Debray in particular has shown.53 For a certain number of historians, religion belongs to the private sphere in a tradition of “discretion” inherited from Franco-Judaism (which contrasts with the investment of the founders of the science of Judaism in the 19th century) and leads them to repress what would relate to Judaism in their object of study. In this context, the minoration of the Jewish fact is such that Greek myths are more familiar to schoolchildren than the stories of the Old Testament.
The Shoah has become an essential milestone of the national narrative, notably in school teaching and official commemorations, but the result is a lopsided teaching where pupils have no representation of the Jews except in the ancient period (insofar as they make the link between Hebrews and Jews) and under Nazism — Judaism in the 20th century appearing only as an abstract and tragic entity, defined in the formula “six million Jews dead in the camps.” This gap is today considered one of the dead ends of the teaching of the Shoah which, despite the important resources devoted to it, fails to make antisemitism recede in the school milieu.
Ignorance of the history of the Jews of France is not the sole explanation: one also notes a bias of representation that makes one perceive Judaism as “out of field” and consider the Jews — in defiance of their effective status — as “rootless,” whose sociocultural specificities are too marginal to make them a constitutive datum of the society studied and, consequently, whose expulsion would take on an anecdotal character. In fact, the Jews are still perceived as foreigners “in exile,” in reference to the ancient Hebrews or to the Jewish notion of exile (of religious essence), instead of being grasped in their anthropological reality as a component of the nation — minority but nevertheless significant, and whose ancient presence is rich in teachings. One could cite numerous examples, from the Allégorie de la synagogue reconnaissante (1806) — a famous engraving by François-Louis Couché in which Middle-Eastern references are preponderant — to the declaration of Raymond Barre, then Prime Minister, making the distinction after the rue Copernic attack between “Israelites going to the synagogue” and “innocent French people.”54 These are collective representations characterized not by their antisemitism, but by a vision of the Jews considered as an ethnico-religious category external to the social body and to the nation, even though it has been present on the territory for two thousand years.
Finally, research on Judaism is perceived as a “reserved domain” where a form of entre-soi would prevail, from which there follows a ghettoization that one does not find to the same degree in Spain and Germany, where particularly dynamic Jewish studies are better inscribed in the university context. This weakness of teaching induces an effect of “circular reference”: the Jewish fact, not being (or barely) taught, is unknown and therefore neglected. In so doing, teachers, museum or heritage curators, archaeologists, and elected officials find themselves ill-equipped to treat of historical, cultural, and religious questions relating to Judaism.
Inscribing the Jewish presence in the national narrative
The knowledge of the history of the Jews is not a “Jewish question,” for it touches on the very idea of France. The forgetting of the Jews contributes to maintaining an amnesiac imaginary that misjudges the diversity of its components. The result is a biased image of the nation as a homogeneous body, Christian in its essence. This narrative abolishes historical evolutions over the longue durée (France was pagan — and very marginally Jewish — before becoming Christian); it forbids a pluricultural vision of the identity of France, yet particularly composite, and reduces European history to its “Christian roots,” paving the way for ideologues who claimed to inscribe this ahistorical notion in the European treaty in defiance of republican neutrality.
It is obviously not a question here of denying the profound mark of Christianity on Western Europe — and the preeminence of Catholicism since the 17th century in France — but of pointing out that these cultural and religious traits are not exclusive, and do not belong ontologically to the nation. They are the result of a complex history that, depending on the periods and geographical spaces, allowed other groups with different cultural and religious characteristics to live in France and to form society there.
Beyond the individual awareness of many researchers (archaeologists, historians, sociologists, curators, heritage officials), public authorities should play an essential role in inscribing this domain in the axes of university research and in school programs, but also in integrating them into the objectives of heritage officials and in the calendar of national commemorations.
This text takes up and updates the principal elements of the introduction by Paul Salmona in Paul Salmona and Claire Soussen (eds.), Les Juifs, une tache aveugle dans le récit national, Paris, Albin Michel, 2021, pp. 13–38.↩︎
Albert Malet and Jules Isaac, “Révolution, Empire, XIXe siècle,” Histoire universelle depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours, vol. VI, Paris, Hachette, 1927, p. 101.↩︎
Albert Malet and Jules Isaac, “Révolution, Empire, XIXe siècle,” Histoire universelle depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours, Paris, Marabout, 1993, p. 607.↩︎
Mathias Dreyfuss, “Les Juifs de France et le récit national entre centre et absence,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 39–51.↩︎
Claire Soussen, “Un silence hérité des Grandes Chroniques de France ?” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 53–66.↩︎
Juliette Sibon, Chasser les Juifs pour régner. Les expulsions par les rois de France au Moyen Âge, Paris, Perrin, 2016.↩︎
Geoffroy Tory, L’art et Science de la deue et vraye Proportion des Lettres attiques, qu’on dit autrement Lettres Antiques et vulgairement Lettres Romaines, proportionnées selon le Corps et Visaige humain, Paris, Geoffroy Tory, 1529. In-4°, fo 5 v°.↩︎
Louis Trincant, Abrégé des antiquitez de Loudun et païs de Loudunois, edited by Roger Rouault, Loudun, imprimerie A. Roiffé, 1894, p. 24, cited by Moïse Schwab, Revue des études juives, vol. 69, 1919, p. 223.↩︎
Étienne Baluze, manuscript 212, folios 144 to 156, BNF.↩︎
Patrick Cabanel, “Huguenots et séfarades dans la littérature ‘réfugiée’ au lendemain de 1685 : des usages du détour,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 67–80.↩︎
Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Les Juifs dans l’œuvre de Jules Michelet,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 81–92.↩︎
Id.↩︎
He published successively Jésus et Israël (1948), Genèse de l’antisémitisme (1956), L’antisémitisme a-t-il des racines chrétiennes ? (1960), L’Enseignement du mépris (1962).↩︎
André Kaspi, “Jules Isaac, artisan du rapprochement judéo-chrétien,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 93–101.↩︎
Discussion by the author with Gérard Nahon in 2010.↩︎
Peter Schöttler, “La ‘cécité’ de Marc Bloch,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 103–113.↩︎
Georges Duby, Guerriers et paysans, 1973; reissued in Féodalités, Paris, Gallimard, “Quarto,” 1996, p. 236.↩︎
Joseph Shatzmiller, Recherches sur la communauté juive de Manosque au Moyen Âge (1241–1329), Paris–La Haye, Mouton, 1973.↩︎
Danièle Iancu-Agou, “Topographie historique des juiveries : l’entreprise des dictionnaires régionaux,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 183–193.↩︎
Jacques Le Goff, La Civilisation de l’Occident médiéval, Paris, Flammarion, 1984; reissued “Champs Histoire,” 2008.↩︎
Jacques Le Goff (ed.), Hommes et femmes du Moyen Âge, Paris, Flammarion, 2012.↩︎
Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis, Paris, Gallimard, 1996; reissued “Folio,” 2013, pp. 912–935.↩︎
Pierre Birnbaum, “Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy et Copernic. Les Juifs au cœur de l’histoire de France,” in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, III Les France, 1. Conflits et partages, Paris, Gallimard, 1992, pp. 560–613.↩︎
André Chédeville, Jacques Le Goff and Jacques Rossiaud, La ville médiévale, “Histoire de la France urbaine,” ed. Georges Duby, Paris, Seuil, 1980.↩︎
Michel Sot, Jean-Patrice Boudet and Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, Le Moyen Âge, “Histoire culturelle de la France,” ed. Jean-François Sirinelli and Jean-Pierre Rioux, Paris, Seuil, 1997; reissued in coll. “Points,” 2005.↩︎
Claude Gauvard, La France au Moyen Âge, du Ve au XVe siècle, coll. “Quadrige,” Paris, Seuil, 1996.↩︎
Press dossier of the “Histoire de France” collection at éditions Belin.↩︎
Florian Mazel, Féodalités (888–1180); Jean-Christophe Cassard, L’Âge d’or capétien (1180–1328); Boris Bove, La France de la guerre de Cent Ans.↩︎
Jean-Christophe Cassard, op. cit., p. 726.↩︎
Except for the recent Juifs et chrétiens. De Perpignan à Puigcerdà. XIIIe–XIVe siècles by Claude Denjean, Canet, Trabucaire, 2004; and L’Expulsion des Juifs de France by Céline Balasse, Brussels, De Boeck, 2008.↩︎
Danièle Sansy, “Étudier l’histoire des Juifs à l’Université,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 139–148.↩︎
Suzanne Citron, Le Mythe national — L’histoire de France en questions, Paris, Les éditions ouvrières–EDI, 1989, p. 238; reissued Le Mythe national : l’histoire de France revisitée, Ivry-sur-Seine, Éditions de l’Atelier, 2017.↩︎
Alexandre Bande and Christine Guimonnet, “Quelle est la place des Juifs dans les programmes, les enseignements et les manuels du secondaire et des classes préparatoires ?” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 149–158.↩︎
Sylvie Lindeperg, “Montrer sans dire : les images muettes de la Shoah dans Nuits et brouillard,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 159–168.↩︎
Jean Ferrat, Nuit et brouillard, 4th stanza.↩︎
Pascal Ory, “Le tournant mémoriel des années 1970 autour de l’histoire française de l’antisémitisme,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 169–181.↩︎
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961; French translation La Destruction des Juifs d’Europe, Paris, Fayard, 1988.↩︎
Robert Paxton and Michael R. Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews, New York, Basic Books, 1981; French translation Vichy et les Juifs, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1981.↩︎
Léon Poliakov, L’Auberge des musiciens, Paris, Mazarine, augmented reissue, 1999.↩︎
Danielle Iancu-Agou, art. cit.↩︎
Danièle Iancu-Agou, Provincia judaica — Dictionnaire de géographie historique des Juifs en Provence médiévale, Paris–Louvain, Peeters, 2010.↩︎
Simon Schwarzfuchs and Jean-Luc Fray, Présence juive en Alsace et Lorraine médiévales. Dictionnaire de géographie historique, Paris, Cerf, 2015.↩︎
Michaël Iancu and Danièle Iancu-Agou, Présence juive en Bas-Languedoc médiéval. Dictionnaire de géographie historique, Paris, Cerf, 2021.↩︎
Gérard Nahon, “L’archéologie juive de la France médiévale,” Archéologie médiévale, vol. 5, 1975, pp. 139–159.↩︎
Paul Salmona and Laurence Sigal, Archéologie du judaïsme en France et en Europe, Paris, Inrap–La Découverte, 2011, acts of the colloquium organized in January 2010 at the mahJ.↩︎
Paul Salmona, Archéologie du judaïsme en France, Paris, Inrap–La Découverte, 2021.↩︎
Claire Decomps, “La place du judaïsme dans les musées en France,” in Salmona and Soussen, op. cit., pp. 209–222.↩︎
Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (ed.), Savants et croyants. Les Juifs en Europe du Nord au Moyen Âge, Ghent, musées de Rouen–Snoek, 2018.↩︎
Claire Decomps (ed.), Héritage inespéré, Objets cachés au cœur des synagogues (exh. cat.), Strasbourg, musées de Strasbourg, 2016.↩︎
Speech on the freedom of worship and the separation of Church and State, delivered on 12 April 1869 in Madrid before the Congress of Deputies.↩︎
Ley de concesión de nacionalidad a Sefardíes originarios de España.↩︎
Speech delivered by Felipe VI at the Royal Palace in Madrid, 30 November 2005.↩︎
Régis Debray, L’Enseignement du fait religieux dans l’école laïque. Report to the Minister of Éducation nationale, 2002.↩︎
Raymond Barre on TF1, 3 October 1980: “I return from Lyon full of indignation at this odious attack that meant to strike Israelites going to the synagogue and that struck innocent French people crossing the rue Copernic.”↩︎