Stanford University Press Blog

The “I” in History

My grandparents were victims of the major tragedies of the first half of the 20th century.

by IVAN JABLONKA

Identification records for Matès and Idesa Jablonka, June 1938. Sûreté générale du ministère de l'Intérieur, Archives nationales (France).

Being a historian does not preclude one from talking about one’s family, but it does offer the use of a unique vocabulary to describe it: the language of the social sciences. My attempt at a family biography is both a private and public reflection about the fate of my family and I speak about them not as if theirs was a unique, remarkable destiny, but rather as one that traversed, and was perhaps determined, by broader social forces.

If their life was short and tragic, it is because they were manipulated by one totalitarianism and destroyed by another, under the indifferent gaze of democracies.

My father's parents were born in Poland in the early 20th century. As officials in the local Communist Party, which was illegal at the time, they were sentenced to five years in prison. On their release, they migrated to France, without a visa, and settled in Paris in the late 1930s. A few years later, they were arrested and deported to Auschwitz where they were murdered. To summarize, we can say that they spent their entire lives in hiding: first in Poland, as communists; then in France, as illegal immigrants; and finally, under the Vichy regime, as Jews. Three clandestine lives, three absences from the world, until the ultimate one: their annihilation in the context of genocide. If their life was short and tragic, it is because they were manipulated by one totalitarianism and destroyed by another, under the indifferent gaze of democracies.

My book, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, is a reflection on the fate of my family, but it is also an essay on the writing of history. Three methodological issues are close to my heart: the use of the "I"; the need for distance and reflexivity; and the relationship between history and memory.

 

 

The Everyman of Poetry

The quiet subversiveness of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry has been too long overlooked.

by CHANA KRONFELD

Yehuda Amichai reading at Tmol Shilshom café in Jerusalem, June 1994. Photo by Yair Medina. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

My first meeting with Yehuda Amichai, in the fall of 1970, was what we call in Hebrew a chavaya metakenet, a “corrective” or “healing experience,” one that mends a messy or unpleasant earlier experience. Overeager and all too young, I was trying to put together a series called “Rendezvous with an Author” for Israeli Educational Television, which would allow high school students to meet with cutting-edge Hebrew writers in a relaxed roundtable discussion of the writers’ work. I was still reeling from a failed attempt to produce the series’ pilot: an author whose stories I adored was so sadistically cruel to the young students that we had to stop the taping! And then it came to me—Yehuda Amichai, of course.

He was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet.

Having gotten into the habit of reading his poetry daily for my own emotional sustenance since age fifteen, I was sure: Yes, Amichai would be the one to start with. He would know how to connect with the students and put them at ease; he would be able to talk about the most complex poetic issues with utter simplicity and without egocentric affectation. I had never met him before, but from everything I heard, he was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet—even though by 1970 his status as the most revolutionary, indeed the most important poet of the Statehood Generation (dor ha-mdina) had solidified and he was acquiring an international reputation. Regardless, he was synonymous with unpretentiousness. And indeed, in his Everyman appearance and unaffected manner, Amichai proceeded to treat the students as his equals, joking his way into all our hearts, and thus the series was off to an exciting start. That experience was the beginning of my lifelong friendship with the man and the catalyst for my dedication to study and teach the work of the poet.

In Memory of Benjamin Harshav

Stanford University Press remembers a gifted poet, translator, and literary scholar.

Benjamin Harshav, 1928-2015, via Wikimedia Commons.

Benjamin Harshav, poet, author, teacher, translator, and literary scholar, died last week, leaving behind him a remarkable legacy in the fields of Yiddish and Hebrew literary scholarship. A prolific writer and editor of multiple volumes on poetry, literature, and culture, Harshav published no less than eight titles with Stanford University Press—titles that included translations, edited anthologies, and original essays. His life spanned nearly nine decades and three continents—from Eastern Europe, to Israel, to the United States. During his life he was a champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement and worked indefatigably to bring volumes of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry to wider audiences through translation.

A champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement.

Harshav’s Yiddish roots ran deep—he was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1928, a town which he described as the “self-styled bastion of Yiddish culture.” But in 1941, the year the Germans wrested the city from Soviet control, Harshav and his family fled to the Urals, where—despite that fact that he would eventually follow a calling in literary scholarship—Harshav attended university to study math and physics.

Message in a Bottle

The buried manuscript of a Greek Jewish inmate of Auschwitz.

The main gate of Auschwitz. Creative Commons image by Tulio Bertorini via Wikimedia Commons.

In a Q&A with the editors of Sephardi Lives, each was asked to share some of what they regarded as being the most memorable stories recorded in the compendium of Sephardi experience on which they collaborated, collecting and translating—with the help of other scholars in the field—over 150 documents written by or about Sephardi Jews. Co-editor Julia Phillips Cohen mentioned (among others) a diary, partially erased by time, written by a Greek Jew named Marcel Nadjary who was interned at Auschwitz. Of this record she says:

Amazingly, the manuscript—which bears witness to Nadjary’s dogged refusal to be cowed by the dehumanizing experience of the camp, his enduring faith in God, and his deep attachment to Greece—was discovered between Birkenau’s Crematoria I and II in 1980. Much of the original was by then lost to the ravages of time, leaving only a fragmented text full of spaces that can no longer be filled in. Somehow, to my mind, these absences do not detract from the text but instead make it even more powerful. They bear testimony not only to the story of the man who had the courage to write and bury his manuscript while imprisoned in Auschwitz but also to the incredible material history of the text itself and to its reappearance in the world after so many decades.

Dear Rebecca …

A Turkish Jew interned at Drancy writes home.

The camp in Drancy, circa 1941. Creative Commons image from the Bundesarchiv of Germany via Wikimedia Commons.

The following is a letter from Yaco Soulam, detained in Drancy, to his wife, Rebecca in Paris. The letter was translated from Ladino by Julia Phillips Cohen and is excerpted below from Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History 1700-1950:

Located in a northeastern suburb of Paris, the Drancy camp was first established by the German authorities in August 1941 as a site of internment for foreign Jews living in France. It later became the primary transit camp for all of French Jewry. In this intimate letter a Sephardi man named Bension Haim Yaco Soulam (1901-1942) tells his wife, Rebecca Soulam (née Bensasson) (1900-1974) about his days spent in the camp, urges her to keep their family safe, and attempts to arrange a clandestine meeting with her while he is interned. Yaco's letters to his wife during this period, written in a combination of French and Ladino, included elaborate coded messages and instructions, including his suggestion that their children keep a record of their naturalization as French citizens as a form of insurance. By contrast both husband and wife remained stateless, although they had come to France from Turkey more than a decade earlier; having failed to renew their papers with the Turkish authorities, they were not recognized by the Turkish consulate as Turkish nationals. Along with countless other stateless Jews of Turkish origin, Yaco was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz, where he perished. His wife Rebecca remained in Paris for another two years before she too was sent to Auschwitz. Having endured the horrors of the camp and nearly dying of typhus, after the war Rebecca Soulam was reunited with her children, both of whom survived in hiding. 

A Russian Jewish Woman in New York Seeks Dating Advice (... in 1916)

The question of the hour: can a Sephardi-Ashkenazi romance survive?

The following letters originally appeared in a Ladino newspaper, La Bos del Pueblo. They were translated into English by Aviva Ben-Ur and are excerpted below from Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History 1700-1950:

In early-twentieth-century New York City, as elsewhere in the United States, immigrant communities of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews and Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews settled in the same neighborhoods. Many Yiddish-speaking immigrants had their first chance to meet Sephardim under these circumstances. Although young Sephardi and Ashkenazi immigrants often met on the street, in schools, and in the workplace, they spoke different languages, had different cultural mores and religious rites, and even pronounced Hebrew differently. As a result many Ashkenazim, who formed the vast majority of Jews in the country, had difficulties believing that their Sephardi neighbors were in fact Jews. Frustrated by their Ashkenazi coreligionists’ refusal to recognize them as Jewish, more than one Sephardi man reported being driven to desperation and contemplating offering proof of his Jewishness to incredulous peers by demonstrating that he was circumcised. The following source, written in the form of an advice-seeking letter, a genre that first appeared in New York in the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts of Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) during this period, describes the various tactics Sephardi immigrants employed to try to gain the recognition and acceptance of their coreligionists. 

To the editor of La Bos del Pueblo: 

I am a Jewish girl born in Russia who came to America eight years ago. Although I am not remarkably well-educated, I have always wanted to marry a well-educated boy of the Jewish faith. 

One of my girlfriends took me to the Oriental ball organized by La Bos del Pueblo, where I met a boy named Jack. . . . 

Plumbing 250 Years of Sephardi History

A new documentary history sheds light on a vibrant culture.

a Q&A with JULIA PHILLIPS COHEN & SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

Sephardi couple from Sarajevo, circa 1900. Public Domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

Inspired by the relative scarcity of information and understanding about Sephardi culture, Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein sought to collect, study, and translate a diverse array of sources by and about Sephardi Jews into a single documentary history. Combining the fruits of their own research with the findings of dozens of colleagues, they compiled over 150 sources originally written in 15 languages and spanning a period of two-and-a-half centuries. Their recently-published volume, Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History 1700-1950, is the result of this undertaking. In light of its publication, we wanted to ask them a few questions about what it was like to work on a project of this scope.

 

Q:

Sephardi Lives collates hundreds of years worth of primary source material written by or about Sephardi people—what motivated you to bring these texts together?  

JULIA PHILLIPS COHEN:  A number of years ago, not long after I had first begun teaching, a student in one of my classes approached me at the end of one of our sessions to thank me for assigning so many original, historical documents. I’d never had a student put it this way: she explained that she was grateful to have access to sources crafted by the historical subjects we were studying rather than simply getting scholars’ interpretations of the same sources. Ever since that time I’ve considered primary sources a pedagogical exercise in empowerment—one that allows students to do the work that historians do, including reading between the lines, contextualizing a source, and making links between documents.

Not long after this, some six years ago now, Sarah and I began to discuss the possibility of putting together a documentary history of the modern Sephardi world. The need for such a volume was quite evident to us.

How Does One Invent a Canon?

On collating hundreds of years worth of cultural history.

by JULIA PHILLIPS COHEN & SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

Some six years ago, we began a collaboration with little idea that it would last so long, or yield such rich fruit. Our collaboration was motivated by a single realization:  the bulk of sources by and about the Jewish communities we had dedicated our lives to studying remained inaccessible, to specialists, students and lay readers. Most had never been translated into English, republished (in the case of published works), or (in the case of archival sources) published in any form.

Our goal was to amass a corpus of sources that reflected Sephardi history in all its diversity.

The communities in question were modern Sephardi Jews—descendants of Jews who fled medieval Iberia (modern-day Spain and Portugal) following their expulsion in 1492 and settled in the western portions of the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine. For over four-and-a-half centuries these communities continued to speak and write in their own Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino, an Ibero-Romance language grammatically similar to fifteenth-century Castilian Spanish but encompassing loan words from other Romance languages as well as from Hebrew, Aramaic, and other languages that Sephardim encountered in their new homes, such as Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic languages.

Fútbol in Argentina: A Common Passion for a Country of Immigrants

Fútbol has provided a unique arena for immigrants to immerse themselves in Argentinian culture.

by RAANAN REIN

Colombia's President, Juan Manuel Santos, asked Colombia's soccer coach, the Jewish-Argentine Jose Pekerman, to stay on after leading the national squad to and through the most successful World Cup in history. Pekerman is the most recent example of Jewish Argentines' involvement in football since its early days in South America.

There was no Hank Greenberg, Red Auerbach, Moe Berg, or Mark Spitz in Argentina, although this does not mean that no Jews made names for themselves in Argentine sports. Prominent Jewish footballers have included, among others, Leopoldo Bard, the first team captain and president of River Plate; Ezra Sued, a striker on both the Racing and national teams; Aaron Werfiker, stopper on the River and national teams (his fellow players had trouble pronouncing his name, so they called him “Pérez”); Miguel Reznik, who played for Huracán; and, more recently, Juan Pablo Sorín, midfielder for River as well as a Spanish team. All these figures challenge the still very common myth that Jews did not participate in Argentine football.  At any rate, simply buying a ticket to a game, learning the names of all the members of a team, following the sport in the media, or rooting for your favorite team or player was enough to make you an active participant in Argentine popular culture.

Club Atlético Atlanta is a predominantly Jewish fútbol club, and still today a fan favorite for Argentina's Jewish fútbol fans; pictured here in 1936

Most books about Argentine football tend to claim that religious and ethnic differences have not been issues in Argentina's national sports. This claim is not confined to sports history. The fact is that many intellectuals in Latin America reject ethnicity as a significant analytical category (unless they are discussing the indigenous population or people of African descent), even if they themselves are part of an ethnic minority. Thus, football is presented as a channel of social mobility based on talent alone and as the sport that best represents some of the most cherished Argentine values and character traits, irrespective of the players’ ethnic origins.

Remembering Jews in Morocco

It wasn’t until he attended secondary school in Marrakesh that Moroccan native, Aomar Boum met a Jewish person. Though as recently as the 1980s nearly a quarter of a million Jews called Morocco home, the Moroccan Jewish community today hovers just under 4,000 and most young adult Moroccans of Boum’s generation glean what they know of Jewish culture and people from international media.

Now an assistant professor and ethnographer, Boum returned to Morocco to better understand the evolution of public perceptions of Jewish people, and how the vacuum left from the staggering decline of Moroccan Jews has precipitated shifts in public opinion of non-Jewish Moroccans.

Memories of Absence investigates how four successive generations remember the lost Jewish community.

Boum’s ethnographic study, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco engages four generations of Moroccans: the great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and young adults. In the course of his research Boum found that older generations—those for whom Jewish people were familiar neighbors, merchants, and community members—held nuanced opinions about Jews in general, views informed by their own memories.

Expecting some transmission of this familiar knowledge from the older generations to the younger, Boum was surprised to observe instead a rigid stratification of opinion in Moroccan households. The younger generations, more focused on a broader political relationship between Jews and Muslims and informed by media representations, were more likely to subscribe to anti-Semitic discourses, espousing stereotypes about Jewish monopolies on power and control.

In an interview with Tablet Magazine Boum notes

Whether we call them misinformed thoughts or not, these are opinions that are out there and we have to look at them, we have to study them, we have to break them down and explain why people think of them that way. 

These discourses, prevalent in other Middle Eastern and North African countries have been normalized in Morocco, Boum concludes, since the massive emigration of the Moroccan Jewish community.

In this podcast (via Tablet Magazine) Boum discusses his research at greater length—the opinions he encountered, the role of Israel, and implications for the region: 

Start Reading from Memories of Absence »

 

A Q&A with the Jewish Studies editors

What immediately interested you in taking on this series?

Sarah Abrevaya Stein: Helping to steward Stanford University Press’ distinguished Series in Jewish History and Culture allows me to focus on those aspects of academic life all of us wish we had more time to enjoy: books, ideas, and the freshest directions in scholarship.  I feel a personal connection to the series, as its first book was published in 1992, the year I applied to Stanford’s graduate program in Jewish History, where I would train with the series’ founding (and, until now only) editors, Steven Zipperstein and Aron Rodrigue.

David Biale: The excellent work that Steve Zipperstein and Aron Rodrigue did in establishing this series serves as a great foundation to continue and expand their work. I have watched the development of Jewish Studies as a discipline for nearly forty years, refereeing for at least half a dozen presses and serving as a mentor to junior faculty on their books. So, it is of great interest to me to apply those experiences to the development of a Jewish Studies series. 

 

What drew you to Jewish Studies in the first place?

DB: When I was an undergraduate in the late 60s to early 70s, I was very active in Jewish student life at Berkeley and was studying European intellectual history.  It occurred to me in my senior year that I should really combine my personal extracurricular passions with my academic work.  So, I have always pursued projects in my scholarship that have great existential, political and cultural importance to me.

SS: Scholarship, in both its aggravations and its joys, is unavoidably personal, whatever topic you study.  I always introduce my classes by saying that you don’t need a personal connection to a topic to study it:  the goal is to develop one with time, and therefore to read and write with passion and empathy.

Within Jewish Studies, are there any areas of research you think don’t receive the attention they deserve?

SS: More than I can mention, and hopefully more than I can imagine (surprises, after all, keep the enterprise interesting)!  I am eager to see the field of Jewish Studies continue to expand—thinking about places we have not, as scholars, inhabited before, or moments of history that have been overlooked. In my own work, I gravitate to topics that others might dismiss as a footnote, but whose stories can be used to illustrate histories of difference and reframe the larger landscape of Jewish culture.

DB: More and more attention is now being paid to less studied Jewish communities, such as in the Arab world, but there is still much work to be done to bring that subject in line with the attention paid to European Jewish history.  But the future lies in comparative work.

Under your stewardship, where do you hope to see the series go?

DB: I should state first how excited I am to be working together with Sarah Stein, one of the very best of a younger generation of Jewish historians whose work comparing the Sephardic and Ashkenzic paths to modernization is a model for what I would like to see in the series.  Sarah and I understand the steep challenges of academic publishing in an era of shrinking sales.  We hope to acquire scholarly books that speak to a wide audience and that address issues of current urgency and to support the work of young scholars of exceptional promise.

SS: I am committed to the idea of writerly craft.  Academic publishing faces a novel future, and, partly as a result, we are increasingly obligated to think about readers beyond a given, narrow field, and to think of ourselves as writers as well as scholars.  This trend toward a more accessible voice, in my view, is a positive development, even if it may have associated growing pains.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, as well as Vice Chair for Undergraduate Affairs of the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

David Biale is the Emmanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis and the Director of the Davis Humanities Institute.

Stanford UP Welcomes New Series Editors

 

Stanford University Press is excited to announce the new editors for our series Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture:

 David Biale & Sarah Abrevaya Stein

 

 

David and Sarah bring wide-ranging and wonderfully complementary expertise in Jewish Studies to their new posts. Through their own scholarship, they have demonstrated a commitment to a broadly comparative approach to Jewish Studies, bringing the field into productive dialogue with the newest concepts and methods in the historical discipline. David and Sarah will bring this approach to the series to publish books that speak compellingly to a wide audience of scholars and students.

As many of you are aware, Aron Rodrigue and Steven Zipperstein recently stepped down as series editors after two decades of service. Since the inception of the series Steve and Aron have been essential in establishing the series as a home for the finest scholarship on Jewish history and culture. The series published some eighty books under their direction and received numerous awards and accolades.

We are confident that Sarah and David will continue this legacy and will usher in projects that will make long-lasting contributions to scholarship. Stanford University Press is eager to collaborate with them on innovative, ambitious, and influential publications. We extend to them a warm and enthusiastic welcome and hope you will do so as well.

David Biale is the Emmanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University
of California, Davis and the Director of the Davis Humanities Institute. His research interests center on Jewish intellectual and cultural history, European intellectual history, and the history of religion. He is the author or editor of ten books, three of which have won National Jewish Book Awards. He currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Jewish Studies for the Oxford Bibliographies online, editor of the Norton Anthology of the World Religions: Judaism, and project director of a multi-author work on the history of Hasidism.

 

 

 

 

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies, as well as Vice Chair for Undergraduate Affairs of the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her scholarship explores Jewish cultural diversity in the modern period, ranging across the British and French imperial, Russian, American, Ottoman and wide Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and North African settings. She is the author of two award-winning solo-authored books and co-editor of two publications in Stanford's Jewish Studies series: A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Landino Memoir of Sa'adi Besalal a-Levi (co-edited with Aron Rodrigue, 2012) and Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (co-edited with Julia Philips Cohen, 2014). A third book, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, will be published in 2014 with University of Chicago Press.