Collective memory: a living, breathing gift from the past, less fragmentary than the recollections of any one individual, more personal by far than "history." The authors of Jewish Memories saw in the large numbers of Jews who migrated to France during the twentieth century the chance to retrieve a past that might otherwise be lost forever. Through dozens of interviews, they listened to men and women talking of their lives and the places they came from, and found an almost uncanny resonance of individual voices with one another. Individual memories became part of a shared memory, projecting major themes of the Jewish tradition—exile and the sense of loss, the duty to remember, and the transmission of Jewish experience to the next generations. Hélène H. tells of dropping the all-important family teakettle during a terrified race to escape skirmishing soldiers. Charles H. talks about the innocent love he shared with a non-Jewish girl who studied with him. Anna D. describes her wordless reunion with her wounded husband after World War II. From communities now disappeared, scenes of home and family life, occupations, happy times and holidays reinforce one another, and we can feel the painful nostalgia for a kind of existence no longer possible. Two distinct but parallel sets of memories run through the narrative, that of Sephardi and that of Ashkenazi Jews, all of whom found their way to France. They arrived from Tunisia, Turkey, Poland, and Russia, from poor and well-to-do families, almost always driven from their homes by difficult circumstances, often with their most recent memories filled with horror and tragedy. The desire to remember it all and to pass it on to others who will also remember shines from every page, and makes this book as memorable for general readers as it is valuable for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians.

Jewish Memories

Wachtel, Nathan

VALENSI, Lucette

Biographies & Memoirs

University of California Press

In her graceful account of the transformation of European attitudes toward the Ottoman empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lucette Valensi follows the genealogy of the concept of Oriental despotism. The Birth of the Despot examines a crucial moment in the long and ambiguous encounter between the Christian and Islamic worlds: the period after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, when Venice's pursuit of its commercial and maritime interests brought two powerful protagonists―Venice and the Sublime Porte―face-to-face. Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha Triumphans, in which Judith liberates her besieged town by killing the Turk Holofernes, serves as the organizing metaphor in Valensi's study of how Venice's perceptions of its rival changed. Valensi shows how Venice's initial admiration for the sultan and his orderly empire metamorphosed into revulsion at a monstrous tyrant.

The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte

History

Europe

Cornell University Press

On the Eve of Colonialism: North Africa Before the French Conquest

Africa

Holmes & Meier Pub

Africana Pub

The Last Arab Jews: The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia (Routledge Library Editions: North Africa)

The once numerous and vital Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have disappeared, succumbing during the past century to the assimilating temptations of French culture, or, more recently, to the pressures of migration. Only the two communities of the island of Jerba still remain. Only they have succeeded in maintaining and reproducing their religious and social institutions, in adjusting to the new realities around them while preserving intact their cultural, communal identity. This lavishly-illustrated book, first published in 1984, portrays the life and history of two Jerban Jewish villages and explores the paradoxes of their continuity. How and why are they so fully Jewish while, at the same time, so thoroughly embedded in their Muslim, North African environment? Although its focus is one small ethnic group, the implications of this study extend to the broad subject of relations between Arabs and Jews in modern times.

Udovitch, Abraham L.

Perez, Jacques

Reference

Routledge

The once numerous and vital Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have disappeared, succumbing during the past century to the assimilating temptations of French culture, or, more recently, to the pressures of migration. Only the two communities of the island of Jerba still remain. Only they have succeeded in maintaining and reproducing their religious and social institutions, in adjusting to the new realities around them while preserving intact their cultural, communal identity. This lavishly-illustrated book, first published in 1984, portrays the life and history of two Jerban Jewish villages and explores the paradoxes of their continuity. How and why are they so fully Jewish while, at the same time, so thoroughly embedded in their Muslim, North African environment? Although its focus is one small ethnic group, the implications of this study extend to the broad subject of relations between Arabs and Jews in modern times.

The recent wave of interest in oral history and return to the active subject as a topic in historical practice raises a number of questions about the status and function of scholarly history in our societies. This articles in this volume, originally pubished in 1990, and which originally appeared in History and Anthropology, Volume 2, Part 2, discuss what contributions, meanings and consequences emerge from scholarly history turning to living memory, and what the relationships are between history and memory.

Between Memory and History (Routledge Library Editions: Historiography)

Co-édité avec les Éditions Déméter (Tunis), l’ouvrage richement illustré retrace l’histoire d’un artisanat méditerranéen d’une extraordinaire richesse en même temps que le parcours d’une famille remarquable. Les « fils de Jacob Chemla », fut un cas unique d’une entreprise juive engagée dans la production de céramique d’art, une activité régulièrement exercée exclusivement par les musulmans depuis le Moyen-Âge. Les Chemla l’ont revivifiée et l’ont inscrit durablement dans l’art et le paysage tunisiens. Des années 1860 à la fin du 20e siècle, c’est l’aventure de cette entreprise unique que le livre présente, en même temps que le souvenir d’une Tunisie plurielle que la nouvelle Constitution du pays tente, avec bien des di cultés et bien desefforts, de faire revivre.

UN SIECLE DE CERAMIQUE D'ART EN TUNISIE

CHEMLA, Jacques

GOFFARD, Monique

Arts & Photography

ECLAT

Fellahs tunisiens: L'économie rurale et la vie des campagnes aux 18e et 19e siècles (Civilisations et Sociétés, 45) (French Edition)

Walter de Gruyter

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