Ethan B. Katz

Did the Paris Mosque Save Jews?: A Mystery and Its Memory

The 2011 French feature film Les Hommes Libres brought unprecedented attention to the story of the Grand Mosque of Paris as a haven for Jews during the Holocaust. Many press accounts and even “expert” commentaries on the film conveyed an almost breathless enthusiasm and framed it as an invaluable pedagogical tool. Such reactions frequently blurred the line between dramatic fictionalized history and verifiable historical fact. This accelerated a pattern seen in discussions around the story of the mosque from the time it first garnered interest in the early 1990s. This article offers the first scholarly analysis of both the collective memory of the mosque’s efforts to save Jews during the Occupation, and the conflicting historical evidence around this story. The article’s first section argues that discussions of the mosque’s history have reached an impasse between mythology and silent disengagement. The author maintains that three binary historical debates have shaped discussion about the mosque. These debates surround the Vichy syndrome, competing myths of Jews in Muslim lands, and Muslims and the Holocaust. The article’s second half attempts to move beyond these debates by turning to the historical record of the mosque’s conduct in Occupied France. It illuminates the seemingly contradictory choices of the mosque and its rector, Si Kaddour Benghabrit. Benghabrit acted as, all at once, an agent of resistance, collaboration, and accommodation. The history and memory of the Grand Mosque during the Occupation offer important new insights on wartime Muslim-French and Muslim-Jewish relations. The article also sheds light on how Jews, Muslims, and broader French society seek to confront the shifting stakes of the Holocaust and the Second World War in the twenty-first century.

Memory at the Front: The Struggle over Revolutionary Commemoration in Occupied France, 1940-1944

The period of Occupied France presents a striking example of the failure of memory studies thus far to penetrate certain essential questions in French historiography. Despite its paramount importance, the memory of the French Revolution during the Occupation years has received little serious examination. This article argues that the central revolutionary commemoration of le 14 juillet assumed a critical role during the Occupation. Le 14 juillet was the occasion when Vichy, the collaborationists and the Resistance each chose to glorify, qualify or condemn the Revolution. Their respective selected symbols, words, and ceremonies projected narratives of the proper French past and visions for the postwar future that competed for legitimacy. Each year, this anniversary also served to gauge the French public’s response to the conflicting manipulations of the Revolution’s memory, thereby becoming a vital testing ground for the political direction of the nation. Ultimately, the evolution of the holiday’s meaning during the Occupation period had consequences that reached well into the post-war era.

DISPLACED HISTORIANS, DIALECTICAL HISTORIES

For German‐Jewish refugees, the Holocaust and its aftermath produced extremely difficult questions of identity and memory. The considerable literature on German‐Jewish émigré historians has rarely addressed scholars’ efforts to confront such questions, and has particularly neglected the important role of second‐generation refugee historians. This article examines the connection between the experiences, memories and scholarship of two leading second‐generation emigrant historians: George L. Mosse and Peter Gay. As children, Mosse and Gay lived the Goethian Germany of Bildung, and then fled as the same Germany produced the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Each went on to write important work on the life and death of the modern German‐Jewish community. This article contends that Mosse and Gay thus shared a unique combination of intimacy and distance regarding German and German‐Jewish history. Such a combination and a correspondent status of insider‐outsider made Mosse’s and Gay’s lives and perspectives paradigmatic of the dialectical paths of Germany in the twentieth century.