TBA
“Jewish Suffering in the Global Humanitarian Imagination: The Camps of Unoccupied France” | Carolyn Dean, Yale University
France and the World Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center
This talk will focus on a pre-circulated paper. Please write to Hannah Frydman (hfrydman@fas.harvard.edu) to request it.
How did everyday racism and antisemitism become so routine and normalized that civic death and even genocidal murder become imaginable? How did the precariousness of Jewish life become so unremarkable that most of a population came to accept a future in which there would be no more Jews? Such questions are usually answered by reference to broad patterns of technocracy, instrumentalization, and the malignancy of fascist ideas, or to the predictable if regrettable behavior of ordinary people. This essay is part of a project that argues that the category “bystander,” if rethought, might account for popular complicity in genocidal violence rather than simply operating as such a fluid category that it cannot define with clarity those who belong to it. The essay analyzes how rabbis, under the aegis of both the Consistoire (the communal institution overseeing Jewish religious affairs) and other secular Jewish groups worked with a wide array of Christian aid organizations, including the YMCA and the Quakers. They provided religious services, food, and comfort mostly to foreign Jews as they were being deported from concentration camps near Toulouse in August and September of 1942. I don’t treat the participation in deportation as a function of administrative logic, the inability to imagine the fate that awaited the Jews, or the inevitable complicity of politically neutral humanitarians with state-aligned perpetrators. Instead, I use multiple eyewitness accounts to focus on how Christian humanitarians, many of whom eventually engaged in resistance, assisted in the deportations while also knowing, albeit without being entirely certain, that the victims were likely being sent to their deaths. In so doing, I explore how they and Jewish groups each experienced the deportations and understood their actions. The radical differences between their perceptions distinguishes the “not knowing” of bystanders from the “not knowing” of victims.
About the Speaker
Carolyn J. Dean is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale. She is the author of books on French cultural and intellectual history and Holocaust memory, most recently The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell, 2019).
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of History, and France and the World Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center.