Bernard Dov Cooperman, “Review of ‘The Jews of Europe after the Black Death by Anna Foa’, by Andrea Grover,” AJS Review 27:2 (November 2003): 334-335 (original) (raw)
Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2017
department of russian and east european Studies, charles university, prague, czech republic Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winner, journalist and activist originally from Romania who survived Nazi extermination camps, noted in his speech at the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1995, the uniqueness of the occasion with the following words: ' After Auschwitz, the human condition is not the same, nothing will be the same. ' 1 By now, the Holocaust has become a cultural trauma that has left its indelible imprints beyond Southeast Europe. As Jeffrey Alexander suggests, it changed collective cultural consciousness and permanently marked both the Jewish community and the majority society (Alexander et al. 2004, 1). In this way, the Holocaust demonstrates a very specific example of collective destruction, 'the apocalypse of genocide' (Moses 2011, 91), which uniquely influenced the perception of a common trans-nationalized European past (Diner 2003, 36-44) based on the experience of joint trauma. In 2005, the United Nations designated the 27th of January as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, and the EU immediately and fully supported the resolution. While some scholars describe the experience of the Holocaust as possibly the 'paradigmatic European lieu de mémoire' for Europe (Assmann 2007, 13), others go so far as to portray the event simultaneously as one-of-a-kind and general, unique and universal, fully unexplainable and a precedent to learn from (Chaumont 1997; Lagrou 2011, 281-288). Nonetheless, as the existing research confirms, this topic did not get enough reflection in the academic sphere within some countries struck by the Holocaust, let alone local public discourses. Southeast European states indisputably belong among the countries that still struggle to come to terms with their past. Reasons for this could be found not only in the marginalization of formerly important Jewish communities, since the vast majority were annihilated, but also in the installation of non-democratic regimes after WWII. Though not the only ones, Balkan states attempted to suppress the exclusively Jewish experience involved in the memory of the Holocaust to a degree. Jews were, as elsewhere in Europe, incorporated among the victims of a collective national suffering (Lagrou 2005, 13-15), which obscured the uniqueness of the Holocaust and generalized the persecution of Nazi victims. Historically speaking, Jewish studies on Southeast Europe go much further back than the Holocaust. 2 As American political scientist Daniel J. Elazar wrote in the very first synthetic book about Jews in the Balkans, including their fate after WWII, the Balkan Peninsula is a region with the longest history of Jewish settlement in Europe dating back to the Second