This book is not a collection of good jokes, although it contains an armful of them. To repeat them in society, we will wait for a gentler period, which would not refer to anti-Semitic ignominy or the summons to choose one’s side in a desperate conflict. The Last Jewish History (Denoël, 192 pages, 18 euros), told by sociologist Michel Wieviorka, is less in the humorous register than in historical analysis, while methodically exploring what links one to the other. Noting that Belgian (or Corsican) stories do not particularly make those interested laugh and are not invented by them, he sets out to define the specificity of Jewish stories and what distinguishes them from anti-Semitic stories.
Preferably told by Jews, or in their presence in a context of mutual goodwill, these stories “must be heard with understanding by non-Jews” and are “based on the hypothesis of empathy”. If these conditions are not met, then there is a risk of falling into falsely innocent anti-Semitic connivance. Punctuated with the author’s personal references, because it is not indifferent to come from a Polish family decimated by the Shoah, this work transcends them by surveying the geography where the singular genre of Jewish humor unfolds, woven with mischievous insolence in the face of misfortune, self-deprecation, a sense of the absurd and a reversal of prejudices.
End of a golden age
From the vanished universe shtetlthese Jewish villages of Eastern Europe before Nazism, centers of Yiddish culture, the reader is taken to the Parisian district of Sentier, where the schmattès, an activity of making and trading clothes first practiced by Ashkenazim before the Sephardim, who came from North Africa, took over. But these references are quickly placed in a broader framework. The author identifies a “climax” Jewish stories: the last three decades of the 20th centurye century, corresponding to a surge in identity, in a positive and cultural sense, first in the United States then later in France.
On the American side, this flowering is marked by a strong presence of Jewish humor in the media, cinema and literature, around famous names like Philip Roth or Woody Allen and the recurring characters of the “New York Jew” and the “Jewish mother”. This period of rather happy visibility, started in France with the success of the film The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob (1973), will come up against in both countries, with variations, the common phenomena which are the resurgence of anti-Semitism, the competitive claim of the status of victims by other communities and the contestation of Israeli policy.
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