Lacunas and Triangulation : The Yidisher Arbeter Sport Klub (YASK) and French Jewish Sports History

Résumé 0

Historians of French sport can attest to the lacunas of historical archives. Most interwar sporting life was not considered noteworthy and so it was not preserved in state institutions. Similarly, historians of Jewish life have also often looked towards local organizational records to recapture the social life of their membership. However, many Jewish institutions, especially sporting organizations, did not leave behind comprehensive records. So how do scholars overcome the physical gap in the archives? Through an exploration of the history of the Yidisher arbeter sport klub (YASK) primarily during the interwar period, this article uses Danna Agmon’s theoretical interventions to better understand how scholars might identify, understand, and overcome the absences, dispersals, and destructions of the archives related to Jewish sports history. In doing so, it points out the physical, epistemological, and historiographic gaps in the scholarly record, demonstrates the global diffusion of documents related to YASK, which exist in repositories in France, the United States, and Israel, and suggests the possibility for non-textual sources to open future research.