La recherche sur la Shoah : existe-t-il une « école israélienne » ?

Résumé 0

This article shows that a particular school of Holocaust studies did indeed develop in Israel, with clear lineaments and distinct leaders. This “Israeli School” was a new avatar of the “Jerusalem School” of Jewish history, as it evolved during the 1920s and 1930s at the Hebrew University. It emphasizes the Jews as a living collective and views anti-Semitism as an existential datum of European culture that also explains the Holocaust. This school did not emerge or congregate at Yad Vashem, but rather – on account of developments there in the late 1950s – at the Hebrew University, in the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, from which it extended some limbs to other institutions as well. After these foundations had been laid in the 1950s, Bauer and Gutman were its chief molders from the 1960s to the 1980s, surrounded by other scholars at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and they raised a new generation of researchers. Leni Yahil’s comprehensive book on the Holocaust can be viewed as the archetypal product of the school, but there are other prominent research models, too – on Jewish communities (most of them in Eastern Europe) as integral entities, on Jewish reactions under Nazi rule and elsewhere (with the accent on Jewish organization of all stripes), and on the successful rehabilitation of the survivors after the Holocaust. Jewish testimonies are central to this school. Many Holocaust scholars with other approaches, some of them with international reputation, have worked and continue to be active in Israel (Saul Friedländer, Uriel Tal, Avraham Barkai, Omer Bartov, Dan Diner, etc.). Nevertheless, the school the article describes did manage to entrench itself as the Israeli School, and is so perceived both within Israel and abroad. There is no doubt that this status derives from the scholarly and personal vitality of Bauer and Gutman, which brought them frequent invitations from institutions abroad and created broad research ties with institutions there, especially after Holocaust studies “took off” in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. These traits attracted many students to them, from both Israel and overseas and gave them major influence on Israeli school curricula.