Les juifs dans les manuels scolaires d'histoire en France : une minorité dans la mémoire nationale
Examines the portrayal of Jews in French history textbooks between 1870 and the present. Pp. 111-122 deal with the presentation of the Dreyfus Affair, and pp. 122-126 with the description of French antisemitism. Ch. 6 (pp. 137-174), "Face à la Shoah", traces differences in treatment of the Shoah in textbooks of the 1960s-70s as compared with those of the 1980s-90s. Regarding the Dreyfus Affair, notes that textbooks recognized antisemitism as the force behind the events only in the interwar period. Until then, textbooks either ignored Dreyfus's Jewish identity or failed to connect the affair to hatred of the Jews. Regarding French antisemitism, the textbooks began to admit its existence only in the 1950s, and then it was connected to French nationalism and to the extreme Right. In the 1980s, the texts admitted that antisemitism had many supporters in France in the 1930s, within both the Left and the Right. World War II was introduced as a subject in French schools only in the 1960s, with a focus on military operations. In the 1980s, the perspective changed and the books began to tackle sensitive issues, e.g. Vichy's collaboration, the concentration camps, and the genocide of the Jews, including its uniqueness. By the end of the decade, Vichy's role in the Shoah was acknowledged. Concludes that French textbooks mainly deal with the Jews in the context of the Dreyfus Affair and the Shoah, and hold them at arm's length; therefore, they appear as "objects" of history. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Print Book, French, ©2011
Harmattan, Paris, ©2011