Shirli Gilbert: Attendance at Lessons & Legacies XVII: “Languages of the Holocaust” conference (14-17 Nov 2024)
Aleksandra Jakubczak: Daughters, Migrants, (Sex)Workers: Prostitution in the World of East European Jewry
Rosa de Jong: Attendance at Lessons & Legacies XVII: “Languages of the Holocaust” conference (14-17 Nov 2024)
Claire Leibovich: Healing from Violence: The Semite’s Body in Denis Guénoun’s Writing on the Algerian War
Irina Nicorici: Jews and the Politics of Citizenship in Romania, 1938-1948
Silvia Pin: Beyond Shanghai: Holocaust refugees in North China and Manchuria, 1933-1948
Julie Reich: Archival research on Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi and Sarah Kofman
Shirli Gilbert
Attendance at Lessons & Legacies XVII: “Languages of the Holocaust” conference (14-17 Nov 2024)
I was grateful to receive support from the EAJS small research grant fund to attend this year’s Lessons and Legacies conference. The meeting took place from 14-17 November 2024 in Claremont and Los Angeles, California, hosted by Claremont McKenna College and the University of Southern California. Lessons and Legacies is one of the most important conferences in Holocaust Studies and it is an important forum for keeping abreast of the latest scholarship and connecting with colleagues in the field.
In addition to traditional conference panels consisting of papers and Q&A, Lessons and Legacies offers the seminar format, in which a group of scholars focused on a single theme pre-circulate papers and gather for 1.5 hours each day of the conference for discussion of their work. The seminar in which I participated was titled ‘The Holocaust: Global, Imperial, and Postcolonial Approaches’, and it brought together a group of 10 scholars examining intersections of the Holocaust with the histories of regions in the global South. I offered a paper on British colonial Africa, focusing on the arrival of refugees in South Africa, northern and southern Rhodesia, Swaziland, and British east Africa in the 1930s and 40s. Papers were also offered on Jewish refugees arriving in Puerto Rica, Ecuador, India, Jamaica, Suriname, Curacao, Shanghai, and the Dutch West Indies, by scholars at various career levels hailing from across the US, Europe, and China.
During our discussions we discussed at length the similarities and differences between our case studies. While attending to the distinctive political, social, cultural, and economic contexts in each place, we also noticed some important common themes beginning to emerge: the issue of Jewish refugees’ ambiguous ‘whiteness’ in colonial spaces, and how they navigated their in-betweenness in colonial hierarchies; the challenge of how to access relations between Jewish refugees and the diverse local populations with whom they engaged (colonial representatives, native populations, existing Jewish communities, ‘white’ society); the challenges of identifying source materials, which are often haphazardly dispersed across continents (mirroring in some ways the dispersal of their subjects); and many others. The seminar also engaged some core theoretical questions: How does the ‘postcolonial’ shift in scholarship impact study of the Holocaust? What kinds of theoretical and methodological approaches can inform our integration of the Holocaust with local and regional histories of the global South? How can we work with scholars in other fields – refugee and migration studies, gender studies, refugee history, imperial history – to enrich our work?
In addition to attending the seminar on each day of the conference, I also attended many fascinating sessions including Digital Humanities-focused sessions on using mapping technologies such as ArcGIS and QGIS. There were also two keynote addresses – one by literary scholar Sara Horowitz, and the other by historian Christopher Browning – and two plenary panels facilitating debate about what it means to be studying the Holocaust at this fraught historical moment.
The conference was an enriching and stimulating experience, and I am grateful to the EAJS for financial support that enabled me to attend.
Aleksandra Jakubczak
Daughters, Migrants, (Sex)Workers: Prostitution in the World of East European Jewry
In early July 2025, I visited the Amtsbibliotek at Landespolizdirektion in Vienna, Austria, to complement the previously collected documents from the National Archives in Cracow and the Stadt- und Staat-Archiv in Vienna, which shed light on migratory prostitution and an organized network of trafficking through Austro-Hungarian borders. The Amtsbibliotek holds Austrian police documents on the trafficking of women and prostitution in Habsburg Galicia that are crucial for completing my current book project.
The project, tentatively called Daughters, Migrants, (Sex)Workers: Prostitution in the World of East European Jewry, explores how prostitution constituted a conscious labor strategy for Jewish women and was inextricably connected to the migration of East European Jewry. Unconventionally, my book examines together areas of Jewish settlement that were governed by different states – Austro-Hungary and Tsarist Russia. By comparing Jewish women’s mobility and labor strategies in both places, I reveal that, against previous suppositions, the disproportionate participation of Jews in the sex industry was not the result of Russian antisemitism and persecution, but rather an intentional strategy to navigate a dramatically changing economic landscape. Daughters, Migrants, (Sex)Workers locates sex work, a state-recognized occupation in most nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe, within the broader context of the regional and global economy, labor, and migration patterns between 1870 and 1939. This book argues that members of Eastern European Jewish society did not necessarily marginalize and ostracize women who sold sex. In fact, their experiences illuminate how economic, labor, and migration pressures shaped the Jewish minority. Examining Jewish sex workers at various stages of their lives (young in their twenties and as mature as their late thirties and forties, single, married, divorced) and in multiple contexts (in the labor market, and migration routes) this book provides new perspectives on Eastern European Jewish families, marriage, household economy, and women’s emancipation.
As this project tells a truly transnational story, it relies on a variety of sources spread out through the world’s libraries and archives – ranging from police records, statistics of prostitution, letters penned by sex workers, pimps, brothel keepers and their relatives, correspondence between Polish ministries, Austrian and Polish consulates, and Jewish aid organizations, Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew press. Drawing on materials from numerous archives in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Israel, Austria, the United States, and Argentina, Daughters, Migrants, (Sex)Workers reveals that sex work belonged to a larger repertoire of strategies used by East European Jews facing economic transformation and legal restrictions on their movement and occupational opportunities. In many ways, prostitution resembled other economic endeavors Jews undertook during this period, such as juggling between various seasonal jobs and traveling to different towns and cities for temporary work.
Sources for Habsburg Galicia are divided into numerous archives – Cracow, Lviv, and Vienna. I have attempted to access the Amtsbibliotek on my previous visits in Vienna, but because it is part of a local police station, the use of the holdings is far different from a regular visit to public archives. During my visit, I read and extensively photocopied reports from the Viennese Central Police Offices, produced between 1889 and 1907, as well as correspondence between Viennese headquarters and the branches of the Austrian police in Lviv and Cracow, and the consulates in Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and Bombay. These materials provide invaluable information about various Russian and Galician Jews who moved around in the region as well as outside Europe to sell sex or to procure others to do so. Thanks to the collected documents in Vienna, I am able to follow various individuals who cross borders, but not in the obvious directions that have been studied by earlier scholars – the United States. They moved from Russia to Habsburg Galicia and from there traveled to such distant places as Bombay, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, or Montevideo.
While I cannot determine how much I will gain from the materials collected, given that I have always had difficulty accessing these holdings and that the archivist allowed me to view numerous boxes with thousands of pages, I am very satisfied with my research trip.
Following my visit, in the upcoming months, I will closely study the photocopied materials and put information about individuals into my database. I collect in various archives elements of the life journeys of various traffickers and sex workers. Thanks to this painstaking research, I can provide my book readers with lively and detailed descriptions of individuals, rather than generalizing about a group. Already from looking through the pages on the spot, I have noticed familiar names, such as that of Isaac Schaefferstein, who stood trial in Lviv in 1892 for belonging to a trafficking gang. The materials in the archives come from a later period, hence shedding light on what happened with the protagonists of the highly publicized trial. The results of this research trip will be incorporated into my book Daughters, Migrants, (Sex)Workers: Prostitution in the World of East European Jewry, which I plan to submit for review to Cornell University Press this winter.
Rosa de Jong
Attendance at Lessons & Legacies XVII: “Languages of the Holocaust” conference (14-17 Nov 2024)
I used the Small Research Grant Program to travel to Los Angeles to present my paper ‘Echoes Across Empire: Caribbean Refuge and the Reimagining of Holocaust Histories’ at the Lessons and Legacies XVII conference, themed “Languages of the Holocaust.” Hosted at Claremont McKenna College and the University of Southern California in LA, this four-day event featured seminars, panels, workshops, and two keynotes. My primary aim was to engage with scholars working on similar themes, present my research, and gain valuable feedback on the methodological and theoretical frameworks underlying my dissertation.
The specific seminar I participated in, “The Holocaust: Global, Imperial and Postcolonial Approaches”, examined the experiences of Jewish refugees in diverse global contexts. This lens was particularly relevant to my research, as it highlights lesser-known refugee narratives, illuminates cross-cultural exchanges, and investigates how colonial and imperial policies shaped Jewish survival and resettlement during and after World War II.
The seminar participants’ topics spanned diverse geographic regions, including Ecuador, China, India, Argentina, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Puerto Rico. During the seminar, we debated pre-circulated research papers, which provided rich material for comparative discussions. Its structure allowed for intensive scholarly engagement. The seminar group convened three times during the conference to discuss pre-circulated papers. Each session included a detailed discussion of three to four papers, allowing us to delve deeply into shared themes, challenges, and methodologies. On Friday, we joined forces with another seminar group, “Teaching Holocaust Studies with Refugee Studies: Global Perspectives,” to explore how these histories are and should be taught in contemporary contexts.
On Saturday, I presented my research at the University of Southern California (USC) campus. The seminar participants provided invaluable feedback, particularly on the challenges of reconstructing local perspectives on refugee groups. These insights will directly inform the introduction of my dissertation, which I am currently revising.
Aside from the seminar sessions, I attended many other panels and workshops. These are just two examples of gatherings that are useful for my research. The panel titled ‘“Del Holocausto también se habla en español”: Testimonies, Memorials, and Commemorations in Latin America’. Discussions this panel revealed significant thematic overlaps, such as the shared difficulties of accessing archival material and sensitivities in colonial spaces about comparisons of the Holocaust. Especially the paper about the history of the Holocaust and Holocaust education in Guatemala was gripping. The second, the workshop ‘Placing Photographs as Holocaust Research: The “Language” of the Visual in Digital and Analog Forms’ enriched my understanding of using photographs to model spaces (in this workshop camps). As my dissertation takes a spacial approach, I was grateful to be engaging with this highly current research.
To be able to participate in this seminar was an incredibly enriching experience for my research. In the Netherlands, debate about colonial spaces in Holocaust Studies are still in its infancy. This international context brought together, for the first time, historians from different backgrounds to discuss the field of Global Holocaust. I plan to incorporate the comparative perspectives discussed into the introduction and theoretical framework. Additionally, the seminar group has created a mailing list to facilitate future collaboration.
A longer-term shared project discussed during the seminar involves mapping global Jewish refugee movements and examining unfulfilled resettlement plans, particularly in the (former) colonies. This initiative could also investigate the development of alternative Zionisms in colonial contexts, but its realization depends on securing funding and further conceptual development.
I extend my deepest gratitude to the European Association of Jewish Studies for providing the funding that made my participation in this conference possible. I also thank the organizers of the Lessons and Legacies XVII conference, especially the seminar organizers Atina Grossmann, Sandra Gruner-Domić, and Pragya Kaul, for creating such an intellectually stimulating environment.
Claire Leibovich
Healing from Violence: The Semite’s Body in Denis Guénoun’s Writing on the Algerian War
My archival trip to Paris was part of a research project entitled “Healing from Violence: The Semite’s Body in Denis Guénoun’s Writing on the Algerian War”. This research project constitutes the final chapter of my PhD thesis, which explores literary approaches to the “Jewish question” in Francophone postcolonial Jewish literature from North Africa. It has also resulted in an article which I aim to publish in a peer-review journal such as French Studies.
Denis Guénoun (b. 1946) is a French Algerian-born Jewish philosopher, actor, stage director, and playwright. Along with numerous plays and essays, Guénoun wrote a novel entitled Un sémite (2003) that tells of the author’s Algerian Jewish family history across the twentieth century. The narrative focuses on the father’s experience as a drafted soldier during World War II, the narrator’s childhood in Oran in the wake of the Algerian War of Independence, and the family’s departure to France following the bombing of their house in 1961, one year before the declaration of Algeria’s independence.
My research project examines how colonial violence shapes and dysregulates the relationship between body and language in Un sémite. Ultimately, I argue that Un sémite is a literary attempt to heal the relationship between the traumatized body and language. It does so by incorporating the body’s experience in writing through formal strategies such as embodied writing and theatrical practices. Inasmuch as Un sémite places the body at the centre of its thinking on colonialism, which had an impact on Jewish-Muslim relationships in North Africa and beyond, the body is also key in the novel’s reimagining of Jewish-Muslim relationships in the context of Algerian independence. The novel’s insistence on a Jewish-Muslim physical commonality sets the ground to include both Jews and Muslims in its attempts to recover individual and political expression through a reappropriation of the body’s modes of expression. Thus, the creative and political recovery of the racist term of “the Semite” includes both colonized indigenous North African Jews and Muslims through a mythologized physical commonality, but also a freely chosen political alliance against the violence of colonial oppression.
The body-language relationship, then, is an important theme in Guénoun’s work, and it is central to the argument I make in my analysis of Un sémite. Understanding Guénoun’s philosophy of theatre, and in particular how he relates theatre to the political, was an important step to completing my research project.
The objective of my research trip was to gather material on Guénoun’s work in theatre that is only available in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). In Paris, I visited two libraries that are part of the BnF. First, I scanned Guénoun’s out-of-print essays at the Bibliothèque Tolbiac. These include Lettre au directeur du théâtre (1996), Le théâtre est-il nécessaire (1997), and Relation, entre théâtre et philosophie (1997). Then, I visited the Denis Guénoun archives situated in the Département des Arts du spectacle at the Bibliothèque Richelieu. These archives, provided by Guénoun himself, hold audio, video, as well as written documents. I was especially keen to discover the contents of the archives, as the descriptions online were vague or non-existent, and for the most part did not permit me to identify or situate the documents. The written documents are constituted of article clippings and press reviews. The audiovisual documents include radio and television interviews, recordings of plays and performances, and other miscellaneous recordings (music, television shows, family holidays).
My research trip’s objectives were achieved; however, they were somewhat disappointing. On the one hand, I was able to scan and read important essays by Guénoun as well as articles and interviews of him that are not available online and helped me develop a clearer conception of his philosophy of theatre and his political thinking. The audiovisual documents allowed me to gain a more comprehensive understanding of Guénoun as a thinker and artist, as it demonstrated his multidisciplinary interests in music, German philosophy, experimental theatre, and theology.
The recording of Guénoun’s talk at a conference on the student riots in France in May 1968 was particularly enlightening. In this recording, Guénoun explains that his experience as a politically active student during “Mai 68” is what led him to work in theatre. He describes the affinity between political commitment and the fundamental act of theatre, which is to assemble somewhere – “le rassemblement”. For him, the primary question that theatre asks is “who are we?” However, theatre does not attempt to establish a stable collective identity, but rather it is interested in exploring what connects us now, in this moment. Here, Guénoun’s line of thinking is relevant in my analysis of his novel Un sémite, which examines and reimagines relationships between Jewish and Muslim Algerians.
On the other hand, I was unsuccessful in finding audio or video recordings of performances that would have been useful to analyze for my project. For instance, I was hoping to find public readings of Un sémite, a recording of its dramatic adaptation or of plays that are closely related to the narrative and themes explored in the novel, such as Scène (2000). Nonetheless, this research trip constituted an essential step in my research project, as the material I gathered helped me understand and situate more rigorously Guénoun’s work in theatre, his political and philosophical thinking. Furthermore, this material will allow me to develop future research projects on representations of the body in North African Jewish literature.
Irina Nicorici
Jews and the Politics of Citizenship in Romania, 1938-1948
My project examines the key role of citizenship in the evolution of Romania’s antisemitic policies in one particularly violent decade, 1938-1948. I focus on the top-down policies and practices of denaturalization from below, starting from 1938 when, in parallel with Germany, Italy, and France, Romanian government officials redefined the legal boundaries of belonging for the Jews residing in the kingdom. Swiftly and brutally, 200,000+ Romanian Jews lost access to economic benefits, educational opportunities, business permits, residency, property ownership, and other civil protections. During my research trips to Romania, I centered their voices and experiences and collected unique, previously underused primary materials to investigate how, and to what consequences, they became stateless and how they reacted to such exclusions. My research suggests that, instead of passively accepting their reduced opportunities, some Romanian Jews sought creative solutions to sudden statelessness, protested, and even defied systemic persecutions.
I started reconstructing their fraught stories from denaturalization records produced by the Romanian Ministry of Justice, held at the National Archives in Bucharest, collection 2383 (Citizenship Verification Commission, 1923-1948), which contained administrative instructions, citizenship review committee deliberations, denaturalization records, and reports. These folders included the most high-profile official papers which were prepared for, reviewed or signed by the initiators of citizenship revisions, the top dogs of Romanian political power at the time, Kings Carol II and Mihai I and General Ion Antonescu himself, the main perpetrator of violence in Romania during WWII. During their reigns, each signed citizenship decrees, issued various naturalization orders, or drafted special notes because the final executive authority on the matters of Romanian citizenship rested in their hands. Encountering these names was somewhat unexpected yet undeniably memorable for me as I assumed citizenship had not been their domain of direct control and the authoritarian rulers delegated the matters of citizenship rights to subordinates or executive offices. The yellowed pages viscerally unsettled me at times when I reflected not only on the content of texts and inked notations but also on who in fact produced, touched, signed, or read them before me.
I found access to a different cast of actors in the drama of Romanian citizenship through a set of folders of Inter-Agency Correspondence, collections 1176 and 2386 (Ministry of Justice, Correspondence, 1917-1943), also at the National Archives in Bucharest, which yielded a treasure trove of complaint letters from the 1938 policy’s direct subjects – Romanian Jews writing in their own voices, hands, and names, including ordinary residents, Jewish community leaders, lawyers, and other advocates or institutions, who initiated appeals or simply questioned citizenship exclusions. My objective was to decipher the appeals processes and document individual responses to statelessness. To my knowledge, the records of legal defiance and individual survival narratives I found have never been examined or published. They hold an unprecedented potential as evidence of agency among affected Jewish populations for those interested in the Holocaust in Romania and proved invaluable for my project. They were also my favorite to read and trace, even if the fates of some letter writers proved tragic. Losing a citizenship revision appeal could lead to catastrophic consequences or produce high-risk vulnerabilities such as arrest or deportation to forced labor camps in Transnistria. My new archival findings suggest these outcomes were frequent. In a few exceptional cases, I was able to reconstruct the legal pathways of petitioners from 1938 in Romania to their applications as Holocaust survivors for Yad-Vashem in Israel in 1986, with rich documentation detailing the complexity of their citizenship woes.
I was also interested in the actions of mid-level agents charged with putting the denaturalization decrees into action and examined the key files of Police Directorate (1919-1952) in two major cities with significant Jewish populations before the war, Bucharest (100,000 Jewish residents, 10% of total population) and Iasi (50,000 Jews, 50% of total city population). I sifted through the mundane law enforcement papers in the National Archives in Bucharest and in the Municipal Archives of Bucharest and Iasi to extract only those related to citizenship matters between 1938-1948, which absorbed a lot of my time and effort. The aim here was to shed new light on the rarely visible perpetrators’ perspectives, how ordinary officers interpreted, justified, or reported on the legal and physical violence they were ordered to carry out against the Jews. I also wanted to identify criteria used by local administrators for citizenship determinations and detect variations in local implementation of denaturalization policies.
I am grateful that EAJS gave me a unique boost to pursue this research and collect previously unknown materials. Locating and direct contact with these sources would not have been possible otherwise. None of the records I worked with were digitized or available online. They were not explicitly “Jewish” and thus have not been of interest to scholars of Holocaust. Yet, I can now confirm that the records on Jewish citizenship and statelessness are abundant in Romania, and future researchers will have plenty more to explore and bring to light. The sheer volume of documents I accessed seemed so overwhelming that I left aside my initial interest in exploring the link between citizenship exclusions and migrations abroad to prioritize the victims’ and survivors’ stories, for now. I encountered no logistical constraints or any processing delays. Even with my multi-archival research strategy, my visits to Romania ran smoothly. I enjoyed excellent staff assistance and onsite conditions, free access to primary records. Some advance preparation and planning was necessary such as contacting the repositories, applying for permits, examining archival catalogs and finding aids before submitting my orders, and paying modest fees for photo camera use.
Silvia Pin
Beyond Shanghai: Holocaust refugees in North China and Manchuria, 1933-1948
The project Beyond Shanghai: Holocaust Refugees in North China and Manchuria, 1933-1948 aims to investigate the history of Holocaust refugees in North China and Manchuria by studying their escape and years of residence in Harbin, Tientsin (Tianjin), Tsingtao (Qingdao), and Dairen (Dalian), as well as their transit through Manchuria in 1940-1941, en route to their final overseas destinations. The aims of the research mission to Washington D.C. and New York were to consult and gather primary sources held at the USHMM and YIVO, in order to draw a richer picture of the arrival, life conditions, relations with local populations and Jewish communities, and further destinations of emigration of the refugees. The material included reports and correspondence of Jewish aid agencies working to inform and assist refugees fleeing to China, and family collections produced by refugees who spent wartime in one of these cities.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington D.C.
The archives of the Far Eastern Jewish Central Information Bureau (DALJEWCIB): This is a huge collection containing incoming and outgoing correspondence of the Daljewcib, Hicem’s China office, based in Harbin (1917-1939) and Shanghai (1939-1948). Daljewcib informed and assisted the emigration of German Jews to China starting from 1933-1934, worked to assist refugees in Shanghai and to sponsor their emigration to other cities in China in 1938-1939, and was involved in the creation and organization of the trans-Siberian and trans-Manchurian route to Japan in 1940-1941.
HIAS-JCA Emigration Association (HICEM), Paris (Fond 740): A partial archive of Hicem, it contains correspondence with Daljewcib until 1940 (many are duplicates from the collection above).
Elihu H. Rickel papers: Contain a report compiled in 1945 by Elihu Rickel, a US navy chaplain, describing the situation of European Jewish refugees in Tientsin and Beijing, as well as biographical information of 16 families of European refugees living in Tientsin.
Rotenberg family collection and Seeligmann family papers: Family collections of two families who lived in Tientsin.
The World Jewish Congress New York Office records. Series H (Alphabetical Files): Contain information about the evacuations of Jews from China in 1948-1949, including some information about European refugees in Tientsin and Harbin.
RZ 214, Referat D/Abteilung Inland: Contains some correspondence of German consulates in Harbin and Tientsin about Jews (in particular, passport renewal and denaturalization).
International Tracing Service Digital Archive: Provides information regarding refugees from Tientsin, Harbin and Tsingtao in the post-war period, including: applications for emigration, lists of residents, list of ship passengers, personal files, etc.
YIVO, New York
Leo Gershevitch collection: Contains documents about the Tientsin Hebrew Community, mostly related to Russian Jews and to the Tientsin Jewish School.
Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Irene Eber Collection: Contains documents collected by Irene Eber about the Jewish presence in China.
Private archive in Nyack (New York)
Steve Upton Sino-Foreign Archive: A rich collection gathered by Steve Upton on foreigners in China, including material related to the Tientsin Jewish school and documents pertaining to several German Jewish pupils as well as many rare books.
As this short overview shows, this journey has been an essential part of my doctoral project, contributing to build a more reliable picture on the history of Holocaust refugees in Manchuria and North China. Combining several sources ranging from personal memoirs to agency reports, from oral interviews to refugees lists, the arrival, life conditions and departure of about two hundred Holocaust refugees in Tientsin, one hundred in Harbin and several dozens in Tsingtao taking a more defined shape. In addition, it is certain that several families of refugees lived in Dairen (Dailan) and Beijing, too.
In Tientsin, it appears that many refugees enjoyed quite good lives, integrating in the semi-colonial system prevailing in the foreign concessions. Conditions worsened after Pearl Harbor, but refugees never incurred in the overcrowded and sometimes desperate situation that prevailed in the Shanghai ghetto. Some of the European refugees founded an independent association, the “Association of Jewish European Immigrants”, which was aimed at helping the poorest among the refugees, as well as at aiding in post-war emigration. Between 1946 and 1949, refugees that had come from Europe dispersed: some went back to Germany and Austria, others to Israel, most, probably, to the United States. It is interesting to note that several refugees in Tientsin only reluctantly left China for the United States in 1949.
Reading the Daljewcib files provided interesting insights about the early arrivals in Harbin, as well as about the enormous difficulties that refugees encountered to enter Manchukuo from late 1938. In comparison to Tientsin, which had an utter international character, Harbin was a Sino-Russian city, and the few memoirs and interviews available show for example that children, receiving an entirely Russian education, developed a Russian identity. Completely cut off after the Soviet invasion in 1945, it seems quite clear that all refugees in Harbin wanted to leave the city as soon as possible, but were prevented from doing so. The WJC material included valuable material about the evacuation of Harbin, which finally happened in 1949, when the European refugees (DPs) could exit Manchuria before Russian Jews. Much remains to discover about Harbin.
Finally, in 1940-1941, some thousands German and Austrian Jews crossed the USSR, Manchukuo and Japan to reach North America, South America and Shanghai. This happened when ships stopped leaving Italian ports in late May 1940 due to Italy’s entry into war, and the German Jewish Aid Association (Hilfsverein) asked Daljewcib in Shanghai to book all the available places on Japanese liners leaving from Japan to the United States. Daljewcib helped in coordinating the East Asian part of the journey, while the Harbin and Dairen communities received funding to help transient refugees. Due to the collaboration of quite a large network of different agencies, it is no easy task to retrace the dynamics of this route, but the Daljewcib material has been a precious source of information.
Julie Reich
Archival research on Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi and Sarah Kofman
Research Objectives
I am currently a PhD student in philosophy. My research focuses on the transfer of Jewish Thought from the Weimar Republic to post-War France, with a special attention to gender and the ways in which feminism and Jewish Thought influenced and opposed each other. In order to do so, I study the works of several female Jewish philosophers of the 20th century: Margarete Susman, Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi and Sarah Kofman. The primary goal of this research trip to France was to access original documents, personal correspondences, manuscripts, and rare editions of books and essays related to my research. By reviewing these materials, the objective was to obtain firsthand insights, uncover new perspectives and gather all necessary texts in order to start writing the first chapters of my doctoral thesis.
Archives Visited:
Alliance Israélite Universelle; Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF); IMEC
Visiting the library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was crucial for my research. The AIU has the largest collection of documents pertaining to one of the philosophers I am studying: Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi (1919-2006). At the AIU, I was able to review documents which are unpublished and available only there, such as her manuscript for an auto-biography called “Un automne sans feuilles mortes” and Lévy-Valensi’s personal correspondence with her childhood friend, Francine Bloch. Both of these gave me insights as to the influence different life events have had on the development of her philosophy. The correspondence with F.Bloch spans her whole life and covers the German occupation of France, the Shoah, her divorces, her Aliyah and life in Israel after 67. In addition to these important documents, I was able to review, read, scan and collect a variety of texts and contributions of Lévy-Valensi which are unavailable in Berlin, where I currently live. Most importantly, the AIU has all of the protocols of the colloques des intellectuels juifs de langue française, a post-war Jewish intellectual group which sought to revive post-war Jewish Thought and of which Lévy-Valensi was one of the founding members and organisers. To be able to consult all of these in one place was a necessary step in my research project, since it will enable me to have an overview on her publications and the development of her thought from the early 60s to the late 70s as well as compare her thought to that of her peers. There were also other important works such as her essay-collection Lettres de Jérusalem and psychoanalytical works such as Job. Réponse à Jung.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France is, next to the AIU one of the few libraries where un-reprinted works by the philosopher Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi can still be found. At the BNF, I accessed an essay of hers called ‘Oui je suis femme et juive’. This article is fundamentally important to understand the development of her thought on the ties between gender-relations and Judaism’s relation to the West. Being able to go to Paris and read it was a necessary step before laying out my thesis-structure and starting to write.
The IMEC is an archive located in what used to be an Abbey close to Caen, Normandie. It holds the archives of many prominent philosophers, amongst others the archives of Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman. At the IMEC, I was able to consult the private correspondence between Derrida and Kofman as well as her notes on her works Autobiogriffures; Le mépris des juifs, L’énigme de la femme, her seminar la femme dans la philosophie du XIXe and her first and second draft of her autobiography Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Particularly interesting were the transcriptions and different versions of an interview by Evelyne Ender, published under the title Subvertir le philosophique ou Pour un supplément de jouissance. In this interview, which was published in a magazine called Compar(a)ison in 1991, Kofman talks about her position as a woman and as a jew in post-war French academia and philosophy. She develops her own feminist stand and methodology, in relation and in opposition to ‘french feminism’ but also to the american feminisms of the time. It is an important document which I will amply use in the introduction to my thesis, in dialogue with Judith Butler’s response (A Response to Sarah Kofman) which was published in the same edition. The manuscripts of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat gave me insights into her work process, the parts she left out or changed, and her manuscripts of her other works on women and philosophy helped me understand her unique positionality on feminism, gender, academia and how these are linked to her experiences as a Jews in post-war France. The location of the archives and the possibility of staying there for 4 days was also very fruitful for productive work.
The research trip to Paris provided invaluable access to primary sources, enabling a deeper understanding of the lives and thoughts of Eliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, Sarah Kofman and Jacques Derrida as well as the general context of French-Jewish Modern Thought after World War Two. The information gathered will significantly contribute to my PhD project. Next to the material, being in Paris, working at the places and libraries which are specialised in post-war French and Jewish Thought and meeting other PhD students working in this field made my stay very productive.