center dot This article looks at the relationship between reparations and the reconstruction of Jewish livelihoods in West Germany, focusing on businesses. Reparations were a vital source of capital for the many Jewish businesses (re-)established after the war. Indeed, without them, the postwar Jewish (re-)turn to entrepreneurship would undoubtedly have been smaller. However, reparations did not provide enough capital, or provide it in a timely enough manner, to allow Jewish business owners to establish stable enterprises. They thus contributed to the precarity of postwar Jewish economic life. This situation encouraged collective action. Through their organizations, Jewish business owners and their supporters fought not only to improve the existing program but also to gain access to the kinds of assistance available to other recognized war victims in West Germany, especially German refugees. In doing so, they highlighted the discrepancies between what were effectively different reparations regimes and sought to bring them into alignment.
To what extent can past injustices perpetrated by states and entire societies be “repaired” through offering victims official recognition and material compensation? The question reflects a distinctively post–1945 understanding of the meaning and goals of reparations. Previously, the term had been associated with questions of “war guilt and the burdens victorious nations placed on defeated enemies.” The magnitude of Nazism's crimes necessitated new approaches to restorative justice centering the violation of victims’ human rights.
center dot This article approaches the subject of reparations for Nazi crimes by understanding the reparations process primarily as routine administrative practice. This is an approach that has rarely been adopted by historians. During their often lengthy compensation proceedings, applicants gained experiences that went far beyond dealing with the final decisions. Close analysis of the concrete interactions and complex dynamics between Sinti and Roma claimants and the compensation bureaucracy in Baden-W & uuml;rttemberg, conceptualized as a systematic "contact zone" of individual negotiations of Wiedergutmachung, shows that, for this specific victim group, compensation was often experienced as frustrating. This had as much to do with antigypsy discrimination as it did with tragic misunderstandings and negative preconceptions on both sides. These difficulties of mutual understanding eroded acceptance of the political program of reparations.
Abstract Recent calls in the United States for reparations for slavery have often referenced Germany as a useful model because of its payments to Israel and efforts to atone for the Holocaust. This article traces how Germans have grappled with the Nazi legacy since 1945, focusing on developments and debates in the Federal Republic. It brings more specificity to the lexicon of reparative justice as it considers the lessons that emerge from the German case. Pondering the relative absence of reparative justice for slavery in the United States, the article suggests that the failure to reckon with this difficult history has paradoxically created conditions that made racism's shape-shifting nature more evident and necessary to confront in the United States than they have appeared in Germany.
center dot Nobles' losses of income and property during the French Revolution have been widely discussed in the historiography on modern France. Less is known, however, about how nobles pursued financial compensation from the French state. In the France of the Bourbon Restoration, former & eacute;migr & eacute;s and their heirs became eligible to receive payment through the indemnity law of 27 April 1825 that became known as le milliard des & eacute;migr & eacute;s. This article presents five case studies of noble families' experiences in claiming an indemnity for properties in France and Haiti. Nobles' engagement with the administrative processes set up for the 1825 indemnity law served as collective memory-making for the goal of consolidating patrimony to protect status and income in future generations.
Abstract Forced sterilization of ethnic and social groups the regime considered “inferior” constituted a key element of Nazi racial policy. However, after 1949, the resilience of eugenics in the Federal Republic blocked reparations ( Wiedergutmachung ) for victims of Nazi-era sterilizations. The first group of persons labeled “non-Aryan,” whom the Nazis subjected to systematic forced sterilization, were the German descendants of French and US soldiers of color who had participated in the 1920s Rhineland occupation. Between four hundred and six hundred biracial Rhenish children and teenagers were forcibly sterilized over the summer of 1937. Many aspects of biracial Rhinelanders’ lives remain obscure. Their struggles for reparations in the Federal Republic mark a virtually unexplored field. This article is a first attempt to address this historiographic gap. Based on extensive archival research, it focuses on five biographical case studies. The preliminary research does not confirm assessments that victims of the 1937 Rhineland campaign never received any compensation. However, although a small number of biracial Rhinelanders may have obtained modest levels of Wiedergutmachung , there is little evidence of growing public awareness of the crimes of the Rhineland campaign. Biracial Rhinelanders’ political isolation challenges us to revisit influential interpretations of reparations for the forcibly sterilized as a contested and slow yet ultimately productive societal “learning process.”
Abstract This article explores the transnational and intergenerational dynamics of Holocaust reparations in Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It focuses on these dynamics in the case of Austria in the context of deepening European integration, through detailed case studies of two Austrian Holocaust survivors’ reparations and restitution claims history. Those claimants were the author's paternal grandparents; her portrait of their experience draws on both archival research and private family papers. The article suggests that a transnational approach to the instrumentalization of Holocaust reparations in contemporary Europe can open up fruitful new lines of inquiry for comparative research on reparations for transatlantic slavery and colonialism.
center dot The history of modernity's emergence has often been described as secularization, with the Enlightenment understood as a crucial chapter. Since the late twentieth century, however, the secularization paradigm has been severely undermined in various disciplines.This article intends to contribute to these historiographical debates by tracing core Enlightenment ideas to the religiously grounded philosophy of the Middle Ages, revealing major yet overlooked continuities between scholasticism and Enlightenment thought. Focusing on one especially influential stream of Enlightenment moral philosophy, which provided the intellectual basis of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, it demonstrates that the concept of an instinctive moral sense originated in Aristotelian-Thomist scholasticism as developed by Bonaventure. This tradition was transmitted to seventeenth-century England through John Wilkins's circle, enabling Shaftesbury's engagement with these ideas. Shaftesbury subsequently influenced Enlightenment moral philosophy both in Scotland and, via Diderot and Rousseau, in France.
center dot This article focuses on the influence of liberal and postliberal historiography on the study of Christianity. It aims to define a postliberal historiography that goes beyond the constraints of existing critiques of liberal historiography. Postliberal historiography critiques liberal historicism but has yet to fully escape its ontological assumptions. To move beyond its limitations, history must be reinterpreted through a new ontological framework that redefines history's nature, time, causality, and human agency. The article then examines how a truly postliberal historiography reshapes the historical study of Christianity. Such an approach sees Christianity not as a historical phase to be outgrown but as a continuous and authoritative tradition integral to human history.
center dot Earthquakes are among the most destructive natural disasters; however, accurately predicting when an earthquake will strike remains elusive. Consequently, the statistical analysis of historical earthquake records becomes invaluable for forecasting future seismic events. In pre-modern Vietnam, from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries, chronicles such as The Abridged Chronicles of Vi & ecirc;.t, The Complete Annals of & Dstrok;a.i Vi & ecirc;.t, The Imperially Ordered Outlines and Essentials of the Comprehensive Mirrorofthe HistoryofVi & ecirc;.t, and The Veritable Records of the Great South recorded seventy-three earthquakes. This article provides an overview of earthquake records in historical sources, recounts notable earthquakes, and compares these accounts with seismic data. Additionally, it examines the perceptions of pre-modern Vietnamese people, as documented by royal historiographers, regarding the origins and causes of earthquakes, along with the measures taken in response to these natural disasters.
center dot During the Cold War, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted ex-tensive surveillance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), claiming to protect national security and prevent communist infiltration. Influ-enced by J. Edgar Hoover's personal biases against the civil rights movement, the FBI used methods such as wiretapping, infiltration, and psychological tactics. These surveillance operations had a considerable impact on the NAACP's operational dynamics, inducing psychological distress among its members and adversely affecting public perception. In response to the intensifying red scare, the NAACP adopted a pronounced anti-communist position. The FBI's surveillance not only squandered substantial resources within the US judicial system but also severely disrupted the internal functioning of the NAACP, tarnished its external reputation, and ultimately undermined its leadership role in the civil rights movement.
center dot Expectations for the future infused 1950s culture. Drawing on the recent wartime past and the new Cold War, individuals and governments around the world imagined the years to come, anticipating both the unbounded potential and the terrifying problems that seemed just over the temporal horizon. The governments of East and West Germany became particularly invested in describing the better future and especially in trying to bring their visions to fruition. Despite claiming that they were embarking toward opposing futures of socialism and capitalism, the two states presented the future in similar ways. They focused on predictions that were concrete, achievable, and near at hand. Indeed, the future was so near that it was possible to point out some ways in which it was already present.
center dot The aim of the article is to understand historians'silences toward certain topics. The main argument is that sometimes historians' silence can be considered as unspoken judgment and such judgment tends to be more meaningful and important than spoken and articulated one.To achieve the goal and demonstrate the argument, I will utilize modes of conceptual implications that are derived from legal theory (us.& umacr;l al-fiqh) as a methodology and apply them to some cases from pre-modern Arabic historiography. The article is an opportunity to vitalize humanities fields via interdisciplinarity and likewise to give legal theory a chance to engage with humanities fields.
At the intersection of Holocaust and World War II studies, a systematic and comparative analysis of Jews’ behaviors in Western Europe remains underexplored. This brief article proposes a methodological framework for studying choices between 1940 and 1945, focusing on the experiences of two Jewish women who survived in Vichy France. Drawing on concepts from French cultural history, I argue for a shift from “survival” as an outcome to “surviving” as a social process, which reframes agency by focusing on intent, process, and wartime perceptions. Ultimately, the article challenges binary frameworks of resistance and compliance, calling for a dynamic and contextualized approach to wartime decision-making.
More than 150 years after its issuance and six decades since the mass departure of Algerian Jews from Algeria, the bestowal of French citizenship on Algerian Jews through the so-called Crémieux Decree remains one of the most heatedly debated episodes of Arab Jewish history. As historical study of Jewish life in the Arabic-speaking world comes increasingly under the pressure of utterances shaped by conflicts of the present, the degree, motivations and conditions of Algerian Jews’ choice when interacting with or participating in the French state are becoming increasingly hard to grasp and problematize. By deconstructing current narratives of pre-colonial shared worlds destroyed by divide-and-rule measures, this article revisits the question of choice in Jewish experiences of and responses to European colonialism.
This article focuses on the work of Ilse Bing, a German Jewish photographer who immigrated to Paris in 1930, was interned in the Gurs camp, and then escaped to New York via Marseille in 1941. In particular, it focuses on three of her self-portraits from 1913 to 1952 to study the development of her practice in photography and self-representation as a child and then an avant-garde woman photographer, depicting Jewishness as both beyond the frame and a crucial part of her trajectory. Finally, the article looks to a counter- example in a wartime identity photograph in Bing's immigration papers, which do not allow for any identity beyond their frame.
This article examines the lives, philosophies, and wartime/postwar activism of Edmond Fleg (1874–1963) and Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985), two Jewish intellectuals in twentieth-century France deeply influenced by Henri Bergson's philosophy of time, creativity, and hope. Both Fleg and Jankélévitch were active in the Resistance during World War II. Fleg taught clandestine classes for Jewish youth that promoted pluralism as a strength within the Jewish community and beyond. Jankélévitch wrote anti-fascist works for underground publications and shifted to a deeper engagement with Jewish themes, especially related to messianism and moral responsibility. After the war, Fleg supported the nascent State of Israel while also focusing on the need to nurture diasporic Jewish culture. Jankélévitch balanced loyalty to Israel's existence with the readiness to critique its policies, especially after the 1982 Lebanon invasion, advocating for mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians. Fleg and Jankélévitch model engaged, pluralistic Jewishness grounded in ethical action, intellectual rigor, and openness to change. Their work encourages holding multiple truths in tension—valuing both Jewish particularity and a deep compassion for humanity—and confronting moral crises through study, dialogue, and activism.
Sheikh ͑ Abd al-Ḥamīd Ben Bādīs (1889–1940), the most esteemed Islamic scholar ( ālim ) of interwar Algeria and leader of Algerian Salafist Islamic reform movement, had things to say about Jews and their relationship to Muslims. Writings published in his journal, al-Shihāb (The Meteor) surrounding several incidents of Muslim–Jewish violence in Algeria and Palestine reveal his dual understanding of Jews. He saw Jews as historically woven into the Islamic world—a protected, valued, and culturally vibrant community. But he cast modern-day Jews as a privileged, provocative, and threatening group. Read together, we see a critique of colonialism that he understood as having transformed Jews, derailing a previously harmonious coexistence. Notably, Britain and France's colonial policies had given privileges to Jews that were denied to Muslims, producing social unrest.
The articles in this volume revolve around movement: social, political, physical, spiritual, and intellectual. Some offer new modes of thinking about shifts in status—from colonial subject to state citizen; others ask about how we adapt to new languages, new ways of thinking, and new forms of artistic expression; while others explore the often-haunting experiences of hiding, dislocation, relocation, and migration (forced and voluntary). The authors examine catalysts in nineteenth and twentieth-century metropolitan and colonial France that shaped difficult decisions uniquely affecting Jews and Muslims to uproot and find means of belonging in new places, new social realities, and within different language communities. Catalysts triggering these movements of people included: changing laws and new legal restrictions, Nazi persecutions, transformations in geo-politics, or new aesthetic vocabularies. This volume offers students and readers new ways of approaching and understanding the constraints and opportunities that shaped Jewish and Muslim—individual and collective—decision-making from late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century metropolitan and colonial France.
This article examines the earliest moments of North African Jews’ arrival in France after 1945, focusing on the attitudes and dialogues within Jewish aid organizations. It highlights postwar Jewish identities in France and illustrates that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century categorizations of who belonged had not significantly changed, despite the ruptures of the Holocaust and World War II. While it may be tempting to argue that, in the wake of the Holocaust, Jewish communities in France would freely welcome their coreligionists from North Africa, the reality was more complex. Longstanding categories of difference, once applied to Eastern and Central European Jews seeking refuge in France, were reframed within a colonial context, influencing how Jewish aid organizations perceived and assisted Jews from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.
