National Policy, Global Memory

The Commemoration of the "Righteous" from Jerusalem to Paris, 1942-2007

Sarah Gensburger

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785332555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Holocaust

Since 1963, the state of Israel has awarded the title of "Righteous among the Nations" to individuals who risked their lives sheltering Jews during the Holocaust. This distinction remained solely an Israeli initiative until the late 1990s, when European governments began developing their own national categories, the most prominent of which was the "Righteous of France, " honoring those who protected Jews during the Vichy regime. In National Policy, Global Memory, Sarah Gensburger uses this dramatic episode to lend a new perspective to debates over memory and nationhood. In particular, she works to combine two often divergent disciplines—memory studies and political science—to study "memory politics" as a form of public policy.

Chapter 1

MEMORY AS AN INSTRUMENT OF FOREIGN POLICY?

The term “Righteous of France” refers directly to the title “Righteous among the Nations,” which the state of Israel borrowed from Jewish religious tradition in order to honor the men and women who came to the aid of Jews during World War II. The expression arises from the double translation, both literally and metaphorically, found in Michel Callon’s research.¹ To understand the dynamics that led to this term requires studying the original paradigm, that is, the actors, networks, processes, and contexts that presided over Israel’s creation of the title Righteous among the Nations.

While, generally speaking, commemorations of the Holocaust have inspired a wealth of literature, the establishment of the “Righteous”² title has, on the contrary, aroused little interest.³ The U.S. historian Peter Novick has studied it, however, considering at first that the “intention of most commemoration of the ‘righteous minority’ has been to damn the vast ‘unrighteous majority’” before concluding, “Whatever the intention, this [the fortress-like mentality or suspicion of gentiles] seems to have been the consequence.”⁴ Such difficulty in discerning intention and consequence invites the researcher to take a dynamic approach in considering the political decision behind this linguistic creation not as a moment but rather as a process.

In search of the decision

The mechanisms leading to the creation of the title Righteous operated over a period of about twenty years. Was this type of instrument⁵ intended to serve a new public policy pertaining explicitly to remembrance? Or does this instrumentation of the commemoration of non-Jewish rescuers fall within one of the standard areas of public action?

The legislative creation of the term “Righteous among the Nations”

In 1942, in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, Mordechai Shenhabi, a Zionist activist from Russia, formulated a desire to preserve the memory of non-Jews who had helped Jews and bestow on them the title “Righteous among the Nations.” His plan to create the Yad Vashem memorial—a monument and a name—included drawing up a “list of Righteous among the Nations who rescued people or protected property” in one of the destroyed communities.⁶ The man who promoted the project gave no details of his intention. What’s more, this particular mission holds only a marginal place in his overall undertaking.

Very quickly, however, Mordechai Shenhabi wanted to use this specific commemorative means as a diplomatic instrument. In 1947, he informed Golda Meir, then a member of the Yishuv political department, of the death of the king of Denmark and outlined the diplomatic benefits that could be derived from including this monarch among the Righteous.⁷

The project to establish the Yad Vashem Institute did not come to fruition until 1953. The prospect of a competing memorial being built in Paris and the refusal to see the “memory” of “Jewish Martyrdom”⁸ established in another country decided the prime minister of the young state of Israel. The government drafted the bill for the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance [Yad Vashem] Law in 1953.⁹ Unlike Mordechai Shenhabi’s initial proposal, it made no provision for the commemoration of the “Righteous among the Nations.”

The theme came up in the parliamentary debates that began in the Knesset on 18 May 1953. A member of Knesset (MK) from the Mapai,¹⁰ the party in power, was introduced it. The idea of paying tribute to the Righteous was greeted with favor by all the participants, whatever their political persuasion. Several lines of cleavage appeared, however, with regard to the meaning to be invested in this category. The communist Mapam¹¹ wished to honor only those who had taken up arms in the course of collective worker action. The liberal General Zionists group¹² felt that rescue was primarily an individual act. Between military action and civilian engagement, between collective and individual actors, between the extreme left and right, the Mapai MKs occupied the middle ground in these debates, reflecting their position on the political checkerboard: “Murderers as well as rescuers came from all social strata. . . . All those who came to our aid are dear to us, and when the history of the Holocaust is written, an eternal monument will also be erected in honor of these Righteous among the Nations.”¹³

The bill was brought before the Knesset Education and Culture Committee. The working group devoted none of their discussions to the theme of commemorating the Righteous, the idea seeming to have been approved in principle at the end of the first debate.¹⁴ On 19 August 1953, the Knesset passed the amended text¹⁵ by relative unanimity.¹⁶

The bill comprises eight articles. The first outlines the nature of the Yad Vashem Institute memorial and lists the nine themes that it should commemorate. The ninth and last paragraph refers to “the high-minded Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews.”¹⁷ No other criterion was added to that of mortal risk. The phrasing settled none of the questions raised in the parliamentary debate. It gave rise to a new memorial expression that was defined (in order to gather consensus) in minimalist terms likely to produce protean, multiple, and evolving interpretations.

Manifestation of a cognitive framework

The legislative creation of the category the “Righteous among the Nations” is the result of a discontinuous process. Whereas the aspect of the Shenhabi project pertaining to the commemoration of the Righteous was absent from the text the government submitted to the Knesset, it cropped up again during parliamentary debates without the 1942 precedent even being mentioned. A decisional continuity emerged beyond the breaks that occurred in the decision-making chain. The strong and enduring presence of a cognitive framework shared by all of the actors in the decision-making process over the entire time explains the passage of this legislative provision.

The existence of such a framework appears first of all in the use of the expression “Righteous among the Nations” by all of the protagonists. In 1942, as in 1953, none of them felt the need to explain the origin of the term or explain the meaning given to it. In Jewish religious tradition, the Hebrew expression Hasidei Ummot Ha-Olam at first referred to pious non-Jews.¹⁸ Use of the expression became widespread in the Middle Ages and ended up referring to non-Jews who were “friends” of the Jews and who, by their attitude, were an exception to the dominant hostility of the former with regard to the latter. When the Knesset members began using the expression in 1953 to honor the memory of those who had helped the Jews, despite the temporal discontinuity and the heterogeneity of its protagonists’ political commitment, it thus came to refer to a specific conception of the relations between these two groups otherwise considered antagonistic. “The feeling of isolation and betrayal by Jews who, for many years, had lived amicably together with non-Jews under a non-Jewish government”¹⁹ thus played a central role in the legislative borrowing of a religious expression.

In this respect, the measure concerning the Righteous is perfectly in keeping with the rationale presiding over political commemoration decisions. Adhesion to the idea of the “negation of exile,”²⁰ the assertion of the illegitimacy of a Jewish Diaspora community, is evidence of a cognitive framework shared by all Israeli MKs. During parliamentary debates, each speaker began with a reminder of the crimes perpetrated by the goyim. It is in view of those crimes that honoring those gentiles who helped the Jews was all the more necessary:

It is a falsification of history to suggest that only Jews rose up and that no one else took part in the revolt. There are goyim who have our blood on their hands. But there are also rescuers. . . . It is true that we have heavy accounts to settle with goyim who lived by our blood. But rescuers were also from various walks of life.²¹

Eleven years earlier, this belief in the negation of exile already permeated the entire project conceived by Mordechai Shenhabi: the aim then was to make Jews of the Diaspora realize that the Genocide merely carried to an extreme the impossibility of a truly Jewish life in non-Jewish states.

The study of the legislative creation of the “Righteous among the Nations” category thus reveals once again the role of cognitive factors in the implementation of public policies. Rather than the existence of an “intention” as identified by Peter Novick, which would be in this case concealed behind a pretense of gratitude, the study of the legislative creation of the title “Righteous among the Nations” confirms that “the interests brought into play in public policies are expressed only through the production of frameworks of interpretation of the world.”²² In this case these are characteristic of Zionism and the Israeli political officials of the 1950s. The existence of these frameworks is explained in turn by a particular social morphology produced by the trajectories and social positions of the actors behind this legislative measure. The composition of the second Knesset as well as the social identity of Mordechai Shenhabi thus provided a social framework that held a particular point of view on the Holocaust and more broadly the history of Jews in exile.²³ Shenhabi, the instigator of the initial project for a commemorative institute, was born in 1900 in Czarist Russia, had been a militant in the Hashomer Hazair youth movement, and had lived in Palestine since 1919. Most of the MKs who sat on the Knesset in 1953 had a similar life trajectory: 67 percent of them were born in Eastern Europe and 79 percent had immigrated to the Yishuv between 1920 and 1940. Militant Zionists since the interwar period, they had a similar personal history and a largely common view of the Jewish condition in the Diaspora.

Comparison of the Israeli process with other projects envisioned by Diaspora Jews of the time confirms the power of this link between actors’ social trajectories, a shared cognitive framework, and the decision to honor the Righteous among the Nations. First of all, in February 1945, two senior World Jewish Congress officials²⁴ (both citizens of the United States) had also made a proposal to create a Genocide memorial that in particular would include a “special room honoring non-Jews who saved Jews.”²⁵ Although, like Mordechai Shenhabi’s contemporaneous project, the location envisaged was in Palestine, the approach was the opposite. Its backers sought to remember the Holocaust while distancing it from the United States, where most Jews felt they were a part of the victorious America²⁶ and sought “acceptance by the Gentiles, and not confrontation.”²⁷ Correlatively, the term “Righteous among the Nations” was not used, and the expression “non-Jews who helped the Jews” was favored instead.

The same mechanism was in operation in 1953. The very year in which Knesset members voted in favor of creating the title Righteous among the Nations, the Italian Union of Jewish Communities decided to honor with great solemnity Italians who helped the Jews. Representatives of Italian Jews sought to thank their country and thus reassert their own belonging to the national community.²⁸ On 17 April 1955, twenty-three “gold medals of merit” were awarded in a grand ceremony held in Milan. The recipients were from all sorts of religious backgrounds and walks of life. They were supposed to represent Italian society as a whole. The commemoration of non-Jews who had helped Jews in this case served as an affirmation of their collective belonging to the Italian nation. There, too, it was not the term “Righteous among the Nations” that was used but “Benemeriti” citizens “decorated for merit.” Traditionally used by the Italian state to distinguish its gre...