II.4. Pourquoi eux et pas les autres ?
How three-quarters of the Jews of France survived the Holocaust has long been a subject of debate between historians. After the war, top Vichy officials sought to frame their participation in the persecution of the Jews in the best light possible and were amongst the first to articulate what came to...
Gardado en:
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| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Français |
| Publicado: |
2020
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| Acceso en liña: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | How three-quarters of the Jews of France survived the Holocaust has long been a subject of debate between historians. After the war, top Vichy officials sought to frame their participation in the persecution of the Jews in the best light possible and were amongst the first to articulate what came to be known as the “shield thesis.” According to this argument, the Vichy regime had served as a shield against the worst of Germany’s plans for Jews. As a result, the government saved thousands of people, and French Jews in particular, from destruction.This thesis was subsequently advanced by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, who tended to rally around one of its central tenets, the “French-foreign dichotomy.” According to this view, Vichy authorities made the pragmatic decision to sacrifice foreign Jews in order to save French Israélites.This article challenges what has become the principal framework for understanding the Holocaust in France by examining the arrests and deportations of Jews living in the department of Vaucluse in southeast France through the prism of quantitative prosopography. It argues that, through its repeated appeals to the “French-foreign dichotomy,” the historiography has overemphasized one explanation for the fate of the Jews in France during WWII by conflating very different individuals into two artificially homogeneous groups, thereby inadvertently obscuring other, more important, differences. |
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