Shibboleth XI: Architecture

shib • bo • leth

an undergraduate journal of Jewish thought at Yale

Shibboleth is Yale’s undergraduate magazine of Jewish thought and culture. Shibboleth hopes to enrich the Jewish conversation at Yale and in the world, and to amplify the voices of emerging Jewish scholars.

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Editors in Chief

Yosef Malka

Ruthie Davis

Associate Editors

Max Bamberger

Giovanna Truong

Netanel Schwartz

Elio Wentzel

Layout and Design

Ruthie Davis

Cover Image

Amy Cohen, Mezuzah in Binary, 2023. Charcoal and ink.

When our associate editor Max Bamberger originally suggested an issue devoted to architecture, we eagerly agreed. The Jewish people have a complicated and fascinating relationship with space and materiality — we have been shaped by our alienation from a Temple and stigmatized for our attitudes toward the body, and in the process have become makers of ritual in both space and time.

Over the last few decades, history has undergone a “spatial turn.” Historians have focused more and more on the loci of events how the specific forms of the natural, social and built environments can frame our understanding of human interaction and relations. The spatial dimension is basic to our experience of the world. To be without time is a philosophical dilemma, to be without space is merely impossible.

This issue, focused exclusively on Jewish spaces, and on architecture in particular, is grounded in that premise and moves far beyond it. Our issue begins with a beautiful rendering of a mezuzah, which sanctifies and invites us into space uniquely Jewish (Cohen, cover). These pages then flow through a home in Great Neck, NY (Tartak, p.6), and through Spain, both medieval (Shear, p.9) and modern (Neal, p.18). They explore sacred space and secular space turned sacred (Schwartz, p.22; Truong, p.23). The Jewish calendar, reframed and reimagined as a series of spatial imagery (Bamberger, p.24). They move through archives and Holocaust memorials in France, exploring the gaps between material and immaterial memory (Kirsch, p.25), and end, dipping their toes into mikvahs new and old (Davis, p.39). Throughout it all is a thread – a narrative of what it means to be, physically and materially, Jewish.

Thank you again to all of our editors, contributors, and readers. You have made Shibboleth into the vibrant community we have always hoped it could be. To all of our seniors, a double thank you. First, for your contributions in these pages and second, for your presence in the Jewish spaces we have co-created over the years. As you go out into the world, we hope that you will carry a piece of those spaces with you. As they say: “ – If I forget you, New Haven…”

Chaim Goldberg, Shabbat, 1963 Oil and gouache on canvas

Ruthie Davis and Yosef Malka

ןבייה וינ ךחכשא םא

Contributors:

Amy Cohen is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College She is from Gainesville, Florida and studies mechanical engineering.

Sahar Tartak is a first year in Pierson College. She is from Great Neck, NY and studies history.

Daniella Shear is a junior in Saybrook College. She is from Pittsburgh, PA and studies architecture

Reese Neal is a sophomore in Trumbull College He is from Houston, TX and studies computing and the arts

Netanel Schwartz is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College He is from San Diego, CA and studies English.

Giovanna Truong is a senior in Pauli Murray College. She hails from Cedarburg, Wisconsin, is majoring in physics, and would have a minor in Yiddish if that were an option

Max Bamberger is a sophomore in Grace Hopper College He is from Berkeley, CA and studies film and media studies.

Isabel Kirsch is a senior in Pierson College. She is from Chevy Chase, Maryland and studies anthropology.

Ruthie Davis is going to be a senior in Benjamin Franklin College. She is from Bala Cynwyd, PA and majors in Jewish and environmental studies

Background image credits as follows:

Pages 6-8: Home, Sahar Tartak

Page 22: Transporting the Ark of the Covenant, gilded brass relief, Cathedral of Sainte-Marie, Auch, France. Image via Encyclopedia Britannica.

Page 23: HQ, Giovanna Truong

Page 24: Shofar in Toledo, Reese Neal.

Page 39: Mikvah at Masada Image via Wikimedia Commons

Page 40: Mikvah in Besalu Image by Barbara Weibel, HDCT

Page 41: LMCM, Ruthie Davis.

A Home with Two Hearts

I believe my home has a heart One that beats in sync with the rest of its residents And I bet yours does, too. When you’re sitting at your desk, tapping your feet, rushing through a menial task, you can feel the hasty pace of hard work in the air. It creeps onto your skin and rushes into you When it’s ten o’clock post meridian, and you’ve finally made it to bed on time, you can feel the air at rest.

This is a story about a home with two hearts – one that beats in the backyard, and another in the living room. If you traveled from one heart to the other on that fateful Saturday night, you’d have been on two planets.

In the backyard, twenty people are crammed onto a white porch in the suburbs of Great Neck, a town once known as “West Egg,” a mile away from the Long Island Sound. Some lean over the painted wooden edges and look out into the long, dark backyard Others stand in circles and chat, counting on each other for warmth in the evening chill of a New York winter. The porch has a wooden countertop built into one side, and a table rests on the other There are virgin drinks on the countertop and snacks on the table Water, lemonade, soda, potato chips, tortilla chips, guacamole, bread pudding, crackers, and an assortment of chocolates – all purchased from Costco, just yesterday morning.

A wooden staircase leads from the porch into the open space of the backyard First, there is a patio, made of rough stone tiles squared and separated by the moss growing between them. A few people stand on the patio, cramped: a barbecue grill serving as a makeshift fire pit stands awkwardly in the middle, surrounded by plastic chairs and blocking the path. Sometimes, the chairs are full of guests. They sit around the fire and lean in as close as possible, just until they feel their hands begin to burn. Soon, the guests return to the porch to grab a snack or pour a drink, and the patio grows crowded and empty all at once, with its chairs and its fire flickering in the grill

Beyond the patio, and deeper into the backyard, there are two more makeshift fire pits, two more circles of chairs. The first circle is well-lit. In addition to the flame at the center, it is illuminated by the light from the porch A string of red light bulbs on a wire stretch from an electrical outlet on the porch all the way to a nearby tree, shading the first circle in a warm glow. Just a few yards away, the second circle sits beyond the lights’ reach The lone firepit in its center provides the only antidote to the surrounding darkness.

Despite their differing circumstances, each fire pit shares the beauty of orange strokes dancing in the night. They dance and dance and dance, moved by the direction of the wind They dance to the conversations of the guests, to the laughter, a tango, and to the gestures, a waltz. They hear and see and touch the excitement in the air. They shrink, and they grow. They chase a guest’s hand away when she comes too close, but they also draw her in

Fire speaks to the guests in ashes, launched into the air and latched onto sweaters, coats, gloves, and scarves. The entire backyard smells like ash. Even the water, lemonade, soda, potato chips, tortilla chips, guacamole, bread pudding, crackers, and assortment of chocolates smell like ash. Even the chairs emanate ash. But the guests don’t know it. They can’t recognize the scent, since they are within it. The backyard’s heart beats to the rhythm of the smell of the ashes, a rhythm of excitement and intimacy and touch. The same rhythm of music you might listen to at home, attempting to transport yourself to this very backyard. The ashes come from the flames of life and represent the residue of celebration.

In the backyard, there is a birthday party. A brother and a sister. He is almost three years older than she, born on January 7, 2001 She is almost three years younger than he, born on January 6, 2004 They are two years and three-hundred sixty-four days apart They celebrate their birthdays together in the backyard because why not? And because, “We couldn’t cram everyone inside during the pandemic!” And because, “Over time, it’s become a tradition.”

What better place to celebrate than the backyard? It is spacious, with different sections for different guests with different preferences. Maybe some like the dark. Maybe others like the crowd. Maybe one just likes the lemonade.

All like – no, all love – the heart of the backyard. Resting their hands on the white wooden countertop on the porch, tracing their fingers between its cracks, too gently to splinter their skin. They love the trees in the dark, which are rough to the touch, yet kind. They love the divine joy of the jumping ashes, which speak to them and hug them through the night. They love the coastal chill, which whispers something beautiful into their ears. There is something in the air It is life, it is joy, and it cheers on their celebration in the backyard. No matter where they wander, the guests are never alone. They return home happily reeking of ashes.

A guest who wanders up the porch staircase and through the crowd and into the house finally realizes how that the strong scent of the ashes is hugging him He sniffs his shoulder and pulls his nose away in shock The floor is smooth and yellow now – not the grass of the backyard or the rough tiles of the patio or the white painted wood of the porch. There is a refrigerator, a cluttered counter, and an overcrowded sink. The countertops are flooded with leftover party delicacies. They are all packaged in boxes and plastic bags, a glorious pile of goodies too disorganized to show to the guests He is now behind the scenes, witnessing what feeds the backyard’s beating heart and composes its rhythm.

The kitchen has no particular heart. The guest knows he is in the wrong place. He was sent to pass through the kitchen and into the living room, to visit the brother and sister’s father, who did not join the celebration.

The guest moseys on into the next room, where the father is sitting, beyond the piles of snacks and drinks and dishes and trash. The clutter is gone, and so are the crowds of the backyard The trees and the disparate lights and the excitement and life

In the living room, three beige couches almost form a rectangle, but with one missing side. They face inwards towards a Persian rug. The rug exhales a calm air, with its elaborate design of deep red floral patterns and carefully woven fringes and knots. In the old country, the guest and the father would have sat on the rug. But here, there is no room; a brown granite coffee table with thick black legs swallows the center. In reality, the couches don’t face the rug but rather the table. The rug rests disappointedly in its shadow.

If the guest chooses, he may recline the couch by pressing a button. Somehow he knows not to. He feels it in the air of the living room, in the pace of the walls and the solemnity of the rug. He feels that the table is an interruption, and he knows not to interrupt any more than he already has. So he sits upright on the beige couch, perpendicular to the couch upon which the hosts’ father sits. The father is leaning back, slouched into himself with his hands in his lap. His knees may or may not be pressing against the coffee table. His feet certainly are.

The air in the room is that of a private shiva, a ritual Jewish mourning period The bereaved sit at home for seven, or sheva, days, usually on a chair that is distinctly close to the ground, demonstrating the mourner’s departure from normalcy. People visit the home, friends and family and coworkers and acquaintances, and speak with the sufferer. The mirrors in the home are covered by sheets. It is a peculiar sight to the guest, and he is cautious not to touch and contaminate them with his lively leftover ashes. He is cautious to move as little as possible on the couch, not to squirm or gesticulate or stretch as he did in the backyard. He looks across the wall to an old picture of the sister, the hostess, when she was twelve. The frame is white, and she is wearing a pink shirt with only one shoulder and white pants. She is outside somewhere, at a park with a view of the ocean, maybe even a dock. Her hair is straight and brown, but he knows that her real hair is curly. Though she is nineteen now, her old picture is the guest’s center of gravity. It reminds him of the heartbeat waiting for him in the backyard, of the impermanence of grief. He cannot sit with her father forever.

Shifting his gaze back to the mourner, the guest listens closely to his story. He glances at the bookshelf beside the picture on the wall. The brown wooden bookcase almost reaches the ceiling, certainly too tall for most men to touch the top. He sees math textbooks and historical literature and philosophy and personal notes. The books are no different from the mourner; they tell a certain story.

So he listens closely to the mourner as though he is reading his very favorite book, not “favorite” in the shallow sense of the term, but “favorite” in the sense of a book that shifts his very heartbeat. Minutes pass in the living room, and nothing changes. The mirrors stay covered. The bookshelf stays full. The couch stays beige. The rug stays ancestral. The coffee table stays disruptive. And the mourner stays sad, telling the same infinite story of his late mother. He is part of the furniture now; he is part of the heartbeat.

– Sahar Tartak

Conquest, Conversion, and the Myth of Convivencia

Two Iberian Case Studies

by Daniella Shear

“The first chapel ... was sacked and burned to the ground in 1097 by Al Mansur, the last important ruler of the Caliphate of Córdoba, who forced captives to carry the huge bells back to his home town, where they hung in the great mosque until the city was retaken by Christians 239 years later, and they were carried again, this time by Muslim prisoners, all the way to Toledo.”

The quotation at the top of the page is taken from Robert Rosenstone’s “A Muslim-Jewish Pilgrimage,” a 2016 essay about the trip he took with his wife to Spain and Portugal to explore the Islamic and Jewish histories of the region. At Santiago de Compostela, Rosenstone heard this myth. It is clear that details have been altered or lost after centuries of retelling. The dates are off: 239 years after 1097 is much later than 1236 when Córdoba was reconquered The bells were actually taken back to Santiago,

Image 1: Unknown artwork of the bells being returned to Santiago from Cordoba

not Toledo. And, other sources state that the bells never hung in the Great Mosque of Córdoba; they were used instead as oil lamps Accurate or not, the legend of these bells persists through storytelling.

The artwork [1] is somewhat mysterious. Representationally it is quite clear though. In the foreground, we can recognize Muslim prisoners (wearing chains) carrying the huge bells. Christian soldiers oversee the operation. In the background, we can recognize the architecture of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, which is noteworthy for two reasons: the location tells us that this backbreaking journey has only just begun; we see Christian rule and supremacy over a significant (formerly) Muslim space. AlAndalus is no more. Still, the question remains, where did this image come from? Some people have suggested that the painting was commissioned by Fernando III to immortalize his victory, but this is stylistically impossible

Despite the inconsistencies and unknowns, these representations are relevant because they tell a story that is still in the public consciousness. They tell us about the religious and political agenda of the “reconquista” by broadening a story of regaining territory to a story about the restoration of Christian supremacy, represented by the bells returning to their former condition and place. The focus on the bells tells us a lot about the conversion of things rather than people – one thing has been claimed and altered repeatedly by multiple peoples or powers. The functions may have changed while form has remained the same. All of these same ideas arise in the study of architectural conversion.

By the end of the reconquista, the Great Mosque in nearly every Spanish city had been taken by the Catholic Church. In many cases a Mass was held in the former mosques as an expression of Christian power and supremacy Given the importance of Muslims and Jews being encouraged or forced to convert to Christianity, these building transformations can be taken symbolically as a ritual conversion of the

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building from one religion to another. The ritual “conversion” was usually followed by a physical conversion (literally) transformation of items in the buildings At first, altarpieces and furnishings were brought in so the newly christened churches could function properly. In time, most of these buildings were torn down so that new romanesque or gothic cathedrals could be erected in their place. In Córdoba, however, the Great Mosque was converted into a church but was never torn down. The Córdoba Great Mosque is a story about power changing hands from the Muslim Andalusians to the Catholic Spanish.

Synagogues converted to churches tell a story that is less about state power, but is about theological triumph. Diaspora Jews could live relatively comfortably, and sometimes even prosperously, as a minority, but they did not have state power More importantly, while Spain tolerated Jews for centuries, the ultimate goal was conversion for theological reasons, which eventually led to the expulsion of Jews who did not comply The most comprehensive account of medieval Spanish synagogues in Iberia is José Luis Lacave’s Juderías y Sinagogas Españolas (Spanish Jewish Quarters and Synagogues). Lacave created a list of synagogues based on local and regional archival evidence, and on his travels to every site mentioned in the archives He identified at least one former synagogue in each of 118 cities. Of these, only six remain standing. One of these extant buildings is the church of Santa Maria la Blanca in Toledo, originally the Ibn Shoshan Synagogue As one might expect, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, numerous abandoned synagogues were repurposed for alternate uses, although we unfortunately have very poor documentation of individual cases. The case of Santa Maria la Blanca was unique because it was a case of conversion before the Jews had left. The synagogue was converted to a church early in the 15th century, leaving its congregants to find seats at another synagogue in Toledo.

The ideas of conversion and restoration seem to be in tension with one another. How can one restore Christianity while maintaining Islamic (and to a lesser extent Jewish) architecture? The answer seems to rely partially on whether religious architecture is viewed as belonging to distinct religions because of its formal and aesthetic qualities or its function. Through the examination of two sites – the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba and Santa Maria La Blanca – we will see that the different decisions made about different buildings were all done with the intention of advancing specific political and religious goals.

T h e a n s w e r s e e m s t o

r e l y o n w h e t h e r

r e l i g i o u s a r c h i t e c t u r e i s

v i e w e d a s b e l o n g i n g t o

d i s t i n c t r e l i g i o n s

b e c a u s e o f i t s f o r m a l

a n d a e s t h e t i c q u a l i t i e s

o r i t s f u n c t i o n .

Case I: Mosque to Church

Abd al-Rahman I founded a congregational mosque in Córdoba, his capital city, in 786 CE. We know that the new mosque was built on the site of the Visigothic Basilica of San Vicente. The roughly 80 square meter space was divided equally between an open courtyard in the northern half and a hypostyle prayer hall in the southern half (facing Mecca) The exterior walls were plain with buttresses at the corners and alongside the prayer hall. In the hypostyle hall, there are 120 spoliated column shafts, bases, and capitals that were taken from other buildings to be reused in the mosque. This yielded visible variety in the hall. Borrowing from older architecture was an integral part of this building from its inception. This space corresponds to the portion of the plan [2] labeled “A” and can be seen in the photograph [3].

l a ( N e w

H a v e n : Y a l e , 2 0 2 0 ) 1 8 – 2 0

Y e t , n o o n e i n c l u d e s B a s i l i c a i n t h e n a m e o f t h i s s i t e t o d a y - - a r c h i t e c t u r e s u r p a s s e s t h e s i t e i n v a l u e

C ó r d o b a : G r e a t M o s q u e : I n t : I m a g e s , n d h t t p s : / / j s t o r o r g / s t a b l e / c o m m u n i t y

Image 2: Plan of Córdoba’s Mosque-Cathedral by L Golvin (1979) Additions to the mosque are labeled in letter order

Image 3: Photograph of the hypostyle hall in the original portion of the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba. Notice the double arches and the variation in column capitals and bases 12

The 9th-century expansion (necessitated by population growth) by Abd al-Rahman II doubled the size of the prayer hall The rectangular hall was made square by knocking down the qibla wall (the wall that faces Mecca) and extending the columned hall This addition is labeled “B” in plan Also in the 9th century, Abd al-Rahman II’s son Mohammed I restored the Western portal into the prayer hall called Bab al-Wuzara, which was part of the original building’s exterior Subsequent rulers made further changes, enlarging the overall site as they went. By the time of Christian conquest in 1236, the entirety of the site that we see on the plan was occupied

Immediately after Christians conquered Córdoba, a cross and royal banner were hung from the Mosque’s tallest tower. A mass was held in the mosque to consecrate it as a church the following day. This was the standard display of Christian supremacy. Substantial interior work was completed over the rest of the thirteenth century. A choir chapel was built in the southwest corner of the building. Secondary chapels were built around the perimeter of the mosque. A baptistry was built in the building’s western-most nave. There was likely an altar and processional nave built below the existing clerestory dome.

The changes to the mosque were physical manifestations of successful conquest. Converting the mosque in this way could have been seen as a way of asserting power over and over again. Muslims could still see their magnificent mosque, but were never allowed to pray in it again. Although, they were permitted to work in it. Muslim laborers were primarily responsible for these renovations. Converting their own sacred space into chapels and baptistries must have been emotionally fraught. The Muslim workforce furthers our understanding of “religious architecture.” Here we must separate the patron from the builder. Ecker offers another distinction; she suggests that we delineate “Christian” and “Muslim” architecture not by form, but by intention.

In 1489, the Bishop wanted to demolish the central part of the original mosque to create a chapel with more space. Queen Isabella opposed this plan and offered a compromise which involved removing five rows of columns adjacent to the existing choir chapel to enlarge that space. This turned out not to be a very satisfactory compromise, because, in 1523, plans were publicized for a large-scale choir and high altar to be constructed in the mosque’s central hall. With Emperor Charles V’s permission, construction began on the new cathedral that same year.

The emperor is said to have regretted giving permission for the new construction after visiting Córdoba, because he saw that the project had destroyed something entirely unique. They may have destroyed something unique, but they also created something

d r a l s : C o n v e r t i n g S a c r e d S p a c e D u r i n g t h e S p a n i s h R e c o n q u e s t , ”

1 2 2 .

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( 2 0 0 3 ) : 1 1 9 - 1 2 5

E c k e r , “ T h e G r e a t M o s q u e o f C ó r d o b a i n t h e T w e l f t h a n d T h i r t e e n t h C e n t u r i e s , ” 1 1 5

K r o e s e n , “ F r o m M o s q u e s t o C a t h e d r a l s : C o n v e r t i n g S a c r e d S p a c e D u r i n g t h e S p a n i s h R e c o n q u e s t , ” 1

entirely unique in its place. A renaissance cathedral set within a forest of moorish columns does not and could not exist anywhere else in the world.

The building was equally transformed and destroyed by Muslim and Christian rulers alike. It had not looked like Abd al-Rahman’s square congregational church for centuries Ultimately, we cannot know exactly what decisions prompted the mosque to be left standing, nor can we understand the reasoning behind each transformation the building underwent. We can, however, do our best to understand the architecture in its dynamic religious and political contexts. When architecture is built, it becomes alive; it ages over time; it is altered by the people it is closest to. The emperor was upset because he viewed the architecture as static, but the building was always fluid, always borrowing and changing with the times.

Image 4: Cathedral in Cordoba’s Mosque-Cathedral

Image 5: Exterior view of the Mosque-Cathedral. 20

Case II: Synagogue to Church

The Ibn Shoshan Synagogue was built by and for members of Toledo’s Jewish community either during the late 12th century or early in the 13th century. In 1300, Toledo had the largest Jewish population in Spain with 3,500 Jewish households and ten synagogues The Ibn Shoshan Synagogue was particularly impressive It was an irregularly shaped building [6], which was likely a result of the street patterns. The image on the right [7] begins to offer a sense of scale; the single story building is approximately 5,000 square feet large and the central nave is almost 39 feet tall Four arcades of horseshoe arches divide the space into five aisles. The capitals and upper walls are elaborately decorated. It was designed and decorated by Mudejar architects, which is why it looks like a mosque. Synagogues are more commonly designed around a large unobstructed space to facilitate communal prayer services. Functionally this was a synagogue and then a church. However, formally the architecture has more in common with mosques. Even in the case of the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, columns were removed to create open, central spaces.

Ibn Shoshan became Santa Maria La Blanca [8] when it was converted from a synagogue to a church in 1405 This conversion involved the removal of the Ark (a cabinet that holds the Torah scrolls) and the addition of a large altarpiece. These were essentially furniture being exchanged in a building that remained structurally unchanged. Therefore, this conversion relied heavily on the way we spiritually embody religious spaces which refines our categorization of religious architecture by religion. Buildings can

s 1 2 0 5 H a l p e r i n d a t e s t h e s y n a g o g u e t o 1 2 6 0 , b u t t h e m o r e r e c e n t s c h o l a r s h i p a g r e e s t h a t t h e d a t e w a s e a r l i e r e v e n i f t h e r e r e m a i n s d e b a t e o n j u s t h o w m u c h .

M a n n , “ S y n a g o g u e s o f S p a i n a n d P o r t u g a l d u r i n g t h e M i d d l e A g e s , ” 1 5 2

H a l p e r i n , T h e A n c i e n t S y n a g o g u e s o f t h e I b e r i a n P e n i n s u l a , 4 9

J o c e l y n H e l l i g , “ T h e J e w i s h G o l d e n A g e O f S p a i n R e v i s i t e d , ” R e l i g i o n i n S o u t h e r n A f r i c a 3 , 2 ( 1 9 8 2 ) :

Image 6 (left): Plan of Santa Maria La Blanca Image 7 (right): Santa Maria La Blanca prior to restoration 21

have the same structure, but different religions have their own symbolic and formal typologies. Jale Negdet Erzet argues that the more one understands the symbolism of mosques, the more meaning one will find in the space. But this seems to apply to all sacred architecture – it is an architecture that rewards the knowledgeable.

This conversion also rewarded the knowledgeable. Christianity began when it diverged from Judaism. This was an expression of power and a statement of religious supremacy, achieved not through structural changes, but through stating that the building is a church, a departure from its former state as a synagogue. At the heart of this conversion was faith It was a church if you believed it was

m b e i n g l o s t t o t i m e . I t w a s n o t t h e i n t e n t i o n o f t h e c o n v e r s i o n , b u t t h i s h e l p s t h e p r e s e n t - d a y r e c l a m a t i o n o f S p a n i s h J e w i s h h i s t o r y .

T o l e d o : S y n a g o g u e : S a n t a M a r i a L a B l a n c a : I n t : A r c h e s I m a g e s , n d h t t p s : / / j s t o r o r g / s t a b l e / c o m m u n i t y 1 3 9 0 8 5 9 8

Image 8: Santa Maria La Blanca arcades

Conclusion

It says something about a site’s complexity when it is hard even to settle on its name. A Google search for “mosque cathedral Córdoba” turns up many names to describe one site. The Google Maps entry (linked to Wikipedia) tells us that the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba (Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba) is officially known by its ecclesiastical name, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption. Other names on the first page of search results include Great Mosque of Córdoba, Mezquita Mosque-Cathedral, Cathedral-Mosque, and Mezquita Mosque and Cathedral. Why does this matter? Names reflect our beliefs about places. The plurality of names reflects a debate about what this building is and when it is from. How do we assign dates to a building when a building changes over time? Do we emphasize that which came first (mosque) or the thing that is most recent (cathedral)? It depends on the goal. Religiously converted architecture continues to be used to advance certain goals. If the medieval goal was to emphasize a change in political and theological power, 21st-century tourism boards have different goals. Convivencia is a 20th-century theory that describes the medieval period in Iberia as a time of great religious tolerance which allowed for an exchange of culture and ideas The theory has fallen out of favor with scholars, but prevails in Spain’s modern consciousness by design, to further an economic project. In 2014, there was a dispute among religious and local officials over the name of the Cordoba “Mosque-Cathedral ” Andalusia’s minister of tourism said, “It’s an essential tourist site for Andalusia, the second most important after the Alhambra. It seems absurd that they are not exploiting all the possibilities for tourism due to religious reasons.” The economic agenda is quite clear.

This new economic agenda requires reframing history in a way that obscures some of the deliberate decisions made to advance the previous political-religious agenda. Just as one can take a building and convert it to another religion, one can take a building and convert it to a monument to religious pluralism. Often religious architecture is categorized by the formal qualities of buildings, but these case studies bring nuance to this picture by focusing on changes to interior space, symbolism, and use While the physical changes are significant, the ways that we talk about buildings and describe them also matter and are part of political agendas.

” R e l i g i o n C o m p a s s 3 ,

1 ( 2 0 0 9 ) : 7 2 - 8 5 . A s h i f a K a s s a m , “ C ó r d o b a ’ s M o s q u e - C a t h e d r a l i n n a m e - c h a n g e r o w , ” T h e G u a r d i a n , D e c 5 , 2 0 1 4 ,

a c c e s s e d D e c 1 6 , 2 0 2 1 , h t t p s : / / w w w t h e g u a r d i a n c o m / w o r l d / 2 0 1 4 / d e c / 0 5 / c o r d o b a - m o s q u e - c a t h e d r a l - n a m e - c h a n g e - r o w - a n d a l u s i a

The Ark of the Covenant

"You are a dead man, but I will not put you to death at this time, because you carried the Ark of my Lord God before my father David..."

- Kings I, 2:26

You crawled into that box, three boxes, really, gold, wood, gold, and said from the other edge of the bed you hated your body for what it could do (I had noticed you wore turtlenecks and trench coats )

When you crawled back out I saw you were right Sex was a master from Gei-bin-hinnam and love was a slave from New Jersey and you thought I would tell you which one was sat there between the two of us?

--Netanel Schwartz

ויק־שטייא

לגיצ ןופ ןינב א לגיצ א

עקרא ןא ןיא םיור א רעמיצ א םיור

עקרא ןא ןופ

לגיצ ןיא לפמעטש א

ןגיוא יד ליומ ןײד

לגיצ ןיא לכעל א רעטכעלעג ןײד

עקרא ןא ןיא רעמיצ א חומ ןײד

,עקרא ןא חומ ןײד

טעקארדעגנא פאק ןײמ טציש סאװ עקרא ןא

םערוטש םעד ,םערוטש םענופ טעקארדעגנא טציש

עקרא ןא טימ טפערט סאװ עקרא ןא ןבעל ןײד

למיה םעניא שוק א

חומ םעד רימ טציש סאװ לגיצ םענופ שוק ןײד

eytsh-kyu

a brick a building of brick a room a space in an arch room from an arch a stamp in brick

your mouth the eyes

your laugh a needle’s eye in brick

your mind a room in an arch

your mind an arch, an arch that protects my head scribbled protects scribbled by the storm, the storm

your life an arch that meets an arch a kiss in the heavens

your kiss of brick that protects my mind a kiss in a stamp that a kiss is a stamp a space in an arch a stamp in the heart a brick a building of love

Giovanna Truong

time, travel

Meticulous fringes tether our path to the skies, a thrice-reflecting peephole to infinity

Every morning, the same words, the same leather squeezing your arm You run your hand along the wall of a long hallway and its texture whispers prayers to your fingertips A corridor of mornings, a corridor of sleepy eyes and unfolding days

Friday night, the same tunes. Candle pillars and grapevines line the steps up to the palace. Enormous, egg-washed double doors break open, and you step from the sixth to the seventh, where the air is sturdier and the mind clearer A space oblivious to the laws of the physical world Stairways lead to libraries and chessboards, pages turn to far-away lands and songs sing their own praises Night, and day A presence finds itself absent-mindedly

Saturday night, a farewell at the back door. A braided, glowing doorframe, the same grapevines that adorn the palace’s entrance. Cinnamon, cloves. Leading down from the palace, a fading magenta walkway searches the skies for a glimpse of a new moon.

Temples tell the tale of our landscape.

A grand temple of ramshorn and honey. A ten-day corridor flows into a white temple, full of candor, dizziness, and overexposed vision.

A temple of leaves and tapestries, of outstretched branches, of eternal impermanence Colors themselves hang from the ceilings, twisting slowly, catching glimmers of sun

A temple of light in the darkest valley, inverted chandeliers, windows, and coatracks Towering golden stacks, frying oil, letters that spin too quickly for you to glean their meaning

One temple is adorned with masks, like a theater, though its entrance places you not in the audience but on the stage An unwinding funhouse, where down leads to up and up becomes down, only stable through its embrace of instability Appearances are not what they seem poppy masquerades as cocoa and the strongest shape crumbles in your hands

A temple with mortar made from taste and bricks made from memory itself. A containment defined by escape. Cushions so comfortable that they tell you you’re moving, bread made in such haste that it tells you you’re there. Gateways in the shape of goblets, a door that is ajar.

A temple of fire that nearly consumes itself.

A hilltop temple of marriage and covenant, a great gateway to holy union, a honeymoon suite for the newlyweds to study the terms of their contract all night long.

A temple of ruins. A stolen altar to ashes, cries, to the lost and to the losing.

Our landscape is a globe, and a sweet siren tells you that the ramshorn temple is breaking the horizon once more

Meticulous fringes, a guardrail for our walkway in the clouds

--Max Bamberger

The Memorial

Excerpted from "Hidden in Plain Sight: An Itinerary through the Landscape of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary France"

by Isabel Kirsch

In a reading room named for King Louis XIV and decorated with ceiling-height oil paintings of French military victories, I saw my great-grandfather, Adam Stein, for the first time. He was unsmiling, although his unevenly perched glasses made him seem a bit less stoic, and I was surprised by his youthful appearance, the smoothness of his skin. The curve of his chin reminded me of both my grandmother, Marguerite, and of my father I lingered on the photograph, struck by my inability to take the picture out of the state archive for my family to appreciate and by the sudden, unexpected physicality of an ancestor who had existed only in words until then I compromised with a photograph of the photograph and continued through Adam’s dossier. I found his image in a dossier housed at the Service Historique de la Défense (SHD), the Ministry of Defense’s main archive in a suburb just east of Paris, thanks to Laura, an archivist at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris who suggested searching for individual family members in an online military database. My father had told me that Adam served in the French military as a medic, but given the many laws enacted by the Vichy state to strip recently naturalized Jews of their citizenship, I was surprised to see Adam’s name pop up online, associated with dossiers in both Vincennes and at another SHD location in Caen. In these two dossiers, one linked to his resistance participation and the other to his military servicerelated death, I discovered the paper trail of his military roles, the circumstances of his death in September 1944, and ultimately his receipt of a coveted Mort pour la France (MPF) designation of having died in national military service. Jarnac’s local war memorial includes Adam because of this designation; however, the etching of his name into a marble slab fails to reflect the context that I found in his personnel files. What is the relationship between the version of Adam Stein constructed in the SHD’s dossiers and his representation on Jarnac’s war memorial? How does memory move from its construction in an archive to a tangible public presence?

In this final chapter, I will move beyond private, family knowledge and the construction of archival narratives to explore how these dynamics play out in concrete terms. Guided by medical anthropologist João Biehl’s application of the term “file self” to describe the identity established by a patient’s collected medical records, I will describe Adam’s as reflected in French military archives. His “file self” not only extended the gaps

inherent in any archive, but it also shaped the construction of a physical memory landscape. My analysis will draw on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s understanding of the process by which archives construct historical silences, James E. Young’s genreshaping work on Holocaust memorials, particularly his idea of “countermonuments” as “brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being.” While Young applies this term to the German memorial landscape and installations created by younger artists with no lived experience of the Nazi period, I will consider Jarnac’s war memorial as simultaneously, and unintentionally, both a monument and a countermonument. Analysis of Adam’s archival files revealed the inherent challenge that his name on Jarnac’s marble slab poses, the subversive potential that it holds to disrupt the memorial’s sturdy foundations. Nora’s framework of lieux de mémoire also proves generative in this chapter, as well as Andreas Huyssen’s description of “urban palimpsests.” The Jarnac war memorial is a monument, a countermonument, and a palimpsest, a layered, textual reflection of differentially visible narratives and histories.

Adam’s File Self

Adam’s “file self” presents a naturalized Polish immigrant, doctor, military veteran, and resistance-affiliated medic who lost his life in a military accident in September 1944. His first dossier, labeled “16P 556576,” was housed within the “Résistance” office of a larger repository of the land army’s personnel files. The labeled manila file holding his documents featured a laundry list of acronyms of different officially recognized Resistance groups. Here, somebody had drawn an uneven box around “FFI,” the acronym that applies to his “Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur” affiliation. The folder included about twenty pages of documentation on almost transparent paper, including a “Certificate of Membership in the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, ” the “Dossier of Homologation of F.F.I. Grade,” Adam’s “Individual Officer Record,” and descriptive mailing slips Within his homologation dossier, I found a reprinted “Certificate of Membership,” an additional copy of his “Individual Officer Record,” two additional slips describing the dossier’s contents, and a few smaller sheets attesting to his promotions and titles within the resistance movement. These promotion-proving sheets carried the signature of his sector’s leader, Colonel Bernard. These documents were dated from either 1946 or 1950, timing that suggests a slow military bureaucracy, that Adam’s wife and my great-grandmother, Fania, filed additional paperwork from New York after leaving France with Grammy in 1946, or perhaps both.

It is worth noting that the Angoulême questionnaires, which asked schoolteachers to describe their experiences of occupation and liberation for the Commission of the History of the Occupation and Liberation of France (CHOLF), also dated to 1950, in the midst of the ten-year period that historian Henry Rousso describes as France’s “unfinished mourning” of World War II’s humiliation and devastation. The immediate aftermath of the Occupation prompted debate about the appropriate role of résistants in post-war politics; in fact, these tensions between Communists, different branches of résistants, and reactionary Pétainist parties were so worryingly visible that a former Pétain staffer coined the term “guerre franco-française” to characterize this political “civil war.” It is within this context, and at the same approximate time, that regional military commanders in nearby Bordeaux reviewed and stamped Adam’s dossiers and that local schoolteachers described the German occupation of their towns for the CHOLF questionnaires.

These 1950 examples offer two distinct models of government-created questionnaires prompting civilians to engage with the recent wartime past. In the first model, the

d ’ s I n S e a r c h o f t h e

M a q u i s o f f e r s h e l p f u l b a c k g r o u n d o n t h e d i f f e r e n c e b e t w e e n o f f i c i a l l y r e c o g n i z e d , c a p i t a l - R R e s i s t a n c e

m o v e m e n t s l a t e r a b s o r b e d i n t o t h e F r e n c h a r m y a n d s p o n t a n e o u s , l e s s c e n t r a l l y o r g a n i z e d , l o w e r c a s e - R r e s i s t a n c e . I n t h i s p a p e r , I u s e u p p e r c a s e a n d l o w e r c a s e “ R e s i s t a n c e / r e s i s t a n c e ” d e p e n d i n g o n t h e c o n t e x t a n d g u i d e d b y t h i s d i s t i n c t i o n

D o s s i e r 1 6 P 5 5 6 5 7 6 S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , V i n c e n n e s , F r a n c e A c c e s s e d J u n e 2 0 2 2

D o s s i e r

1 6 P 5 5 6 5 7 6 S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , V i n c e n n e s , F r a n c e A c c e s s e d J u n e 2 0 2 2

H e n r y R o u s s o , T h e V i c h y S y n d r o m e ( B o s t o n : H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y , 1 9 9 1 ) , 1 5

R o u s s o , T h e V i c h y S y n d r o m e , 2 9

Charente schoolteachers submitted their completed questionnaires to a sealed archive for the stated purpose of “historical ends ” In the second model, Adam’s widow, Fania, filled out paperwork to administratively recognize the wartime death of her husband with the expectation that military bureaucrats would view and process the documents in the immediate future. Rousso’s description of France’s “unfinished mourning” in 1950 takes on additional significance with these archival examples in mind. Archives, too, were unfinished just five years after the war’s end. The multi-decade crystallization of French World War II memory that Rousso traces supports Trouillot’s observation that the act of assembling archives is a prerequisite to the creation of enduring historical narratives. In 1950, the questionnaires and wartime dossiers that make up today’s archival materials were still under construction.

The Adam that emerges in this dossier was patriotic and critical to the French war effort, a naturalized French citizen who joined the country’s military as a reservist medic and went on to serve with distinction within a local resistance chapter After a childhood of hearing unconfirmable stories about my great-grandfather’s heroism and resistance activities, I was heartened by the version of Adam that became visible in these materials. In fact, not only did he participate in local resistance, but, according to a signed certificate in his file, he became the leading regional medic for his resistance unit in early September 1944, just days before his death. While this rosy description was comforting to me as Adam’s descendant, it also served a concrete purpose for Fania After all, if not for archival preservation for posterity, why might Fania have filled out such a daunting sheaf of documents? I will explore the writer, Fania, that these forms revealed. Just as the documents constructed an edited or burnished “file self” of Adam, so too did they reflect their author’s priorities. Unlike the local teachers who filed CHOLF questionnaires, Fania had a financial stake in the satisfactory shaping of Adam’s “file self,” for confirming her husband’s military service was critical to securing a widow’s pension.

In the spirit of Stoler and Trouillot, it is worth emphasizing how the structure of the “Individual Officer Record” shaped Fania’s ability to answer the stated questions. It appeared that the officer himself was meant to fill out the form, which did not mention a date of death and referred to the officer as the “interested party.” However, by March 1946, the date stamped on the form, Adam was no longer alive, and Fania was left to complete the form in his absence In asserting her own role in submitting the form, Fania also emphasized her status as a war widow, whether out of administrative necessity or to prompt sympathy in the military bureaucrats who processed the form. She mentioned this positionality in various ways throughout Adam’s detailed “Individual Officer Record,” ranging from subtle edits to an explicit assertion of her financial needs.

In the bottom-right corner on the back of the first pages, Fania signed the form where prompted However, she crossed out the form’s language, “Signature of the interested party,” and replaced it with “Signature of the widow.” This one-word substitution may have generated an emotional response and suggested that Fania was a uniquely and especially interested party. While a local military bureaucrat might have breezed through hundreds of forms each day, perhaps this description of Adam as an individual linked to a grieving, struggling, and very much alive wife could have encouraged the employee to give the document another read or even to advocate for benefits for Adam’s family. I cannot measure any such effects, yet, intentionally or not, Fania further shaped Adam’s “file self” by asserting her relationship as the signing party.

Fania also used her role as a widow to justify the form’s incompleteness When asked for the address of the office charged with liquidating Adam’s army unit after the armistice in June 1940, she responded, “Being a widow, I do not remember.” However, Fania’s widowhood itself said nothing about her ability to understand Adam’s military roles In fact, she offered detailed notes about Adam’s different military and medical titles in the previous question. Instead of leaving the question blank or even writing “not applicable,” Fania defined herself as a widow to explain her lack of knowledge, knowledge that any French army officer would be expected to recall. In a form intended for a living officer with memories of his military placements, Fania clarified her incomplete information. I will never know the degree of intentionality behind Fania’s responses – was her insertion of the phrase “being a widow…” meant to provoke sympathy or simply to explain the form’s gap? No matter this distinction, however, this example further revealed Fania’s usage of the term “widow” beyond contexts where that information was explicitly requested, like the opening section’s request for details about the officer’s immediate family.

Fania’s gymnastics to accurately respond to a form meant for a living officer became painfully clear in a final example, her answer to a question about a preferred job or transfer to a new unit. She wrote, “I want to obtain a job, as a war widow, given that I have a child and that I lost all my family and all my belongings in the wake of the war ” The form’s structure guided this response. Fania was not a military officer herself, but the only way to advocate for her family’s needs in this form was in this section, titled “Wishes expressed by the interested party ” The form expected and prompted officers to request a new role or transfer, yet Fania took the opportunity to emphasize her financial need. I did not find the relevant documentation, but I do know from my father that Fania was ultimately successful in her request for a war widow’s pension She and Grammy arrived in New York City in late 1946, just a few months after she submitted Adam’s “Individual Officer Record.”

What Went Unfiled

While Adam’s first dossier illuminated details about his medical training and resistance activity, as well as Fania’s efforts to file posthumous paperwork on his behalf, his “file self” was additionally generative in its gaps. The dossier did not contain any mention of Adam’s status as a Jew. Nowhere did the form request religious or ethnic information; however, Fania alluded to anti-Jewish legislation in an addendum to Adam’s “Individual Officer Record.” The first question on this one-page addendum asked for a list of the respondent’s civil and military jobs between June 1940, the date of France’s devastating defeat to Germany, and liberation in September 1944. Fania responded with the following: “Having lost the right to exercise medicine under the law of August 16 1941 (son of a foreigner), he took a civilian job as an agricultural laborer ” Upon further examination, this response seemed to combine details of different antisemitic statues implemented in the early years of the Vichy regime.

Fania’s reference to Adam’s classification as the “son of a foreigner” most closely referred to a Vichy law enacted just two months after the armistice. On August 16, 1940, Marshal Pétain, the head of the Vichy government, approved a law that created a doctor’s guild, called the Ordre des Médecins, and prohibited doctors without a French father to practice in or enter the medical field. Historians Marrus and Paxton note that the medical profession had been “the most resentful of refugee interlopers in the 1930s” and had much to gain by restrictions on Jewish doctors and medical students. Adam, who received his medical degree in August 1938, was exactly the kind of immigrant doctor that French doctors and the Vichy government had in mind with the passage of the 1940 law: he had left his birthplace, Warsaw, to pursue a medical degree in Paris due to restrictive quotas that prevented him from enrolling in Polish medical schools. The 1940 law did not explicitly mention Jews; however, Marrus and Paxton note a “[general understanding]” that Jews were the primary target of this legislation.

Almost exactly one year later, on August 11, 1941, Marshal Pétain implemented additional restrictions and quotas on Jewish doctors Unlike that of the prior summer, this legislation explicitly mentioned Jews and fine-tuned the regime’s first Statut des juifs, passed the previous year in October 1940. The suite of summer 1941 laws focused not just on doctors, but also on Jewish lawyers, dentists, university students, architects, and others in the liberal professions. The August statute limited Jewish doctors, for example, to comprising no more than two percent of licensed practitioners, while Jews could make

up no more than three percent of the student body at higher education institutions. Fania’s description of “the law of August 16 1941” seemed to mix these two statues – the first a veiled attempt to restrict immigrant Jewish doctors in August 1940, the second an explicit quota imposed on Jewish doctors regardless of parental citizenship as part of a larger purge of Jews from the liberal professions in August 1941.

Fania’s apparent error stood out given her clear and corroborated timeline of Adam’s military and resistance roles during the war. Why did she incorrectly reference a law passed on August 16, 1941, that prevented Adam from practicing medicine due to his status as the child of a foreigner, no matter his own naturalization as a French citizen? Instead, Adam’s medical practice was restricted the previous year, on August 16, 1940, when the Vichy government passed its first statute aimed at limiting Jewish participation in the medical profession. While the later August 1941 quota on Jewish doctors would have similarly restricted Adam’s ability to work as a doctor, it only further cemented professional exclusion that he already experienced thanks to the 1940 statute. Had Fania referred to the August 16, 1940, legislation, Adam’s Jewish background would not be immediately clear to the form’s reader. Instead, while the general understanding the Marron and Paxton mention may prompt readers to assume Adam’s Jewish origins, it is Fania’s perhaps subconscious reference to explicitly antisemitic legislation passed in August 1941 that would confirm Adam’s background to a suspicious reader. Perhaps Fania simply wrote the wrong date in 1946 after years of targeted antisemitic statues. This likely lapse or confusion could also point to an attempt to conceal Adam’s Jewish background in his military dossier, especially her parenthetical reference to his foreign parentage, not his Judaism, as the justification for his cessation of licensed medical work. No matter the rationale behind her actions, Fania’s responses provided clues to Adam’s origins without explicit clarification.

Beyond Adam’s Jewish background, the dossiers also presented the circumstances of his death ambiguously I will turn now to his second dossier, the folder housed in Caen at the SHD’s branch archive devoted to “victims of contemporary conflicts.” This slim file, his official “Dossier de Décès, ” included his entry in Angoulême’s city death records, internal resistance documents reporting the incident, a few paper slips that labeled and explained the various documents, and two forms about Adam’s posthumous receipt of the

“Mort pour la France” designation bestowed on French soldiers who lost their lives in military service The summary page of Adam’s dossier listed the “genre” of death as an “injury

a service accident.” A

copy of Angoulême’s death registry went

r y d u r i n g t h e V i c h y p e r i o d W h i l e t o d a y , I m i g h t a n s w e r “ J e w i s h ” i f a s k e d a b o u t m y r e l i g i o n o n a f o r m , a t t h i s t i m e , b e i n g c a t e g o r i z e d a s a J e w w a s a p r e d o m i n a n t l y r a c i a l c a t e g o r y t h a t c a r r i e d w i t h i t a s s o c i a t e d r e l i g i o u s b e l i e f s M a n y o f F r a n c e ’ s J e w s , A d a m i n c l u d e d , w e r e s e c u l a r , b u t t h e r a c i a l c l a s s i f i c a t i o n s t i l l a p p l i e d

M o r e i n f o r m a t i o n a b o u t t h i s a r c h i v a l d i v i s i o n i s a v a i l a b l e h e r e , o n t h e S H D ’ s w e b s i t e : h t t p s : / / w w w s e r v i c e h i s t o r i q u e s g a d e f e n s e g o u v f r / l e - s h d - e n - f r a n c e / c a e n - d i v i s i o n - a r c h i v e s - d e s - c o n f l i t sc o n t e m p o r a i n s .

D o s s i e r d e D é c è s 2 1

D o s s i e r d e D é c è s 2 1

P 1 5 7 6 5 0 , S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , C a e n , F r a n c e . A c c e s s e d J u l y 2 0 2 2 .

P 1 5 7 6 5 0 , S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , C a e n , F r a n c e A c c e s s e d J u l y 2 0 2 2 M a r r u s a n d

into more medical detail, listing the death as the result of a “penetrating wound in the 2nd left intercostal space by a service accident ” A report filed the day after Adam’s death by his resistance unit’s commander, Colonel Bernard, offered additional context: “On the date of 13 September 1944, around 19h30, the Médecin-Commandant STEIN was found gravely wounded in his room by a firearm. The position of his body and that of the revolver found underneath him, as well as the inquest completed immediately, permit the clear conclusion of an accident during the manipulation of the gun.”

Claude, the gruff man in his mid-sixties with whom I had coordinated my visit to the Caen archive, was suspicious after I asked for assistance deciphering the cursive handwriting on one of these documents. He read the multiple descriptions of Adam’s death, pointed out a few cursive words, and paused to look at me

“This sounds a lot like a suicide.” I froze. I do not remember how I learned this information, but it is common family knowledge that yes, Adam died by suicide At the time, suicide was not recognized as a service-related military death, so technically speaking, Adam’s name should not have been engraved on the Jarnac war memorial. Yet my more immediate concern was financial – Fania should never have received the widow’s pension that ultimately enabled her and Marguerite to relocate to New York in 1946. Could Adam be retroactively stripped of his Mort pour la France designation with the confirmation of his suicide? Could my family be liable for theft from the French government? I stuttered a response about the ongoing ambiguity of my greatgrandfather’s death and how curious my family and I were about its circumstances, but my answer can’t have been particularly compelling. I returned to my carrel and deciphered the rest of the cursive without Claude’s assistance.

Mort pour la France

It took Claude just moments to identify the unstated cause of Adam’s death. How, then, did these documents succeed in proving Adam’s Mort pour la France status? I will trace the bureaucratic path that these documents revealed, from Adam’s death to his confirmation as “an MPF,” as contemporary archivists abbreviate the title, to demonstrate the role of archival ambiguity in making this designation possible. Unlike Susan Slyomovics, whose grandmother’s reparations claims were possible in large part because of carefully maintained German records of Jewish persecution, I will argue that the ambiguity in Adam’s documents ultimately allowed for a successful MPF claim and Fania’s receipt of a widow’s pension

s i e r d e D é c è s 2 1 P 1 5 7 6 5 0 , “ R a p p o r t d u C o l o n e l B e r n a r d , ” S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , C a e n , F r a n c e

A c c e s s e d J u l y 2 0 2 2

S u s a n S l y o m o v i c s , H o w t o A c c e p t G e r m a n R e p a r a t i o n s ( P h i l a d e l p h i a : U n i v e r s i t y o f P e n n s y l v a n i a P r e s s , 2 0 1 4 )

A n t h r o p o l o g i s t S u s a n S l y o m o v i c s t r a c k s h e r g r a n d m o t h e r ’ s a n d m o t h e r ’ s e f f o r t s t o s e c u r e G e r m a n p a y m e n t s a n d t h e p a p e r w o r k r e q u i r e d t o p r o v e J e w i s h v i c t i m h o o d a t t h e h a n d s o f t h e N a z i s t a t e . T o S l y o m o v i c s , p r o o f o f h e r g r a n d m o t h e r ’ s p r e s e n c e i n t h e G e r m a n c o n c e n t r a t i o n c a m p s y s t e m u l t i m a t e l y e n a b l e s h e r r e l a t i v e t o r e c e i v e

Colonel Bernard’s report, filed the day after Adam’s death, suggested the seeming inevitability of a forthcoming MPF declaration Besides his assertion of the “clear conclusion of an accident,” Bernard also included a glowing paragraph about Adam’s contributions to the resistance movement The document ends in capital letters asserting Adam’s military sacrifice: “IL EST MORT POUR LA FRANCE!!” I suspect that Bernard understood the circumstances of Adam’s death; his confident language and laudatory paragraph both seem so forceful potentially as attempts to hide ambiguous or alternate explanations Perhaps Bernard understood the financial stakes for Adam’s widow and daughter of securing a widow’s pension and MPF designation, although I do not know the motives underlying his report

A few months later, on January 22, 1945, Fania submitted a form titled “Request for Inscription of the Mention Mort Pour la France on the death act of a member of the FFI.” In this document, Fania used the local death registry’s language to describe the cause of Adam’s death, with a slight addition: “Penetrating wound in the 2nd left intercostal space by a service accident – taken dead to the hospital.” Understandably, Fania did not mention her husband’s suicide in her application for a military designation and related financial benefits. The case was picked up in Angoulême later that year with a typewritten report, handwritten addendum, and a final October 10, 1945, document confirming Adam’s approval for MPF designation.

The ambiguity of Adam’s death was visible even during these final exchanges. Despite Colonel Bernard’s earlier certainty of the cause of Adam’s death, a typed memo from August 1945 mentioned that “the causes of his death are still unknown.” A handwritten note affixed to the memo summarized this concern and ended with a question: “The causes of his death remain unknown according to the report of the Commandant… [despite being assigned locally in Angoulême,] can the [MPF designation] be sustained without supplement from the inquest?” Underlined below this question, another person’s handwriting responded, “yes ” With this willingness to overlook the inquest’s lack of certainty about Adam’s cause of death, it seemed that the next step was approval of his MPF status On October 10, 1945, almost thirteen months after Adam’s death, the military’s Paris-based Service Central sent a form to the mayor of Angoulême requesting the addition of MPF status to Adam’s local death record Upon receipt, the mayor’s office stamped the form, agreed to the addition, and returned the document as requested.

i n a n c i a l p a y m e n t f o r h e r p e r s e c u t i o n D e s p i t e t

e

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l a t i o n

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a n i n t o f i n a n c i a l t e r m s , i t i s u l t i m a t e l y o n l y w i t h a r c h i v a l p r o o f t h a t S l y o m o v i c s ’ g r a n d m o t h e r i s a b l e t o e s t a b l i s h h e r e l i g i b i l i t y f o r c o m p e n s a t i o n T h e c o n t e m p o r a r y G e r m a n r e p a r a t i o n s s y s t e m r e s t s o n t h e s a m e n a m e - r e l i a n t a r c h i v a l l o g i c a s t h e b u r e a u c r a t i c d o c u m e n t s o f N a z i g e n o c i d e D o s s i e r d e D é c è s

2 1 P 1 5 7 6 5 0 , “ R a p p o r t d u C o l o n e l B e r n a r d , ” S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , C a e n , F r a n c e

A c c e s s e d J u l y 2 0 2 2

D o s s i e r d e D é c è s

2 1 P 1 5 7 6 5 0 , “ D e m a n d e d ’ I n s c r i p t i o n d e l a M e n t i o n M o r t P o u r l a F r a n c e , ” S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , C a e n , F r a n c e A c c e s s e d J u l y 2 0 2 2

D o s s i e r d e D é c è s 2 1 P 1 5 7 6 5 0 , “ R a p p o r t d u C o l o n e l C o m m a n d a n t l a S u b d i v i s i o n M i l i t a i r e d e l a C h a r e n t e , ”

S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , C a e n , F r a n c e A c c e s s e d J u l y 2 0 2 2 N o t e a f f i x e d t o D o s s i e r d e D é c è s 2 1 P 1 5 7 6 5 0 , “ R a p p o r t d u C o l o n e l C o m m a n d a n t l a S u b d i v i s i o n M i l i t a i r e d e l a C h a r e n t e , ” S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , C a e n , F r a n c e A c c e s s e d J u l y 2 0 2 2

D o s s i e r d e D é c è s 2 1 P 1 5 7 6 5 0 , “ J e v o u s p r i e d e b i e n v o u l o i r , ” S e r v i c e H i s t o r i q u e d e l a D é f e n s e , C a e n , F r a n c e A c c e s s e d J u l y 2 0 2 2 .

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Fania’s successful efforts to apply the MPF label to her deceased husband complicate Trouillot’s sequence of the production of historical silences that I discussed in the previous chapter. To Trouillot, the assembly of facts into archives requires selectivity; I agree that no one archive can possibly contain a complete record of all perspectives and experiences of a given event. However, in Adam’s case, archival incompleteness allowed recognition of his resistance involvement and wartime activities Both his Jewish background and suicide were not explicitly visible in his dossiers. The first silence may have minimized Fania’s concerns about antisemitism in the bureaucratic process, while the second enabled her to receive financial support from the French government. This section is not to challenge Trouillot’s progression of historical silence production, from the assembly of facts to the concretizing of shared historical narratives. Instead, I offer a caveat – that, in certain circumstances, archival silences may tangibly benefit the families referenced in said archival material. Unlike sealed government archives which scholars have described as benefiting the perpetrators of French colonial crimes, the silences that I analyze here benefited a victim of Nazi and Vichy antisemitic persecution, despite his proud service in the French military.

I will consider Adam’s dossier as a palimpsest, a text with overlapping meanings and content inscribed by different authors over time. Historian Jody Russell Manning notes that the Greek-derived word describes the erasure of previous writing from a parchment scroll and the inscription of new content. In contemporary academic use, urban geographers, psychologists, and anthropologists alike usually use the term to emphasize either the act of erasure of memory or the creation of new, overlapping patterns through repeated inscriptions. It is in this second sense that I view Adam’s dossiers as a palimpsest. Although these files did not reflect the literal erasure of one text and its replacement by another, they displayed a temporal progression between authors and the ongoing influence of earlier iterations. This dynamic was most clear in the files that traced the trail of Adam’s MPF designation. Four months after Colonel Bernard’s patriotic missive following Adam’s death, Fania mobilized the language on the local Angoulême death record to submit an application for military review. Later that year, internal military documents showed uncertainty about Adam’s status given the inconclusive inquest into his death, despite Bernard’s apparent confidence that a tragic accident had taken place. However, the application’s reviewers did not deem this concern worthy of derailing Adam’s posthumous application, and in late 1945, the Angoulême mayor’s office confirmed his new administrative status and its reflection in city materials

I n q u i r y i n t o t h e C o n d i t i o n o f V i c t i m h o o d ( P r i n c e t o n , N J : P r i n c e t o n U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 2 0 0 9 ) ; R o t h b e r g , T h e

m a : A n

I m p l i c a t e d S u b j e c t . I u s e t h e t e r m s “ p e r p e t r a t o r ” a n d “ v i c t i m ” w i t h c a u t i o n g i v e n F a s s i n ’ s , R e c h t m a n ’ s , a n d R o t h b e r g ’ s a w a r e n e s s o f t h e m a l l e a b i l i t y o f t h e s e t e r m s a n d t h e i r a p p l i c a b i l i t y i n d i f f e r e n t s i t u a t i o n s J o d y R u s s e l l M a n n i n g , “ T h e P a l i m p s e s t o f M e m o r y : A u s c h w i t z a n d O ś w i ę c i m , ” H o l o c a u s t S t u d i e s 1 6 , n o 1 – 2

( J u n e 2 0 1 0 ) : 2 3 6 .

The Jarnac War Memorial

With this reading of Adam’s dossiers as a palimpsest in mind, I will now move to the most tangible result of Adam’s MPF status, the presence of his name on Jarnac’s memorial to the local men killed in military service during the World Wars. Jarnac is not alone in its prominent memorial to French war dead from the two World Wars – in fact, as historian Antoine Prost notes in an essay compiled for Nora’s “Lieux de Mémoire” collection, almost all French communes have such a memorial The monuments were initially constructed in the years immediately following World War I, often with a modest subsidy from the national government. Instead of creating new monuments, after World War II, most municipalities simply added World War II casualties to the original monument, often in a less central location due to space constraints. While Prost identifies four different categories of monuments, classified by varying degrees of funereal, patriotic, civic, and republican elements, he emphasizes that most of the monuments share similar language and read “Morts pour la Patrie.”or “Dead for the Country,” mirroring the Mort pour la France vocabulary of military death certificates like Adam’s.

I visited Jarnac’s memorial, a substantial white marble slab with names etched on all faces, with Corinne, the descendant of dear friends of my great-grandparents who had hidden Grammy in their home during the war. Both Corinne and Pierre, her cousin, had brought up the memorial in the context of Bastille Day and Armistice Day ceremonies, although neither of them routinely visited the memorial in everyday life. Corinne mentioned that the memorial was recently relocated from a central traffic circle to the quiet park, replaced by a bust of hometown hero and former president François Mitterrand. She noted that the new memorial site, with its open plaza, allowed for commemoration ceremonies without closing busy downtown streets. Despite this reasonable justification, I was struck by the sterility and emptiness of the plaza and noticed that Corinne and I were the only visitors except for a man walking his dog on the other side of the park. While Nora views local military monuments like this one in Jarnac as exemplary lieux de mémoire, this memorial did not hold nearly the same degree of meaning for Corinne as the gifts and letters from Grammy maintained privately at home.

Thanks to his MPF classification, Adam’s name did appear on Jarnac’s memorial The front and back sides of the slab were already full with almost one hundred alphabetized names and excerpts of speeches from World War I, so Adam and the other five local military casualties from World War II appeared on a thinner side, not either of the main faces. Below these names were short lists from two more conflicts, colonial independence struggles in Southeast Asia and Algeria. The slab was adorned with carved bunches of grapes, and a statue of a cloaked mother stood in front of the display, pointing out names to her sculpted young son. With my newfound understanding of the paper trail behind

Adam’s technically inappropriate MPF designation, my visit to the memorial prompted mixed emotions. I was at once proud of my great-grandfather’s military and resistance service, disheartened by the glossing over of his Jewish background and any other personal details besides his name, and unsure how much my companion, Corinne, knew about the circumstances of Adam’s death and the receipt of this MPF recognition Did these later generations of Corinne’s family, the Girods, know that Adam died by suicide? After the discomfort of my interaction with Claude in the Caen SHD archives, I did not ask this question, despite my curiosity.

While Adam s dossiers themselves served as a palimpsest in a more literal, textual sense, Jarnac’s war memorial as a whole can be considered an “urban palimpsest,” to use the phrasing of comparative literature scholar Andreas Huyssen. Huyssen cautions against a growing trend of considering cities and buildings as palimpsests, as most buildings are not actually reinscribed on the same foundation as their predecessor, and a building performs one purpose at a given time To Huyssen, the “urban palimpsest” is temporal rather than spatial; urban palimpsests emerge at the convergence of past memories, present uses, and even future possibilities brought together by modern technologies and a seeming compression of the past into contemporary life. This convergence of past and present was clear during mine and Corinne’s visit to the memorial. Corinne and I, connected by links between past generations of our families, stood together in front of a monument bearing my great-grandfather’s name.

While this engraving on the marble slab was the most tangible, permanent, and publicly displayed evidence that I found of my family’s presence in Jarnac, it was also the least informative. In the process of inscribing and consolidating Adam’s “file self,” from a sheaf of personnel documents to his death records to memos about an ambiguous inquest to, finally, his certificate of MPF designation, details about his Jewish background and the circumstances of his death disappeared. Instead of the erasure and rewriting that a palimpsest suggests, Adam’s engraved name was the result of a layered selection process. Not only did his paper trail reveal different iterations and authors, but it also shrank from full archival folders to a simple two-word inscription on the memorial. It was this shrunken representation of a complex, layered human life that remained visible to passersby

Yet even this shrunken, context-free representation of Adam on the marble slab was enough to transform the memorial from a straightforward monument to an unwitting “countermonument.” While James E. Young uses the term to describe “brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being,” the Jarnac memorial reflected no such intentionality. However, to an informed viewer, the presence of Adam’s name unintentionally challenged the patriotism and united French national sentiment that the monument glorified. Adam, a naturalized, Communistaffiliated Jew of Eastern European origins and a graduate of French medical school, was a prime target of the Vichy government’s antisemitic legislation And yet, following the war, Adam was included on this memorial, officially recognized as a soldier who “died for France” for his military and resistance service. Despite the circumstances of his death, despite the lack of context about his life, and despite this painful irony, I was proud to see my great-grandfather’s name etched onto Jarnac’s war memorial. However, the Jarnac war memorial became a subversive “countermonument” only with additional context. I knew nothing about the other men listed on the wall, just as most other visitors would be unaware of the layered texts and meaning behind Adam’s name. My countermonument, a tangible reminder of Adam’s national service in the midst of active persecution, was, to most visitors, a standard local war memorial

Conclusion

It is worth noting a final silence in both Adam’s constructed “file self” and his presence on the Jarnac war memorial’s side – his role not as a military officer or resistance medic but as a father. Grammy’s own memoir, a twenty-page Microsoft Word document circulated within our small extended family a few years before her 2020 death, provided just this insight. From Fania’s addendum to the “Individual Officer Record,” we learned that Adam worked as an agricultural laborer after losing his license to practice medicine. Not only did Grammy’s memoir describe Adam in a different job, working in road construction, but it also offered insight into Adam’s emotional life: “He was very unhappy. I remember how sad he looked. I have thought a lot about this, both when I was young and when I was

older. Despite his obvious unhappiness, he continued to want me to learn. I had some special moments with him, and they are memories I cherish ” While Fania’s forms and Grammy’s memoir presented similar timelines of Adam’s restriction from his chosen profession, it is only in Grammy’s reflection that I could feel the emotional weight of these statutes on Adam

Her description of her father’s death was similarly evocative. Beyond the detailed medical language in the dossier’s description of Adam’s “penetrating wound in the 2nd left intercostal space,” Grammy’s brief memoir offered a personal account of his death and is worth including in full:

“And I immediately figured out what was happening: my mother in tears, everybody gone, and I’m here, and the daughter [of the family at whose house I was staying] of all things goes out and brings out a real stove, and a real potato, and starts a real fire?

‘What’s happened to my father?’ I asked.

‘Well, he’s busy ’ And I said, ‘I know he’s dead.’

She was just speechless. Literally. She never said another word about it. Neither did I Nor did anyone else! Even my mother never officially told me he died She took for granted that I already knew. She was at her wit’s end too. Everyone was upset. I didn’t find out until more than a quarter century later that he had killed himself.” 46

No glorified statement from Colonel Bernard or administrative confirmation of Adam’s MPF status could capture the emotions that Grammy described Laura, the archivist at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris who directed me to Adam’s dossiers in the SHD archives, commented that, despite her job at a public archive, she found private family archives to be “the best” archival source because of the personal flavor of family documents. Bracketing the implications of this statement for families without such traceable archivable documents, it is Laura’s point about the personal, emotional content of private family documents that stands out in this case However, it took both official monument and personal memoir, public record and private account, to represent Adam in his various roles as a résistant, doctor, reservist, and father. Despite its public visibility, the war memorial’s shrinking of layered archival materials and lack of context made it an incomplete representation of Adam’s life and military service.

Mikvah Night

On Masada we sat down inside the mikvah, which was just a short flight of stairs down and then a relatively small square space There was no water anymore, having dried up long before we thought of visiting. Not the most impressive sight, nothing to write home about. But for whatever reason the Alexander Muss High School in Israel staff decided that Masada was the right place to try and convince a group of mixed-observance eleventh graders that niddah – the system of menstrual purity laws – was actually a really sexy system intended to keep the spark alive in Jewish marriages. So while visiting the mikvah, our teacher (male) regaled us with his description of “mikvah night” where his wife comes home after two weeks of strictly not touching and … you get the picture. It was simultaneously illuminating and scarring, highly instructive and totally inappropriate.

When I was twelve or maybe fourteen or maybe even fifteen, my shul ran a fundraising campaign for 1.5 mil to build a new mikvah. Or rather my whole community ran a campaign, because it wasn’t just my shul doing the fundraising. But we’re the largest Orthodox shul in the area, so therefore we were spearheading the campaign We spearheaded the campaign, which was really a whole community wide-effort, and our shul joined up with all the other local shuls and maybe even Chabad to raise money to build this new mikvah Or maybe not Chabad, who possibly have their own mikvah and don’t use ours. But we raised the whole 1.5 million – or maybe it was more, I am terrible at orders of magnitude and it could easily have been 15 mil – in order to build the new mikvah, because the old one was pretty dilapidated Or possibly the old one wasn’t dilapidated, but it was just not really that conveniently located. The old one is out in Wynnewood, which likely means nothing to you, but which I can tell you is close enough by car and not particularly close by foot to most of the shuls and therefore not where the Orthodox Jews actually mostly live. Or possibly the old mikvah was both dilapidated and far. Reader’s choice.

So they raised all the money to build the new mikvah, which they then bought the property for and built. The property was previously a vacant lot, about a half a block around the corner from my house. About five houses down, all things told. I used to walk by that abandoned lot every day on my way to my school bus stop in the morning, with its puddles and its cracks in the pavement I had that bus stop starting in second grade and until I graduated high school, which was after the mikvah was built.

I don’t think I knew what a mikvah was until they raised the money to build the new one. I knew about toveling – where you dip your new dishes before kashering – but not about niddah. Even if I did know about mikvahs I certainly could not have told you where ours was I don’t remember learning about mikvahs, even though I have generally a pretty good memory for that kind of thing. It was just like – when I was young I was never aware of mikvahs, and then suddenly they became this crucial part of Judaism and also right there on my way to the bus stop

One thing I do remember – likely inspired by my Muss teacher’s “mikvah night” lesson –is sitting down with my mother and talking to her about niddah. She wasn’t exactly forthcoming, but I remember sitting there, on our living room couch, piecing together the details of her practice of taharat hamishpachah, looking back on when I was younger and my parents bought that chair that one of them would sometimes sleep on. At the time I had understood it just to mean that they just didn’t always like to share the bed, because sometimes sharing a bed is not very comfortable Sharing a bed is not always very comfortable, but that was beside the point.

The new mikvah is by all reports very nice, although I don’t know whose reports, because I cannot tell you if my mother has ever used this mikvah, because as previously stated I do not know either the intimate details of my mother’s practice or when this mikvah was built But I think it’s nice with deep pools and good privacy and nice lighting or something. Very clean, nice showers. The mikvah building, I can tell you about – I still walk by it quite frequently. It is set back from the street, which is Union Ave. if you are curious, quite a quiet residential street. The parking lot is in front, with a few trees along the sidewalk, and on the whole the building is fairly inconspicuous except it has a sort of an arch with some Hebrew words on top. It could perhaps be mistaken for a very nondescript shul.

There are two doors, one to the mikvah proper and one to the keilim mikvah. I have never been to the mikvah proper, for obvious reasons, but I once accompanied my mother to the keilim mikvah I was shocked to find it was just a really deep sink They do have a plastic-laminated print out sheet next to the deep sink with the bracha that you’re supposed to say as you dip your dishes, like you see sometimes in downscale kosher restaurants by the sink for washing, except here it’s a different bracha I believe that I got to do some of the dipping.

At night the mikvah has a little more intrigue I am always self-conscious about looking in the parking lot to see how crowded it is. There are about ten parking spots in the parking lot. Sometimes I walk by at night and it is almost all parked up, and I feel on some level that it is not respectful of the privacy of the women using the mikvah to look too carefully at their cars, so I do my best to avert my eyes or focus on other things. The outside lights on the building at night are a very warm yellow – almost orange. It is incredibly inviting.

At the end of high school I had a few years packed full of Jewish Tourism. I went with school to Israel, and with my siblings to Prague and Budapest and France and Spain. In Besalu, which is a medieval town about a 40-minute bus ride outside of Girona, which had, in the 13th century, a notable Jewish presence, I took one of my siblings on a day trip to see the old mikvah. I am not saying this to brag, but at this point I have seen a lot of mikvahs all of them without water All of them basically just a few steps down, and then a smallish square room or pool, I guess, where you dunk. I believe the mikvah at my summer camp was a little curtained-off section of our camp lake, but I would not say that

I ever saw it. Can you really say that you’ve seen something if you know the image but never recognized it for what it is?

In any case, perhaps someday I will go to a real mikvah under the cover of night and I will not drive because I am not planning on learning to drive, and so I will not worry about a nosy girl looking too hard at my car in the parking lot, and I will walk into the building with its warm inviting light and inside there will be harsher less inviting light because everyone needs to be able to see very carefully. And then I will go to the mikvah itself, which will be much larger than I expect given the ancient and medieval mikvahs I have seen, or perhaps just about the same size, actually, just like I was surprised when the keilim mikvah was just a sink. But this mikvah, so unlike the tourist sites, will have flowing water and I will walk down a step or two with my cleaned and examined toenails, and then I will dunk three times, and then I will put everything back on and go out back onto the pavement.

Back on Muss, the (all male) teachers took the boys in our grade to the Ari Mikvah on Friday night during our Shabbat in Tzfat. While they were gone, the girls in our grade discussed sexual harassment, while sitting in a circle of metal-framed chairs with purple cushions – you know the type that they only have in synagogues and mid-scale conference centers. We sat there in the largest room on the right-off-the-entryway hall of the hostel we were staying in, a room with warm yellow-orange lighting Then the boys came back, and we all went back into the entryway hall, which had very limited seating and harsh overhead LED lighting, and the boys had decided to only respond to anything we girls said with questions, which I know is confusing, but I cannot make it make more sense for you because it did not make any more sense for me. And somehow, even in question format, these 17-year-old-boys looked at us and could not help but brag about how transformative their trip to the mikvah had been, and also how they got to see our teacher’s cute butt.

– Ruthie Davis