Liora R. Halperin, *The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), pp. 368.

by Yair Wallach

In standard Zionist periodization, the “First Aliya” refers to the early period of
Zionist migration and colonization, between 1882 and 1904. In sociological terms,
the group associated with the “First Aliya” are Eastern European Jewish migrants,
who established themselves as private farmers in the agricultural colonies, the
Moshavot. This group and its legacy have attracted surprisingly little scholarly
interest in English. In contrast, there is a considerable body of literature in Hebrew
on the “First Aliya,” primarily in the form of Zionist historiography and
hagiography—in both scholarly and popular genres—as well as plenty of
memoirs, commemoration books, and museums and memorials, dotted around
the country. In Israel, this generation enjoys some nostalgic halo as the ones who
laid the first foundations for the “new Jewish Yishuv,” but ultimately their role
during the British Mandate and the establishment of Israel is seen as a minor one,
compared with the organized labor movement.

It is this public image—and its contradictions—which is the subject of Liora Halperin’s excellent book, on the Zionist settler memory culture. In chronological terms, *The Oldest Guard* focuses on the British Mandate and the early decades of the state of Israel—during which members of “the First Aliya” were steadily relegated to the sidelines of Zionism. The Labour Zionist movement, which took over the Yishuv and Zionist institutions, was led by socialist Jews, who typically arrived in Palestine after 1904. The Labour movement was built on a model of communal settlements and cooperative economy, “Hebrew Labour” and the exclusion of Arab workers, and a staunch secularized version of Jewish nationalism. All these were in stark contrast with the First Aliya settlers, who were private landowners, employed Arab workers and rejected the principle of exclusive “Hebrew Labour.” They were mostly religiously observant and hostile to “ideology,” that is, to Zionist socialism.

Against the rising labor hegemony, key members of the Moshavot forged their
image as “first settlers,” to defend their role and legacy within the larger story of
Zionism. This was a story that cast the first settlers as pragmatic farmers, rooted in
the soil; committed Zionist, yet “apolitical;” able to defend themselves against “the Arabs,” but also to get along with them. Halperin follows this crafting of pioneer mythology through a dazzling wealth of sources, including documents from Moshavot archives, oral history collections, memoirs and press articles, museums and images—and even a commemorative brandy bottle. The book develops its analysis through an attentive reading of the writings of memory agents, colourful and idiosyncratic characters (all men) who include David Tidhar, the private investigator, detective story writer, as well as biographer, who published the 19-volume encyclopedia of “the founders and builders of Israel” (much of it dedicated to the First Aliya); the tireless self-promoter Menashe Meirovitch, a Rishon Lezion colonist who wrote for newspapers and the radio, and regularly lectured school pupils about his legacy; and, above all, the inimitable Avraham Shapira, the “Oldest Guard” from Petach Tikva, with his trademark moustache, walking stick, and Arabian horse. Shapira is a constant presence in the book, as the archetypical “first settler,” who was routinely lauded and celebrated—including in the annual Tel Aviv Purim parade. Renowned for fending off attacks on Jewish colonies, but also for his Arabic proficiency and relations with Palestinians, Shapira provided a model for a settler in the “Oriental frontier,” in close proximity to Palestine’s natives: unstable and dangerous at times, but mostly peaceful, allowing settler hegemony without open war.

Indeed, a central part of the “First Aliya” mythology hinged on their relations with Palestinians, which involved, in virtually all narratives, an agonistic mix of coexistence and friendship alongside violence and confrontation. Emphasizing the unequal and settler-colonial nature of these relations, Halperin terms this “hierarchical co-existence,” as clear relations of domination existed between Jewish farmers and their Arab workers or neighbors. The contradictions within this narrative come to the fore in the narratives around the Nakba. Through a careful reading of settlers’ accounts of 1948, Halperin shows how the expulsion of Palestinians was presented both as a rupture in relations of “hierarchical co-existence,” and at the same an inevitability due to a supposedly entrenched Arab hostility.

The 1948 expulsion made the “First Aliya” and its claim for hierarchical coexistence much less relevant. In 1960, for Shapira’s 90th birthday, a forest was planted and named after him on the lands of the destroyed village of Qula.
Shapira, who had symbolized the idea of frontier “coexistence,” had his name written onto a site of depopulation. Halperin reads these two narratives as complementary and successive forms of erasure: early settlers’ hierarchical relations with Palestinians were based on colonial power and denial, very much like the subsequent narrative of a Jewish exclusive state, in which the Palestinian past was covered up by the forest. And yet, these two narratives may be more at odds than is allowed here. As Halperin finds out, the sign with Shapira’s name has long been removed from the forest to another location. That is to say, the erasure, for which he had lent his name, ultimately erased also Shapira’s own name. Unlike the fallen heroes of the “Second Aliya” (like Yoseph Trumpeldor) Shapira is hardly remembered today. It seems that the value of that early settler mythology of “coexistence” was ultimately limited.

The book does not deal with the history of the Moshavot under Ottoman rule, but rather with the memory of that period. However, cultural memory is produced not only through remembering but also through active forgetting. To understand what the settlers chose to forget, the Moshavot’s Ottoman chapter is crucial and would reveal a more ambivalent and contradictory picture than is provided here. Many if not most settlers in the Moshavot naturalized as Ottoman citizens, in order to be allowed to own land. They became integrated, to varying degrees, into Ottoman state structures, with participation in elections and, after 1908, military service. This means that “hierarchical co-existence” has its limitations in describing the Moshavot during the Ottoman period. In relation to Ottoman state officials, military commanders, or the Arab urban elite of Palestine, Jewish colonists were not in a position of power, even if they could and did appeal to the intervention of European consuls. The Moshavot in Ottoman Palestine presented a hybrid model of European colonization, that, on the one hand, was unabashedly colonial, yet at the same time, integrated within a “native” state. Greater attention to the Ottoman period could help expose the contradictions within settler memory, which in other respects is characterized and analyzed so perceptively here.

Yair Wallach, SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
Yair Wallach

**How to quote this article:**

Yair Wallach, review of *The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past*, by Liora R. Halperin., *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC*23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: [10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13951](https://10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13951)
Luciano Allegra, *La povertà degli ebrei. Voci dal ghetto* (Turin: Silvio Zamorani Editore, 2021), pp. 343.

by Davide Mano

The Italian historian Luciano Allegra is a professor of early-modern history at the University of Turin and a renowned specialist of Italian Jewry during the dark period of the ghettos. Over the last thirty years, he has offered some of the most influential studies on this topic, introducing a social history approach that was tremendously missing in the field of Jewish historical studies. I will mention two of his major achievements: his socio-economic history of the ghetto of Turin during the eighteenth-century, published in 1996, a ground-breaking study that opened many new perspectives in Jewish social history, including a previously unknown attention to the role of women in Jewish family and society;<fnref n="1" /> and, paired with this monograph, the important volume he edited in 2009, on the demography of Italian Jewry, including some critical investigations into Jewish mobilities, onomastics and socio-economic occupations, through the early-modern and modern periods.<fnref n="2" />

Allegra’s most recent achievement, dealing with Jewish poverty in the Italian ghettos, can thus be seen as a coherent step on his peculiar social historical path of investigation. This new book, provocatively titled *The poverty of the Jews: Voices from the Ghetto*,<fnref n="3" /> has the merit to be the first monograph to investigate the connection between ghettoization and pauperization in Jewish history. Though mostly based on sources produced by Jews of lower strata in the ghetto of Mantua during the first half of the eighteenth-century, this study can be considered as a work of scholarship relevant for other contexts of Jewish ghettoization and pauperization throughout the Italian peninsula, such as Venice, Rome or other minor towns and villages. It thus offers a significant contribution to the history of the Italian ghettos as a whole.

<footnote n="1">¹ Luciano Allegra, *Identità in bilico. Il ghetto ebraico di Torino nel Settecento* (Turin: Silvio Zamorani Editore, 1996).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Luciano Allegra, ed., *Una lunga presenza. Studi sulla popolazione ebraica in Italia* (Turin: Silvio Zamorani Editore, 2009).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ My translation.</footnote>
This particular subject has attracted few historians. Allegra mentions only three major works that examined Jewish poverty in a social historical approach in other European and non-European contexts: the 2005 monograph by Mark Cohen dedicated to the Jewish poor in Medieval Egypt, the 2012 book by Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld on poverty and charity among Portuguese Jews in early modern Amsterdam, and the 2021 study by Debra Kaplan on Jewish charities' patrons in early modern Germany. These influential studies are presented very succinctly by Allegra (pp. 13-15), since the sources and their contexts are so different that also the respective analytical approaches are very different as well, to the extent of making any comparison impossible. Yet, some other important studies on Jewish poverty and charities in Europe and in the Mediterranean area, including some pieces of scholarship on Italian Jewry, are not mentioned in the bibliographical references, beginning from the pioneering work by Bracha Rivlin on Jewish confraternities in Venice and the recent work by Matthias Lehmann devoted to the emissaries from the Land of Israel.

The choice of the source material is central in Allegra’s discussion. The author focuses his investigation on the Jewish community in Mantua in light of its impressive archival documentation, that has already attracted several scholars.<fnref n="4" /> From among the internal sources of the community, Allegra chooses to examine a particular type, a body of more than 1600 petitions addressed by poor Jews to communal charity institutions between 1700 and 1750. He describes this body of sources as an “extraordinary unicum” (p. 16) in Jewish history in light of its particular nature: these are direct letters addressed by the poor to the chiefs of the communal charity without any notarial mediation or prescribed textual shaping. This is certainly a remarkable case from within the typology of petitions, otherwise a very common source in Jewish community archives, as much as in non-Jewish archives, such as town and state archives.

According to the author, this special body of sources from the Mantua community allows a comparative comprehension of both the struggle of the poor for survival and the charities’ collective actions to help them survive. This is a central contribution in Allegra’s study that shows great empathy toward the

<footnote n="4">⁴ It is worth mentioning the essential work of Shlomo Simonsohn, *History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua* (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1977).</footnote>
historical actors he describes. The author considers different social situations, from
contingent and permanent poverty to misery (chapters 1 and 2); he connects them
with infirmity and precariousness, as well as with communal conflicts and family
breakups (chapters 2 and 3); he discusses the risky instability of dowries (chapter
4) and reconstructs Jewish struggles for a decent accommodation (chapter 5). In
the process, Allegra bears particular attention to the narrative contents in the
petitions, to the life stories emerging from them. In the last two chapters (chapters
6 and 7), he gives a quantitative image of Jewish poverty in the Italian ghettos, that
he proposes to describe as a permanent, structural situation throughout the early-
modern period. As regards Jewish charitable institutions, Allegra recalls the
extremely pyramidal socio-economic stratification in the ghettos, as well as the
Jewish traditional principle of redistribution, centered in the moral duty of
tzedakah (alms). As already said, his study shows strong empathy toward the poor
and their struggles for survival: in this sense, the book owes a debt to the celebrated
Fiction in the archives by Nathalie Zemon Davis, while proposing a different
reading of petitions that calls for further discussion.

Allegra’s monograph is thus a remarkable study that puts together both individual
and family biographies in order to reconstruct the social, collective, dialogical
experience of poverty, such as it emerged within Italian ghetto societies. Allegra’s
book has also the merit to succeed in countering the stereotypical image of the Jew
as a rich man, present in medieval and early-modern anti-Jewish polemics, as well
as in antisemitic propaganda, up to its very contemporary variations.

A question remains to be raised about that particular association between poverty
and minority status, socio-economic and socio-juridical poverties, inherent to the
Jewish condition. What did it mean to be Jewish and poor? Such a condition of
double dependence on both state tolerance and communal charity still needs
further investigation.

Davide Mano, CNRS, EHESS-Centre de recherches historiques, Paris

**How to quote this article:**

Davide Mano, review of *La povertà degli ebrei. Voci dal ghetto*, by Luciano Allegra, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History*. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI:10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13955
Alma Rachel Heckman, *The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), pp. 344.

by Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli

The title Alma Heckman has chosen for her book “The Sultan’s Communists” hints at the title *Tujjār as-Sultān*—“The Sultan’s Merchants”—a group of Jewish traders who operated in the service of the sultan of Morocco and under his protection, mainly from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.<fnref n="1" /> The intended allusion is that like those Jewish merchants had a special link and dependence on the monarch of Morocco, so the Jewish Moroccan communists—the protagonists of this book—acquired a similar status. The allegory seems odd at first, since the notion of monarchy represents almost the opposite of communism. Nevertheless, as Heckman demonstrates, the small group of Jewish Moroccan communists, who due to their political choice were pariahs of their country and community in the 1960s-1980s, became favorites of the Moroccan court at the turn of the twenty-first century, joining the circle of iconic national figures. Heckman’s book seeks to explain the process that created this peculiar situation, setting it within a broader range of events.

The book is an outstanding study, which is based on intensive research of a wealth of information that the author gathered in archives, interviews, the contemporary press and scholarly books. She brings all these data together and analyzes it brilliantly. Accordingly, the book is an essential contribution to the historiography of Moroccan Jewry.

The volume includes an introduction, five chapters ordered chronologically from the interwar years to the present, and a conclusion. The choice of chapters' titles reflects Heckman's analytic perspective, which traces several stages in the history of Moroccan Jewish Communists and their broader milieus. The first chapter, “Choices,” examines the political associations, including communism, that Moroccan Jews had access to under the French protectorate in Morocco during the interwar years. This period saw antisemitism and fascism rising in the

<footnote n="1">¹ Michel Abitbol, *Les Commerçants Du Roi: Tujjār Al-Sultan: Une Élite Économique Judéo-Marocaine Au XIXe Siècle* (Paris: Maisonneuve-Larose, 1998); Daniel J. Schroeter, *The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World* (Standford: Standford University Press, 2002).</footnote>
metropole, and the consolidation of a liberation movement in Morocco. The second chapter, “Possibilities,” focuses on the Second World War period. It analyzes how the French betrayal of Moroccan Jews during the Vichy period affected their belief in France as a protecting power, and their trust in the Moroccan King. The third chapter, “Tactics,” concentrates on the actions of Jewish and Muslim members of the Communist Party during the struggle for Moroccan independence, and examines their strategies to create a space for inter-confessional national activity. The fourth chapter “Splinters” underlines the disappointments during the first years after independence, and the rise of the Moroccan authoritarian state. It discusses the oppression of the Communists as well as other leftist parties, and the simultaneous mass emigration of Moroccan Jews while in faraway Palestine the Arab-Israeli conflict reached its peak. The fifth chapter, “Co-optation,” begins with the imprisonment and exile of the book’s protagonists during the reign of Hassan II, and goes on to examine their subsequent release and return to Morocco under Mohamed VI. Within these settings, it analyzes their inclusion in the national narrative under the new King, and this inclusion’s connection with Morocco’s relationships with the USA, Israel, and some large Jewish organizations.

The book's approach is micro-historical and biographical, as it utilizes the life stories of five main individuals in order to discuss the overall history of Jews in the Moroccan Communist party, the history of the Moroccan Jewish community and its mass emigration, and the history of Morocco at large.

The main characters of the book are Léon Sultan, Simon Lévy, Abraham Serfaty, Edmond Amran al-Maleh, and Sion Assidon, with short references to some of their close family members and political associates. This small group matured in the Moroccan communist party and held key positions in its leadership. They all held anti-Zionist views and pledged their co-religionists to fully integrate into Moroccan social and political life. As time passed, and following the stages that Heckman delineates in her chapters, their political trajectories diverged. Each found a personal path within the larger body of Moroccan leftist movements, and each suffered special harassment, from imposed or self-exile, to torture and imprisonment due to resisting governmental policies they deemed unjust. In old age, their routes converged again when they returned to Morocco and became a symbol of Moroccan Jewish patriotism. Four of them lived into the twenty-first
century (Léon Sultan died in the Second World War), but as fate would have it,
three of those four passed away over the course of one year—between November
2010 and December 2011. Serfaty was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Rabat, Lévy
in the Jewish cemetery in Fes, and Elmaleh in the Jewish cemetery in Essaouira.
Heckman makes the point that although this was a very small group within the
Jewish community, its members became some of the community's most well-
known representatives in recent Moroccan discourse. This occurred as their
current public depictions construct them as symbols of Moroccan patriotic inter-
confessional diversity and coexistence, a feature which is often presented as part of
the so-called "Moroccan exceptionalism."

The difference between the size of the group and the disproportionate attention
to it appears also in Western historiography. This is due to their unique stand, on
the one hand resisting Moroccan governmental policies in the 1960s-80s, and on
the other rejecting the perspective of the greater part of their Jewish community,
which chose Zionism and emigration over staying in Morocco. In this respect,
those figures who preached for continued Jewish life in their home country were
part of a larger phenomenon of communist Jews in Muslim countries who held
the same views (e.g., in Iraq,<fnref n="2" /> Egypt,<fnref n="3" /> and Iran).<fnref n="4" /> Some of the latter had very similar
experiences to those of these Moroccan Jews; Henri Curiel in Egypt, for example,
was arrested several times and sent into exile in France due to his activities, much
like Heckman's protagonists. However, unlike them, the end of his life was much
more unfortunate. Curiel was murdered in France in 1978 while he was involved
from afar in political events in Egypt, as well as attempts to bring about Israeli-
Palestinian negotiations.<fnref n="5" /> All these Jewish communists struggled against
colonialism during the colonial era; after decolonization, they fought for the rights
of oppressed groups in their countries and made personal sacrifices for their
struggle. Being at odds with the larger part of their Jewish communities that chose

<footnote n="2">² Orit Bashkin, “Red Baghdad: Iraqi Jews and the ICP, 1941–51,” in *New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq* (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2012), 141-182.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Joel Beinin, *Was the Red Flag Flying There?: Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel 1948-1965* (London: Tauris, 1990).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Lior B. Sternfeld, *Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Gilles Perrault, *A Man Apart: The Life of Henri Curiel* (London: Zed Books, 1987); Curiel Henri, *On the Altar of Peace* (Tel-Aviv: Mifras, 1982) [In Hebrew].</footnote>
to leave, they became a symbol of the politically outcast Jewish figure, the pariah in Arendt's terms,<fnref n="6" /> which in the last few decades has been the object of considerable academic research within the realms of postcolonial and subaltern historiographies.

However, the pariah stage is over as regards the Moroccan group. The current commemoration of the Jewish communist leaders in Morocco is exceptional, as Heckman describes in her concluding chapter. The main intellectual depositories of the Moroccan state—the national archives, the national library, and the Mohamed V University—hold their personal archives and arrange events to commemorate them. This attitude has spread to other domains. For example, at its seventieth anniversary in 2013, the current reincarnation of the communist party, the PPS (Le Parti du Progrès et du Socialisme), launched a webpage that commemorated its founders. That webpage included Léon Sultan, his spouse Fortunée Sultan, Simon Lévy, and others.<fnref n="7" /> Some of the group's members also appear in current Moroccan cultural production sites such as Muḥammad Sa‘īd Aḥajjīūj's 2020 book *The Riddle of Edmond Amran El Maleh*, in which El Maleh's life story and literary production are the topic and inspiration.<fnref n="8" />

Reviewing and analyzing this unique group Heckman's book presents a very well-written and detailed history. Some special highlights in the volume include pamphlets of diasporic Moroccan students' organizations in France which demanded the release of political prisoners in Morocco and especially Abraham Serfaty, and banners of Simon Lévy from his election campaign for Casblanca's municipal council. On top of this rich data, Heckman also adds a personal touch to her writing, like describing the special atmosphere during her multiple interviews with Incarnation—Simon Lévy's widow. In this latter regard, it would have been excellent if more material and observations had been made on the

<footnote n="6">⁶ Hannah Arendt and Ron H Feldman, *The Jew As Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age* (New York: Grove Press, 1978).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ “70 Sana fi Khidmat al-Waṭan wa-al-Sha‘ab,” Bayanealyaoume, accessed July 4, 2023, http://bayanealyaoume.press.ma/1943-2013-5/.html</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Muḥammad Sa‘īd Aḥajjīūj, *Uḥjīyat Idmūn ‘Umrān al-māliḥ* (Bayrūt: Hāshīt Anṭwān, 2020).</footnote>
women in this group, who also operated a unique women's movement,<fnref n="9" /> but as Heckman notes, unfortunately, there is almost no record about them.

In summary, the book is very important, it adds a new perspective to scholarship about modern Jewish history in Morocco. It is an excellent resource for researchers, students, and laypersons interested in the history of Morocco and its Jewish community, and is certainly worth an in-depth reading.

Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

**How to quote this article:**

Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli, review of *The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging*, by Alma Rachel Heckman, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: [10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13957](https://10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13957)

<footnote n="9">⁹ Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli, “Jewish Women in Intercommunal Political Movements in Colonial Morocco,” *Journal of Modern Jewish Studies* 18, no. 2 (2019): 227-244.</footnote>
Chiara Becattini, *La memoria dei campi. La Risiera di San Sabba, Fossoli, Natzweiler-Struthof, Drancy* (Firenze: Giuntina, 2022), pp. 396.

by Elena Pirazzoli

In recent years the research on memory and trauma has been increasingly flanked by a new historical approach to the memorials built on the very same places where the events occurred. The analysis of these sites (thinking at Pierre Nora's definition of *lieu dé memoire*) means investigating several aspects: the stratification of different violent events and traumas, even in contrast to each other; the political choices aimed at preservation or oblivion; the architectural and artistic forms that shaped the memorial message.

In her book *La memoria dei campi. La Risiera di San Sabba, Fossoli, Natzweiler-Struthof, Drancy*, the historian, photographer and filmmaker Chiara Becattini analyses four cases, divided between Italy and France: two transit camps Drancy (near Paris) and Fossoli (near Carpi, in the Modena countryside between Bologna, Verona and Milan) and two concentration camps located in border regions, Risiera di San Sabba (in Trieste) and Le Struthof (in Alsace). If Drancy and Fossoli functioned as the main transit camps in the two countries, Struthof and Risiera carry the burden of difficult memories of territories divided for political and identity reasons.

After 1945, several places in Europe bore the scars not only of the war, but of the Nazi concentration camp system. This system was articulated in different branches and in complex hierarchies, the camps being devoted to specific functions: concentration, extermination, imprisonment, forced labor and transit. In some cases, these functions could coexist in the same camp or be delegated to specialized sub-camps. Moreover, different categories of prisoners were divided into camps according to the fate assigned by the Nazi ideology. Consequently, concentration and heavy labor camps were mainly destined to political opponents, while extermination camps mostly to racial deportees—such as Jews, Roma and Sinti—to be *liquidated*. However, this system of *organised horror* had porosities, overlaps, crossovers.

All these specificities have emerged gradually, thanks to testimonies and historical research. Immediately after the war, the camps were often reused for current
Elena Pirazzoli

emergency functions (refugee shelter or internment of German prisoners or collaborators). In many places, the memorial process began in parallel with these uses, and developed over the following decades. Before the architectural memorial project, as Becattini clearly shows, the first commemorative signs have been placed by survivors or associations of victims' relatives. Humble and simple signs, like crosses or stones, installed in these sites of violence and trauma for the purpose of building memory, while life goes on all around them.

Thus a place appears as a “palimpsest” of events, functions and memories. Becattini borrows this term from André Corboz, historian of architecture and urban planning: disciplines that investigate territories in full awareness of their stratification of layers. Actually, the strength of Becattini’s approach is to hold different disciplinary viewpoints together. The historical view of deportation is combined with the perspective of architectural history, particularly applied to memorial design. Moreover, Becattini has conducted exhaustive research in local archives, reconstructing political and administrative choices that had an important repercussion on the management of the places under study. When documents were not comprehensive or were not present at all, she sought alternative sources. In particular, the author conducted interviews with several protagonists (historians, architects, artists). Furthermore, due to her sensibility as a photographer, Becattini sees pictures as a documentary source. By using different perspectives, Becattini points out how some places became important elements to the national narrative while others remain on the edge. For example, Le Struthof was recognized as a French national monument in 1960 and all the initiatives on this site were organized by national institutions. Differently, the other three places taken into account in Becattini’s work have been the subject of a local valorization. In 1975 Risiera di San Sabba was recognized as an Italian national monument too, but this acknowledgment has not led to greater national awareness of its historical importance. As Fossoli and Drancy, Risiera carries the burden of a difficult memory: collaborationism. These three places are the symbol of the Italian and French political collaboration and support to the Nazi occupation: here the violence was perpetrated not only by the German troops, but also by the collaborationist military and police forces. Consequently, the memory that takes shape in these places is inconvenient for the national unity that had to rebuild itself after the war.
Nevertheless, these four places of violence and trauma share one same condition: none of them is a central point for a national commemoration of deportation. Seeking a reason for this, Becattini attempts to set these four cases in the broader development of the European culture (and politics) of remembrance of the Shoah and deportation. Thus, a substantial difference emerges between the French and Italian cases: for example, the strong centrality of Paris (and of the French State) in the memorial national policies is unparalleled in Italy, where a local dimension to these projects is prevalent.

The conclusion of the book is devoted precisely to the differences among national memorial narratives and practices across Europe, intensified by the rising memory of communism after 1989. In some countries of Eastern European countries these memories seem to be in competition with those of nazism and the Shoah. As Becattini points out, the current challenge for all the places of memory of political and racial deportation and extermination is to find a way to create a European memory framework, both respectful of local peculiarities and of sovra-national common aspects.

Elena Pirazzoli, University of Cologne

**How to quote this article:**

Elena Pirazzoli, review of *La memoria dei campi. La Risiera di San Sabba, Fossoli, Natzweiler-Struthof, Drancy*, by Chiara Becattini, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: 10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13959