The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust, and reported the following:
Page 99 concludes the end of my discussion of a major postwar survey conducted by Belgian administrators during the early 1950s. By this point, readers have learned that the people behind this initiative had invited 403 Jews to speak about their persecution under Nazism—and, surprisingly, also decided to ask them about the experiences of people persecuted as “Gypsies.” I seek to understand why they did this and what we can learn from their choice to venture beyond a focus on Jewish suffering alone, concluding with this paragraph:Learn more about Rain of Ash at the Princeton University Press website.Goldstein’s survey was revolutionary in the Belgian context. It not only identified but also singled out Jews as victims of racial persecution and prepared reports on their deportation from Belgium and France that could support Jewish claims for compensation and recognition. Originally “forgotten victims” themselves, Belgian Jews were asked to speak about the experiences of another largely ignored victim group whose fate they only knew from distant observation. Even those Jews who suggested that Roma had been treated worse than Jews indirectly found their experiences recognized as the benchmark for the treatment of racial persecutees. The questionnaires that illustrate the silencing of Roma thus enabled the empowerment of Jews. This is the enduring paradox of the Goldstein commission’s documentation work.A new section entitled “The First Romani Archives of the Holocaust” then begins. Placing this Belgian survey into its larger context, the first paragraph of this section tackles the question of why so few people cared to talk to Roma themselves about their experiences. It reads:Just as the Belgian questionnaires produced knowledge about Roma while centering the position of Jewish victims, Romani Holocaust Studies would eventually emerge as a field dominated by historians trained to study the Jewish Holocaust, while Romani Studies largely remained the domain of linguists, musicologists, anthropologists, social workers, and folklorists. […] This bifurcation meant that those who could speak to large numbers of Roma and had the resources to record their statements for posterity gave little support to historians who began their work decades after the fact.The discussions that appear on page 99 are surprisingly representative and central to the argument of Rain of Ash. In the book, I trace the story of the unusual relationship between two heterogeneous groups both operating in the shadow of a shared genocide. I start with the little-known story of how Roma and Jews suffered next to each other, exposed to the images, sounds, and smells of the other group’s destruction, even as they remained largely ignorant of each other’s histories. I then show how initiatives such as the one in Belgium brought Jews and Roma together in unexpected ways, as Jewish survivors started to organize to demand justice and seek recognition, first for the genocide experienced by their own people and, with time, also for Romani victims of Nazi genocide. Such efforts first took shape as individual Jewish scholars, community leaders, and lawyers began to write about the Romani Holocaust in the 1950s and 1960s—and to use that knowledge to fight for compensation for them. By the 1980s, Romani and Jewish activists and intellectuals began to work cooperatively toward similar ends, yet the asymmetry of their relationship remained palpable throughout. The book follows this story through the contemporary moment, at a time when Jewish and Romani youth have for the first time created shared spaces of commemoration, regularly campaign for each other’s rights, and find new means of speaking about a relationship that remains unequal into the present.
The passages on page 99 mark one crucial turning point in how these developments played out in the immediate postwar period. They also offer an example of the complicated dynamics that shape this unequal relationship. While later parts of the book revolve around the experiences of Romani survivors in a world shaped by the memory of the Jewish Holocaust, in this early period of testimony collection Roma often remained completely unheard. As in many court cases, legal proceedings, and early historical works, the example above Jewish experiences served as a yardstick that could be used either to make the untold story of Romani suffering audible or to downplay the suffering of Roma. Ultimately, this is a book about the monetary, legal, and conceptual structures that shape how we get to know the past, as well as the moral choices entailed in the writing of history.
--Marshal Zeringue
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