PrintMarch 20, 2011
Same Mob, Different Caption
Since December 2010 I have spent long hours watching television footage of what is now dubbed in France as "le printemps arabe." Echoes of the Prague springtime and other inappropriate comparisons. I watched the BBC, CNN, SkyNews, GuysenTV, and the major French channels. Le printemps arabe was the cover story of all the news weeklies, usually illustrated by a photo of a woman in hijab shouting hysterically. The flow of these current images intersected with my reading of L'exil au Maghreb [Paul Fenton and David Littman, L'exil au Maghreb / La condition juive sous l'islam / 1148-1912. Presse de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne 2010], an exhaustive exposé of eight centuries of persecution of Jews in the Maghreb.
Embarking on this long journey, the reader might wonder why the authors chose to present hundreds of pages of raw documentation rather than using the tools of historiography to digest, summarize, and frame it. Descriptions of the situation of Jews in...(Read Full Article)
