Lucette Valensi

In her graceful account of the transformation of European attitudes toward the Ottoman empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lucette Valensi follows the genealogy of the concept of Oriental despotism. The Birth of the Despot examines a crucial moment in the long and ambiguous encounter between the Christian and Islamic worlds: the period after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, when Venice's pursuit of its commercial and maritime interests brought two powerful protagonists—Venice and the Sublime Porte—face-to-face. Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha Triumphans, in which Judith liberates her besieged town by killing the Turk Holofernes, serves as the organizing metaphor in Valensi's study of how Venice's perceptions of its rival changed. Valensi shows how Venice's initial admiration for the sultan and his orderly empire metamorphosed into revulsion at a monstrous tyrant.

Venice and the Sublime Porte

The Birth of the Despot

la glorieuse bataille des trois rois, 1578 : souvenirs d'une grande tuerie chez les chrétiens, les juifs & les musulmans

Fables de la mémoire

Abraham L. Udovitch

Jacques Perez

The once numerous and vital Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have disappeared, succumbing during the past century to the assimilating temptations of French culture, or, more recently, to the pressures of migration. Only the two communities of the island of Jerba still remain. Only they have succeeded in maintaining and reproducing their religious and social institutions, in adjusting to the new realities around them while preserving intact their cultural, communal identity. This lavishly-illustrated book, first published in 1984, portrays the life and history of two Jerban Jewish villages and explores the paradoxes of their continuity. How and why are they so fully Jewish while, at the same time, so thoroughly embedded in their Muslim, North African environment? Although its focus is one small ethnic group, the implications of this study extend to the broad subject of relations between Arabs and Jews in modern times.

The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia

The Last Arab Jews

Juifs et musulmans ont partagé en Algérie une longue histoire qui s'acheva en 1962 avec l'indépendance du pays. Si en 1954 on y comptait environ 130 000 juifs, il n'en reste presque plus aujourd'hui. Pourquoi cette coexistence a-t-elle pris fin ? Juifs et musulmans ont vécu ensemble les grands mouvements de l'histoire de l'Algérie : les débuts de l'islam et les rivalités entre dynasties au Moyen Age, l'intégration à l'Empire ottoman entre le XVIe et le XIXe siècle, la colonisation française, les lois antijuives du régime de Vichy, la guerre d'Algérie enfin. Sans parti pris, Lucette Valensi s'attache à comprendre les relations que juifs et musulmans ont entretenues, faites de domination et de violences sur la minorité juive, mais aussi d'échanges et de paisible collaboration.

VIIe-XXe siècle

Juifs et musulmans en Algérie

Nathan Wachtel

Marie Noelle Bourguet

The recent wave of interest in oral history and return to the active subject as a topic in historical practice raises a number of questions about the status and function of scholarly history in our societies. This articles in this volume, originally pubished in 1990, and which originally appeared in History and Anthropology, Volume 2, Part 2, discuss what contributions, meanings and consequences emerge from scholarly history turning to living memory, and what the relationships are between history and memory.

Lucette Valensi

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