Revisiting ‘Two Jewish Historians in Extremis’: Elias Tcherikower and Marc Bloch

Saul Friedländer’s ‘Two Jewish Historians in Extremis: Ernst Kantorowicz and Marc Bloch in the Face of Nazism and Collaboration,’ served as an inspiration for this essay, which sets the wartime musings of two Jewish historians in France–the Ukrainian-born Elias Tcherikower and the French-born Bloch against one another. Though different in nature, Tcherikower’s personal diary in Yiddish (still in manuscript) and Bloch's Strange Defeat, published posthumously, discussed in the essay, touch on the ways in which the inner being of individuals translates the dramatic moments of the period into their lives and responds to them; the so-called ‘ego-documents’ provide discrete moments of reflection and narration that enable the historian to consider a variety of historical insights that cannot be reduced to simple ‘objective facts’ alone–as emotions, musings, dreams, nightmares, and character, and how one came to make certain decisions are enmeshed in these texts. The ways in which an East-European Jew relates to the German occupation as opposed to those of a native French Jew are at the heart of this essay.