Volume 43, Number 17 · October 31, 1996
Victims and Executioners
By Bernard Knox
The Jews: History, Memory and the Present
by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, translated and edited by David Ames Curtis
Columbia University Press, 337 pp., $29.50
On the cover of Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent II (1991) Pierre Vidal-Naquet is identified as, among other things, 'the author of numerous books on ancient Greece and contemporary history.' This brief description covers a remarkable (and still continuing) literary career. He is, in his own words, 'by training…a historian and a specialist in the study of the ancient Greek world,' and the author of many brilliant studies of ancient Greek politics, mythology, ideology, and literature, but he also published, between 1958 and 1989, a series of books exposing and indicting the role of the French army in the Algerian War,[1] and, beginning in 1981, three collections of essays, reviews, and prefaces devoted to the past and present of the Jews, as well as Les assassins de la mémoire (1987), a merciless analysis of the claims of Faurisson and other deniers of the Holocaust.[2] The book under review is a selection, made by the author, from the three volumes on the Jews, memory, and the present.
Review, 4081 words
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