Medieval Studies in Troubled Times: The 1930s
2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/706097
ISSN2040-8072
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Tourism and Spaces
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeMedieval Studies in Troubled Times: The 1930sDavid WallaceDavid WallacePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis essay considers medieval studies in troubled times, specifically the decade leading into World War II. It begins with the Great War of 1914–18, which globalized European territorial rivalries, with St. Petersburg, and with France and Germany—then key to developing philological and historical disciplines, now at the committed core of European constitutional identity. Observing the dynamics of the Danube, the Rhine, and the Alps, it passes through some key locales such as Belgium, Réunion, Iceland, Ireland, Italy (with Ethiopia and Somalia), England, and the USA. It finds imaginings of globalism that we might hesitate to embrace, with racializing terminology freely employed and little discussed; it considers possibilities of female academic employment. Pondering the status of Jewish studies, and the study of Islam, it ends at the knife edge (then as now) of Istanbul. It considers both academic medievalism, as Speculum gets into stride through the 1930s, and uses of the medieval which, then as now, could deploy creatively, or foster violence. It evaluates amateurism, good and bad. It is hard to know how this essay might read just a decade from now, as current graduate students come to assume leadership of our profession.I would like to begin with a graduate student. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Albert Demangeon was conducting research on Picardy, that region of France centered on Amiens and bisected by the river Somme. His book of the thesis, published in 1905, includes multicolored pullout maps showing regional rainfall, according to place and season; the blotch of red unhappily hints at the mud of the Somme battlefield in 1916.1 Demangeon was one of the few who carried his professional training, as a regional geographer, directly into war service; he drafted maps and topographical memos for the French army, and also for the politicians who would later divide up territories. The word Picardy, he argued in 1905, has no geographical sense, but rather indicates an area where a language, Picard, is spoken; it is only in the fourteenth century that Picardy emerges in documents as an administrative term. Later, writing in 1920, Demangeon argues that in contemplating the disasters of the Great War, set to hobble Europe and its economy for years to come, one turns back to the most miserable epochs in the history of humanity: for France, the Hundred Years War.2Demangeon goes on to suggest that the intensity and especially the scale of recent destruction are without precedent: terrifying new engines of war have broken millions of human lives, wiped away centuries of labor and economic effort, while destroying "la terre des champs."3 This last phrase unwittingly evokes a French poet of the Hundred Years War, who renamed himself on being "burned out" of the fields of his country estate by marauding English soldiers, "brulé des champs"; thus Eustache Morel became Eustache Deschamps.4 Such raiding as carried out by English soldiery was known as chevauché, a form of economic warfare waged through the destruction of human settlements and lines of supply. The poet Chaucer, who fought in this region in this war, declares the Squire of his Canterbury Tales to be expert in chyvachie, as exercised or inflicted "in Flaundres, in Artois, and Pycardie."5Such synergies between the Great War and the endless medieval war were keenly felt by poets and writers in the trenches, and long after. Albert Demangeon's book of 1920 strongly registers recent destructiveness while also, from a European point of view, foreseeing a diminished future: its title is Le déclin de l'Europe. The species of decline foreseen here is imperial: for the overseas colonial subjects of England and France will notice, he argues, that the European powers could not win the recent war without help from overseas—by which he means, chiefly, the United States. Writing eighty years before Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, Demangeon speaks of "a displacement of the center of gravity of the world outside Europe," toward "the peoples of America and of Asia."6 Europe has dominated globally for centuries, he says, through "the superiority of its noble and antique civilization"; but will not the massive losses of the war strike a fatal blow for the hegemony of Europe through the world, over the world ("un coup fatal à l'hégémonie de l'Europe sur le monde?").7 Albert Demangeon thus situates himself in a difficult mental space that Paul Saint-Amour brilliantly characterizes as tense future: mindful of horrors from the immediate past, while yet intuiting upsets to come from the immediate future.8 These are the troubled times through which European medieval studies will unfold through the 1930s.The Jerusalem War Cemetery provides a resting place for soldiers from the British West Indies Regiment, from India, from Australia, from Britain, and from many other places. There are 2,515 burials here, along with a memorial to a further 3,300 with no known grave. Memorialization again fuses medieval and modern, with a helmeted Saint George above the entrance gate standing in for the helmeted men of the Great War. Some 1,680,000 Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu men and women served in the Great War, along with some 173,000 animals; some 62,060 men died (6,670 in France and Belgium), plus 98 Indian army nurses.9 In the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, it was reasonably hoped that such service might secure greater rights to self-determination; Woodrow Wilson, the American president, heading for the Paris Peace Conference, was known to uphold the principle of national self-determination. Negative consequences foreseen by Albert Demangeon, following American entry into the Great War, might thus be read positively in Egypt and Algeria, in Jamaica and elsewhere in "the British West Indies."Alas, it was not to be. President Wilson did support self-governing nationhood at Paris, but chiefly for those abutting western Europe, such as Poles, Czechs, and Yugoslavs, and those affected by the disintegrated Austro-Hungarian empire. The victorious imperial powers, France and England, opposed self-determination for Flemings because of German collaborationism; and they did not support comparable aspirations in their own colonies, either, even though colonial subjects had contributed mightily to winning the war. The German-trained sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was, however, present in Paris in 1919 to argue for the creation of a central African state.10 Given that European imperial structures will unravel so rapidly after 1946, following the Royal Indian Navy uprising,11 it is perhaps not surprising that the scholarly surfaces of medieval studies in the 1930s—and not just in Berlin, Munich, and Rome—are so frequently crossed by terminologies of race. This holds true for uses of the medieval, what we now call medievalism, although the boundary between medievalism and medieval studies, then as now, proves blurry.Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University, became the first serving American president to visit Europe when he came to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He brought with him three chief advisers, one being Charles Homer Haskins, who served as "Chairman of the Division of Western Europe."12 Haskins, the most influential of American medieval historians, became a founding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America just a few years later. Much will be written about the Medieval Academy's early years as we approach its centenary, in 2025, but for now we might simply note its ebullience, viewed from the perspective of its chief object of study, namely Europe. When Albert Demangeon's work of 1920, Le déclin de l'Europe, came to be published the following year in the USA, it appeared as America and the Race for World Dominion.13 This in no way betrays Demangeon's vision, since he had detected a tilt in the direction of the world in favor of "the peoples of America and of Asia." Ebullience and rising confidence can be read in the early direction and production of Speculum, including the use of heavy, high-quality paper and a design so compelling that it has changed little in ninety years—and we know, deep down, that the printed Speculum models an archaic gorgeousness of layout and detail that we are not yet quite ready to renounce.The initial impetus for a Medieval Academy was somewhat narrow, reflecting its origin as a breakout movement from the Modern Language Association, led by medieval Latinists. But its remit widens quickly. At the first annual meeting, Francis Peabody Magoun is already urging Speculum to embrace "mediaeval music, law, science, art, and education, together with a recognition of Byzantine culture."14 Magoun himself soon submits an article on a Czech prose translation of the Historia de Preliis, and this neighbors an article in Speculum 3.2 on "Mozarabic melodics"; the next Speculum sees Pio Rajna writing in Italian, Étienne Gilson in French, and a book written in Czech reviewed in English. This confident internationalism counter-balances an infra-nationalism, since the strong centering upon Cambridge, MA, where Haskins taught, is supplemented by representation from universities and small colleges across the Midwest, to the West Coast; the logic of the Committee for Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) makes itself felt early on.15The determination that Speculum should be widely inclusive, a Gesamtkunstwerk of medieval studies, reflects Germanic inspiration seen elsewhere in Medieval Academy structures, such as its peculiar mechanisms of Fellowship. When Medium Aevum was launched at Oxford in 1932, it was determined that "history and antiquities will be treated in its pages only in so far as they illustrate an author or a text."16 The journal Medieval Studies opened its pages in 1939 with a letter from the Archbishop of Toronto, followed by an imprimi potest, a nihil obstat, and an imprimatur; five of the first seven contributors were professional religious. Speculum would eventually settle into an Anglo-French pattern of domination, complementing the Anglo-Italian domination of the Renaissance Society of America, but plenty of space in the early years is dedicated to Spanish and Italian, Slavics and Arabic. The first issue of 1930 features an article by Olga Dobiaš-Roždestvensky, who had received a doctorate in 1918 and then worked as a professor at Petrograd University, and among manuscripts in the illustrious Public Library (founded in 1795). In 1929 she published at Leningrad a descriptive catalogue of the Latin manuscripts in her workplace library (Fig. 1).17 She confines herself to manuscripts from the fifth to seventh centuries, and she writes in French. Her appearance in Speculum allows her to dwell at length on just one of these manuscripts, with much better illustrations.18 Working conditions for Leningrad librarians deteriorated through the Stalinist 1930s, with many of them murdered or disappeared. When the siege began in 1941, many library staffers signed up to fight. One hundred thirty-eight of them died during the winter of 1941, yet the library never ceased functioning as a library. Dobiaš-Roždestvensky died in 1939, and it was not discovered until 1965 that she had carried right on working on her early Latin manuscripts, covering the eighth and early ninth centuries. Her work was translated from Russian and published by CNRS in 1991, following the editorial principles she had laid down in the 1920s and 1930s, with her "admirable érudition."19 The first issue of Speculum in 1930, then, shows active commitment to internationalist scholarship as Europe heads steadily back into troubled times.20Fig. 1. Cover detail from Olga Dobiaš-Roždestvensky, Les anciens manuscrits latins de la Bibliothèque Publique de Léningrad (photograph by David Wallace).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAt the heart of Europe's troubles, American scholars might observe, lay intense rivalries between France and Germany, sharpened by the disciplinary exercise of philology and history. Which nation "owns" the Oaths of Strasbourg, and whose edition of the Song of Roland—newly edited, on each side, with each new outbreak of war—can be held definitive?21 Medieval texts were put to populist ends, as we shall see, although the Francophone and Germanic scholars who drew them from manuscript could not help but recognize—if only to themselves—shared methodological terrain. And in better times, such rivalry, playing out at border locales such as Strasbourg, might be seen as a dialectic keeping each side sharp, obviating the lazy amateurism that might pass for scholarship in England. When M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr22 wished to become a philologist she headed for Leipzig and then Zürich; when Haskins wanted to study deeper he headed for the École Nationale des Chartes.Karl Lachmann, who died in 1851, synthesized Hellenist methods to produce a newly "scientific" way of editing texts, one favoring recensio over emendatio, the comparative study of several manuscripts, and the forming of stemmata, over any subjective séance between opinionated scholar and individual exemplar.23 Gaston Paris, "the patriarch of French Romance studies,"24 mainstreamed this German-authored method into French editing tradition while yet refusing (as Lars Boje Mortensen observes) suggestions of subordination: "the Niebelungenlied," Gaston Paris says, referring to Lachmann's magisterial edition of 1841, and speaking amid the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, "is a human poem, while the Chanson de Roland is a national poem."25 It is not until the beginning of our period, in 1928, that Joseph Bédier decisively asserts the "best manuscript" tradition that has broadly replaced Lachmannian genealogism (except in Italy). Bédier, Frencher than the French, was a lifelong Germanophobe;26 one first major fruit of this new method is Edmond Faral's edition of a French crusading text, from 1938.27In turning from philology to history, we find a comparable pattern of long methodology domination by a German Meister followed, as the 1930s begin, by French rebellion. The Meister here is Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), whose scientific study of primary textual sources had finally supplanted older traditions of narrating the nation as if she were a maturing person, a method owing much to Sir Walter Scott.28 Popular appetite for old-style national history never died, and professional medieval historians were isolating themselves through their very professionalism. Rebellion against élite scientific textual method was staged in bookshops, where élite historians failed to sell, but also finally at an élite place in French society: the Collège de France. It was here, on 13 December 1933, that Lucien Febvre gave his inaugural lecture, a wonderfully colloquial and dialogic performance that models a new kind of popular appeal.29 "History is made with texts," he intones early on, a mantra long uniting élite philologists and historians. The dreary life of young men (only men) aspiring to become élite historians is comically evoked, with every life stage confined to the reading of texts, the study of texts, the interpretation of texts, and examination by knowledge of texts. The French of the final sentence is too good to miss, evoking an ABD life of sitting in a small space, with windows closed and blinds drawn:… les jeunes hommes, façonnés intellectuellement par une culture à base unique de textes, d'études de textes, d'explications de textes, passaient, sans rupture d'habitudes, des lycées où leurs aptitudes de textuaires les avaient seules classés, à l'École Normale, à la Sorbonne, aux Facultés où le même travail d'étude de textes d'explication de textes leur était proposé. Travail sédentaire, de bureau et de papier; travail de fenêtres closes et de rideaux tirés.30Febvre bursts from this text-bricked prison by first repeating the standard formula—history is made with texts—and then flipping it to pose a question. This works neatly in French, as the term fait shifts from verb to noun:"L'histoire se fait avec des textes."***Mais par les textes on atteignait les faits?History is made ("se fait") with texts; but can we reach facts ("les faits")—realities on the ground—through texts? Earlier, Febvre had probed at the strange consequences of binding history so tightly to writing, l'écriture: what then of the bizarre notion of prehistory—which would purport to write, without texts, the longest chapter in human history? Economic history, human geography, and archaeology should fill this lacuna, liberating young pale male historians from stuffy confinement. Febvre speaks of examining "the footprints left on a landscape humanized by the intensive labor of [many] generations" ("l'examen des empreintes laissées sur la terre humanisée par le labeur archané des générations"31), and we might return here to the graduate student we began with, the "open air geographer" Albert Demangeon,32 seen reading the landscape of Picardy, in an iconic image (Fig. 2).Fig. 2. Albert Demangeon, c. 1935.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointDemangeon is by now a Sorbonne professor, and in 1933 Febvre was working with him on a joint project, on the River Rhine.33 Its aim, as Febvre says in his lecture, is to get beyond, or before, a Rhine "charged with national hatreds, a frontier Rhine," which separates Gaul from Germany.34 Toward the end of his talk Febvre references Marc Bloch, so now we have all the elements of what became known as Annales, a movement that began on the Rhine, at Strasbourg, before sealing its ascent to institutional power by moving to Paris. Febvre effectively secured the second-generation future of Annales when, in sailing back from Brazil in 1937, he met Fernand Braudel. Braudel taught French and Mediterranean history in Algeria from 1923 to 1932; from 1935 to 1937 he worked at the University of São Paolo. Febvre soon adopted Braudel as "un enfant de la maison," adding to the stable of young men he had gathered about himself in Paris.35 One cannot help but notice here that Annales, for all its collaborative spirit, forgot to include women.36 So let us consider the life and work of Lucie Varga.It has been said that "individually, neither Bloch nor Febvre was the greatest French historian of the time, but together both of them were."37 Lucie Varga (Fig. 3) arrived in Paris at about the time Febvre was giving his inaugural lecture, and three months later Febvre writes enthusiastically to Bloch about her, employing a curious term: she is his entraineuse, his … female personal trainer.38 She had grown up near Vienna as Rosa Stern until, as a schoolgirl, she changed her name to Lucie, hence becoming "Light Star," Lucie Stern. She had a daughter, then studied for a PhD at the University of Vienna, publishing her thesis on the expression Dark Ages in 1932.39 She moved to Paris to escape Nazism, to connect with Annales, and to pursue research on Cathars. Writing and reviewing increasingly for Febvre, she also contributed a long lead-off piece on National Socialism, particularly its origins, for the German-focused issue of Annales in 1937. It was in 1937, however, that Suzanne Febvre demanded the end of all contact between Lucie and Lucien: Varga, aged thirty-two, and Suzanne's husband, fifty-eight. And it was later that same year that Lucien Febvre met his new "enfant de la maison," Fernand Braudel. Lucie Varga, now unemployed, worked as a traveling salesman and factory worker, and later as farm laborer and teacher of German. Malnourished and diabetic, she died in 1941 after a village doctor apparently misdiagnosed a diabetic coma as the after-effects of an abortion. She was thirty-six years old.Fig. 3. Lucie Varga, c. 1930.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointLucie Varga did pursue research on the Cathars, and continued publishing in Annales and elsewhere when she could. Her most distinctive work focused on two Alpine valleys, as local folk traditions and religiosity began intertwining with fascism.40 Thus, as Demangeon chose Picardy, and then worked on the Rhine with Febvre, so Varga chose the Alps, anticipating later developments in ethnography, sketching the cultural logic of "witchcraft as a profession," and apologizing to the readers of Annales for not having properly qualified—as a local witch. Many influences flowed into her writings: "German, Austrian, and French academic traditions, intellectual and social history, folklore and ethnology, Jewish, Catholic, and materialist points of view, academic and journalistic modes of writing."41 This baggy profusion puts one in mind of another Jewish Viennese writer of this period, and of the vanishing Austro-Hungarian culture he so much missed. "The Vienna of Yesterday," says Stefan Zweig in 1940, was from the start invitingly capacious: "From Moravia, Bohemia, the mountainous regions of Tyrol, from Hungary and Italy came artisans and merchants; Slavs, Magyars, Italians, Poles and Jews arrived in greater numbers into the ever-widening circle of the city."42Claudio Magris, in his "drowned novel" Danubio, characterizes the river flowing through Vienna as "German-Magyar-Slavic-Romanic-Jewish Central Europe";43 he pushes its hybridizing qualities further when contrasting it with the other major river:Ever since the Song of the Niebelungs the Rhine and the Danube have confronted and challenged each other. The Rhine is Siegfried, symbol of Germanic virtus and purity, the loyalty of the Niebelungs, chivalric heroism, dauntless love of the destiny of the Germanic soul. The Danube is Pannonia, the kingdom of Attila, the eastern, Asiatic tide which at the end of the Song of the Niebelungs overwhelms Germanic values.44Others imagined the Danube quite differently: Hölderlin and, in our period, Heidegger envisioned it redolent not of Attila the Hun, and the Eurasian steppes, but of ancient Greece, a conduit of purer inspiration.45 And whereas the Rhine researches of Demangeon and Febvre would accentuate complexity and hybridity, the Rhine Institute founded by historian Hermann Aubin at Bonn in 1920 was singularly German.46 As the 1930s advanced, Aubin began bending his geographic thinking eastward while acknowledging Charlemagne as the first to take up "the Western task of civilizing the sub-germanic zone."47 By this "zone" Aubin, now an Ostforschung, is thinking of Slavic countries, especially Poland, and he was to speak of a continuity of movement of Germanic peoples, from west to east, beginning in the Middle Ages, and ripe to revive.48 In 1929 he successfully migrated east himself, taking up a professorship at Breslau (Wrocław). After the war, recalibrating his skills in Ostforschung, Aubin served Cold War opposition to the Eastern Bloc and enjoyed a long and successful career.By now we are seeing politics strongly intrude upon medieval studies in the 1930s, so let us directly consider some uses of the medieval in this region—first Germany, then France. In the Bavarian Alps, the Oberammergau Passion Play has been performed every new decade since the seventeenth century; the next opportunity to see it comes this year, in 2020. The year 1934, however, would represent the three hundredth anniversary of its first performance, so an extra season was mooted. Planning began late in 1932, with political conditions changing rapidly, and with scriptwriters pressured to accentuate Gospel-based anti-Semitism. Two newspaper reviews published on the exact same day, 18 May 1934, offer very different impressions. "Little in the village of Oberammergau and nothing in the Passion Play," says the Times of London, "has been affected by the changed conditions of Germany. The tercentenary performance … is completely free from the political distortions rumored in England."49 Frederick Birchall saw things quite differently in the New York Times: "Never have Oberammergau's Jewish mobs been more virulent, never have the Pharisees and scribes who invoke the mob been more vehement than this year."50 American attendance at Oberammergau was down some eighty percent in 1934, but Britons made up more than one-third of all foreign visitors.51 A pocket-sized guide published by the Catholic press of Burns, Oates and Washburn in 1934 tutors English visitors in the appropriate mores: "Inside the theatre," it says, "a quiet, respectful attitude should prevail—no audible remarks, no passing round of chocolates, no rustling of papers. Smoking is not allowed." It warns of affective intensities that English visitors, even Catholic ones, might never have known: "the fact that the Play is conducive to great emotional excitement, and at times almost unbearably poignant, should not be lost sight of. Smelling salts are not out of place."52This promise is borne out by the "Official guide," issued by the Parish of Oberammergau and printed in an English edition of 35,000 copies.53 Marketing of medievalia begins right away, opposite the contents page, with an ad for "the glamour of 'Meier Helmbrecht,' the mediaeval drama of knights and peasants." This is adapted from a mock epic of c. 1250 by the local poet Wernher der Gartenaere; its protagonist, Meier, is a farm boy who aspires to be a knight, steals freely, and learns a smattering of foreign words; he ends up being blinded, losing a hand, losing a foot, and then being hanged by peasants (for presuming to abandon the plow).54 Later in the guide we find further ads, for Hamelin and its 650th Pied Piper anniversary, and for Würzburg, the town of Walther von der Vogelweide. You can even go skiing when all the Passion Play excitement is over. But the guide's main aim is to inculcate expectation of an intense collective experience. We begin with a view of the hall, the communal viewing space, and then progress to an extraordinary series of high-affect actor portraits. The owner of the guide now in Cambridge University Library sought out Anni Rutz, who played Mary, and got her autograph (Fig. 4). The pocket-sized book seems designed for such pursuits, and for the kind of intensive viewing experience we might now associate with video artist Bill Viola.55Fig. 4. Image of Anni Rutz as Mary, with her autograph, from Franz X. Bogenrieder, Jubilee of Passion Play Oberammergau 1634–1934: Official guide, issued by the Parish, trans. Margaret Senft-Howie (Munich, 1934), Cambridge University Library exemplar, 2010.7.787, p. 51, with permission.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointAll this was channeled by the visit, and immersive participation, of Adolf Hitler in 1934. According to the New York Times he arrived with a ticket issued anonymously to a "Nordic travelling group," and sat among his "beloved folk" as "a Passion Play pilgrim, full of desire for total concentration."56 This was a delicate moment for Hitler. Six weeks earlier, Ernst Röhm and a hundred or so members of his Sturmabteilung had been murdered just fifty miles from Oberammergau. Hindenburg had died just days before, and a few days later Germans would vote in a plebiscite that would make Hitler both president and chancellor. Hitler's concordat with Pope Pius XI had effectively ended political Catholicism, and he was hoping that this visible immersion in Catholic dramatic tradition would seal the deal with Catholic voters.James Shapiro, writing at the time of the 2000 Oberammergau, finds the village broadly aligned with the Nazification of their passion play. Helena Waddy, ten years later, seeks instances of local resistance to Third Reich ideologizing, and of enduring Catholic-Jewish friendship. Strong nuances of interpretation are applied to other ongoing medievalisms in this period, such as the processing and display of the four cloth relics at Aachen. This tradition, beginning in 1349, takes place for ten summer days every seven years: Dorothea of Montau traveled from Danzig for the sixth showing in 1384, and Margery Kempe from Lynn caught the twelfth, in 1433; the ninety-fourth showing takes place in 2021. Die Aachener Nachrichten, a daily paper published at this citadel of Charlemagne, makes the case that the 1937 procession was staged as a protest against the Nazi regime.57"By 1930," says Helen Solterer, "almost every Christian community across France had medieval drama brought home to them, performed by fellow parishioners."58 She tells how Gustave Cohen refreshed his teaching at the Sorbonne by offering "something other than routine textual analysis."59 Averse to the rote learning parodied by Lucien Febvre, Cohen taught through modernizing and acting out texts such as Aucassin and Nicolette, the jeux of Adam de la Halle, the Mystery of the Passion, or Rutebeuf's Miracle de Théophile, after which his famous acting troupe was named. Students came from across the Francophone world, and notable Théophiliens in the 1930s included Paul Zumthor and Roland Barthes. Reims, burial place of kings and home to Guillaume de Machaut, is one of the greatest French lieux de mémoire.60 In 1938, before a cathedral façade newly redeemed from the damages of World War I, the Théophiliens performed Cohen's idiomatic realization of an Anglo-Norman play from the 1120s. As Carol Symes notes, such plays were treated as prototypically "modern," "secular," and "French,"61 clearly challenging the adaptive traditions of the religious right. Among the performers in 1938 was the Syrian Moussa Abadi, "a religiously minded Jewish actor," says Solterer, "who used medieval roles to enact the secular, universal values of the French Republic at the very time when they had failed him."62 When German troops occupied Paris, Abadi transferred to Nice, performing medieval plays by day and smuggling away children by night, saving more than two hundred.63 When Marc Bloch w
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