Hopes

DC: Let’s go further into your involvement in the events of this tumultuous era. Your appointment at Berkeley brought you an ever-growing number of students, right?

NZD: The idea of becoming a professor at Berkeley attracted me not only to train more graduate students, but especially because it was then a larger intellectual world than what I had at Toronto and more open to the new directions in which I was moving. Right away I got to know anthropologists working on peasant studies and folklorists. I had contacts in the literature departments, and especially with the young Stephen Greenblatt: over lunch we would talk of ideas from my essays in Society and Culture and approaches he would take in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning. With Svetlana Alpers,¹ historian of art, I began our lifelong friendship of discussion, gossip, and argument; she was then writing her pathbreaking book The Art of Describing. And in the history department I had spectacular colleagues in the early modern period: William Bouwsma,² Randolph Starn,³ and Gene Brucker.⁴ What conversations we had about our courses and our scholarly projects! There was only one other woman teaching in the large department when I arrived, but with the help of some male colleagues, we finally brought in terrific young women, Lynn Hunt⁵ in eighteenth-century French history and the U.S. historian Paula Fass.⁶ The political ambiance of the 1970s was exciting in Berkeley; there were coffeehouses for discussion all around the campus. It was a time of intellectual exuberance, an adventure.

DC: Why then move again, as if after a certain moment you needed a change of scene to avoid the routine of the same faces and conversations, as if you wanted a new life, you who set for yourself a mission to restore past memories, the itinerant treks of preachers in the early Reformation, always in search of new people to meet?

NZD: I’m not simply a missionary! Personal elements played their part, too. When Chan and I first agreed that I’d take the Berkeley post, there were not many academic couples teaching in different cities, and especially not women who initiated the separation, Today you see commuting academic couples more often in North America, but in 1971 it was unusual, and I had never imagined Chandler and I would live that way. We decided to look at it as an experiment, and we used a special formula that I sometimes quote today in advising young people facing what Chan calls “the two-city problem”: “Let’s try it for five years, and then we’ll see. If after five years, things are not working, we’ll try something else.”

So that’s what we did, starting off with our usual naïve optimism that we’d work out all problems. Chan took leaves from UT and taught as a visitor at Berkeley, but it became clear that he was not going to get a good permanent post in California, despite all he had been publishing and the esteem in which he was held for his mathematics. He needed to spend time with his own UT graduate students. And commuting between Berkeley and Toronto took six hours on the plane alone and crossed three time zones…

DC: You thus chose to try something else. When did Princeton recruit you?

NZD: Princeton had already expressed its interest in my joining the history department, and after one complicated weekend in the spring of 1977, when Chan and I both had professional trips to the Midwest and met in St. Louis, I phoned Lawrence Stone⁷ and said, “Next time you make me an offer, I’ll accept.” Berkeley and Toronto were just too far away from each other. And then Simone, our youngest child, had finished high school and had gone off to the next stage in her life, and I was alone in our big redwood house. I was very sorry to leave my friends in Berkeley and my graduate students. The students got back at me in a delicious way. They interrupted a lovely but very traditional good-bye party with an uproarious costumed charivari, with masks, drums, processions, and shouts. I was required by the rules of charivari (I should say the rules of misrule here) to pay a forfeit. My son, Aaron, was there and he proposed I sing “You Can’t Get a Man with Your Brains.” Red-faced in front of my feminist students, I belted it out, to much laughter. Ruth Rosen,⁸ one of my students who went on to write terrific books in U.S. women’s history, gave me a hug of forgiveness.

So I went to Princeton in 1978, stayed there for eighteen years till my retirement, and never regretted my decision. Chan and I worked out the commute quite well, taking turns to fly to one of our two homes almost every weekend, and spending long summers, holidays, and sabbatical years together in one place; we worked out Davis’s Rules for Commuting Couples and stuck to them. And once again I had changed my intellectual community, a very different universe, or so it seemed when I first arrived. California was very open, expansive, outdoorsy—we all did lots of sports and mountain climbing—brilliant sun once the fog dissipated. Princeton was very pretty as well, but small, intense, civilized, a culture of conversation around dining room tables. I rejoiced in my colleagues. Lawrence Stone was directing the Shelby Cullom Davis Center,⁹ with its weekly seminars full of debate and new ideas. Bob Darnton¹⁰ and I compared notes on the history of the book. The young Tony Grafton¹¹ was already enlivening every conversation with the sparks of his wondrous erudition. Carl Schorske¹² had founded a program in European Cultural Studies, which offered a broad model for teaching to the department. Bob Darnton and Clifford Geertz started their course on history and anthropology within this ECS frame, and once or twice I taught the course with them. When, in the wake of my Martin Guerre adventures, I wanted to start a seminar on History and Film, it was welcomed by ECS. Though I first had the idea of trying to turn the Martin Guerre story into a film while I was at Berkeley, I think I would never have followed through on it if I had not come to Princeton.

Meanwhile there was our “woman question.” Princeton had become coed in the fall of 1969, and when I arrived in 1978, I think we had only about eight tenured women on the entire faculty. But we were a very determined group, we met and met, agitated and coaxed, and finally things began to change.

DC: You thus feel you’ve taken part, certainly within limits but with no lack of will, in a history that saw women begin a long journey to promote their rights. You’ve lived this history with exuberance, joy, and a total commitment similar to the ones we see in your own historical work, haven’t you?

I believe, at this point in our conversation, we should shift to consider the historian’s conscience as you confront history; no longer the history that motivated you in your essays to reclaim past experiences or even lives, but henceforth the history that you’ve actually witnessed and to which you often seek to attest in your books through a kind of appeal to dialogue between past and present: an appeal that quietly grows in the framework of your analyses, which isn’t apparent but which the reader must suspect is there. How would you describe this relationship to an immediate moment, more or less proximate, that certainly serves as an anchor point from which you strive to develop or modify your outlook and questions?

NZD: Let me begin with a remark about my general state of mind in regard to current politics. If there were any vestiges of my youthful utopianism still left in my spirit, they have been erased by events of the past years. Bitter war and cruel rape in so many places. Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and parts of Africa.¹³ The United States with its triumphal and aggressive military power in Afghanistan and now Iraq, Islamicist merciless violence put to such wrongful ends. Think of the protest mounted in so many parts of the world this past spring against Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Huge marches in so many cities, an avalanche of protest, and yet no effect. So many situations proving so difficult to resolve or to change.

DC: Did you become disenchanted or rather, more specifically, did you gradually become more realistic after a long and growing series of disillusionments and disappointments that in the end just wore you out?

NZD: More realistic, yes, but not worn out. My realism is still accompanied by hope. There are moments in recent times infused with hope: 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down; 1990, when apartheid laws were repealed in South Africa and Mandela¹⁴ was released from prison. The unexpected can still happen. I think back to 1949, when I had just graduated from Smith. What Chandler and I most feared as a possibility at that time was nuclear war. Now that didn’t happen—or at least it hasn’t happened yet—but we didn’t dream of the possibility of a new worldwide plague of AIDS or the resurgence of such extreme ethnic hatred and violent religious fundamentalism as we have seen. What we might have hoped for as discovery was the exploration of outer space—Chan had even published science fiction stories about that—but we would not have imagined the electronic revolution of our time. So hope is nourished by the element of surprise, even though often the surprise is very bad news.

And hope can be nourished by a chastened realism. I long ago gave up on full-scale state socialism as a panacea, not only because of the atrocities of the Soviet regime, but because of the absurdities and failures of command economies. But one can take heart from the varieties of mixed economies, as in Scandinavian lands or as recommended by Karl Polanyi¹⁵ or Amartya Sen,¹⁶ where the family interest and competitive enterprise are always in relation with belief in sharing and the public good.

Especially painful for me has been my sorrow and my shock at the unjust violence associated with the establishment of the State of Israel and continuing there, as well as at the emergence of a group of Jewish political thinkers in America of the extreme right, allied to centers of power and admirers of brute force. Now I know well, both from my own experience and from my historical studies, that there are all kinds of Jews. But the rabbis who excommunicated Baruch Spinoza¹⁷ in 1656 from the Portuguese Jewish congregation of Amsterdam did not have “the power of the sword”; that is, they could excommunicate Spinoza, but not execute him. The court Jews of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including in the circle of Glikl, served as bankers for and provisioners to emperors, princes, and dukes and accepted absolute rule for strategic reasons, but they didn’t believe in the divine right of kings or embrace the mystique of absolutism; their loyalty was elsewhere.

As for Israel, I had never been a partisan of the nationalist elements of Zionism, as I’ve mentioned, and always took to heart the vocation or special challenge of the Diaspora. But I considered Palestine as a necessary place of refuge for the Jews fleeing Europe after the horrors of the Holocaust and unable to go elsewhere. And I initially hoped the diverse forms of Jewish culture and different Jewish peoples could develop in a society together with Arabs and Muslims. (Too bad I couldn’t have been there with my great-uncle Ziman and my Grandma Lamport under the British Mandate,¹⁸ when there was still a chance for that.) My Smith College history teacher Hans Kohn¹⁹ had been a cultural Zionist in Palestine in the 1920s, like Martin Buber²⁰ seeking spiritual and cultural renewal, but he was very opposed to political-nationalist Zionism and its response to Arabs there, and finally left the movement. I don’t recall that we talked about Zionism when we studied his famous book on The Idea of Nationalism, where he distinguished between civic liberal forms of nationalism and ethnic illiberal ones. But he wrote about it in the 1950s, saying that Zionism had gone the way of an ethnic territorial nationalism that was betraying the Jewish prophetic tradition. I wish I had discussed these matters with him while I was at Smith.

During my first visit to Israel in 1976, I was filled with ambivalence. I marveled at the old quarter of Jerusalem, with its historical juxtaposition of religious cultures and the contiguity of the sacred and the profane. I was impressed by the diversity among the Jews, people from so many different places, by the literary success of the Hebrew language, and by the flourishing university and research institutions. But I was constantly uneasy at the traces of displaced Palestinian Arabs. The houses of my friends were often the former homes of Arabs, involuntary exiles. One of my dear historian friends felt guilty about this, but my cousin Naftali Herzog, a warm supporter of the violence of the Irgun,²¹ crowed to us about his role in the seizure of Safed from the Palestinians and was delighted to be living in one of their houses. Then in the 1980s the Israeli New Historians²² gave documentary proof of the expulsion of Arabs, of the confiscation of their lands, and the destruction of their villages in 1947 to 1948. Meanwhile since 1967 Israel had illegally occupied and sent settlers into the Territories and East Jerusalem; Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the butcheries of Sharon, and so on: none of these could help bring peace to the region in any way and were unjust.

DC: I would see things somewhat differently, but that’s not the question. I would like to know how your thinking about Israel has evolved. In listening to you, it seems Israel is as much a threat to herself as she faces from her adversaries, no?

NZD: Let me answer by saying how reflecting on Israel—and here I’m referring to its governments, its army, its settlers, and their supporters—has changed the way I define the Jewish condition in the world and my own relation to it. For quite a while I kept in my heart the naive idealism of a Jewish girl in a goyishe neighborhood who thought the Jews had a special calling to defend justice and unmask false idols. But for some time now, I’ve understood, not just as a historian, but as a moral person, how diverse are the interpretations of a religious tradition or of any grouping where deep identity issues are at stake. You could almost say that a defining mark of religion is serious quarrels about the right way to worship God. The Bible is full of such arguments. Early Christianity exactly the same. The first generations of Islam. Early Protestantism and onward. Arguing about the right way to be Jewish or Muslim and about who’s a heretic is the name of the game. And the same is true of intense political movements. Maybe arguing within a tradition about how to relate to the sacred has more going for it than we have understood. Anyway, the call to the defense of justice against wrongful power and to the unmasking of false idols, including those of land and blood, is one of the Jewish traditions, and that’s the one I identify with. At Toronto, I support a group, organized initially by Jewish women, that draws together Jews and others, too, each Friday for a vigil before the Israeli Consulate, with signs saying “End the Occupation,” “We Refuse to Be Enemies.” The vigil has gone on for some years, always in the hope of a change for the better and of getting passersby to think about the question.

But in Israel itself, I see this tradition sustained through the actions and courage of those who resist the politics of exclusion, expansion, theocracy, and cruelty. I think of my friend and political ally at Smith College, Judith Blanc,²³ who already fifty years ago was circulating mimeographed news about “the other Israel” and has worked for decades with Palestinian women toward a viable solution. I think of Gadi Algazi,²⁴ a superb historian of medieval and early modern cultural history, who did prison time for refusing military service in the Territories and was one of the founders of Ta’ayush,²⁵ an organization of Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel who bring help to besieged Palestinian communities. I think of the insightful writings of Sidra Ezrahi²⁶ on the Israeli poets and novelists, who hold on to a sense of exile and distance even while living in the land of Israel—a distance that leaves room for moral questioning. I think of the Israelis and Palestinians who—in opposition to both their authorities—have just negotiated the Geneva Accord²⁷ for two neighboring states; I think of a few other voices there who have proposed the establishment of a binational secular state (an idea already bruited about by some cultural Zionists in the 1920s). These are positions difficult to reconcile, but they open the way to fruitful communication and negotiation, in contrast with the repetitious and belligerent arguments you usually hear.

So that’s my current stance, using the Israel-Palestine case as an example. I try to have a realistic understanding of the comedies and tragedies of history and the present-day world; but it’s a realism informed by a passionate interest in human activities and by hope—I’d like to say a belief—that there will always be some persons who will speak against injustice, indifference, cruelty, and oppression.

DC: You say you’ve recently experienced this displacement, or at least you’ve in some way theorized or assimilated it for yourself. But haven’t the vicissitudes of your historical research proceeded from this realization? Because when we study your works in succession, we note that you’ve always roamed broadly and chosen subjects one more different than the next, covering expanses ever larger and farther away…How do you interpret this desire to constantly renew your research by leading it elsewhere? Does this tendency provide some compensation because, for you, the present has slowly lost its ability to offer hope, even though the search for hope remains? Doesn’t it seem that you’ve tried to go back into the past to show that even in a character stricken with the saddest fate there survives a radiance and sense of confidence? In reality, almost all your heroes and heroines are unhappy, but they always manage to salvage some hope, striving to transform the worst into something better, even just a little bit better. Didn’t your own writing, in its choices, in the ways it assigns value to these fragments of a past person, precede this realization? Hasn’t it entailed a kind of intimate conversion that would have required you to surrender some of your dreams? Isn’t it because you wanted to enter into the dreams of your historical characters that you ended up deciding to abandon some of your own dreams, your own personal truths?

NZD: Perhaps it worked in the order you describe, but I hadn’t thought about it that way. It seemed to me that my assessments of lives in the past and lives in the present were just going in tandem with each other, except that in assessing the past I have always had to define “dreams” and “disappointments” in their terms, not ours. If anything, I learned from thinking about them. In any case, as I finish my book now about al-Wazzn, I’m once again balancing off disappointments and unfulfilled dreams with legacies and compensations. He seems never to have done all the writing he’d hoped to after he returned to North Africa, but during his Italian years, he did find a peaceful way to think about the world—a world around him that was saturated by war and violence: wars between Christians, wars between Muslims, wars between Christians and Muslims, slaughters, massacres, expulsions, the sacking of towns, rapes…

In our present-day world, torn between imperialist, nationalist, and religious movements with their unshakeable certitudes and convictions, it is a relief to be able to write about al-Wazzn, because he was situated “in between.” He was not a saint: he used ruses, shrewdness, and craft to survive in between and to prevent himself from falling into despair. The legacy of his life is modest, but I see in it a hope: the possibility to find a voice and to live in between, at a distance from exclusive claims. I think we can see in him not a betrayal of Islam, but an art of living.

DC: But aren’t there other ways to pose questions that don’t require this constant give and take between past and present, between your life and the lives of the people from the past you’ve chosen and fashioned, after all, for yourself and by yourself?

NZD: I can answer only with another example of a perspective from the past that has given me insight into some features of the present and ways to live in the present. I’m thinking of the concept of “the sect,” developed by Ernst Troeltsch²⁸ and elaborated as an ideal type by Max Weber, and of the eschatological spirit, which you have used so remarkably in your book on the Wars of Religion in France. In quietist sects, like the Mennonites²⁹ or the Labadists,³⁰ whom my Maria Sibylla Merian joined for a time, families lived a perfect life, without private property and without bearing the sword, in communities separated from the world; they would serve simply as an example for others, “a mirror for the wicked world.” The militant sects wanted to impose their perfect way of life on others through war, a violence anticipating the millennium from which would follow the end of the world. And then there were the sects in between, like the Society of Friends or Quakers,³¹ where families lived among themselves in a spirit of charity, but also intermingled in the world in a peaceable fashion, that is, without bearing the sword. For me, the people of Ta’ayush in Israel/Palestine resemble this last form, for these young Jews and Arabs put aside their differences to speak and live their truth, a truth of cooperation, respect, and nonviolence. They bring help to Palestinian villages deprived of food and water, isolated by the wall being built.³² There’s the mirror aspect here as well. For they hold up to a world riven with strife around them the possibility of another life.

It is fascinating to watch the emergence right now of militant eschatological movements of the right, in America, in Israel, and in the Islamic world. Look at the government of the United States and the enthusiasm of its American supporters for the policies of George W. Bush, this utopian fervor to remake Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Some commentators claim that only the desire for oil is behind the American policy. But there’s more to the story. We are at an extraordinary moment in U.S. history: the richest country in the world, the most powerful military country in the world dreams of ever greater power, ever greater wealth, desires to have even more oil and to change the rest of the world according to its own image.

DC: Messianically?

NZD: Absolutely, a sort of messianism of the Right.

DC: But then why do you think that right now there’s this equally strong resurgence of providential beliefs allied with a sense of universalism that runs to the highest levels of power in the White House? Why does this resurgence show up now, at the moment when we notice that other cultural or religious systems are similarly affected, from Islam to Hinduism and Judaism? Who can explain this shift towards exclusivity among the great world religions, a shift that bears an obvious resemblance to confessional trends in the sixteenth century?

In Christian Europe from 1500 to 1650, we can argue there came into play, along with the hope to return to a faith purified of abuses and pollutants, a faith similar to that preached at the time of the early church, an anguish toward death heightened by the foreboding that the Last Judgment was at hand, an anguish sustained since the last decades of the fifteenth century by the assurance that the world was more rife with sin than ever before, that it was old and near its end, and that it was going to be subjected to the awesome justice of a jealous God. The emergence of alternative beliefs, then the process of building rival confessions within which the Roman Church reached its own sense of completion, can all be understood as related modes of response to eschatological distress. Be it a response by means of interiorizing this apocalyptical eschatology and then by imagining the redemptive involvement in the battle during the end times against evil. It’s the response of German spiritual radicalism, with Karlstadt³³ or Müntzer,³⁴ the Anabaptists in Frisia or Westphalia,³⁵ or the Catholic faithful in France during the Wars of Religion. The certainty to participate in the last battle against Satan’s minions, the assurance to realize or advance one’s salvation through violence and exclusion made it possible to quiet the conscience, to overcome distress or to sublimate it. Be it the response that came with the shift toward an imagination not haunted by such fears of salvation, with for example Calvin’s ideas that overcame the dread of the Last Judgment and that instead enabled Christians to rediscover, by breaking with the papacy, a serenity in the conviction to live one’s daily life to advance the triumph of the Reformed religion on earth, by obeying the Ten Commandments and struggling against the corruption of God’s majesty, to live for the greater glory of God. In one way or another, the forceful rise of rival systems of belief stabilized or hid from view the power of this unsettling anguish of the imminent encounter between a creature fashioned by God in his image but who knows more than ever he’s tainted by worldly sin, more than ever tainted and condemned by it.

But we find it difficult to see this anguish before death or the Last Judgment today. Or perhaps it’s deeply buried inside us…Who today could thus determine this drive in the world toward exclusion in which each religion aims to affirm, in varying degrees of intensity, its messianic character or its views on humanity’s ultimate destiny? Why has there been a return of the sacred and why has it become so colored by these feelings about the end of the world?

NZD: That’s a very difficult question, a mysterious one. Eschatological movements have developed in many parts of the world in the last thirty years. There must be several causes, different explanations for this depending on the place. As for America, the first arrivals from Europe, the seventeenth-century pilgrims, brought to the lands and indigenous peoples the idea that God’s providence was guiding them. Far from corrupt old Europe, they would create a holy society. Much later, the belief in Manifest Destiny inspired and justified American expansion on the continent and elsewhere.³⁶ As for sects and utopian communities, there have been many of them in the United States, but they have been removed from centers of governmental power. President Woodrow Wilson wanted to create “a world safe for democracy,” but good Calvinist that he was, he did not expect a millenarian era in the near future.³⁷ And now, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the appearance of Islamicist movements, the Apocalypse is in the White House. But what a contrast between the millenarianism of Bush and that of the sects of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The latter renounced private property and preached a simple life, the pure Gospel, necessary for the period of waiting for the thousand years of the reign of Christ. Much current American evangelism and the particular sect that forms the sensibility of George W. Bush and his entourage preach the total acceptance of material life and a glorification of riches as the ways of accomplishing God’s will in the world. Here there’s no longer any tension between religion and the worldly life of riches.

DC: A tension that’s long since disappeared. We are both very far from but also still close to Max Weber who, faced with a world that he considered disenchanted as a result of the shift from the spiritual to a mechanistic or cold objectivity, faced with modern societies devoted to the cult of materialism and the search to control knowledge, reintroduced eschatology as a possibility in the future, after the time of the Entzauberung [demystification]. But in a dramatic sense of dread. It seemed possible to him that rationalization, once it had purged all “final and sublime values,” could one day bring about its own critical fate in the time of the “iron cage.” It was as if Max Weber were haunted by the coming of a time marked by an unspoken, unapparent nihilism in which sense and points of reference became lost. He talked about, building upon Nietzsche,³⁸ the “depersonalization,” the “loss of the soul,” and the “dehumanization” of modern humanity. It seems that this collision between the cult of worldly things and the Bible that you’ve described to us comes from a calibrated accommodation in which rationality and irrationality, the preoccupation with plenty and the belief in a final end become dependent on each other, in which that which is the same becomes other, in which all borders disappear.

NZD: In the evangelical sects in the United States, there are still some walls between the self, religion, and the world, for example in the areas of alcohol and sexuality. George W. Bush had a serious drinking problem till he was forty; through religious conversion, he decided he was a sinner, broke with alcohol, and began to perceive himself as a Christian to whom God had entrusted a mission. Before 9/11 there were also “lesser demons” that the evangelical movement wanted to crush, like homosexuality, fornication, and abortion. After the destruction of the World Trade Center, there was the great anti-Christian Satan and the “axis of evil” against America. Now Bush could have the Christian certitude that he was in a position to remake the world.

DC: Does Judaism in this context reflect a resurgence and serve as a reminder of this belief in the end times?

NZD: With the Jews, the eschatological spirit has a different character in different places. The Jewish advisors, the Neocons³⁹ so influential in the circle around Bush, are not to my knowledge part of orthodox movements. Rather they are admirers of the philosophy of power known as “decisionism” [Dezisionismus], associated with the German philosopher Carl Schmitt,⁴⁰ and of Machiavellian methods like preemptive war to accomplish their goals. Among the orthodox groups in Brooklyn, Paris, and Mea Sharim in Jerusalem,⁴¹ there are those who expect the messiah in the near future. A few of them have even turned their back on the State of Israel, saying that such a political establishment must await the coming of the messiah.

Today the eschatological spirit in Israel is most often associated with the expansion of the settlers into the Palestinian Territories and the violent actions carried on by them and by the Israeli army against the villagers and their lands. The terrifying memory of the Holocaust, the absolute and sweeping affirmation of “Never Again” that elevates even little boys throwing stones into the start of a new Holocaust, the understandable fear of suicide bombers—all this gets confounded with the belief that God gave the Jews the extended land of Israel and that their cause must prevail. So against menacing forces, any action is justified to fulfill the glorious promise.

The wall currently being constructed by the State of Israel across the lands of the Palestinians makes me think of Sura 18 of the Qur’an, in which Dhu-l-Qarnayn (often associated with Alexander the Great) constructs a wall to protect humans against the wicked and dangerous forces of Gog and Magog until the last days.⁴²

DC: How would you characterize the actual type of eschatology that’s become so strong in Islam?

NZD: As the wall against Gog and Magog suggests, Islam has an important eschatological current. At the end of time will arrive the Mahdi, a just man, descended from the Prophet and guided by God, who will destroy false religions, restore virtue and justice, and establish Islam throughout the world. In certain eschatological prophecies, the Mahdi will be accompanied by Jesus. From time to time in history, a Mahdi has been identified, the charismatic leader of a purificatory movement, which defends Islam against corrupt Muslims and infidels who have not accepted God and his Prophet Muhammad. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent⁴³ was named by some of his followers as both Mahdi and World Conqueror in a great war against the Christians. This happened at the same time that some European preachers were naming Emperor Charles V as a world conqueror, who was defeating Islam and would bring Muslims, Jews, and the American Indians to Christianity.

Now you can see the possibilities in this eschatological tradition for inspiring the Muslim holy warriors of our own day—and in particular Osama bin Laden and his disciples. It’s interesting that the eschatology of Osama bin Laden, like the right-wing eschatology of George W. Bush and company, accepts and uses the world capitalist economy and private or family property, even while fulminating against the materialism of the West.

DC: If I follow you, there would be both similarity and a distance in the rapid expansion of these worldviews today.

NZD: These various holy warriors on the different sides draw examples from the past to support their aspirations for the seizure of power and the wealth of the golden age. Along with the eschatological metaphors, they choose the model eras that they’d like to restore. For example, there were the many articles in the American press citing Condoleezza Rice,⁴⁴ security advisor to George W. Bush, before the invasion of Iraq. In her view, the U.S. must relive in Iraq the inspiring events after World War II, when the polities of Germany and Japan were restructured under the aegis of the United States. But historians specializing in the study of international relations and of the Middle East have pointed out—including in the popular press—how different these situations and periods are, and have recalled the failures of British policies in Iraq after the First World War. But to no avail. And even the historians are not in accord: one or two of them, dazzled by proximity to power, have given Bush their approbation.

DC: It’s therefore the myth that history repeats itself that, for you, appears to pose another risk in our contemporary world. But doesn’t it seem here that there would be a basic problem of discrepancy between the historical awareness of historians and the type of awareness of those engaged in political action?

NZD: Of course there’s a difference, but this doesn’t mean the historian has nothing of use to say. Since the nineteenth century, no historian would advance the thesis that there are exact repetitions in history: even if Condoleezza Rice had found a good analogy between the past and the present, unexpected events, contingencies, and surprises would end up complicating matters. When a historian responds to projects and declarations of public figures and political leaders—which can be a very good idea—he or she must do so in the spirit of a responsible scholar with public commitment, not in the spirit of an astrologer who flatters a prince or sultan.

DC: I remain attached to the principle that historical research need not be connected to contemporary affairs. Shouldn’t this principle shape the past that the historian studies as a discrete period in time so it becomes but an artificial world, a virtual reality certainly based on the sources, but one virtual reality among many, whose claim to uniqueness rests on a combination of historical logic, documents, and the lack of any internal contradictions? Even if, as you said earlier, it’s possible to offer the reader mirrors that can aid understanding present-day facts through historical ones, wouldn’t the one lesson to learn from the past be distrust of all appeals to logic? Wouldn’t it rather be a sense of historical irony that always comes undone whenever anyone has tried to think of it as a total world that can be articulated so it becomes consciously immediate? Wouldn’t the one lesson to learn from history be that history is haphazard, uncontrollable, indeterminable, wanton, and pointless—even maddening—such as it was understood after Boethius⁴⁵ by people in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the image of Fortuna turning her wheel in ways absurd rather than comprehensible? To such a point as to render the historian’s work a matter of chance, hypothetical, or inwardly self-critical!

It seems to me that historical writing must be built around structures and conditions that suggest facts; that it’s a kind of mind game that works in terms of possibilities and variables, a game of artificial constructs meant to lead to a predetermined image. For me, it’s all a game. If we concede that research into the past ends up as some kind of game, it’s a game in which the historian tries to travel back to a time not his or her own. It’s time indelibly inscribed by a “gap,” in the linguistic sense of the term, that obviously forces us to accept that history can’t help us understand the present or the future. Historical analysis also relies on proof that can’t but be dependent on suggestive influences from the present, even as it condemns using the past to advance an agenda. This doesn’t imply that we pursue history simply for its own sake, for when it’s all said and done, making history is a way to affirm freedom. It affirms and models a way of life that questions the status quo and the very modalities of understanding or reading the past. It’s a kind of history that becomes a stylistic exercise that artfully couches its appeal as a call for freedom of thought based upon a critical consideration of the sources. But all of this must recognize that a particular historical analysis is just one possibility among many others…Thus beyond any didactic purpose…

NZD: I think your doubts are leading you too far. One of the lessons of history is, in a celebrated phrase of Max Weber as reworked by the wonderful late Robert Merton,⁴⁶ “the unintended consequences of purposive social action.” [laughter] This notion leaves a place for the contingent and the planned, for chance and coherence, for the mysterious and the explicable in history. The links between the past and the present are inevitable in our work as historians, and in the best of cases—when one is conscious of and conscientious in regard to this back and forth—desirable, as Marc Bloch maintained long ago. The past can deepen our understanding of the present—our own personal present and our public and political life—by its differences and by its approximate similarities. History offers us no well-defined or precise projects for improvement, but offers us many possibilities—fascinating for the play of our intellect, offering us irony, delight, indignation, but also helpful for our look at our own society.

DC: Doesn’t historical analysis, to the extent it detects or recognizes the possibilities of history, which it studies, recounts, and even accepts, come close to becoming a work of literature? History is a close cousin of poetry, where a sudden passage always begins anew because of the nature of words and the imagination; it’s a form of repetitious self-learning of a freedom rooted in language and various related intellectual pursuits; it’s what a number of works on rationalist and positivist epistemology ignore, clearing away from the field of analysis all possible heuristic exercises in language and instead building its case on the basis of a tentative move towards a final, fixed kind of knowledge. But don’t you share this mistrust with respect to any rhetoric of certainty?

NZD: To be sure I blur the boundary between poetry and history as Aristotle established it so rigidly centuries ago: “the historian relates what happened, the poet what might happen…”⁴⁷ Historians, including Thucydides,⁴⁸ often consider the plausible and the possible—explicitly or implicitly—in evaluating documents, texts, and reports, especially when there are conflicts and differences among them. I’m drawing on “the possible” right now in trying to draw meaning from the silences around al-Hasan al-Wazzn, the silences in contemporary sources about him (where I might have expected observations), and omissions in his own writings. As I said before, I’m trying to turn these silences into a plus, a silence that signifies, that says something about the place of the man in the society around him and about his own personal practices. To speak of what is possible here, I must use my imagination—but it must be nourished by and tightly guided by the sources from and around al-Wazzn.

The poet has more choice. He or she can stay close to the historical sources or leave them freely. I’m thinking here of a beautiful poem by Amy Clampitt, “Matoaka,” on the Indian woman known as Pocahontas.⁴⁹ One learns much in reading it, Clampitt enlarges both our human and our historical vision, but she goes in very different directions from those I took when I imagined the responses of the Huron Theresa Khionrea⁵⁰ to the Ursuline Marie de l’Incarnation. And the poet does not have the responsibility to indicate at each moment the truth status of what has been said, while the historian is obliged to signal it through either “perhaps” or “it’s certain that…” and other markers. I’m not complaining. I accept completely these conditions of my craft like those of an ever-present companion, familiar and supportive.

DC: Have you encountered in your books, in the reactions to some of your books, this kind of obstacle blocking your idea of history as you write it?

NZD: Yes. I’m thinking especially of the reaction of some people to The Return of Martin Guerre. This book has just appeared in Estonian, the twentieth translation as I recall, so from the point of view of readers, the reception has been positive. But some historians did not like the approach of the book, especially the way I depicted the peasants acting with some improvisation and creativity in regard to the events in their lives. They were also critical of my handling of the judge’s book about the legal case. I used it not only as source for information about the case, but also as a literary text, as a story whose structure and ambivalences I could use to help me understand the judge’s state of mind. These critics weren’t numerous, but they were vociferous.

DC: How have you felt about this criticism?

NZD: Oh, but it makes no difference. [laughter] We write our books, we give them to readers, they circulate in the world, arousing reactions, for the most part unknown to us. For The Return of Martin Guerre, I was glad to have participated in a fruitful methodological debate in the American Historical Review.⁵¹ Our books, once they leave our hands, have a life of their own.

DC: If you had to end our conversation with a few words that sum up all of your research, what would you say?

NZD: Historical research has been for me an arena of joy and intellectual passion. I always feel a shiver of anticipation when I enter an archive or a rare book collection: what am I going to find? Is the slave woman I’m looking for finally going to show up on the registers of a plantation? Might I even find her signature, left by her for some special reason and precious to me as a sign that she existed and really could write, as her lover claimed she could? What luck I’ve had to read so many interesting accounts, some moving me to laughter, others curdling my blood, some surprising, others familiar. This thirst for history and the struggle to understand the ways of living and thinking in the past have led me toward several methodologies—social analysis, anthropological questioning, literary techniques—and toward several settings, France always, but places very far from France. Over the years I’ve enlarged my categories of analysis, and not only in adding the category of gender. To start off, I was more centered on dualities and polarities, like domination/resistance, Catholic/Protestant. By now I stress equally the diverse forms of exchange, mixing, and crossing. My book on The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, which has meant a great deal to me, was a culmination of this double approach.

Actually, I sometimes feel that my historical research has come to me as a gift, a gift from people of the past and from other historians, dead and living. The gift imposes on me the obligation to recount their lives and their worlds with responsibility—not recount them exactly as they would have done, but in being ever attentive to their statements and their claims. For me this responsibility involves the writing of a history that offers no direct lessons—a dead end—but that is a critical history, which displaces the historian herself and her readers. This history requires both closeness and difference, and it makes affirmations about the past with the certainty that they can be questioned and modified. This history reveals the possibilities of the past—admirable, troubling, irritating, astonishing—and as such, they encourage us to think of the possibilities in the present and future. For me, the possibilities of the past invite a commitment to humanity and offer a ray of hope for the future.

Paris/Toronto

September 2003