Obituary
Elena Cassin Vernant
Elena Cassin passed away: she was 101 years old (Cuneo 1909-Paris 2011). Born into a middle class family of assimilated Italian Jews, related through her mother to the Rosselli brothers (she was a cousin of Aldo and Nello Rosselli who were exiled in France and, later, in 1937, killed by a local right-wing formation, on the orders coming from the top of fascism). Elena spent the first part of her life in Italy where she studied history of religions at the University of Rome. In 1932 she was already in Paris at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and Collège de France to attend the courses of Charley Fossey on ancient Babylon and of Marcel Mauss on sociology. She had preferred to leave the obscurantist, anti-Semitic and fascist Italy, an environment that was increasingly intolerable to a free spirit like that of Elena Cassin. Elena met her future husband, Jacques Vernant, while attending the same classes taught by the French sociologist Mauss (Jacques was the brother of Jean-Pierre Vernant, the eminent scholar of ancient Greece). Elena and the Vernant brothers were involved in the French Resistance in the Southern France (Operation “Liberation Sud”) in 1941-1944, assuring links with the clandestine socialist party.
After the war Elena Cassin joined the CNRS as a specialist of Assyriology and of history of the religions of the Ancient Near East. She thought that the interpretation of the past could help to better understand the present and the other way round. She was interested in relavant topics related to the study of mentalities, especially in ancient Mesopotamia, while mantaining a great interest in everything concerning the Jewish world. It was this specific intellectual attutude that prompted her to try to understand what had pushed a small town in the Gargano, in southern Italy, to embrace Judaism in the 30’s and 40’s and to start a field research on the converted people of Sannicandro that remains essential for any further study. The study on Sannicandro started in 1952 and lead to the publication of Sannicandro, Histoire d'une conversion (Paris, 1957; San Nicandro. The Story of a Religious Phenomenon London, 1959).
The research on the converts touched her deeply pushing her back forty years later in the Gargano to republish an updated version of her book in French and in Italian, preceded by a lengthy postscript in which she revised and rewrite the story of the conversion up to 1992.Ascolta
Trascrizione fonetica
Other important works are L'adoption à Nuzi ( Paris, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1938), "Symboles de cession immobilière dans l'ancien droit mésopotamien ", L'année sociologique (1952, p. 107-161), La splendeur divine, Introduction à l'étude de la mentalité mésopotamienne (Paris- La Haye, Mouton et co,1968), Le semblable et le différent, symbolismes du pouvoir dans le Proche-Orient Ancien (Paris, Ed. La Découverte, 1987).
Elena Cassin was a scholar who has been able to combine political and intellectual passion, made all the more fruitful thanks to her sharp look. She was a true historian who has demonstrated that there is no conflict between history and interpretation of culture. Finally she was able to hybridize not only the study and the interpretation of ancient mesopotamian and Near Eastern cultures with the Greek and classical civilazations but also the modern with the past and the past with the modern, a true challenge.
Emanuela Trevisan Semi