Jewish Rubble, European Ruins: Didi-Huberman and Embedded Witnessing

While some pasts endure as monumental ruins, some were reduced to rubble and assumed to have left no useful remnants. This article examines Georges Didi-Huberman's recent writings to propose rubble as a critical figure for theorizing testimony after genocide. I argue that Didi-Huberman develops an epistemological toolkit for apprehending the witnessing of traditions disseminated as rubble, often dismissed as illegible or insignificant. Unlike ruins, monumentalized as the legible residues of powerful regimes, rubble emerges as minor, dispersed and unclassified — yet it persists to bear witness through its embeddedness in new habitats: ecological, archival and affective. Such testimony does not merely supplement the narratives of monumental ruins or curated memorials, but frequently unsettles or contradicts them. By foregrounding rubble as an affirmative agent of witnessing, the article rethinks the persistence of Jewish life in Europe and opens pathways for recognizing modes of testimony in histories otherwise presumed to have left no legible trace.