The Jews of Modern France : Images and Identities [1 ed.] 9789004324190, 9789004324183

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The Jews of Modern France

Brill’s Series in Jewish Studies Series Editor David S. Katz (Tel Aviv University)

VOLUME 56

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsjs

The Jews of Modern France Images and Identities Edited by

Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Cover of the magazine Menorah, February 1, 1930. Picture Credit: Library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kaplan, Zvi Jonathan, editor. Title: The Jews of modern France : images and identities / edited by Zvi  Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016] | Series: Brill’s Series in Jewish studies ; volume 56 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016023229 (print) | LCCN 2016023621 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004324183 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004324190 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—France—History. | Jews—Cultural assimilation—France. | France—Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC DS135.F83 J494 2016 (print) | LCC DS135.F83 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/4044—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023229

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0926-2261 isbn 978-90-04-32418-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32419-0 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Contributors ix Introduction 1 Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich

Part 1 Historiography 1 The Jews of Modern France: A Historiographical Essay 9 Daniella Doron

Part 2 Jewish Integration, Jewish Distinctiveness 2 The Trial of Jacob Benjamin, Supplier to the French Army, 1792–93 35 Ronald Schechter 3 Reading, Writing, and Religion: The Education of Working-Class Jewish Girls in Paris, 1822–1914 62 Jennifer Sartori 4 A Jurisprudential Quandary: Jewish Marriage in Post-Separation France 82 Zvi Jonathan Kaplan 5 Affirming Difference, Confirming Integration: New Forms of Sociability Among French Jews in the 1920s 102 Nadia Malinovich

Part 3 Jews and Politics, Jewish Politics 6 Jews, Liberals and the Civilizing Mission in Nineteenth-Century France 129 Lisa Moses Leff

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7 Jewish Anticlericalism in Germany and France: A Transnational Polemic 154 Ari Joskowicz 8 Shaping Children’s Lives: American Jewish Aid in Post-World War II France (1944–1948) 173 Laura Hobson Faure 9 “The French Jewish Community Speaks to You with One Voice”: Dissent and the Shaping of French Jewish Politics since World War II 194 Ethan B. Katz and Maud S. Mandel 10 A Jewish-Muslim Battle on the World Stage: Constantine, Algeria 1956 228 Jessica Hammerman

Part 4 Imagining Jews, Performing Jewishness 11 Thinking the Jew through the Turbulent Nineteenth Century: The Idea of Rachel 253 Julie Kalman 12 Disunity in Death: Jewish Funerals in the Jewish Press in Mid-Nineteenth Century Paris 271 Jeffrey Haus 13 Not as Simple as “Bonjour”: Synagogue Building in NineteenthCentury Paris 286 Saskia Coenen Snyder 14 Reimagining Jewish-Muslim Relations on Screen: French-Jewish Filmmakers and the Middle East Conflict 302 Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

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15 Defining France and Defending Israel: Romantic Nationalism and the Paradoxes of French Jewish Belonging 323 Kimberly A. Arkin Index 351

List of Contributors Kimberly A. Arkin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Her work has focused broadly on how the “Jewish question” is being asked and lived in postcolonial France. She is the author of Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France (Stanford University Press, 2014). Saskia Coenen Snyder is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of South Carolina and a core member of the Jewish Studies Program. She is the author of Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Harvard University Press, 2013). Her new book project, Diasporic Gems: Diamonds, Jews, and Nineteenth-Century Global Commerce, examines the role of Jews in the transatlantic diamond trade. Miriam Cohen copyeditor of The Jews of France: Images and Identities, has published fiction in Black Warrior Review, Story Quarterly, West Branch Wired, Cream City Review, and The Florida Review. She was the 2012–13 recipient of the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.   Daniella Doron is a lecturer in Jewish history at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her fields of specialty include modern Jewish history, modern France, modern Europe, and the history of childhood, gender and the family. She is the author of Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation, (Indiana University Press, 2015).  Jessica Hammerman is Assistant Professor of World History at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Oregon. She is currently writing a book for University of Nebraska Press based on her doctoral dissertation, “The Heart of the Diaspora: Algerian Jews During the War for Independence, 1954–1962” (City University of New York, 2013). Her work explores the everyday lives of Jews in Algeria during the war, and it analyzes how they represented themselves, especially in relation to Muslims and Christians. ​

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Jeffrey Haus is Associate Professor of History and Religion and Director of Jewish Studies at Kalamazoo College. He is the author of Challenges of Equality: Judaism, State, and Education in N ineteenth-Century France (Wayne State University Press, 2009). His most recent essay is “Conspicuous Charity and Jewish Unity: The Jewish Loterie in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” in Leonard Greenspoon, ed., Wealth and Poverty in Jewish Tradition, (Purdue University Press, 2015). Laura Hobson Faure is Associate Professor of North American studies at the Université de Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research focuses on French and American Jewish life, during and after World War II. She is the author of Un plan Marshall juif: la présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944–1954 (Armand Colin, 2013) and co-editor of L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants et les populations juives au XX ème siècle. Prévenir et Guérir dans un siècle de violences (Armand Colin, 2014). Ari Joskowicz is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, European Studies, and History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Julie Kalman is Associate Professor of History at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France (Indiana University Press, 2017). Zvi Jonathan Kaplan is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the Lander College for Women of Touro College in Manhattan. He has published on Moses Mendelssohn, Hungarian Ultra-Orthodoxy, and modern French Jewish history. He is the author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State (Brown University Press, 2009). Ethan B. Katz is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to

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France (Harvard University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and Colonialism and the Jews (Indiana University Press, 2017). Lisa Moses Leff is Professor of History at American University, where she is also affiliated with the Jewish Studies Program. She is author of Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in 19th century France (Stanford University Press, 2006) and The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015), as well as co-editor of Colonialism and the Jews (Indiana University Press, 2017). Nadia Malinovich is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne and also teaches Modern Jewish history at Sciences Po, Paris. She is the author of French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), as well as several articles on the integration and evolving identities of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East in the United States in the post-World War II era. Maud S. Mandel is Dean of the College and Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University. She is author of In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth- Century France (Duke University Press, 2003) and Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), as well as coeditor of Colonialism and the Jews (Indiana University Press, 2017). Jennifer Sartori is Associate Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Northeastern University and co-director of the Adoption & Jewish Identity Project. She is the author of a doctoral dissertation, Our Religious Future: Girls Education and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century France (Emory University, 2004) and, most recently, “Modern Families: Multifaceted Identities in the Jewish Adoptive Family,” Proceedings of the Twentieth-Seventh Annual Klutznick-Harris-Schwalb Symposium (Purdue University Press, 2016). Ronald Schechter is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815

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(University of California Press, 2003) and Mendoza the Jew: Boxing, Manliness and Nationalism. A Graphic History (Oxford University Press, 2014, illustrated by Liz Clarke). He is also the translator and editor of Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing with Related Documents (St. Martin’s Press, 2004). Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall is Professor of History at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of The Abbé Grégoire and the Jews: The Making of Modern Universalism (UC Press, 2005), Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012), and numerous articles on the French Revolution, French-Jewish history, and French colonial history.

Introduction Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Nadia Malinovich Set against the enormous changes of the postwar years—from the trauma of Vichy to the creation of the State of Israel to the large-scale immigration of North African Jews—Brandeis University Press published a collection of seminal essays on the history of the Jews in modern France in 1985.1 Presenting a range of articles by both specialists on the French Jewish community and scholars engaged in French history and civilization, The Jews in Modern France, edited by Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein, posited itself as a conversation, intended to introduce the academic world and broader public to the then emerging discipline of modern French Jewish history. The Jews in Modern France was, in many ways, a transitional volume. Looking through the retrospectives of both genocide and national rebirth, Jewish historical scholarship in the postwar decades tended to emphasize themes such as the persistence of antisemitism, the toll of assimilation, as well as the alleged failure of the assimilatory project. In the 1980s, there was a large-scale reversal of these historiographical trends as a new generation of historians began to reevaluate the pre-Holocaust diaspora communities on their own terms. A central aspect of this reassessment was an insistence on analyzing the Jewish experience within the specific national, historical, and temporal contexts in which it had unfolded. In keeping with this historiographical turn, the diverse range of articles in the Brandeis volume, rather than analyzing French Jewish history from a purely internal Jewish perspective, adeptly integrated the history of French Jews into the history of France. One of the major historiographical shifts signaled by the publication of the Brandeis volume was the calling into question of a view of the French Revolution as having set French Jews on an ‘illusory path’ of assimilation. Rather than painting a picture of French Jews as having progressively abandoned their Jewishness in favor of identification with the French nation, historians began to explore the myriad ways in which these individuals—the first emancipated Jews of Europe—sought to mesh their French and Jewish identities in order to fit a changed social and political landscape. As this scholarship has effectively demonstrated, French Jews, on the whole, made considerable efforts to preserve Jewish particularism even as they modernized and took full 1  Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein, eds., The Jews in Modern France, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1985).

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advantage of the social, economic, and political offerings that French citizenship had offered them. Over the past two decades, a new generation of English-speaking scholars has, in turn, published their own original research on modern French Jewish history, both building on the historiography of the 1980s and 1990s and offering new methodological and thematic perspectives. For example, both the advent of cultural history and the linguistic turn have led many contemporary scholars to draw our attention to continuities in French Jewish identity and cultural practices over time, continuities that often transcended political change. The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities provides a broad overview of this scholarship, synthesizing much of the original work published in recent years and also reflecting the status of the contributors’ ongoing research. In so doing, it builds on both the Brandeis volume and the special issue of Historical Reflections edited by Ronald Schechter, which sought to belatedly continue the conversation begun by the Brandeis volume more than twenty years prior.2 The contributions to The Jews of Modern France build and expand on the major themes put forth in that issue, including Jewish selfrepresentation and discursive frameworks, cultural continuity and rupture from the eve of emancipation to the contemporary period, the impact of France’s role as a colonial power, and the overlapping boundaries between the very categories of ‘Jewish’ and ‘French.’ The purpose of this volume is not to chronologically recount the history of the Jews in modern France. For that very reason, the chapters are divided into thematic rather than chronological sections. As a whole, The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities focuses on the shifting boundaries between inner-directed and outer-directed Jewish concerns, behaviors, and attitudes in France over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors highlight the fluidity of French Jewish identity, demonstrating that there is no fine line between communal insider and outsider or between an internal and external Jewish concern. This blurring of boundaries is apparent throughout modern French Jewish history whether in the persona of revolutionary provisioner Jacob Benjamin or contemporary public intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, both of whom are discussed in this volume. The volume opens with a historiographical essay by Daniella Doron providing readers with an overview of the major trends that have shaped the writing of modern French Jewish history in recent years, with a particular focus on the 2  Ronald Schechter, ed., Shifting Boundaries, Rethinking Paradigms: The Significance of French Jewish History, a special issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32:1 (Spring 2006). 

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rapidly expanding field of Jews in postwar France. Indeed, as a result of the relatively high rate of survival of Jews in France—75%—and the massive arrivals of North African Jewry beginning in the 1950s, France emerged as the country with the third largest Jewish population in the world. Articles on communal development, internal Jewish politics and Jewish self-representation from the mid-1940s to the present thus comprise a major section of the book. The Jews of Modern France deepens our understanding of the complex and often contradictory ways in which both men and women navigated the borders of their ‘French’ and ‘Jewish’ selves, as well as addressing the question of how both ‘Jews’ and ‘antisemitism’ have fit into the problem of difference within modern French imaginaries. Ronald Schechter’s study of Jacob Benjamin, a little known Jewish provisioner for the French Revolutionary Army, for example, provides a striking counterpart to the Dreyfus Affair a century later and indicates the weakness of antisemitism in the immediate aftermath of emancipation. The debate about Muslim girls wearing headscarves to public school has been largely understood as emblematic of issues raised by the wave of immigration from France’s former colonies that began in the post-World War II years. Our volume, by contrast, demonstrates that balancing the rights of ethnic and religious groups with an understanding of the national as a universal political entity has shaped Jewish identity in France from the time of the Revolution. Contributors both show the extent to which Jews have been successful in balancing the universal and the particular in modern France, as well as highlighting the constraints that French politics and culture have imposed on Jewish expressions of a distinct public identity. Lisa Moses Leff and Nadia Malinovich’s chapters, for example, demonstrate French Jews’ ability to synthesize ‘Frenchness’ and ‘Jewishness’ and adapt Franco-Judaism according to the cultural ethos of the surrounding society. Saskia Coenen Snyder’s contribution, by contrast, shows that synagogue building in nineteenth-century France was dictated first and foremost by the exigencies of the French State. Jeffrey Haus’s chapter looks to how changes in death practices among Parisian Jews in the middle of the nineteenth century, which were adapted as part of Jewish acculturation to the French middle class, marked fractures in the Jewish communal structure by erecting economic barriers that traditional Jewish death rituals were intended to avoid. Kimberly Arkin’s contribution, in turn, tracks the role of debates about both Israeli politics and the role of Islam in contemporary France in forging a new brand of ‘romantic nationalism’ among French public intellectuals in the early twenty-first century. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s chapter examines how twenty-first century French-Jewish filmmakers have depicted Muslims and Jews. Often centered on familial and

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romantic connections between Jews and Muslims, these films seek to build bridges between the two communities and provide a counterweight to the dominant contemporary narrative of Jews and Muslims as inexorably separate and hostile. The Jews of Modern France situates French Jewish history within a comparative, transnational, and post-colonial context. Ari Joskowicz’s contribution joins the German-Jewish conversation through an analysis of the shared history of French and German Jews’ polemics against the Catholic Church, while Laura Hobson Faure looks both inward and across national lines to study the relations between French Jewish childcare organizations and their principal benefactor, the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Lisa Moses Leff’s chapter shows how nineteenth-century French Jews embraced the idea of a ‘civilizing mission’ as a way of advocating for a secular foreign policy, thereby advancing their own rights. Zvi Jonathan Kaplan highlights the effects of Russian law on Eastern European immigrants in France on matters relating to their personal status, while Nadia Malinovich’s chapter demonstrates the influence of Eastern European immigrants and their children on the evolution of the French Jewish community in the 1920s. Ethan Katz and Maud Mandel’s contribution highlights the importance of France’s colonial legacy in shaping the dynamics of French Jewish politics in the decades following the Second World War, focusing in particular on the evolution of Jewish-Muslim relations in France. Jessica Hammerman’s chapter explores the colonial legacy in Algeria, arguing that after 1956 conflicts between Jews and Muslims took on a new importance, thereby marking the end of of intercommunal local dialogue. This volume also addresses the extent to which Jewish integration, acculturation, and self-representation have been shaped by gender. Zvi Jonathan Kaplan addresses innovative rabbinic efforts to harmonize Jewish divorce law with the more egalitarian French civil system in wake of the 1905 separation of church and state. Jennifer Sartori demonstrates that school curricula for working class Jewish girls during the long nineteenth century blended modern French conceptions of appropriate gender roles into older Jewish customs that privilege male over female religious learning and practice. Julie Kalman’s essay on the iconic nineteenth-century actress Rachel looks to how gendered perceptions of Jews could function as a point of reference in public discourses around issues such as the nature of citizenship and French nationalism. While it is the editors who solicited the individual chapters that together form a thematic whole, it is the contributors who deserve the credit for sharing their vast expertise on modern French Jewish history. They believed, like their predecessors who contributed to the Brandeis volume, in the importance of introducing the latest scholarship on modern French Jewish history to

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the academic world and broader public. We thank them. We are grateful to Brill editors Katelyn Chin, Meghan Connolly, and Judy Pereira, as well as our copyeditor Miriam Cohen, for helping to bring this work to fruition. We would also like to thank our respective academic institutions, Touro College and the Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, for their support. Although this volume reexamines the history of modern French Jewry, we hope that it will shed light on the attempts of all emancipated Jewish communities to reformulate their positions in response to the challenges of their times.

Part 1 Historiography

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Chapter 1

The Jews of Modern France: A Historiographical Essay Daniella Doron In the mid-1990s Bernard Wasserstein published one of the first scholarly works assessing the trajectory of postwar European Jewry. Though not exclusively focused on the French Jewish case, his conclusions about France and Europe more broadly sounded a dismal and depressing note: assimilatory forces, among other developments, threatened to undermine Jewish social cohesion. The title of the book, Vanishing Diasporas, in a sense said it all. European Jewry, including France’s Jews, faced a “clouded” and “dim” future, he concluded.1 The then-current demographic, religious and cultural trends among European Jews indicated that the world was witness to European Jewry’s “fading away.”2 Wasserstein’s grim 1996 assessment of postwar European Jewry has been challenged by subsequent scholarship and the passage of time.3 French Jews, who are the subjects of this collection, continue to not only reside in France but also increasingly see themselves in communitarian terms. And yet the central concerns of Wasserstein’s research has been mirrored in the French Jewish historiography that had come before and after Vanishing Diasporas. Already in 1910, Simon Dubnow articulated such sentiments. Though he praised the French Revolution and Jewish emancipation as heralding modernity, he expressed unease about the toll that the collapse of Jewish communal autonomy would have on communal cohesion.4 Following Dubnow’s analysis, in the post World War II years French Jews were represented as ‘assimilationists extraordinaire.’ Most notably, Hannah Arendt advanced such a depiction in her analysis of French Jewish reactions to the Dreyfus Affair.5 Both in Arendt, 1  Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: Jews in Europe Since 1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 280. 2  Ibid., 290. 3  For a scholar who directly refutes Wasserstein, see Maud Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 202. 4  Simon Dubnow, Histoire moderne du peuple juif (Paris: Cerf, 1994; 1910), 1604–1605. 5  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 117–9.

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and later Michael Marrus’ account, French Jews had pursued the “politics of assimilation.” Committed to the Republic and its ideals, they eagerly had sought to integrate into the national body at the expense of Jewish ethnic ties. So enamored were they with universalist ideology that they had buried their heads in the sand, willfully blind to contemporary antisemitism and, according to Arendt, their pariah status.6 This assimilationist narrative, once the paradigm in French Jewish history, has been chipped away at by several decades of scholarship. And while the issue of assimilation has enjoyed the lion’s share of historiographical attention, the field has also drifted in new directions by looking beyond the Hexagon to better understand the French Republic and French Jewish history. This essay will examine these major scholarly debates and historiographical developments in order to reveal how, as a whole, French Jewry has remained far from ‘vanishing.’ The question of the vanishing of French Jewry has preoccupied postwar modern French historians, from those working on the French Revolution to those interested in contemporary French Jewish life. As previously mentioned, up until the mid-1980s a considerable body of scholarship on the nineteenth century, not to mention later periods, had been monopolized by a debate about the assimilationist ethos of post emancipation French Jewry. The legacy of the French Revolution loomed large in this scholarly conversation. As Ronald Schechter has somewhat pithily noted, much of this literature was driven by the age-old question of whether the Revolution and emancipation had been “good or bad for the Jews.”7 Literature on the Revolution and French Jewish history had thereby underlined the deleterious consequences of revolutionary ideology upon French Jewry and criticized them for entering into a Faustian bargain of sorts by accepting the assimilationist demands of the new Republic. In the 1960s, Arthur Hertzberg famously blamed Enlightenment ideology and Voltaire for the origins of modern antisemitism. The following decade, Simon Schwarzfuchs remained highly critical of Napoleon’s Jewish policy that included subjecting Jews to special legislation, resurrecting the ancient institution of the Grand Sanhedrin to encourage Jewish assimilation, and centralizing Jewish religious affairs under the Central Consistorial system. To Schwarzfuchs, these initiatives spoke to Napoleon’s violation of republican

6  Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 7  Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 3. Maurice Samuels makes a similar observation in Maurice Samuels, “The Emperor and the Jews,” Judaism 54, No. 1–2 (2005): 34.

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principles of equality.8 Writing more recently—but no less disparagingly—of the Revolution’s effect upon French Jewry, the sociologist Shmuel Trigano has stridently argued that the Revolution “cost [the Jews] their identity and their presence in the world.”9 The Holocaust had undoubtedly framed these conversation about the Revolution and the Napoleonic era, as scholars such as Hertzberg have linked the catastrophe of the twentieth century to the first stirrings of modernity in the eighteenth century. This negative appraisal of the Revolution has been hotly contested by current scholarship. Ronald Schechter’s examination of Enlightenment rhetoric, for instance, has traced how Jews served as a springboard for larger discussions about the power of enlightenment ideology to transform society. While Jews may have been targets of “regenerationist” discourse and practices, however, this does not mean that they shed all forms of Jewish particularity upon emancipation. Schechter has argued that they never underwent a “fundamental transformation of identity,” but, rather, engaged in a strategy of “appropriation” that claimed French ideals (such as equality) as inherently Jewish.10 Other historians of the Revolution and the nineteenth century have likewise suggested that the Revolution failed to instantly transform French Jewry. Jay Berkovitz has adopted a longue durée approach to French Jewish history, starting his inquiry not with the Revolution, but rather with the Old Regime. This novel approach has enabled him to trace the slow but steady transformation of French Jewish religious culture that predated the revolutionaries. While the Revolution certainly had symbolic impact, Berkovitz and others have concluded, the modernization of French Jewry remained “lethargic.”11

8   Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews, and the Sanhedrin (New York: Routledge, 1979); See Schechter on this point about previous historiography, Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 2–5. 9   Shmuel Trigano, “The French Revolution and the Jews,” Modern Judaism 10, No. 2 (1990): 185. 10  Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 179. In making this conclusion, Schechter does not stand alone. See for instance Maurice Samuels, “The Emperor and the Jews”; Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 17–52. 11  Despite his argument for incremental change, Berkovitz is careful to note that the long term consequences of the Revolution are undeniable in Jay R. Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 202. Also see Idem, “Ritual and Emancipation: A Reassessment of Cultural Modernization in France,” Historical Reflections/ Réflexions Historiques 32, No. 1 Shifting Boundaries, Rethinking Paradigms: The Significance of French

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Most current scholars of nineteenth-century French Jewry have shared Schechter and Berkovitz’s preference for framing French Jews as acculturating, rather than assimilating, into French life. Indeed, since the 1980s, modern Jewish historians have embraced social and later cultural history to document how the term assimilation is too blunt a tool to describe the complex ways European Jews both integrated in the majority culture and maintained forms of ethnic difference. Historians of modern French Jewry in particular have adopted this line of inquiry, especially since French Jews had traditionally been cast as prime culprits of radical assimilation. As this now sizeable school of historiography has definitively established, French Jews never intended to radically assimilate into French society. Taken as a whole, this literature overwhelmingly demonstrates that acculturation was a gradual and geographically inconsistent process.12 To offer but one example, Pierre Birnbaum’s research has revealed how even those seemingly ‘assimilationist’ Parisian Jews who had reached the highest echelons of the French administration balanced their loyalty to republican universalism with continued Jewish particularity.13 Much of this historiography has focused on the metropole and the behavior of nineteenth-century French Jews in Paris and its provinces. The most Jewish History (Spring 2006): 9–38; Idem, “The French Revolution and the Jews: Assessing the Cultural Impact,” AJS Review 20, No. 1 (April 1995): 25–86. 12  This is a rather large school of literature. For some representative examples see: Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1977); Idem, “Israelite and Jew: How did Nineteenth-Century French Jews Understand Assimilation?” in J. Frankel and Steven Zipperstein, eds., Assimilation and Community (New York: Cambridge, 1002), 99–109; Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 53–115; Jay R. Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871–1918 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988); Paula Hyman, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009); Jeffrey Haus, Challenges of Equality: Judaism, State, and Education in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009); Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996); Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State (Providence: Brown University Press, 2009); Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006). 13  Pierre Birnbaum, The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996).

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recent scholarship, however, though remaining engaged with questions of assimilation, has taken the field in new directions by gazing beyond the geographical boundaries of France. Influenced by comparative and transnational approaches to history, historians such as Ari Joskowicz and Saskia Coenen Snyder have compared the conditions in France with those of Germany and other great European powers. While at first glance French Jewry may have appeared secure and confident in its position in the French social and political landscape, Snyder’s scholarship on synagogue construction has revealed that French Jews walked a tightrope as they navigated French bureaucracy. With little control over the architectural process, the Jewish elite’s negotiations with French administrators actually speaks to their insecurity and lack of autonomy.14 Ari Joskowicz’s comparison of German and French Jewish secularists and Zvi Jonathan Kaplan’s work on Jewish positions regarding churchstate relations likewise unsettle assumptions about French Jewry accepting the republican model of relegating religion to the private sphere.15 If comparative history has represented one significant new direction in the field, the ‘imperial turn’ has constituted another critical historiographical development. Jews of North Africa had been traditionally sidelined in the histories of French Jewry. Paula Hyman and Esther Benbassa’s synthetic works on French Jewish history, for example, virtually left them out entirely.16 Embracing developments in French history that have sought to integrate French colonialism into French history—referred to commonly as the imperial turn—recent French Jewish historians have turned their eye to North African Jews as sites of new scholarly inquiry. In a sense, this renewed scholarly interest on the relationship between Jews in the Hexagon and those abroad gained traction through the pioneering scholarship of Aron Rodrigue, whose work on the AIU (Alliance Israélite Universelle) documented the organization’s efforts to import France’s ‘civilizing mission’ to the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.17 Newer scholarship has sought to methodologically situate Jewish history within colonial history. Lisa Leff has argued for the interconnected relationship between the 14  Saskia Coenen Snyder, Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 207–52. 15  Ari Joskowicz, The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013), 18; Kaplan, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea?. 16  Hyman, The Jews of Modern France; Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 17  Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

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struggle for republican secularism and Jewish rights in in the Hexagon and the formulation of colonial policy abroad.18 Joshua Schreier, for his part, has traced how Revolutionary and Napoleonic discussions about the “regeneration” of Jews helped lay the groundwork for later colonial policies that sought to “regenerate” colonial subjects.19 The extent to which Jews were shaped by colonialism has sparked considerable historiographical discussion in recent years. On one end of the spectrum lies those historians who find “something admirable,” to borrow Michael Shurkin’s language, in the French state’s conferring of citizenship to Algerian Jews through the Crémieux decree of 1870. In Shurkin’s eyes, being “good to Algerian Jews and ultimately emancipating them allowed the French to make a stand for their liberal vision of France and its endeavors abroad.”20 Shurkin and others have celebrated the liberal values that propelled French colonial practices towards Algerian Jewry, and have posited that Algerian Jews benefited from the colonial system. These historians have generally assumed that a natural intimacy existed between Algerian Jews and the French state, and tend to write the history of North African Jews as distinct from that of Muslim North Africans.21 Sarah Stein, by contrast, has found this “soft form of colonialism” approach to Jewish history disconcerting and has preferred to highlight the illiberal undercurrents embedded in French colonial practices towards Jews 18  Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 11. 19  Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); See also Idem, “Napoléon’s Long Shadow: Morality, Civilization and Jews in France and Algeria, 1808–1870,” French Historical Studies 30, No. 1 (Winter 2007): 77–103; Joshua Cole makes a similar argument for the twentieth century, Cole, “Constantine Before the Riots of August 1934: Civil Status, Anti-Semitism, and the Politics of Assimilation in Interwar French Algeria,” The Journal of North African Studies 17, No. 5 (December 2012): 839–61. 20  Michael Shurkin, “French Liberal Governance and the Emancipation of Algeria’s Jews,” French Historical Studies 33, No. 2 (Spring 2010): 262. 21  Ibid., 261. Similar assumptions about the relationship between Algerian Jews and the French state appear in Hyman, Jews of Modern France; Michel Abitbol, “The Encounter between French Jewry and the Jews of North Africa: Analysis of a Discourse,” in The Jews of Modern France, ed. Francis Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1985). Ethan Katz explores how this “ ‘progress and patriotism’ model of Algerian Jewish remembrance” came into being in Katz, “Algerian Jewish Memory in the Longue Durée (1930–1970),” Journal of North African Studies 17, No. 5 (December 2012): 793–820. For a useful historiographical overview of the literature on Jews and Algeria, see Susan Slyomovics and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Jews and French Colonialism in Algeria: An Introduction,” Journal of North African Studies 17, No. 5 (2012): 749–55.

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and non-Jews.22 In a similar vein, Joshua Schreier has argued that while the Crémieux decree may have emancipated Algerian Jews, it also set the wheels in motion for the permanent exclusion of North African Muslims from the French national body. He has demonstrated how activists and colonial policy makers successfully argued that North African Jews were subjects primed for regeneration and civilization, while Muslims were cast as uncivilized, inferior, and poor candidates for citizenship.23 Stein likewise has highlighted how the Crémieux decree worked to divide North African Jews from Muslims. The Crémieux decree, she has argued, has nurtured both the historical and historiographical assumption that an innate affinity existed between the Algerian Jews and the colonial regime, a presumption that later served to set apart Algerian Jews from Muslims both “from the [later] Algerian nationalist movement and consciousness.”24 Jewish inclusion to the French national body, these scholars have demonstrated, helped cement Muslim exclusion from France and Jewish exclusion from Muslim communities. Within the history of the Jews of the Maghreb, Algeria has enjoyed considerable scholarly attention. In part, this historiographical prominence stems from the fact that Algerian Jews were the only Jewish community in North Africa to be conferred French citizenship, as well as from an implicit assumption that the nature of Jewish modernization in Algeria and the seemingly natural relationship between Algerian Jews and the French state was mirrored elsewhere. But scholarship on Morocco, Tunisia, and even sub-Saharan Algeria suggests otherwise. Stein has recently shown, for example, how sub-Saharan Algerian Jews, like their Muslim counterparts, were excluded from the colonial order, and thereby shared more in common with their Muslim neighbors than Algerian Jews to the North.25 Some Algerian Jews may have been advantaged by colonialism, but other Muslims and Jews remained profoundly disadvantaged by 22  Sarah Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 6. 23  Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith. 24  Idem, “Dividing South from North: French Colonialism, Jews, and the Algerian Sahara,” Journal of North African Studies 17, No. 5 (December 2012): 773. 25  In so doing, Stein, as well as other recent historians working on North Africa, have preferred to focus on the interactions between North African Jews and Muslims, arguing that earlier Jewish historiography’s focus on inter-Jewish communal relations had decontextualized Jewish history. For a few examples of scholars that explicitly make the argument for “entangled” histories of North African Jews and Muslims see Ibid.; Emily Gottreich, “Rethinking the ‘Islamic City’ From the Perspective of Jewish Space,” Jewish Social Studies 11, No. 1 (Autumn 2004): 118–46; Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith; for the twentieth century see, Joshua Cole, “Constantine Before the Riots of August 1934: Civil Status,

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the imperial system. Moreover, other academic work reveals that a multiplicity of Jewish experiences and attitudes towards French culture emerges look beyond the narrative of Algerian Jewish emancipation and the ready embrace of French civilization.26 Turning to Morocco, scholarship has unearthed how Moroccan Jewry followed an alternative trajectory towards modernization and emancipation. Daniel Schroeter, for example, has convincingly demonstrated that the reconfiguration of the Jews’ legal status was an “ambivalent” process for Moroccan Jewry. In fact, Moroccan Jews actually experienced a constriction of rights and freedoms as their legal status was ameliorated. Further, Schroeter suggests that though Moroccan Jewry undoubtedly took major steps towards modernization during the nineteenth century, modernization was not accompanied by secularization. Rather than pursuing the path of acculturation, Moroccan Jewry may have emerged from the process of modernization and emancipation with a fortified sense of communal identity.27 As Jessica Marglin—who also questions the extent of French cultural affiliation—observes, Moroccan Jewry demonstrates how Jewish (and non-Jewish) colonial subjects did not simply ape Western style modernity. Rather, they selectively chose and reinterpreted elements of the larger transnational process of modernization.28 This recent literature on the Maghreb thus has successfully unraveled assumptions about a cohesive North African, or even Algerian, Jewish narrative. Scholarship on twentieth-century France has likewise attempted to underscore the heterogeneity of French Jewry and disrupt narratives of a uniform response to Western style modernity or French state ideology. From the earliest days of the Revolution, French Jews never constituted a homogenous entity. But the waves of Jewish immigrants who landed in France at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century further diversified the nature of French Jewry. Focusing on the extremes of these two groups—the French Anti-Semitism, and the Politics of Assimilation in Interwar French Algeria,” Journal of North African Studies 17, No. 5 (2012): 839–61. 26  See Schreier, for instance, who highlights the comparative wealth, power and diversity of Algerian Jewry in the first stages of colonial conquest in Schreier, “The Creation of the ‘Israélite Indigène’ Jewish Merchants in Early Colonial Oran,” Journal of North African Studies 17, No. 5 (2012): 757–72. 27  Daniel Schroeter, “Emancipation and Its Discontents: Jews at the Formative Period of Colonial Rule in Morocco,” Jewish Social Studies 13, No. 1 (2007): 170–206; On the formation of a Moroccan Jewish identity see Idem, “The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities,” Jewish Social Studies 15, No. 1 (Fall 2008): 145–64. 28  Jessica Marglin, “Modernizing Moroccan Jews: The AIU Alumni Association in Tangiers, 1893–1913,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 101, No. 4 (Fall 2011), 576.

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Jewish establishment such as the Central Consistory and the Alliance, or the activist immigrant organizations—led some historians writing in the 1970s to stress the gulf and the friction that divided immigrant and native French Jews.29 Paula Hyman’s foundational text From Dreyfus to Vichy highlighted the cultural and political divide that characterized the relationship between native and immigrant French Jewry.30 David Weinberg, in his work on the refugee crisis of the 1930s, similarly depicted a fractured French Jewry, and blamed the French Jewish elite for their failed response to the refugee crisis.31 As the title to Weinberg’s study, A Community on Trial, indicates, the Holocaust naturally has cast a long shadow in these historiographical debates about the interwar. Immigrant Jews fell victim to deportation in numbers far greater than native French Jews, a fact that has invited historical inquiry into the Jewish establishment’s interwar and wartime policies regarding immigrants. These historians argued that the French Jewish leadership doggedly adhered, to borrow Hyman’s words, to the “politics of discretion and patriotic rhetoric” in the face of this refugee crisis. Immigrant and youth groups, in contrast, opted to wage a public political battle against antisemitism and champion the cause of Jewish refugees.32 The stakes are even higher when documenting the relationship between immigrant and native Jews under Nazi occupation and Vichy collaboration. The controversy surrounding the UGIF (L’Union générale des israélites de France, General Union of Israelites in France), the French Jewish body tasked by the Nazis as the intermediary between French Jewry and the Nazis, speaks to the impassioned debate that had swirled around the Jewish leadership during the Holocaust. In a book published in 1989, Jacques Adler, mirroring much of the early Holocaust scholarship on the Jewish Councils, remained highly critical of the actions of the UGIF casting them as all too interested in saving their own skins and willing to sacrifice immigrant Jewry for the sake of native French Jewry. In his eyes, the UGIF had fatally erred in cooperating with the

29  Nadia Malinovich makes this argument about previous literature in Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), 5–6. 30  Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 31  David Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 32  Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 151. See also Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 217–29, esp., 228.

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Nazis and should have instead encouraged Jews to opt for armed resistance.33 Historians such as Weinberg and Adler share both an assumption that the Jewish elite fully embraced the assimilationist demands of French republicanism and a skepticism that altruism drove the establishment’s policies towards immigrants. The work of Weinberg and Hyman stand as foundational texts of French Jewish history. More recent literature has preferred to document the zones of commonality and cooperation between the immigrant and native French Jews. In the process, this scholarship has largely adopted a more sympathetic stance to French Jewish reactions to Nazi persecution and Vichy collaboration. Nadia Malinovich’s research on Jewish intellectuals and associational life, for example, has sought to unsettle depictions of a fractured and fraught interwar French Jewry in the years before the Nazi rise to power. Focusing on the 1920s, Malinovich has argued that an increasing number of Jews in France in the 1920s reached a comfortable symbiosis between being “French and Jewish.”34 Writing about the following decade, Vicki Caron has similarly preferred to collapse historiographical divisions between immigrant and native. Whereas earlier scholars had criticized the establishment for their anti-refugee position, in her analysis the native French Jewish leadership eventually went to great pains to help overturn anti-immigration legislation.35 Just as scholars have worked to break down the dichotomy between immigrant and native in the interwar era, we see that it does not hold during the war years either. Richard Cohen, for instance, has documented the thorny set of dilemmas confronting agencies such as the UGIF as they worked towards seeing as many Jews as possible to safety. Rather than depicting the UGIF as staffed by collaborators, Cohen has maintained that the UGIF members worked in the interests of all. In arriving at this conclusion, Cohen has found a comfortable historiographical middle ground between labeling individuals during wartime as either resisters or collaborators. As a great deal of literature both in French and Jewish history has demonstrated, these overly stark poles fail to account for the range of choices and set of behavior exhibited by French Jews and non-Jews during wartime.36 33  Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 34  Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early TwentiethCentury France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008). 35  Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 94–116, 302–20. 36  Richard Cohen, The Burden of Conscience: French Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

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This shift from damning to understanding accounts of the French Jewish elite speaks to how the historiographical pendulum of French Holocaust studies has swung several times.37 In keeping with the French national mood that preferred to avoid uncomfortable tales of French collaboration, the earliest scholarship on the Holocaust in France valorized the heroism of Jewish resistance networks. Notably, the story of rescue efforts was absent from such narratives which preferred to elevate armed resistance as the most efficacious and heroic response to Nazi genocide.38 Also conspicuously missing from these histories was the experiences of the vast majority of French Jews, victims of Nazi persecution. And, indeed, the most egregious omission may have been a lack of scholarship documenting the indigenous origins of French antisemitism and Vichy collaboration. These lacunae began to be remedied as the attention of French historians turned to documenting the complex and uncomfortable history of French state and society during the Second World War. In the early 1970s, Robert Paxton exploded national myths by carefully documenting how Vichy authorities did not simply engage in a “double game” in which they outwardly and reluctantly placated German demands. Rather, he reveals how Vichy authorities eagerly and actively collaborated with the Germans.39 Two decades later, Paxton partnered with Michael Marrus to expand upon these themes. Their pioneering work Vichy France and the Jews thereby outlined the domestic origins of Vichy policy and exposed how Vichy France was not just passively complicit but active agents in the deportation of Jews from France.40 Whereas this scholarship revolved around French policy and dwelled little on the lived reality of Jews in France, Renée Poznanksi several years later broadened the analysis of German occupation and French collaboration. Her work concentrated on the lived experiences of Jews in France, the attempt of Jewish organ­ izations to negotiate with the government and ameliorate the conditions of French Jews, and the responses of French society. These three major lines of inquiry culminated in a new understanding that the “Holocaust in France” 37  For an excellent historiographical overview see Renée Poznanski, “Rescue of the Jews and the Resistance in France: From History to Historiography,” French Politics, Culture & Society 30, No. 2 (2012): 8–32; Daniel Lee also offers a helpful historiographical summary in Lee, “The Chantiers de la Jeunesse, General de la Porte du Theil, and the Myth of Rescue of Jews in Vichy France,” French Historical Studies, Vol 38, No. 1 (February 2015), esp. 140–4. 38  See for instance Jacques Lazarus, Juives au Combat (Paris: Cerf, 1947). 39  Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 40  Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995).

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was not solely the result of German occupation and French bureauc­racy, but rather the complicated interaction between state, society, and the persecuted minority.41 Daniel Lee has recently taken up a similar line of inquiry, focusing on the complex relationship between the Vichy state and French Jews during the first years of the war. He has advanced the intriguing contention that the years between 1940 and 1942 should not be understood exclusively through the prism of victimization, rescue, or resistance. By examining Vichy policies towards and experiences of French Jewish youth during those two liminal years, Lee has explored the “coexistence” that existed between the Vichy regime and French Jewry.42 Furthermore, recent historians have expanded the definition of Jewish resistance itself to include individual and organizational rescue efforts to save Jews from deportation.43 Nonetheless, though a rich and varied literature exists on the subject of the Holocaust in France, some omissions remain. The experiences of North African Jews, to offer one example, have yet to be fully incorporated into the grand narrative of French Holocaust studies.44 41  Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001). More recently she has shown how even amongst resistance organizations and individuals, there was a commonly held perception that France faced a “Jewish problem.” This meant that resisters largely avoided a discussion of Jewish persecution, and these kind of commonly held antisemitic attitudes eased the way for Vichy antisemitic policies and propaganda. Poznanski, Propogandes et persecutions: La Résistance et le ‘problème juif’ 1940–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 2008). 42  Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 43  Lucien Lazare, Rescue as Resistance: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Susan Zucotti: Père Marie Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Katy Hazan and Serge Klarsfield, Le sauvetage des enfants juifs pendant l’occupation, dans les maisons de l’OSE, 1938–1945 (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2009). 44  In part, this is because the histories of the Holocaust in France and the memory and trauma of decolonization in North Africa have taken center stage. On the later, see my discussion below and, for instance, Katz, “Between Emancipation and Persecution,” 796; Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 167–84; Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009); Benjamin Stora, Les Trois Exiles: Juifs d’Algerie (Paris: Stock, 2006). Scholars are beginning to correct this omission. See for instance: Aomar Boum, “Partners Against Anti-Semitism: Muslims and Jews Respond to Nazism in French North African Colonies, 1936–1940,” Journal of North African Studies 19, No. 4 (2014): 554–70; Mohammed Kenbib, “Moroccan

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The effect of the Holocaust upon the vitality and visibility of French Jewry has sparked considerable discussion amongst historians who have been divided as to whether postwar French Jews bowed to the assimilatory forces of the resurrected Gaullist state. At its heart, this historiographical controversy centers on questions of Holocaust memory and the articulation of Jewish ethnicity in the wake of the Holocaust. The earliest scholarship on the postliberation era argued that French Jews desperately wished to return to a normal life as quickly and as inconspicuously as possible.45 This desire accorded with the preferences of the Provisional Government. Under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle, the state pursued the project of national healing by, in part, encouraging French Jews to not call attention to the particular nature of their wartime losses or their distinct postwar needs.46 In a similar vein, more recent historians such as Esther Benbassa have cited name changes and conversions in the wake of the war as evidence of the assimilatory preferences of some survivors.47 Leora Auslander has also underlined the magnetic pull of republicanism to post-Shoah French Jews, concluding that French Jews did not “claim rights” or “emphasize their experience” as Jews. Instead, she points to later decades as witnessing an altered relationship between French Jews and the republican state.48 Auslander is not alone in seeing a quiescent fidelity to republicanism in the first two decades following the liberation, followed by a Jews and the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942,” Journal of North African Studies 19, No. 4 (2014): 533–40; Sarah Roberts shows how interwar antisemitism laid the foundation for Vichy anti-Jewish policies in Roberts, “Anti-Semitism and Municipal Government in Interwar French Colonial Algeria,” Journal of North African Studies 17, No. 5 (December 2012): 821–37. 45  Béatrice Phillipe, Etre Juif dans la Société Française du Moyen-Âge à Nos Jours (Editions Complexe, 1997); William Safran, “France and Her Jews: From ‘Culte Israelite to ‘Lobby Juif,’ “Toqueville Review 5, No. 1 (1983): 104; Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), 27–31; Doris Bensimon, “Jewish Solidarity in the Integration of North African Jews in France,” in Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period, Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus, eds. (Psychology Press, 1992), 363–4. 46  Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 15–59; Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 197–291; Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide: entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Hachette), 1995. 47  Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 182. 48  Leora Auslander, “Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris.” Journal of Contemporary History 40, No. 2 (2005): 259.

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reassertion of ethnicity in the 1960s. As Maud Mandel has observed, many historians glossed over the decades following the liberation because they simply “assumed” that post-Holocaust Jewry was too shattered by the persecutions to rebuild their communities or reassert Jewish ethnicity.49 Other scholars have similarly sought to overturn assumptions about Jewish quiescence by tackling the issue of Holocaust memory. Early French Jewish historiography had insisted that French Jews “preferred silence” to Holocaust memory.50 In adopting this position, these scholars participated in a larger historiographical trend and popular assumption that suggested it took decades for Holocaust survivors, be it in Israel or the United States, to begin voicing their painful memories of genocide and loss.51 But more recently scholars working on France and elsewhere have chipped away at this “myth of silence.”52 Annette Wieviorka’s seminal research on memory in postwar France represented a middle of the road position between those that argue for an absence of Holocaust memory and those who see its birth in the earliest days of liberation. Wieviorka has documented the wealth of wartime testimonies published in the postwar era, a fact that spoke to the burning desire of survivors to publicly narrate their concentration camp experiences. And yet 49  See for this critique see Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide, 9–10. 50  For France, Lagrou, Legacy of Nazi Occupation, 260; Ido de Haan, “Paths of Normalization after the Persecution of the Jews: The Netherlands, France and West Germany in the 1950s,” in Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 65–92; Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 29; Annette Wieviorka and Françoise Rosset, “Jewish Identity in the First Accounts by Extermination Camp Survivors from France,” Yale French Studies (1994): 135–51. Doris Bensimon, Les Juifs de France et leurs relations avec Israël: 1945–1988 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 15; Gérard Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France (XIXe–XXe siècle); Discours publics, humiliations privées (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 491; Benbassa, The Jews of France, 185. Rebecca Clifford does begin to document the efforts of postwar French Jews to memorialize their losses though she argues these discussions about wartime experiences and efforts at commemoration generally occurred in the private Jewish associational or domestic sphere. Rebecca Clifford, Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 41–8. 51  The literature on the lack of Holocaust memory in the aftermath of the Holocaust is vast. A representative example includes: Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000). 52  For the United States see Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009); For a transnational study, see David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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Wieviorka has also argued that these texts were essentially unmarketable as few of France’s citizens were eager to hear stories that diverged from early narratives of shared and equal suffering. Partly for these reasons, she has maintained, French Jewish survivors either opted to remain mute regarding their painful memories or restricted them to Jewish communal circles.53 Scholarship that followed Wieviorka has largely supported her position that deaf ears abounded in postwar France. Nonetheless, not all historians concur that French Jews preferred private rather than public forums to discuss the genocidal nature of their wartime losses. Laura Jockusch’s study on the Jewish historical commission the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, for instance, reveals that postwar French Jews immediately launched into the task of not only recognizing, but also documenting, Nazi exterminatory policies.54 My own research has demonstrated how Jewish associations attempted to publicly disentangle the Jewish experience of genocide from French insistence on equality and patriotism in victimhood.55 These studies have all similarly stressed the magnetic pull of republican universalism for French Jews still reeling from Nazi racial discrimination, but they divide as to whether French Jews sought to penetrate the French public sphere with their genocidal memories of loss. Rather than portraying an inconspicuous and assimilationist French Jewry, the recent scholarly trend has favored the themes of reconstruction and renewal. David Weinberg’s pioneering scholarship on French Jewish reconstruction pointed in this direction, as he traced how the French Jewish community threw itself into the task of rebuilding with determination and energy.56 Maud Mandel, most notably and influentially, has cited the strength of postwar Jewish communal institutions, their rapid response to the pressing financial and legislative needs of postwar French Jews, and their fidelity

53  Wieviorka, Déportation et genocide. 54  Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 55  Daniella Doron, “Remembering the Children, Remembering the Holocaust: Holocaust  Memory in Postwar France,” in Jews and France, France and the Jews, 1944–1954, Steven Katz and Sean Hand, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Idem, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), esp. chapter 1. Also see Clifford, Commemorating the Holocaust. 56  David Weinberg, “The Reconstruction of the French Jewish Community after World War II,” in She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 172–3; Idem, “The French Jewish Community after World War II: The Struggle for Survival and Self-Definition,” Forum 45 (1982): 45–54.

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to Israel as evidence of a conscious maintenance of Jewish ethnicity.57 In the wake of Mandel’s research, scholars such as myself, Laura Hobson Faure, Katy Hazan, and Karen Adler have likewise traced the remarkable efforts at Jewish communal rebuilding and the reassertion of Jewish ethnic affiliation.58 These works seek to dispute the assumption that the immediate postwar years merely represented an uneventful interlude between the disaster of the Holocaust and the drama of later decades. Later decades have indeed captured the historiographical spotlight, dwarfing the literature on the immediate postwar.59 The immigration of North African Jews generated a considerable degree of academic interest and fascination, perhaps as a result of the dramatic nature of the migration. In the wake of decolonization, 250,000 North African Jews departed for either France (while others left for Israel) virtually en masse.60 Beginning in the 1970s, as an embrace of ethnic identity gained traction in much of the developed world, French academics sought to document the new forms of visible Jewish identification percolating in France. Early scholarship by sociologists and historians such as Doris Bensimon and Claude Tapia attributed the transformation of French Jewry, as they saw it, to these large waves of North African Jewish migrants who had joined the French Jewish ranks.61 In proclaiming a revival of French Jewry, Tapia and Bensimon did not stand alone. Several researchers have traced how this immigrant influx radically reconfigured the geographical boundaries of the French Jewish community. Paris and Alsace no longer represented the principal sites of Jewish life in France, as smaller French cities emerged with vibrant and expanding Jewish communities.62 As Paula Hyman 57  Mandel, Aftermath of Genocide. 58  Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity; Laura Hobson Faure, Un “Plan Marshall” Juif: La présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944–1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013); Karen H. Adler, Jews and Gender in Liberation France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 59  See for instance Paula Hyman’s overview of French Jewish history. Whereas the immigration of North African Jews enjoys an entire chapter practically devoted to the topic, the immediate postwar period is squeezed into the final few pages in a larger chapter on the Holocaust. Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 185–214. 60  Claude Tapia, Les Juifs Sépharades en France (1965–1985): Etudes psychologiques et historiques (Paris: Éditions de L’Hartmann, 1986); 283; Michel Abitbol and Alan Astro, “The Integration of North African Jews in France,” Yale French Studies (1994): 252–3. 61  Doris Bensimon, L’intégration des Juifs nord-africains en France (Paris: Mouton, 1971); Tapia, Les juifs. 62  Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 194; Doris Bensimon and Sergio Della Pergola, La population juive de France: socio-démographie et identité, No. 17 (Paris: Centre National de

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and others have noted, the arrival of so many religiously inclined Jews redrew the Jewish religious landscape of France: the number of kosher butchers, kosher restaurants, and religious institutions mushroomed, and North African Jewish immigrants joined the ranks of the consistorial rabbinate.63 Furthermore, these scholars have argued that the influx of North African Jews, in their fervid support of Israel, helped lead to the zionization of French Jewry.64 It is partly for these reasons that terms such as ‘renewal’ and ‘regeneration’ occurred as a leitmotif in the numerous articles and monographs about North African Jews in France.65 As a whole, this scholarship has portrayed the immigration of North African Jews as a relatively seamless process. Unlike the eastern European Jewish immigrants who preceded them, North Africans benefited from cultural and linguistic continuities between the Maghreb and the Metropole.66 Historians have additionally pointed to the remarkable socio-economic mobility North African Jews experienced on French soil as a sign of the ease of their transition to French life.67 The relatively untroubled adjustment of North African Jews to la Recherche Scientifique, 1984), 35–8; Sarah Sussman, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities: The Migration of Algerian Jewry to France,” 1954–1967 (University of California at Berkely, PhD dissertation, 2002), 233–241, 249–251; Michael M. Laskier and B. Gorodetzki, “The Regeneration of French Jewry: The Influx and Integration of North African Jews into France, 1955–1965,” Jewish Political Studies Review (1998): 56–7; See Kimberly Arkin for Jewish life in the Parisian suburbs, Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013). 63  Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 195; Sussmann, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities,” 279–319; “The Integration of North African Jews in France,” 253; Michael Shurkin, “Decolonization and the Renewal of French Judaism: Reflections on the Contemporary French Jewish Scene,” Jewish Social Studies 6, No. 2 (2000): 156–76. 64  Hyman, Jews of Modern France, 200–5; Benbassa, Jews of France, 191; Abitbol, “The Integration of North African Jews in France,” 257–61; On the relationship between French Jews and Israel see Doris Bensimon, Les Juifs de France et leurs relations avec Israël (1945– 1988) (Paris: Harmattan, 1989). 65  Hyman’s final chapter on her French Jewish history survey is entitled “A Renewed Community,” in Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 193–214; Similarly, Benbassa entitles her last chapter, which largely focuses on the immigration of North African Jews, “Recovery,” in Benbassa, The Jews of France, 179–200; Laskier, “The Regeneration of French Jewry”; Shurkin, “Decolonization and the Renewal of French Judaism.” 66  Benbassa, The Jews of France, 199; also see Abitbol, “The Integration of North African Jews,” 251. 67  Benbassa, The Jews of France, 149; Doris Bensimon, “L’intégration économique des immigrants nord-africains en Israël et des Juifs nord-africains en France (Essai d’étude comparative),” Revue francaise de sociologie (1969): 491–514; Idem and Sergio Della Pergola,

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life in France, these scholars have argued, differed dramatically from the experiences of previous waves of Jewish immigrants to France. In contrast to its skeptical attitude towards Eastern European immigrants before World War II, in the 1950s the native Jewish establishment welcomed the Maghrebians with open arms. Both Sarah Sussman and Charlotte Siney-Lange have maintained that the postwar French Jewish establishment had learned their lesson. After the inter-communal tensions of the interwar years followed by the devastating demographic losses incurred during the war, French Jews did not have the luxury of inter-communal discord.68 This warm outreach did not end there. Indeed, Maud Mandel and others have argued that the French Jewish establishment displayed a surprising degree of vitality in coming to the aid of their brethren. These historians have documented how Jewish agencies attended to the urgent relief and rehabilitation requirements of uprooted individuals bereft of resources and belongings. But equally crucially, these Jewish institutions sought to accommodate—not to assimilate—the Jewish immigrants by establishing kosher butchers, Talmud Torah schools, synagogues and oratories, and Jewish Community Centers in the new suburbs. Most scholars of French Jewry would agree that the massive influx of Jews from North Africa to the metropole dramatically altered the contours and the culture of French Jewry. Nonetheless, recent literature has disputed the notion that North African Jews single-handedly brought about the ‘renewal’ of French Jewry. As previously noted, historians of the immediate postwar period have argued that developments often attributed to the immigration of North Africans—namely the zionization and ethnicization of French Jewry, as well as efforts at communal comity—began percolating in the decade following the Liberation. The immigration of North African Jews to France certainly radically transformed French Jewish life, but it was the steps taken in

La population juive de France, 196–7; Maud Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 67–74; Abitbol, “The Integration of North African Jews,” 249. 68  Abitbol, “The Integration of North African Jews,” 253–4; Benbassa, The Jews of France, 187; Charlotte Siney-Lange, “Grandes et petites misères du grand exode des Juifs nord-africains vers la France,” Le Mouvement Social 4 (2001): 38; Sussman, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities,” 14–5; Hyman, The Jews of Modern France; Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity; For Laura Hobson Faure, the Jewish establishment’s successful work on behalf of North African Jews proved to themselves and to the AJDC that French Jews are capable of leading the French Jewish community independent of American assistance: Laura Hobson Faure, “L’immigration des Juifs d’Algérie en France métropolitaine.” Archives Juives 42, no. 2 (2009): 67–81.

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the immediate postwar years that enabled French Jews later to appropriately accommodate them. Even those historians who document how North African Jews “contributed” to the flowering of French Jewish culture are wary of crediting them with single-handedly transforming French Jewry. In this vein, Michel Abitbol has shown how the integration of North African Jews “coincided” with wider social changes amongst French Jews and non-Jews. As he astutely notes, both French and North African Jews equally expressed deep anxiety about Israel’s imperiled future during the 1967 War, a development that helped cement their support of the fledgling state.69 Moreover, in later years the “right to be different” movement of the 1970s and 1980s only further convinced French Jews of the legitimacy of ethnic difference in republican France. Similarly, other scholars have disputed the assumption that North African Jews were spared a rocky transition to life in France.70 As a whole, this literature seeks to nuance an earlier historiography that had feted North African Jews for at once effortlessly rebuilding their lives in the metropole and renewing the French Jewish community at large. Recent historical work that has given due attention to the Jewish experience of colonialism and decolonization has similarly labored to interrogate prevailing assumptions about North African Jews. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, the most significant recent development in French and French Jewish historiography constitutes the embrace of the colonial experience as a site of crucial and long-neglected scholarly research. French Jewish historians of the postwar period have likewise welcomed this line of inquiry by tracing how the experience of decolonization indelibly shaped the history of North African Jewry in subsequent years. Sarah Sussman’s dissertation, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities,” helped initiate this historiographical turn by maintaining that the history of North African Jews in France must be first situated in the context of colonialism and decolonization.71 Other historians have since followed Sussmann’s lead, especially those interested in tracing the increasingly conflictual relations between French Muslims and French Jews. In seeking to explain how Muslims and Jews have arrived at such a fraught relationship in France,

69  Abitol, “The Integration of North African Jews,” 257–60; On how French Jews in general reacted to the Six Day War see Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 25–50. 70  Charlotte Siney-Lange, “Grandes et petites misères du grand exode des Juifs nord-africains vers la France: L’exemple parisien,” Le Mouvement Social 4, No. 197 (2001): 29–55; Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic, esp. 64–6. 71  Sussmann, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities.”

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scholars such as Maud Mandel, Kimberly Arkin, and Ethan Katz begin their stories in Maghreb.72 And yet while these scholars concur on the centrality of North Africa in the French Jewish story, they disagree on how to interpret Jewish actions and reactions to decolonization. In terms of the Algerian conflict, the subject of a considerable body of scholarship, a series of debates have emerged. Did Algerian Jews remain neutral during the long years of conflict? Did Algerian Jews side with those that sought independence for Algeria or those that violently worked to prevent Algerian independence? How did Jews understand their exit from Algeria?73 Should Jewish departures be understood as a specifically Jewish narrative or should they be subsumed under the larger umbrella of pied-noir history? Historians divide on these questions74 Nonetheless, recent scholarship concurs on several critical points. On a basic level, the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of Algerian Jews voted with their feet in moving to France served as a source of public embarrassment for Israel.75 In terms of French history, several historians have maintained that decolonization can be understood as a rupture in that it further severed the bonds between French Muslims and Jews.76 The history of decolonization in North Africa and migration to France is one 72  Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 35–58; Ethan Katz, “In the Shadow of the Republic: A Century of Coexistence and Conflict,” in A History of Jewish Muslims Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Also see Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 2015); Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion and the Republic, 15–55, looks at North Africa more broadly. 73  Ayoun and Sussmann both argue that few Algerian Jews supported the OAS and that Jewish leadership sought to remain neutral, whereas Mandel and Todd Shepard see wider participation and support of the OAS amongst North African Jews. See Richard Ayoun, “Les Juifs d’Algérie pendant la guerre d’indépendance,” Archives Juives 29, no. 1 (1996): 65–71; Sarah Sussmann, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities,” 92–142; Mandel, Jews and Muslims, 55–6; Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 176–80. 74  Sussman and Shepard tend to frame the departures as a pied-noir story, whereas Mandel sees a particularly Jewish narrative emerge in how Jewish departures were narrated and understood. Sussman, “Changing Lands, Changing Identities,” 183–4; Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 180–2; Idem, “Algerian Nationalism, Zionism, and French Laïcité: A History of Ethnoreligious Nationalisms and Decolonization,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, No. 03 (2013): 445–67; Mandel, Jew and Muslims, 42–58. 75  Stein, Saharan Jews, 132; Shepard, “Algerian Nationalism, Zionism, and French Laïcité,” 46. 76  Mandel, Jews and Muslims, 35–58; Shepard, “Algerian Nationalism, Zionism, and French Laïcité”; Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood; Arkin, Rhinestones, Religions and the Republic, 15–55.

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of a set of socio-economic and judicial inequities that have worked to pit these two ethno-religious minorities against each other. Inequities in North Africa were continued with inequities in France. Maud Mandel has argued that the failure of the French state to treat both displaced groups equally bred resentment amongst North African Muslims, as they witnessed North African Jews benefit from rapid socio-economic mobility. As the fortunes of French Jews rose, their own socio-economic status stagnated.77 Thus, in most of this scholarship, the history of North African Jews and Muslims in France touches upon questions that cut to the core of the French republican model of integration. French minority policies not only shaped both ethno-religious groups’ histories, but also have motivated their contemporary disengagement with republican models of integration. Recent sociological and anthropological work has framed both French Jews and Muslims as disenchanted with the French republican model of universalism, and increasingly attracted to ethnically enclosed communities.78 Already in 2000 Pierre Birnbaum documented the “communitarization” of French Jewish and non-Jewish life—a development he attributed to the importation of American models of multiculturalism and the waning power of republican forms of assimilation and integration. Birnbaum, ever committed to republican notions of integration, voiced his concern that the diminishing power of republican universalism could result in “fratricidal battles.”79 The reshaping of the French public sphere and the emergence of “fratricidal battles” has occupied the attention of scholars who have followed Birnbaum’s lead. Kimberly Arkin’s revealing ethnographic research amongst French Jews of North African descent uncovers how younger French Jews increasingly see themselves in racialized terms, and as standing apart from French “whites” (i.e., Christians) and “Arabs” (North African Muslims). Thus not only do these French Jewish youths engage in a process of “racializing” their own religion, to borrow Arkin’s language, but can also direct racism towards other minority groups.80 77  Mandel, Jews and Muslims. 78  Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000), Erik Cohen, The Jews of France Today: Identity and Values, Vol. 18 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Arkin, Rhinestones, Religions, and the Republic; Michel Wieviorka, and Philippe Bataille, The Lure of Anti-semitism: Hatred of Jews in Present-day France, Vol. 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), esp. 8–78. 79  Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, 227. 80  Arkin, Rinestones, Religion, and the Republic, esp. 6–7, 134–63.

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Far more scholarly attention and public anguish, however, has been focused towards contemporary French Jews as victims of racism.81 This anxiety has been largely animated by the upsurge in antisemitic incidents witnessed in France since the second intifada of 2000. And yet academics and commentators have hotly debated the origins of contemporary French antisemitism. Is this new variation of antisemitism simply a continuation of the kind of ago-old enmity that had traditionally flourished in right-wing circles? Or has French antisemitism taken a new direction, spurred on by a growing and increasingly disaffected French Muslim population, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the spread of social media? In other words, as the French intellectual historian Jonathan Judaken concisely phrased the terms of the debate, “ ‘what’s new’ in the new antisemitism?”82 The controversy first flared with the publication in 2002 of Pierre André Taguieff, La Nouvelle judéophobie. Taguieff’s book linked the emergence of the new antisemitism or, as he described it, the “new Judeophobia,” to the increased popularity of radical Islam amongst European Muslim minorities.83 Taguieff’s work, coupled with disconcerting antisemitic incidents in contemporary France, enabled debates about this “new antisemitism” to gain scholarly traction and popular acceptance. For instance, Robert Wistrich blames an unholy and unlikely alliance between radical leftists and “Islamofascists” for the startling rise of antisemitism across the globe, including France. He argues that these groups subject Israel to disproportionate criticism, and often conflate diaspora Jewry with the State of Israel—two tendencies that speak to their antisemitism.84 On the other end of the new antisemitism spectrum lies Michel Wieviorka and his team of sociologists. Unlike Wistrich, who sees an eliminationist antisemitism festering within Islam and the Muslim world, Wieviorka disputes any such connection between the Muslim religion and 81  The debate about the “new” antisemitism has become rather large and heated; for some examples of this literature see, Wieviorka, The Lure of Antisemitism; Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010); Pierre André Taguieff, La nouvelle judéophobie (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002); Shmuel Trigano, La demission de la République: Juifs et Musulmans en France (Paris: Presses universitaires en France 2003); For an overview of this debate see Matti Bunzl, Antisemitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 82  Jonathan Judaken, “So What’s New? Rethinking the ‘New Antisemitism’ in a Global Age,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, No. 4–5 (2008): 531–60. 83  For an abridged and translated version of Taguieff’s La nouvelle judéophobie see Taguieff, Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2004). 84  Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession.

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racism. Instead, he identifies a crisis of republicanism in contemporary France, which lead his research team to largely choose republican institutions—the school system, the prisons, the universities—as their subject of study. These environments reveal a “limited” rise in antisemitism among several sectors of French society, he suggests. And, yet, Wieviorka is not quite ready to ring the alarm bells, carefully noting that this moderate increase in antisemitism in no way constitutes “a widespread, massive phenomenon driven by powerful social and political groups.”85 Furthermore, he conceptualizes the origins of French antisemitism as both old and new, as stemming from internal and external developments. In his final analysis, antisemitism has been nurtured from both internal changes within French society and challenges to republican traditions, as well as the transnational growth of Islamic extremism and events in Israel-Palestine.86 Much of the sizeable body of literature on the new antisemitism have explored the basic questions of who and why: who is responsible for this development, and why has it emerged? Social scientists publishing even more recently have taken the scholarship on new antisemitism on a different trajectory. Rather than focusing on its origins, it concentrates on its perceived victims. Erik Cohen’s sociological analysis of French Jewry in the first decade of the twentieth century reveals an uneasy French Jewry, but one that cannot be described as sitting on packed bags. Cohen’s analysis is based on a series of surveys conducted between 2002 and 2007, and he draws upon previous sociological work from the 1980s to trace the profound transformation of the French Jewish community. Like Birnbaum and Arkin, Cohen documents the increasingly popular embrace of communitarian politics and identities amongst French Jews. Greater numbers of Jews prefer Jewish rather than secular schools for their children, for example, and these youths are increasingly attracted to the idea of aliyah. And yet the surge in antisemitic incidents has not translated into a noticeable uptick of French immigrants to Israel.87 Cohen attributes the fact that younger French Jews now flirt with the idea of starting life anew in Israel to longer-term trends. In a subtle analysis, he concludes that the 85  Wieviorka, The Lure of Antisemitism, 419; For those scholars who have argued against affixing the “new” label to describe the contemporary state of French antisemitism see: Jonathan Judaken, “So What’s new?”; Timothy Peace, “Un Antisémitisme Nouveau? The Debate About a ‘New Antisemitism’ in France,” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 2 (2009): 103– 121; Véronique Altglas, “Antisemitism in France: Past and Present,” European Societies 14, No. 2 (2012): 259–74. 86  Wieviorka, The Lure of Antisemitism, 418–26. 87  Cohen, The Jews of France Today, 90.

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increasing interest in aliyah represents a natural outgrowth of a “gradual but systematic creation of a Jewish social fabric . . .”88 Cohen’s research uncovers a French Jewry largely content with their lives in France, and does not grant antisemitism center stage. In his eyes it is not the reason for French Jewish flight, nor does it cause French Jews to feel perpetually imperiled. Nevertheless, Cohen’s research does reveal that antisemitism is a continuing source of apprehension for French Jews. In his final conclusion, French Jews inhabit a state of “worried happiness.”89 French Jewish historiography, it could be argued, has come full circle. Indeed, the most recent scholarship on contemporary French Jewry revolves around the very questions with which we began this essay: whither French Jewry? Whither France? The publication of Robert Weiner and Richard Sharpless’ study of provincial French Jewish life in 2012 speak to some of the continued preoccupations of scholars. “An Uncertain Future,” faces French Jewry, declares the book’s title.90 Indeed, the tenor of the latest scholarship, especially on the contemporary period, remains far from upbeat: the fraught relationship between French Jews and Muslims and the nature of French antisemitism has spurred on much of the scholarly (and popular) conversation. Nonetheless, this scholarship does not reveal either an endangered or an assimilationist French Jewry. In fact, the newest work suggests quite the opposite. While recent developments may indeed jeopardize the historic relationship between French Jews and the state, they certainly do not damn Jews in modern France as “vanishing.” Rather, much like the literature on earlier eras in French Jewish history, this scholarship traces French Jews’ contemporary struggles to assert their communal identity and their continually reconfiguring relationship with republicanism.

88  Ibid., 95. 89  Ibid., 104. 90  Robert Weiner and Richard Sharpless, eds., An Uncertain Future: Voices of a French Jewish Community, 1940–2012 (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2012).

Part 2 Jewish Integration, Jewish Distinctiveness

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Chapter 2

The Trial of Jacob Benjamin, Supplier to the French Army, 1792–93 Ronald Schechter 1 Introduction On November 8, 1792 Deputy Pierre-Joseph Cambon addressed his fellow lawmakers in the National Convention, the newly-formed legislature of a French Republic that was barely one month old and at war with formidable foreign enemies. He spoke in his capacity as a member of the Finance Committee, and he had bad news about how the nation was spending its money for the provisioning of its armies. Specifically, he reported that his committee “has charged me with denouncing to you numerous fraudulent contracts agreed upon by [Jacques] Vincent, Chief Pay Commissioner for the Army of the South.” Vincent had paid “nearly twice as much as the ordinary market price” for provisions, and Cambon promised to prove this by showing the deputies two agreements the commissioner had contracted with someone Cambon simply called “le juif Benjamin,” or “the Jew Benjamin.” Both contracts had been signed in September, 1792. One was for 500 cavalry horses, which Jacob Benjamin sold the army for 720 livres each or 360,000 livres altogether. The other contract was even larger. It was “for the provisioning of Briançon,” a fortressed Alpine city constructed by Louis XIV’s military engineer Vauban in the seventeenth century, “and the forts that depend on it.” In this deal Benjamin sold 8000 pounds of salt beef and 3600 pounds of salt pork. He also sold 300 sheep, 24,600 pounds of rice, 48,000 pounds of dried vegetables, 30,000 pounds of potatoes, 192,000 pints of wine, 1200 pounds of tobacco, 6000 pipes for smoking the tobacco, 12,800 pairs of linen stockings and the same number of shoes. This agreement was worth approximately 400,000 livres.1 1  Jérôme Mavidal, et al., eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, première série (1787–1799), 101 vols (Paris: 1867–2005), vol. 53, 309. The prices for each item were as follows: salt beef at twenty-seven sous (one livre, seven sous) per pound; salt pork at thirty-six sous, six deniers per pound; sheep (mutton) at twenty-three sous per pound; rice at sixty-six livres per quintal (one hundred pounds); dried vegetables at thirty-four livres, ten sous per quintal; potatoes at nine livres, five sous per quintal; wine at eighteen sous, six deniers per pint; tobacco at

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Although Cambon did not provide a basis for comparison, he claimed that Benjamin had overcharged the army, and he blamed Commissioner Vincent for signing off on the deals. Other deputies shared Cambon’s indignation, and at the end of the session the lawmakers called for Vincent and Benjamin to be summoned to the bar of the Convention to account for their actions.2 Thus began a cause célèbre that occupied a great deal of the Convention’s time and energy over the course of two months and ended in a criminal trial of both Benjamin and Vincent in Lyon. This case, and the documentation it generated, reveal an extraordinary situation. In 1791, following much debate, the National Assembly had removed the legal barriers separating Jews and Gentiles, and the very next year the French government was relying to an astonishing degree on a single Jewish entrepreneur to supply its imperiled armies. While Cambon mentioned two contracts worth over 750,000 livres, other documents (now in the Archives départementales du Rhône) reveal that Benjamin did approximately four million livres worth of business with the Army of the South alone, and that he also supplied two other armies: the Army of Rhine and the Army of the Center. Not only might all this business have made Benjamin one of the richest people in France, it also indicates that he shares credit with other, more famous “architects of victory” such as Lazare Carnot.3 It is worth remembering that the Army of the Center, disbanded after the famous Battle of Valmy, had saved France from the Prussians, and that the Army of the Rhine (for which the Marseillaise was composed) carried the war into Germany itself, conquering the cities of Mainz, Landau, Speyer and Worms. Meanwhile the Army of the South protected France from allies of the deposed Bourbon dynasty in Italy by annexing Savoy. Contemporary documents suggest that many thousands of the men in these armies were eating food, wearing clothing and sleeping in tents provided by le juif Benjamin. If only for these reasons, Jacob Benjamin should be known to students of French and Jewish history alike.4 Yet there is still more to his significance. There eighteen sous per livres; pipes at nine deniers each; stockings at thirteen livres per pair; and shoes at thirteen livres per pair. There were twenty sous per livre and twelve deniers per sou. 2  Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 309–11. 3  I am grateful to Gail Bossenga of Elizabethtown College for suggesting the applicability of the term “architect of victory” to Benjamin. 4  The only mention I have been able to find of Benjamin in the secondary literature on the French Revolution is a brief discussion in Jean Jaurès’s multivolume Histoire socialiste de la Révolution Française (Paris, 1901–1907), vol. 3, 299–300. The only mention I have been able to find in the Jewish historiography is half a sentence in Z[osa] Szajkowski, “French Jews in the Armed Forces during the Revolution of 1789,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 26 (1957): 156.

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is evidence that Benjamin was part of a larger but historiographically overlooked network of Jewish businessmen who supplied the army. Benjamin partnered with at least five major Jewish entrepreneurs, and he had 300 préposés or agents working for him. Though it is impossible to know how many of them were Jewish, it would be surprising if Benjamin’s coreligionists did not make up a large contingent of his enterprise. Among the Jews who participated in Benjamin’s business was his wife, who published an open letter to the Convention—probably the first publication in France by a Jewish woman— in which she defended her husband’s conduct and simultaneously revealed a remarkable familiarity with the details of his business. Benjamin’s Jewish network affords a new perspective on emancipation. Historians, myself included, have tended to see emancipation in terms of the acquisition of political rights, but the case of Benjamin shows that more was at stake than the ability to vote and serve in public office. Benjamin and his Jewish colleagues no doubt appreciated these indicators of belonging to the French nation, but at a more concrete, practical, everyday level the Revolution provided them with a livelihood. Above all, the story of Jacob Benjamin reveals a great deal about JewishGentile relations in the immediate aftermath of emancipation. Specifically, it reveals the weakness of antisemitism in 1792 and 1793. Although some revolutionaries referred to le juif Benjamin, anti-Jewish prejudice was not sufficient to convict the Jewish supplier. Nor did his acquittal spark any perceptible antisemitic response. 2

The Convention Investigates Benjamin

Benjamin appeared before the Convention on November 13. There he came face to face with a formidable array of revolutionary deputies. The encounter began when Hérault de Séchelles, President of the Convention (and future member of the Committee of Public Safety), read the arraignment decree and “invite[d] [Benjamin] to present his means of defense.” Benjamin responded by highlighting his expenses, citing, for example, the high costs of transporting goods to an army that was “dispersed over a radius of 120 leagues [414 miles].” Even when he had supplied a fixed encampment, such as the fortress of Briançon, he had to pay dearly for transportation. “Everyone knows,” he told the deputies, “that to transport a quintal [one hundred pounds] of merchandise from Lyon to Briançon now costs eighteen livres,” adding, “[W]hen it is necessary to supply in a hurry everything is more expensive; that is a truth that cannot be denied.” Benjamin also invoked the satisfaction of the soldiers, declaring, “I abide by the soldiers; they will say how I served them and if they

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are happy.” He added that certificates of reception showed that “my supplies were all of good quality,” and he finished his initial statement by saying, “I await with confidence and without fear the verdict of the Convention.” Cambon was not convinced. He claimed that, according to the Minister of War himself, salt pork was selling for ten sous per pound in assignats (the revolutionary paper money that was subject to inflation), whereas Benjamin had charged thirty-seven sous, half payable in specie. He ridiculed Benjamin’s claim to have favorable certificates of reception, asserting that “at excessive prices . . . such certificates are not difficult to obtain” and implying that Benjamin had purchased them through bribery. At this point “many members” of the Convention, according to the Archives parlementaires, called for Benjamin to be placed under arrest. Benjamin insisted that the price he asked for salt pork was at or even below market value. But his main argument was that General Montesquiou, commander of the Army of the South at the time of the contracts, had agreed to his terms. He asserted: I am a supplier; the general either had the right to deal with me, or he did not; if he had the right, it is up to me to fulfill my engagements . . . if he did not have the right, why did he deal with me? Benjamin concluded, “[I]t was necessary for me to fulfill my promises, which I did; the nation has nothing more to ask of me.” This statement provoked “prolonged murmurs.” Several members of the Convention responded to Benjamin’s statements. Louis-Pierre Manuel insisted, “Let Benjamin go to the Committee of Surveillance, [and] he will say what bribes he dispensed.” The future member of the Committee of Public Safety Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne hinted darkly, “I have facts to expose between the suppliers and the generals; I will produce them at the committee.” Jean-Lambert Tallien, also a future terroriste, declared: Seals have been apposed to Benjamin’s papers, [and] we will discover later whether he was not the front for some generals; but for the moment, I observe that the discussion which is about to open up is too interesting for the members of the Committee of Surveillance to be absent from it. He concluded, “I ask that the Convention send Benjamin Jacob [sic] to the joint committees on finance, war and general security to be heard, and order that he remain in the meantime under arrest.” The Convention decreed Tallien’s

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proposal, then moved on to the business of deciding the fate of another detained person, namely the king.5 That same day, Benjamin was interrogated by Deputy Joseph-Mathurin Musset, who represented the joint committee. The resulting report, signed by Musset, was subsequently sent to the Criminal Tribunal in Lyon and is now in the Archives départementales du Rhône. It reveals a great deal about the nature and extent of Benjamin’s business. When asked about his contracts with war ministers, Benjamin answered that in a contract with the Comte de Narbonne he had agreed to deliver shoes and stockings (he did not say how many) for the Army of the Rhine and the Army of the Center. (Narbonne was a Girondin War Minister who had emigrated after the fall of the monarchy on August 10, 1792.) Benjamin had also signed an agreement with Pierre Marie de Grave—who had been War Minister from March 9, 1792 to May 9, 1792—and who had contracted him to supply “twenty and some thousand shirts.” Finally, he had made a deal for the supply of meat with Minister of War Joseph Servan in June. These contracts were all in addition to the deals Benjamin made with Vincent under the authorization of General Montesquiou. Musset’s interrogation also tells us about Benjamin’s business contacts. Benjamin denied the allegation (made three times by Musset) that his fatherin-law had lent Narbonne 150,000 livres between 1786 and 1792, thereby implying that the discredited War Minister had had a conflict of interest when negotiating with Benjamin. Benjamin, however, revealed a network of business associates including his father-in-law, his younger brother, a partner named Emmanuel Ducas and another named Chemol (spelled “Schemolle” in other documents).6 On November 18 it was Vincent’s turn to face the Convention. He told the deputies of a contract he had signed with Benjamin for 400 soldiers’ tents and one for 1800 beds for the soldiers stationed in Briançon. Vincent had also purchased 30,000 ells (45,000 feet) of cloth for soldiers’ uniforms, as well as shirts, hats, and leggings. When asked about the allegedly high prices he had agreed to pay for Benjamin’s supplies, Vincent defended himself by claiming that he had bargained Benjamin down by ten sous per pair of leggings, and by four sous per pound of lamb, and that he also obtained a discount on cloth 5  Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 384–5. 6  “Interrogatoire de Jacob Benjamin du 13 9bre l’an 1er [de la République],” 39 L 21, Archives départementales du Rhône, Lyon. I am grateful to Etienne Faugier for photographing the documents relating to the Benjamin case at the AD du Rhône and sending them to me electronically.

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for the soldiers’ uniforms.7 When asked by Abbé Grégoire, the radical priest and current President of the Convention, whether he knew of any “deals made between Benjamin Jacob [sic] and General Montesquiou,” he answered: I am profoundly humiliated by this question; my life is without a stain; I have no knowledge of secret deals with General Montesquiou, and despite my friendship for him, if he had made himself guilty, I would have denounced him myself. Despite his protestations of innocence, the Convention voted to keep Vincent under arrest and to send him before the Committee of General Security.8 The Convention became even more suspicious of Benjamin and Vincent when it received a letter on November 20 from three of its deputies who had been sent as observers to Lyon. These deputies—Charles-Jean-Marie Alquier, François Antoine de Boissy d’Anglas and Louis Vitet—had recently visited the army’s storage facility in Lyon and examined some of the supplies within it. They claimed to have scrutinized some of the 200,000 pairs of shoes and 200,000 shirts that two other army suppliers (Lajard and Lebrun) had delivered, and they judged these to have been of very poor quality. They even sent six of the shirts to the Convention to prove how shoddy they were. It was not clear whether or how Benjamin was involved in this deal, but the letter began by denouncing “the enormity of the theft committed by Benjamin and his accomplices.” It also claimed that in the contract that Benjamin and Vincent had signed for the delivery of cloth (to be used in the production of uniforms) only the length, but not the width, had been stipulated, leaving Benjamin with the option of skimping on the total amount. It went on to claim that there was a vast conspiracy of army officials and suppliers to defraud the Republic. After hearing the contents of the letter, numerous deputies expressed outrage and called for severe measures against the accused. Jean-Bon-Saint-André, who would later serve on the Committee of Public Safety, proclaimed, “It is only the scaffold that will dispense justice to those men who show the barbarity of enriching themselves at the expense of the unhappy soldiers of the Republic.” He called for an indictment against Benjamin and Vincent and for wide powers of arrest for the deputies observing the situation in Lyon. The Convention voted in favor of his proposal, though the indictment would only be drawn up on December 25. It also voted to create a commission of twenty-four deputies

7  Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 466–7. 8  Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 384–5.

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charged with investigating the contracts made between provisioners and army officials.9 To make matters worse, that same day President Grégoire announced that he had just received a letter from Jean-Nicolas Pache, Minister of War, which would serve as “a supplement to the general disturbance of the swindlers.” The letter announced that Pache had sent the Convention “a pair of shoes, a shirt and numerous pairs of socks supplied to the storage facility of Strasbourg by Jacob Benjamin.” These items, according to the Minister of War, had been rejected by a commissioner from the Army of the Rhine who was responsible for inspecting military supplies. Pache asserted that the shoes were “of the worst quality,” that the shirt was “almost as coarse as packing-cloth,” and that the socks were too thin. He also claimed that seals of approval from the Ministry of War had been removed from letters and affixed onto the socks, thus fraudulently giving the impression that the army had accepted the merchandise. He therefore saw it as his “duty to denounce this new form of peculation to the Convention.” Pache’s letter prompted still more comments about profiteering suppliers and corrupt army officials.10 According to the Archives parlementaires twenty-three deputies spoke during the debates on army suppliers at the November 20 session. Clearly the matter was of great interest to the Convention, and the discussion might have continued even longer had Minister of Justice Roland not appeared with more pressing news: incriminating documents against the deposed king had been discovered in the Tuileries Palace.11 On November 28 the Convention read another letter from its representatives in Lyon. They had returned to the military storage facility and merchandise that had been accepted by “guilty military commissioners and inspectors” was “recognized” (presumably by Alquier, Boissy d’Anglas and Vitet themselves) as “of the worst quality.” The implication was that military officials in charge of the storage facility and the experts contracted to inspect the merchandise had been bribed. There is no record in the Archives parlementaires as to the response of the deputies in Paris, who spent much of the November 28 session discussing the fate of Louis XVI, but for Benjamin the accusations were clearly accumulating. On December 7 the Committee on Legislation proposed sending Benjamin and Vincent to the criminal tribunal of the Department of Rhône-et-Loire in Lyon. The Convention accepted the committee’s recommendation, and 9    Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 489. 10  Several non-Jewish army suppliers were also denounced. 11   Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 491.

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Benjamin and Vincent departed for Lyon, where they would be held in the jail of the Palais de Justice until their trial.12 3

Madame Benjamin Appeals to the Convention

At some point between November 20 and December 7 an extraordinary publication appeared: La femme de Jacob Benjamin à la Convention Nationale. This undated twenty-two-page pamphlet is historically valuable at several levels. It reveals the close involvement of Benjamin’s wife (who did not provide her given name) in her husband’s affairs and thereby gives a tantalizing glimpse into the role Jewish women may have played in their families’ businesses. It is also probably the first publication in France ever written by a Jewish woman. (Of course it is possible that Madame Benjamin had help in composing the pamphlet.) Moreover, it demonstrates her skill in taking a legal case to the tribunal of public opinion, a strategy that Sarah Maza has shown to have been popular under the Old Regime.13 Finally, it provides us with new information and new perspectives on Benjamin’s business and corroborates evidence from other sources. The open letter to the Convention began with an emotional appeal: My husband is in irons by virtue of a decree of accusation that is based on denunciations which have not been contradicted. The indictment has not been drawn up; the tribunal that will judge him has not been determined, & yet no one is communicating with him. He is in solitary confinement, & remains charged with the execution of numerous deal[s]; obliged to follow a multitude of operations of which he alone is the soul, he is unable to give any orders or to undertake any correspondence. More than two hundred subaltern agents remain under his orders, & he cannot supervise them. Continuing in a patriotic tone, Madame Benjamin wrote, “He has provided immense provisions to the nation,” but this meant that “the republic” had “a large responsibility” toward him. More than 500,000 livres worth of provisions had already been delivered to Briançon, but the Convention had cancelled these agreements, meaning that Benjamin was not receiving payments. 12   Archives parlementaires, vol. 54, 405. 13  Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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Meanwhile, every day “additional merchandise arrives from all over, which he had to provide in advance, not being able to predict that his contracts would be nullified.” Moreover, Benjamin had made agreements with subcontractors who were now demanding to be paid. “All our fortune,” the petitioner continued, “& much more, is therefore visibly absorbed by these vast enterprises.” She depicted a “frightful chaos” in which “numerous creditors are still fighting over the remains” of Benjamin’s enterprise while her husband “trembles in a narrow prison.” Alluding to the effects of anti-Jewish sentiment, Madame Benjamin wrote, “I know that terrible prejudices still rise up against us, that a baneful suspicion calls into disfavor all the business ventures of my husband.” She nonetheless expressed confidence that “the convention is too just to allow itself to be carried away by appearances that are often deceptive.” It would “not permit us to be ruined, if our ruin must be the consequence of a precipitous judgment rather than of real crimes on our part.” The petitioner was asking for two things: first, for a speedy trial in order for Jacob to prove his innocence and then return to his business; and second, for a reinstatement of the “contracts of Briançon” that had been nullified on November 8. To prove that Jacob had a record of supplying quality products, his wife gave an account of deals he had made with the government prior to the Briançon agreement. As early as March, 1792, when war was on the horizon but had not been declared, he had “contracted with the minister of war for various supplies of socks & shoes for Metz & Strasbourg, the shoes at 5 liv[res] 8 s[ous] per pair, payable in assignats.” In May the government again bought socks and shoes from Benjamin, in addition to “twenty-five thousand shirts at 6 liv[res] each, [payable] in assignats.” No one had complained about “the clauses in these initial contracts,” which were not under investigation by the Convention, “nor about the exactitude & the loyalty of the deliveries that followed.” “[I]nfinite precautions” had been taken “to assure the quality of this merchandise.” Indeed, her husband bought “one hundred ten thousand pairs of shoes” for resale to the army but only accepted them after careful inspection by experts he had hired to assure their quality. Interestingly, Madame Benjamin asserted that “the majority” of the shoes had been “made in a workshop that he established in his house.” Outside his house, many in the Marais neighborhood in Paris were involved with “the production of some of the shirts.” Madame Benjamin was aware of the Convention’s complaints about the price Benjamin charged for his meat. She responded by describing his contract with War Minister Servan on June 11, 1792. Benjamin and Servan had agreed to a price of ten sous, six deniers per pound, but when he travelled to Lyon to begin his deliveries, “he found the troops billeted over the space of

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one hundred twenty leagues; rather than being united in an army corps, as the agreement had stipulated.” Transportation costs threatened to be ruinous. When Benjamin informed the Minister of War of this hardship, Servan persuaded him “to supply provisionally.” Madame Benjamin painted the picture of a supremely patriotic husband: Benjamin did not refuse anything, & despite the difficulty of spreading his supplies here & there, from Lyon to Antibes, & even as far as Perpignan, he did not think it right to calculate the losses that he was going to suffer. But the deputies did not have to take Madame Benjamin at her word: To say how my husband acquitted himself of this burdensome service is to repeat what the entire army of the south has so energetically attested in a declaration that is assuredly not suspect. Indeed, Benjamin had received “great praise” from the soldiers at Chambéry, and his wife predicted that they would continue to support “a servant of the patrie who is crushed by misfortune.” As to the provisioning of “the fortress of Briançon” and that of “Embrun & of Mont-Dauphin, which are still further away,” Benjamin was offered this commission precisely because he had done such a good job of supplying meat to the Army of the South. But if it had been difficult to provision a dispersed army, supplying Briançon and its neighboring forts was even more burdensome and risky. Madame Benjamin explained that Briançon was “built on the summit of a very high mountain” and that transportation costs were correspondingly high, particularly during the winter when muleteers had to navigate narrow, snow-covered paths. Madame Benjamin quoted Jean-Pierre Lacombe-Saint-Michel, a deputy who had been tasked with observing the operations of the Army of the South and who had approved of the contract for provisioning Briançon: Montesquiou sent us the contract with Jacob Benjamin to furnish the army with all the goods that it need[ed]. The battalions were arriving in abundance; that part of the republic was threatened: the need was pressing, the safety of the patrie was at stake. We did not hesitate to give our authorization.14 14  Cf. Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 310.

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The rush to supply Briançon only added to the cost. Meanwhile, the contract did not protect Benjamin against losses or damage to his merchandise. The petitioner cited the risk of bandits attacking the caravans or storage facilities. She also pointed to “epizootic diseases, principally among sheep assembled in great quantities,” and the “terrible ravages they almost always cause.” Benjamin had to charge higher prices than usual “to indemnify himself against all these losses.” The author noted that in “all contracts that are aleatory or mixed with risks” the “laws authorize [the price] to exceed the intrinsic value of the thing in question.” She pointed to “maritime contracts” in which “the price of risks is computed,” and asked, “[H]as one ever made a crime of day laborers who raise the price of freight transportation above all in time of war, of insurers who raise insurance premiums?” Nor were the risks to Benjamin’s merchandise hypothetical. At the time Benjamin agreed to supply Briançon, “in the first days of September, part of the territory of the Republic was invaded by a powerful army.” Proof of the enormity of the risk Benjamin undertook was that “no supplier entered into competition” for the contract. Nor did he need the money. He had “great means, an acquired fortune, rather extensive credit,” but “he did not hesitate to expose it all to political uncertainty.” Madame Benjamin went on to defend the prices her husband charged for specific articles. For example, she justified the sale of salt beef at twenty-seven sous per pound by noting that “[e]veryone knows that before salting meat it is necessary to remove the large bones: the operation of salting requires infinite care.” As to the salt pork that sold for thirty-four sous per livre, this was because it needed to be delivered in September, whereas “pigs are only slaughtered two months later” and “purchases made before the time of abundance were necessarily more expensive.”15 Whether Madame Benjamin’s pamphlet had any impact on public opinion is impossible to know, but for the purposes of this essay its value lies in its detailed description of the risks with which Jacob Benjamin’s business was fraught. 4

Benjamin in Lyon

Benjamin arrived in Lyon on December 19 and was imprisoned in the Maison de Justice while awaiting his trial at the Criminal Tribunal of the Rhône-et-Loire Department. On Christmas Day the Convention completed its indictment, 15   La femme de Jacob Benjamin à la Convention Nationale ([Paris, 1792]), 1–13, 22.

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which accused Benjamin of selling meat in one contract for up to three times the price he charged in a previous agreement.16 Moreover, the indictment charged him with: [H]aving concluded with Commissioner Vincent agreements that were fraudulent and prejudicial to the interests of the Republic; having delivered shoes and shirts of the worst quality and having in this way stolen the funds of the Republic and compromised the external security of the State.17 These were serious charges, almost as serious as treason, and in time of war might have carried a death sentence. On January 7, 1793 Benjamin was questioned by Jean-Bernard-François Cozon, president of the Criminal Tribunal, and in the presence of Broches, the public prosecutor.18 The transcript of this interrogation is remarkable, both for the amount of detail it provides regarding Benjamin’s enterprise and as a testimony to Cozon’s willingness to listen to the defendant’s lengthy explanations of his business practices. When asked about his contract for the provisioning of Briançon, Benjamin noted that it was “under the authority of General Montesquiou” and with the approval of the three deputies from the Legislative Assembly (the precursor to the Convention) whose job it was to supervise the Army of the South.19 He confirmed that Commissioner Vincent had succeeded in negotiating a 16  The indictment notes that according to an earlier agreement with the Minister of War, Benjamin was “obligated to furnish meat to 25[,000] or 30,000 men who were going to compose the Army of the South.” Archives parlementaires, vol. 55, 425. 17   Archives parlementaires, vol. 55, 425. 18  “L’an deux de la République et le sept Janvier mil sept cent quatre vingt treize, nous JeanBernard-François Cozon président du tribunal criminel du département du Rone [sic] & Loire d’après l’envoy fait par le ministre de la justice de l’acte d’accusation porté par la Convention N[ationa]lle contre Jacob Benjamin et Vincent Comm[issai]re ordonnateur avons fait amener en l’auditoire du palais de justice le prévenu cy après nommé et l’avons interrogé en présence de l’accusateur public sur les faits énoncés audit acte d’accusation, et sur les preuves qu’il peut judiquer pour la justification ainsy qu’il suit,” 39 L 21. 19  The deputies in question were Jean-Pierre Lacombe-Saint-Michel, Thomas-Augustin de Gasparin and Jean Pascal Rouyer. Under pressure in the Convention for having approved the unpopular contracts, these deputies denied having agreed on any price and shifted the responsibility to General Montesquiou, who was already the object of severe criticism for an unpopular peace treaty he had concluded with the Republic of Geneva. For the legislative debate on this topic see Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 310–1.

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reduction in the price of mutton from twenty-seven to twenty-three sous per pound. When Cozon asked about any previous deals Benjamin had made with War Minister Servan, Benjamin discussed the contract from June 11 “for the supply of meat to the entire Army of the South.” According to this agreement he was to: [D]eliver the meat at the price of 10 sous 3 deniers per pound if the head and the pluck [fraissure] were weighed with the meat, and at the price of 10 sous 10 deniers if the head and the pluck remained in my possession, and finally [at the price] of 10 sous 9 deniers if the heads and pluck were given for free to the soldiers.20 Cozon asked Benjamin what accounted for “this enormous difference between the prices fixed by the deal of June 11 and those of the deal of September 3” for the supply of Briançon. He then listened patiently to an extended explanation. Benjamin explained that fresh meat (the object of the contract of June 11) was always cheaper than salted meat, since the former transported itself whereas the latter required the expensive mediation of carters. Moreover, fresh meat “preserves practically all of its weight,” whereas salted meat “loses one third [of its weight] through drying, not to mention the large bones that must be removed, and which are a pure loss to the supplier.” Benjamin added that for the deal with Servan he received all of his payments in specie, whereas in the contract with Vincent half of his payment was in assignats that lost their value quickly due to inflation. Finally, in the deal of June 11 Benjamin had been indemnified for livestock that died of epidemic disease or was seized “by superior force,” whereas the September deal lacked any such guarantee. Cozon seemed satisfied with this explanation and did not pursue the issue. When Benjamin recalled the contract for 500 horses, Cozon did not ask about the price, which he must have believed to be reasonable. He did ask Benjamin to explain the accusation that he had sold cloth to the army on the basis of length but without stipulating the width. Benjamin replied:

20  The pluck consisted of the heart, liver, lungs and other edible soft contents of the animal’s body cavities. The difference between the price of ten sous, three deniers if the pluck and head were included but not given to the soldiers and the price of ten sous, nine deniers if these parts were given to the soldiers constituted a heavy subsidy by Benjamin of any such gift. It may have contributed to his popularity with the soldiers.

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The width of the cloth is not determined in this deal, but it is in a previous contract presented by another supplier,21 accepted by the commissioners of the Legislative Assembly, and I took it upon myself in the margin of this contract to take the width determined in [the previous] contract as the rule for my supply, and to give as a result cloth of the width of one ell and more. Proof of this was in “the reception reports” written by the army official responsible for accepting supplies. When asked whether he had supplied any shirts to the army, he noted that his “agent” Cerf Dessau had done so and that he (Benjamin) “stood surety” for him. As to the supply of shoes, Benjamin replied, “I never made any deals for the supply of shoes in Lyon. I undertook an engagement in the deal relating to the provisioning of Briançon to supply stockings and shoes at a price of thirteen livres per pair of stockings and shoes together, to be delivered to Briançon,” though that deal was “no longer in effect” due to nullification by the Convention. Cozon then asked, “Are you aware that your deals of last September 3 and 23 have been annulled as fraudulent by decree of the National Convention?” Benjamin did not simply answer this question but defended himself, and Cozon did not interrupt him: Yes, I am aware from the public papers and because this fact is stated in the indictment but the decree pronouncing this annulment was never shown to me. I submit moreover that these two deals are not at all fraudulent, nor are they detrimental to the interests of the Republic. They are not fraudulent, because I did not employ any fraud in having them accepted, as the commissioners of the Legislative Assembly were empowered, as was the General [Montesquiou], not to agree to my contracts. They are not detrimental to the interests of the Republic, because the Republic could not hope to find suppliers who at this time could supply for a lower price at their peril and risk and without guarantee. When Cozon was finished with his interrogation, he informed Benjamin of his right to choose “two friends or counsels” to represent him. Benjamin chose a lawyer named Bret. The following day, January 8, Benjamin submitted a petition to the “the citizen judges of the criminal tribunal.” It was written in the third person, but this was conventional for legal petitions and does not mean that he did not write it himself, though his lawyer Bret may have authored it in part or in full. In any event, Benjamin himself signed it and there is no 21  This supplier was probably Cerf Dessau, who will be discussed later in this chapter.

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signature from Bret. While the petition only asks for Benjamin’s case to be heard at the next court session, it also reveals a defense strategy that combines appeals to existing statutes, humanitarian principles and patriotism. The petition began by narrating Benjamin’s predicament. On November 20, 1792 “the National Convention decreed that there was cause for an accusation against the petitioner,” but “[a] few days prior, called to the bar of the assembly, having gone there, [been] interrogated, [and] sent to the joint committee, the petitioner manifested his innocence and obtained the liberty of his person.” But the “decree of accusation” issued on November 20 “reattached his chains” and Benjamin “accepted them” since this was “the will of the representatives of his compatriots.” The petition gave the impression that Benjamin had a choice in the matter, asserting, “Jacob Benjamin only burdened himself with these chains in order to obey the law.” Yet “if that law was capable of being invoked against him, he had the right to invoke it in turn.” Accordingly, the petition invoked article 19, title 6 of the penal code, which “prescribes that the public prosecutor immediately after the interrogation shall be required to make haste such that the accused may be judged at the first jury assembly that follows.” (Underlining in the original.) That would have been on December 15, but by that date “no tribunal was yet indicated . . . and therefore the petitioner’s detention was perpetuated beyond the prescribed term.” Benjamin was “the victim of arbitrary treatment.” The next scheduled session of the criminal tribunal was scheduled for January 15, and this “irrevocably became the jury that must pronounce the fate of the petitioner.” Benjamin was eager to have his day in court: Far from asking for a dismissal, the petitioner saw with satisfaction the instant of his judgment approaching; his family, his business partners, three hundred agents whom he has to supervise from the depths of his prison, he dares and can say it, the entire army to which he has supplied the subsistence, all are waiting and counting on this moment, their hope must not be deceived, that hope is founded on the law. Thus, the nation itself and the principles that justified its existence depended on a speedy trial—and implicitly, Benjamin’s acquittal. The petition acknowledged that the public prosecutor had “the right to ask for a prorogation,” but if he did so he “would have to expose the motives behind his request.” But “what would be these motives? Is there one that in the scales of justice could for a moment serve as a counterweight to what reason, humanity, and truth demand?” On the contrary, “The prorogation that the public prosecutor would request would be on his part a formal admission of the frivolity

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of the accusation, which he is incapable of defending.” To the possible objection that more documentary evidence against Benjamin was forthcoming, the petitioner remarked that “to ask for a delay on the basis of this hope would be on the part of the public prosecutor to censure the accusation itself and to say that it was at least inconsiderate.” Benjamin (or Bret) appealed again to patriotism and the rule of law: “since the petitioner has been consigned to your authority, an entire army beseeches his presence, three hundred agents his supervision and he who is in irons the execution of the laws.” He therefore “request[ed] . . . that it please you, Citizens, to ordain that the petitioner will appear before the jury of judgment convoked for the 15th of the current month.”22 Vincent, who had been imprisoned for as long as Benjamin, was also eager to have his day in court, and he also petitioned to have his case judged on January 15. The public prosecutor, however, asked for a prorogation to the next scheduled session of the criminal court in February. As Benjamin’s petition had anticipated, he cited delays in obtaining the necessary documentation.23 5

Business Records Seized from Benjamin’s House

Meanwhile the joint committee established to investigate irregularities in army provisioning sought to build a case against Benjamin and Vincent. It had Benjamin’s house in Paris raided and sent his business records to the Minister of Justice, who in turn sent many of them to Broches in Lyon, asking him to have the case tried “at this month’s session.”24 Broches then reversed his request of January 8 and asked Cozon to schedule the trial for January 22.25 The documents, now in box 39 L 21 at the Archives départementales du Rhône, reveal still more about the extent and nature of Benjamin’s business. Particularly interesting, in this regard, are copies of contracts that Benjamin signed with representatives of France’s armed forces. Some of these deals—for the supply of cavalry horses and the provisioning of Briançon, for example—are already 22  Petition from Jacob Benjamin to the judges of the Criminal Tribunal of the Rhône-etLoire Department, January 8, 1793, 39 L 21. Unless otherwise indicated, all further documents cited in this chapter come from carton 39 L 21. 23  Petition from Jacques Vincent to the judges of the Criminal Tribunal of the Rhône-etLoire Department, January 8, 1793; and Petition from Broches to the judges of the Criminal Tribunal of the Rhône-et-Loire Department, January 8, 1793. 24  Dominique-Joseph Garat, Minister of Justice, to Broches, public prosecutor, January 12, 1793. 25  Broches, public prosecutor, to Jean-Bernard-François Cozon, presiding judge of the Criminal Tribunal of the Rhône-et-Loire Department, January 18, 1793.

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known from the Convention’s discussion of them. But other contracts provide new information. Specifically, the June 11 deal between Benjamin and War Minister Servan for the supply of meat is among the documents. This deal was already publicly known thanks to Benjamin’s statements before the National Convention and his wife’s published plea on his behalf. Benjamin had also mentioned it to Musset during his interrogation in Paris, and again to Cozon while under questioning in Lyon. But the contract itself, a 21-article document, reveals more than the agreed upon price of the meat. Article one indicates that Benjamin was required to provide meat for the soldiers in the Army of the South wherever they were “assembled in an army, whether in France or in foreign countries.” Article two shows that Benjamin was obligated to provide one half pound of meat every day for every soldier in the Army of the South from July 1 to December 31, 1792. In other words, it literally charged Benjamin with feeding an army. The contract estimated that there were between 28,000 and 30,000 soldiers in that army. One quarter of the cattle were to be oxen (boeufs) and one quarter cows “of high quality,” the oxen weighing at least 500 pounds a head (and the weight of the cows undetermined). According to article three the hides, tallow and offal were to remain in Benjamin’s possession. (Benjamin also sold candles, perhaps using some of these by-products of slaughtered animals, and his business partner Cerf Dessau sold leather goods to the army).26 Article four required Benjamin to pay any duties on cattle that were brought into France from abroad, indicating an international dimension to the business. Article five provided Benjamin with guards “for the security of the livestock,” corroborating his and his wife’s claims about the risks to the supply, and an area for the butchering of the animals and the distribution of the meat. Article seven reveals that Benjamin sent his own apprentice butchers and other “employees” to the camps, but that they were to be lodged there or nearby at no cost. Article eight confirms Benjamin’s claim to Cozon that there were three rates for the meat depending on its quality and whether the “pluck” was to be given as a gift to the soldiers. The contract also supports Benjamin’s contention that the price of meat was lower in the agreement with Servan in part because the state indemnified Benjamin for possible losses. Article eleven required the government to pay Benjamin 290 livres for each ox and 175 livres 26   The contract to provision Briançon included tallow candles (chandelles). “Approvisionnement des places de Briançon & c.,” September 3, 1792. For Dessau’s contract with the army, to which Benjamin stood surety, see “Conditions aux quelles le sieur Cerf Dessaut [sic] s’oblige à fournir vingt mille chemises, dix mille chapeaux, dix mill[e] gibernes et avec leurs bandrieres, trois mille bandrieres de sabres, et dix milles paires de guêtres pour le service de l’armée du Midy,” September 6, 1792.

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for each cow that was seized “by major force” or died from “epidemic disease,” again revealing the risky nature of his enterprise.27 How much would Benjamin have been earned on the basis of this contract? At the upper end, if the army bought only the highest quality meat at ten livres, ten deniers per pound for 30,000 soldiers, it would have been obligated to pay him 1,494,540 livres. At the lower end, if the army had only purchased the lower-quality meat at ten livres per pound for 28,000 soldiers, it would have paid Benjamin 1,288,000 livres.28 Benjamin received 300,000 livres in advance.29 Other contracts shed light on Benjamin’s clothing and cloth supply business. On August 5, 1792 Benjamin agreed to sell the Army of the South 25,000 shirts at seven livres, five sous a piece. That deal was worth 206,250 livres.30 Even larger deals were for the supply of cloth out of which uniforms would be made. In one agreement dated August 25, 1792 Benjamin sold 30,000 ells of cloth. In return he received over 600,000 livres (627,500 livres).31 Just two weeks later he signed an agreement to sell 32,000 ells of cloth for 708,000 livres.32 Benjamin also sold the army tents. Vincent had mentioned the sale of tents in his testimony to the Convention, but the contract itself reveals more about the sale. It shows that Benjamin sold a thousand tents for 224,000 livres.33 In all, the contracts in the court dossier show deals worth at least 3.9 million livres. (See Table 1.) Of course, we cannot know what Benjamin’s profit margins were, but even if they were as low as ten percent, Benjamin would have earned 27  “Conditions sous les quelles Jacob Benjamin demeurant à Paris rue Ste Avoye s’oblige comme pour les progrès deniers et affaires de l’État envers M Joseph Servan ministre et secrétaire d’état ayant le département de la guerre de fournir la viande aux troupes de la nation françoise qui pourroient être rassemblées soit sur les frontières soit en pays étranger soit enfin dans les places et ce jusqu’au 1er janvier 1793.” 28  Benjamin recalled in his testimony to Cozon that the meat weighed without the pluck was ten sous, three deniers per pound, whereas the contract reveals that he had actually sold it for less: ten sous per pound. 29  “Conditions sous les quelles. . . .” 30  “Armée du Midy. 5. Août 1782. Soumission.” 31  An ell is a foot and a half. Therefore, 30,000 ells are 45,000 feet. The width of the cloth varied, but it was always at least one ell, thus in this deal Benjamin sold at least 67,500 square feet of cloth. “Armée du midi. Habillem[en]ts. 25 Août 1792. Soumission.” 32  “Conditions aux quelles le sieur Jacob Benjamin s’oblige à fournir trente deux mille aulnes de drap, pour l’habillement de ce bataillon de Volontaires et Nationaux,” September 10, 1792. 33  These were large tents. The smallest were 144 square feet, or twelve by twelve feet. (There were 400 of these.) In addition, 600 tents were 216 square feet each. Finally, there were 200 officers’ tents. The contract does not say how large these were, though they were almost three times as expensive as the small tents. “Soumission,” September 15, 1792.

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at least 390,000 livres in less than three and a half months. This alone would have made Benjamin one of the highest-earning people in France. By comparison, a rich landowning aristocrat with an annual income of 100,000 livres would have seemed quite modest, and in any event by the end of the summer of 1792 most of that class had already emigrated.34 Moreover, the contracts in the court file are only those relating to the supply of the Army of the South. We know from Musset’s interrogation of Benjamin in Paris that he also conducted business with the Army of the Rhine and the Army of the Center. If contracts with these other armies were of comparable value—and only a thorough search of War Ministry archives will establish whether this was the case—then Benjamin would have had done roughly twelve million livres worth of business with the state in 1792.35 Table 1

Contracts in the court dossier (39 L 21, Archives départementales du Rhône, Lyon)

Contract

Date (1792)

Value (in livres)

Meat supply for the entire Army of the South 25,000 shirts 30,000 ells of cloth Provisioning of Briançon 30,000 ells of cloth 1000 tents 500 horses

June 11

1,288,000 to 1,494,540

August 5 August 25 September 3 September 10 September 15 September 23

206,250 627,500 At least 500,000a 708,000 224,000 360,000 Total (lowest estimate) 3,913,750

a The exact amount cannot be estimated, since the sheep were sold by head and their weight is unknown. Assuming that the average sheep weighed 200 pounds, the contract would have been worth 538,731 livres. 34  According to Timothy Tackett, the marquis de Lafayette had an income of 108,000 livres in 1778. Only a few aristocrats had higher incomes than that. Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 30. 35  Still more evidence of lucrative contracts with other armies comes from Madame Benjamin’s open letter to the Convention in which it is reported that Benjamin sold 100,000 shirts to the military. The August 5 contract with the Army of the South was only for 25,000 shirts, which suggests that the other 75,000 shirts were sold to other armies.

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The papers seized by the Convention also reveal Benjamin’s connections with other Jewish businessmen. Specifically, the name Cerf Dessau (a recognizably Jewish name) appears frequently in the documents. (Benjamin mentioned Dessau while under interrogation by Cozon.) Benjamin stood surety for two contracts worth more than 850,000 livres altogether in which Dessau supplied the army.36 Another of Benjamin’s associates, Isaac Hesse, was likely Jewish. He stood surety for the contract (worth 708,000 livres) in which Benjamin agreed to provide cloth for soldiers’ uniforms.37 When Benjamin needed someone to co-sign his agreement to sell the army 500 cavalry horses, he chose the Jewish businessman Bernard Alcan.38 In his challenging quest to provide daily meat rations for roughly 30,000 men, Benjamin formed a corporation with two other Jewish men: Aaron Schemolle (the “Chemol” mentioned in the interrogation by Musset and Benjamin’s neighbor on the rue Capon in Paris) and Jacob Trenelle.39 We can only guess at how many of Benjamin’s 300 agents (préposés) were Jewish. Clearly Benjamin could not have done his work without a network of Jewish merchants. In supplying French armies, Jewish entrepreneurs were continuing an Old Regime practice. As early as 1698 an intendant of Metz wrote a memorandum justifying the presence of Jews in part on the basis of their utility in providing cavalry horses and other items to the French army.40 Jay Berkovitz has found that the late eighteenth-century records of the beit din of Metz include many cases relating to army provisioning enterprises.41 Yet the Revolution appears to have increased the opportunities for Jewish army contractors by eliminating restrictions on Jewish mobility and augmenting the size of the nation’s fighting force.

36  Contract between Cerf Dessau and General Montesquiou, August 22, 1792; and “Conditions aux quelles le sieur Cerf Dessaut [sic] s’oblige à fournir vingt mille chemises, dix mille chapeaux, dix mill[e] gibernes et avec leurs bandriers, trois mille bandriers de sabres, et dix milles paires de guêtres pour le service de l’armée du Midy,” September 3, 1792. 37  “Conditions aux quelles le sieur Jacob Benjamin s’oblige. . . .” 38  “Chevaux. Armée du midi. Soumission,” September 21, 1792. Cf. Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 310. 39  Act of incorporation “par devant les notaires de Paris,” June 22, 1792. 40  Roger Clément, La condition des juifs de Metz sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 1903), 38–42. 41  Jay R. Berkovitz, “Acculturation and integration in eighteenth-century Metz,” Jewish History vol. 24, no. 3/4 (2010): 275.

The Trial of Jacob Benjamin

6

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The Trial

The trial finally took place on January 22, 1793. The Archives départementales du Rhône contain a printed record of the trial (box 39 L 60), though this document is a form describing the procedure of all criminal trials, with sparse handwritten commentary. Unfortunately, it does not tell us what the lawyers, defendants or witnesses said. But the form does contain important information. The trial began with Cozon, the president of the tribunal, calling both Benjamin and Vincent to appear before the bench, “free and without irons.” Afterward, the twelve jurors, sitting at the left of the judges, stood up and Cozon administered “the oath prescribed by the Law” to them, to which they all said, “I swear,” before returning to their seats.42 “Citizen Reyre,” Vincent’s defense attorney, and “Citizen Bret,” defending Benjamin, then took “the required oath.” Cozon asked each defendant his name, age, profession and place of residence, and the clerk recorded their answers. The clerk then read the indictment. Handwritten commentary on the printed record indicates that shirts from the military storage facility were “shown to the accused and to the witnesses” who in turn were asked “if they recognize[d] them.” Unfortunately, the record is silent on who the witnesses were or what their (or the defendants’) responses were. The public prosecutor and the defense attorneys addressed the court, though again we do not know what they said. Finally, Cozon “summarized the case” and gave the jury “written questions and all the documents of the case, with the exception of declarations written by the witnesses.” This was presumably standard procedure, since the quotations in the sentence above are from the printed form, not the handwritten commentary. It is unrealistic to think that the jurors could have read the more than two hundred pages of documentation in the file. No doubt they were relying on Cozon’s having “summarized the case” for them. By being authorized to compose a questionnaire for the jury, Cozon had a high degree of influence. The questions he gave the jury, which are included in box 39 L 60 in manuscript form, suggest that Cozon was sympathetic to Benjamin:

42  The jurors were: Antoine Guilloud, Jean Brochet, Jean Baptiste Gagueur, François Lespinasse, Antoine Gabriel Buisson, Pierre Bonnefoy, Pierre Gariot, Pierre Montfalcon, Jean Baptiste Barret, George Ramet, Jean Deschenaud and Claude Vial. L’an second de la République, le vingt deux janvier mil sept cent quatre-vingt treize les Juges du tribunal criminel, l’Accusateur public, étant dans l’auditoire du palais de Justice, chacun à leur place [Lyon, 1793], 39 L 60.

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1st: 2nd: 3rd: 4th: 5th: 6th: 7th:

Were the deals subscribed to by Jacob Benjamin fraudulent? Is Jacob Benjamin convicted of fraud for concluding these deals? Did Jacob Benjamin, who is accused of having delivered shirts and shoes of poor quality to the military magazines of Lyon, deliver shoes? Did he deliver shirts? Were the shirts that were taken out of said magazines and shown in the audience as exhibits of poor quality? Did these shirts come from deliveries made by Benjamin or by his agents? In all of these cases is Jacob Benjamin convicted of the crime of theft of the Republic’s funds, or was he on the basis of his [illegible] deals subject to a civil action for their execution or annulment?43

Then the jurors proceeded to their chamber for deliberation. According to an annotation on the printed court record, the shirts were brought into the chamber.44 The jury voted to acquit both Benjamin and Vincent. With respect to Benjamin, their declaration affirmed: that Jacob Benjamin did not deliver shoes to the military magazines of Lyon, that his agents made deliveries of shirts, that the shirts taken from the magazines and exhibited in the audience are of poor quality, but that it is not certain whether they come from deliveries made by Jacob Benjamin’s agents.

43  The verdict for Vincent also closely followed a questionnaire by Cozon that implicitly raised significant doubts about the prosecution’s case. The questionnaire asked whether General Montesquiou and the three deputies supervising the Army of the South (LacombeSaint-Michel, Gasparin and Rouyer) had approved of the contracts with Benjamin. (The contracts themselves revealed that these authorities had approved of the deals.) It also asked whether Vincent had signed any certificates accepting the “shirts and shoes of poor quality,” an accusation he had vigorously denied. The prosecution had been unable to discover any evidence to the contrary. The jurors therefore concluded that Vincent was “not at all convicted of having favored the theft of the Republic’s funds by accepting supplies of shirts and shoes of poor quality, since it is not established that he ever made any reception or acceptance of military effects.” “Jacques Vincent. Jacob Benjamin. 22 Janvier 1793,” 39 L 60. 44   L’an second de la République, le vingt deux janvier . . ., 39 L 60.

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The jurors added “that Jacob Benjamin is not convicted of the crime of theft of the Republic’s funds by reason of his deals and that he was only subject to civil actions resulting from these deals and their execution.”45 7 Conclusions Jacob Benjamin turned up again in the records of the National Convention, but this time he was not suspected of stealing public funds or endangering the Republic. On the contrary, on September 20, 1792, a little less than nine months after he walked out of the Maison de Justice in Lyon a free man, Benjamin was the subject of a letter from the Minister of War, Jean Baptiste Noël Bouchotte, to the Convention, reporting a contribution by the entrepreneur to the continuing war effort. Bouchotte wrote: Citizen President [of the Convention], I am forwarding to you a letter from Citizen Jacob Benjamin by which he announces to me the gift that he made of thirty tents in good condition, with their stakes and cords, and for his brothers in arms of the Section of the Réunion [the militant sans-culotte ward]. I ask you, Citizen President, to please pass it on to the National Convention. J. Bouchotte The letter from Benjamin, written on September 18, read as follows: Citizen Minister, The duty of every good citizen is to contribute to the public good, and even to make sacrifices, without looking at his means and his abilities. I have the honor of sending you, citizen minister, for my brothers in arms of the Section of the Réunion who are ready to leave for the frontiers, thirty tents in good condition with their stakes and cords, etc. I desire that my brothers in arms return soon victorious to their homes after having defeated our enemies. I am very perfectly, Citizen Minister, your entirely devoted citizen. Jacob Benjamin 45  “Jacques Vincent. Jacob Benjamin. 22 Janvier 1793,” 39 L 60.

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This contribution was given “honorable mention” by the Convention and reported in its official bulletin.46 It was a significant contribution. According to the contract for tents that Benjamin had signed with Vincent on September 15, 1792, the price of tents ranged from 136 to 410 livres, depending on their size. Even if the tents in the subsequent patriotic gift had been the smallest size, thirty of them would have been worth 4080 livres, more than half the average annual income of a deputy.47 But this was not the last of Benjamin’s contributions. On 7 Frimaire Year II (November 27, 1793) Benjamin announced to the sans-culottes of the Réunion section that he was making a gift of fifty tents for the war effort. He also gave coal, wood and wine to the poor-relief fund. The section acknowledged his generosity with a “civic mention.”48 I do not know what happened to Jacob Benjamin after November 1793. He is not listed in the F7 series of dossiers on Terror victims at the Archives Nationales in Paris, so he appears to have survived the Terror.49 In any event, it is hard to imagine him having been executed without any mention in the Archives parlementaires or the press. So his is a story with a happy ending, at least as far as I can determine. But what does it mean, and why has it been forgotten? Let me begin with the second question first. For the French historiography the answer lies perhaps in the density of dramatic events during the fall of 1792 and the winter of 1793. Benjamin’s deals with the Army of the South coincided with the fall of the monarchy, the invasion of France by foreign forces and the September Massacres. The Convention’s discussion of these deals took place against the backdrop of a much more contentious debate over the fate of the king. And Benjamin’s trial took place the day after the king was executed. Under the circumstances it is unsurprising that his story is absent from almost all accounts of the Revolution. As to the Jewish historiography, the story of Jacob Benjamin does not fit well into widely-accepted understandings of the emancipation, which has often been portrayed as a bargain in which Jews had to give up something (communal autonomy, identity, tradition) in return for the elusive promises of liberty and acceptance. Indeed, my own previous work

46   Archives parlementaires, vol. 74, 513–4. 47  Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 40. 48  I am very grateful to Colin Jones of Queen Mary University, London, for providing me with this information in an email of March 20, 2014. Professor Jones found the relevant documentation in: Minutes of the Réunion section, box F7* 2595, Archives Nationales, Paris. 49  Again I am grateful to Professor Jones for this information. Email from Colin Jones, March 20, 2014.

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has been informed by this model.50 Yet it is not clear what Benjamin had to give up. He grew up in Paris. He did not belong to a kehilla that was in the proc­ ess of being disbanded or that was burdened with debts from the Old Regime. He called the sans-culottes of his neighborhood his “brothers in arms,” and he cheerfully sold many thousands of pounds of pork with no apparent pangs of conscience. The Revolution made him a citizen and also made him very rich. It is true that he suffered the misfortune of imprisonment, but then he was acquitted and soon in the favor of the highest authorities. Why does Jacob Benjamin matter? At the most basic level, his significance lies in the crucial but unacknowledged role he played in the survival of the Revolution. He fed and clothed tens of thousands of its soldiers at a time when such logistical support might have made the difference between victory and defeat.51 But his story is also significant for what it tells us about Jewish-French relations immediately following emancipation. Specifically, it is worth mentioning that the revolutionary government entrusted the vital task of feeding and clothing its armies to a Jew, and less than a year after the emancipation. Furthermore, even though certain revolutionary leaders accused him of serious crimes, antisemitism appears to have played a very small role in the case. It is true that Cambon introduced the army supplier as “le juif Benjamin,” but he was unusual in doing so. Almost every other reference to Benjamin in the Archives parlementaires, as well as in the court records, identified him as “le citoyen Benjamin,” or (in pre-republican records) “le sieur Benjamin,” or simply “Jacob Benjamin.”52 More importantly still, no one in the Convention made the case that Benjamin was unpatriotic because he was Jewish. One can imagine 50  Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 51  On the importance of the relatively neglected study of logistics in military history see John A. Lynn, “The History of Logistics and Supplying War,” in John A. Lynn, ed., Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 9–27. I am grateful to Professor Julia Osman of Mississippi State University for bringing this source to my attention. 52  In over 200 pages of documentation in box 39 L 21 Benjamin’s Jewishness is only mentioned three times. Deputy Musset’s interrogation identified the suspect as “Benjamin Jacob [sic] Juif.” “Interrogatoire de Jacob Benjamin du 13 9bre l’an 1er [de la République].” A letter from the deputies en mission in Lyon to the Convention’s Surveillance Committee denounced an army official named Vass for having written reception reports for shoddy merchandise, claiming that “it is he who favored the brigandage, in the midst of war, of the Jew Benjamin.” Charles-Jean-Marie Alquier, François Antoine de Boissy d’Anglas and Louis Vitet to the Surveillance Committee, November 21, 1792. Finally, a deposition by two businessmen of Lyon reported that they had visited the army storage facility in Lyon and

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a scenario in which at least one deputy claimed that it had been a mistake to emancipate the Jews, or even that Jews were taking advantage of the generous revolutionary laws to profit at the expense of the brave soldiers who were risking their lives for the principle of equality. After all, little more than a year prior to Benjamin’s appearance at the bar of the Convention deputies had argued about whether Jews were capable of citizenship. Yet no one even hinted at the need to revisit emancipation. Deputy Jean-François Rewbell, who had argued vociferously against Jewish political equality while serving in the Constituent Assembly in 1789 to 1791, was present in the Convention during the discussion of Benjamin. He even spoke on November 20, 1792, following the reading of the letter from Deputies Alquier, Boissy d’Anglas and Vitet accusing Benjamin of additional depredations. But he said nothing about Benjamin or the Jews in general. Rather he said that the war ministers were ultimately responsible for any peculation in army contracts and that they should be indicted.53 Why antisemitism so quickly and dramatically disappeared from political discourse is an interesting question, to which I do not have a ready answer, but for the purposes of my argument it is sufficient to note that antisemitism is almost entirely absent from the relevant political and judicial documentation. If the twelve jurors in Lyon had been antisemitic, it is unlikely they would have acquitted Benjamin, despite the coaching they appear to have received from Cozon. Furthermore, there is clearly no sign of antisemitism in Cozon, who actively resisted the rush on behalf of the Convention to see Benjamin (and Vincent) punished. To be sure, it is possible that political considerations motivated Cozon and the jury, just as political considerations motivated the deputies who sought to prove that they were good stewards of the nation’s resources. In this respect it may be relevant that the trial of Benjamin and Vincent took place on January 22, 1793. On January 21, a much more famous suspect had gone to the guillotine: Louis XVI. Though news of the event may not have reached Lyon yet, the king had already been condemned to death on January 17. Whether and to what extent the execution impacted Cozon or the jury in the case of Benjamin and Vincent are matters of speculation. The execution of the king was unpopular in the provinces, and perhaps the Lyonnais, in particular, were reluctant to give the regicide Convention what it wanted in the case of Benjamin and Vincent. After all, less than six months later Lyon, France’s second city, would be in rebellion against the Paris-based legislature. During that rebellion the examined covers of uneven quality from a delivery by “Jacob Benjamin Juif.” Deposition of Vincent Perret and Jacques Ordassiere, December 1, 1792. 53   Archives parlementaires, vol. 53, 492.

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Jacobin activist Joseph Chalier was executed, and the judge who presided over Chalier’s trial was none other than Jean-Bernard-François Cozon.54 But the rivalry between Paris and Lyon does not explain Benjamin’s high standing with the War Minister during the Terror or his warm relations with the sans-culottes of the Réunion section. Clearly a wide range of revolutionaries believed that Benjamin was good for the Republic. This does not prove that antisemitic opinion was non-existent among republican legislators, officials and activists, but any such opinion failed to resonate or to affect Benjamin’s standing adversely. It is hard not to read the Benjamin Affair in juxtaposition to the Dreyfus Affair a century later. In the Dreyfus Affair, a man who was manifestly innocent was widely seen as guilty simply because he was Jewish. In the Benjamin Affair, a man whose innocence was less obvious (at what point does an army contractor become a war profiteer?) was nevertheless acquitted and even honored as an extraordinary patriot despite being Jewish; in other words, despite belonging to a long-scorned group in French society. Of course, judicially the two cases were very different. Dreyfus was tried by a military court and Benjamin by a civil court. But in terms of public opinion, the Benjamin case had the same potential to provoke accusations of treason as the Dreyfus case, if not more, since France was fighting for its survival in the fall of 1792 but not in the 1890s. Yet there were no street demonstrations against Benjamin or ‘the Jews,’ and there was no looting of Jewish businesses. Public opinion in 1792 and 1793 was famously susceptible to conspiracy fears, but none of these seem to have prominently featured the Jews, despite the publicity of the Benjamin case.55 Anyone who would cite the Dreyfus Affair as evidence of a supposed propensity to antisemitism among the French must also reckon with the Benjamin Affair.

54  J[ean]-B[aptiste] Monfalcon, Histoire de la ville de Lyon (Lyon, 1851), vol. 3, 955–62. 55  Peter R. Campbell, Thomas E Kaiser and Marisa Linton, eds., Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007).

Chapter 3

Reading, Writing, and Religion: The Education of Working-Class Jewish Girls in Paris, 1822–1914 Jennifer Sartori In 1822, the Ladies’ Committee in charge of Paris’s recently opened Jewish girls’ primary school—the first of its kind in France—reported on the rules being established to govern both the girls’ and the boys’ schools. Among other suggestions, the Ladies proposed that girls remain in school until the age of fourteen, one year longer than boys. They argued: If [Jewish] boys can remain until the age of thirteen, girls certainly need an extra year to improve their knowledge of the various occupations specific to their sex. . . . [I]t is virtually impossible to expect a young girl of ten or eleven to have learned to read, write, add, and spell, and at the same time be in a position to become a dressmaker, a seamstress, a mender of cashmere and muslin, etc. That, however, is what the good students who come out of Catholic and Protestant schools are capable of; our students also study Hebrew, while students of other religions might say their prayers in Latin but do not learn that language.1 The Ladies’ Committee’s words suggest the complex mix of Jewish tradition, French influence, and practical realities that shaped the school curriculum for working-class Jewish girls in nineteenth-century France. According to the overall vision for the girls’ school, a primary education should first and foremost provide Jewish girls with basic academic skills and preparation for future employment. These goals resembled in broad outline the emerging French public primary system, which likewise aimed to prepare working-class children for productive work lives without fostering in them unrealistic aspirations for socio-economic advancement. The attention to French reading and writing, too, was clearly a result of the increasing integration of the Jews into French society. The heavy emphasis on acquiring marketable skills reflected

1  “Note, Relative au Règlement de L’Ecole des Jeunes Filles,” Paris, 1822, Brandeis University Special Collections (hereafter cited as BUSC), Consistoires Israélites de France, IV. 23 c.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004324190_005

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both the economic needs of the Jewish masses and the long Jewish tradition of economically active women. It was with respect to religion that the Ladies’ Committee’s words most embodied the intricate combination of French and Jewish elements that molded Jewish girls’ education. In highlighting the religious instruction dispensed by the institution, the Ladies reflected not Jewish tradition, which minimized the formal religious instruction of girls, but rather the influence of French culture, which had prompted the Jewish community to reevaluate the place of women in religious life. Yet despite their claim that Hebrew instruction made the religious instruction of Jewish girls more rigorous than that of non-Jewish girls, in the end religion occupied a far more limited place in the Jewish girls’ primary schools than in comparable Christian schools. In pre-emancipation Jewish communities, only religious learning was considered true education, and because normative Jewish identity was generally seen as dependent on the transmission of religious knowledge from one generation of men to the next, virtually all boys obtained at least the rudiments of a religious education. Women, by contrast, were neither obligated nor expected to perform such study, and in fact were usually discouraged from doing so. Their religious instruction was largely­­practical in nature, centering on the performance of the Jewish laws that lay within their purview and the fulfillment of domestic ritual and celebrations. Knowledge of the theoretical basis for these laws and rituals was considered unnecessary—even dangerous—for women. In largely Catholic France, educational norms also differed by sex, but the nature of the disparities reflected a worldview very different from that of traditional Judaism. While traditional Jewish culture saw much of official religion as lying within the male sphere, nineteenth-century French society trained children to consider religion largely a feminine task. Although the nature and extent of the ‘feminization’ of French Catholicism has recently come under considerable scholarly debate, that French women played a key role in the revival of Catholicism in the nineteenth century is clear.2 Whether through the thousands of women who entered female religious orders over the course of the century or the far larger numbers who attended mass and confession regularly, women were often the mainstays of Catholic observance

2  For recent discussions of the concept of the feminization of Catholicism, see, for example, Carol E. Harrison, Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen M. Mangion, eds., Gender, Catholicism, and Spirituality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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and service.3 Moreover, according to the dominant gender ideology of separate spheres, women were ‘innately’ spiritual beings; their greater capacity for emotion made them more religious than men, closer to God, more pure, and inherently pious.4 Consequently, French girls’ schools, more than transmitting knowledge of history, literature, or science, were supposed to nurture their students’ ‘natural’ faith and morality. Expected to become the spiritual guardians of their future families, French girls spent substantially more class time on religion than did boys. In their public pronouncements, many nineteenth-century Franco-Jewish leaders appeared to have assimilated to Western bourgeois gender ideology that posited women’s inherent religiosity and emphasized their duties in the private sphere of home and family. Communal leaders argued widely that women were critical to ensuring that the next generation retained an allegiance to Judaism. Rabbi Simon Lévy’s 1869 sermon was typical: “Strictly speaking,” he proclaimed: It is on the education of our girls that our entire religious future depends. What do you expect to become of Judaism, if those whose destiny it is to make its spirit and its holy practices shine around them are brought up in irreligion and impiety?5 Yet as mothers, women were also seen as responsible for raising upstanding French men and women. Recognizing that women could succeed in these crucial tasks only if they themselves received an education that included an appropriate mix of Jewish knowledge, French culture, and secular learning, countless rabbis, pedagogues, and other observers now insisted that a balanced educational program for girls was necessary to fostering the delicate balance between Frenchness and Jewishness that communal leaders identified as essential to a successful Jewish life in modern French society.

3  See Claude Langlois’ magisterial Le Catholicisme au feminin (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1984); Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989); Rebecca Rodgers, Les demoiselles de la Légion d’honneur: Les maisons d’éducation de la Légion d’honneur au XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1992). 4  For more on the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres and its Jewish variant, see my “ ‘Our religious future’: Girls’ Education and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France,” Ph.D. Diss., Emory University, 2004, chapter 1. 5  Simon Lévy, Discours sur la Condition et les Devoirs de la Femme Israélite, prononcés pendant l’hiver 5629 (Bordeaux: Impr. general d’Emily Crugy, 1869), 46.

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The actual education of Jewish girls and boys demonstrates that while the dominant vision of proper gender norms had indeed changed, it had not done so in quite the way commentators described. The French emphasis on female religiosity certainly left its mark, as evidenced by the fact that Jewish girls generally received more religious instruction than they had in earlier times. But although the overall level of girls’ religious instruction rose and that of boys fell, girls’ religious education continued to lag behind boys’, and in the end, the instruction of the majority of working-class Jewish girls failed to include the level of religious teaching that would have effectively matched their secular and practical training. Yet it did mold the girls into modern ‘French Jewesses,’ by training them for lives similar on the surface to those of their nonJewish counterparts while blending nineteenth-century French conceptions of appropriate gender roles into older Jewish customs that privileged male over female religious learning and practice. 1

The Context: Jewish Primary Education in Nineteenth-Century France

Following emancipation in 1790 and 1791, Franco-Jewish leaders quickly realized a new type of education was necessary to facilitate the integration of the Jews into French society. Earlier, boys had learned to read and write Hebrew and received an elementary religious education, and girls were generally educated informally in the home.6 Now, communal leaders argued, the Jewish masses would be unable to succeed in the wider world if they could not read and write French and do basic arithmetic; likewise, the socio-economic profile of the Jewish community would come to resemble that of non-Jewish society only if young people were trained for ‘useful’ occupations.7 The first Jewish primary school was opened in 1817; by 1829, sixty-two schools existed.8 Although in theory the schools were open to children of all classes, in practice they were attended by a largely working-class clientele.9 6  Jeffrey Haus, Challenges of Equality: Judaism, State, and Education in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 11. 7  Jay Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 150–4; Haus, Challenges of Equality, 14–27. 8  Zosa Szajkowski, Jewish Education in France, 1789–1939 (New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, 1980), 4–5. 9  See Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, chapter 7, “Schools and Schoolmen,” especially 156, 166.

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The Paris Consistory opened its first primary school for boys in 1819 and its first school for girls in 1822, with several additional schools opening over the next decades.10 While some of these schools were administered directly by the Consistory throughout their existence, two were transformed into public Jewish primary schools under the system of confessional public education established by the 1833 Guizot Law.11 Among other provisions, this law allowed for schools intended specifically for children of a minority religion to be designated as public institutions. No school was to be religiously neutral; if not specifically designated as Protestant, Jewish, or mixte, public primary schools were officially Catholic. The ability to have their schools ‘municipalized’ was especially important to religious minorities because the Guizot Law also formally placed moral and religious instruction at the head of the primary curriculum and allowed Catholic teaching orders to operate public schools.12 Although the Jewish schools changed somewhat in nature when they became public institutions, they remained distinctively Jewish. They continued to dispense instruction in Hebrew and Jewish religion and the Consistory’s Education Committee continued to supervise Jewish teaching, give out prizes for good behavior and religious knowledge, and recommend teachers.13 All of the instructors were Jewish, as were virtually all of the students, and while most French public schools closed on Thursdays and Sundays, the Jewish schools held classes on Thursday in order to have the Jewish Sabbath free. The justification for separate Jewish schools was considerably enhanced in 1850 with the passage of the Falloux Law, which significantly heightened the influence of the Catholic Church on primary education by strengthening Catholic dominance of local academic councils and increasing the likelihood that public schools would be entrusted to religious teachers.14 The Falloux Law gave particular urgency to the calls for Jewish schools for girls, for, drawing upon the link between women and religion in contemporary gender ideology, it especially augmented the already strong position of the Church in public girls’ schooling. After 1850, many more public girls’ primary schools were 10  See Léon Kahn, Histoire des Ecoles communales et consistoriales israélites de Paris (1809– 1884) (Paris: A. Durlacher, 1884) for the story of the creation of the boys’ school (2–22) and the girls’ school (23–30). 11  One set of schools was made public in 1836, another in 1874. Kahn, Histoire des Ecoles, 51–2, 72, 75–7. 12  See Pierre Albertini, L’Ecole en France XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1998), 18–20, for the text of the Loi Guizot. 13  Kahn, Histoire des Ecoles, 70; Jeanne Brody, “L’école de la rue des Hospitalières-SaintGervais: pratique religieuse et école laĭque,” Archives Juives 28, no. 2 (1995): 55. 14  R. D. Anderson, Education in France, 1848–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 47–8.

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entrusted to Catholic teaching orders than were public boys’ schools. Although in theory boys and girls studied the same subjects, in actuality religion often played a larger role in girls’ schools, even in those run by ‘secular’ teachers.15 The Church’s position in public education was not to last. The Ferry Laws of 1881–1882 made public primary instruction free, compulsory, and secular; the 1886 Goblet Law, continuing this trend, required that all members of Catholic teaching orders be removed from the ranks of public school personnel within five years.16 For those Jewish children who attended non-Jewish public schools, these developments made the public school experience far less religiously threatening than it had been under the Falloux Law. At the same time, they also took away a valuable resource from the Jewish community. Although the formerly Jewish public schools remained in many ways identifiably Jewish institutions (most notably, they continued to have an almost entirely Jewish student body and an overwhelmingly Jewish faculty and won permission to continue closing on Saturdays and Jewish holidays), they could no longer dispense Jewish instruction. In response, communal leaders quickly established a supplementary system of religious courses, intended specifically to compensate for the lack of religious instruction in the public schools. The secularization of public instruction also had an impact on the private system of consistorial schools, for it removed an important part of the ration­ ale for private religious education. When Jewish students were no longer at a disadvantage in public primary schools, the incentive to pay even reduced fees for private Jewish education weakened. Most working-class Jews, like most Protestants, found it more advantageous to send their children to the now free and secular public primary schools.17 The number of native-born French Jews who selected the consistorial schools began to shrink, and only the arrival of

15  Between 1850 and 1853, 47% of newly created boys’ public schools and 60% of new girls’ schools were placed in the hands of religious teachers. In 1866, 19% of boys and 55% of girls in public school had religious teachers. See Linda Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1984), 9–14. 16  See Albertini, Ecole en France, 69–70, for the texts of the Ferry and Goblet Laws. 17  Although the children of indigent parents attended the consistorial schools for free, parents above the level of destitution were expected to pay; see Florence Régis, “La Politique éducative des consistoires juifs au dix-neuvième siècle (1830–1914),” Maîtrise d’histoire contemporaine, Université de Paris-I Sorbonne, 1996, 156. This move by Jewish and Protestant parents to send their daughters to public schools contrasted with the behavior of Catholic parents, for enrollment at private Catholic girls’ schools rose following the secularization of public education. See Clark, Schooling the Daughters, 14–5.

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large numbers of immigrants, who often felt out of place in general public schools, kept the enrollment figures high. 2

The Content: Curriculum at Private and Public Jewish Schools

Although the private primary schools run by the Paris Consistory educated only a minority of Jewish children, they are particularly important for any study of Jewish education because they provide evidence not only of the experiences of those who attended them but also of the priorities and beliefs of the Jewish community overall. What, then, did these schools teach? If the fundamental aims of teaching children the basics of their religion and preparing them for ‘useful’ occupations was common to boys and girls, how to fulfill that goal was not. Because the community expected women and men not only to take on different economic and religious roles but also to arrive at different balances between the secular and religious facets of their identity, the instruction provided by the Jewish school system varied by sex. The differences in the education dispensed to boys and girls were most pronounced in the early years of the Jewish school system. The curriculum of the original boys’ school created in 1819 reflected the founders’ objectives of providing boys with religious and secular instruction and fostering their patriotic feelings toward France. The level of religious instruction, although far lower than in traditional Jewish establishments, was quite high, encompassing Hebrew reading, Bible translation, and catechism; the most capable students studied Hebrew grammar as well. Secular subjects included French reading, writing, spelling and grammar; basic arithmetic; and elementary notions of cosmology, geography, and ancient and modern history. The order was given “to stress particularly the history of France, whose political institutions and their advantages for the Jews [the teacher] should elucidate and make known.”18 The only vocational training was a class in linear design instituted in 1825; the administration focused on encouraging parents to place their sons in apprenticeships upon the completion of school. The original curriculum at the girls’ school was more practical in orientation, reflecting different expectations for girls’ futures. Surviving sources make no mention of cosmology, geography, or history, nor of extensive religious instruction or Hebrew grammar. Evidently such studies were not thought useful for young Jewish girls, who, in addition to learning very basic academic 18  Kahn, Histoire des Ecoles, 12. By 1824, the program had been slightly simplified, but the overall tenor remained the same. Kahn, 35.

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subjects, spent their time acquiring the skills necessary for ‘women’s work.’ The remarks made in a report issued at the end of the school’s first year— “a portion of the students . . . read, write, and sew very prettily”—testify to the areas seen as most important in girls’ education. In a similar vein, the Ladies’ Committee was “extremely proud to be able to say that several students ‘know their arithmetic from addition through division . . ., including fractions’ ”; in sewing, the girls had progressed “from hems on paper to buttonholes, backstitching, and shirring for collars and cuffs.”19 Although the girls did learn to read some Hebrew, religious instruction formed a significantly less important part of the curriculum than it did at the boys’ school. Practical preparation for future domestic duties and employment took precedence over both religious training and rigorous academics. Over the next decades, the schools kept pace with developing notions of what knowledge was appropriate and necessary for members of the working classes, but the level of the girls’ instruction in both religious and secular subjects always remained below that of the boys. In September 1832, a government inspector found that the boys’ school taught French reading and grammar, writing, arithmetic, and linear design; he was pleased to note that French history was not neglected. The boys also learned to read Hebrew, received Jewish religious instruction, and were taken Friday evenings and Saturday mornings to synagogue services; the general teaching of the Hebrew language, which had been temporarily suspended, was soon to be reinstated. The inspector enthusiastically praised the boys’ knowledge of French and Hebrew reading, French grammar, and arithmetic.20 As it had ten years earlier, then, the school produced boys at least minimally literate in Jewish knowledge and observance and dispensed considerable secular instruction, stressing in particular subjects that fostered dedication to the French nation. The following day, the inspector paid a visit to the girls’ school, but his report made no mention of French history, nor of any religious instruction beyond Hebrew or of attendance at synagogue. The girls were studying only French and Hebrew reading, French grammar, writing, arithmetic, and sewing.21 Evidently the Jewish communal authorities did not consider extensive knowledge of Judaism as a religion, the ability to speak, write, or understand Hebrew, or attendance at religious services to be essential to shaping a girl’s commitment to the Jewish world. Instead, the only Jewish knowledge deemed 19  Kahn, Histoire des Ecoles, 27. 20  Report of the inspector of the Académie de Paris, September 5, 1832, Archives Nationales (hereafter cited as AN), F17 12514. 21  Report of the inspector of the Académie de Paris, September 6, 1832, AN, F17 12514.

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necessary for girls was the ability to recite Hebrew prayers, and the focus remained on basic academic instruction and practical sewing skills. As the years passed, the relatively strong religious instruction in the consistorial boys’ school yielded considerable ground to secular learning. By the 1840s, the boys spent only two hours per day on religion and used few traditional Jewish textual sources. Although they studied Hebrew and recited their prayers in the sacred language, the primary classes conducted the bulk of their religious studies in French, a significant departure from traditional norms. The school also focused attention not on the Talmud, as earlier Jewish education had, but rather on the Bible.22 And much to the chagrin of traditionalists, the amount of time devoted to Jewish subjects continued to decline, as the school added secular subjects, such as sciences and composition, and broadened the scope of existing subjects to keep pace with the public schools. By 1877, the boys spent only six hours per week on religious subjects, falling to approximately five in the 1880s and 1890s and four by 1909. For the older boys, an additional hour of post-biblical history, taught by rabbis outside of class time, supplemented these hours, and for the elementary classes, at least one hour of reading time was to be devoted to religious and moral subjects.23 Just as the boys spent less and less time on Jewish subjects, so, too, did the girls. In 1877, when the boys spent six hours per week on religious studies, the girls spent only four, two on Hebrew and two on biblical history and catechism; by the 1880s, those two hours of history and catechism had generally fallen to one. By 1909, the amount of time the girls devoted to Jewish instruction dropped to three hours per week for the older girls and only two for the younger girls.24 Unlike for the boys, moreover, this instruction was not supplemented by additional classes outside of school hours. The girls, then, typically spent approximately three-fifths as much time on religious subjects as the boys. Given that boys were also more likely to attend synagogue, the difference between girls’ and boys’ exposure to religious training was substantial. 22  Régis, “Politique Educative,” 88; Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, 180. Because the Bible, unlike the Talmud, was shared with Christians, emphasis was removed from the Talmud in much of nineteenth-century Franco-Jewish thought. 23  See the schedules for the consistorial schools for 1877–8, 1882–3, 1889–9, and 1897–8, in Association Consistoriale Israélite de Paris (hereafter cited as ACIP) F2 (Ecoles 1874–1878), F4 (Ecoles 1883–1885), F5 (Ecoles 1886–1889), F8 (Ecoles 1895–1908). See also minutes of the meeting of the School Committee, March 4, 1909, BUSC, Consistoires Israélites de France, IV. 19 d. 24  See the schedules cited in fn. 23.

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Most of the time the boys spent studying religion the girls spent on subjects that were neither religious nor academic: vocationally oriented classes, singing, and physical education. Girls spent much more of their time on such classes than did boys. In the 1880s, the advanced girls spent fully one-third of their time on sewing, drawing, singing, and gym; the boys spent only one-quarter of their time on linear design or drawing, singing, and gym. Although both of those percentages dropped over the next decades, the gap between them only widened: in 1909, this type of instruction took up 27% of the older girls’ time but only 13% of that of the older boys. The main culprit was sewing. While the hours the boys spent on drawing compensated for some of this time, the rest came out of other subjects, generally French reading and dictées, Hebrew, religious instruction, and physical education. The school administrators evidently assumed that training in needlework would be more useful than additional academic or religious instruction. Needlework, unlike both academic and religious subjects, could be justified by appealing to contemporary French ideas about separate spheres, to older Jewish ideas about women’s economic roles, and to the practical realities most working-class families faced. While most of the boys, too, were destined for manual labor, they had a greater chance of entering a job demanding academic knowledge or of continuing their education; as a result, devoting more hours to academic subjects appeared to be a better investment. In 1856, a rabbinical conference adopted an official religious curriculum to be used in Jewish primary schools. For boys, the curriculum included Hebrew reading and ‘elements’ of the Hebrew language; translation of the liturgy, the Pentateuch, and the first section of the Prophets; recitation by heart of the Sh’ma and the most common blessings; catechism, and religious history. Girls were to study the same subjects, with the notable exceptions of Hebrew language and translation of the Pentateuch and the Prophets; in other words, their instruction was to focus on basic liturgy and blessings, catechism, and religious history, without acquainting them with key Jewish sacred texts or equipping them with the language skills necessary for further study.25 By the early 1900s, some communal leaders had begun to question this discrepancy; an article in the Univers israélite commented:

25  Minutes of the meeting of May 15, 1856, ACIP, 1A10e (Conférence rabbinique pour la réforme du culture israélite, 13–23 mai 1856).

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Since 1856, feminist ideas have progressed, and we do not see why our young girls should not receive the same religious education as our boys. One should not consecrate inferiority in the name of religion.26 Yet this very comment indicates that, despite the progress of ‘feminist ideas,’ the imbalance between girls’ and boys’ religious instruction had persisted. Girls’ secular studies also lagged behind boys’. Although it is impossible to determine exactly what the children studied, the girls simply could not progress as far, with less time in which to learn the material. Those who ran the schools also translated differing expectations of the children’s future roles as women and men into different assumptions about girls’ and boys’ innate abilities. Teachers and inspectors assumed that boys were naturally better at math and science, girls at such subjects as spelling and penmanship. As the author of an 1878 inspection report commented, “Girls have, in general, less disposition for the sciences”; similarly, a member of the School Committee wrote in 1881, “[I]n general, girls’ schools have the advantage over boys in spelling, the disadvantage in math.”27 Despite the fact that the children’s performance on examinations and in competitions often confounded these expectations, assumptions about the sexes’ ‘natural’ affinities for certain subjects remained in place.28 In the late 1890s, the Consistory’s Inspection Commission debated the idea of instituting cours complémentaires at the girls’ schools, supplementary courses that would have allowed the more gifted female students to pursue their education beyond the standard primary curriculum. According to one member, such a program would not only provide the girls with a lengthier education, it would also enable the schools to teach students about subjects such as hygiene and home economics, topics that were becoming increasingly fashionable in girls’ education. But the well-known author Théodore Reinach, a member of the commission, disagreed. “What use would there be in pushing girls beyond primary schools?” he asked, arguing that any additional money could be better 26  “L’Extension de l’instruction religieuse,” Univers israélite (hereafter cited as UI), July 19, 1903, 488. 27  Inspection Report, Ecole Fleur, January 18, 1878, ACIP, F2 (Ecoles 1874–78); Report on the Spelling Competition, Comité des Ecoles, 1881, ACIP, F3 (Ecoles 1879–1882). 28  See, for example, Inspection Report, Ecole Fleur, January 18, 1878, ACIP, F2 (Ecoles 1874–78); Report on the Ecole Halphen, December 15, 1878, ACIP, F2 (Ecoles 1874–78); Report on the Spelling Competition, H. Heumann, Comité de Ecoles, 1881, ACIP, F3 (Ecoles 1879–1882); Inspection Report of Mr. Guillaume Beer on the Ecole Halphen, January 8, 1883, ACIP, F4 (Ecoles 1883–1885).

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used for “more urgent” improvements in the schools. The Commission sided with Reinach, for none of the members saw serious efforts to raise the level of girls’ education as sufficiently ‘urgent.’ Similarly, when one of the consistorial schools took up the issue of opening a cours complémentaire for girls in 1905, it, too, tabled the plan. Although the school’s board of directors agreed that instituting the courses would be an excellent move, it decided that the time was not propitious for committing to new expenses.29 More advanced instruction for girls was unable to rise to the top of the consistorial schools’ list of priorities. The time devoted to various subjects, the content of the curricula, and the rigor of the instruction in the consistorial schools all transmitted distinct messages about what Franco-Jewry considered important for Jewish boys and girls, and, correspondingly, what roles it considered appropriate for Jewish men and women. By providing any kind of systematic religious instruction for girls, the Jewish community made clear that it took the role of religion—defined more broadly than simple obedience to relevant Jewish laws—in women’s lives more seriously than it had in the past. At the same time, by allocating more time and resources to boys’ education, it also made clear that male religious knowledge retained its primacy over female religious knowledge and practice. Similarly, the very fact that girls received a basic secular education represented a leap forward, but again, the relative weakness of the girls’ instruction indicated that women should not strive for intellectual advancement. Because neither extensive religious training nor rigorous academic teaching would be directly useful to girls in their future roles as wives, mothers, and workers, the overall level of the girls’ schools simply did not have to match that of the boys’ school. The preparation and the end results proved mutually reinforcing. Although the consistorial schools most directly reflected the concerns and priorities of Parisian Jews, they educated only a minority of the capital’s growing Jewish population, and the public Jewish schools also served as an important resource for the community. Prior to the secularization of the French public school system, the experience of girls in these schools differed little from the consistorial institutions. First and foremost, the overall programs of instruction were very similar.30 Because the private Jewish schools incorporated 29  Minutes of the Commission d’Inspection, December 20, 1898, ACIP, F8 (Ecoles 1895–1908); Minutes of the Ecole Lucien de Hirsch, January 7, 1905, ACIP, FF3 (Ecole Lucien de Hirsch, Procès-Vervaux, 1900–1906). 30  The French public school curriculum was highly regulated by the State. The Guizot Law established the primary school curriculum for boys, and the Pelet Law of June 23, 1836, set the curriculum for girls; see Anne Therese Quartararo, “The ‘Ecoles Normales Primaires d’Institutrices’: A Social History of Women Primary School Teachers in France, 1879–1905”

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some subjects the state system reserved for the higher primary schools, such as linear design, singing, and some history and geography, at least some of their students received a more substantial education than did their public-school counterparts. Particularly in the early years, however, many of these additional subjects were reserved for boys, with the girls’ curriculum largely paralleling that of the ordinary public primary schools. Until the 1880s, religious teaching, too, was similar in the consistorial and public Jewish primary schools. Until secularization, religion and moral instruction retained their primacy at the top of the list of required subjects in French primary schools. Because the system of confessional public instruction aimed specifically to maintain tight links between religion and primary schooling, no attempt was made to remove Jewish influence from the Jewish schools when they were municipalized. Rabbis supervised the religious instruction, which was given not simply according to Jewish guidelines but also by Jewish teachers, lay or rabbinic. Although detailed records of the religious instruction do not exist, the high degree of control by and involvement of the Jewish authorities suggests that the Hebrew, Jewish catechism, and religious history studied by children at public Jewish schools likely bore a strong resemblance to that taught in the consistorial schools. Under these circumstances, the imbalance between girls’ and boys’ religious instruction characteristic of the consistorial schools was replicated in the public schools. Following secularization in the early 1880s, the similarities between the Jewish public schools and the consistorial schools began to wane, as all teaching of Hebrew, Jewish history, and catechism was removed from the public institutions and the Consistories lost the right to supervise and inspect the schools. Although the student body remained overwhelmingly Jewish, as did the personnel until the late 1890s, parents could no longer expect their children to absorb a full picture of Judaism and Jewish life from attending these schools. As the formerly Jewish public schools came to resemble more and more the majority of French public schools, the Jewish education of girls, who outside of school were less encouraged than boys to attend religious services and did not receive instruction for a Bar Mitzvah (the Bat Mitzvah did not yet exist), suffered in particular.

(Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1982), 42. The curriculum established by the Falloux Law left the basic subjects in place, adding only several potential supplementary subjects.

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Distribution des prix: Teaching and Rewarding Gender Differences

At the end of each school year, students from the various Jewish schools competed for prizes in individual subjects, as well as for prizes for overall performance and conduct.31 Money prizes, in the form of savings passbooks, were given to those children who received their certificats d’études, or primary school certificates; as an incentive to parents to keep their children in school longer, such prizes were also given to those students who, having received their certificats the previous year, had remained in school and done well. Students received their awards in formal ceremonies, complete with speeches, hymns in both Hebrew and French, and a “prayer for the fatherland.”32 The prizes reflected Franco-Jewry’s priorities for male and female education. Prizes were given to children of both sexes in all the secular branches of instruction and for religious history and catechism, validating the importance these subjects were considered to have for girls and boys. Only boys, however, competed for prizes in Hebrew.33 The lack of public recognition of girls’ achievements in Hebrew reinforced to all concerned that while the historical, ethical, and spiritual aspects of Judaism were necessary to all children, the linguistic skills required for participating in services and engaging in textual study were important only for boys. Even more than the prizes for individual subjects, special prizes endowed by prominent members of the Jewish community helped to shape children’s specific goals and aspirations. The children were generally tested in the same subjects as they were for the standard awards, with the addition of sewing for the girls; only the boys’ prizes required an exam in Hebrew.34 But the special prizes imposed a variety of less concrete criteria, indicating to the children the behavior they should emulate and the kind of future for which they should 31  Prior to secularization, students from the consistorial and municipal Jewish schools participated in the distributions des prix together; following secularization, only the consistorial schools took part. 32  See, among many others, the “Programme de la Distribution des Prix aux Elèves des Ecoles Consistoriales Israélites de Paris,” ACIP, F4 (Ecoles 1883–1885); “Nouvelles Diverses,” Archives israélites (hereafter cited as AI), August 20, 1885, 263; “Instruction Publique: Distribution des Prix aux Ecoles Consistoriales,” AI, July 30, 1891, 244–7. 33  For the subjects for which students were given prizes, see the records of the yearly distributions des prix in ACIP, F3 (Ecoles 1879–82), F4 (Ecoles 1883–5), F5 (Ecoles 1886–9), F6 (Ecoles 1890), F7 (Ecoles 1893–6). 34  See, for example, the records of the competition for the girls’ Prix Bettina de Rothschild and the boys’ Prix Azvedo-Valery and Oppenheimer and the boys’ scholarships to the Ecole Commerciale, ACIP, F7 (Ecoles 1893–6).

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aim. For both the girls’ and the boys’ prizes, the basic requirement beyond success on the exams was steady performance at school and exemplary conduct throughout the year. Some prizes were open only to students who had received their certificats d’études, and some also required the children to have celebrated their initiation religieuse, a ceremony roughly equivalent to confirmation introduced into France in the 1840s.35 The moral and material situation of the students’ families was also taken into account; only children from needy but respectable families were eligible. The girls’ prizes, however, were even more pointed than the boys’ in their expectations of the recipients’ behavior, both prior to and after receiving the award. Explicitly intending the prizes to facilitate marriage, communal leaders often described them as providing a dowry to a poor but deserving girl. The Prix Hauser, for example, was intended for “the student who, by her wide-ranging merit, promises to become a distinguished young lady and later a model wife, a Jewish woman worthy of the name,” suggesting that only being a model wife made one worthy of the name of ‘Jewish woman.’36 Recipients gained access to the cash portion of their prizes only at the time of their weddings, although girls who did not marry could receive their money at the time of their establishment in their chosen profession. Each year a high-ranking member of the Consistory or the School Committee delivered a lengthy address to the audience at the distribution des prix. In these speeches, school authorities not only exhorted the children to apply themselves diligently to their studies and to behave well at home and at school, but also elaborated on general issues of ideological importance to the French Jewish community and specific ideas about proper male and female roles. The most common theme of the speeches was patriotic duty. One of the fundamental aims of the Jewish school system was to inculcate in the students a deep-seated patriotism, and year after year speakers emphasized the love and devotion their audience owed the fatherland. Many of their points applied equally to male and female listeners. When, for example, Edouard Kohn, vice president of the School Committee, stressed in 1885 that many students had benefited personally from France’s well-known hospitality to its immigrant population, the reference would have resonated with both boys and girls, as well as with their parents. Two and a half decades later, Louis Mayer continued the same theme, exclaiming:

35  For more information in the initiation religieuse, see my “ ‘Our religious future,’ ” chapter 5. 36  Distribution des Prix, July 23, 1894, ACIP, F7 (Ecoles 1893–6).

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Jews of Russia, of Poland, of Palestine, of elsewhere, you are today above all French. . . . You have called for help, and France has opened its doors to you. Love it for the freedom it has given you.37 The patriotic fervor that school authorities worked so hard to inculcate in the students, however, often had quite different nuances for men and women. In his 1885 speech, Edouard Kohn emphasized the benefits that accrued to Jews from living in a country in which all careers were open to talent, regardless of birth or religion; Jews in France, he pointed out, were represented “in all the branches of active life,” including the army, the magistrature, science, the arts, literature, the liberal professions, commerce, industry, finance, and crafts. But the doors to most of these professions were closed to women; while they benefited from the opportunities open to their husbands, fathers, and brothers, their gratitude to France would necessarily be of a different nature from that of their male counterparts. Similarly, with many of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship—voting, holding office, military service, etc.—reserved for men, obeying Kohn’s urging to “attach [themselves] to this generous land and make efforts to become worthy citizens of this great country” meant something very different for girls and boys. Kohn himself recognized this fact when he concluded by addressing himself directly to the girls: “The delicate sentiment innate to your sex will make you discern which part [of this speech] applies to you.”38 Théodore Reinach’s 1898 speech, too, made broad references to aspects of French history and politics that had very different meanings for males and females. Exclaiming that “there are no more subjects in France, only citizens,” Reinach celebrated the fact that “today, everyone can vote and run for office, everyone makes the law instead of only submitting to it.”39 The role of primary education, he argued, was to prepare future citizen-voters to understand and fulfill their civic duties. His words, however, must have resonated very differently with his female listeners, who knew they would never cast a vote, never be elected to public office, never participate in the making of law. What were girls supposed to think as they heard that the very rationale behind schooling was to train children for tasks they themselves would never perform?

37  “Distribution des prix aux écoles consistoriales,” AI, August 27, 1885, 278; “Distributions des prix des écoles,” UI, July 21, 1911, 593–4. 38  “Distribution des prix aux écoles consistoriales,” AI, August 27, 1885, 278. 39  “Discours prononcé à la distribution des prix des Ecoles consistoriales israélites de Paris,” UI, July 19, 1898, 589.

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Speakers at the prize ceremonies also worked to steer children explicitly into gender roles that conformed to nineteenth-century separate spheres ideology. Eugène Manuel’s 1887 speech was typical. In keeping with contemporary ideas about male and female nature, Manuel associated the boys with wage-earning activities in the public sphere, the girls with sacrifice and maternal duties in the private sphere: “In these happy pupils in front of us,” he declaimed: We see men, workers, citizens, soldiers, fathers of families; in these young, graceful girls who breathe in life through their lips and their eyes, we glimpse women, mothers sitting in front of the hearth, serving as good examples, ready for great sacrifices!40 Although most working-class women had little time to sit in front of the fire, Manuel emphasized this bourgeois gender division of labor as an ideal towards which all should strive. Listening to his words, the girls might well have felt torn between what communal leaders told them was their duty and what they envisioned as a more realistic future. Edouard Kohn’s speech four years later retained a strong conviction that men’s and women’s destinies differed. He urged the children to remain virtuous, honest, and honorable, regardless of their status in life, “whether you choose one of the liberal professions, or are salaried, an artisan, a worker, or a peasant.” A few paragraphs later, he recognized that his earlier words did not reflect the likely future of his female listeners. “And you, my dear girls,” he said, “I know well that such tasks do not accord with the delicacy of your sex.” Yet Kohn hinted that, in this fin de siècle, women were on the verge of considerable change, for he continued: In addition to the employments that have been your sort until now, others have been created and are being given to women, such as the Post Office, the Telegraph, and the Telephone; even financial establishments willingly resort to your fingers, more delicate and adroit than the calloused hands of men. Kohn’s words not only testified to the growth in white-collar employment of women, they also helped the community at large see such employment as normal and even desirable.41 40  “Distribution des prix aux élèves des écoles consistoriales de Paris,” UI, August 16, 1887, 711. 41  “Distribution des prix aux écoles consistoriales,” AI, July 30, 1891, 245.

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Like the curriculum, then, the messages embedded in the prize ceremonies were by no means static. Indeed, they fluctuated according to French and Franco-Jewish views on patriotism and national identity, the socio-economic profile of the Jewish community, and appropriate employment for Jewish children. Yet certain themes remained constant. Contrary to earlier educational norms for both sexes within the Jewish community, all children were expected and encouraged to do well in their secular studies, as evidenced by the fact that girls and boys were rewarded for receiving their certificats d’études and for continuing in school. At the same time, taught by their classes, their exams and prizes, and the speeches they heard to set their sights on a far more restricted sphere than their brothers, girls regularly received the message that their academic achievements were less important than those of their male counterparts; told that they were destined for a life revolving largely around home and family, they were given little incentive to achieve academically. Similarly, the strong emphasis Jewish school authorities placed on patriot­ ism for all children contrasted with previous Jewish norms. Prior to the nineteenth century, when Jews and non-Jews alike had considered the Jewish community to be a separate ‘nation’ within France, neither boys nor girls were expected to develop a strong loyalty to the country in which they lived. Now devotion to the patrie on the part of both sexes was vital to the Franco-Jewish project of successful integration into the surrounding society. But communal leaders made clear that girls’ and boys’ patriotism was to be experienced and expressed in significantly different ways. Regulations for the girls’ special awards and the words of prize ceremony speakers taught girls that they should demonstrate their love of country by becoming devoted wives and mothers, nurturing their families, and raising their children to be productive, civicminded, patriotic French citizens; unlike in traditional Jewish communities, girls were not encouraged to see themselves as breadwinners. Boys, on the other hand, should express their attachment to France through actions in the public sphere. 4 Conclusion In the decades following emancipation, Jewish communal leaders became convinced that the education of girls was crucial to solving the key dilemma of nineteenth-century Franco-Jewry: how to ensure that becoming French did not mean discarding Judaism. Influenced by the views of the surrounding society that saw women as inherently more religious than men and as the primary

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vehicles of cultural transmission, they fretted that without a properly balanced education, girls would grow up ill-equipped for this crucial task. As the patterns of instruction in Paris’s Jewish primary schools indicate, however, the vast majority of French Jews, rather than accepting a radically new gender ideology, instead melded contemporary French and traditional Jewish ideas about proper gender roles. These schools dispensed an education to girls that differed dramatically from that of their foremothers, who had learned most of what they needed to be good wives, mothers, and Jews by following the example of female relatives in the home. In public and private Jewish primary schools of the nineteenth century, girls acquired a religious knowledge different in both nature and degree from that characteristic of earlier generations of Jewish women. They became familiar with Jewish history and morality and studied new Jewish catechisms that enumerated duties toward others, toward God, and toward the nation. But while these provisions reflected the influence of general French ideas about religion, they fell far short of the more intense spirituality cultivated in Catholic women, of the central position nineteenth-century French Catholicism expected women to play in their religious community, and of the religious instruction dispensed to Jewish boys. Jewish communal leaders, fearful of their religious future in an increasingly secularized society, expressed the hope that increased knowledge would enable women to act as the mainstays of the religion, as appeared to be happening in the Catholic community. Yet they never fully equipped girls to pursue the religious scholarship that, in contrast to Catholicism, traditionally lay at the heart of Jewish religious identity. Neither those who supervised the Jewish school system nor the majority of Jewish parents had completely discarded Jewish traditions that privileged male over female religious knowledge and observance. The fact that Franco-Jewry was able to reconcile what would earlier have been contradictory positions—that men were more important religiously but women were the mainstays of the Jewish community—hints at significant transformations in the nature of Jewish identity itself. In a progressively more secular world, the traditional male province of religious scholarship seemed increasingly irrelevant to many, if not most, Jews. Under such circumstances, the fact that young Jewish children of both sexes continued to absorb the message that boys should be more religiously knowledgeable than girls was not incompatible with Jewish women’s adoption of the primary responsibility for the maintenance of a family’s Jewish identity. The changing educational norms within working-class French Jewry accorded well with the move of the primary locus of Jewishness away from intricate knowledge of Jewish law and

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writings to a family’s social circle, the foods eaten, and the holidays and cultural traditions observed, all of which lay within women’s domain. Despite the relative weakness of their religious instruction, then, Jewish girls’ education did indeed help to shape a modern Franco-Jewish identity, albeit in ways unanticipated by communal leaders.

Chapter 4

A Jurisprudential Quandary: Jewish Marriage in Post-Separation France1 Zvi Jonathan Kaplan 1 Introduction On December 11, 1905, President Emile Loubet officially promulgated the law on separation, thus ending the official recognition and subsidization of religious bodies in France.2 Yet, despite passage of the separation law, many French and foreign-born Jews remained subject to the constraints of Jewish religious family law. Marriage was a particularly complex area with regard to the principle of the religious neutrality of the state because marriage was both a civil institution that fell under the jurisdiction of the state and a religious ritual that fell under the jurisdiction of the rabbinate. Furthermore, even after 1905, foreign law and not French law technically applied to the thousands of foreign Jewish nationals residing in France with regard to matters relating to personal status, and as a result, they could not rely on French civil authorities to terminate their marriages. In this chapter, I address the innovative halakhic efforts of the French rabbinate to harmonize Jewish and civil divorce law. I also explore how the French civil courts struggled to balance the dictates of French law, which promoted the secularization of marriage, and foreign law, which often reflected the principles of religious law. In a review of the relevant case law, I demonstrate how the courts, to the consternation of the Jewish community, were slow to resolve these tensions, which led to the denial of civil protections to foreigners in France.

1  I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Jewish Studies for granting me permission to reprint passages from my article “A Marital Dilemma: French Courts, Foreign Jews and the Secularization of Marriage,” in Journal of Jewish Studies 64, no. 2 (2013): 365–82. 2  On secularization and the separation of church and state, see Jean-Marie Mayeur, La question laïque (Paris: Fayard, 1997) and John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

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A Rabbinic Proposal and Judicial Decision

Within two years after the passage of the separation law, the Union des Rabbins Français,3 the rabbinic body of the Jewish consistories, attempted to bridge the gap between civil and Jewish law in the realm of divorce.4 The republican government had reestablished civil divorce in 1884.5 Although Judaism, unlike Catholicism, permits divorce, it must follow a specific procedure. In order for a Jewish divorce to be valid, the husband has to deliver to his wife a religious bill of divorce, a get. If a husband refuses to give his wife a get, according to Jewish law she remains married to him even after she has obtained a civil divorce. Such a woman is known as an agunah or chained woman because she is figuratively speaking chained to her recalcitrant spouse. If she remarries civilly before obtaining a religious divorce, she is committing adultery according to Jewish law, and any children conceived from her second husband are deemed illegitimate. On the other hand, because biblical law does not prohibit polygamy, a man who remarries without a get does not technically commit adultery, and any children conceived from his second wife are not classified as illegitimate. The refusal of husbands to free their wives after a civil divorce illuminated a lack of harmony between the Jewish and the French legal systems and presented an ethical dilemma for French rabbis. The rabbis attempted to resolve this legal and ethical quandary through the introduction of conditional marriages. On June 12, 1907, at the conference of the Union des Rabbins Français, Rabbi Joseph Lehmann, director of the Ecole Rabbinique, introduced a resolution to require conditional marriages. At the marriage ceremony, the bridegroom would proclaim that his bride is betrothed to him on the condition that she would not be left an agunah (chained woman) on account of him, and that if the French courts were to grant a divorce, the marriage would be retroactively void. The members of the Union adopted the proposal but voted to delay its implementation for six months.6 As Lehmann subsequently clarified in a letter 3  In 1907, the Union des Rabbins Français changed its name to the Association des Rabbins Français. 4  On earlier attempts to bridge civil and Jewish family law, see Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and Problem of Church and State (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2009). 5  During the course of the French Revolution, in 1792, the National Assembly introduced civil divorce. In 1816, after the Restoration, Louis XVIII abolished civil divorce. 6  L’Univers israélite 62, pt. 2 (1907): 430–3; Judah Lubetzki, Ein Tnai Be-Nisuin (Warsaw: KrinesKubelski, 1930), 12.

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published in Les Archives israélites de France, his proposal did not call for the abolition of religious divorce. Rabbis would still request that husbands grant their wives a get. They would only declare a conditional marriage void when a husband did not succumb to rabbinic pressure to grant his spouse a religious divorce.7 Reaction to Lehmann’s proposal for conditional marriages from non-Union rabbis was swift. Even before Lehmann had formally introduced his proposal at the rabbinic conference, Rabbi Judah Lubetzki,8 the Russian-born rabbi of the Orthodox Eastern European Jewish immigrant community in Paris, denounced it. When Lubetzki heard that Lehmann intended to propose the introduction of conditional marriages, he wrote to him a long letter in Hebrew urging him to reconsider.9 Lubetzki did not see a need to reconcile Jewish and French divorce law. As he noted, the Catholic Church had not harmonized Catholicism with French law. On the contrary, Catholicism, unlike Judaism, did not permit divorce.10 Furthermore, he argued that a change in an area as sensitive as marital law required the input and consent of the renowned sages worldwide and not just a group of French rabbis.11 Both in his personal letter to Lehmann written before the conference and in an open letter published in the French Jewish press afterward, Lubetzki explained that rabbis, in the past, had employed conditional marriage very sparingly. In those few cases where rabbis had permitted conditional marriages, the circumstances were totally different than they were in modern France. The Union des Rabbins Français wanted to uniformly introduce conditional marriages in France to prevent a potential problem associated with divorce; during the Middle Ages, the rabbis had allowed conditional marriages in very limited circumstances in order to prevent an unavoidable problem associated with childless widows.12 According to biblical law, when a man dies childless, his brother must either marry the widow (that is, perform his leviratic duty) or release her through the ceremony of halitsah (removal).13 If the brother-in-law does not wish to marry his brother’s widow and desires to release her, he must proclaim in front of the rabbinate, “I do not want to marry her,” and the widow must then remove his 7    Les Archives israélites de France 68 (1907): 203. 8   There are many variations of the spelling of his last name. I have chosen the one that he used in his letters to the French Jewish press. 9   Lubetzki, Ein Tnai Be-Nisuin, 5–11. 10  Ibid., 6. 11  Ibid., 9–10. 12  Lubetzki, Ein Tnai Be-Nisuin, 8–9; L’Univers israélite 62, pt. 2 (1907): 494–5. 13  French law prohibited Levirate Marriage. See Roger Berg and Marianne Urbah-Bornstein, Les Juifs devant le droit français: Législation et jurisprudence fin 19e à nos jours (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1984), 171.

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sandal, spit in his face, and proclaim, “Thus shall be done to the man who will not build up his brother’s house!”14 When, at the time of the marriage, it was already known that the bridegroom’s brother was either missing or an apostate and so could not or would not perform halitsah, some rabbinic authorities had permitted the use of a conditional clause in the declaration of marriage.15 This clause retroactively annulled the marriage in the event that circumstances required halitsah. Unlike those authorities who had permitted the use of a conditional clause in limited circumstances, the Union wanted to introduce a conditional clause in all marriages in order to prevent a potential problem associated with divorce. In addition to presenting his halakhic objections to conditional marriage, Lubetzki also voiced concern that the Union’s proposal threatened the morals of the community. In his view, subjecting the solemn act of marriage to conditions would weaken respect for the institution. He asked, “What authority will the sanction of religious marriage have in the eyes of Jewish spouses and families if a court composed of non-Jews is enough to break the sacred bonds?”16 Similarly, another non-Union rabbi, Rabbi Moïse Weiskopf, leader of the Communauté Israélite de la Stricte Observance, asserted that the conditional marriage clause would degrade the institution of marriage by undermining the permanent nature of the marital covenant.17 By performing a conditional marriage, a rabbi was effectively telling the couple that “The union that you are contracting at this moment before God and man will be dissolved even after years of communal existence by the effect of these fateful words, and each of you will regain your complete and entire freedom.”18 Furthermore, Weiskopf contended that conditional marriage would dampen the joy of the marriage ceremony, a concern shared by the Hippolyte Prague, editor of the religiously liberal journal Archives israélites.19 As Weiskopf lamented: At the moment when one celebrates the union of two hearts beating as one, where feelings of security and hope in a happy future fill the soul of the young couple, we would tell them: This is the sad eventuality that may one day break the union and happiness that await you.20

14  Deuteronomy 25:5–10 (NJPS). 15  See Moses Isserles’ gloss on Shulhan Arukh, Even ha-Ezer, 157: 4. 16   L’Univers israélite 62, pt. 2 (1907): 495. 17  Ibid., 524. 18  Ibid., 525. 19   Les Archives israélites de France 68 (1907): 204. 20   L’Univers israélite 62, pt. 2 (1907): 525.

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In a series of letters to the religiously conservative journal Univers israélite, Mathieu Wolff, rabbi of Sedan and a member of the Union, responded to the opponents of conditional marriage. He asserted that the absence of harmony between civil and Jewish law in the area of divorce had created an intolerable situation for many divorcees. He emphasized that the purpose of a conditional clause was not, as the opponents of conditional marriage had proclaimed, to dispense with religious divorces. Rather, the purpose was to enable the rabbis to annul marriages in those cases where a civilly divorced husband refused to grant his wife a get. He argued that it was not the French (consistorial) rabbinate that threatened the sanctity of marriage but rather the short-sighted and faint-hearted rabbis who did not appreciate the gravity of the situation. To shun the formula would force the victims of recalcitrant husbands to choose between remaining alone or remarrying civilly without a get, violating the laws of adultery, and giving birth to illegitimate children.21 Notwithstanding the arguments for conditional marriage, the Union des Rabbins Français ultimately dropped the proposal in the face of opposition from leading European rabbinic authorities.22 Despite the absence of a halakhic solution, French courts occasionally intervened on behalf of the victims of recalcitrant husbands. One well-known case involved a couple in French Algeria. In 1904, a civil court granted Rachel Lévy and David Toubiana23 a divorce. Toubiana, however, refused to give his wife a religious divorce. In 1905, Lévy asked the Tribunal of Bône to require Toubiana to grant her a get or to pay her damages. In 1906, the Tribunal ruled that civil courts could not intervene in matters of religion, and Lévy appealed to the Court of Appeal of Algiers. In 1908, the Court of Appeal reversed the lower court’s decision. The court distinguished between an order to perform a religious act and award of damages for the consequences of not performing such an act. By refusing to grant Lévy a get, Toubiana, who had even remarried, had inflicted ongoing harm on Lévy. While the court acknowledged that it could not order Toubiana to grant a religious divorce, it ruled that it could compel him to pay damages. It therefore awarded Lévy 5000 Francs, to be reduced to 1000 if Toubiana granted Lévy a religious divorce within a month.24 If by intervening in a religious affair and by applying French tort law the court aided Lévy, the refusal of courts to apply French law to foreign 21  Ibid., 553–8, 588–91. 22  Lubetzki collected the responsa of these authorities in Ein Tnai Be-Nisuin. 23  In L’Univers israélite, the name is spelled Tubiana. 24   Lévy v. Toubiana, Cour d’Alger, April 9, 1908, Journal du droit international 36 (1909): 740–2; L’Univers israélite 63, pt. 2 (1908): 208–9.

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marriages made divorce more difficult for foreign-born Jews. Indeed, in 1905, the same year that Lévy brought her case before the lower court, France’s Supreme Court, the Court of Cassation, delivered a critical ruling that denied civil protections to Russian Jews in the area of family law. 3

The Levinçon Decree

The Civil Code of the Russian Empire ordained that marriage and divorce were the responsibilities of each confession. Russian Jews who wished to marry required a religious marriage, and those who desired to legally terminate their marriages required a religious divorce, a get. In contrast, French law mandated that a civil marriage precede any subsequent (and optional) religious ceremony. Likewise, the French code mandated a civil divorce to legally terminate a marriage. However, because Russian law technically applied to Russian nationals in France in matters relating to personal status, neither Russian Jews nor Russian non-Jews could rely on French civil authorities to divorce.25 On May 29, 1905, just as Russian Jewish immigration began to surge in the wake of the 1905 failed revolution,26 the Court of Cassation took an important step towards ending all Russian Jewish divorces in France. In 1894, Henriette Heimann, a French citizen, married Mr. Levinçon,27 a Russian national, both civilly before a government official and religiously in a Jewish ceremony. In 1901, Henriette Levinçon asked the Civil Tribunal of the Seine, the area where she and most Jewish immigrants resided, to grant her a divorce. Mr. Levinçon challenged the lower court’s right to terminate the marriage before the Court 25  On Jewish marriage in the Russian Empire, see ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002). For a summary (in French) of several important court decisions relating to the marital status of Russian and Austrian Jews, see Berg and Urbah-Bornstein, Les Juifs devant le droit français, 178–85, 223–31. See also Ernest G. Lorenzen, “The French Rules of the Conflict of Laws,” Yale Law Journal 37, no. 7 (1928): 849–73. 26  Approximately 40,000 Eastern European Jews arrived in France between 1881 and 1914. The first wave followed the pogroms of 1881; the second wave followed the failure of the revolution in Russia in 1905. On Eastern European immigration to France, see Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 201–6; Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 116–7; Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Littman Library of Civilization, 2008), 30. 27  French courts often identified the litigants by their surnames only.

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of Appeal of Paris on the grounds that Tribunal did not have the authority to pronounce a divorce between Russian Jews.28 On March 17, 1902, the Court of Appeal ruled in favor of Mr. Levinçon.29 Mrs. Levinçon appealed her case to the Court of Cassation. On May 29, 1905, the Court of Cassation rejected Mrs. Levinçon’s appeal and reaffirmed the decision of the Court of Appeal.30 The Supreme Court acknowledged that the existence of a diplomatic treaty could confer upon foreigners the right to seek redress from a French court. However, the 1874 Franco–Russian Diplomatic Convention, which granted Russian nationals in France free access to French tribunals, did not apply in this case because Russian law specifically granted religious authorities sole jurisdiction over the marriage and divorce of Russian subjects. And, as the court confirmed, both Mr. and Mrs. Levinçon were indeed Russian nationals. Although Mrs. Levinçon was once a French citizen, according to Russian law, she acquired her husband’s nationality when she married him.31 Furthermore, even though they married both religiously and civilly, their French civil marriage, while recognized by French law, did not grant the court jurisdiction over their divorce. They were still subject to Russian law. Although more than twenty years had passed since the reestablishment of civil divorce in 1884, and despite the republican government’s renewed anticlerical campaign in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, the Court of Cassation effectively affirmed that the principle of the secularization of marriage was not absolute. Foreigners living in France could not simply invoke this principle and expect their marriages to fall under the jurisdiction of the French courts. At the same time, as the court explained, because Russian divorce was by its very essence a religious act, it could not choose to enforce Russian law because French courts were not qualified to meddle in religious affairs. Thus the Supreme Court proclaimed that French courts could not grant Russian Jewish immigrants a divorce.

28  Despite Russian law, until 1902 French courts routinely granted Russian Jews divorces. 29   Levinçon v. Levinçon, App. Paris, March 17, 1902, Journal du droit international 30 (1903): 342–50. 30   Levinçon v. Levinçon, Cass. (civil), May 29, 1905, Journal du droit international 32 (1905): 1006–9. 31  Although the court did not explicitly refer to it, Article 19 of the Napoleonic Code also states that “A Frenchwoman, who shall espouse a foreigner, shall follow the condition of her husband.” See www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/code/book1/c_title01. html#chapter1 (accessed January 20, 2016).

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Although the Levinçon case involved Russian Jews, French courts dealt similarly with non-Jewish foreign residents in France. For example, in Stankiewicz v. Stankiewicz, both the lower and appeal courts refused to grant a Christian Russian couple a civil divorce. The Stankiewiczs, like the Levinçons, married both civilly before an officer of the French state and religiously. The court ruled that they were subject to Russian law, which granted ecclesiastical tribunals the sole authority to pronounce a divorce. The court, as in the Levinçon decree, refused to enforce Russian law itself because Russian divorce was by its very essence a religious act, and French courts would not meddle in religious matters.32 The Levinçon decision placed those Russian Jewish immigrants seeking to terminate their marriages in a difficult position. Although French courts did assert jurisdiction over issues such as custody, alimony and child support,33 they would not grant a civil divorce, and Russian Jews could only terminate their marriages with a religious divorce. Furthermore, in a 1907 decision, the Court of Appeal of Paris upheld a lower court decision to deny Mrs. Levinçon even a legal separation because Russian law did not recognize legal separation but only (religious) divorce.34 4

Impediments to Obtaining Divorce

The Archives israélites and the Univers israélite reported on the various court rulings regarding the legal status of foreign marriages.35 Although they both had supported the separation of church and state,36 only the Univers israélite protested the court decisions. The Archives israélites merely cited and summarized them, perhaps regarding the rulings as more about conflicting jurisdictions rather than about the church and state question and Jewish law. In a 1908 editorial, the Univers israélite argued that the rulings conflicted with 32   Stankiewicz v. Stankiewicz, Trib. civ. Seine, July 13, 1911; App. Paris, January 26, 1914, Journal du droit international 44 (1917): 602–7. 33  See, for example, Levinçon v. Levinçon, App. Paris, December 31, 1907, Journal du droit international 35 (1908): 518–23; Pessac-Lévin v. Pessac-Lévin, App. Paris, December 26, 1912, Journal du droit international, 41 (1914): 180–2. 34   Levinçon v. Levinçon (as in fn. 33). 35  See, for example, Les Archives israélites de France 67 (1906): 142; L’Univers israélite 63, pt. 1 (1907–08): 613–7. 36  On the Jewish Press and the separation of church and state, see Jean Laloum, “La Séparation au regard de la press israélite,” in Vers la Liberté Religieuse: la séparation des Églises et de l’État, ed. Philippe Boutry and André Encrevé (Bordeaux: Bière, 2006), 67–87.

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the French policy of separating the religious and civil spheres. When French Catholics sought to civilly divorce or remarry, the courts did not consider the Catholic approach to divorce; they merely enforced civil law. Likewise, when a French Jewish woman sought to remarry, the Officer of the Civil Registry did not inquire whether she had received a get, a Jewish bill of divorce. Yet, by applying foreign law, the courts subjected an entire segment of the population, foreign nationals in France, to religious criteria for divorce and remarriage. Because rabbis could not coerce a man to grant his wife a get, a Jewish woman seeking to terminate her marriage was at the mercy of her spouse. While a reversal of the Levinçon decree would not resolve that religious dilemma, it would at least guarantee foreign women in France civil equality in the sphere of marriage with those women who were citizens. Until then, they had no legal remedy, which was a violation of the public policy that no litigant may be left without a judge.37 Even worse from the perspective of those seeking to end their marriages, after the separation law, it was impossible for Russian Jews to obtain a religious divorce in France legally recognized by Russia. Prior to the separation law, when French rabbis functioned as paid employees of the state, the Russian government recognized their divorces. With separation, French rabbis lost their official status, and the Russian embassy announced that Russia would no longer recognize their authority to pronounce divorces among its Jewish subjects in France.38 As a result of the Court of Cassation’s ruling and the Russian embassy’s declaration, neither secular nor religious French courts had jurisdiction over the realm of Russian Jewish divorce. From the perspective of the Supreme Court, Russian law applied, and only rabbinic courts could issue a divorce. However, French rabbinic courts no longer possessed any civil authority, and therefore Russia did not recognize their jurisdiction. Thus the only option available to Russian Jews in France was to return to Russia and obtain a divorce from Russian rabbis, which, needless to say, presented a severe hardship. 5

The Annulment Loophole: The Mosticzker Case

Although the pronouncements of the French courts and Russian embassy prevented Russian Jews from obtaining a divorce in France, the Court of Cassation 37   L’Univers israélite 63, pt. 1 (1907–08): 613–7. 38  Observations de Me Tchernoff sur les actes d’état civil des Juifs Russes en France, in Brandeis University Archives, Consistoire Israélite Collection, I. 4 c.

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issued a ruling on October 30, 1905 that provided an opening for Russian Jews to terminate their marriages. In many ways, the facts of the case were similar to the Levinçon case. In 1902, Emilie Philippe Mosticzker, an Austrian national, asked the Civil Tribunal of the Seine to pronounce a divorce from her Austrian husband Alphonse Mosticzker.39 They had married civilly, though not religiously, two years earlier in Paris. Mr. Mosticzker argued that the Austrian Civil Code, which prohibited divorce for Catholics, permitted Jews to divorce only by mutual consent or on the grounds of the wife’s adultery.40 In effect, the Austrian code imposed the conditions of Jewish law for divorce, and Jewish law did not allow a wife to unilaterally divorce her husband even for cause. Mrs. Mosticzker, however, asserted that because she and her husband had only married civilly, and not religiously as required of Jews in Austria, that they were not subject to the conditions imposed on Jews for divorce. The Austrian code treated Jews who renounced their religion as non-Catholic Christians for the purposes of divorce and allowed a wife to divorce her husband for cause. The lower court accepted Mrs. Mosticzker’s argument, and Mr. Mosticzker appealed to the Court of Appeal of Paris. The Court of Appeal overturned the lower court’s decision, and Mrs. Mosticzker appealed to the Court of Cassation.41 The Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the Court of Appeal.42 It reiterated that the personal status of foreigners was governed by their national law. Furthermore, it emphasized that the Mosticzkers’ French civil marriage did not affect their personal status, and that they remained subject to the Austrian rules for divorce. And, according to the Austrian code, as a Jew, Mrs. Mosticzker could not sue for divorce. Finally, the court rejected Mrs. Mosticzker’s contention that by marrying only civilly, she and her husband effectively renounced their religious affiliation and that thus she was permitted by Austrian law to divorce her husband for cause. The court declared that a civil marriage was not 39   Mosticzker v. Mosticzker, Trib. civ. Seine, May 18, 1903, Journal du droit international 31 (1904): 383–5. 40  On Austrian divorce law, see E. Tilsch, “Austrian Divorce Law,” Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation 12, no. 1 (1911): 44–51. On Jewish divorce, law and the state in the Habsburg monarchy, see Lois C. Dubin, The Port Jews of Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 174–97; Idem, “Jewish Women, Marriage Law, and Emancipation: The Civil Divorce of Rachele Morschene in Late Eighteenth-Century Trieste,” in Acculturation and Its Discontents, ed. David N. Myers et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 119–47. 41   Mosticzker v. Mosticzker, App. Paris, March 9, 1904, Journal du droit international 31 (1904): 678–9. 42   Mosticzker v. Mosticzker, Cass. (civil), October 30, 1905, Journal du droit international 33 (1906): 410–2.

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sufficient proof that a couple intended to disaffiliate from their religion and was not a legitimate substitute for the formal renunciation of religion required by Austrian law. On the surface, the court’s ruling reaffirmed the Levinçon decision. In the Levinçon case the court rejected a Russian Jewish woman’s request for a divorce, and in the Mosticzker case the court rejected an Austrian Jewish woman’s request for a divorce. Similarly, in the Levinçon case the court confirmed the foreign status of Mrs. Levinçon, and in the Mosticzker case the court confirmed the Jewish status of the Mosticzkers. The confirmation of Mrs. Levinçon’s foreign status subjected her to the Russian code on matters of personal status, and the confirmation of the Mosticzkers’ Jewish status subjected them to the Austrian regulations for Jewish divorce. As a Russian national, Mrs. Levinçon could not terminate her marriage with a civil divorce, and as an Austrian Jew, Mrs. Mosticzker could not unilaterally divorce her husband even for cause. Despite similar outcomes, there were notable differences between the two rulings. One difference had to do with the unique divorce laws of Russia and Austria. In the Mosticzker decision, because the Russian code conferred sole jurisdiction over Jewish divorces to the rabbis, the court refused to intervene. In the Mosticzker case, the court was theoretically able to enforce Austrian law because the Austrian code did not cede sole jurisdiction for Jewish divorce to the rabbis. Had Austrian law permitted Jewish women to unilaterally terminate their marriages, the court presumably would have granted Mrs. Mosticzker her divorce. On the other hand, even if the Levinçons had mutually agreed to divorce, the Supreme Court presumably would have refused to intervene and directed the couple to seek a divorce from the rabbinic courts. Furthermore, after passage of the separation law, as noted above, Russia only recognized the authority of Russian rabbinic courts to grant its Jewish subjects a divorce. Both the Levinçon and Mosticzker decrees conflicted with secularizing trends that dated back to the French Revolution. During the course of the French Revolution, the National Assembly had established civil marriage and divorce. French law, confirmed in the decree organizing the Jewish consistories, mandated that a civil marriage or divorce precede any subsequent (and optional) religious ceremony.43 In the Levinçon decision, the court acknowledged the validity of the Levinçons’ French civil marriage but argued that their subsequent religious marriage subjected them to Russia’s requirement for a religious divorce. In effect, the religious marriage took precedence. In 43  Décret impérial qui ordonne l’exécution d’un règlement du 10 décembre 1806, concernant les Juifs. A copy of the decree can be found in Roger Berg, Histoire du rabbinat français (Paris: Cerf, 1992), 211–4.

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the Mosticzker decision, the court did not even acknowledge the validity of the marriage. While the absence of such recognition was very much at odds with the principle of the secularization of marriage, it provided Mrs. Mosticzker an opening to end her marriage that was unavailable to Mrs. Levinçon. She sued for an annulment. On April 28, 1906, the Civil Tribunal of the Seine ruled that a civil marriage between two Austrians is to be considered null in the absence of a subsequent religious marriage.44 By applying Austrian law, this court decision granted Mrs. Mosticzker her freedom. At the same time, the court effectively restricted the principles of the marital regulations of the decree organizing the consistories to French Jews. That decree, as noted above, regarded civil marriage as authoritative and religious marriage as optional. In its Mosticzker ruling, rehearsing Austrian law, the Civil Tribunal of the Seine declared that religious marriage was authoritative, and civil marriage was optional. For foreigners, foreign law, not French law, was to take precedence. The following year, in Edinson v. Edinson, the Tribunal issued a similar ruling regarding two Russian Jews who had married only civilly. Using even sharper language than the previous year, it declared their marriage both null and non-existent.45 If the Levinçon decision created impediments for foreign Jews to divorce, the Tribunal’s Mosticzker decision, by requiring religious marriage, created impediments for foreign Jews to marry. Fortunately, for both Mrs. Mosticzker and Mr. Edinson, the absence of a religious marriage abrogated the necessity for a divorce. Nonetheless, without the legal protections of civil marriage and the remedy of civil divorce, thousands of Jews in France were living in very tenuous circumstances. While the Civil Tribunal of the Seine’s ruling provided relief for foreign Jews seeking to terminate their marriages, the relief was limited. Russian Jews in France who wanted to end their marriages still had to obtain a religious divorce from rabbinic authorities in Russia. Austrian Jews in France who married religiously could apply to the French courts for a divorce, but the courts subjected them to the Austrian regulations for Jewish divorce. These regulations were more restrictive than the French regulations for divorce and did not allow a woman to unilaterally terminate a marriage even for cause. Furthermore, subsequent rulings did not always conform to the 1906 and 1907 annulment decrees. On some occasions, the courts ruled that civil marriages among foreign Jews were valid. On other occasions, while not going as far to declare such 44   Mosticzker v. Mosticzker, Trib. civ. Seine, April 2, 1906, Journal du droit international 33 (1906): 1146–8. 45   Edinson v. Edinson, Trib civ. Seine, November 25, 1907, Journal du droit international 35 (1908): 1148–52.

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marriages valid, the courts ruled that a claim for annulment was inadmissible before a French court. 6

Application of French Public Policy to Marriages and Abolition of the Loophole: Roitstein v. Roitstein

On June 26, 1912, in Roitstein v. Roitstein, the Civil Tribunal of the Seine carved out an important exception to the rule that Russian Jews were subject to foreign law on matters of personal status.46 Mr. and Mrs. Roitstein, both Russian nationals, had married civilly in Paris 1905. In 1912, seeking to terminate his marriage, Mr. Roitstein asked the Tribunal for an annulment on the grounds that he had not married religiously as required by Russian law. The court rejected his request and decreed that it would not apply foreign law when such application was contrary to French public policy. Because the secularization of marriage was a principle of public policy, it would not allow a person to marry civilly before an officer of the state, as had Mr. Roitstein, and then to later claim that his failure to marry according to his national law voided the marriage. While such claims for annulment were inadmissible, the court refused to comment on the actual status of the civil marriage. The court did not give a specific reason for its shifting position on the civil marriage of foreigners, and there is no evidence that political considerations played a role. It is true that during the war years Catholics rallied to the Republic, and the Church downplayed its opposition the separation law. Yet that was not yet the case in 1912 and would not explain the court’s emphasis on the secularization of marriage at this time. It is possible that the court was sensitive to the emerging French feminist and suffrage movement, but there is no proof of that either. Rather, from the language of the decision, it appears that the court was simply exasperated by claimants who knowingly entered marriages that were not recognized by their national law, and then “later claiming the benefit of [their] national law [sought] to annul [those] marriage contracted before the Officer of the Civil Registry.” The court could not condone this deceptive legal ‘pretext’ for annulment.47 Because the court was moving in the direction of claiming jurisdiction over foreign marriages, some welcomed the Roitstein decree. For example, in his comments on the ruling, Gaston Cluzel, deputy chief clerk at the Ministry of 46   Roitstein v. Roitstein, Trib. civ. Seine, June 26, 1912, Journal du droit international 41 (1914): 202–4. 47  Ibid., 203.

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Justice, expressed his great satisfaction with the evolution of the Tribunal’s jurisprudence since the Mosticzker and Edinson decisions that denied the validity of the civil marriages of Russian and Austrian Jews. He expressed his hope that future rulings would further clarify the status of foreign marriages.48 While it is true that in the long term applying French law to the marriages of foreigners would resolve the impediments they faced, in the short term the Roitstein decree presented a challenge for foreign Jewish couples seeking to terminate their marriages. Although the court invoked the principle of the secularization of marriage, the court did not apply it uniformly. First, as already noted, the court did not proclaim that civil marriages among foreign Jews were valid. It merely ruled that claims for annulment were inadmissible. More important, the court did not apply the secularization principle to marriage breakdown. If, in a subtle way, the court implicitly recognized the status of the civil marriages of foreigners, it noticeably did not claim jurisdiction in the area of divorce. On the contrary, the court refused to admit the claim for annulment but did not suggest the remedy of divorce. Therefore, foreign Jews seeking to end their marriages found themselves in the same position as they did prior to the Mosticzker annulment decree. Neither French courts nor French rabbis could terminate their marriages. As a result of the Roitstein decision, foreign Jews who married only civilly were in a worse predicament than those who married both civilly and religiously. Although they could not obtain a divorce from French civil or rabbinic courts, Russian Jews who married religiously could theoretically seek a divorce from the rabbinic authorities of their place of origin. However, the Roitsteins, who married only civilly, could neither obtain a divorce in France nor Russia. The Civil Tribunal of the Seine revoked the possibility of annulment but did not offer them the remedy of civil divorce. The only option for those in such circumstances was to seek an annulment from the rabbinic authorities of Russia. However, this option did not exist. Russian state rabbis did not issue annulments for non-existent marriages, and so far as they were concerned a Jew who married civilly had not married. 7

Relaxing the Conditions for Religious Divorce: Sloutsky v. Sloutsky

While the Roitstein decision placed civilly married Russian Jews seeking to terminate their marriages in an impossible position, several months later the Civil Tribunal of the Seine in Sloutsky v. Sloutsky provided some relief for religiously 48  Ibid.

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married couples. Ironically, the relevant case did even not involve a request to terminate a marriage.49 On the contrary, Mindel Kokhan (Sloutsky) asked the Tribunal to invalidate her divorce from Abraham Ber Sloutsky. Kokhan and Sloutsky were married in 1902 by the rabbi of their district, Tourek, in Russia, and they later moved to France. In 1910, they divorced before a French rabbinic court, and Sloutsky remarried soon after. Unsatisfied with the financial terms of her divorce, Kokhan argued that the religious divorce was legally invalid, and that she and Sloutsky were still married. The court ruled that the Sloutskys required a Russian religious divorce and that the French religious divorce was invalid. If the Tribunal had stopped there, it would have broken no new ground. However, the Tribunal went further. It proclaimed that had the French rabbinic court forwarded a copy of the certificate of divorce to the Russian religious authorities for transcription in the civil registry of Tourek, the Tribunal would have recognized the divorce. In other words, it proclaimed that French rabbinic authorities have partial jurisdiction over divorce. They can start the process but the divorce is only final when it is legally recorded in Russia. Thus Russian Jews would not have to travel to Russia to obtain a divorce but could receive a divorce from the French rabbinate and have a copy forwarded to Russia for transcription. 8

Formal Recognition of the Civil Marriages of Foreigners

While the Sloutsky decision relaxed the conditions of divorce for religiously married couples, it did not deal with couples who married only civilly. In both 1914 and 1915, the Civil Tribunal of the Seine ruled that such marriages were legally valid. The 1914 Danichewsky decision involved a divorce suit by a French Jewish woman who had married a Russian Jew civilly but not religiously. The court proclaimed that the marriage was valid according to French law. In this particular case, however, the court granted her a civil divorce because from the Russian perspective they had never married and thus she had never become a Russian subject.50 Although this loophole helped French women who civilly married foreign men to terminate their marriages, it offered no remedy when both spouses were foreigners. In the 1915 Offenthal v. Moscowitz ruling, the Civil

49   Sloutsky v. Sloutsky, Trib. civ. Seine, December 27, 1912, Journal du droit international 41 (1914): 172–7. 50   Danichewsky v. Danichewsky, Trib. civ. Seine, April 9, 1914, Journal du droit international 43 (1916): 173–5.

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Tribunal of the Seine rejected a petition for annulment by a Russian Jew who married another Russian Jew civilly but not religiously.51 The Danichewsky and Offenthal decrees went further than the Roitstein decree of 1912 as the latter did not explicitly validate such marriages. In the Roitstein case, the Tribunal ruled that a plaintiff could not challenge the status of his civil marriage, but it did not comment on the actual validity of such a marriage. The court’s explicit recognition of the civil marriages of foreign Jews in the Danichewsky and Offenthal decisions dashed any hope for annulments, and the Tribunal did not offer the remedy of civil divorce unless the wife was a French citizen. Furthermore, unlike those foreign couples who married religiously, those who married only civilly could neither obtain nor record an annulment with Russian rabbinic authorities because from the latter’s perspective there was nothing to annul. 9

Pleas for Annulment or Civil Divorce

In his plea before the Court of Appeal of Paris, J. Tchernoff, a distinguished Russian-born Jewish author and attorney, pointed to what he saw as the faulty logic of the lower court’s Offenthal decision.52 In validating the marriage and rejecting the request for annulment, the Tribunal emphasized how the couple resided in Paris and married before the Officer of the Civil Registry in conform­ ance with the dispositions of French law. Yet, as Tchernoff noted, that marriage did not carry the consequences of a marriage between French citizens. As he explained, when an officer of the state marries a couple, he informs them of the expectations of marriage such as fidelity. When these expectations are not met, a spouse may sue for divorce. While foreign couples are also told about these expectations, they, unlike French citizens, have no remedy if they are not met. For example, unlike a French victim of adultery, an aggrieved Russian spouse cannot request a divorce. Therefore, as Tchernoff argued, it was unjust to say that by residing in France and marrying before a state official that the foreign couple had truly entered into a valid civil marriage. They may

51  A copy of Offenthal v. Moscowitz, Trib. civ Seine, July 7, 1915, can be found in the Jewish Theological Seminary Archives, French Jewish Communities Group, Box 21. 52  Although born Iouda Tchernoff, he signed his name J. Tchernoff. On Tchernoff, see Malinovich, French and Jewish, 63–5.

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have technically married according to French marital law, but for them, unlike French citizens, this law has no teeth, no power of enforcement.53 Similarly, in his argument before the Civil Tribunal of the Seine for the annulment of a civil marriage in 1915 in Offenstein v. Offenstein, the radical advocate Vincent de Moro-Giafferi pointed to the injustice of applying French civil law selectively. Why should the courts recognize civil marriage but not civil divorce? They should either consider the marriage as non-existent as it would be considered in Russia or consider it existent and permit its termination. While Moro-Giafferi acknowledged that a Jew who married religiously could divorce in France so long as the divorce was recorded in Russia, that option was not available for his client. He could not remarry religiously because his spouse abandoned him, which was exactly why he was seeking an annulment. Beyond his specific arguments for annulment, Moro-Giafferi made a sweeping case for abolishing the principle that Russian Jews are subject to their national law on matters of personal status. As he explained, the Jews of Russia Jews were not Russian nationals but members of a recognized religious community. In France, however, Jews and other religious groups did not constitute a legally recognized religious community. Thus once a Russian Jew moved to France, he was no longer officially a member of the Jewish community. He could voluntarily join a religious community, but from the perspective of the modern French state, he was simply an individual living in France. To subject him to the Jewish laws of marriage was to treat him as a member of a community to which he did not legally belong.54 In addition to Moro-Giafferi’s broader principled argument for applying civil law, he raised an important practical issue with regard to the children of those Russian Jews denied either an annulment or divorce. If the wife were to have children with another man, the husband would still be legally required to support them. As Moro-Giafferi exclaimed, he could not imagine that the court would be more open to the repudiation of children than it was to divorce. On the other hand, reconciliation could pose its own challenges. If the husband were to reconcile with his wife and have children with her, those children would be stigmatized if they ever settled in Russia. From the perspective of the Russian authorities, Jewish and non-Jewish, these children would be regarded

53  A copy of Tchernoff’s speech can be found in the Jewish Theological Seminary Archives (as in fn. 51). 54  A copy of Moro-Giafferi’s plea can be found in Jewish Theological Seminary Archives (as in fn. 51).

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as born out of wedlock.55 In fairness, if they reconciled, they could always remarry before a rabbi so that the marriage would be valid in Russia, and future children would not be stigmatized, but Moro-Giafferi did not address that possibility. Nonetheless, he certainly made a strong ethical and political case for annulment or divorce. In 1916, the Court of Appeal of Paris reached its decision in Offenthal v. Moscowitz. The court upheld the decision of the lower court and refused to annul a French civil marriage on the grounds of the absence of a subsequent religious ceremony. Although the court did not terminate the marriage, surprisingly and significantly it suggested the possibility that civilly married foreign Jews could apply for divorce. “French law, which has regularly pronounced [civil] marriage[s,] could dissolve [them] if need be.”56 Nonetheless, it was not until 1921 that the Civil Tribunal of the Seine actually pronounced a divorce between two Russian Jews. 10 Resolution In 1921, Marthe Bermann, a Russian Jew, sued her husband Abraham Mendel, also Russian, for a civil divorce on the grounds of abandonment.57 She had married him both civilly and religiously in France in 1900, and she had obtained a religious divorce from the French rabbinate in 1908. Before addressing the legality of granting a foreign Jew a civil divorce, the Civil Tribunal of the Seine first posed the question of why a foreigner whose national law required a religious divorce, and who had received such a divorce, would even request a civil divorce. As the court explained, divorces granted by French rabbis were not recognized by France or by Russia. While the court did not say so explicitly, presumably this particular religious divorce was not recorded in Russia, a legal option first presented in the Sloutsky decision four years after the Bermanns terminated their marriage. After concluding that a civil divorce would be advantageous, the Tribunal addressed the question as to whether a foreigner could legally sue for a civil 55  Moro-Giafferi actually used the word bâtards, but according to Jewish law they would not be regarded as illegitimate because the mother was single. Only children born to a married woman from an adulterous liaison are deemed illegitimate. 56  This citation from the unpublished Court of Cassation Offenthal decision appears in Bermann v. Bermann, Trib civ. Seine, December 24, 1921, Journal du droit international 49 (1922): 121. 57  Ibid., 117–25.

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divorce. It noted that until the Paris Court of Appeal’s 1902 Levinçon decree, French courts routinely granted foreigners civil divorces. This decree, confirmed by the Supreme Court, proclaimed French courts could not grant divorces to Russian nationals because Russian law required religious divorces, which they could not enforce. However, as the Civil Tribunal of the Seine explained, Russian Jewish divorce was actually a civil institution. Divorces were not performed by internally recognized rabbinic leaders but rather by rabbinic functionaries appointed by the state.58 If, then, religious divorce was really a civil procedure draped in religious garb, there was no reason why a French court could not apply civil law and pronounce divorces. Citing the Offenthal decision, the Tribunal noted that the Court of Appeal of Paris had suggested this very possibility. Additionally, the court noted the hardships of either obtaining or recording a divorce in civil-war-torn Russia. Finally, the court applied the principle of secularization of marriage to divorce. Previous court rulings had invoked the principle to uphold the validity of a civil marriage between two foreign Jews. The Civil Tribunal of the Seine went further and decreed that only a civil divorce could legally terminate a marriage. Henceforth, foreign couples would have to apply to a French court for a legally binding divorce. In December 1917, shortly following the Russian Revolution, the Soviet government introduced civil marriage and divorce.59 However, until France recognized the Soviet Union in 1924, technically French courts still had to grapple with the religious definition of marriage of the Civil Code of the Russian Empire. Nonetheless, it is clear from the Bermann decision, which specifically referred to changing legal circumstances in Russia, as well from previous rulings such as Offenthal and Offenstein, that the courts were gradually applying French law to Russian Jews. 11 Conclusion While the courts, beyond the reference to changes in Russian law, did not explicitly explain their reasons for their shifting position on the application of French law, it is not surprising that they ultimately promoted the secularization of all marriages. After all, the revolutionary government had established civil marriage back in 1792, and anticlerical republicans had suppressed 58  On conflicts between “spiritual rabbis” and “state rabbis,” see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 106–9. 59  For a summary of these laws, see M. M. Wolff, “Some Aspects of Marriage and Divorce Laws in Soviet Russia,” Modern Law Review 12, no. 3 (1949): 290–6.

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unauthorized religious orders, secularized schools, cemeteries and divorce, and separated church from state between 1880 and 1905. Unlike the anticlerical republican legislators who moved at a rapid pace to secularize the public sphere, the officially apolitical courts could not move as swiftly because of the constraints of foreign law. Nonetheless, by 1921 they too affirmed the paramountcy of the policy of secularization and applied French law to foreign marriages. By then, even the Catholic Church had reluctantly come to terms with the separation law in the wake of the outburst of national unity, the union sacrée, during the First World War. In fact, the Civil Tribunal of the Seine rendered the Bermann decision the very year that the Vatican reestablished diplomatic relations with the French state. Both the longstanding adherence of French courts to foreign law and the failure of rabbinic courts to introduce conditional marriage demonstrate how the principle of the secularization of marriage remained elusive long after the separation of church and state. French courts, at first, refused to apply French law in matters relating to the personal status of foreign Jews, and the Union des Rabbins Français withdrew its proposal to harmonize Jewish and civil divorce law. However, unlike the rabbinate, French courts ultimately reformulated their positions, invoked the principle of the secularization of marriage, and strengthened the civil protections of tens of thousands of Jews in France.

Chapter 5

Affirming Difference, Confirming Integration: New Forms of Sociability Among French Jews in the 1920s1 Nadia Malinovich “Before the war,” noted the journalist and communal activist Meyerkey2 in 1926, “there was hardly any Jewish activity outside religious and mutual aid associations . . . Today, things are different. Associations of all kinds—Zionist, athletic, mutual aid, and secular—are rising up and reclaiming Judaism as their own.”3 As Meyerkey’s comments suggest, the appearance of new spaces for Jewish sociability, the expansion of Jewish popular education, and a proliferation of discussion among Jews and sympathetic non-Jews about the nature of Jewish identity and culture in the modern world constituted a major shift in French Jewish life in the 1920s. A number of interrelated factors—the rise of the Zionist movement, the sense of spiritual vacuum created by the First World War, and a much larger population of young people remaining in school through their teenage years—all contributed to the growth of Jewish community centers, youth groups, and educational societies. This phenomenon was not particular to France. From Vilna to Frankfurt to Minsk to Baghdad to New York, the 1920s were a period of cultural creativity and growth of associational life for Jews the world over. One of the distinguishing features of the Jewish cultural revival in France in the 1920s, however, was the degree to which French Jews understood the new forms of Jewish community life and self-expression that they created to be a product of their integration into French society rather than a rejection of it.4 The antisemitic crisis 1  The original version of this chapter was published in French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008). 2  Meyerkey was a pseudonym for Meyer Levyne, a columnist for both Chalom and Le Rayon and a prominent figure in the Union Universelle de la Jeunesse Juive. 3  Meyerkey, Le Rayon (June 15, 1926): 13. 4  Interestingly, French Jews may have most resembled Baghdadi Jews in their degree of integration into, and confidence in, the surrounding society in the 1920s. On the Iraqi Jewish cultural revival of the 1920s, see Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of the Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2012), chs 1–3.

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of the Dreyfus Affair had sparked a handful of French Jewish intellectuals to become disillusioned with the ‘ideology of assimilation’ and to start thinking about their Jewishness in new ways.5 For most French Jews in the 1920s, by contrast, antisemitism appeared to be on the decline, and the expansion of French Jewish cultural and associational life reflected this perception.6 At the same time that they affirmed the value of Jewish difference, French Jews in the 1920s felt confident that in so doing, they were also confirming their status as integral members of French society. 1

Creating New Spaces for Sociability: Jewish Youth Movements in the 1920s

Young French Jews, influenced by many of the same factors as others of their generation—rejection of the past, commitment to political and social change, interest in organizing sporting and leisure activities in the country, and, more generally, a desire to publicly display group allegiance through insignias, uniforms, and other outward signs of belonging—formed a variety of different youth groups over the course of the 1920s.7 These groups were conceived as an antidote to the post-emancipation Jewish community’s failure to encourage young Jews to socialize together, a situation many felt had paved the way for total assimilation.8 In an article for the Zionist-oriented journal Menorah in 1923, the writer Henri Hertz commented on the Consistory’s failure to meet 5  Most prominent among them were André Spire and Edmond Fleg. On the Jewish journeys of these two men and the beginning of a Jewish revival in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, see French and Jewish, chapters 1–3. 6  On the decline in antisemitism in France during and in the aftermath of the First World War, see Philippe Landau, Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre: Un patriotism républicain (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1999); Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) and Richard Millman, La Question juive entre les deux guerres: Ligues de droite et antisémitisme en France (Paris: Armand Colin 1992). 7  On the development of youth movements in France, which only began in earnest after the First World War, see Yolande Cohen, Les Jeunes, le socialisme et la guerre: Histoire des mouvements de jeunesse en France (Paris: Editions d’Harmattan, 1989) and Gérard Cholvy (ed.), Mouvements de jeunesse chrétiens et juifs. Sociabilité juvénile dans un cadre européen, 1799– 1968 (Paris: Gérard, 1985). 8  For an overview of the creation of Jewish youth movements in France, see Danielle Delmaire, “Mouvements de jeunesses juives en France, 1919–1939,” in Cholvy, Mouvements de jeunesse chrétiens et juifs and Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, ch. 7.

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the needs of contemporary French Jews. While the Consistory’s role as a passive administrator had satisfied a homogeneous, complacent Jewish community prior to the World War, Hertz asserted, this was no longer the case. French Jewry, he lamented, had been transformed by the great changes of the post war era—the rise of Jewish nationalism and religious revival, as well as the arrival of immigrants from Eastern Europe—but the Jewish establishment had done nothing to respond to these changes. For Hertz, a Zionist sympathizer who believed that French Jews should openly affirm their Jewishness in ethnic terms, the Consistory’s insistence on maintaining a narrowly confessional definition of Judaism was a major part of this problem.9 Even those people who were critical of Zionism and defended a religious understanding of Jewishness had become increasingly critical of consistorial Judaism by the early 1920s. It was this sentiment that provided the impetus behind the creation of the first national Jewish youth movement, Chema Israël, in 1919. An important motivating force behind the creation of Chema Israël, billed as an “organization for religious education and advocacy,” was a desire on the part of the younger generation of French rabbis to counter the war’s assimilating effect on Jewish soldiers. Whereas many young Catholics had come back to the church in response to the trials of their wartime experiences, asserted Archives israélites editor Hippolyte Prague in 1919, the war had generally led to disaffiliation from the Jewish community. Young Jews who might have hesitated before marrying outside their faith before the war, he suggested, “no longer [had] any scruples about uniting with a person outside their religion.” The present challenge for Jewish religious leaders, Prague suggested, was to counter this trend by “creating organizations and activities capable of interesting [young Jews] in Jewish life, in cultivating within them a love of religion.”10 Maurice Liber, a rabbi who was the driving force behind the creation of Chema Israël, expressed the need for the organization in similar terms: “every religion, in order to remain vibrant and endure, needs established practices and ongoing modes of public expression; in two words, appropriate institutions.”11 As Liber’s comments suggest, though Chema Israël was explicitly defined as a 9   Henri Hertz, “La Situation,” Menorah (Sept. 16, 1924): 383–4. 10  Prague, “La Marée montante des mariages mixtes,” Archives israélites (May 22, 1919): 93. 11  Ben-Ammi “La Journée culturelle du Judaïsme français,” L’Univers israélite (Apr. 15, 1921): 750 (emphasis in original). Ben-Ammi was one of several pen names that Liber used for his articles in both L’Univers Israélite and the Revue des etudes juives. Liber, one of the most prominent figures in the French rabbinate in the interwar years, had served as a military chaplain during the First World War, and became director of courses in rabbinic Judaism at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in 1921.

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religious organization, its leadership felt that it was necessary to broaden the range of activities included under that heading to accomplish this goal.12 The group grew rapidly over the course of the decade. The Parisian section counted 500 members by 1927, and sections existed in fourteen cities by the early 1930s. Chema Israël had a strong base of support in Alsace, with sections in Lunéville, Metz, Forbach, Mulhouse, and Thionville, and a particularly active section in Lyon.13 An important characteristic of French confessional youth movements, as distinct from an earlier genre of ‘œuvres’ or ‘patronages’ run by various religious and charitable organizations, was that the inter-war groups were created by young people themselves.14 Chema Israël followed this pattern to some extent. Though created under the auspices of the rabbinate and Central Consistory, it was run by a committee of young people who assumed responsibility for the group’s activities and programming.15 The initiative for the creation of the two other major youth movements of the 1920s—the Union Universelle de la Jeunesse Juive (UUJJ) and the Eclaireurs Israélites (Jewish Scouts)—came more decisively from outside the consistorial structure. The UUJJ was founded in Salonica in 1921 and transferred to Paris in 1923, when its two founders, Charles Nehama and Jacques Matalon, immigrated to the French capital.16 Created in the aftermath of the First World War, the group was originally intended as a kind of modernized Alliance Israélite Universelle, devoted to fighting antisemitism around the world and working to promote the goals of world peace and internationalism set forth at the Paris Peace 12  Paula Hyman makes a similar point in her discussion of the organization in From Dreyfus to Vichy, where she notes that, “Following the model of the adult community, the founders of Chema Israël accepted a purely religious definition of the Jewish community in France. However, they included a wide variety of educational functions within the purview of the religious,” 182. However, it is important to note that, as Liber’s statement suggests, even as they defined ‘religion’ as the basis of Jewish community, the creators of Chema Israël understood this term differently from the Consistory leadership. 13   L’Univers israélite reported regularly on Chema Israël’s activities throughout France. Outside Paris, activities and lectures sponsored by the Lyon section appeared most frequently. 14  Aline Coutrot, “Le Mouvement de jeunesse: Un phénomène au singulier?” in Cholvy (ed.), Mouvements de jeunesse chrétiens et juifs, 119. 15  See the group’s founding statement in L’Univers israélite (Nov. 28, 1919): 222–4, which lists the members of the committee. 16  The group, originally called L’interjuive and conceived of as an “exchange association for Jews around the world,” changed its name with its move to Paris in 1923. See Delmaire, “Mouvements de jeunesses juives en France,” 318.

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Conference. Initially it functioned primarily as a social club for French-born middle-class Parisian teenagers and young adults, and was neither religious nor Zionist in orientation. The World Zionist Organization, however, saw it as a potential forum for increasing support for Zionism among French youth, and played a major role in securing the unlikely election of the 58-year-old Aimé Pallière, president of Keren Kayemet, as UUJJ president.17 Pallière proved very successful in building the organization up internationally, and by the end of the decade the UUJJ federation counted fifty-seven sections and affiliated groups around the world. He was also initially very successful at attracting new members to the original Paris section, which jumped from sixty members in 1926 to close to 600 by the end of 1927.18 The rapid increase in the UUJJ’s membership was due primarily to Pallière’s recruitment of young people from immigrant backgrounds to the organization. These young men and women, for the most part secular in orientation and more interested in fighting international antisemitism and promoting leftwing politics than in Zionism, were attracted by the UUJJ’s innovative decision to abandon an exclusively religious definition of Judaism and welcome all Jews who identified as such as members. In fact, however, Pallière and his entourage saw the group as a forum for building support for Zionism and encouraging a religious revival among French Jews.19 A chasm therefore began to open between the UUJJ’s leadership and the Paris section: while Pallière imposed kashrut on the UUJJ’s community center there, inserted a column devoted to religious life in Chalom, and preached the importance of Zionism to the religious renewal of the Jewish people, the Parisian members formed a close bond with journalist Bernard Lecache, and devoted their energies to

17  Aimé Pallière, an eclectic figure of Catholic origin who played a critical role in Jewish religious and communal life in the interwar years, never underwent a full-fledged conversion. He rather chose to identify as “Noahide”—someone who believes in the basic precepts of Judaism and observes the Ten Commandments, but who, as a non-Jew, is not bound by the obligations that Jews must fulfil according to Talmudic law. On Pallière, see Poujol, Catherine, Aimé Pallière (1868–1949): Itinéraire d’un chrétien dans le judaïsme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2003). Whereas Poujol’s book focuses on Pallière’s spiritual journey, her doctoral thesis (by the same name) “Aimé Pallière (1868–1949): Itinéraire d’un chrétien dans le judaïsme” (Ph.D. dissertation, 3 vols, University of Paris 1, 2002) includes extensive additional information about his involvement in Jewish communal life of the day. 18  Catherine Poujol, “Une exception dans la presse des mouvements de jeunesse: Chalom,” Archives Juives 36, no. 1 (2003): 30. 19  Poujol, “Aimé Pallière” vol. 2, 417–21.

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protesting against the Schwartzbard trial,20 numerus clausus, and pogroms in Eastern Europe. This group formed a club within the UUJJ called the Club de la Jeunesse Juive, and began publishing its own paper, La Jeunesse juive.21 Tensions between the UUJJ leadership and this group of increasingly active new members culminated in their departure en masse following the UUJJ’s annual conference, which was held in Strasbourg in August 1928. While the UUJJ continued to publish Chalom and keep up appearances for the now sizeable provincial and international sections of the organization, after this defection its Paris section was in fact reduced to a core group of twenty members.22 Ultimately, it was the Eclaireurs Israélites de France that succeeded in accomplishing the UUJJ’s mission of bridging the gap between Jews from varying social, religious, and class backgrounds.23 The first Eclaireur troop was created in Paris in 1923 by Robert Gamzon, the 17-year-old grandson of the chief 20  Shalom Schwartzbard, a Russian Jew living in Paris, killed the Ukrainian nationalist Simon Petlioura, who had been responsible for carrying out pogroms during the First World War. Defended by Henry Torrès, a prominent lawyer with communist sympathies who came from the Bordeaux Jewish community, Schwartzbard was ultimately acquitted of the crime after a highly publicized trial. It was in the aftermath of this trial that Torrès and his entourage—including journalist Bernard Lecache, with whom he travelled through Russia and the Ukraine on a fact-finding mission—founded the Ligue Internationale contre l’Antisémitisme. Poujol details both the increasing support for anti-religious, left-wing political organizer Bernard Lecache among new members of the UUJJ in 1926–7 and the deep antipathy of Pallière and his entourage towards Lecache and the LICA: see Poujol, “Aimé Pallière” vol. 2, 470–3, 497–504. 21  Tellingly, Poujol notes, we find only one reference to La Jeunesse juive (and none at all to the corresponding club) in the pages of Chalom. See “Aimé Pallière,” 472). The Frenchness of these young people is an interesting issue that reveals some of the problems of categorization that I address in Chapter 4 of French and Jewish. While the UUJJ leadership referred disparagingly to their Eastern European roots as the source of these new members’ predilection for left-wing politics and noisy demonstrations, they described themselves as “all French” as well as “the son and daughters of immigrants.” The majority of this group probably came to France as children or young adults, and were naturalized in 1927, the year that the Poincaré government relaxed immigration laws. As André Kaspi points out, for these young people this act of naturalization was an important symbolic step, marking their decision to stake their claim as “the Frenchmen and women of tomorrow.” André Kaspi, Les Juifs pendant l’Occupation (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 45; see also Poujol, “Aimé Pallière,” vol. 2, 473. 22  Poujol, “Aimé Pallière,” vol. 2, 490–507. 23  On the Jewish Scout movement see Alain Michel, Juifs, Français et Scouts: L’Histoire des E.I. de 1923 aux années 1990 à nos jours (Jerusalem: Editions Elkana, 2003) and “Qu’est-ce qu’un Scout juif? L’Education juive chez les Eclaireurs Israélites de France de 1923 au début des années 1950,” Archives Juives 35, no. 2 (2002), 77–101.

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rabbi of France Albert Lévy, and son of an immigrant engineer from Eastern Europe. By 1924 a Jewish scouting movement had been established under the patronage of a central committee of wealthy members of the native Parisian Jewish community.24 Gamzon originally defined the goals of the movement in terms very acceptable to the Consistory and rabbinate. Just as Catholic Scouts pledged to support “God, the Church, and France,” Jewish Scouts would pledge their allegiance to “God, Judaism, and France.”25 By 1926, however, the Scouts’ strictly religious vision of Judaism was being called into question, largely through the influence of Edmond Fleg. Deeply moved by Edmond Fleg’s L’Enfant prophète, the story of a young boy’s search for the meaning of his Jewish heritage,26 Gamzon asked him to be president of the organization in 1926. While Fleg refused,27 he did become involved with the movement, and pushed it to expand its definition of Judaism to include non-religious forms of Jewish identity.28 In 1927 the movement’s pledge was modified to encourage Scouts to “develop their sense of themselves as Jews,” and it committed itself to admitting members from “all the diverse tendencies” within French Judaism.29 This redefinition opened up the possibility of collaborating with Zionists, and over the next decade cultural Zionist tendencies became predominant within the movement.30 The decision to push the group in an inclusive direction was due in large part to the collaboration between Gamzon and Pallière, who began working together to create UUJJ-affiliated scouting troops in 1927. As it became clear to Pallière that he would be unable to make the UUJJ the meeting-place between Jews of different backgrounds and ideological orientations that he had originally hoped, Pallière wisely passed the baton to Gamzon, whose personal background and youthful energy were better suited to reaching out to young Jews across religious, ideological, and class lines. While the scouting 24  Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 191. See also Isaac Pougatch’s biography of Gamzon, Un Bâtisseur. Robert Gamzon, Dit ‘Castor Soucieux’ 1905–1961 (Paris: Service Technique pour l’Education, 1971). 25  Michel, Juifs, Français, et Scouts, 37. 26  Edmond Fleg, L’enfant prophete (Paris: Gallimard, 1926). 27  For Fleg’s reasons for refusing initially refusing the presidency, which he did eventually take on in 1935, see Gamzon, “Edmond Fleg et les Eclaireurs Israélites de France,” Revue de la pensée juive, 2 (Jan. 1950): 18–21. 28  Michel, Juifs, Français, et Scouts, 43–5. 29  Ibid., 45. 30  The issue of a religious versus a Zionist definition was a continuing matter of debate between the Eclaireurs and the French rabbinate and Consistory. See Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 193–8.

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troop arrived too late to save the Paris section of the UUJJ, the Eclaireurs’ rapid climb in membership, from 150 members in 1927 to 600 in 1929, can perhaps in part be accounted for by the fact that the Scouts were able to re-enlist some of the young people who had left the UUJJ in 1928.31 It was also at this point that the Eclaireurs created a federation and began forming troops throughout Paris and the provinces, as well as Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. Some troops were organized by neighborhood, others by already existing clubs with different ideological orientations. Both Chema Israël and the Jeunesse Libérale Israélite (the youth wing of the Reform congregation L’Union Libérale) for example, had created their own scouting troops by the end of 1927. Lily Simon, the founder of the female scouting troops (the Eclaireuses), created a troop for disadvantaged Jewish immigrants in 1928 that had a distinctly Zionist orientation. By 1931, nineteen troops existed in North Africa, seventeen in Alsace-Lorraine, and twenty-seven in the rest of France, with a total of 1200 members.32 In addition to these national movements, many smaller youth groups were created in Paris and the provinces from the early 1920s on. By 1925, Jewish youth associations existed in Bordeaux, Nice, Tours, Epinal, Besançon, Nancy, Thionville, Sarrebourg, Lille, Marseilles, and Lunéville, and by 1930 in Mulhouse, Sélestat, and Metz as well.33 Local consistories, for the most part, provided the space for these groups. La Jeunesse Libérale Israélite was formed in 1924.34 A number of groups were also created specifically for young people from immigrant backgrounds. Among the most successful of these were the Union de la Jeunesse Juive, which had 800 members by 1930,35 and the Parisian branch of the Maccabi sports club, with a membership of 1,300 by the end of the decade.36 In 1929, several independent immigrant youth associations merged to form the Union des Jeunesses Israélites de France.37 While the group’s activities were centered in Paris, it also established sections in several other French cities. The Union des Associations d’Etudiants Juifs en France, created in 1927 as an umbrella organization for already existing student groups in Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Nancy, Paris, Toulouse, Caen, Rouen, 31  For these points see Poujol, “Aimé Pallière,” vol. 2, 486. 32  Michel, Juifs, Français, et Scouts, 47–9. 33   L’Univers israélite noted the creation of these youth groups over the course of the decade in its ‘Nouvelles diverses’ column. 34  See Le Rayon (Nov. 15, 1924): 5–6. 35   L’Univers israélite (Jan. 17, 1930): 535. This group existed as early as 1917. 36  The Maccabi club was an international Jewish sporting organization with strong links to the Zionist movement. It became affiliated with the UUJJ in 1930. 37  See L’Univers israélite (Apr. 12, 1929): 983–4.

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Strasbourg, Montpellier, Besançon, and Tours, counted 3,000 members by 1931. Bené-Mizrah and La Fraternité were created by Sephardi youth in 1925 and 1930 respectively, and though it did not function exclusively as a youth organization, most of the activities sponsored by the Association Amicale des Israélites Saloniciens were geared towards young people.38 The primary purpose of all of these groups was to create a place for young Jews to socialize with each other. Different orientations, of course, affected programming to some degree: the religiously oriented Chema Israël and Jeunesse Libérale Israélite sponsored independent religious services39 as well as an annual Passover seder for members who did not have a family environment in which to celebrate.40 As a scouting movement, the Eclaireurs’ activities were focused, for the most part, on various sporting and wilderness activities. Most groups held annual or semi-annual balls, as well as more informal weekly or monthly dances. The Union des Jeunesses Israélites’s 1929 annual dance drew over 2,000 people, and Bené-Mizrah’s 1931 Hanukah ball, presided over by the writer Gustave Kahn, drew 900.41 Bené-Mizrah opened a Université Populaire Juive in 1930, which sponsored sports events and parties as well as weekly lectures and debates. The largest range of activities was offered by Chema Israël and the UUJJ. By mid-decade, both groups had begun organizing theatre productions, group excursions, and choral singing, as well as holding annual conferences that united members from the different national and international sections. Their main activity, however, was weekly lectures and discussion groups, often followed by concerts or poetry readings.

38  Bené-Mizrah had 761 members by 1931 (see L’Almanach juif, 104). While it attracted a largely working-class membership, La Fraternité, which counted 500 members by November 1930, was created within a more upper-class, intellectual milieu. See L’Univers israélite (Nov. 28, 1930): 346. On the differences between these two groups, see Annie Benveniste, La Bosphore à la Roquette: La Communauté judéo-espagnole à Paris, 1914–1940 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989). 39  Chema began sponsoring its own religious services for major holidays in 1927. See L’Univers israélite (Oct. 14, 1927): 21. The Jeunesse Libérale Israélite held monthly services for young people. 40  These Passover seders were an innovation of Chema Israël’s, which also built its own sukah for the festival of Sukot. See Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 183. The AAIS also sponsored a Passover seder and organized its own high holy day services in accordance with Sephardi ritual. 41  See L’Univers israélite (Nov. 29, 1929): 280, and Bené-Mizrah’s journal, also called BenéMizrah (Dec. 1930).

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Before the 1928 collapse of its Paris section, the UUJJ weekly Saturday night meetings for members drew on average between 100 and 150 people,42 and the group sponsored monthly “Grandes Conférences” that regularly filled the Salle Comœdia, one of the largest conference halls in the city.43 A glance at the programme for 1925/6 gives a sense of the range of topics of interest to French Jews of the day. The season opened with a series of lectures on “Different Aspects of Contemporary Judaism” presided over by Justin Godart, a prominent French political figure of the day.44 Speakers included novelist Myriam Harry, Reform rabbi Louis-Germain Lévy, and several non-Jewish speakers, among them Jean Izoulet, author of Paris: Capitale des religions ou la mission d’Israël. A debate on Jews and communists featuring writer and communal activist Henry Marx, Henry Torrès (the lawyer who defended Shalom Schwartzbard), and an anticommunist former professor at the University of Petrograd attracted such a crowd, Chalom reported, that the organizers were obliged to turn people away.45 Novelist Jean-Richard Bloch, Aimé Pallière, and Henry Marx participated in a discussion on the future of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a debate on two novels on Jewish themes, Bernard Lecache’s Jacob and Edmond Fleg’s Le Juif du Pape, was followed by a series of lectures on different aspects of the Jewish religion.46 Other sessions included a lecture on Zionism by Vladimir Jabotinksy, two Catholic speakers (Paul Vulliaud and Marie-André Dieux) on Jewish symbolic poetry and Judaism and science respectively, and the (nonJewish) novelist Lucie Delarue-Mardrus on her recent trip to Palestine. André Spire’s lecture on the poet Henri Franck was followed by a debate on the merits of establishing Jewish settlements in the Crimea. The season closed with a debate on the significance and implications of the ‘mode juive’ itself.47 Many youth groups sponsored sporting events, teams, and physical education classes and, like their non-Jewish counterparts, organized day excursions 42   Chalom (Oct/Nov. 1927): 23. 43  W. Rabinovitch, “Rapport sur le travail de la section de Paris,” Chalom (Aug. 1927): 6. 44  Godart, a member of the Cartel des Gauches who briefly served as Minister of Labor under Eduard Herriot’s first government (June 1924-April 1925), was a strong supporter of the French Zionist movement in the interwar years, and went on to become a prominent figure in the French Resistance movement during the Second World War. On Godart’s involvement in French Zionism, see Philippe Boukara, “Justin Godart et le Sionisme: Autour du France-Palestine,” in Justin Godart: Un homme dans son siècle (1871–1956) (Paris: Editions CNRS, 2004). 45  “Nos conférences à Paris,” Chalom (Mar. 1926): 16. 46  Aimé Pallière spoke on traditional Judaism, Sacha Krinsky on Reform Judaism, and Léon Berman on “Liberal Conservativism.” 47  “Nos conférences à Paris”.

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to the country.48 A survey of French Jewish youth groups’ publications and lecture topics does not reveal the kind of concern with creating a ‘muscular Jewry’ that was so important to the more Zionist-oriented German groups. This difference was undoubtedly related to differences between German and French youth culture and the position of the Jewish community in France and Germany more broadly.49 While French youth groups, like their German counterparts, exhibited certain militaristic tendencies (such as the wearing of uniforms or marching in the country), they were almost exclusively inspired by a pacifist and internationalist ideology and for the most part discouraged antisemitism. Generally speaking, Jewish youth groups in France saw themselves as part of this wider community committed to international peace and understanding. The brand of Zionism that inspired these groups was associated with a desire to develop Jewish particularism within a broadly universalist, humanitarian framework.50 Differences and divisions among these various Jewish youth groups reflected some of the central tensions within French Jewry during this period. As we have seen, the UUJJ’s rank and file did not automatically follow the leadership’s decision to make the organization an organ of religious renewal and Zionist propaganda. The Zionist orientation of the group also put it at odds with more conservative elements within the rabbinate and the Consistory, which sought to prevent collaboration with Chema Israël.51 Nonetheless, members of Chema did not remain untouched by the brand of religious Zionism that Aimé Pallière played such an important role in disseminating during this era, and may have been more open to collaboration with the UUJJ than their leaders, especially after 1928. At the UUJJ’s Strasbourg conference, for example, Maurice Liber objected vigorously to the suggestion of an Alsatian representative of Chema that the group, like the UUJJ, should adopt a resolution to help with the 48  Coutrot, “Le Mouvement de jeunesse,” 115. 49  See Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 50  On the prevalence of this brand of ‘universalist Zionism’ in the 1920s, see Malinovich, French and Jewish, ch. 8. On German-Jewish youth culture in the 1920s, see especially Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. I develop this comparison between the German and French cultural revivals of the 1920s in French and Jewish. See also Nadia Malinovich “Le ‘Réveil juif’ en France et en Allemagne. Eléments de comparison en manière d’introduction,” Archives Juives 39, no. 1 (2006): 4–8. 51  According to Pallière, it was also opposition from consistorial circles that prevented the UUJJ from branching out in France. By 1928 only two sections, in Marseilles and Tours, existed outside Paris. For a detailed discussion of the tensions between Chema Israël and the UUJJ see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 187–91.

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construction of Jewish settlements in Palestine. Writing in Chalom in 1928, UUJJ co-founder Charles Nehama noted that members of the two organizations regularly attended each other’s conferences and discussion groups.52 Nor did the divide between their respective leaderships entirely prevent cooperation between the two groups. They sponsored a joint Hebrew course in Marseilles beginning in February 1929,53 and both participated in the creation of the Comité d’Entente des Groupements Jeunes in 1931.54 While the revival of Hebrew as a living language was a product of the Zionist movement, this development was also warmly welcomed by most religious Jews. As a result, encouraging French Jews to study Hebrew and setting up courses and educational societies with that objective in mind was one of the main areas in which groups and individuals with differing political and ideological orientations could collaborate. The French branch of the international Hebrew educational society Tarbout (Culture), presided over by Zionist leader Hillel Zlatopolsky, also counted Maurice Liber as a member.55 The first modern Hebrew courses in Paris were organized by a small network of Zionist associations at the turn of the century. In the post-First World War years, Tarbout, Chema Israël, the UUJJ, the Institut des Sciences Juives in Strasbourg, and Hatikva—an educational organization publicizing the Zionist cause in France—all offered Hebrew classes.56 Though the Union Libérale favored the use of more French in religious services, studying Hebrew as a living language was also encouraged within this milieu: “As the general tendency is to abandon the study of ancient Greek and Latin,” a contributor to the Union Libérale’s publication, Le Rayon, suggested in 1924, “why should our children not replace these truly dead languages with the study of Hebrew . . . which is presently becoming the universal language of the Jews, just as Latin was for humanists and scholars of medieval times?”57 A 1927 article in the group’s youth 52  Charles Nechama, “Pour un rapprochement,” Chalom (Nov. 15, 1928): 15. 53   Chalom (Mar. 15, 1929): 31. 54  This group, organized by the Cercle d’Etudes Juives in 1931, invited members of five different Parisian youth groups—Chema Israël, the UUJJ, the Eclaireurs, the Jeunesse Libérale, and Rouah Israël, a culturally oriented Zionist group created in 1931—to present their programmes and discuss their shared objectives. See L’Univers israélite (Feb. 12, 1931): 725. 55  This group mostly had branches in Eastern Europe. See Michel Abitbol, Les Deux Terres promises, Les Juifs de France et le Sionisme, 1897–1945 (Paris: O. Orban, 1989), 270. 56  Hatikva, described in Le Peuple juif as a youth group for the study of Hebrew and Jewish history, was created in 1918 and had branches in Paris, Strasbourg, and Bordeaux by 1924. Menorah (Jan. 22, 1924): 31 reported that Tarbouth had 150 children enrolled in Hebrew classes in Paris. 57   P.S.T., “Etude de l’Hébreu moderne,” Le Rayon (Aug/Sept. 1924): 26–7.

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magazine, Le Petit Rayon, also encouraged young French Jews to study Hebrew and described its revival as a modern miracle.58 The desire of native Jews to speed the acculturation of new immigrants from Eastern Europe often shaped youth group politics and programming. The principal motive behind the creation of the Union des Jeunesses Israélites, for example, was native Jews’ desire to exercise more influence over immigrant youth and, in particular, to inculcate in them patriotic French values. “While you must not forget your origins,” deputy Jean Fabry reminded his audience at the Union’s 1930 banquet, “you are French and your traditions are those of France.”59 Shortly thereafter, the group amalgamated with the Union Scolaire, a social networking association for Jewish graduates of Parisian primary and secondary schools that had shifted its orientation during the 1920s to reach out to the immigrant community.60 The leadership’s condescending attitude towards the immigrant population, however, ultimately alienated many within that community.61 Whereas East Europeans were often under pressure from natives to ‘be more French,’ this problem was largely non-existent for immigrants from the former Ottoman empire. Because these Sephardic Jews were already French-speaking and familiar with French cultural norms, they tended to have an easier relationship with the native Jewish community.62 At the same time, however, their experience as a national group within the Ottoman Empire gave them an ethnic understanding of Jewish identity very different from the religious model 58  See “Hanouka à Tel-Aviv,” Le Petit Rayon (Jan. 1927): 6. 59   L’Univers israélite (Jan. 17, 1930): 502. 60  This organization was originally created as a social networking association for Parisian graduates of Jewish primary and secondary schools in 1882. It opened a community center in 1897, the first of its kind in France. On the creation of the Union Scolaire and it activities before the First World War, see Malinovich, French and Jewish, 87–8. 61  Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 139. Hyman describes the group as “anti-Zionist and smugly assimilationist.” Attitudes towards Zionism within the Union Scolaire may have been more diverse than she suggests, however. One of the driving forces behind the group was Charles-Edouard Lévy, who led most of the weekly discussion groups. Though Lévy does not appear to have collaborated with the Zionist movement in the post-First World War years, he encouraged French Jews to support Zionism in an article for L’Echo sioniste (Mar. 10, 1912): 45; in the same year he published a short story entitled “Du temps qu’on n’était pas encore français,” L’Echo sioniste (Dec. 12, 1912): 245–9. I discuss this story, which valorizes ethnic pluralism, in Chapter 8 of French and Jewish. 62  Jews from North Africa formed another element of the Sephardi population in France during this period. On this community, see Jean Laloum “Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord dans le Marais dès l’entre-deux-guerres,” Archives Juives 38, no. 2 (2006): 47–83.

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developed by French Jews over the course of the nineteenth century. It is for this reason that the Association Amicale des Israélites Saloniciens (AAIS), an organization created by Salonican immigrants, served as a model of the possibilities for Jewish community-building in France. The AAIS was originally affiliated with the Association Cultuelle Orientale, an umbrella organization established by Ottoman immigrants in 1909 to provide members with services that followed the Sephardic rite and supervise the Jewish education of their children. The Salonicans split off from the Association Cultuelle in 1923. While this split came in part from power struggles within the organization, it also reflected their particular position within the Ottoman Jewish community. As the economic and social elite of Sephardic immigrants, Salonicans tended to identify even more strongly with French Jews than did other Ottomans.63 They therefore wanted to create a stronger link between their own community and the Consistory. While the Salonicans organized their own High Holy Day services in accordance with Sephardic ritual, for example, they did so in consultation with the Consistory and invited rabbis from the native community to attend.64 The fact that the AAIS was close to both the Consistory and the Alliance, however, did not preclude the organization from having a strong relationship with the French Zionist movement. Though the group was officially politically neutral, it was close to French Zionist circles, and both Menorah and La Nouvelle aurore reported regularly on its activities.65 The AAIS set up new headquarters in 1924, complete with a cafeteria, library, and reading and recreation rooms, and also began to sponsor lecture series and parties. These developments led Aimé Pallière to describe the AAIS as the

63  The port city of Salonica became a major Jewish cultural center in the late nineteenth century, and Jews actually formed the majority of the population before the Balkan Wars in 1912–13. At this point, the city was conquered by Greece, and a hostile government policy, which intensified during the First World War, forced the majority of the Jewish population into exile. 64  On the Salonican Jews and other Ottoman immigrants in Paris during the interwar years, see Benveniste, La Bosphore à la Roquette. She emphasizes the importance that the Salonicans placed on consistorial approval while at the same time insisting on maintaining many of their own traditions (83). 65  In his article “L’Eveil d’une critique d’art juive et le recours au ‘principe ethnique’ dans une définition de l’art juif,” Archives Juives 39, no. 1 (2006): 61–74, Dominique Jarrassé also points to the Salonicans’ particular combination of French and Jewish ethnic/national identity, which, he argues, facilitated their participation in the Jewish art world in the 1920s.

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only existing French equivalent to the American Jewish community center.66 The president of the Union des Adhérents Orientaux de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle made a similar observation, praising the AAIS’s decision to serve as a “home for all Sephardic Jews” with the opening of its new community center. While the Union des Adhérents Orientaux, he noted, had originally been conceived of as an educational society as well as a fundraising committee for the Alliance, the AAIS’s willingness to host the group’s meetings and welcome members to its own activities made it unnecessary for the former to set up an independent headquarters.67 The AAIS’s hospitality, however, was not limited to the Sephardic community. A number of different associations, including Tarbout and the Union des Femmes Juives Françaises pour la Palestine, held their meetings at the AAIS, as did the UUJJ on several occasions before it opened its own community center in 1927. The AAIS sponsored regular conferences and lectures, with a range of speakers and topics very similar to that of the UUJJ. 2

Creating New Forums for Jewish Education and Culture

The first successful Jewish scholarly society to be created in France was the Société des Etudes Juives.68 Organized in 1880 under the patronage of Baron James H. de Rothschild by a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals,69 this 66   L’Univers israélite (Jan. 23, 1925): 413–5. Though the group was created in 1919, it does not appear to have sponsored anything in the way of social and cultural activities before it moved into its headquarters in 1924. It is interesting to note that an article in the following issue of the L’Univers israélite reminded readers that the Union Scolaire was, in fact, the first organization of this kind. 67  See “Assemblée Générale de l’Union des Adhérents Orientaux de l’Alliance Israélite,” Menorah (July 15, 1924): 189–90. 68  In its founding statement the group noted the brief existence of two other similar organ­ izations, La Société des Bons Livres and La Société Scientifique et Littéraire Israélite. See “Procès-verbaux,” Revue des études juives, 5 (1880): 154. In The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century, (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1977) Phyllis Cohen Albert notes Hippolyte Rodrigues’ unsuccessful attempt to create the later organization in 1865, 251. 69  These included Théodore Reinach, James Darmesteter, Salomon Munk, and the Turkishborn Hebraist scholar Joseph Halévy. On the Revue des études juives, see Perrine SimonNahum, La Cité investée: La “Science du Judaïsme” française et la République (Paris: Cerf, 1991) and Simon Schwarzfuchs, Simon, “Les Débuts de la science du Judaïsme en France,” Pardes, 19–20 (1994): 214.

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group aimed to bring scholarship on different areas of Jewish studies together and serve as a forum for diverse aspects of the study of Jewish society and culture. The society, its founders hoped, would become “an intellectual center for French Judaism and a new link between different members of Jewish society.”70 While the group created a library, sponsored lectures, and published a journal, the Revue des études juives, these activities were limited to an elite group of scholars doing advanced research in Jewish religion, history, and philology. During the 1920s, these kinds of discussions moved from the realm of high culture to a language and a forum accessible to the broader public. French Jews did not create structures for Jewish education that rivalled those of either their German or American counterparts.71 Jewish elementary schools, which catered almost exclusively to new immigrants, experienced a steady decline in the interwar years and the curriculum in the few that did exist had little Jewish educational content.72 While some attempts were made to reform the synagogue system of religious instruction, the evidence does not suggest that any major changes were made during this period: religious instruction remained mostly limited to providing young boys with a basic reading knowledge of Hebrew for their bar mitzvahs. Nonetheless, the new network of Jewish associations and clubs created over the course of the 1920s did provide French Jews with a much greater opportunity to immerse themselves in Jewish culture, broadly speaking, than had existed before the war. Youth groups provided the most important forum for Jewish education. In his overview of French youth movements in the interwar years, Gérard Cholvy notes that the category of youth corresponded more to marital status than to age. Longer periods of schooling and later marriages meant that participation in ‘youth activities’ often extended well into the twenties. The age limit for 70  See “Procès-verbaux,” 154. 71  In Germany, the Weimar period saw both the revival of separate Jewish education for children and the Lehrhaus movement, which succeeded in setting up a network of adult education societies in different cities in the early 1920s. In the United States, a concern with providing Jewish education for both children and adults started as early as the late nineteenth century, with the Hebrew school and community center movement. See Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, chs 3 and 4 and David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool: The Synagogue Center in American Jewish History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999). 72  See Zosa Szajkowski, Jewish Education in France, 1789–1939, Jewish Social Studies monograph series 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). The handful of Jewish schools run by the Consistory, Szajkowski notes, all put much more emphasis on acculturating immigrants than on Jewish education. In Paris, the number of pupils at the three existing Jewish elementary schools declined from 947 in 1915 to 342 in 1925.

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membership in the Eclaireurs Israélites was 29, and Scout leaders were often older.73 For Jewish groups, the particular importance of cultural programming meant that the age barrier was even less crucial than for French youth groups in general. There was also a distinction among the Jewish groups themselves: dances, sporting clubs, and other purely social activities were obviously geared towards adolescents and singles in their early twenties; lectures, conferences, and discussion groups intended to educate Jews about their particular heritage, however, were much less age-specific. In heralding the creation of the Union Scolaire in 1897, Louis-Germain Lévy, who would become the first head of a Reform congregation in France with the founding of the Union Libérale in 1907, envisaged the group as a forum for Jewish education. In fact, however, the Union’s weekly lectures and discussion groups—by far the most successful of its activities74—did not, for the most part, deal with specifically Jewish topics.75 While the group prided itself on providing a forum for Jewish sociability, this was not linked to a concern about educating Jews about Judaism per se. For all the Jewish youth groups created in the 1920s, by contrast, lectures, conferences, and discussion groups on Jewish themes were a central part of the programming. Speakers and topics of course varied from group to group: whereas Chema Israël and the Union Libérale primarily featured conferences on religious subjects, the UUJJ and the AAIS favored lectures on Jewish history, current events, and contemporary Jewish literature. Nonetheless, there was a fair amount of overlap in these groups’ range of interests. While the Eclaireurs Israélites was primarily a sporting organization, it reserved an important place for Jewish education as well. Scouts earned certificates for participating in various activities, each of which was assigned a certain point value, and the category with the highest number of points was the religious certificate.76 Although the majority of the UUJJ’s lectures focused 73  Cholvy, Mouvements de jeunesse chrétiens et juifs, 16. 74  Writing about the group in 1923, Jules Meyer noted that “neither its adult education courses, its placement services, its artistic evenings or balls gave the Union Scolaire its excellent reputation . . . rather, it owes its success to its conferences and above all its weekly discussion groups. See “L’Union Scolaire,” Menorah (Apr. 29, 1923): 275–7. 75  Conferences for spring 1910, for example, included only one with a Jewish topic: a lecture by Victor Basch entitled “Judaism and German Thought in the Nineteenth Century.” Other lectures touched on everything from theatre and art to the ‘depopulation crisis’ in contemporary France to exploration of the North Pole. The president of the organization, Charles-Edouard Lévy, spoke regularly on scientific and medical subjects. See L’Union scolaire (May/June 1910): 276. 76  Michel, Juifs, Français, et Scouts, 52.

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on Zionism and current affairs, Aimé Pallière spoke frequently on religious themes.77 The first meeting of the Jeunesse Libérale Israélite featured a debate on Zionism: Théodore Reinach represented the anti-Zionist position while Aimé Pallière, Zionist leader Léon Filderman, and Ferdinand Lop (a regular columnist for both L’Univers israélite and La Tribune juive, the Strasbourg Jewish weekly) spoke on Jewish nationalism.78 Zionist sympathizers Pierre Paraf, Charles Gide, Baruch Hagani, Maurice Level, Victor Basch, and Jean Schrameck (an Alsatian who would become president of the UUJJ’s central committee in 1930) were all invited to speak for Chema Israël, whose members were perhaps more sympathetic to Zionism than its leadership: reporting on the popularity of Aimé Pallière’s speeches for the group, L’Univers israélite reported that some of the audience applauded when he praised the Zionist movement, and others when he spoke about the importance of religion.79 The issue of Jewish identity itself—who is a Jew? what is Judaism?—was a common focus for lectures, conferences, and debates. Speaking at the Union Scolaire in 1921, for example, Fernand Lévy-Wogue, a high-school teacher and author of a collection of short stories on Jewish themes published under the pseudonym Kislev, analysed the various ways in which Jews had understood themselves to be linked with one another, from a sense of being part of a common race or religion to a shared sense of moral values and even a sense of humor.80 To be Jewish, he asserted, was in fact to feel all of these things at once: to be moved by injustice and violence, to attach oneself to the values of “justice, equality, and charity” that form the “moral heritage” of Judaism. The AAIS sponsored a conference in 1924 on “The Jew in Contemporary Society,” in which four speakers elaborated on the tension between assimilation and self-preservation.81 A 1928 article in L’Univers israélite entitled “What Is a Jew?” commented on the central place this issue had come to occupy in contemporary discussions: after Julien Weill, a young rabbi and the author 77  As noted above, the UUJJ also organized a conference in 1926 entitled “Different Aspects of the Jewish Religion.” See “Nos conférences à Paris,” Chalom (Mar. 1926): 16. 78  See “Séance d’ouverture de la “Jeunesse Libérale Israélite,” Le Rayon (Feb. 25, 1925): 4–7. Reinach and Pallière participated in a debate on the same topic at the UUJJ in March 1927. See Chalom (Mar. 15, 1927): 5. 79   L’Univers israélite (Feb. 16, 1922): 571. 80  Lévy-Wogue’s short-story collection (Kislev, Contes de Hanouka) includes an essay entitled “Etre Juif,” which is the text of his 1921 lecture at the Union Scolaire. It was also published in L’Univers israélite (Jan. 28, 1921): 493–5, and reprinted in L’Union scolaire (Mar. 1921): 1–6. 81   Menorah printed a report on the conference. See “Le Juif dans la société contemporaine,” Menorah (Mar. 1, 1924): 55–8.

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of several books on Judaism gave a lecture on the subject for Chema Israël, the author noted, Chief Rabbi Israël Lévi also felt compelled to address the question.82 Another 1928 Chema lecture series entitled “The Tendencies of Modern Judaism” featured talks by Victor Basch on Zionism, Aimé Pallière on “the Jewish soul,” and Edmond Fleg on Martin Buber and Jewish mysticism. UUJJ conferences the same year featured, among other talks, Léon Filderman and André Spire on the subjects, respectively, of “Different Ways of Being Jewish” and “Why I Am a Jew.”83 Debating clubs and literary societies provided another forum for discussion of Jewish identity and culture in the public sphere. The most successful was the Club du Faubourg, created by journalist, left-wing political activist, and playwright Léo Poldès in 1918. Defined as an “open forum for cordial debate” the club, located on the boulevard Perrière in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement, sponsored debates on politics, literature, and current affairs. By the mid-1920s, the club was meeting three times a week and attracting thousands of participants.84 People with radically opposing viewpoints were often invited to ensure a lively debate: a discussion of ‘the Jewish question’ in 1924, for example, featured René Groos, the notorious Jewish member of Action Française, Louis-Germain Lévy, and novelist Josué Jéhouda.85 The most frequent format for Faubourg meetings was the ‘book trial’: several speakers would be invited to debate the issues raised in a recently published novel or essay. Audience participation was encouraged.86 All of the most popular books 82  Louis Weill, “Qu’est-ce qu’un Juif?” L’Univers israélite (Dec. 12, 1928): 454. 83  Spire’s lecture was a commentary on Edmond Fleg’s 1928 memoir Pourquoi je suis Juif. 84  Charles Sowerine, France Since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (New York: Palgrave, 2001). On the Faubourg and its prominence in Parisian cultural life in the interwar years, see also Juliette Goublet, Léo Poldès, le Faubourg (Aurillac: Editions du Centre, 1965) and Charles Sowerine and Claude Maignien, Madeleine Pelletier: Une féministe dans l’arène politique (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1992). Pelletier was a regular speaker at the Faubourg, and the club was sued for “outrages aux bonnes mœurs” after sponsoring a debate of her 1935 book La Rationalisation sexuelle (Madeleine Pelletier, 221–3). 85  Josué Jéhouda, who was born into a hasidic family in the Ukraine, divided his time between Paris and Geneva in the 1920s and became a prominent figure on the Parisian Jewish literary scene. Chapter 7 of French and Jewish contains a detailed discussion of his two-volume saga, La Tragédie d’Israël, 2 vols (Paris: Grasset); vol. i: De père en fils (1927); vol. ii: Miriam (1928). Set in contemporary France, these novels combine an anti-rationalist critique of modern society with a plea to young Jews to resist assimilation and ‘be true’ to their own ethnic and spiritual heritage. 86  This was a form of debate popular in the Soviet Union at this time, where trials were often staged theatre pieces. Actors would represent the various points of view and the audience would declare a verdict at the end. In France, passing judgement appears to have been

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on Jewish themes published in the 1920s were submitted to the tribunal of the Faubourg.87 The fact that debates on topics such as antisemitism, Zionism, and mixed marriage were featured regularly by a debating society best known for sponsoring debates on provocative political, social, and cultural issues of the day such as communism, race war, gender identity, feminism, and homosexuality helped to make the ‘réveil juif’ a focal point of the Parisian cultural revolution of the 1920s.88 The Faubourg was a source of inspiration for many in the Jewish community. The UUJJ’s ‘causeries contradictoires’ were modelled on the Faubourg’s format, and a club of Jewish journalists created in 1930 invoked the Club du Faubourg as its model.89 A report on the club in the Revue littéraire juive referred to it as “a forum for open discussion and education that has attracted the attention of the press the world over.”90 By 1928, the Faubourg had begun to hold its meetings at the Salle de Wagram, one of the largest halls in Paris. A 1928 debate on the Schwartzbard case, which coupled Joseph Kessel with an antisemitic journalist, drew such a large crowd that people had to be turned away.91 A barely disguised reference to the club in Jacob Lévy’s 1925 novel Les Pollaks92 suggests the club’s notoriety and widespread appeal: the story’s protagonists attend a meeting of the “Club de la Rue,” a popular debating society run by “that curious and alert spirit, Géo Moldès.” Lévy refers to the friendly atmosphere of the

less important: I have found no reference to verdicts at the Faubourg’s ‘trials.’ I am grateful to Edna Nahshon for this background on mock trials. Specifics on this phenomenon in the Soviet Union comes from Anna Shternshis’s unpublished paper, “Jewish Theatrical Trials in the Soviet Union (1917–1941)” presented at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference (1999). 87  These included, among others, folklorist Raymond Geiger’s collections of Jewish jokes, Histoires juives (Paris: Gallimard 1924) and Nouvelles histoires juives (Paris: Gallimard 1925), Jacob Lévy’s Les Juifs d’aujourd’hui and Sarah Lévy’s O mon goye!. I discuss all of these works in French and Jewish, ch. 7. 88  A sampling of topics for 1924, for example, includes “Polygamie,” “Un révolutionnaire: Peut-il croire en Dieu?” “Un conflit: Peut-il éclater entre Noirs et Blancs?,” “Peu ou beaucoup d’enfants,” and “Le Spiritisme.” See Goublet, Léo Poldès, 24. 89   L’Univers israélite (Jan. 3, 1930): 441. 90   Revue littéraire juive (Sept. 1930): 320. 91   L’Univers israélite (Mar. 30, 1928): 15–6. 92  Lévy published this novel as part of a four-volume series, Les Juifs d’aujourd’hui, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7 of French and Jewish. Originally published between 1925 and 1928, this was republished in 1999 as a single volume entitled Les Juifs d’aujourd’hui: La saga des Springer (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999).

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club, “a place where people from a wide variety of backgrounds and opinions have the opportunity to mix and share their views.”93 Another Parisian debating club with a strong Jewish emphasis was Henry Marx’s Université de Connaître. Like the Club du Faubourg, the Université de Connaître, which published a journal by the same name, sponsored lecture series and conferences that often focused on Jewish themes. Marx founded this group after a trip to Salonica in the early 1920s, and it was apparently his encounter with young Jews there that inspired its creation. In particular, Marx, who had both communist and Zionist sympathies, was impressed by the combination of socialism and Jewish cultural nationalism espoused by many of the Salonicans he met.94 Reconciling these two ideals became an important theme of discussion for the group, which held a particular attraction for Salonican immigrants. By 1928, when the group was planning thirteen lectures on Jewish themes for the year—ranging from “Zionism: Jewish Honor and Jewish Land” and “Moses” to “The Jewish Masterpiece: The Writing of Georges de PortoRiche”—it had a considerable following both in France and abroad.95 French Jews created several Jewish study circles in 1930 and 1931. The most important of these was the Cercle d’Etudes Juives, which brought different elements of the Parisian Jewish intellectual elite together. The group, which met at the home of its president Baron James H. de Rothschild, included Maurice Liber and other members of the Consistory and rabbinate, as well as prominent Zionist sympathizers including André Spire, Fernand Corcos, and writer Lily Jean-Javal.96 The Cercle organized some lectures in conjunction with the Société des Etudes Juives and, like that group, had a program consisting mainly of presentations by prominent scholars rather than the kind of sensationalist debate sponsored by the Club du Faubourg. André Siegfried, a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes des Sciences Politiques, gave the opening

93   Les Pollaks, 193. 94  On this group, see Connaître, subtitled Revue mensuelle juive, sioniste, littéraire et philosophe, which was launched in August 1924. The journal reported on Marx’s trip as well as on the creation of a sister society, the “Groupe Henry-Marx” in Salonica. See “La Vie du groupe,” Connaître, 1 (Aug. 1924): 23. A number of the articles in the two existing issues of the journal (which, Menorah indicates, was published for six years) focus on the Jews of Salonica. 95  See “Les Conférences de Henry Marx,” Menorah (Feb. 1, 1928): 44. 96  Lily Jean-Javal was a Parisian-born femme de lettres and Zionist activist who came from a French Jewish family of long standing. I discuss her novels, Noémi (Paris: Plon 1925) and L’inquiète (Paris: Plon 1927), which detail the spiritual journey of a young woman from southern France away from and back to Judaism, in chapter 7 of French and Jewish.

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lecture, entitled “The People Israel in Modern Democracies.”97 Other speakers included Salomon Reinach on James Darmesteter, Edmond Fleg on his book Ma Palestine, and literary critic René Lalou on the poetry and literary criticism of André Spire. As with youth groups, issues of definition and identity were important for the circle. The first item on the group’s agenda, as described in an article in Le Rayon, was “to discuss the issue of our audience so as to be certain that our self-definition is open enough to include the diverse tendencies that make up our community.”98 The article then outlined these various tendencies, from degrees of religious belief and observance, to an attachment to Jewish tradition or memory, to cultural nationalism and Zionism. 3

Jewish Associational and Cultural Life in Alsace

The main center of Jewish life outside of Paris was Alsace-Lorraine. After the region was returned to French control following the First World War, the Jews of Alsace maintained a largely independent institutional structure.99 Alsatian Jews developed their own Zionist institutions and published a weekly paper, La Tribune juive.100 They tended to be more religious than their Parisian counterparts, and many of the associations they created reflected this orientation. The Union des Amis de la Tradition Juive was created in Colmar in 1922, and in 1920 Alsatian students started a club for observant Jewish students living in Paris. There was a much stronger alliance between religious leaders and Zionists in Alsace than elsewhere in France. It was there that the Mizrahi movement (of religious Zionists) was strongest, and Zionist organizations often counted local rabbis among their members. Many of the new associations created in Alsace during this period reflected this combination of religious traditionalism and Zionism. 97  “Israël dans les démocraties modernes: Une conférence de M. André Siegfried au Cercle d’Etudes Juives,” L’Univers israélite (May 23, 1930): 203–4. 98  See the article on the group’s formation by Etienne Treves, “Qu’est ce qu’un Juif?” Le Rayon (Oct./Nov. 1931): 15–9. 99  Despite its re-annexation to France, Alsace maintained a certain amount of regional autonomy. In particular, the separation of church and state did not apply there, which gave local consistories much more control than in other regions of France. 100  This paper was originally published as Le Juif by the religious Zionist group Mizrahi, beginning in 1920. It became an independent publication and changed its name to La Tribune juive in March 1923. One of the main reasons for Alsatian Jewish autonomy, of course, was linguistic. While French articles appeared with increasing frequency over course of the decade, the majority were in German.

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One of the first new adult educational institutions to emerge in Alsace in the post-First World War years was Emounah (Faith).101 An association of former religious school students in Strasbourg—inspired, perhaps, by the Lehrhaus movement in Germany—created the group in 1923 in order to continue Jewish education into young adulthood.102 The group offered a series of lectures and courses on Jewish history and religion, and frequently collaborated with local Zionist groups. It sponsored the Strasbourg opening of Keren Kayemet’s film La Terre promise in 1925, as well as a conference on Martin Buber in conjunction with the Association Sioniste des Dames Juives. Emounah was joined in 1929 by the Institut des Sciences Juives à Strasbourg, geared specifically towards providing a traditional Jewish education for adults. This group offered courses on Talmud, biblical exegesis, and classical and modern Hebrew, Jewish literature, history, and philosophy, as well as “the physical, economic and human geography of Palestine.”103 It received a significant amount of attention in the Parisian Jewish press and inspired the Paris Consistory to sponsor a similar series of courses on Judaism the following year.104 The institute was also used as a meeting-place for other Jewish groups, and moved into larger headquarters in summer 1931. A group of young people in Strasbourg set up a study group that sponsored lectures and meetings at the institute, as did the local Zionist association, the Union des Dames Juives, and Emounah.105 One of the most important links between the various Jewish groups created during this period was the ubiquitous Aimé Pallière. In a posthumous tribute 101  Several literary and historical societies were already functioning in Alsace in the 1920s, including the Société pour l’Histoire des Israélites en Alsace et Lorraine and the Société d’Histoire et de Littérature Juive de Mulhouse et Metz. 102  The organizing committee included Jean Schrameck, a member of the Union Régionale des Sionistes de l’Est de la France and the UUJJ. Emounah became a UUJJ affiliate in 1930. 103  See Meyerkey, “Un seul Judaïsme,” La Tribune juive (Jan. 11, 1930): 1–2. 104  In an article on the opening of the Institut, Aimé Pallière praised the group’s programme and suggested that, even without creating such an organization, Parisian Jews could organ­ ize a similar set of courses; see Chalom (June 1929): 1–2. The following February several members of the Consistory, including Edouard and Robert de Rothschild and Mme R. A. Olchanski, a member of the Cercle d’Etudes Juives, organized a series of “Conférences pour la Jeunesse.” The founders’ statement explaining the objective of the courses— which invoked both young people’s renewed interest in Judaism and their lack of knowledge about it—was the same of that of the founders of the institute in Strasbourg. See L’Univers israélite (Feb. 14, 1930): 632–3. 105   La Tribune juive (Feb. 14, 1930): 106. The article noted that the institute’s own courses were suffering due to all the other activities going on at its center. La Tribune juive reported that some courses were attended by as few as ten people while others were overcrowded, but in general courses were well attended. See La Tribune juive (July 25, 1930): 474.

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to Pallière published in the Revue de la pensée juive, contemporaries recalled his impact on French Jewish life in the interwar years.106 In addition to playing a leadership role in the UUJJ, he lectured frequently at the AAIS, Chema Israël, and the Jeunesse Libérale Israélite, and wrote numerous articles in support of all of these groups in the Jewish press. It was after a discussion with Pallière that Lily Simon decided to found the Eclaireuses.107 As someone who was both deeply religious and a committed Zionist, Pallière encouraged the various groups to develop whichever of these aspects of Jewishness he felt they lacked. The importance of religion in the UUJJ’s agenda was largely due to the influence of Pallière, for whom Zionism was meaningless if it was not accompanied by a commitment to religious spirituality. In his lectures for Chema Israël and the Jeunesse Libérale Israélite, by contrast, Pallière sought to persuade his audiences that the Jewish religious revival of the day was intimately linked to the Zionist movement. His position as the president of the UUJJ does not seem to have made him any less welcome as a speaker at Chema, where gave a very well-attended three-part lecture series on his trip to Palestine in 1930.108 4 Conclusion The dramatic and tragic events of the 1930s and 1940s meant that the rich web of Jewish associational life that French Jews created in the 1920s was not allowed to run its natural course. In the 1920s, French Jews felt a new sense of freedom to explore their difference from a wide variety of perspectives, and to create organizations and institutions that would enable them to do so. These organ­ izations and activities, however, were largely fuelled by a sense of freedom based on the conviction that that antisemitism was on the decline. The orientation of French Jewish associational life inevitably changed with the political climate. Cultural concerns and debates over the meaning of Jewish identity in the modern world gave way to responding to the rise of Nazi Germany and the refugee crisis, as well as the growth of French fascism and the resurgence of antisemitism as a critical factor in French political life. As recent scholarship 106  See “Hommage à Aimé Pallière,” special issue of Revue de la pensée juive, 8 (July 1951). In both her book and doctoral dissertation, Poujol details the critical and unique role that Pallière played in youth, Reform, and Zionist movements in France in the 1920s, and underlines the ways in which Pallière’s very particular insider/outsider status enabled him to move between milieus in a way that no person born and raised as a Jew could do. 107  Michel, Juifs, Français, et Scouts, ch. 1. 108   L’Univers israélite (Mar. 14, 1930): 70.

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demonstrates, however, the rich associational life that French Jews developed in the 1920s played an important role in shaping communal responses to these crises as well as in developing the Jewish networks that would engage in rescue activities during the Second World War.109 Whether they defined Judaism as a religion, a culture, a race, or a historical community, French Jews in the 1920s increasingly shared the conviction that it was only by creating new spaces for Jewish sociability that their community would survive into the next generation. With the end of the war and the Vichy era of Jewish persecution, issues of Jewish identity and self-definition that had occupied religious and communal leaders in the 1920s once again became relevant. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Jewish community was transformed by a myriad of new developments, including French Jews’ own recent history of persecution, the creation of the state of Israel, and the arrival of thousands of new immigrants from North Africa. All of these developments further complicated both the ideology of assimilation and a narrowly religious understanding of Jewish identity, and encouraged French Jews to build on the shifts in communal self-understanding and self-perception that had begun in the early twentieth century.

109   See Meredith Scott-Weaver, “Lobbyists and Humanitarians: Networks and French Jewish Activism in Interwar Strasbourg, Nice and Paris, 1919–1939,” (Phd diss., University of Delaware, 2012); Erin Corber, “L’esprit du corps: Bodies, Communities, and the Reconstruction of Jewish Life in France 1914–1940,” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013) and the special volume of Urban History entitled “Beyond the Pletzl: Jewish Urban Histories of Interwar France,” Urban History, 43 (Dec. 2015).

Part 3 Jews and Politics, Jewish Politics

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Chapter 6

Jews, Liberals and the Civilizing Mission in Nineteenth-Century France1 Lisa Moses Leff As numerous historians of nineteenth-century France have shown, “civilization” was a battle-cry of liberals in their struggle against ultramontane Catholicism.2 By the time of the Third Republic, “civilization” had become a “mission” in French colonial policy, which replaced the Catholicism and mercantile capitalism of Old Regime policies as a warrant for colonialism. According to Alice Conklin, the Third Republican “civilizing mission” was an extension of a particular set of liberal values to the rest of the world through a kind of tutelage. These values included liberation from tyranny, slavery, and feudalism; economic productivity; a belief in science and progress; hygiene and medicine; private property; and anticlericalism.3 Yet despite the strong place of anticlericalism among these goals, the way that liberals described the “civilizing mission” suggests a surprising pairing of the secular “civilizing” and sacred “mission.” And indeed, a close look at the discourse used by nineteenthcentury liberals in their support of colonization suggests that the clerical right did not have a monopoly on religious fervor. This study examines how “civilization” became a “mission” at the heart of liberal French colonial and foreign policy, articulated and deployed with religious zeal. By examining the centrality of religious questions in the debates about French foreign and colonial policy in the mid-nineteenth century, we will better understand why the republican rhetoric of the “civilizing mission” resembled, in tone though not in content, the Catholic mission it sought to replace. 1  Adapted from Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenthcentury France, by Lisa Moses Leff, © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford, Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used with permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. 2  Lucien Febvre, “Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas,” in A New Kind of History and Other Essays, ed. Peter Burke (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 219–57 and R. A. Lochore, History of the Idea of Civilization in France (1830–1870) (Bonn: Ludwig Rohrscheid, 1935). 3  Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 5–8.

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Examining the story from a Jewish perspective provides a particularly good lens through which to see this struggle. As the only group of non-Christian citizens whose religion was officially recognized, administered and supported by the state, the Jews were in a unique position in nineteenth-century France. On the one hand, France had made them citizens and was thus committed to protecting their religion within France’s borders. Yet on the other hand, until the 1860s, France remained committed to certain Catholic concerns, especially in its foreign policy. At we shall see, these dual commitments sometimes came into conflict with one another, in ways to which Jews were particularly attentive. In this ambiguous position, French Jews were especially committed to the de-Christianization of French foreign policy in the July Monarchy and Second Empire; embracing the liberal rhetoric of a “civilizing mission” played an essential role in this struggle.

The Problem: Jews and French Foreign and Colonial Policy in the 1840s

Jewish commitment to framing France’s mission in the world as a “civilizing mission” seems to have emerged first during the Damascus Affair.4 In February 1840, a Sardinian Capuchin friar named Father Thomas disappeared with his servant in Damascus. The city’s Jews were accused of abducting the two men and killing them in order to use their blood for ritual purposes. A long inquiry ensued, in which Muslim and European Christian officials—especially the French consul, the Comte de Ratti-Menton—worked together to extract “confessions” from leading members of the Jewish community. The methods they used included torture, and resulted in numerous deaths. Meanwhile, Ratti-Menton sent stories about the events to the European press, enraging British and French Jewish leaders who saw the reports as inciting traditional European Christian anti-Jewish beliefs. In the summer, Adolphe Crémieux, as Vice President of the Central Consistory, the official administrative body of French Judaism, traveled to the Middle East with Sir Moses Montefiore of England in order to defend the Jews against the charges. Beyond helping the Jews of Damascus, Montefiore and Crémieux sent back news reports, providing European readers with an otherwise absent defense of the Jews. By the end of the summer, the accused had been pardoned and Crémieux returned 4  Although earlier examples of this rhetoric can be found, they did not occupy center stage in the way they did during and after 1840. See, for example, Michel Berr, “Sur la Liberté des cultes,” Mercure de France, September 1814.

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home a hero for having defended Judaism against fanaticism in the name of the civilized world.5 The Damascus Affair showed Jewish leaders just how important foreign policy was for their own sense of security at home. According to a series of treaties dating back to the seventeenth century, Roman Catholic clergy, and the Capuchins in particular, were protected in Ottoman lands by the French consuls, who answered to the French Foreign Minister, a post occupied in 1840 by Adolphe Thiers.6 In this case, the consul Ratti-Menton was not dealing with the rights of Jewish citizens of France, but with Damascus Jews accused of killing a man whose safety he was bound to protect. There was, therefore, an opportunity for the French official’s prejudices against Jews and Judaism to inform his actions. If Ratti-Menton, as an agent of the French state, acted on his (false) belief that the Talmud demanded that Jews kill Christians, then similar accusations could surface once again in France. This was likely, since RattiMenton was also responsible for sending news to European newspapers about the events as they unfolded. Especially in newspapers like the ultramontane Catholic Univers, Ratti-Menton’s reports gave credence to popular Christian fears about the Jewish religion at a time when the place of Jewish in French society was still insecure.7 Because of the situation’s gravity, French Jewish leaders had to be extremely careful about how they responded. Though they believed Ratti-Menton to be in the wrong, criticizing a French official for mistreating foreign Jews was tricky business. Furthermore, as Jonathan Frankel has so perceptively illustrated, the Damascus Affair had reopened the debate about the morality of the Jewish religion in the German states and England, where government leaders had begun to consider expanding the rights of Jews.8 In France, the situation seemed dangerous as well. In the Chamber of Deputies, Thiers ardently supported Ratti-Menton when more liberal deputies like the anti-slavery activist François Isambert and the Jewish deputy Benoît Fould criticized the consul for his actions and his obvious prejudice. In a move that greatly disturbed French Jews, Thiers even went so far as to describe an opposition between French interests and Jewish interests. Addressing the Chamber, he said: 5  See Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics and the Jews in 1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6  Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 19–20. 7  See for example “Feuilleton de l’Univers: Assassinat du Père Thomas. Documents officiels,” Univers, May 3, 1840. 8  Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 185–6.

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You protest in the name of the Jews of Damascus and I protest in the name of a Frenchman who until now has carried out his duties with honor and loyalty. . . . When the facts were known, [the Jews] were aroused all over Europe and they brought to this affair an enthusiasm and heat which in my eyes do them profound honor. And, if I may be permitted to say so, they are more powerful in the world than they have pretensions to be. . . . Gentlemen, you should know, and I repeat, the Jews at this very moment are in the chancelleries about this affair and our Consul has no support except in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.9 By criticizing Ratti-Menton directly, French Jews would only make it appear as though they were working against French interests. Moreover, Thiers clearly assumed a solidarity between the Jews of the world, which, at least in this case, he identified as contrary to French policy. Crémieux challenged this view by identifying his work on behalf of the Damascus Jews with French ideology. He and his colleagues on the Central Consistory identified France with “humanity, civilization, and religion,” terms that for them denoted freedom of conscience, the equality of Jews and Christians, and the understanding of Judaism and Christianity as religions sharing a set of fundamental values. In this framework, the Jews of Damascus, wrongfully accused, were portrayed as needing the protection of “civilized” France from barbaric oriental despots. Armed with this rhetorical strategy, the Central Consistory wrote to Thiers in July: France, the first country to abolish torture in criminal trials, does not want to perpetuate its use in the countries where it favors the progress of civilization. We do not ask any favors for the accused, in spite of what they have been through; we demand only an enlightened and regular justice, which does not use violence. If they are guilty, may they be left to the rigor of the country’s law, if they are not, may their innocence be proclaimed. . . . Say a word, one single word, and the truth will be revealed, and we will thank you in the name of humanity, civilization and religion.10 This identification of Western states with civilization and religious tolerance was diffused throughout the liberal Western European press, including several 9  Montieur universel, June 3, 1840, 1258. This translation from Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 189. 10  Central Consistory to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, July 20, 1840, in Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem (hereafter CAHJP) HM 1058. The British Jew mentioned here is Sir Moses Montefiore.

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new Jewish newspapers, such as the German Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and the new Archives Israélites de France, founded in the wake of the Affair.11 Jews thus linked their interests to the ideals of the French constitution, asserting that their cooperation to help the Damascus Jews was in fact an expression of their belonging to the “civilized” world rather than an attack upon France. In the minds of French Jewish leaders, if not in Thiers’ mind, the French government had a duty to protect the rights of people outside French jurisdiction suffering under the oppression of “barbaric” or “uncivilized” rulers. Rather than seeing a conflict between their advocacy for Jews in other countries and their integration in France, they defined their defense of the Damascus Jews as an integral part of France’s “civilizing mission” to bring the values of the Revolution to the world. This strategy became a central part of the Jewish self-defense arsenal after the resolution of the Damascus Affair. In part, this was because the Damascus Affair reverberated throughout the 1840s. New ritual murder accusations against Jews in the Ottoman Empire surfaced in the French press in 1843, 1844, and 1847, and the anti-Jewish press continued to publish documents from the Damascus Affair itself throughout the 1840s.12 On these occasions, the French Jewish press called on the government to protect accused Jews in the name of France’s most cherished humanist values, which, the Jews argued, took priority over the traditional mission of French Middle Eastern policy to protect Christians. For example, in the 1843 case, Samuel Cahen of the Archives israélites wrote: “The representatives of the most civilized nation must make the exigencies of civilization prevail everywhere. France proclaims herself the protector of the Catholics of the Orient. Here is what politics dictates: France must be the protector of humanity everywhere . . .”13 The 1844 case elicited a similar call to the Foreign Ministry to abandon the protection of Christians over and above the goals of civilization, which Cahen defined as “tolerance and legality.”14 Similarly, Jewish publicists advocated “civilization” in French policy toward Algerian Jews. Under the military control of the antisemitic General Thomas Robert Bugeaud, more than 20,000 Jews in the newly-conquered colony lived in 11  Frankel, The Damascus Affair, 109–231. 12  “Nouvelles accusations contre les juifs de Damas,” Archives israélites de France (hereafter AIF) 4 (1843): 736–41; “Affaire des israélites de Marmara,” AIF 5 (1844): 180–182; “Nouvelle Persécution à Damas,” AIF 8 (1847): 625–8. On the publication of documents from the Damascus Affair in the anti-Jewish press, see Frankel, Damascus Affair, 415. 13  “Nouvelle Accusation contre les Juifs en Orient,” AIF 4 (1843): 737. 14  “Affaire des israélites de Marmara,” AIF 5 (1844): 181.

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r­ eligiously-defined communities much like the Old Regime corporations that the Revolution had rendered obsolete. Subjected to accusations of barbarism and disloyalty, they even faced the prospect of expulsion, which the Ministry of War considered an acceptable option. In addition, since the late 1830s, a vocal group of Catholics in Marseilles had been pushing the War Ministry to begin to convert the Algerians to Christianity.15 In response to the dangers they perceived, the Central Consistory asked Altaras and Joseph Cohen, a young lawyer from Aix, to travel to Algeria and assess the situation. In 1842, Altaras and Cohen submitted a report that painted the situation of the Algerian Jews’ conditions as dire. To solve their problems, Altaras and Cohen advocated direct governance by metropolitan agencies rather than by Army officials. The Army had been treating the Algerian Jewish communautés as legal entities, and had designated an indigenous chief to govern each local communauté according to religious law. This, Altaras and Cohen argued, was fundamentally unconstitutional, and left the Algerian Jews open to “abuses” inherent in arbitrary rule that the French, “as civilized rulers,” were obligated to oppose.16 Instead, they insisted the Jews should be elevated to the status of citizens and their rabbis stripped of civil and juridical control, with consistory officials overseeing their transition to educated and upright citizens. The suggestion of Altaras and Cohen to establish consistories in Algeria rested on their understanding of the proper relationship between religions and the state. In a civilized society, they believed, religious bodies should be educational and spiritual bodies, whose main task should be to teach the values needed for citizenship. Law should emanate from a single source—the state—rather than from the various religious bodies currently in place. In addition, they sought to replace Algerian rabbis and religious teachers with French schools and French rabbis, in order to assure that “civilization” would progress without compromising freedom of conscience. French-run religious schools would “enlighten” Algerian Jews by teaching them “useful” vocational skills as well as the duties and fruits of modern citizenship. Significantly, they described state-sponsored schools as a “baptism to be spilled on the head of the people” to teach them good morals, good work habits, and agricultural knowledge.17 Here, to emphasize that the bestowal of the rights and 15  Pierre Guiral, Marseille et l’Algérie, 1830–1841, in Annales de la faculté des lettres d’Aix-enProvence, nouvelle série, no. 15 (Cap: Editions Ophrys, 1956), 156–80. 16  Jacques Altaras and Joseph Cohen, “Rapport sur l’état moral et politique des israélites de l’Algérie et des moyens de l’améliorer,” in Simon Schwartzfuchs, Les Juifs d’Algérie et la France (1830–1855) (Jerusalem: Insistut Ben-Zvi, 1981), 115–8, 119, 153–7, 160–70. 17  Altaras and Cohen, “Rapport,” 172.

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o­ bligations of citizenship was uplifting and transformative, Altaras and Cohen adopted the language of Christian conversion for the French colonial mission. Although they did not envisage a literal baptism, they nevertheless evidently understood the proposed transformation as a sacred one. In terms that foreshadowed those of Third Republican colonial policies, the “civilizing mission” that Altaras and Cohen advocated was a sacred transformation that would introduce them to the fruits of the French Revolution, changing and uplifting them without compromising their religious freedom.18 Altaras’s and Cohen’s suggestions were accepted by a special commission appointed to determine the status of Algerian Jews in 1843, and the King formalized them by the ordonnance of 9 November 1845.19

Jews, Liberals, and the Crimean War

As Aron Rodrigue has observed, the Crimean War of 1853–56 was a crucial moment in sparking French Jewish interest in “civilizing” Jews in Ottoman lands, in ways that bore a striking resemblance to the earlier proposals regarding the Jews of Algeria. “Civilization,” in the minds of contemporary Jewish leaders and publicists, involved the establishment of schools to “regenerate” and “productivize” Jewish youth, but it was not limited to such philanthropic measures. “Civilization” also involved taking steps to improve the legal status of Jews and other religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire. French Jewish advocacy for Ottoman Jewry in the early 1850s was carried out by representatives of the most important institutions of French Jewry. The members of the Central Consistory wrote to Emperor Napoleon III, urging him to assure that Jews as well as Christians would soon be treated as legal equals in the Ottoman Empire. The philanthropist Albert Cohn, a member of the Paris Consistory and employee of the Rothschilds, embarked on a trip to assess the condition of Ottoman Jewry and established schools for them. The Jewish press published numerous articles on Ottoman Jewry, informing the public of their living conditions and the dangers they currently faced and calling on readers to 18  Altaras and Cohen, “Rapport,” 114–9, 160–77. On analogies to the Revolution in Third Republican colonial discourse, see Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, esp. chapter 3. 19   On the establishment of consistories in Algeria, see Richard Ayoun, “Les Efforts d’assimilation intellectuelle et l’émancipation législative des Juifs d’Algérie” (paper presented at the Cultures juives méditerranéennes et orientales conference, Paris, 1982), 173–188, and Morton Rosenstock, “The Establishment of the Consistorial System in Algeria,” Jewish Social Studies 18 (1956): 41–54.

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express support for the “civilization” of Ottoman Jewry in a sustained way.20 In all of these appeals, French Jewish leaders emphasized that “civilizing” Ottoman Jewry was a part of France’s mission to bring civilization to the East. Articulating this particular conception of what it meant to “civilize” Ottoman Jewry was by no means unconnected to the French Jews’ battle of forging a secular foreign policy for their own country. On the contrary, the Crimean War had occasioned a broader public discussion about whether the French mission to the world was liberal or Catholic. In this discussion, French Jewish leaders and their liberal allies used religious terms such as “mission” in order to sacralize the values they espoused: freedom of conscience, equality before the law, and the championing of the rights of the oppressed. The Crimean War was an important moment in forging the liberal ideological foundation of France’s “civilizing mission.” France and Great Britain entered the Crimean War in 1854 to defend the Ottoman Empire against Russian expansion into its territory.21 At the beginning, the French press often depicted the Crimean conflict as a Catholic struggle. Sending troops to the Crimea appealed to the same diverse group of Catholics who had supported the 1849 campaign to support the Pope against Roman revolutionaries, undertaken when Louis-Napoleon was President of the Second Republic. This group included moderate republicans like Msgr. Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour, the Archbishop of Paris; it also included ultras like Univers editor Louis Veuillot, a notorious Jew-hater and staunch defender of a strong role for the Church in French governance. Catholics supported French involvement in the Crimea because they saw it as the best way for France to uphold its duty to protect Catholics and Maronite Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Russian incursions into Ottoman territory were seen as a threat to this right, which the Turks had guaranteed in a series of treaties dating back to the seventeenth century. Seeking the clerical party’s support for his reign, the Emperor framed

20  Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 13–22. The Central Consistory’s petition can be found in “Intervention par le Consistoire central en faveur des israélites de la Turquie,” AIF 15 (1854): 228–230. A similar appeal to the Minister of Foreign Affairs can be found in “Lettre adressée par le Consistoire central au Ministre des Affaires Etrangères,” AIF 16 (1855): 217–18. On Albert Cohn’s work in this period, see Isidore Loeb, Biographie d’Albert Cohn (Paris: Durlacher, 1878), 46–56. 21  Winfried Baumgart, The Crimean War, 1853–1856 (London: Arnold, 1999), 3–4; William Miller, The Ottoman Empire and Its Successors, 1801–1927 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), 199–222. David Wetzel, The Crimean War: A Diplomatic History (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1985), 39–48.

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France’s involvement in the conflict as based in the long-standing French duty as the Church’s “eldest daughter.”22 The declaration of war was well received by numerous French Catholic leaders. Since the 1840s, Catholic leaders in France, like Protestant leaders in England and Switzerland, had been calling on their congregations to put pressure on their governments to help the beleaguered Christians of the Ottoman Empire.23 Their views were widely publicized at the outset of the conflict. César Famin, the French consul in Jassy (Romania) and editor of the Encyclopédie catholique, published a book in 1853 reminding readers of the French legal obligation to protect Christians in Ottoman lands, where Christians were not allowed to own property or build churches. Explicitly invoking the memory of the crusades, Famin asserted that in the current crisis, the main issue was whether Russia or France would emerge as the protector of Christian rights in the Ottoman Empire, and patriotically called on France to uphold its historic duty in this regard.24 Although Famin argued that France should protect Jews in the East as well—whose rights, he said, were also compromised under the Turks—other leaders were more focused on defining France’s mission as exclusively Catholic.25 According to reporters in the Jewish press, Archbishop Sibour led public prayers for the troops engaged in what he saw as a new holy war, fighting for “the cause of civilization and our holy religion.” Sibour, who had been a staunch supporter of the Second Republic, had also played an important role in the clergy’s struggle for greater control in education. The blessing he offered in the name of both “civilization” and Catholicism mirrors his attempt to embrace liberalism while also strengthening the role of the Church in public life.26 More conservative Catholic publicists were reported to

22  René Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe Since the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 86–87 and Wetzel, The Crimean War, 41. 23  The Jewish press reported on these efforts continually, urging Jews act in kind, especially since Catholic and especially Protestant activity in the East so often involved attempts to convert Jews as well as Muslims. See for example, “Revue de l’année 1847,” UI 5 (1849–50): 20; “Les Sympathies des israélites de l’Occident pour leurs coreligionnaires de l’Orient,” AIF 15 (1854): 367–8; “Chronique du mois,” AIF 15 (1854): 453; and “Chronique du mois,” AIF 16 (1855): 107–8. 24  César Famin, Histoire de la Rivalité et du Protectorat des églises chrétiennes en Orient (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1853), especially 1–6, 8, 14–8, 162–3, 459–61. 25  Famin, Histoire, 52–5. 26  On Sibour’s liberal Catholicism, see Philip Spencer, The Politics of Belief in NineteenthCentury France: Lacordaire, Michon, Veuillot (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 148.

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have called the war a “holy crusade” waged purely on behalf of the Church.27 In the eyes of those embattled against the clerical party, Church leaders at home seemed to be using this opportunity to push for a greater role in policy-making and national self-definition. For this reason, liberal publicists sought to define France’s mission in the conflict in “civilizational” rather than Catholic terms. Still supporting the war, liberals defined the war as a struggle between “barbarism” and “civilization” rather than between Catholic and Orthodox Christians or between Christians and Muslims. In adopting this strategy, liberals did not oppose protecting Christians in Ottoman lands, but rather, claimed that only advancing liberalism within Turkey would truly protect Eastern Christians. Journalist Emile de Girardin, former deputy and founder of the liberal newspaper La Presse, was particularly articulate in putting forth this perspective. As he saw it, France should pursue a policy that would bring religious tolerance, the liberation of oppressed nations, as well as the development of science, technology, industrial production, commerce and credit in the Ottoman Empire. Only this, he claimed, would strengthen Turkey and thus solve the Eastern Question. Girardin contrasted this goal of “the civilization of Turkey” to a number of other proposals, all of which he saw as either impractical or barbaric. For example, John Lemoinne, editor of the Journal des Débats, had suggested supporting a Greek takeover of the Ottoman Empire, thereby Christianizing it. This, Girardin contended, was a throwback to the medieval crusades, based in ultramontane superstition and intolerance, which went against nineteenthcentury France’s most fundamental notions of freedom and “civilization.”28 Other publicists, according to Girardin, had suggested dividing the Ottoman Empire among the European Christian powers; this, he asserted, was impractical and unjust, since it would involve either a massive population transfer of Muslims to Asia, or even worse, their extermination.29 Furthermore, he contended a new crusade on the medieval model would do nothing to protect the holy sites in Syria; on the contrary, any war around those sites would certainly destroy them.30 “Civilization” was thus an overarching goal that would simultaneously advance modern governance, industry, finance, science and technology, and also protect Christian holy sites and the rights of non-Muslim subjects 27  “Chronique,” UI (1853–54): 382. See also “Chronique du mois,” AIF 15 (1854): 284. For a fuller account of the spectrum of Catholic responses to the war, see Spencer, Politics of Belief, 155–68. 28  Emile de Girardin, Solutions de la Question d’Orient (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1852), 26–41. 29  Girardin, Solutions, 19–25. 30  Girardin, Solutions, 25.

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in the Ottoman Empire. Thus, Girardin was not attacking Catholicism here; rather, he was putting forth an argument for state secularism recognizable to others in his orbit by claiming that particular religions, including the Christian confessions, were best protected and even uplifted by establishing a liberal legal and economic system. The religious politics of Girardin’s liberalism were important to his argument, particularly since they resonated with, and thus drew support from, ideas being articulated by others committed to state secularism along this same model. University professors who had opposed the return of the Jesuits to French education since the 1840s were particularly good allies in this regard. Historian Edgar Quinet, a republican in exile following Napoleon III’s coup d’état of December 1851, had advanced a similar perspective in two different works in the 1840s. In his 1845 Le Christianisme et la Révolution française, Quinet had argued that the French Revolution represented a new moment in which particular sectarian concerns were replaced by a broader “religious” system characterized by its democratic principles. In the Revolution, Quinet asserted, France had superseded the Catholic Church as the bearer of the “religious” mission to form an “alliance of the human races” by extending democratic principles to the world.31 In appropriating the terms “religious” and “Christian” to describe revolutionary principles, Quinet defined democratic beliefs and practices as a set of transcendent values that incorporated and thus protected particular ways of worshipping. In contemporary discourse, using these terms in this way also signaled a strong opposition to the clerical party. Quinet’s view of religion and politics was made even clearer in 1849, when he published a tract provocatively entitled La Croisade Autrichienne, Française, Napolitaine, et Espagnole contre la République Romaine, which criticized the Rome Campaign. When France sent troops to protect the Pope against the insurgent Roman Republic, Quinet restated his position that France’s mission in the nineteenth century was liberal rather than Catholic. The Republic should not launch crusades, as it had in the Middle Ages, he argued, nor should it support the Pope as a temporal ruler by “torturing” the Roman people like medieval inquisitors. “Men of good faith,” he wrote, “tell me how you expect to establish order by toppling all notions of human conscience . . . destroying nationality, using religion as a mask . . . dismissing a freely elected national assembly by the sword, waging a religious war without faith, a crusade without Christ, which will turn religious freedom into a friendly

31  Edgar Quinet, Le Christianisme et la Révolution française (Paris: Imprimeurs-Unis, 1845). This quotation from page 209.

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nation’s auto-da-fé.”32 Quinet argued that France needed instead to be true to the basic “religious” principles of the Revolution by championing oppressed national groups like the Italians, as well as freedom of conscience, teaching (enseignement) and religious belief.33 The terms Quinet used here—freedom of conscience, teaching, and religious belief—were the rallying cries of the contemporary Liberté de penser (freedom of thought) movement, and served to connect international politics to recent struggles within the University. Under the leadership of philosophy professors Amadée Jacques and Jules Simon, an entire spectrum of intellectuals had united in 1847 to limit the role of the Church in education, and their work continued throughout the Second Empire.34 Yet, far from abandoning religiosity altogether in their efforts, these intellectuals insisted that their work was a mission for extending the French revolutionary ideals they deemed sacred. Girardin’s views on religion in his Solutions de la Question d’Orient were also similar to those of the members of the Saint-Simonian movement, active in the 1820s and 1830s. Former Saint-Simonians were by no means marginal— since the movement’s demise in the early 1830s, some former members had become noted intellectuals (Auguste Comte, Léon Halévy), journalists (Charles Duveyrier, Adolphe Guéroult), government officials (Michel Chevalier), political activists (Pierre Leroux), engineers (Fernand de Lesseps) and capitalists (the Pereire brothers). Girardin believed that particular religious sects, including the Christian confessions, Islam and Judaism, would best be protected by the extension of “civilization,” an internationally connective set of values. For former Saint-Simonians, this notion of “civilization” resonated with the “New Christianity” which they had elaborated in their early years. New Christianity was at once a political, economic and spiritual system. It sought to bring coherence, rationality, and progress to both the material and moral aspects of modern life. Its aims included establishing an international banking system, 32  Edgar Quinet, La Croisade Autrichienne, Française, Napolitaine, Espagnole contre la République Romaine (Paris: Chamerot, 1849), 30. On the Rome Campaign more broadly, see Emile Bourgeois and E. Clermont, Rome et Napoléon III (1849–1870): Etude sur les origines et la chute du Second Empire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1907), 3–196. 33  Quinet, La Croisade, 3–16, 21. 34  On this movement, see Philip A. Bertocci, Jules Simon: Republican Anticlericalism and Cultural Politics in France, 1848–1886 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 48–71. Two Jewish students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Eugène Manuel and Isidore Cahen, the son of the editor of the Archives israélites) were involved in the movement. See Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 201–2; and on their reticence to become as fully involved as they might have liked, see Eugène Manuel, Lettres de jeunesse (Paris: Hachette, 1909), 15–6.

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building global transportation networks, emancipating women and workers, eradicating the power of the traditional aristocracy, improving the economic position of the poor, and establishing a new dogma that would unite Christians, Muslims and Jews in a new spiritual order.35 Girardin’s notion of “civilization” can be seen as growing out of this commitment to global integration within a new religious framework. This understanding that in order to foster world integration, Catholicism had to be replaced by a broader religious perspective was widely diffused among liberals in the mid-nineteenth century, in spite of the demise of the movement itself. Saint-Simonians had been among the earliest political theorists to articulate a new “mission” for France in the world following the Revolution using religious terminology. One of the group’s members is reputed to have been the first to dub France the “eldest son of civilization,” a play on the traditional term “the eldest daughter of the Church,” which would later be used by such liberal luminaries as François Guizot, Charles de Rémusat, and Quinet.36 It was thus not unusual for mid-century liberals like Girardin to incorporate such basic Saint-Simonian concepts into their work. Indeed, Girardin’s 1852 book shares many of the same policy suggestions advanced by the former Saint-Simonian Gustave d’Eichthal, a writer who was born Jewish but who converted to Catholicism at the age of 13. During the 1840 Eastern crisis, in which Britain and France almost went to war in the Middle East, d’Eichthal wrote a book entitled De l’Unité européenne arguing in favor of European development of Syria. As the “cradle of the religious thought of so many peoples,” he argued, Syria could be used for reunifying Europe in the nineteenth century.37 Instead of fighting wars to control of the Holy Land, the European nations should work together to develop commerce and transportation networks in the Middle East, and pressure Turkey to emancipate its non-Muslim subjects. By working together to “regenerate” Syria, d’Eichthal argued, Europe itself could be regenerated. But, he stressed, in order to forge this unity, Europe needed to hold Turkey to its recent promise that “all religions (cultes) based in the Bible [will] have the right to worship freely.” Only this, 35  On the goals and membership of the Saint-Simonian movement, see Sébastien Charléty, Histoire du Saint-Simonisme (1825–1864), 2ed ed. (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1931); Georges Weill, L’Ecole Saint-Simonienne: son histoire, son influence jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896); and Emile Durkheim, Le Socialisme, sa définition, ses débuts, la doctrine Saint-Simonienne (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1928). On the “New Christianity,” see Henri de SaintSimon and Eugène Rodrigues, Nouveau Christianisme (Paris: Globe, 1832). 36  Laurent de l’Ardèche in the Globe, December 22, 1830, as cited in Lochore, History of the Idea of Civilization, 72. 37  Gustave d’Eichthal, De l’Unité européenne (Paris: Truchy, 1840), 11.

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he ­concluded, could bring about “the association of all the modern peoples and the two major elements of their civilization: in the material domain, freedom and regularity of circulation between the farthest removed parts of the globe; and in the moral domain, union of faith with religious tolerance.”38 In his use of the terms “civilization,” “regeneration,” and “tolerance,” Girardin was thus recapitulating this earlier Saint-Simonian argument. Jewish writers and leaders in the early 1850s supported arguments like Girardin’s in order to express their own liberal views. More directly than Girardin, writers in the Archives israélites and the Univers israélite spoke out against the Catholic leaders’ views on the war. When Archbishop Sibour blessed the troops in 1854, Simon Bloch objected, reminding his readers that there were Protestants and Jews among the French troops, and reclaiming the mission for the cause of “civilization.” He wrote, “We too call on Heaven to bless our brave troops, not for the good of the Pope or Mohammed or for Latin or Greek orthodoxy, but in the interest of French national glory, justice for all men, the civilization of all the empires, the moral emancipation of all humanity. For this holy crusade, we can say, God wills it!”39 Here, Bloch was contrasting a new, universalist religiosity with a Catholic one. Isidore Cahen voiced a similar objection to Sibour’s blessing of the troops in a report in the Archives israélites. “To evoke in such a case memories of the crusades; this anachronism is more ridiculous than dangerous,” he wrote. “Have they forgotten that the first exploits of the crusaders of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were massacres of Jews?” Crimea was not a “war of one sect against another,” Cahen argued, “but a truly holy war, that is, a duel between humanity and justice against barbarism and iniquity.”40 Cahen had studied philosophy with Jules Simon in the 1840s and had taken courses with Quinet and Michelet as well. The influence of these anticlerical republican mentors is apparent here in his distinction between Catholicism and the cause of “justice and humanity,” claiming these latter ideals as truly transcendent, and the sectarian concerns of Catholicism as having no place in state policy. Jewish leaders and publicists also adopted a liberal perspective on how the “civilization” of the Ottoman Empire should be achieved. Focusing on how to improve the condition of Ottoman Jewry, French Jews argued that a long-term solution could only be reached with the extension of Western European education, science, technology, industry, and commerce to the Ottoman Empire. Isidore Cahen suggested that bright young Turkish Jews be brought to Europe 38  D’Eichthal, De l’Unité européenne, 32–3. 39  “Chronique,” UI (1853–54): 382. 40  “Chronique du mois,” AIF 15 (1854): 284–5.

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for training in the fields of “teaching, commerce, manual trades, medicine, surgery, architecture, and other sciences.” In addition, young Turkish Jews would also “become familiar with the customs, industry and relations of Europe,” which were necessary for establishing lasting relationships with Europeans through which “civilization” could be spread to the entire region.41 Like Girardin, Cahen saw the creation of global networks of capitalist production and trade as a crucial element of the civilizing process. Suggestions for legal reform were also just as common in French Jewish discourse as in other liberal discourse. Often, these suggestions were framed in terms reminiscent of the French Revolution. For example, in their petition to the Emperor at the outbreak of war, Central Consistory members described Ottoman Jews as living under “feudal tyranny.” They argued that France’s war should be waged not on behalf of Christians, but against the “intolerant laws” that discriminated against both Jews and Christians. Just as France had established equal rights and duties for all men on its own soil, and had brought “freedom of conscience” to Africa by “liberating” Algerian Jews from “savage fanaticism,” so too should the French establish religious equality and freedom in the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War.42 This same liberal perspective is clear in Jewish responses to the 1856 Congress of Paris. Among the numerous internal legal reforms the Turks made at the conclusion of the war was the hatti Hümayun, promulgated before the Congress but included in the treaty as well, which granted members of all religious confessions greater equality in school admission, the military, and civil service employment.43 “The Turkish government has fulfilled its duties,” Isidore Cahen wrote, “as long as it executes these rules, freedom of conscience is guaranteed from now on in Turkey, and a regime of oppression, iniquity, and antagonism is toppled completely . . . from now on in Turkey, there are no more privileges!”44 As in Jewish leaders’ views on the French colonization of Algeria, Cahen saw the hatti Hümayun as the destruction of a feudal order.

41  “Les Israélites en Orient,” AIF 15 (1854): 317. 42  Letter of the Central Consistory to the Emperor, dated March 24, 1854, as published in “Intervention du Consistoire central des israélites de France en faveur des israélites de la Turquie,” AIF 15 (1854): 228–9. 43  On hatti Hümayun as well as the delicate diplomacy over its inclusion in the treaty signed at the Congress of Paris, see Winfried Baumgart, The Peace of Paris 1856: Studies in War, Diplomacy and Peacemaking, trans. Ann Pottinger Saab (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1981), esp. 128–30, 162–4. 44  “Les Rayas de la Turquie . . . et la Suisse,” AIF 17 (1856): 188–90.

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One element that distinguished French Jewish publicists from other liberals, however, was that Jews felt that their own rights were at stake in the construction of a new mission for French foreign policy. It is clear from the Jewish coverage of the Crimean War that Jews saw French foreign policy aims as inextricably linked to their own struggle for equality. In one especially telling article, Isidore Cahen argued that France’s championing of equal rights at the peace conference was a sign that “civilization” was making headway in France as well as in Turkey. He suggested that while the troops were fighting in the East, an equally important war had been waged between liberals and the clerical party in the pages of the French press. Initially, he reminded his readers, the war was seen as a kind of crusade undertaken to protect Christian rights in the East. Yet by the end, liberals had won the day. Far from the narrow politics of defending Christians, French diplomats at the peace conference framed France’s mission as the pursuit of “universal justice,” “rights of conscience,” “equality of sects (cultes),” “tolerance,” “civilization with its arts, teaching, and generosity,” and the “cause of the oppressed.”45 For Cahen, French foreign policy had itself been civilized when the French government and the French nation had embraced a mission to civilize the rest of the world.

The “Civilizing Mission” as a Liberal Crusade

Cahen was in many ways correct to see liberalism as triumphant in the Crimean War. By the 1860s, the term “mission civilisatrice” had become commonplace in the press and the Emperor’s foreign policy had become more ­liberal.46 One telling moment came in 1858–59, when Napoleon III took action on behalf of an Italian Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, who had been abducted by Papal authorities after he had been baptized secretly by a Christian servant. Though the Emperor’s actions in this affair alienated many Catholics, the liberal press heartily defended the cause of the Mortara family.47 The Emperor’s actions in the case testified to the shift in his foreign policy, which had

45  “Les Conséquences religieuses de la Paix,” AIF 17 (1856): 252–3. 46  On the evolution of the Emperor’s foreign policy, see William E. Echard, Napoleon III and the Concert of Europe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983) and Jean Tulard, “Nationalités (politique des),” in Dictionnaire du Second Empire, ed. Jean Tulard (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 904. 47   On the Mortara Affair, see David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Vintage, 1997). For Catholic responses, see Spencer, Politics of Belief, 168–72.

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come to prioritize freedom of conscience over the interests of the Church in numerous circumstances. As liberalism became a more powerful force in foreign policy, it nonetheless bore the stamp of the earlier battles with the clerical party in defining French national identity. Like the Catholic mission in opposition to which it had been constructed, the term “civilizing mission” was based in a set of ideals that defined a community of believers and obligated them to spread the ideals to the world. The term “civilization” had developed from being a largely academic concept, explored by historians such as François Guizot and Edgar Quinet, to a political one meant to be the basis for French action in the world.48 Among mid-century intellectuals, there was an increasingly strong disagreement over whether there was a single, ever expanding civilization or rather multiple “civilizations” developing at the same time.49 Yet the writers who developed the political concept of the “civilizing mission” were clearly committed to Guizot’s of a single “civilization,” which was spreading from its European birthplace to the rest of the world. They understood this concept to include a legal system guaranteeing religious equality and freedom of conscience, an international system that recognized the right to national self-determination, an economic system based in capitalist production and trade, and a commitment to the progress of science, technology, and the arts. These ideals were treated as transcendent, sacred and universal, and those who espoused them assumed that if they were embraced everywhere, a peaceful global system would be created which would allow humanity to realize its fullest potential. Jewish writers in the mid-nineteenth century were particularly committed to this unitary, expansive conception of civilization. In assessing the gains of the Crimean War, Isidore Cahen wrote the first of many articles in which he measured the “degree of civilization to which a society had arrived” by level of equality between its citizens. He stated provocatively that with the hatti Hümayun, Turkey had achieved a greater level of “civilization” than Switzerland, since many Swiss cantons still had laws discriminating against Jews.50 In another article, Cahen declared that Sweden had not yet achieved the degree of “civilization” it claimed to have, since Catholics there were still burdened with civil disabilities. He called on the people of Britain and France to dedicate themselves to “the diffusion” of tolerance to all the countries of Europe by pressuring Sweden to guarantee equality to members of all religious 48  On the academic uses of the term “civilization” from the 1820s to the 1840s, see Lochore, History of the Idea of Civilization, 9–33 and passim, and Febvre, “Civilisation,” 240–4. 49  On this disagreement see Febvre, “Civilisation,” 244–8 and passim. 50  “Les Rayas de la Turquie . . . et la Suisse,” AIF 17 (1856): 184, 190.

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confessions.51 Civilization, in Cahen’s view, was thus something that could be spread through public outrage and diplomatic pressure from the more “advanced” nations. What distinguished the Jewish perspective on France’s civilizing mission before and after Crimea was not so much the liberal language in which it was expressed, but rather, the degree to which Jews took independent action in its name. Whereas before the conflict, Jews called on French leaders to understand their activities in a liberal framework, now Jews themselves took steps of their own to fulfill the civilizing mission. The arena in which they applied themselves most energetically was in the “civilization” of the Algerian Jews, whose lives had been transformed by the Royal ordonnance of 1845 establishing consistories in Algiers, Constantine and Oran. The French consistorial rabbis dedicated themselves to “regenerating” the Algerian Jews in the way that Altaras and Cohen had hoped they would. They limited the influence of native rabbis, established schools to teach young Algerian Jews the “useful professions,” transformed traditional charity to make it “productive,” and composed sermons about the duties and obligations of modern citizenship.52 With these efforts, French Jewish leaders saw themselves as contributing to France’s own civilizing mission by educating Algerian Jews in the ways of liberalism, including “productive” work habits and new notions of governance and citizenship. And as in the Crimean War, Parisian Jewish publicists saw this work as testifying to the progress of civilization within France as well as in the colony. “France never forgets that she is the fertile mother of civilization and freedom,” Samuel Cahen wrote. “She found Jews in Algeria oppressed and miserable, downtrodden by slavery and humiliation . . . she took on the glorious task of rehabilitating them, of breaking the chains of their ignorance and prejudices, of reawakening the feelings of dignity and honor within them. And she gave this noble mission to eminent men, chosen from among the French Israelites, entrusting them with the education of these disinherited pariahs.”53 Cahen’s view of French Jewish action in Algeria is clear here: it is a sacred work of tutelage, conducted in the name of the French revolutionary tradition which 51  “De la liberté de conscience en Europe,” AIF 18 (1857): 693–5. 52  On the relationship between French Jews and Algerian Jews in the Second Empire, see Michel Abitbol, “The Encounter Between French Jewry and the Jews of North Africa: Analysis of a Discourse, 1830–1914,” in The Jews of Modern France, ed. Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1985); Richard Ayoun, Typologie d’une carrière rabbinique: l’exemple de Mahir Charleville, 2 vols. (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1993), I: 221–403. 53  “Menés fanatiques de rabbins indigènes d’Alger,” AIF 11 (1850): 592.

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l­ iberates people from the bondage of barbarism and religious fanaticism. This positive view of the effect of French colonialism would characterize the attitude expressed by the vast majority of French Jewish writers and leaders well into the twentieth century. But colonialism was not the only means through which France could fulfill its sacred civilizing mission, according to Jewish leaders. In 1859, Cahen called for an international organization to be constituted through democratic election, to maintain international peace and justice. Such a body, he wrote, would bring “civilization” by supporting such endeavors as the building of railroads, the improvement of the postal and telegraph systems, the abolition of slavery and piracy, the protection of trade in wartime, and the protection of national rights. Last but not least, of course, this body would make freedom of conscience an “international dogma,” sacred and protected everywhere.54 Europe had a special responsibility in this regard, Cahen argued, in order to prove it was truly “civilized.” “How can Europe insist on the equality of the sects (cultes) in the East, in spite of the opposition of Muslim fanatics, if she herself continues to exhibit signs of inequality? What mission can France fulfill in North Africa, and England in the Indies, if not a mission of civilization? How can this mission be fulfilled, if not by scrupulously respecting the beliefs of the conquered races, and intervening only in the practices against which outraged humanity imperiously demands intervention?”55 The concerns he voiced here demonstrate the degree to which economic liberalism, human rights, and colonialism were intertwined in Cahen’s mind. Taking the colonial “civilizing mission” as an unquestioned good and an essential part of the liberal agenda, Cahen placed particular stress on the notion that minority religious rights should always be included within it. These arguments were developed in conversation with other liberals, and were designed to convince allies of the importance of religious equality. In this regard, Jewish publicists seem to have been remarkably successful. For example, Léon Plée wrote in the Siècle in 1859 that improving the lot of Jews around the world was a collective duty of the European sovereigns.56 Similarly, in an 1857 study entitled La Libérté de conscience, Cahen’s former teacher Jules Simon used equal rights for Jewish citizens as a kind of litmus test for the progress of civilization, which he believed to be moving toward greater tolerance.57 Using the level of Jewish rights to measure the progress of civilization would 54  “Simple voeu d’un honnête homme,” AIF 20 (1859): 681–97. 55  Cahen, “Simple voeu,” 693. 56   Siècle, November 11, 1859, as cited in Cahen, “Simple voeu,” 696. 57  Jules Simon, La Libérté de conscience, 4ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1867), 8, 302–18.

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quickly become commonplace among liberals and Jews. By 1869, the Jewish writer Léon Hollanderski presented the practice as commonsensical, requiring no explanation: “The Jews have become a sort of thermometer of civilization and universal progress,” he wrote. “If you want to know if one country or another is prospering, look into the status of Jewish rights there.”58 Liberal Jews were not only some of the most ardent proponents of the “civilizing mission;” they also acted independently of the government in its name. They found another perfect opportunity to turn their rhetorical commitments into action in 1860, when French public attention was turned once again to the problems facing the beleaguered Christians of the Ottoman Empire. Civil war between Maronite Christians—still protected by the French—and the Druze broke out in late April 1860 on Mount Lebanon in what was then Syria. News of massacres of Christians reached the French press in June, provoking widespread public outrage. Seeing the conflict as exacerbated by the actions of Ottoman authorities in the area, European troops—half of them French— were sent to the region in the fall.59 Undoubtedly, Jewish leaders felt a degree of trepidation about the clerical party’s response to these massacres, remembering the Damascus Affair all too well. Seizing the moment to press forward with their campaign to forge a liberal mission for France, a diverse group of Jewish leaders publicly declared its support for the Syrian Christians in the name of religious freedom and equality. Adolphe Crémieux, the Jewish leader best known in liberal circles in France, wrote a letter that appeared in the Siècle of 12 July 1860 calling on French Jews to donate money to the cause. “French Israélites, let us be the first to come to the aid of our Christian brothers; let us not wait for the results of diplomacy, which are always so slow . . . Let us not lose a day, not an hour. Let the signal of an immense rescue be sounded from a meeting of Jews, here in this capital of civilization.”60 Jewish groups around the country showed their support with impressive donations. Money flooded in from the Central Consistory, the departmental consistories, philanthropic groups and Jewish schools. The cause drew support from rich as well as

58  Léon Hollanderski, Dix-huit siècles de préjugés chrétiens (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1869), 74. 59  For a full account of this conflict, see Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and, specifically on European intervention, Caesar E. Farah, The Politics of Interventionism in Ottoman Lebanon, 1831–1860 (London: Tauris, 2000), 554–701. 60  Initially appearing in the Siècle of July 12, 1860, the letter was reprinted in all organs of the Jewish press.

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poor Jews; in Paris, for example, the wealthy Jules Mirès gave 1000 francs while other Jews gave only one franc.61 This action on behalf of the Syrian Christians was also an opportunity for Jewish leaders to announce that they had founded a new organization, the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The Alliance had been formed in April of that year by a group of young republicans including Jules Carvallo (an engineer and former Saint-Simonian), Eugène Manuel (a professor, poet and former student of Jules Simon), Narcisse Leven (a lawyer working for Adolphe Crémieux) and Isidore Cahen (the editor of the Archives Israélites).62 The organization was dedicated to working on behalf of Jews in need around the globe, through advocating for their rights and establishing schools. Deliberately rooting their mission in Judaism, the founders framed their mission as a sacred one that would make Judaism relevant in the current era. The “Appeal to all Israelites” was explicitly addressed to those Jews who “believe that the oldest and the simplest of spiritual religions should keep its place, fulfill its mission, proclaim its right, manifest its vitality in the . . . ever more ardent struggles between theories in modern societies.”63 Making the campaign for the Syrian Christians its first publicized activity, its leaders believed, would prove from the outset that Jews were interested in religious liberty for all, and not just Jews. As Isidore Cahen would write of the campaign, “Mr. Crémieux’s idea is great and generous; the clerical party is dumbfounded.”64 Thus the Alliance was but putting into action the liberal and anticlerical ideals long embraced by its founders. The campaign met with applause in the liberal press, from Léon Plée at the Siècle to the Opinion nationale, a liberal newspaper founded by Adolphe Guéroult, a former Saint-Simonian who had recently left the Presse. “Is it not a sign of the times,” wrote Guéroult, “that this appeal on behalf of the Christians would come from France, that is, the only country where custom, in accord 61  Some of these donations were publicized in the Jewish press during the summer of 1860; this list from the records kept by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which managed the donations. See Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (hereafter AAIU), France XXXV B 309, “Souscriptions en faveur des Chrétiens du Liban.” Simon Bloch reported that by the beginning of August, the Alliance had collected over 50,000 francs for the cause. See “La Pérsecution des Chrétiens en Syrie,” UI 14 (1859–60): 19. 62  On the foundation of the Alliance, see André Chouraqui, Cent ans d’histoire: L’Alliance israélite universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine: 1860–1960 (Paris: PUF, 1965), 25–39, and Narcisse Leven, Cinquante ans d’histoire: l’Alliance israélite universelle (1860–1910), 2 vols., (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1911), I: 63–77. For a sociological profile of the founders of the Alliance, see Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 194–288. 63  “Appel à tous les israélites,” Bulletin de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860): 18–9. 64  Isidore Cahen, “La Souscription pour les victimes de la Syrie,” AIF 21 (1860): 433.

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with the law, has granted Jews complete equality?”65 Clearly an ally in this cause, Guéroult too framed the campaign as a universal, sacred (though by no means Catholic) work of “civilization.” True to his Saint-Simonian roots, Guéroult depicted Jewish action on behalf on the Maronites as a sign that the old religions were finally being replaced by a new religious system. He wrote: Our era is great and truly religious, and those who deprecate it are wrong and misunderstand it. While all the established religions seem to be in decline, with their official representatives attacking one another in a war of persecution and intolerance; while Protestants, persecutors in Ireland and Sweden, are unable to pray in Rome or Spain; while Rome is stealing Jewish boys from their parents and Jewish wives from their husbands under the pretext of religion; while fanaticism is oppressing Jews in Tunis and Christians in Lebanon; while Russia is oppressing Catholics in Poland and Muslims in the Crimea; we are proud and happy to see that one country alone, and it is our country, France, is protecting the Church, the temple, the synagogue and the mosque equally, and proclaims loudly, in all its laws, that all men are brothers and that everyone is everyone else’s neighbor. Is this not the pure tradition of the Gospel?66 Alliance leaders and liberal writers saw an inextricable link between the progress of religious tolerance, human rights, colonialism, and the French revolutionary tradition. These writers consistently used religious terminology, calling upon readers to understand the civilizing mission as analogous to the Catholic religious mission, only better suited to the modern age. As we have seen, Guéroult saw the fulfillment of the civilizing mission as “the pure tradition of the Gospel.” This was not a unique turn of phrase. In a book advocating the colonization of Indochina, Francis Garnier wrote that France had “received from Providence a higher mission, that of the emancipation, enlightenment, and liberation of the races and peoples still in the slavery of ignorance and despotism.”67 The Jewish intellectual Léon Halévy lauded the 1860 Syrian Expedition with an ode containing the lines, “Crusade of the consoling God/ You bring together all believers/ The Jew has made his contribution/ Just as 65  Both Crémieux’s letter and Plée’s response can be found in “Chrétiens du Liban,” Le Siècle, July 12, 1860. Guéroult’s response can be found in the Opinion nationale of July 15, 1860, and was reprinted in its entirety in the UI 14 (1859–60): 659–63. 66   U I 14 (1859–60): 662. 67   La Cochinchine française en 1864 (Paris: Dentu, 1864), 44–5, as cited in Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972), 23.

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he will give his children!”68 As this poem suggests, using the term “crusade” in order to sanctify action carried out in the name of human rights and especially minority religious rights had become surprisingly acceptable among Jews by the 1860s. Although Cahen and Bloch both objected vociferously to Catholic invocations of the crusades (for example, in the Crimean War), they both adopted the term themselves to describe liberal action in the international arena.69 The Jewish writer Moses Hess, living in Paris since the 1840s, was so taken with the term that he described the Syrian Expedition as a new “crusade” paving the way for a Jewish national revival in the Holy Land.70 This strange intellectual leap was only possible in a discursive context where the term “crusade” was used to sacralize the extension of liberalism. Hess may have been in limited company in hoping for a Jewish national revival in Palestine, but he was not alone in using the term “crusade” to replace Catholic concepts with sacred ideals of his own. Conclusion The “civilizing mission” of French imperial policy and diplomacy grew out of the liberal struggles to limit the influence of the Church and Catholic concerns in state policy. However, as we have seen, its visionaries were anything but irreligious. Formed in opposition to Catholicism, nineteenth-century liberals described “civilization” as a transcendent, sacred ideal rooted in revolutionary revelation, and they argued that those who were “civilized” had a sacred duty to bring these ideals to the rest of the world. While the content of the civilizing mission was markedly different from the Catholic mission, the basic form was the same. Recognizing it as such forces us to reevaluate our widespread assumption that the “secularism” of nineteenth-century France was an irreligious force of modernization, forged in opposition to all religiosity, which itself is assumed to have been a purely conservative force. In this sense, this chapter follows in the footsteps of scholars such as Caroline Ford, who has 68  “Six mille hommes et six mois,” first published in the Journal des Débats, as excerpted in “Chronique du mois,” AIF 21 (1860): 579. Italics in original. 69   Bloch, for example, claimed the term “crusade” for liberalism in “Chronique,” UI (1853–54): 382 (as cited above, n. 58). Similarly, Cahen had written of a “new Holy Alliance of the people, a new crusade from free and enlightened circles . . .” AIF 11 (1850): 8. This translation of Cahen’s words from Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, 205. 70  Moses Hess, The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question, trans. Meyer Waxman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 146–9.

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argued that Catholicism in nineteenth-century Brittany functioned as a force of modernization, and Claude Lefort, who has argued that nineteenth-century liberal historians treated the Revolution as a “new religion.”71 An extension of the Revolution, the civilizing mission reflected the decidedly religious worldview of its architects. However, our examination of the construction of the civilizing mission from the particular perspective of nineteenth-century French Jews raises challenging questions about the nature of this new kind of religiosity. Why, for example, did gentile liberals support the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s activities, and its remarkable identification of Judaism, the French revolutionary tradition, and the civilizing mission, given their hostile attitude toward Catholic religiosity and action in the name of its ideals? In part, of course, this had to do with the liberal universalist terminology Jews used; as we have seen here, Jews avoided any religious particularism and even embraced Christian terms such as ­“baptism” and “crusade” in sacralizing the civilizing mission. Still, given the efforts of some Catholics such as Sibour to reconcile liberalism and Catholicism in this same period, the disparity between Catholics and Jews is remarkable. Whereas anticlerical activists came increasingly to describe Christianity and the revolutionary tradition as irreconcilable in the 1850s and 1860s, they were clearly more welcoming of Judaism.72 Perhaps the clearest early expression of this rejection of Christianity as a whole can be found in Michelet’s work on the French Revolution; other anticlerical activists would remain open to incorporating Christianity in some form for a longer time. However, anticlerical support for Jewish liberal religiosity remained constant, and in this sense, mirrors the philo-Protestantism of anticlericals like Quinet and Prévost-Paradol.73 Why?

71  Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Claude Lefort, “La Révolution comme Religion Nouvelle,” in The French Revolution and Modern Political Culture, vol. 3, The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789–1848, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), 391–9. 72  On liberal anti-Catholicism, John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870–1914 (London: SPCK, 1972), 16–44; and Ceri Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet, Michelet (London: Routledge, 1993); on the philo-Protestantism of some anticlericals, see Adrien Dansette, Histoire réligieuse de la France contemporaine: L’Eglise catholique dans la mêlée politique et sociale (Paris: Flammarion, 1965). 73  On the philo-Protestantism and anticlericalism of these two figures, see Pierre Guiral, Prévost-Paradol, 1829–1870: Pensée et Action d’un Libéral sous le Second Empire (Paris:

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The evidence presented here allows for some degree of speculation on this question, though not a definitive answer. With the widening gap between ultramontane Catholics and liberals in the 1850s, exacerbated by the hardening of the Pope’s position against liberalism, French liberals may have found in the kinds of Jewish expressions we have seen here a language to sacralize their political agenda.74 Judaism continued to appear authentically “religious” to these liberals, and yet, accepting expressions of religiosity from Jews could never be confused with openness to Catholicism, since the ultramontane camp under the leadership of men like Veuillot was so decidedly anti-Jewish. Thus, embracing Jewish sacralization of the civilizing mission could have provided liberals with a language clearly understood to be irreconcilable with the Catholicism of the clerical party, but which remained recognizably religious nonetheless. Acceptance of this language would have served to grant a degree of credibility to their efforts to replace the sacrality offered by Catholicism with an obviously different kind of religiosity. Tentative as this conclusion about what liberals gained by applauding Jewish activity in the name of the civilizing mission must be, it is clear from the evidence presented here that Jews themselves had much to gain from the alliance. French Jews’ commitment to the liberal civilizing mission was grounded in their struggle for equality. Jews saw the global expansion of “civilization” as a sacred process that could solve the problems they continued to face within France and around the world in a single, unified process. In this vision, imperialism and a paradoxically sacred secularism within France were intertwined in a fundamental way.

PUF, 1955) and François Furet, “Quinet,” in Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap, 1989), 991–1002. 74  On the effect of Pope Pius IX’s rejection of liberalism on French politics in the Second Empire, see Dansette, Histoire réligieuse de la France contemporaine, 263–324, Philip Spencer, Politics of Belief in Nineteenth-Century France: Lacordaire, Michon, Veuillot (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 122–175, and Hugh Mcleod, Secularization in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Pres, 2000), 31–48.

Chapter 7

Jewish Anticlericalism in Germany and France: A Transnational Polemic1 Ari Joskowicz In December 1870, Simon Bloch (1810–79) wrote a survey of the past year for his journal, L’Univers isráelite. His retrospective touched on various far-reaching developments, including the defeat of French forces at the hands of Prussia and its allies, the declaration of the French Third Republic, and the siege of Paris. Rather than focus any of these major moments in French national history, however, Bloch suggested that the most relevant event for his French Jewish readers had taken place in a different country: The principal Jewish event that we can report for the year 1870 was the deliverance of our coreligionists from papal oppression; an oppression all the more odious as it took religion as a pretext and God as an accomplice. Through the fall of the pope’s temporal power, God and religion are in turn liberated from this monstrous complicity that the self-declared vicars and representatives of God on earth imposed on them.2 Italian troops had taken Rome in September after the French state withdrew its garrison from the city in the course of the war with Prussia and its allies. As a French patriot Bloch had never been enthusiastic about the war, which represented a major setback for his country and had caused widespread suffering, yet he welcomed this particular development. Many Jews on the other side of the conflict concurred. The German Jewish journal whose position was closest to Bloch’s conservative Jewish periodical issued very similar comments in the wake of the war. Just a week after the Prussian king accepted the imperial crown of the unified German Empire,

1  A version of this chapter appeared in French as “L’anticléricalisme juif en Allemagne et en France: Une polémique transnationale,” Archives Juives 46, no. 2 (2013): 97–115. It draws on examples and arguments that I develop in more detail in The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 2  S. Bloch, “1870,” L’Univers israélite (UI), Jan. 15, 1871, 196.

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the Israelitische Wochen-Schrift’s editor Abraham Treuenfels (1818–79) complained about the bloodshed the hostilities had caused, writing: It is to be hoped that it is more than patriotic wishful thinking that the misery of war will be a blessing for Germany. Already the overthrowing of Cesarism and the temporal rule of the papacy are events that compensate for the great sacrifice and the awful suffering.3 By suggesting that liberalism had emerged victorious precisely as French troops abandoned their positions in the remaining papal territories, Bloch, Treuenfels, and other Jewish journalists across France and Germany offered a decidedly Jewish and anticlerical reading of the events unfolding before their eyes. Despite the different positions they took as German or French nationals on the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War, and the overall horror they evinced at the devastation it had caused across Europe, Jewish commentators on both sides of the Rhine consistently celebrated the fall of Rome.4 This essay proposes that this shared conclusion was the result of a longstanding Jewish preoccupation with Catholicism and the papacy in both countries. Indeed, it argues, claims of Catholicism’s resistance to modernity had already become central pivots of modern Jewish political thought in German and French-language spheres nearly a century earlier. To bring this trend into focus, this essay surveys Jewish anti-Catholicism and anticlericalism in Germany and France from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century. It also offers reflections on the history of these polemics as a transnational development with an eye to answering the following question: What does it mean to pursue a shared discourse across national contexts that are otherwise deeply divided? This question is all the more perplexing in light of an important scholarly tradition that focuses on how differently French and German societies came to regard the relationship between religion and politics in the modern era. Among the contrasts that appear most frequently in the literature are the following: whereas France was a predominantly Catholic country, Germany had both large Protestant and Catholic populations; whereas conflicts in France flared between Catholics and liberals or republicans (mostly from Catholic backgrounds), in Germany there existed the additional element of a p ­ oliticized 3  “Mutter und Tochter,” Israelitische Wochen-Schrift (IWS), Jan. 25, 1871, 25–6 and Feb. 8, 1871, 41–2. 4  On German Jews’ reactions to the war, see Christine G. Krüger, ‘Sind wir denn nicht Brüder?’ Deutsche Juden im nationalen Krieg 1870/71 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006).

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Catholic-Protestant denominational conflict; whereas in France liberals and republicans aspired to create a form of non-denominational anticlericalism, in Germany liberals often explained their vision of a religiously neutral state in the language of cultural Protestantism. One result of these juxtapositions is terminological: In France, scholarship has focused on anticlericalism, whereas in Germany most debates revolve around anti-Catholicism. These two terms also hint at the distinct and unspoken moral judgments implicit in scholarship on the subject. Scholars often employ the term anticlericalism as a neutral or even positive description, as was true of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century organizations such as the French Ligue anticléricale. By contrast, scholars approach anti-Catholicism as a form of prejudice. This division is nowhere more visible in the fact that few would claim the legacy of anti-Catholicism today, whereas many defenders of French laïcité view themselves as the heirs of nineteenth-century anticlericalism. In its transnational focus, this essay seeks to transcend these different scholarly traditions and to rethink the terminologies and underlying assumptions that emerge from particular national contexts. Rather than speaking of French anticlericalism or German anti-Catholicism, it highlights what united different critiques of the Catholic Church across Germany and France. No less important, it gauges what Jews gained by explaining their politics through critiques of Catholicism over a century’s time. In spite of their differences and the different challenges they faced, this essay asks, when and why did French and German Jews see themselves as engaged in a common battle? How did the notion of a civilizational battle between the forces of liberalism and Catholicism allow Jews in different contexts to forge common interests, texts, and organizations? 1

Jewish Anticlericalism and the Origins of Modern Jewish Politics

The search for the origins of Jewish anticlericalism, understood here as a political critique of the Catholic Church, returns us to Jews’ earliest attempts to speak about politics in a ‘non-Jewish’ language. In both France and Germany, Jews first expressed their criticism of the church in public debates from the very moment they began to write about politics in French and German. One such starting point is Berlin in the 1780s, when Moses Mendelssohn and other representatives of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, began to forcefully enter public debates over Jewish social integration and legal equality.5 5  Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

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Mendelssohn’s seminal Jerusalem (1783) offers the most famous example of a Jew’s simultaneous turn to politics and anti-Catholicism. Indeed, the leading figure of the Berlin Haskalah commenced his major political treatise with a critique of the Catholic Church. On the book’s first pages, Mendelssohn contrasted the enlightened form of sociability he admired with despotism, which he described as a force that brutally suppressed freedom of conscience. According to Mendelssohn’s portrayal, the Catholic Church was the epitome of despotism—an institution that assured a “horrible peace” by regulating all aspects of life at the expense its believers’ freedom of thought.6 He considered the pope’s rule as a particularly vivid example of everything he sought to combat: He who considers tranquility in doctrine and life to be felicity will find it nowhere better secured to him than under a Roman Catholic despot; or rather, since even in this case power is still too much divided, under the despotic rule of the church itself.7 Unlike later Jewish polemics against the Catholic Church, Mendelssohn’s statements did not spur any anti-Jewish accusations. For the Protestant enlighteners in his circle, his polemics appeared simply as an expression of his political outlook. While certain detractors, such as the theologian and orientalist Johann David Michaelis, criticized Mendelssohn for other statements they believed to be anti-Christian, even his Catholic critics did not publicly attack him for insulting the Catholic Church.8 In this sense, the Berlin of Mendelssohn’s day appears typical primarily of Protestant-dominated debates: in this context, anti-Catholic anticlericalism was sufficiently widespread among enlighteners so as to become a viable option for Jews who sought to announce themselves as progressives through such polemics. It was, however, equally possible for the handful of Jews who began to write political tracts in predominantly Catholic France during the same period to draw on a modern repertoire of anticlerical critiques. Zalkind Hourwitz (1738– 1812), one of the few Jews who lived in Paris in the late eighteenth c­ entury,

6  Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or, On Religious Power and Judaism, ed. and trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), 34. 7  Ibid. 8  See, for example, Benedikt Stattler, Wahres Jerusalem oder, Ueber religiöse Macht und Toleranz in jedem und besonders im katholischen Christenthume (Augsburg: Mattäus Reigers sel. Söhnen, 1787).

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produced similar—if more biting—commentaries in France.9 A recent immigrant from Poland, Hourwitz found inspiration from enlighteners such as Voltaire, whose works he claimed to have used to learn the French language. His first known article was a response to a letter sent from Warsaw in 1783 to the Anglo-French serial Courier de l’Europe.10 The letter that raised Hourwitz’s ire had described Jews as robbers and greedy usurers. According to its anonymous Polish author, Jews were thus incapable of becoming members of European nations. They were “Arabs” and not like members of the other religious sects who were capable of becoming Poles. Hourwitz’s riposte, published in the same journal, marked the beginning of his career as a writer who liberally drew on Enlightenment anticlericalism. Hourwitz opened his piece with the following charge: It appears that the author of this letter is a defrocked Austrian monk, who in his ambition to damage the Jews also hopes to censure indirectly the sage and humane conduct of his Majesty the Emperor who gave so many privileges to the Jews, as he did to all the heterodox sects, while suppressing the convents and appropriating for the demands of the state the wealth of those who took an oath of poverty. My suspicion is confirmed by the fact that he accuses the Calvinists of being less tolerant.11 This short section clearly illustrates how Hourwitz adopted anticlericalism as a form of Jewish apologetics, starting with his arbitrary suggestion that the author he addressed was an embittered monk who sought to indirectly critique Joseph II for his anti-monastic policies. By proposing that those who vowed poverty nonetheless hypocritically amassed great amounts of wealth, Hourwitz also inverted the stereotype of Jewish commercial greed that the anonymous author had employed in his editorial. According to Hourwitz’s portrayal, it was not he (the self-declared ‘Polish Jew’) who acted out of personal interest but rather his opponent, the foe of Jewish equality, who was motivated as much by private feelings of revenge as by political calculations. Hourwitz thus skillfully drew on anticlerical tropes that would have resonated with the prejudices of contemporary enlighteners to counter the anti-Jewish rhetoric of his adversaries.

9  On Hourwitz, see Frances Malino, A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 10   Courier de l’Europe, Oct. 7, 1783, 225–6. 11   Courier de l’Europe, Oct. 31, 1783, 287–8.

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In France, opportunities for public declarations of anticlericalism expanded during the Revolution. This was largely the result of rising tensions between the revolutionaries and the church—ranging from new divisions over the Civil Constitution of the clergy in 1790 to the culture of suspicion that increasingly targeted so-called non-juring priests—which in turn fueled new expressions of anticlerical citizenship.12 In this context, articulating one’s doubt about the Catholic clergy and, in particular, the large number of priests who refused to take an oath to the state, became a way of showing one’s dedication to the new revolutionary nation. The small number of Jews who began speaking in the highly politicized public sphere of the early French Revolution thus found that they could easily express their vision of attachment to the state in anticlerical terms. Among those who did so was a Jewish enlightener from Metz, Isaiah Berr Bing (1759–1805), who described the ancien régime as a “time [. . .] when fanaticism, fed by certain bloodthirsty priests [prêtres sanguinaires], sowed hatred and divisions between the children of a single father.”13 Despite their differences, Enlightenment Berlin, pre-revolutionary Paris, and post-revolutionary Metz reflect the transnational character of the Enlightenment’s anticlerical repertoire. As Jews (and others) hurled insults at Catholic clergymen in each place they drew on tropes that were already broadly familiar to European readers, including representatives of radical critiques of religion as well as more moderate proponents of the so-called ‘Religious Enlightenment.’14 Although only a small handful of Jews took part 12  See Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2000); Claude Langlois, “La rupture entre l’Eglise catholique et la Révolution,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), 3: 375–90; Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 13  Isaiah Berr Bing, “Cantique,” reprinted in Les Juifs et la révolution française: histoire et mentalités, ed. Mireille Hadas-Lebel and Evelyne Oliel-Grausz (Louvain: Peeters, 1992), 185–7. This quote appears in Berr-Bing’s loose translation of a patriotic canticle sung by the Jews of Metz at a public celebration in 1792. On this source see also Ronald Schechter, “Translating the ‘Marseillaise’: Biblical Republicanism and the Emancipation of Jews in Revolutionary France,” Past & Present, no. 143 (1994): 108–35. On Bing, see Jay R. Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 67–70 and Jay R. Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 96–9. 14  David Jan Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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in these early debates, those who did so swiftly discovered that anticlericalism could be a potent weapon. As they abandoned Jews’ older strategies of vertical alliances with the monarch, these same individuals began to forge horizontal ties that depended in large part on a shared rhetoric of opposition to clerical despotism and Catholic oppression.15 In this sense, Jewish anticlericalism was both a central strategy and symptom of the emergence of modern Jewish politics. Jewish anticlericalism also signaled a major transformation in the ways West and Central European Jews came to construct their sense of history and civic belonging. Overcoming the Catholic Middle Ages—be it through Protestantism, science, deism, or alternative visions of renewed forms of Christianity—was central to the notion of a modern age. The pursuit of new forms of civic belonging in revolutionary and Enlightenment circles also entailed creating new divisions between those who fell within and without the body politic. These new insiders regularly defined themselves against Catholic despotism (to use Mendelssohn’s term), which now became the past that Jews had also overcome. 2

Anticlericalism Moves to the Mainstream

The political changes that occurred during the Napoleonic wars and with the restoration regimes of the post-1815 period in particular altered the character of statements Jews made about the church. Whereas critiques of the Catholic Church in 1780s Berlin or in France during the early years of the Revolution could be construed as an expression of loyalty to the government, anti-­ Catholicism and anticlericalism became decidedly oppositional positions by the first decades of the nineteenth century. When authors such as Heinrich Heine described Catholicism in his Die Romantische Schule as the cultural core of all that was reactionary about literature and politics in the age of Romanticism, they explicitly challenged existing regimes.16 In this context, critiques of the Catholic Church remained a minority position, entertained by

15  See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Servants of Kings and not Servants of Servants: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews (Atlanta: Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Emory University, 2005). 16  Ari Joskowicz, “Heinrich Heine’s Transparent Masks: Denominational Politics and the Poetics of Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France,” German Studies Review 33, no. 1 (2011): 69–90.

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individuals who saw themselves as independent political voices rather than those with official leadership positions in the Jewish community. This changed in the 1840s with the rise of new conflicts between Catholics and liberals across Europe. In France, battles over the role the university should play in determining secondary education inspired a new wave of anticlericalism from university circles;17 in Germany, meanwhile, liberals began to express their outrage at the Catholic Church’s mobilization of half a million of its faithful on a pilgrimage to the Holy Coat, a relic exhibited in the cathedral of Trier in 1844.18 In both the German and French contexts, anti-Catholic anticlerical accusations resurfaced in public debates: denouncing Catholic popular piety as superstition or depicting the Catholic Church’s hold on certain populations (in particular the poor and women) as a form of manipulation of the weak once again became a mainstream form of political discourse. A number of texts that emerged at this moment, in particular Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet’s lectures on the Jesuits at the Collège de France, instantly became transnational classics of anticlericalism.19 In contrast to the first decades of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of French and German Jews from different walks of life joined anticlerical liberal circles at this time. Among the most enthusiastic were young, ­university-trained men such as Isidore Cahen, Eugène Manuel, or Armand Lévy who attended anticlerical lectures, joined anticlerical associations, and religiously read installments of anticlerical novels like Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew of 1845 (another bestseller throughout Europe).20 Even older Jewish journalists and community activists less prone to join radical anticlericals found their way into these debates. In France, the prominent lectures and books of the historian Jules Michelet, who warned that priests were destroying French families by manipulating women to resist their fathers and husbands, 17  Georges Weill, Histoire de l’idée laïque en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 2004), 113–31. 18  Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 77–88; Wolfgang Schieder, Religion und Revolution: Die Trierer Wallfahrt von 1844 (Vierow bei Greifswald: SH-Verlag, 1996). 19  On the role of French anticlerical literature in the United States, for example, see Timothy Verhoeven, Transatlantic Anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 20  Sue’s work was immediately translated to English: Eugène Sue, The Wandering Jew (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846). On these students, see Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 202–3.

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r­ esonated with many Jewish commentators.21 Indeed, by the mid-1840s, different Jewish authors articulated their fear of Catholic proselytizers in a language that adopted Michelet’s model: instead of warning of priests who undermined Catholic families by controlling their wives and daughters, Jewish writers warned of priests who seduced Jewish women with an eye to converting them to Catholicism.22 Whereas Michelet described the family unit and the nation as imperiled by Jesuitism ( jésuitisme), Jewish writers claimed that Catholic missionaries not only unraveled the family in general but the Jewish family in particular, thus serving to undermine the unity of the nation and the Jewish community simultaneously.23 Even as they drew on similar scripts and created shared texts, these conflicts remained largely national in character through the mid-century. At this point, German and French Jews came to have different political concerns. Whereas French Jews struggled with the impact of an increasingly politicized ultramontane Catholicism, German Jews—in particular in the Protestant and Prussiandominated north—grew preoccupied about new concepts of the Christian State. Although there were also individual Catholic advocates of a confessional state in Germany, Jews’ main adversaries in this context were conservative Protestants such as Friedrich Julius Stahl and Ludwig von Gerlach who hoped to disenfranchise them. This changed by 1858, when French and German Jews increasingly began to portray themselves as participants in the same conflicts. The most important turning point for Jewish-Catholic relations was without a doubt the Mortara Affair of the same year, which brought European and American Jews together in new ways. The well-known affair erupted after the papal police seized a Jewish boy by the name Edgardo Mortara from his family in Bologna—then part of the Papal States—because a Catholic maid claimed that she had baptized the child after he had fallen ill.24 According to the Roman authorities the boy, now a Christian, could no longer remain in the care of his Jewish family. The affair became a cause célèbre for European and American liberals and for Jews from Berlin to San Francisco who campaigned for the boy’s restitution to 21  Jules Michelet, Le prêtre, la femme et la famille (Paris: Hachette et Paulin, 1845). 22  See, for example, G. “Mort de M. le Docteur Terquem,” Archives israélites, Mar. 1845, 189–91. 23  Ari Joskowicz, “The Priest, the Woman, and the Jewish Family: Gender and Conversion Fears in 1840s France,” Jewish Quarterly Review 101, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 439–57; Thomas Kselman, “Turbulent Souls in Modern France: Jewish Conversion and the Terquem Affair,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 32, no. 1 (2006): 83–104. 24  On the details of the affair in Italy, see David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1997).

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his parents.25 As they articulated and organized their outrage, Jewish activists drew liberally from the anticlerical toolbox, speaking often about the importance of the family, paternal authority, and the constitutional state, which, they claimed, were all threatened by the pontiff and his regime.26 The scandal surrounding the Papal State’s forceful removal of Edgardo Mortara from his parents’ custody began an era of increasing liberal and republican Jewish engagement.27 It coincided with a decade-long period of West and Central European Jews’ upward mobility and their aspirations to become citizens by adopting middle-class values, many of which were also expressed in anticlerical polemics.28 It also overlapped with political realignments that affected many Jews’ political outlook. In France, this period ended the close cooperation between Napoleon III and an increasingly ultramontane Catholic Church. After 1859, the French regime parted ways with many Catholics who expressed their disappointment at the French emperor’s support for the unification of Italy at the expense of the Papal States. In Prussia, meanwhile, the autumn of 1858 began the so-called New Era, with a stronger liberal presence in parliament. Looking abroad, German and French Jews also believed they saw signs of progress in other places. In Great Britain, the first Jewish deputy was allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons in 1858. From the vantage of French and German Jewish liberals, Europe appeared to be returning to a path towards progress after the setbacks of the immediate post-1848 period.

25  For reflections on the affair’s impact in Europe, see Georges J. Weill, “L’affaire Mortara et l’anticléricalisme en Europe à l’époque du Risorgimento,” in Aspects de l’anticléricalisme du Moyen Age à nos jours: hommage à Robert Joly: colloque de Bruxelles, juin 1988 (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1988), 103–34. 26  On issues of gender in French anticlericalism, see Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); René Rémond, L’anticléricalisme en France de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1976), 68–9. 27  On the importance of the 1860s and 1870s for Jewish republicanism in France, see Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 64–89; on the Jewish embrace of liberalism in Germany, see Jacob Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland; von Jena bis Weimar (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1966). 28  On Jews’ upward mobility and middle-class values in France, see Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 53–76. On Germany, see Jacob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 1847–1871: zwischen Revolution, Reaktion und Emanzipation (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 100–118; Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004).

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Liberals’ growing optimism about these various political developments only served to convince them of Rome’s backwardness. In their view, the Papal States under Pius IX grew ever more anti-modern just as European politics seemed poised to fulfill the promise of modern progress. In this context, the campaign to free the kidnapped Jewish child from the oppressive hand of the Roman pontiff spurred new initiatives of transnational Jewish political and philanthropic action, such as the creation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The organization’s founding in 1860 was the direct result of agitation surrounding the Mortara Affair as well as the culmination of a longer history of Jewish competition with Catholics over foreign and domestic policy, as many scholars have highlighted.29 The affair also created new assumptions about the fundamental antagonism between Jews and organized Catholicism, however, a development that appears less often in scholarship. In this era the opposition between liberalism and Catholicism became a powerful paradigm that helped Jews in Germany, France, and beyond interpret national as well as international politics. Increasingly, self-identified Jewish writers—like Simon Bloch and Abraham Treuenfels, whose reflections on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 appear at the beginning of this essay—inscribed themselves into these conflicts. In the process they reshaped their political and religious outlooks to such an extent that the fall of papal Rome appeared to them as an event of supreme world-historical importance as well as a providential sign of coming progress. The new situation is clearly illustrated by the reactions the French Jewish journalist and lawyer Joseph Cohen (1817–99) elicited when he came out in support of the papacy a few years after the Mortara Affair.30 Cohen was a member of the Jewish Consistory of Paris, a contributor to various newspapers, and the editor of his own Jewish weekly, Vérité israélite (1860–62).31 In 1862, his reputation in the Jewish community suffered due to two missteps. The first involved a strongly-worded critique of the rabbinate that suggested it was contributing to the decline of Judaism. Perhaps not surprisingly, Cohen’s comments offended 29  Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France. On anticlericalism and Jewish internationalism, see Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). On transnational competition between different religious groups, see Abigail Green, “Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East, c.1840-c.1880,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (2008): 535–58. 30  On his life, see Assan Valérie, “Joseph Cohen, avocat, publiciste (Marseille, 1er novembre 1817–Paris, 22 novembre 1899),” Archives Juives 45, no. 2 (2012): 141–2. 31   U I, Aug. 1862, 552.

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various important rabbis before he quickly retracted them. Cohen’s second misstep proved to be even more damaging, however.32 In September of that year, he declared himself in favor of the pope’s temporal rule over Rome in the conservative daily France, insisting that preserving the small remaining territory of the Papal State was important for the stability of the European political system. Combining political and religious considerations, Cohen argued that Catholicism would not survive the fall of the Papal States, a development he feared would endanger the future of religion in general. Although some non-Jewish commentators mocked Cohen’s position, his most vehement critics were members of the Jewish community.33 Cohen’s attempts to explain his position in his newspaper were to no avail. Nothing could save him from the indignation of his fellow Jewish journalists. In the pages of L’Univers israélite Bloch declared that it was “not fitting to rest in the camp of Israel while enlisting under the flags of our most implacable enemies.”34 He even suggested that it was “against the nature of being Jewish” to support the pope.35 Such critiques hit hard. In reaction, Cohen decided not to stand for reelection in the Paris Consistory. He also resigned as editor of his paper, the Vérité israélite, which soon ceased publication. Certain German Jewish commentators shared Bloch’s outrage. Among them was Ludwig Philippson, the editor of Germany’s most influential Jewish paper, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums. In his fiery response to the controversy Cohen had sparked, Philippson portrayed his French coreligionist’s position as utterly untenable for someone who publicly represented Judaism as a member of a consistory.36 In Philippson’s words, Cohen’s opinions were both “un-Jewish and anti-Jewish.”37 In the political climate of the years following the Mortara Affair, which had turned Judaism and the papacy into irreconcilable enemies, Cohen’s position appeared as nothing less than treasonous.38 The scandal that surrounded Cohen’s comments exposes the extent to which antagonism toward the pope was becoming ingrained into the fabric of an increasingly transnational Jewish public sphere. Debates that emerged in 32  J. Cohen, “La politique anglaise en Italie,” France, Sep. 25, 1862. 33  For non-Jews’s critical comments, see, for example, A. Hébrard, “Bulletin du Jour,” Le Temps, Oct. 1, 1862. 34  S. Bloch, “Les adieux d’un journaliste,” UI 18 (Nov. 1862): 123–4. 35  Ibid., 124. 36  “J. Cohen und die weltliche Macht des Papstes,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (AZJ), Oct. 21, 1862, 605–8. 37  Ibid., 605. 38  Ibid.

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one national context inspired related reactions in other countries, reinforcing many Jews’ sense of their common interests in Europe and around the world in the process. This was true even for events that could not be as easily described as ‘Jewish’ matters as the Mortara Affair or the debates over Cohen’s comments about the papacy. Indeed, Jewish journalists were equally invested in drawing their readers’ attention to other conflicts that reinforced the idea of a liberalCatholic culture war independent of Jewish concerns. Developments such as the pope’s 1864 publication of the Syllabus of Errors, which condemned liberalism and religious equality as mistakes of modernity, or the Vatican Council’s declaration of Papal infallibility as a dogma in 1870 made Jewish struggles against the Catholic Church seem like part of a much larger conflict. Many Jewish liberals took comfort in this, since it suggested that they were not alone but rather part of a broader progressive alliance that was bound someday to prevail. As the century wore on, Jews continued to find multiple strategic uses for anticlericalism. At times, they enlisted it in support of international campaigns for Jewish solidarity. In other instances, they turned to anticlerical positions in an effort to express their commitment to integrating into the nation-state. The latter pattern was particularly pronounced in Germany, where the Prussian government under Otto von Bismarck and liberals in parliament engaged in the Kulturkampf against Catholicism throughout the 1870s. In these conflicts, liberals attempted (however paradoxically) to socially unite the country— after its political unification in 1871—by eliminating the Catholic Church and Catholicism as both a political and cultural force.39 While many German Jewish journalists and politicians rejected measures such as the expulsion of German (among other) Jesuits from Germany— which they judged to have undermined their fellow Germans’ civil rights— others accepted Bismarck’s fight as their own.40 The official statement that 39   Armin Heinen, “Umstrittene Moderne: Die Liberalen und der preußisch-deutsche Kulturkampf,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003): 138–56; Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 40  Most of the literature on Jewish anti-Catholicism in Germany has focused on the Kulturkampf and its aftermath: Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 81–120; Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen, 246–94; Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 258–80; Olaf Blaschke, Offenders or Victims?: German Jews and the Causes of Modern Catholic Antisemitism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Alexander (Ari) Joskowicz, “Liberal Judaism and Confessional

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r­ epresentatives of the Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund (German Jewry’s largest supracommunal body) offered to Bismarck upon his assumption of the German chancellorship perfectly illustrates the new opportunities that the Kulturkampf brought to German Jews, even as it also generated new ambivalence. The authors of the Gemeindebund’s first address to the politician who had recently brought full civic equality to Jews across the German Empire expressed their position thus: Your Highness, drawing on the same energy [with which you battled for confessional equality] you have victoriously fought the battle against the internal enemies of the empire. To the best of our abilities we also stand by your and the empire’s side in this battle—because it was precisely the one-time omnipotence of this enemy that made many generations of our co-religionists suffer persecution, pressure, and exclusion.41 Couching an otherwise German nationalist position in undeniably Jewish terms, the authors of the address suggested that the enemies of the empire and the enemies of the Jews were one and the same. This statement about the “internal enemies of the empire” encapsulates the Gemeindebund’s experiments with anti-Catholic expressions of German patriotism. Not all members of the Jewish community were on board with this approach: Orthodox circles mocked the organization’s position while certain liberal Jewish observers remained hesitant about their official representatives’ embrace of such controversial strategies.42 While many Jewish communal leaders worried about the potential consequences of actively aligning themselves with Bismarck’s most radical anti-Catholic campaigns, few had any problems with the same campaigns’ underlying triumphalist message. Indeed, French and German Jewish reformers, as well as Jewish apologists across Europe more broadly, aimed to prove that the form of religion they practiced was progressive and ideally suited to the demands of citizenship. In the midst of the German Kulturkampf of the 1870s as well as major anticlerical initiatives that emerged in France during Politics of Difference in the German Kulturkampf,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 50 (2005): 177–97. 41   “Verhandlungen der Constituirenden Versammlung des Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeindebundes (Zweiter Gemeindetag),” Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People M1/8, 29–39. 42  “Der deutsch-israelitische Gemeindebund,” Der Israelit, May 5, 1872, 433–4, and May 29, 1872, 477–8.

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the 1880s and 1890s, various Jewish commentators sought to bring home this point by highlighting the differences between Judaism and Catholicism. Whereas the Catholic Church’s aggressive policies forced the state to intervene into its affairs and to pass successive laws to limits its influence, they argued, Jews had no collective political ambitions and thus steered clear of state intervention. In certain contexts, Jewish authors decided that their unique position allowed them to lend their advice to Catholics interested in reforming their ways. As one German Jewish journalist put it: What [Catholicism] calls [. . .] God’s law, is priests’ law. It is founded on [. . .] forged documents [. . .] and it serves: authority, churchly power, worldly property. We also have priests. Don’t give them more power, authority, property, than our kohanim have, then all will be well. Elect and appoint your teachers and clerics as we do; do not ask for privileges and preferential treatment from the state. Then the state will also have no reason to interfere in your affairs.43 After a century of being on the receiving end of their Christian compatriots’ advice about how they might reform themselves, and their Judaism, Jews now found themselves in the position to return that favor, explaining to their fellow Catholic citizens how they might alter their religion so as to become as modern and patriotic as the Jews. Both the patriotic positions that French and German Jews adopted and their growing willingness to come together in support of transnational Jewish causes were intimately connected with the positions they espoused vis-à-vis Catholicism. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, polemics against the papacy stood at the center of German and French Jews’ attempts at nationalization, internationalization, and the religious and theological narratives they employed to support their visions of a tolerant and secular political order more broadly. The trope of Roman fanaticism thus became part of transnational debates about Judaism’s role in the modern world. At the same time, Jewish anticlericalism formed part of broader European and Atlantic anticlerical traditions. As Wolfram Kaiser has argued, the conflicts that lasted through the final two thirds of the nineteenth century in different European countries produced shared anticlerical texts, networks, and organ­ izations while also encouraging the transfer of new models of ­anti-Catholic 43  “Der Kampf zwischen Kirche und Staat,” IWS, July 17, 1872, 228. Italics are mine.

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action.44 The transnational character of these debates also allowed anticlericals in one country to be radicalized by events occurring elsewhere. The examples cited above show that Jewish anticlericalism followed all these patterns: it produced shared texts and inspired collective action; scandals in one country often intensified debates in another. 3

Antisemitism and the Decline of Jewish Anti-Church Polemics

Jewish expressions of political anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism transformed once antisemitic activists began to attack Jews for the positions they took in debates on church-state relations. This pattern intensified in the 1880s and 1890s. In both France and Germany, antisemites accused Jews of threatening national unity through their attacks on the church. Many of the same individuals actively identified Jews with various forms of secularism as well as with the secular, republican state that they were fighting.45 Devout Catholics increasingly depicted Jews as anti-Christian, materialistic manipulators who sought to profit from the fall of traditional religious structures. These accusations took strikingly similar form in Germany and France. Although they convinced certain French Jews to further identify with republican anticlericalism, on the whole they complicated Jews’ attempts to use anticlericalism as part of an effort to appear patriotic. Antisemites’ newfound hyper-sensitivity to any Jewish comment on church-state relations soon led to the decline of anticlericalism as a significant Jewish political strategy and transnational phenomenon. In Germany, the Kulturkampf concluded in the early 1880s just as political antisemitism appeared on the political scene. Jewish journalists writing for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums or other confessional papers subsequently highlighted Jews’ resistance to anticlerical legislation, rather than their support for, or even ambivalence about, such initiatives.46 Although many Jews 44  See Wolfram Kaiser, “ ‘Clericalism—that is our Enemy!’: European Anticlericalism and the Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47–76. 45  Pierre Birnbaum, The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 46  See, for example, the press’s emphasis on the fact that no Jew in parliament voted to expel the Jesuits: “Die Motive der ultramontanen Presse,” AZJ, Sep. 28, 1880, 609–12; - a -, “Berlin, 6. Mai,” Jeschurun, May 1883, 300.

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in the Protestant parts of Germany continued to have closer social relations with Protestants than they did with Catholics, in particular in institutions such as universities, by the late nineteenth century few Jews advertised their willingness to define the nation in an anti-Catholic manner.47 Once it became clear with the rise of the exclusivist nationalism of Protestant liberalism that Protestant visions of the German nation were similarly unaccommodating to Jews as they once had been to Catholics, anticlericalism nearly disappeared from German Jews’ political repertoire. By the turn of the century, liberal Jews in Germany even began to vote for Catholic candidates when opposing candidates were antisemites.48 In France, the situation was much more complicated. Most important for the transnational perspective developed here is the fact that German and French Jews no longer felt that anti-Catholicism bound them together. For many observers, Catholic antisemitism now became mainly a problem of Catholic countries such as France or Austria, where antisemitic Catholic massmovements such as the French leagues or the Viennese Christian Socialists appeared to be changing the political landscape.49 There was no longer any consensus that antisemitism was inherent to Catholicism or that anti-Jewish policies emanated from Rome. Instead, Jewish journalists and writers depicted anti-Jewish political movements as emerging from local situations, or they explained the spread of antisemitism in terms that made it seem like a contagion, with one country ‘infecting’ another. The simple vision that prevailed in the decades after the Mortara Affair had disappeared by the First World War. European Jews no longer viewed themselves as part of a global liberal movement at war first and foremost with the anti-modernism of a similarly global and coherent Catholic Church. 4

Transnational Polemics and Secularism

What then can we learn from this transnational history of Jewish anticlericalism? Which patterns come into focus that separate histories of German and 47  On Jewish-Protestant relations with a focus on university life, see Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890– 1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); on these relations in nineteenthcentury Germany more broadly Uffa Jensen, Gebildete Doppelgänger: Bürgerliche Juden und Protestanten im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). 48  Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen, 170–7. 49  See, for example, “Der Antisemitismus in Frankreich,” AZJ, Apr. 15, 1898, 169–70.

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French anticlericalism would not have illuminated? First, where shared developments exist across multiple countries, we must avail ourselves of all possible methodologies to make sense of them. This includes comparative studies that highlight the specificity of each locale, transfer histories that show the movement of ideas between cultural zones, and entangled perspectives that demonstrate the connections between and the coevolution of similar phenomena in different social contexts. Second, transnational histories force us to question not only the deceptively hermetic quality of national narratives but also the very terminology we employ to create them. There are, of course, good reasons why French scholars have tended to speak of anticlericalism while German scholars preferred to refer more often to anti-Catholicism. Yet, a shared history of this phenomenon across national boundaries demonstrates the ways in which both terms are inadequate. When German and French Jews attacked the power of the Catholic clergy in European society they were not simply criticizing any kind of clergy, as the term anticlericalism implies, but the power of the clergy of one religious group in particular; nor were they motivated by confessional hatred, however, as the term anti-Catholicism implies. As a small minority in each context they were not in a position to directly exclude Catholics. Instead, Jewish critiques of Catholic clerical influence were part of larger strategies of integration motivated by Jews’ political commitments and their social circumstances. Finally, transnational histories expose the shared assumptions that formed part of French and German debates. These stand in stark contrast to the tradition, initiated already in the late eighteenth century by German and French commentators, of juxtaposing the two countries’ politics of religion.50 In their attempts to explain what was specific about their situation, nineteenth-­ century Jews and non-Jews alike employed a vocabulary that highlighted distinctiveness. German and French Jews followed this pattern when they gauged their own relative progress by comparing it to the position Jews enjoyed across the Rhine. It was in this context that nineteenth and twentieth-century French Jewish authors and activists desirous of avoiding internal schisms sought to emphasize the fact that the notion of ‘reform’ was distinctive to the German context, for example. Such terminological boundary-making obscures the fundamental entanglement of French and German Jews’ understandings of what was really at stake in their discussions of the Catholic Church. This was no less than the 50  On French and German perceptions of the other country as enemy, see Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1792–1918 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992).

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relationship between religion and politics as well as their very definition of these concepts.51 Their anticlerical polemics not only shaped their visions of appropriate religion and religious practice, anti-Catholic anticlericalism was also one of the major vehicles Jews used to explain—both to each other and to non-Jews—the ways in which their approach to religion was unproblematic. For nearly a century, this remained true in both Germany and France because the foil for Jews’ discussions were similar in each place. Jewish thinkers, journalists, and activists in both countries imagined Judaism to be a religion that cultivated autonomous individuals, encouraged a healthy family life, gave women access to religious knowledge, made no claims to political power, and whose transnational networks aligned with their respective national interests. In all these respects they believed they were unlike adherents of the Catholic Church, which they accused of suppressing free choice, undermining family life, encouraging women into naive superstition, having political ambitions, and sustaining a transnational organization that competed with the state. As distinct as the Protestant and Catholic-dominated religio-political cultures of Germany and France were, the anticlericalism of nineteenth-century German and French liberalism created a strikingly similar set of discourses about religion and politics. Only a transnational account of their political languages and the polemics that sustained them can reveal these similarities.

51  On these concepts in Jewish thought and in different national contexts, see Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Ari Joskowicz and Ethan Katz, eds., Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Chapter 8

Shaping Children’s Lives: American Jewish Aid in Post-World War II France (1944–1948)1 Laura Hobson Faure As symbols of the future, children lay at the heart of European reconstruction after World War II. Jewish children, like the other ‘lost children’ of Europe who came of age during the upheaval of war, provoked passionate debates on collective identity and nation-building.2 Indeed, for the Jewish communities who sought to care for them after the war, these children represented an extremely important and highly scrutinized population. As youth, they were malleable; as survivors (a word not yet used at this time for this population), they represented precious remnants of the diversity that had characterized European Jewish life just a few short years before. This combination of vulnerability and potential made children both important actors and sought-after instruments of the Jewish reconstruction process. This emotional investment in Jewish children can be seen in postwar France, where it was estimated in 1944 that between five and fifteen thousand Jewish orphans needed care.3 These figures can be explained by deportations, but also by the fact that many parents were unable to care for their children as a result of physical or mental illness, or had placed their children with Jewish aid organizations temporarily, while looking for housing, jobs and surviving family. The growing historiography on Jewish children in France after the Shoah reflects the importance of children to reconstruction. If historians first analyzed the structures that cared for Jewish children within the French Jewish 1  This chapter represents a longer and reworked version of “Les enfants juifs et le Joint dans la France de l’après-guerre,” in L’Enfant-Shoah, ed. Ivan Jablonka, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), 83–97. The author would like to thank the Presses Universitaires de France for its permission to adapt this article, as well as Alexandra Garbarini for her valuable comments. 2  Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Bloomington, Indiana University Press). 3  David Weinberg, “The reconstruction of the French Jewish community after World War II,” in She’erit Hapletah, 1944–1948, Rehabilitation and Political Struggle. Proceedings of the Sixth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jerusalem, 1985, ed. Yisrael Gutman et Avital Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 172. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004324190_010

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community, they quickly turned to the thorny problem of children who had been hidden during the war.4 Most recently, historians have incorporated the discussion of Jewish children into larger frameworks and across disciplinary boundaries, documenting the extent to which children served as symbolic actors to hone national and/or collective identities in the aftermath of world war.5 Indeed, as Tara Zahra has shown, international organizations aimed to serve “the best interests” of displaced children in the aftermath of World War II, yet interpreted such interests according to their own specific viewpoints. Such so-called universal principles dictated placement decisions for children, who in the process had become prized objects in a nationalist “tug-of-war.”6 Working specifically on France, Daniella Doron’s study of postwar custody battles has shown how such collectivist considerations—in this case French or Jewish—influenced the lives of Jewish children. Breaking with the notion that French Jews remained silent in the postwar period, she has shown that French Jewish child care organizations actively sought to obtain guardianship over formerly hidden children in the name of the Jewish collective, which put them in conflict with French authorities who preferred to maintain these children in Christian families. For the French, keeping a child in a family environment was more important than ethnic considerations, as was bolstering the Republic with a new generation of assimilated (or assimilable) French citizens.7 In postwar France, however, French Jewish organizations and the Republic were not the only parties shaping Jewish children’s lives. In the decade following World War II, French Jews benefited from extensive funding from American Jewish organizations. The ‘Jewish Marshall Plan’ was a vast program,

4  Sabine Zeitoun, L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants sous l’occupation en France (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990); Katy Hazan, Les Orphelins de la Shoah. Les Maisons de l’espoir, 1944–1960 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000); Catherine Poujol (dir), “L’Affaire Finaly, pistes nouvelles,” Archives Juives, Revue d’histoire des juifs de France 37, no. 2 (2004); Catherine Poujol, Les enfants cachés, l’affaire Finaly, (Paris: Berg International, 2006); Catherine Poujol, L’église de France et les enfants juifs. Des missions vaticanes à l’affaire Finaly (1944–1953), (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013). One must underline the fact that we still know very little about Jewish children placed in non-Jewish institutions after the war, such as the COSOR, which ran a network of children’s homes in the postwar period. 5  For a historiographical discussion on the case of France, see Jablonka, L’Enfant-Shoah, 11–30. 6  Zahra, The Lost Children, 88–145; Daniella Doron also uses this term in discussing France; Daniella Doron, “Drama of Faith and Family, Familialism, Nationalism and Ethnicity Among Jews in Postwar France,” Journal of Jewish Identities 4 (2), (2011): 11. 7  Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity, 74–117.

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orchestrated by individuals and organizations, to help reconstruct European Jewish life.8 Without taking into account this transnational dimension of reconstruction, we cannot fully understand the forces operating on the lives of Jewish children in postwar France. This essay thus seeks to engage with this broadening historiography by looking both inward and across national lines at what was happening within the Jewish community. In particular, it will consider relations between French Jewish childcare organizations and their principal benefactor, the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Indeed, while the growing body of literature on children in postwar France has recognized the aid provided by the JDC, descriptions of this American organization have focused almost exclusively on its financial support.9 While the JDC’s financial aid was significant—it provided 27 million dollars to French Jews in the decade after WWII10—my own research, building on Maud Mandel’s contributions to the historiography, has shown that the JDC was no “silent benefactor”11 in French Jewish reconstruction. The organization reformed the aid practices of the French organizations it funded according to an American model and, as I will argue here, shaped both the lives of Jewish children and the contours of postwar French Jewish life. First, we will see how the JDC, by supporting local Jewish welfare organizations from multiple ideological affiliations—from Communist to Orthodox— encouraged continuity with interwar communal diversity. French Jewish organizations, funded primarily but not exclusively by the JDC, allowed for a new generation of children to be raised according to the ideology of their missing parents. Second, we will analyze the JDC’s decision to reduce funding for Jewish children’s programs in France after 1947. Understanding how American and French Jews reacted to this policy change allows us to situate how each of these groups understood their roles among Jewish surviving youth, and finally, 8  Laura Hobson Faure, Un “Plan Marshall juif ”: la présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944–1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013). 9  For example, Sabine Zeitoun, L’OSE sous l’occupation, 187–192; Katy Hazan, Les Orphelins de la Shoah, 209–223. An exception, Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity, 198–232. 10  On JDC funding figures for France, Joint Distribution Committee Archives- New York (JDC-NY), Loeb and Troper Report, 1973. 11  Maud Mandel was the first to underscore the extensive influence of the JDC in postwar French Jewish life. The term “silent benefactor” is her own; Maud Mandel, “Philanthropy or Cultural Imperialism? The Impact of American Jewish Aid in Post-Holocaust France,” Jewish Social Studies 9/1 (2002): 54. Building on Mandel’s research, my doctoral research explored the work of not only the JDC but other American Jewish organizations in France, and most importantly, sought to assess the reception of this aid by French Jews and their associations; Laura Hobson Faure, Un “Plan Marshall juif”.

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how such policies affected the children themselves. Indeed, this shift in the JDC’s program constituted an irreparable break with the interwar years: on the one hand, organizations, strapped for resources, began working together in new ways, breaking with the ‘for each his own’ mentality which had previously characterized Jewish welfare in France.12 On the other hand, budget cuts further exposed the vulnerabilities of the Jewish population, revealing to what extent the Shoah had destroyed family networks, making children’s lives all the more precarious. This chapter thus shows that American Jewish organizations’ policies on children created both continuity and rupture with pre-World War II French Jewish life. 1

The American Jewish Mobilization for Postwar French Jewry: Encouraging Pluralism

American Jewish organizations, which had been present in France in the interwar period and active there during World War II, renewed their programs in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah to help French Jews pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and communities. The most important of these organ­ izations was the American Joint Distribution Committee (the JDC, or Joint), which was founded in New York in 1914, and which had become the largest overseas philanthropic representative of American Jews in the interwar period. Other American Jewish organizations, such as the Jewish Labor Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women, or the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress (working through the World Jewish Congress), entered the field of Jewish child welfare in France as a result of the Shoah, in the immediate postwar period.13 As the major American Jewish organization for overseas philanthropy during the interwar period, the JDC received roughly 57% of all funds raised in the 12  More research is needed on philanthropic practices among Jews in interwar France; cf. Laura Hobson Faure, “Un ‘Plan Marshall juif:’ la présence juive américaine en France, 1944–1954” (PhD Diss., Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2009): 107–27; 385–392. Cf. Le “Moment” philanthropique de juifs de France (1800–1940), Archives Juives 44, no. 1 (2011), edited by Céline Leglaive-Perani. 13  The Jewish Labor Committee organized extensive rescue program in France during World War II, but focused on emigration and relief; Catherine Collomp, Résister au nazisme, Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York, 1933–1945, (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2016). Their childcare programs began after WWII; Constance Pâris de Bollardière, “Mutualité, fraternité et travail social chez les bundistes de France, 1944–1947,” Archives Juives: Revue d’histoire des Juifs de France 45, no. 1 (2012): 27–42.

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United States by the United Jewish Appeal, the centralized fundraising institution of the American Jewish community established in 1939.14 Influenced by American philanthropic principles of the Progressive Era, the JDC believed strongly in cultivating the autonomy and self-sufficiency of those it helped.15 It therefore refused to provide services directly to individuals, and instead funded local organizations, which offered an array of services. In postwar France, such principles dictated the shape of the JDC program. American representatives of the JDC returned to France in December 1944; its first postwar director, Arthur Greenleigh, pursued what could be considered a contradictory policy. On one hand, to reach as many individuals as possible, Greenleigh considerably expanded the number of organizations receiving JDC assistance, providing funding to about 35 organizations, which in turn ran 115 institutions.16 This allowed the JDC to assist indirectly 50,000 individuals- or 25–28% of the Jewish population—in 1945 alone.17 Yet on the other hand, Greenleigh attempted to eliminate the duplication of services in order to make the French Jewish welfare system more efficient. Therefore, in early 1945, he facilitated the fusion of the three largest local aid committees to establish one family services agency, the Cojasor.18 Ironically, this two-pronged policy meant that in the immediate postwar period, widespread JDC funding in fact stimulated the duplication of services for Jews in France, which the JDC then defined as a problem to be counteracted through centralization.

14  On the United Jewish Appeal, cf. Abraham J. Karp, To Give Life. The UJA in the Shaping of the American Jewish Community (New York: Schocken Books, 1981); Marc Lee Raphael, A History of the United Jewish Appeal, (Brown University, Scholars Press, 1982). 15  On emergence of philanthropy in the United States, cf. John Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagination, A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): 19–42; Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), and Ludovic Tournès, Sciences de l’homme et politique, les Foundations philanthropiques américaines en France au XXé siècle (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013) 21–51. 16  Executive Committee Minutes, April 18, 1950, 249, France 1945–1954, Joint Distribution Committee Archives, New York (JDC-NY). 17  “JDC Primer,” 1945, p. France-8, Non-catalogued, JDC-NY. This is percentage is based on a Jewish population numbering between 180,000 and 200,000 individuals. 18  Cf. Maud Mandel, “Philanthropy or Cultural Imperialism,” 61–6, Laura Hobson Faure, “Penser l’accueil des immigrés juifs, L’American Joint Distribution Committee et les oeuvres sociales juives françaises après la Shoah,” in Terre d’exil, terre d’asile, Migrations juives en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Colette Zytnicki (Paris: Les éditions de l’éclat, 2010), 102–5.

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Contrary to other programs, children’s organizations had initially escaped the JDC’s centralizing efforts.19 The sacred duty of honoring the memory of deported parents seems to have generated an argument in favor of pluralism, allowing even the smallest voices a right to exist. This led to a large ideological diversity among the organizations that received JDC funding, including Orthodox (l’Association des israélites pratiquants de France, as well as yeshivot), Bundist (the Cercle amical), Zionist (WIZO, l’Œuvre de protection des enfants juifs, Youth Aliyah) and Communist (la Commission centrale de l’enfance de l’ Union des juifs pour la résistance et l’entraide), as well as the Franco-Jewish Eclaireurs Israélites de France, and the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE). This last group’s internal pluralism makes it more difficult to classify. The JDC should not be given sole credit for preserving interwar communal diversity. First and foremost, it was French Jewish leaders who dedicated their postwar existences to rekindling Jewish associative life: without the ­“skeleton” that they reconstructed, the JDC could not provide “muscle.”20 It is also important to emphasize that other American Jewish organizations stepped in, at times to the dismay of the JDC, to assure that their particular movement would continue to be represented in postwar Paris. Recent research on French Bundists, for example, has shown the key role of the Jewish Labor Committee in funding a network of children’s services in France, thus defending their right to “reconstruct according to their own values and cultural references.”21 In a similar vein, Alex Grobman has demonstrated the role of the American Vaad Hatzala, whose Rescue Children Inc. supported Orthodox children’s homes in France from 1945 until 1948.22 Finally, the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress established the American Committee for the Rehabilitation 19  One exception: The Zionist organizations quickly chose, on their own, to coordinate their efforts. The WIZO thus turned over its wards to the Oeuvre de protection des enfants juifs; Meeting on Budgets for Children’s Organizations in France, August 2, 1946, 249, France 1945–54, JDC-NY; Katy Hazan, Les orphelins de la Shoah, 162. 20  The autobiographies and biographies of French Jewish leaders and social workers of the postwar period emphasize the all-consuming nature of this task. Cf. Félix (Fajwel) Schrager, Un militant juif (Paris: les Editions Polyglottes, 1979), Isaac Pougatch, À l’écoute de son peuple. Un éducateur raconte (Paris, Albin Michel, 1980), Vivette Samuel, Sauver les enfants (Paris: Liana Levi, 1995). The significant role of Léon Meiss, “president of French Judaism,” has yet to be fully analyzed by historians. Cf. Paule Ferran, Julien Samuel. Un Homme Engagé (Paris: Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1999). On his role in the creation of the Fonds Social Juif unifié, see Laura Hobson Faure, Un “Plan Marshall juif,” 139–76. 21  Constance Pâris de Bollardière, “Mutualité, fraternité et travail social,” 30. 22  This organization supported as many as nine homes in France through its affiliate, Rescue Children Inc. In early 1948, the JDC took over the care of these homes; Alex Grobman,

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of European Jewish Children, which, under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress, financed six children’s homes in France run by Zionist, Communist and Orthodox organizations, as well as foster care, from 1945 until late 1947.23 The JDC attempted to mediate among these American Jewish aid efforts in the name of centralization and efficiency. It succeeded in negotiating an agreement with the Vaad Hatzala and the World Jewish Congress in late 1947– 1948, by which the JDC would fund their homes.24 Nonetheless, if American aid was thus progressively centralized under the auspices of the JDC, local diversity among French Jewish organizations appears to have been maintained (the Orthodox children remained in Orthodox homes, the Zionist children, among Zionists, etc.). American Jewish funding thus encouraged communal diversity, in continuity with the interwar and war years. The cases of two extremely different organizations, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, and the Commission centrale de l’enfance, which was affiliated with the Jewish communist Union des juifs pour la résistance et l’entraide, exemplify in particular how funding from the JDC gave life to an array of services, in each ideological shade. At liberation, the JDC renewed its grants to OSE, which it considered the most professional of the children’s organizations, an image certainly bolstered by the fact that OSE was assigned the care of the some 500 young survivors of Buchenwald who were given permission to enter France in June 1945.25 In 1945, OSE obtained 26% of the JDC’s global budget for France (the JDC’s global budget was almost 2 million dollars for 1945).26 Conversely, in 1945, the OSE’s monthly budget was 9 million francs (approximately $180,000 dollars in 1945), roughly Battling for Souls. The Vaad Hatzala Rescue Committee in Post-Holocaust Europe (Jersey City: Ktav, 2004), 238. 23  Foster Children in Europe, April 30, 1947, D 73/9, World Jewish Congress (361), American Jewish Archives (AJA). 24  Alex Grobman, Battling for Souls, 238; Agreement between the World Jewish Congress and the American Joint Distribution Committee, December 26, 1947, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 25  According to the JDC: “A large number of doctors, social workers, social assistants are now working in the OSE institutions,” Child Care in France under the Auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1945, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. On the Buchenwald children in France, cf. Katy Hazan et Eric Ghozlan, A la vie! Les enfants du Buchenwald, du shtetl à l’OSE (Paris: Éditions le Manuscrit, 2005), 167–202; Alex Grobman, Rekindling the Flame, American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944–1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 51–2; Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity, 179–197. 26  “JDC Primer,” 1945, France-8, non-catalogued, JDC-NY.

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69% of which was provided by the JDC.27 As of March 1945, this allowed OSE to maintain seventeen children’s homes, which housed 2,300 children.28 JDC funding allowed for a rapid expansion of the OSE network: by January 1946, this organization had twenty-four children’s homes and branches throughout France, where it provided medical care for adults and children, offered professional orientation services, and ran recreational activities.29 In 1947, the JDC was funding a total of 66 Jewish children’s homes in France, where care was provided to 3,574 children. At this moment, OSE still represented the largest Jewish childcare organization, with 1052 children, or 29.2% of Jewish children living in homes after the war.30 While the JDC reached the greatest number of Jewish children through its funding of OSE homes, Zionist and Jewish Communist organizations also cared for a significant number of Jewish children, with roughly 500 children each under their auspices.31 2 The JDC and Jewish Communists: A Cold War? In spite of the growing tensions of the Cold War, the JDC’s goal of distributing its funding widely is most evident in its decision to fund Jewish communist organizations in France. This constituted a new policy, since it had not funded communist organizations during the war years.32 In particular, the JDC 27  Child Care in France under the Auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1945, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. By 1946, their monthly budget had increased to 13.5 million francs per month. The JDC continued to support 70% of its budget; the rest of the OSE’s funding came from the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, the French government, the Union OSE and local sources; Meeting on Proposed Budgets for Children’s Organizations in France, August 1946, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 28  According to this document, 700 additional children were going to be placed in OSE homes, and an additional 6,800 were receiving another form of assistance (placement in families or boarding schools, or medical care). Children, Child Care in France under the Auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1945, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 29  Role de l’Oevure de Secours aux Enfants OSE en tant qu’agent bénévole du Comité Intergouvernemental pour les réfugies. Extrait du rapport general d’activité de 1945, January 1946, AJ 43/1252, Archives Nationales. 30   J DC France Children’s Homes, July 10, 1947, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 31   J DC France Children’s Homes, July 10, 1947, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 32  Report for France for last quarter of 1944, September 1945, 247, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. According to this document, the UJRE did not receive JDC funding during WWII, when it was run by two French representatives (of socialist-zionist orientation). On the JDC in France during WWII, cf. Laura Hobson Faure, “ ‘Guide and Motivator’ or ‘Central Treasury’?

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funded the Children’s division of the Union des juifs pour la résistance et l’entraide, which, in order to obtain JDC funding, called itself the Commission centrale de l’enfance (CCE, Commission).33 According to the Commission, the JDC was providing at least 31% of its budget at the beginning of 1946.34 By August 1946, according to the JDC, the American organization was providing 1.1 million francs monthly, which represented 45% of the Commission’s budget.35 When the Commission requested more funding in August 1946 to place 360 children who were being cared for in Christian families in two new children’s homes, JDC director for France Laura Margolis did not hesitate to recommend that their grant be increased.36 In 1946, the JDC gave the Commission a total of 27 million francs, not including supplies.37 From the liberation until the late 1940s, the relationship between the JDC and the Commission thus appears to have mirrored the relationships the JDC had with other Jewish children’s organizations. These relationships were far from perfect: there were ups and downs, disagreements involving budgets and the right of the JDC to interfere in the bookkeeping of the organizations. Yet as the winds of the Cold War began to blow, the JDC began to display a concern over the communist orientation of the Commission. In April 1947, the JDC raised a flag on the Commission in an internal memo, noting that it was a “Communist-inspired Jewish agency” that needed “careful scrutiny as to its real financial needs, particularly in view of the fact that it solicit[ed] funds from other sources outside of France.”38 Yet from the wording of this document, we can see that the JDC was more concerned with the Commission’s financial integrity than its ideological positions. The JDC wanted to make sure that the Commission was not obtaining the bulk of its budget from another source, and The Role of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in France, 1942–1944,” in Rescue Practices Facing Genocides. Comparative Perspectives, eds. Jacques Sémelin, Claire Andrieu, and Sarah Gensburger (London and New York: Hurst and Columbia University Press, 2011) 293–311. 33  Joseph Minc, “Un Travail immense,” in L’Album. La CCE, 40 ans de souvenirs, ed. Les Amis de la CCE, (Paris: Les Amis de la CCE, 1998), 10–11. On the CCE’s pedagogy, see Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity, 143–152. 34  Letter from UJRE to the American Jewish Committee, Jan. 22, 1946, 297, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 35  Meeting on proposed budgets for children’s organizations in France, Aug. 2, 1946, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 36  Meeting on proposed budgets for children’s organizations in France, Aug. 2, 1946, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 37  Memo from Research Department to R. Pilpel, April 2, 1947, 284, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 38  Memo from Research Department to R. Pilpel, April 2, 1947, 284, France 1945/54, JDC-NY.

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thus benefiting from additional funds. It also wanted to verify that its f­ unding was going directly to children and not to propaganda.39 As McCarthyism began to gather momentum in the United States, American Jewish organizations mobilized to disprove what historian Peter Novick has called the “JewCommunist equation.”40 In this context, the JDC’s continued financial support of the Commission can actually be considered a progressive—and potentially risky—stance.41 Children of Jewish communists, therefore, were not excluded from JDC aid as a result of the Cold War, at least not initially. In 1952, the JDC was still providing one million francs per month to the Commission.42 Such funding, however, could not withstand the increased tensions of the 1952 Slansky Trial in Prague and the 1953 Doctor’s Plot in the Soviet Union. Moscow targeted the JDC in both affairs, leading to a public relations nightmare in the Paris Yiddish press, which then leaked into the French national press. Fearing an outbreak of scandal in the US, the JDC finally cowed to French Jewish socialists’ and Bundists’ demands and stopped funding the Commission.43 This example of the Jewish communists allows us to assess the limits of the argument that American Jewish funding enabled continuity with interwar communal diversity. In fact, in the case of the Communists, failure to obtain JDC funding after 1953 did not cause this movement to founder. On the contrary, the CCE continued to exist into the 1980s: its last home closed in 1958, and its summer camps were maintained until 1985.44 Unlike OSE, however, the CCE had never obtained the majority of its funding from the JDC. The Communists, like the Bundists—thanks to the Jewish Labor Committee—had diversified their funding sources as a survival strategy, even if their funding

39  Letter from J. Schwartz to L. Sobel, June 20, 1947, 281, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 40  Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 93, 85–102. 41  Other American philanthropic organizations were targeted during the McCarthy Era, such as the Unitarian Service Committee and the Rockefeller Foundation. The House of Representatives’ Cox and Reece investigations (1952–1954) targeted the work of American Foundations to verify the political orientations of their grant recipients. In this context, JDC funding of communists is quite unusual. Cf. Elizabeth Subak, Rescue and Flight. American Relief Workers who Defied the Nazis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 217–32. 42  Letter from R. Cohen to M. Beckelman and H. Katzki, Dec. 3, 1952, 297, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 43  Laura Hobson Faure, Un “plan Marshall juif,” 205–20. 44  Katy Hazan, Les Orphélins de la Shoah, 127, 399.

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sources remain somewhat mysterious.45 Nonetheless, losing JDC funding in 1953 is not the same as not having had it during that most crucial moment immediately following the war. If children benefitted directly from American funding, the Jewish movements of the interwar period also reaped indirect benefits from American aid. By enabling them to maintain homes, summer camps, and other services into the mid-1950s and beyond, the JDC and other American funders helped such movements indoctrinate a new generation of children in their distinct ideologies. 3 JDC Budgetary Restrictions: The End of the “Halcyon Days”?46 If American Jewish funding facilitated the establishment of a diverse care network for Jewish children in France, it could not last forever. Long before the JDC cut funding to Jewish communists for political reasons, it chose to scale back its French program. JDC funding was strongly linked to the generosity of American Jews, who gave unprecedented sums to the 1946 campaign of the United Jewish Appeal. This allowed the JDC to double its 1946 grant to France, with a record JDC grant of 5.9 million dollars in 1947.47 However, predictions of an economic recession and a slow-going United Jewish Appeal campaign in the United States, coupled with an increase in the cost of living in France, forced the JDC to start radically cutting back its programs in 1947. While a financial necessity, JDC budget cuts were also a means of provoking a response from the agencies it funded. Indeed, in is attempt to make French Jews self-sufficient, the JDC’s Office for France, under the direction of Laura Margolis since June 1946, pursued its policy of centralization to eliminate the duplication of services. Margolis, an experienced international social worker with a ‘no-nonsense’ approach to French Jewish life, now targeted childcare agencies. Writing in 1949, one JDC child-care specialist assessed the JDC childcare program policies for the 1946–1948 period: 45  The CCE resisted the JDC’s attempts to audit their books. It obtained funds from the French State beginning in 1947 and was very active in raising local funds; Katy Hazan, Les Orphélins de la Shoah, 214–221. 46  This expression was used by JDC director Laura Margolis in reference to Robert Gamzon, a prominent Jewish leader: “He still cannot forget the Halcyon days of 1944–1946, before this office got organized and caught up with him.” Memo from Laura Margolis to Beckelman, December 18, 1948, Service Social des Jeunes, 5A1 C. 43.045, JDC-Israel. 47  Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust Jewry (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), xvii–xviii.

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One of the principles applied throughout our work during the past two years with our child care agencies is, that just as JDC or any other public or private welfare agency has limited funds at its disposal and must of necessity limit and select out certain priorities [. . .], so our agencies must learn to limit themselves as to what they can and cannot do. Here again we encountered no end of resistance on the part of our agencies. In retrospect, we can safely say that we have made progress [. . .]. This progress we feel did not come only from teaching through a consciously planned educational approach. The pressures, complexities and size of our program was such that we had neither time, money, nor sufficient personnel to rely on the educational process only. Where persuasion and interpretation brought only halfhearted acceptance of our ideas, the thing which actually made our agencies face reality, was budget cuts. Although these budget cuts were frequently essential, based on budgetary limitations which headquarters imposed on the Office for France, we must admit that in some situations, we cut budgets with a conscious purpose of ‘shocking’ our agencies into facing reality. Thus, we used the subvention as a tool in treating an agency in much the same way as relief has been used as a tool in treating the individual client.48 The budget cuts were accompanied by new policies that the JDC implemented in September 1947: it would no longer systematically support summer camps; it would not support the placement costs in children’s homes of those children who had two living parents, and—most controversially—it would no longer provide funds for youth over the age of 18 who were living in children’s homes.49 The citation above shows it was efficiency and self-sufficiency, in the name of the ‘American Empowerment Tradition’ that motivated the JDC’s decisions to cut funds for children’s programs, and not the ongoing debate in child welfare circles on whether it was more desirable for children to be placed in collective children’s homes or in families, through foster care placements.50 48  Welfare Department Report #2, Report of Child Care Department, Office for France on developments from October 1946 to October 1948, April, 1949, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 49  Welfare Department Report #2: Report of Child Care Department, Office for France on developments from October 1946 to October 1948, April 1949, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 50  Cf. Barbara Levy Simon, The Empowerment Tradition in American Social Work: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). On the US vs. European, collectivist vs. individualist placement debate, see Tara Zahra, The Lost Children, 59–87; Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity, 118–161. Nonetheless, this debate surrounding institutional care vs. family placement was clearly ongoing at the Paris JDC office. In its justification of its

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French Responses: The Case of OSE

French and American Jews may have been partners in the reconstruction of French Jewish life, but by cutting budgets, the JDC flexed its financial muscle, reminding French Jews of the differences that separated them. OSE, which had a long history with the JDC in Eastern Europe,51 remained lucid about the dangers of financial dependence on the JDC. Already in February 1946, one of the organization’s most experienced leaders, Lazare Gurvic, reminded his colleagues that it was best to avoid complete financial dependence on the JDC: In its dealings with the Joint, the Union [OSE] relies on the principal that it would not be advisable [souhaitable] for the Joint to provide the totality, that is, 100%, of the Union’s budget, as this would diminish OSE’s independence.52 In 1945, almost 70% of the French OSE’s budget was from the JDC.53 The OSE thus remained highly vulnerable to changes in the JDC’s budgetary policy. This explains why the 1947 budget cuts represented a major upheaval for OSE in particular: this organization was obliged to reduce its number of wards from 1200 to 650 children, and closed 11 children’s homes, between October 1946 and October 1948.54 JDC policy did not change overnight, however. Budget cuts were discussed and negotiated with French organizations, leaving time for planning, but also for resentment to set in. The OSE leadership protested internally after a meeting with the JDC in April 1947, at which its leaders learned that the JDC would be cutting funds. One month later, OSE received confirmation of its funding budget cuts, the JDC recognized that it had initially intended to develop a “sound foster care program” (corresponding to American social work trends), but that such a program did not correspond to the realities of postwar France, due to a lack of trained personnel; Welfare Department Report #2: Report of Child Care Department, Office for France on developments from October 1946 to October 1948, April 1949, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 51  Laura Hobson Faure et al., Ouevre de Secours aux Enfants et les populations juives aux XXème siècle. Prévenir et Guérir dans un siècle de violences (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 46–61, 112–26. 52  Procès Verbal (PV), February 4, 1946, non-catalogued, Archives de direction 1948–1952, OSE Headquarters. 53  Child Care in France under the auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1945, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 54  Welfare Department Report #2: Report of Child Care Department, Office for France on developments from October 1946 to October 1948, April 1949, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY.

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from the JDC. Instead of a budget cut, it had in fact been granted more funding than expected. However, OSE leaders were shocked by the unilateral manner in which the JDC had decided on the OSE budget, as well as a new element: the JDC had fixed the amount of the total budget of the OSE. In this manner, the JDC would be able to reduce its contribution if OSE obtained funding from external sources.55 Soon thereafter, one OSE official noted that the JDC was attempting to “transform OSE into its own agency,” and declared that “the moment has come to firmly oppose this tendency.”56 OSE leaders also remarked that a shift had occurred: instead of playing a purely technical role, the JDC was increasingly becoming involved in internal OSE social work matters.57 Interestingly, reductions in JDC funding rekindled OSE’s interest in the French government, a funding source heretofore underexploited by this organization.58 If the OSE leadership protested what they considered as the JDC’s overinvolvement in the management of their organization, it was the educators and the children themselves who experienced the new policy changes most intensely. The policy of “emancipating”59 youth over the age of eighteen provoked the strongest reactions. Was this population actually comprised of ‘children’ or were they adults? In the late 1940s, individuals of this age were considered minors, in both France and the US.60 This distinction may explain Gaby Wolff Cohen’s negative reaction to this policy. Known as Niny to the OSE children, Wolff worked for the OSE during and immediately after WWII, when she helped care for the children from Buchenwald. In a 2005 interview, she recalled: 55   P V de la reunion du conseil de direction, May 9 1947, non-catalogued, Archives de direction 1948–1952, OSE Headquarters. 56   P V de la reunion du conseil de la direction, May 16 1947, non-catalogued, Archives de direction 1948–1952, OSE Headquarters. 57   P V de la reunion du conseil de la direction, October 3 1947, non-catalogued, Archives de direction 1946–1952, OSE Headquarters. 58  Mathias Gardet, “Des orphélins de la Shoah aux Maisons d’enfants à caractère social,” in Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, eds. Laura Hobson Faure et al., 245–255. 59  For the sake of simplicity, I will hereafter use the term ‘emancipation’ as a euphemism, in quotations. 60  In the United States, 21 was considered the age of majority in the late 1940s; T. E. James, “The Age of Majority,” American Journal of Legal History 4, 1 (1960): 22–33. It was not until 1971 that the 26th amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. In France, 21 was also the age of majority, until the modification of the Civil Code by the law 74–631 in 1974, which lowered the majority to age 18; http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do;jsess ionid=6DADF72E37FBB0E1A1BF2B518CE01C92.tpdila11v_3?cidTexte=JORFTEXT0000007 00039&dateTexte=20081231, consulted March 6, 2015.

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I remember, they said ‘OK, children of this or that age, its over, they have to leave the children’s homes, they have to become ‘selbständig’. That is, I’m using a German word, to say that they had to become independent. And for us, even though we were “professionals”—quote unquote— because we had been assigned this job, but in fact, we hadn’t considered this. It was my brother’s [child], it was my sister’s [child], it was my uncle, it was family, one can’t just throw them out into the wild and say ‘Ok, you have to be autonomous,’ we didn’t understand the principle. They [the JDC] saw the best interests of the child, but we saw things from an entirely different point of view: How, our very own, and we’re going to put them in the street and say ‘work, leave, etc.’? Even though it originated from the good intentions of trained people who were thinking of the future of the children . . . and we—we felt this viscerally, the feelings, the love we had, like a Jewish mother or a Jewish father, he doesn’t want to throw out his kid.61 .

For Wolff and others who were trying to replace absent parents, the JDC had crossed a line by kicking out children.62 They thus defended the right of “their children” to live in the homes and undertake long courses of studies, emphasizing a certain symbiosis between the French caregivers and their wards, united in opposition to the American funder.63 The earlier writings of another OSE educator suggest a more complex relationship dictating the ‘child-OSE-JDC’ triumvirate, which perhaps better contextualizes the JDC’s ‘emancipation’ policy. Originally published in the French journal Enfance in 1949, Lotte Schwarz, who ran an OSE home in 1947, 61  Interview with Gaby Wolff Cohen, Paris, May 28, 2004. My translation. 62  This analysis counters the findings of Tara Zahra, who wrote “OSE educators did not hope to replace the child’s parents; or even to mimic the family,” Tara Zahra, The Lost Children, 106. Zahra bases her conclusions on the writings of Robert Job and Ernest Jouhy (Jablonski). The latter was active in child welfare circles and clearly displayed greater professional distance. But OSE staff was heterogeneous and included many who had a deep emotional attachment to the children, such as Gaby Wolff Cohen. 63  Gaby Cohen and Franceline Bloch (who worked for the Service Social des Jeunes, a Jewish social service agency for adolescents) both brought up the need in our oral history interviews to defend the right for their wards to undertake long courses of studies. The JDC, however, preferred shorter vocational trainings, which would lead to autonomy quicker. Interviews with Gaby Cohen, May 28 2004; Franceline Bloch, November 18, 2004. On the use of vocational training in postwar French Jewish social work, cf. Laura Fourtage, “Les organisations juives d’aide sociale et l’insertion professionnelle dans l’immédiat aprèsguerre,” Archives Juives 45, no. 1 (2012): 11.

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s­ pecifically addressed the difficulties working with young camp survivors. She described the educator-child relationship as conflict-ridden, with American funding serving as a manipulative tool for both Jewish organizations and children: Since the Americans (the Joint) were giving a huge amount of funding for the upkeep of these survivors [rescapés], the French organizations fought amongst themselves to “appropriate” them, and in doing so opened themselves up to all sorts of blackmail [chantages] from the children. “If you don’t give me this fur coat, I’ll go to ORT,” declared one youth at the OSE offices (or the opposite). And he received his fur coat. [. . .] In Ecouis, [an OSE home for Buchenwald survivors] already, their position in relationship to the organization that was housing them was clarified: OSE was enemy number one: “These people are getting rich off of us, they are paid by America to serve us and we don’t even receive everything that we want,” etc.64 Schwarz’s remarks show how deeply American funding had permeated French Jewish life and informed (and even poisoned) the relationship between caregivers and receivers. This less than idyllic portrait of life in Jewish children’s homes casts new light on the complexities of the postwar period. In this context, the JDC budget cuts may have indeed had a salutary effect, forcing caregivers and children to reevaluate their relationship to one another. Sources on the OSE children from both the postwar and the contemporary period reflect such ambivalence. The OSE children’s publication Lendemains documented the upheaval of the JDC budget cuts. Its November 1947 issue appeared two months late as a result of the difficulties “which were immense. Children from the homes were dispersed, then regrouped, as a result of which the contact between the editorial board and the outside [le dehors] was partially lost [. . .].”65 In the following pages, in an article entitled “Emancipation,” 64  Lotte Schwarz, Je veux vivre jusqu’à ma mort (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 174–177. Interestingly, the original published text in Enfance differed slightly from her autobiography. First, her gender changed: in Enfance, the author is listed as Ludwig Schwarz and L. Schwarz (and not Lotte). Second, some of her remarks on American aid are absent in the 1949 article; L. Schwarz, « Une expérience avec les jeunes déportés », Enfance, Tome 2, n. 5, 1949, 497–505. 65  “Appel,” Lendemains n. 12, November 1947, reprinted in OSE et Amicale des Anciens et Symphatisants de l’OSE, Lendemains, Par les jeunes, pour les jeunes, Journal des Enfants de l’OSE ( Juin 1946-Avril 1946), Tome II, (Paris: OSE et Amicale des Anciens et Sympathisants de l’OSE, 2012), 347.

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one child provided his own experience, describing the shock of receiving the letter that informed him of his ‘emancipation,’ and the difficult transition period following his departure from the home. He nonetheless ended on a hopeful note: Yes, in the beginning it wasn’t always so great [pas si rose que ça] but now, when I think about it sometimes, I have to admit that I wasn’t throwing myself into life as I had believed [je ne me suis pas du tout jeté dans la vie comme je le croyais], but that, thanks to OSE, I was able to slide in gently.66 The mix of anger and gratitude in this essay shows a great deal of ambiguity on the part of the author towards OSE, as does his last sentence: the reader is left wondering if the writer did not really intend to say he was “thrown into life” instead of “throwing [him]self into life”. . . . Contemporary views are less ambiguous. In her discussion of the emancipation of 117 children from Buchenwald from OSE homes in 1948 as a result of this policy, Katy Hazan writes: “. . . some had the impression that they had been thrown out without any follow-up.”67 Indeed, over sixty years later, at a meeting of the Amicale de l’OSE in autumn 2014, the former children expressed their anger, both at OSE and the JDC, for getting ‘kicked out’ of their homes. According to their collective account, OSE provided very little notice to the children who were being sent out of the homes. Some had to sleep in parks, others grouped together to share hotel rooms and maids quarters.68 Because many ‘emancipations’ occurred in 1948, these children associated this event with the establishment of Israel, which they interpreted as taking away their funding. This impression was shared—and perhaps fostered—by some OSE employees, who in their 1948 board meetings had accused the JDC of encouraging emigration to Israel in order to “cut costs.”69

66  Bébé, “Emancipation”, in Lendemains, Par les jeunes, pour les jeunes, 350. 67  Katy Hazan, Les orphelins de la Shoah, 252. 68  This account, provided to the author in a group setting, requires further research. Meeting of the Amicale de L’OSE, October 20, 2014. Such remarks were confirmed in a telephone interview with A. Bulwa, March 9, 2015. 69  Mathias Gardet, “Des orphélins de la Shoah aux Maisons d’enfants à caractère social,” in Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, eds. Laura Hobson Faure et al., 245–6. The JDC archives do not suggest this to be true. Laura Margolis was indeed a Zionist, but encouraged the survival of Jewish life in France. On Margolis’ longterm legacy in France, cf. Laura Hobson Faure, Un “Plan Marshall juif,” 139–76.

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The Case of Young Women: A Gendered Consensus

If all youth over eighteen were affected by the JDC budget cuts, both French and American organizations shared their concern for young women over eighteen. The actions of both American and French organizations in the name of this population reveal a new pattern in French Jewish welfare and suggest a more activist and engaged JDC. Indeed, when approached by French Jewish organizations about the fate of young women who were about to be ‘emancipated,’ the JDC shared its concern and said it would provide assistance. This gendered approach to ‘emancipation’ was later justified by the JDC, which feared that due to inadequate housing options, these young women might end up in the street.70 While not explicitly evoked, avoiding their sexual exploitation clearly appears to have been a motivating factor for the JDC and French Jewish agencies. Indeed, as Mary Louise Roberts has pointed out, the Parisian sex industry underwent restructuring in the postwar period, giving way to a clandestine system of individual street-walkers. Many prostitutes were young, poor and “dangerously far from home and family.”71 Keeping vulnerable young Jewish women off the street was in the best interests of all Jewish organ­ izations, intent on protecting youth, but also avoiding antisemitism in this fragile postwar period. The JDC thus promised to assist French Jews in finding a solution for young women, yet only if the organizations formed a representative committee so that the problem would be addressed on the collective rather than the individual level. In December 1947, JDC employees were happy to note that the major French Jewish childcare organizations had created such a committee in order to open a home for young women over 18.72 This event represented a positive sign of autonomy to the JDC, especially since the American organization had, on its own, been looking for another solution, thanks to a collaboration with the American-based National Council of Jewish Women. Indeed, the National Council, established in 1893 with local chapters implanted throughout the US, represented a network of Jewish women who were able to offer their time and financial assistance. The National Council intensified its efforts in Europe after the Shoah, and in 1946 it sent 70  Letter from Laura Margolis to Hortense Goldstone, October 15 1947, 291, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 71  Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do. Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) 141–142 (quote), 133–58. 72  Welfare Department Report #2: Report of Child Care Department, Office for France on developments from October 1946 to October 1948, avril 1949, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY.

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a ­representative to France—Gloria Wagner—who was given a desk in the JDC offices. Once there, the National Council developed two new programs for France: a scholarship program, which afforded French Jewish women the opportunity to study welfare-related topics in American universities, and a home for young working women, which opened in Paris on the rue de Notre Dame des Victoires in August 1947. Laura Margolis, the head of the JDC French program had, in fact, kept the National Council informed of the acute needs of young women, especially in light of the JDC policy of emancipating 18 year olds.73 The need for such a home was obvious when it opened: it was so submerged in requests from young women that Gloria Wagner and Laura Margolis suggested that the National Council open a second home only three months after the opening of the first.74 Together—and without approval from Margolis’ superior— the two women managed to convince Simon-Joseph Scheuer, an American Jewish philanthropist who was visiting France, to take on their cause. As soon as Scheuer returned to the US in the fall of 1947, he met with the president of the National Council and convinced her of the importance of the new home.75 In response, the National Council offered 50,000 dollars over a twoyear period for the home. Scheuer then wrote to the JDC requesting financial support,76 having himself pledged $5,000 to the project. He then began zealously fundraising among his friends.77 Scheuer’s private fundraising campaign quickly became embarrassing for the National Council and the JDC because it breeched the strict fundraising agreements these organizations had signed with the United Jewish Appeal.78 Overall, the story of this advocacy campaign on behalf of Jewish women reveals the contradiction between American Jewish 73  Letter from Laura Margolis to Hortense Goldstone, October 15 1947. Letter from Laura Margolis to Joseph Schwartz, October 20 1948, 291, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 74  Letter, Laura Margolis and Gloria Wagner to Mrs. Joseph Welt, May 7 1948, 291, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 75  Letter, S. Scheuer to J. Schwartz, Nov. 20 1947, D11/16, World Union for Progressive Judaism (Collection 16), AJA. 76  Letter, S. Scheuer to J. Schwartz, Nov. 20 1947, D11/16, World Union for Progressive Judaism (Collection 16), AJA. 77  Contributions received through efforts of Mr. Scheuer, no date; Letter, S. Scheuer to potential donors, December 20 1947, D11/16, World Union for Progressive Judaism (Collection 16), AJA. 78  In order to participate in the UJA, affiliated organizations such as the JDC and the NCJW relinquished the right to raise funds independently. In addition to his philanthropy, Scheuer was the secretary on the American board of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, the international organization of the Reform movement. On his activities for

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­ hilanthropic ­discourse and reality: in this case, the JDC was orchestrating a p complex private fundraising initiative, outside of the auspices of the United Jewish Appeal, to provide funding for a population that it claimed should become independent. It also shows the JDC’s activism when faced with what it deemed legitimate vulnerability. Young women, not young men, fit this category. In the meantime, five French Jewish organizations had joined forces and established their own home for young Jewish women in Versailles in summer 1948.79 For the JDC, especially Laura Margolis, this news came as a relief, and she was able to tell her superior, Dr. Joseph Schwartz, that a second home was not necessary. Still, not willing to lose the benefits of their fundraising campaign, she asked if the National Council could use the funds to create a home for female Jewish students who were “living in more than miserable conditions.”80 The JDC’s actions on behalf of young women were not known by the French. The French image of the American Jewish organization remained stuck on its decision—according to many, cold and premature—to ‘emancipate’ the 18 year olds. Considering postwar French Jewish life in transnational perspective allows us to highlight the important role of American organizations in the reconstruction process, and demonstrates the complex relationship between those who provided aid and those who received it, not only between organizations and individuals, but also among organizations. It also allows us to pose the question of Jewish life in France after the Shoah in light of a ‘continuity or rupture’ paradigm. American Jews were shaping the reconstruction of Jewish life at the exact moment when French Jews began the tentative dance of reintegration into the Republic. How did internal communal transformations, under American auspices, inform this process? What kind of Jewish life reemerged? Maud Mandel has shown that French Jews “maintained a visible presence” in the Republic, in large part due to the vibrant institutional life that emerged in the aftermath of the war, which in turn facilitated the e­ xpression

the NCJW home, see Letter, S. Scheuer to J. Schwartz, Nov. 20 1947, D11/16, World Union for Progressive Judaism (Collection 16), AJA. 79  Welfare Department Report #2: Report of Child Care Department, Office for France on developments from October 1946 to October 1948, avril 1949, 249, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. Letter, L. Margolis to Joseph Schwartz, Oct. 20 1948, 291, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. 80  Letter, L. Margolis to Joseph Schwartz, Oct. 20 1948, 291, France 1945/54, JDC-NY. The result of this request is not known.

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of ­non-religious forms of Judaism.81 Building on this research, this study on American Jewish policies on children has demonstrated that communal diversity, in continuity with the interwar period, was encouraged by American Jewish organizations. Their widespread distribution of funding kept different Jewish political and religious voices alive at a most fragile hour. Yet we can also make the case for rupture with the pre-World War II period. Just as American funding allowed for diversity, its withdrawal revealed the deep-seated vulnerabilities of a generation of children who had been cruelly deprived of their family networks. JDC budget cuts also led to change by creating incentives for French Jews to establish new patterns in their communal welfare work. Even though the divisiveness that characterized interwar Jewry never entirely disappeared, French Jewish leadership began to adopt a more coordinated approach to welfare. Creating a home for Jewish young women, co-directed by multiple Jewish welfare organizations, is one example of such new ways of working together.82 Ultimately, such coordinating led to the establishment of the Fonds Social Juif Unifié in 1949. Even in this case, however, the influence of American models is evident. The Fonds Social Juif Unifié was based on the United Jewish Appeal in the United States and was established by French Jewish leaders and the JDC to coordinate French Jewish welfare. Maud Mandel has emphasized the key role of the JDC in importing structures from the American Jewish community, yet considers the war itself as the major unifying force for postwar French Jews.83 Here, through the analysis of social welfare policies for Jewish children, the importance of the postwar period itself is revealed. American Jewish aid—both its presence and its withdrawal—was instrumental in fashioning postwar French Jewish life.

81  Maud Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide. Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 162–77. 82  In the postwar period, the JDC provided similar ultimatums to French Jews, for example, to force them to group their initiatives to bring Polish Jews to France in 1946; Laura Hobson Faure, Un “Plan Marshall juif,” 147. 83  Mandel was the first to highlight the important the role of the JDC in the creation of the FSJU; Maud Mandel, “Philanthropy or Cultural Imperialism,” 74–80. The significance of this structure to a new postwar Jewish identity was first noted by Colette Zytnicki, “L’accueil des Juifs d’Afrique du Nord par les institutions communautaires (1961–1965),” Archives Juives 31, no. 2 (1998): 103. On postwar unity, see Mandel, In the Aftermath, 166–7.

Chapter 9

“The French Jewish Community Speaks to You with One Voice”: Dissent and the Shaping of French Jewish Politics since World War II Ethan B. Katz and Maud S. Mandel Introduction In December 1961, the influential Tunisian-born French Jewish writer and thinker Albert Memmi penned an article in the Algerian Jewish newspaper Information juive, in which he heavily critiqued what he deemed the lack of “Jewish politics” in France. He exclaimed: One certainly encounters numerous Jews in political circles, but a Jewish presence in the political life of the country does not exist, practically speaking. Numerous Jews try to act, even do act politically, but almost never as Jews.1 In particular, he sharply criticized, even mocked the attempts of some to fight antisemitism “as Frenchmen”; rather, he contended, one should openly recognize the particular danger for Jews, while still acknowledging the commonalities in all forms of racism. It is difficult to imagine a major French Jewish commentator offering such a critique today. Indeed, organized French Jewry’s response in the early twentyfirst century to both a marked rise in antisemitism and periodic violence in the Middle East has been publicly, robustly, even emphatically Jewish. Moreover, not only have French Jewish community institutions long become comfortable speaking publicly for Jews qua Jews; they generally have done so in an insistently unified and uniform manner. Equally notable is that, by the late twentieth century, such public speech on behalf of French Jewry was often highly critical of the French government and its policies in a manner unprecedented in prior generations. If in 1961, the community consensus was not to 1  Albert Memmi, “Le Juif et la politique,” Information juive (IJ), December 1961. Emphasis ours.

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speak politically as Jews, within a generation, that consensus had transformed into one about how precisely to speak as Jews.2 Though such a sea change demands explanation, few scholars have posed the question. While historians have begun to examine Jewish politics in France in the post-1945 period, they have generally focused on a particular moment or strand, rather than tracing shifts over time or looking at various competing currents. By emphasizing a long-term, multi-vocal perspective, this chapter begins to show how a range of Jewish political engagements both came together to create and institutionalize a more assertive, public and particularistic French Jewish politics and periodically contested the direction of that politics.3 We trace this evolution in French Jewish politics since the Second World War through a pair of case studies. The first comes from the last years of the FrenchAlgerian War, the very moment when Memmi wrote. In fact, contrary to his critique, a number of French Jews—particularly those who had come of age 2  Jews in France have of course been ‘politically’ pursuing Jewish interests for generations, ranging from the Napoleonic Grand Sanhedrin to the support of specifically Jewish causes by French Socialist Party leader Léon Blum. The shift we want to underscore is one toward a far greater willingness not to be political but to articulate publicly a Jewish group politics that distinguishes ‘Jewish’ values, interests, or obligations from those of France more broadly. 3  French Jewish political evolution has been of interest to historians ever since Michael Marrus’ The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) posited the emergence in the nineteenth century of an aggressive assimilatory Franco-Jewish politics that denied particularistic concerns. While a significant body of scholarship has since traced an ethnically conscious Jewish politics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of this work has nevertheless confirmed Marrus’ view of a French Jewish leadership reluctant to adopt publicly visible, particularistic politics at odds with the French state (even if Jewish leaders worked behind the scenes or through non-Jewish secular entities to promote Jewish interests). Recent work on mid-twentieth-century French Jewish history has pointed to moments when a more confrontational public Jewishness began to emerge even in the heart of mainstream Jewish institutions. For the origins of this process, see Maud S. Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); for the impact of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, see Joan Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); for the impact of colonialism and the Arab-Israeli conflict, see Ethan B. Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) and Maud S. Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). For a more general overview, see Maurice Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française: De 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 181–8; Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 57–8.

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during or following the years of Vichy and the German Occupation—began to challenge the relative silence of official communal institutions regarding the struggle for Algeria’s future. They insisted on taking a position on the war in a manner that foregrounded their Jewish religious, cultural or ethnic identity. In the second case study, a group of Jews challenged the communal leadership during the first Lebanese war of 1982–1983, insisting that the community’s official pro-Israel line misrepresented the majority of Jews, who, these activists claimed, were deeply critical of Israel’s actions. By examining these two instances where Jews from the margins challenged the politics of the center, we identify four key factors that transformed Jewish politics in mid-to-late twentieth-century France. First were the lessons of the Holocaust, which reverberated throughout institutional life from the moment the war ended and in time became deeply contested among both the wider French population and Jews themselves. Second was the growing importance of Israel for French Jewish identity, which was eventually opposed in a powerful dialectic with increasing criticism of Israel on the part of the French state and society. Demographically, several hundred thousand Jews from North Africa migrated to France in the 1950s and 1960s. These new arrivals imported new models of Jewishness to France that reflected greater comfort with visible displays of ethno-religious expression. The North African Jewish immigrants had also been shaped by several years of grappling with the impact of the Arab-Israeli wars on Muslim-Jewish relations. Finally, these developments, while distinct to the postwar era, resumed a longer process of working out the meaning of being Jewish in public in the context of French laïcité that had begun following the 1905 separation law and accelerated with the rise of an immigrant Jewish politics in the 1930s.4 Chronologically, the shift proceeded in three stages. The first phase had already begun in the years following World War II and crystallized from the late stages of decolonization through the mid-1960s. The developments of these years at once anticipated and prepared the way for more visible changes to come. This was the case with regard to explicitly Jewish politics (including concerning Israel), the contested politics of Holocaust memory, and the demographics of French Jewry. In the second phase, catalyzed by the 1967 war

4  Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) and Maud Mandel, “The Changing Nature of Jewish Politics in post-World War II France,” in Zvi Gitelman, ed., The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003): 197–219.

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and May ’68, two strands of Jewish ethnic politics—the mainstream community leadership and the Jewish Left—cemented their presence in the French public sphere. Each challenged the French state in new ways, but the two strands took opposing positions on Israel, and appropriated the memory of both the Holocaust and decolonization in very different ways. The third phase began in earnest with the writing of the new charter of the CRIF in 1977, which institutionalized the fully embodied Jewishness of French Jewish politics that had been demanded from the margins a generation before. During this stage, the wider dissemination of Holocaust talk far beyond the Jewish community, the increasingly controversial policies of the state of Israel, and a spate of antisemitic and racist incidents in France combined to catalyze both fiercer criticism from the Jewish Left and a sharper focus on Jewish unity from many community leaders. This phase was emblematized by the debates over the first Lebanese war. Remarkably for French Jews, during this phase both mainstream Jewish leaders and those critiquing the approach of those leaders proudly proclaimed their right to represent Jews qua Jews to the wider French public. They did so, despite their differences, by claiming Jewish values and history as the justification for their political activism. 1

Decolonization and Jewish Politics

The French-Algerian War (1954 to 1962) pitted the mostly-Muslim Algerian revolutionaries of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), as well as several other organizations, against the French army and colonial state. In time, the war bitterly divided France. By its last stages, as France prepared to leave Algeria, the French army and the FLN faced not only each other. Both also had to withstand the attacks of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), a group of colonial settlers and former army officers—with a paramilitary wing—that was dedicated to keeping Algeria French at all costs. Jews in Algeria, and eventually to a lesser extent in metropolitan France, largely found themselves caught in the crosshairs of this struggle. For much of the first four years of the French-Algerian War, the Jewish communal leadership of mainland France said little about the conflict, despite its impact on the 140,000 Jews of Algeria who, by the late 1950s, increasingly opted to migrate to France in search of stability and security. Representatives of the French Central Consistory, the official representative body of French rabbis and communal leaders, acted as if determined to avoid giving attention to the war. When most rabbis and community leaders did discuss Algeria, they expressed support for France’s efforts, as well as hope for a just and quick

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end to the conflict and for continuing ecumenical coexistence.5 The Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France [CRIF], the umbrella organization established in 1944 to represent Jewish interests to national authorities, even twice condemned the choice of member associations to take a position on the war without prior approval from the larger council.6 Thus although the CRIF constituted a new organizational direction in French Jewish life—a body that emerged out of World War II expressly to represent Jewish interests to the authorities—it remained highly selective about its public political engagements, and rarely if ever criticized French domestic or international policies. And while French Jews held a range of views on the Algerian conflict, most expressed those in the traditional form of republican Jewish activism. That is, they took positions on the war as French citizens rather than as Jews. Ranging from left-wing intellectuals Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Laurent Schwartz, to centrist former Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, such individuals appeared at all levels of French society and adopted stances that spanned the political spectrum, while never publicly articulating a connection between their Jewishness and their perspectives on the conflict. In contrast, a new generation of Jews was coming of age in France, shaped by the Nazi genocide, the young Jewish state in the Middle East, and the ongoing question of decolonization; many of these Jews were prepared to step out of the traditional republican model of quietist politics. Instead of emphasizing their loyalty to France at the expense of any other public identities, they contemplated the possibility and meaning of a distinctly Jewish politics. Indeed, many aimed to redefine the place of Jewishness in French public life. In many ways, they picked up the flame of more assertive Jewish politics previously kindled in the 1930s by the Jewish communists, Bundists, Zionists, and other Jewish leftists, whose ranks had mostly been comprised of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Just as the earlier generation had challenged Jewish institutions to publicly oppose antisemitism and fascism as Jews, their ideological descendants (however unwitting) were frequently those challenging the community leadership to speak loudly about the Jewish opposition to what they saw as the return of such threats. Within the more cohesive community structure of the post-1945 era, however, these critiques were, in a sense, more threatening. Rather than emanating from what amounted largely to an a­ lternative 5  See, for example, the Rosh Hashanah address of Chief Rabbi Jacob Kaplan in 1956: “Message de Roch-Hachana du grand rabbin de France,” Journal des Communautés ( JDC), August 31, 1956; “Message du docteur Modiano, président du C.R.I.F.,” JDC, September 28, 1956. 6  Meeting of 23 December 1955; meeting of July 1960, MDI 14 and 18, Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC).

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world of Jewish immigrant associations and parties, the new opposition came mostly from those very much affiliated with the large umbrella of France’s Jewish organizational life.7 Several Jewish political organizations on the Left advocated for peace or independence in Algeria, as well as for coexistence between Jews and Muslims.8 Perhaps the most visible was the French Jewish Student Union (UEJF).9 In 1955, the UEJF openly opposed sending French troops to North Africa.10 Starting in 1957, the group organized conferences and published issues of its journal Kadimah on topics such as Jewish students’ responses to decolonization, and how Christians and Jews should relate to Islam.11 The UEJF’s activism reflected a larger trend among Jewish young adults across France. As the war dragged on, a number of other Jewish organizations and young activists also showed an increasing willingness to deviate from a position of neutrality or support for the French state. In late 1960, for instance, generational tensions over the Algerian question came to a head within the Jewish community of Strasbourg, the largest city in Alsace. In a December 1960 cover story in the local consistory’s official organ, Le Bulletin de Nos Communautés, Lucien Lazare, a thirty-six-year-old survivor of the Holocaust and former Jewish resister, took on directly the leadership of the French Jewish community.12 Entitling his editorial “Our Hands Have Not Shed This Blood,” Lazare began by citing the Torah and the Talmud regarding the responsibility of the community and its leaders in the face of atrocity:

7  See Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy; Mandel, “The Changing Nature.” While Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early TwentiethCentury France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), has shown that pro-Zionist sentiment in the interwar years was much more widespread than scholars previously contended, her observation is much more in the realm of Jewish cultural life than Jewish politics, where it appears, along with the other streams mentioned here, to have still been an active cause mostly among Jewish immigrants. 8  For a useful summary of the Jewish Left’s position and activism during the war, see Philippe Boukara, “La gauche juive en France et la guerre d’Algérie,” Archives Juives: Revue d’histoire des Juifs de France 29, no. 1 (1ère semestre 1996): 72–81. 9  Curt Niedermaier, “Union d’étudiants . . . en France,” Communauté, December 1959– January 1960, 29. 10  Meeting of December 23, 1955, MDI 14, CDJC. 11  Niedermaier, 26–8. 12  Lucien Lazare, “Nos mains n’ont pas versé ce sang,” Bulletin de nos Communautés (BNC), December 2, 1960.

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When a crime is committed and the author cannot be found, ‘the priests and the elders of the city’ (Deuteronomy XXI, 1–9), [that is] the spiritual and political leaders, the heads of the Community, are put on trial. They must declare, in order to attest to their innocence, ‘Our hands have not shed this blood’ (Deuteronomy XXI, 7). In this manner, he invoked the collective responsibility of a community for bloodshed, which fell particularly to the community’s leadership. After citing the Talmud’s greater elucidation of who bears this issue of responsibility, Lazare insisted in short: “When the innocent die of assassination, it is thus the entire society that is guilty, but above all its leaders and its guides.”13 Lazare’s emphasis here on the question of assassination of the innocent and the need for intervention drew directly upon his own experiences during the Second World War. His work in the Jewish resistance was specifically oriented toward rescue, and as a historian he would subsequently devote considerable attention to the subject of Jews who took part in rescue efforts during the Holocaust.14 He would also chronicle stories of “les justes,” those non-Jews who risked themselves to save Jews, carrying out “a gesture of goodness in a world submitted to the empire of barbarity and violence.”15 While in his critique of the community leadership, Lazare did not mention the Second World War, one can detect its shadow and its memory lurking over the Biblical passages and halakhic principles that he invokes. After discussing abstract principles, Lazare’s piece turned forcefully to the present situation: We ask them, our leaders, or rather God asks them: what have you done, what are you doing, to protect the victim, to prevent the crime? . . .  [F]or six years already, [Algeria] has troubled or should have troubled our conscience . . . First because we are French and that signifies fidelity to the principles of the [French] Revolution expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Also because we are Jews and our spiritual tradition taught by the Bible and the Talmud includes a demand of justice for all humans, without any distinction. 13  Lazare appears to refer in his discussion to the interpretation of this commandment as discussed in BT Sotah 45b–46b. 14  Lucien Lazare, Rescue as Resistance: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 15  Lucien Lazare, Le Livre des Justes: Histoire du sauvetage des juifs par des non juifs en France, 1940–1944 (Paris: Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1993), 15.

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Here, Lazare invoked a juxtaposition and complementarity between the principles of the French Revolution and the Hebrew Bible that had long informed French Jewish articulations of the relationship between Judaism and good citizenship. Yet Lazare’s mention of the Talmud also reminded readers, like his opening paragraph, of his extensive traditional religious training (he had attended the yeshiva at Aix-les-Bains) and thus his halakhic, rather than simply Biblical, perspective. Lazare was setting forth a set of obligations that he framed as quite simply ordained by God and Jewish law. Nonetheless, in a gesture toward the typical concerns of Franco-Judaism, Lazare took pains to acknowledge that he understood that French Jewish leaders should not speak politically—a stance that, as we will see, had shifted radically for many French Jews by the end of the 1960s. Yet he called nonetheless for what he deemed necessary spiritual engagement. “Pleading for justice when Muslims are persecuted,” he wrote, “is an absolute demand of the Jewish spiritual tradition. . . . [H]eads of our community, make yourselves the mouthpiece of the cry of the Jewish conscience.”16 In an illustration of how uncomfortable such direct critiques that were rooted in Jewish tradition could make community leaders, not long after, two cover editorials in the same community newsletter pushed back against claims like Lazare’s. One of them dubbed “naïve” those who found fault with French rabbis on such issues.17 Lazare’s effort to employ Jewish sources, values, and history to assess the proper response to the events in Algeria was hardly unique. During the final stages of the war, the question of engagement with the Algerian conflict became an issue of burning importance for many young French Jews. In January 1961, Lionel Cohn, himself a traditionally educated religious Jewish student, wrote in the UEJF newsletter Kadimah that Jews found themselves torn in the conflict. They felt compelled by Jewish tradition’s support for a people’s right to independence (here he cited instances from Judah Maccabee to Bar Kochba to Zionism, itself rooted in the Torah) and by the clear opposition of traditional Jewish principles to inhumane methods like torture. But he explained that as a religious Jew he also cared deeply for his fellow Jews, specifically those in Algeria, including what their rights might be regarding Israel in a future independent Algeria.18 16  Lazare, “Nos mains n’ont pas versé ce sang.” Lazare did note that both the French and the FLN had committed atrocities, hence acknowledging the political and moral complexities of the situation. 17  Cedre, “Du politique et de la politique,” BNC, February 10, 1961. 18  Lionel Cohn, “Réflexions d’un étudiant juif religieux sur le problème algérien,” Kadimah, December 1960–January 1961.

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In March 1961, at a conference on French Jewish youth, these competing concerns helped to frame a lengthy debate on the subject of “Jewish engagement and non-engagement.”19 Cohn was the first speaker. He argued that the Torah, which he cited as the ultimate guide to a Jew’s actions, insisted on engagement. He noted how, in the aftermath of Adam and Eve’s corruption of the world through the sin of eating the apple, God called upon man to re-perfect the world. For religious Jews, engagement had to include not only explicitly Jewish issues but rather all of the pressing questions of the time. Cohn then addressed the issue of how Jews should engage politically, arguing that they should do so not within political parties but rather by supporting the good ideas of each party, based on Jews’ own doctrine, the Torah. According to Cohn, “Jewish tradition cannot admit a distinction between the political and the spiritual, or oppose eternity to the temporal.”20 The speakers who followed Cohn revealed the wide range of emerging views on both the appropriate position for Jews to take on the Algerian War, and on the larger issue of if and how Jews in France should engage in a ‘Jewish’ politics. Some, like the leftist Jacques Greilsammer, utilized a similar framework to Cohn, linking Jewish tradition and values—whether through the Torah and the Prophets or the Talmud and other halakhic sources—to the terms of Jewish engagement. Present as well in the comments of many speakers was the claim that Jewish engagement needed ultimately to be about the welfare of the Jewish people. A Monsieur Tarpi, for instance, insisted that while he could understand Jews’ particular interest in the Algerian War as a cause of self-determination for another people, Jews needed to focus instead on the many needs of the Jewish people. Several speakers contended that Israel, as the Jewish state, had to be at the center of contemporary Jewish politics. Nearly every speaker agreed that under present circumstances, a contradiction existed between the desire to 19  Central Zionist Archives (CZA) (Jerusalem)/C10/3303. Transcript of debate on “engagement et non engagement,” Colloque de la jeunesse juive en France, March 1961. All subsequent accounts of remarks from this debate are drawn from this transcript. See also entire issue of Kadimah, April–May 1961. 20   C ZA/C10/3303, transcript, 112. Here Cohn was revealing his own religious background, and his learning of Torah and Talmud at home from childhood. By the late 1960s, Cohn would receive a doctorate in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University, relocate to the Orthodox community of B’nei Barak, and co-translate a Hebrew-French edition of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. Here we have drawn from Lionel Cohn, La nature et l’homme dans l’oeuvre d’Albert Camus et dans la pensée de Teilhard de Chardin (Lausanne: Editions de l’Homme, 1976), back jacket; Robert Sommer, “Preface,” in Cohn, ed., L’Ame Juive (Paris: Fondation Sefer, 1970), XIII.

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promote Jewish values broadly speaking and the need to defend the best interests of the Jewish people. Whereas some saw this contradiction as forcing Jews to focus on strengthening Judaism internally, Greilsammer described how, for him and other left-wing Jewish students, their contacts with Muslims had moved them to reconceive their position in the conflict as Jews: [F]or a large part of the Jewish youth . . . up until the Algerian problem, they had the feeling of being on the good side of the fence, on the side of those who had defeated Nazism, but there was the war in Algeria, and when we encountered students from black Africa and Algerian students, when they spoke to us of the tortures and the concentration camps, of villages razed and all the rest, we perceived that we were able, us as well, to be on the bad side of the fence, that we had to choose right away, because if not, it was done . . . we were there . . . that the face that we could present to others was no longer the face of liberty or of great principles but the face of the butcher, of the torturer, and that [could happen] very simply and very easily. He concluded: Therefore, it seemed to us that a Jew who had a certain idea of what was a Jewish engagement, had to be absolutely in the thick of the fight, of the organizations that in France, political or apolitical, cultural or otherwise, were fighting for peace, for negotiation in Algeria.21 More directly than Lazare or Cohn, Greilsammer connected his position to Jews’ recent history, while like them invoking a sense of particular Jewish obligation that grew out of textual tradition. In this manner, his outlook previewed the terms of what would soon become a growing mobilization of young Jews and left-wing Jewish organizations on behalf of Muslims in France, who found themselves the victims of increasingly widespread attacks and discrimination. On the night of October 17, 1961, Parisian police unleashed a wave of repression in which they killed somewhere between 30 and 200 Algerians and rounded up twelve thousand more.22 By early 1962, the OAS increasingly brought its 21   C ZA/C10/3303, transcript, 123. 22  The French Federation of the FLN protested a ‘voluntary’ (yet effectively compulsory) curfew for Algerian Muslims in Paris, and encountered a brutal response from Parisian police. On October 17 and the considerable debate and memory surrounding it, see Joshua

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ultra-nationalist propaganda and terror campaign to the metropole. Certain Jewish figures and groups responded with denunciations that compared current events explicitly to those of Nazism and the Shoah. The Jewish religious leader closest to the Jewish Left was future chief rabbi of France René Samuel Sirat. Sirat had been the Paris Consistory’s student rabbi since 1955, and worked closely with the UEJF during the Algerian War. Sirat, who had grown up in a traditional household in the Algerian city of Bône before coming to France to attend the Aix-les-Bains yeshiva, declared that the murder and roundups of Algerian Muslims “touches me personally.” Indeed, Sirat had, like so many other Algerian Jewish schoolchildren, not only lost his citizenship during World War II but also endured humiliating antisemitic experiences at his lycée.23 He exclaimed: I only am able to be reminded of twenty years ago, when every Jew was able to be led into the high places of civilization that are Vel d’Hiv and Drancy. . . . When I affirm that the ill treatments suffered by Algerian Muslims touch me personally, that I feel them as if I was myself the subject of them, that is not a figure of speech. It is the first time since the [Second World] War that ethnic profiling has taken place in Paris. It seems to me that we must do something so that this does not begin again.24 While Sirat, like Lazare, claimed to be taking a position that was spiritual rather than political, he invoked the most serious of halakhic obligations. He implied Jews should, if necessary, disobey French law in order to stand against the current waves of racism and repression: We must have the courage . . . to see the reality; and the fact is that we are not acting. We must educate those close to us relentlessly, to fight against racism under all of its forms, but that is a long-term remedy. The Talmud teaches that, when an Israelite is ordered to violate, under the threat of losing his life, one of the commandments that the Law sets out, the Israelite may submit, unless it is a matter of the sin of apostasy, of an illicit Cole, “Remembering the Battle of Paris: 17 October 1961 in French and Algerian Memory,” French Politics, Culture & Society 21, no. 3 (2003): 21–50; Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 23   See René-Samuel Sirat, La joie austère: Entretiens réalisés par Emmanuel Hirsch, Recherches morales (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1990), 11–2. 24  “Le Judaisme contre la violence,” JDC, November 24, 1961.

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relationship, or of murder [‘shedding bloods’]. And our Sages explain that the plural in ‘shedding bloods’ [means that it] refers not only to [a direct] assassination but also to any attack on [another] human being. Such wording suggested that Jews, even if their own safety was threatened by French police or by OAS forces, were bound by Jewish law to avoid participating, even through silent assent, in the shedding of blood. Sirat, then, articulated a different version of the same dilemma posed by Lionel Cohn and many other speakers at the debate on “engagement and nonengagement”: that between the obligation of Jews to their fellow Jews and their obligation to the universal values taught by Jewish tradition. In February 1962, Sirat would face this dilemma more personally than most, as his own brother was murdered by the FLN in Constantine while leaving the synagogue on a Friday night. Yet even in the face of this event, Sirat continued to emphasize Judaism’s broader obligations. Years later, in explaining his outlook, he invoked the Algerian-born Albert Camus’s famous remark to a reporter during the war, “I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice.” Sirat declared that with the murder of his brother, “We lived the drama of Camus: to choose between justice and one’s own mother! Camus made his choice. As a Jew, we must always privilege justice—expression of generosity—whatever the infinite love that one feels for his mother.”25 While Sirat’s deep articulation of such choices was exceptional, his basic position was not. During the same period, Jewish leftist groups like the Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’Entraide (UJRE) called Jews to action against “the danger of a French Nazism.”26 Here the echoes of their interwar immigrant forebearers of the anti-fascist movement, from Zionists, to Bundists, to the LICA, are particularly hard to miss.27 Following the events of October 17, the UEJF organized a protest meeting in Paris attended by numerous prominent Jewish figures and organizations.28 By April 1962, the UEJF, UJRE, the Cercle Bernard-Lazare, and others formed a “Jewish Committee of Antifascist

25  Sirat, La joie austère, 94. 26  Quoted in Boukara, “La gauche juive,” 80. 27  The LICA was the widely used acronym for the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme, whose acronym was only changed to LICRA in 1979. For the group’s interwar history, see Emmanuel Debono, Aux origines de l’antiracisme: La Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme (LICA), 1927–1940, preface by Serge Berstein (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2012). 28  Raphael Visocekas, “L’U.E.J.F. au Quartier Latin,” Cahiers Bernard Lazare (CBL), April 1962.

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Action.”29 Thus, from outside the central institutions of the Jewish community, many Jewish individuals and groups placed the Algerian conflict in definitively Jewish terms. They invoked Judaism’s sacred texts, Jews’ position in Algeria, loyalty to Israel, and the memory of the Holocaust and World War II to make arguments for where Jews should stand in a conflict central to French political life.30 2

From Silent to Cacophonous Unity: 1962–1967

Five years on from the conclusion of the French-Algerian conflict, as has been well-documented, the outbreak of war between Israel and its Arab neighbors in June 1967 led to an explosion of highly visible Jewish politics. This occurred among the very communal institutions and leaders that had shied away from political activism for Jews qua Jews in prior decades. Marked by large and vocal pro-Israel demonstrations and massive fundraising campaigns, the 1967 war inspired participation from a wide range of French Jews who had never before been active in communal life. Moreover, the representatives of Jewish institutions adopted new techniques for reaching a wider Jewish public and uniting them behind a single cause, establishing the Comité national de coordination on May 26 under the presidency of Guy de Rothschild (president of the two largest French Jewish philanthropic bodies) to express “total solidarity with Israel.”31 This new entity coordinated all aid for Israel, including rallying support among religious leaders, professors, and journalists, coordinating demonstrations, intervening with elected officials, raising and centralizing funds, surveying press coverage, gathering medical supplies and organizing volunteers for civil service in Israel.32 Noteworthy for its outreach and push for communal consensus, the Comité national de coordination helped establish an impressive display of public political unity among French Jews unprecedented in the history of communal life. This unity broke down in short order, challenged primarily by voices on the Jewish Left critical of Israeli actions during 29  “Grand succès de la réunion d’information du C.J.A.A.,” CBL, April 1962. 30  Partly drawn from Boukara, “La gauche juive,” 79–80. 31  Déclaration adoptée a l’issue de la réunion constitutive du Comité de coordination des organisations juives de France, “La communauté juive de France solidaire d’Israël en péril,” JDC, 8e année, Supplément au nº 395, (June 2, 1967); Bulletin d’information et de liaison du Comité de coordination des organisations juives de France [BIL], Nº2, May 29, 1967, MDI 98, CDJC. 32  B IL, Nº2, May 29, 1967, MDI 98, CDJC.

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the war and its occupation of conquered territories. Yet the leftist challenge could not undermine the new pro-Israeli consensus among organized Jewish communal leaders who claimed to speak on behalf of all French Jews. Scholars, including ourselves, have explained the more vocal French Jewish activism in 1967 by underscoring two factors.33 First was the impact of North African Jewish migration on notions of public Jewishness. The period following decolonization was one of both great upheaval and renewal for France’s Jewish community. Between the late 1950s and 1970, the French Jewish population mushroomed from 350,000 to approximately 535,000. This was largely the product of decisions by Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian Jews to leave North Africa shortly before or after their countries gained independence, and in many instances, to migrate to France.34 The impact of these migrations was more than demographic. The newcomers were different in crucial respects from the Ashkenazic Jews who had long predominated in the community that welcomed them. Jews from North Africa tended to be less affluent and from more lower and lower-middle-class professions than those of mainland France; they also had higher birthrates. These differences were made more visible by the Jewish immigrants’ often distinctly North African sensibilities in cuisine, attire, and liturgy and their typically more religiously observant practices. More importantly for our purposes, particularly for those from Morocco and Tunisia, the public-private divide— so crucial to Franco-Judaism and the traditionally quietist politics of the Consistory—was not deeply engrained.35 Not only were these Jewish migrants 33  We further discuss many of the developments in 1967 and 1968, albeit in a different context, in Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, chap. 6; Mandel, Muslims and Jews, chaps. 4–5. For synthetic overviews of the impact of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war on French Jewish communal politics, see Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 201–202; and Michel Winock, La France et les Juifs: De 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004), 307–16. 34  Many Jews who left North Africa in this period went elsewhere, primarily to Israel or North America. About 355,000 went to Israel, 270,000 from Morocco, 25,000 from Algeria, and 60,000 from Tunisia. Canada received 10,000–12,000 Jews mostly from Morocco, and fewer than 10,000, largely from Morocco’s former Spanish zone, went to Spain. Jacques Taïeb, “Immigrés d’Afrique du Nord: Combien? Quand? Pourquoi?” in Colette Zytnicki, ed., Terre d’exil, terre d’asile: migration juives en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Éditions d’éclat, 2009), 149. The issues discussed here are elaborated further in Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, chap. 5; Mandel, Muslims and Jews, chaps. 2–3. 35  Figures and observations from Colette Zytnicki, “Du rapatrié au séfarade: l’intégration des Juifs d’Afrique du Nord dans la société française: essai de bilan,” Archives Juives 38, no. 2 (2005): 85–8.

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more broadly accustomed to demonstrations of Jewish identity in public, but the decolonization process—which had meant both a struggle to defend their rights as Jews and a sharp set of choices pitting Jews and Israel against anticolonialists and the Muslim Arab world—had prepared them more than their co-religionists in France to articulate a vocal ethnic and pro-Israeli politics.36 Anti-Jewish hostility in Tunisia and Morocco in summer 1967 forced several thousand more Jews to leave the region, in many cases for France. This only furthered the pro-Zionist political commitments that had come to the fore among France’s North African Jewish population by the early 1960s.37 The newcomers thus challenged many long-standing assumptions of republican Judaism in ways that the likes of Rabbi Sirat or his allies at the UEJF had only foreshadowed. Secondly, as Joan Wolf has cogently argued, charged rhetoric calling for Israel’s destruction, particularly from Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, led many French Jews to read the 1967 conflict through the lens of the Holocaust. Indeed, the importance of Holocaust consciousness articulated by Sirat, Lucien Lazare, Lionel Cohn, and others during the Algerian crisis was only the crest of a growing wave of so-called Holocaust talk among French Jews.38 For those French Jews who criticized their community for doing too little during the Second World War, the 1967 conflict provided an opportunity for a more robust politics of self-defense. Communal discourse was thus saturated with Holocaust imagery, as the Jewish community, and particularly those

36  See, for example, Doris Bensimon-Donath, L’Intégration des Juifs nord-africains en France (Paris: La Haye, Mouton, 1971), 216–35; Claude Tapia, “Religion et politique: interférence dans le judaïsme français après l’immigration judéo maghrébine,” in Jean-Claude Lasry and Claude Tapia, eds., Les Juifs du Maghreb: Diasporas contemporaines (Paris: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal-L’Harmattan, 1989), 207–23. 37  Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 78, 82. 38  This is the phrase of Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, though Wolf does not place the emergence of Holocaust discourse until the 1967 war and its aftermath. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), by contrast, highlights the role of the memory of World War II during the French-Algerian War but treats it as confined to a set of marginal voices, and emphasizes its universalism rather than particularist strands like that of some of the young Jews discussed here. Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2005), also places “Holocaust talk” earlier than 1967 in France, noting in particular discussions in the Yiddish press.

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who had come of age after World War II, sought to make different choices than their predecessors.39 To fully understand French Jews’ surprisingly vocal and combative political rhetoric during the 1967 war, however, it is also crucial to understand their fears: of growing hostility within France’s political and media establishments towards Israel and toward Jews more generally.40 Indeed, whatever the turbulence of the late 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s for French Jews, in many respects the developments of the preceding decade and a half had brought them newfound security in the French public sphere. The defeat of the Nazis and the demise of Vichy had seemingly rendered antisemitism to the dustbin of France’s political history.41 Moreover, the closing period of the FrenchAlgerian War had ensured that all Jews from Algeria had French citizenship and were classified as ‘Europeans,’ unlike their Muslim fellow natives, who became legally categorized, with rare exception, as simply ‘Muslims.’ If there were racial dividing lines in post-decolonization France, Jews appeared now to be among the ‘white Europeans.’42 Meanwhile, the emergence of the state of Israel, with France as one of the country’s closest allies, made Zionism a key unifying thread of public Jewishness in France by the mid-1950s.43 However, in June 1967, at least in its official policies, the French state seemed to be moving away from its unambiguously pro-Israel stance of the early 1960s. Having given up all colonial holdings in North Africa, France was increasingly dependent on alliances in the Arab world to preserve its regional influence. 39  Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust. As early as the 1950s, the Jewish press had made links repeatedly between Nasser and Hitler. Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 61. Samir Kassir and Farouk Mardam-Bey, Itinéraires de Paris à Jérusalem: La France et le conflit Israélo-Arabe, vol. 2: 1958–1991 (Paris: Revue d’études palestiniennes, 1993), 131–5, note that in the period surrounding the June 1967 war, such links and concerns about a second genocide filled not only the Jewish but the wider French press. 40  Kassir and Mardam-Bey, Itinéraires de Paris, 52–90, argue that emphases on “rupture” in French/Israeli relations in 1967 are exaggerated, since diplomatic relations were never cut off. 41  Regarding what was indeed a marked shift, see Richard Vinen, “The End of an Ideology? Right-Wing Antisemitism in France, 1944–1970,” Historical Journal 37, no. 1 (1994): 365–88. Antisemitism certainly did not disappear altogether from the extreme right, as evidenced by segments of movements like the Poujadists and the OAS. For arguments for far right ideological continuity that included the presence of antisemitism, see James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (New York: Routledge, 2007). 42  See Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. chaps. 6 and 9; Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, chapter 5; Mandel, Muslims and Jews, chapter 3. 43  Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide, 135–48.

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This new context, coupled with President de Gaulle’s belief that Israel had been unnecessarily aggressive in May 1967, led France to declare neutrality in the conflict and to impose an arms embargo on the region. For French Jewish leaders, these political betrayals seemed to go hand in hand with a growing criticism of Israel in the French media.44 Moreover, the French Communist and Socialist parties, both of which had enthusiastically supported Israel since 1948, readjusted these positions after the 1967 war.45 National polls in June showed massive public support for Israel with 56% of the French public supporting Israel as opposed to 2% for the Arab states, and the numbers supporting Israel grew to 68% by September (with pro-Arab sentiment only spreading to 6% of those polled). Nonetheless, French Jewish leaders remained highly concerned about the image of Israel in France; during the months following the war, they doubled down on their efforts to protect Israel against media and political attacks.46 De Gaulle’s much-criticized November 1967 press conference, in which he labeled Jews an “elite people, sure of itself and domineering,” heightened considerably many Jews’ concern that something fundamental had shifted in French political life with regard to Israel and to Jews.47 Indeed, the sequence of fears on the part of French Jewry that emerged publicly in May 1967 and did not dissipate altogether after Israel’s victory created a new and enduring form of communal activism.48 The Zionist demonstrations of that summer did not mark the birth of pro-Israeli sentiment among French Jews, many of whom were already supportive of the Jewish state at

44  The Jewish press expressed concerns about changing French Middle Eastern policies as early as 1962. See Mandel, Muslim and Jews, 81. For Jewish responses to the shifting political terrain in 1967, see Doris Bensimon, Les Juifs de France et leurs relations avec Israël: 1945–1988 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 154–62; Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, 200–5. Denis Sieffert, Israël-Palestine: Une passion française (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), 117, and Kassir and Mardam-Bey, Itinéraires de Paris, 11, 127–31, argue that, in fact, the media remained staunchly behind Israel during the conflict if becoming more critical with the occupation of new territories. 45  Sieffert, Israël-Palestine, 151–9. It should be noted that support for and criticisms of Israel during the 1967 war cannot be divided neatly into left and right. See Michel Winock, Chronique des années soixante (Paris Éditions du Seuil, 1987), 200–2. 46  Kassir and Mardem-Bey, Itinéraires de Paris, 131; Winock, La France et le Juifs, 317; Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 36–7. 47  For more on this point, see Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, 255–8. 48  Daniel Mayer, “La Guerre des six jours a-t-elle modifié la conscience juive en France?,” L’Arche, March/April 1968, 39. Much of the material in this paragraph appeared previously in Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 83–4.

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its founding.49 Rather 1967 marked the moment when the Jewish communal establishment was willing to adopt an ethnically-infused oppositional politics even when it conflicted with France’s international agenda.50 No longer tethered to the political line of the French state, Jewish spokesmen became increasingly open to criticizing their own country’s policies in the name of their fellow Jews. Thus, Chief Rabbi Jacob Kaplan, who remained largely silent and supportive of French policies throughout the Algerian conflict, now publicly criticized France’s arms embargo.51 Guy de Rothschild described French policies as “making us uncomfortable in our skin,”52 while André Neher urged his co-religionists to challenge their government: “[T]his is the time to remember that in certain cases the sacred obligation of all citizens in a free country is to disagree with their nation’s policies and to protest and to act based on that disagreement.”53 While mainstream French Jewish institutions had long worked to influence government policies behind the scenes, Jewish leaders had parroted the republican ideal that Jews had no political identity qua Jews. The 1967 war challenged such perspectives. As Claude Kelman, Vice President of the Comité de coordination, argued, “[T]he steps that we are taking are the product of the adoption of a clear-cut position with no ambiguity or prevarication; we are acting as Jews, our reactions are Jewish reactions.”54

49  Mayer, “La Guerre des six jours,” 38–42, argued that pro-Israeli sentiment had been a longstanding if latent force in communal life. 50  Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 34–5, notes that while some of the traditional Jewish leadership conceded only slight disappointment with de Gaulle and called for restrained communal responses, they were out of step with most French Jews. 51  “Après l’application de la décision française d’embargo sur les armes destinées à Israël: Déclaration de M. le Grand Rabbin Kaplan,” no date, MDI 1–55, CDJC. The CRIF remained reticent to criticize the government publicly. Bureau du CRIF, 3 July 1967, MDI 1–55, CDJC. 52  “Allocation prononcée par M. Guy de Rothschild, Président du Comité de coordination, à l’occasion de la Conférence extraordinaire des communautés et organisations juives de France,” June 1967, BIL, Nº 6, June 8, 1967, MDI 98, CDJC. Reprinted as “Nous nous identifions à Israël pour le droit à la vie,” L’Arche, June 1967, 4. 53  André Neher, “Nous sommes l’arrière: Israël est le front !” reprinted in BIL, Nº5, June 7, 1967, MDI 98, CDJC. 54  Emphasis in text. “Le Peuple juif premier allié d’Israël: une interview de Claude Kelman, vice-président du Comité national de coordination,” L’Arche, June 1967, 6. Also see Yaïr Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche en mai ’68 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), 168. While Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 34–6, argues that Rothschild and Kelman represented contrasting responses to the war (with Rothschild articulating a more traditional perspective on Franco-Jewish solidarity), even Rothschild was more critical of the government than had been typical.

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Such widespread assertions of the Jewish imperative to support Israel did not, however, erase political divisions that had long marked Jewish life in France. Eastern European Jewish immigrant communities, for example, longdivided over Communism, were particularly polarized in summer 1967 over the criticism that Jews in the Communist party directed at Israel.55 Other Jewish leftists expressed revulsion at the vocal Zionism of the organized community. In the words of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the soon-to-be-infamous student radical who led the May 1968 uprisings: It was awful, all these nationalistic and chauvinistic Jews. This was the first time that I experienced Jewish racism: exactly the same comments that the Germans make about the Turks today or the French about the North Africans. When I tried to explain that [Jewish] national unification in Israel would resolve nothing, I almost got beaten up. Nobody could open a discussion. My Jewish identity was broken.56 Other Jewish leftists published a petition in Le Monde on June 15, proclaiming themselves “entirely in solidarity with the Arab people in their just struggle” and criticizing Israel for its “war of aggression and conquest.”57 June 1967 also saw the founding of the Comité des étudiants juifs antisionistes by Tony and Benny Levy, the latter of whom went on to co-found the Gauche prolétarienne, a Maoist organization that worked tirelessly to spread word of the Palestinian plight to a largely indifferent French public.58 Thus while not all Jewish radicals were willing to criticize Israel, anti-Zionism became a central component of the ideological make-up of a subset of young Jews drawn to revolutionary politics.59 55  For previous divisions, see Jacques Frémontier, L’étoile rouge de David: Les Juifs communistes en France (Paris: Fayard, 2002), last chapter and 279–83; Laura Hobson Faure, Un ‘Plan Marshall’ juif: La Présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944–1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015), 209–12. 56  Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Le grand bazar (Paris: P. Belfond, 1975), 11, cited in Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche, 173–4. 57  “Aucun Arabe se trouvant au-delà du Jourdain ne sera autorisé à venir dans le secteur ‘israélien,’ ” Le Monde, June 15, 1967, 3 and Yvan Gastaut, L’Immigration et l’opinion en France sous la Ve République (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 277–8. 58  Gastaut, L’Immigration, 155; Hervé Hamnon and Patrick Rotman, Génération, vol. 2, Les Années de poudre (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 90–4. 59  According to Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche, 184, the Palestinian cause received relatively muted support in France when compared to support for other leftist causes in part because of Jewish participation in radical groups.

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As Yair Auron has argued, many of these Jewish radicals understood their leftist commitments as a direct response to the history of anti-Jewish persecution. Indeed, many were children of Holocaust survivors or escapees seeking to come to terms with their parents’ past.60 For them the answer to fascism and racism was not ethno-nationalism but social revolution.61 Neither hiding nor celebrating their ethno-religious origins, and horrified by what they saw to be the narrow, ethnocentric vision of the mainstream French Jewish establishment, they moved violently in the other direction, embracing the Palestinian cause as their own. Their radical politics gathered steam a year later in May and June 1968 when Anarchist, Trotskyist, and Maoist student groups initiated uprisings that led to the largest general strike in French history, providing fertile ground for a wide range of leftist causes, from feminism and sexual freedom to gay rights, anti-racism, anti-imperialism and third-worldism. Many of the young Jewish radicals so turned off to Jewish politics a year before found their way into these movements, and came of age fighting for Palestinian national self-determination as part of these wider struggles.62 As this discussion suggests, the late-1960s proved a significant moment of transition in the French Jewish political landscape. On the one hand, communal leaders took a combative pro-Israeli stand in the name of collective Jewish interests, publicly criticizing French national policies and thereby endorsing a pro-Zionist ethno-politics that endures to this day. On the other hand, by challenging a unified Jewish voice on Israel, Jewish radicals—­wittingly or not—picked up the other strand within the Jewish politics of the hour of decolonization: they argued that universal values and Jewish history called on them to dissent from the community line. But because their critique came from ‘outside’ self-defined Jewish circles, these Jewish leftists never sought to reshape the community’s sense of self. Rather they opted out. Only in the 1980s, with the first Israeli-Lebanese War, would the long-term legacy of

60  Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche, passim; Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française, 57–8. 61  R. G., “El Fatah et les révolutionnaires français,” June 25, 1969, 19990260, art. 23, Centre des archives contemporaines (Fontainebleau) (CAC). 62  This move to the far left by some Jews then pushed others into the middle. For example, the UEJF adopted a complicated balancing act between Zionist engagement and a measured criticism of Israeli policies. Despite its stated pluralism, as discussed above, UEJF members were often actively leftist on the Algerian crisis and other issues. In 1968, however, the UEJF broke away from the anti-Zionist Left, asserting Israel’s right to exist while also acknowledging the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination. Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 114–5.

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May ’68 crystallize in a Jewish context, galvanizing a more sizable opposition from within to the Jewish community’s pro-Zionist bent. 3

Enduring Legacies: The 1967/8 Split Takes Hold

The divisions in French Jewish politics that emerged in 1967–1968 endured for years to come. While Jewish “ ‘68ers” like Benny Lévy and Alain Geismar became leading figures in the fledgling pro-Palestinian movement, mainstream Jewish communal institutions continued to place pro-Israel political activism at the heart of their agendas. In part, French Jewish pro-Israel activism was driven by the continuing move of French foreign policy toward greater support for the Arab world. Particularly in light of France’s substantial and increasingly rooted Muslim population, Jewish organizations now found themselves faced with a newly competitive political dynamic: long gone were the days when they could assume that France would align with Israel. Instead, supporting Israel often meant openly criticizing the French government for its Middle East policies.63 Here Holocaust memory remained central. In November 1974, for example, the French decision to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) provoked widespread protests from Jewish organizations. The coordinating committee of the Associations juives de Marseille criticized France for giving in to Middle East oil, comparing this capitulation to “the tragic self-abnegation before Nazi Germany.” The committee argued further that the current policy “if pursued, would put in danger the courageous State of Israel.”64 Here, the committee’s words joined a growing chorus—both within and far beyond the Jewish community—that was at once drawing historical parallels, lessons, and continuities from the era of Vichy and the Occupation.65 Indeed, several weeks later the Marseille committee for the CRIF, in denouncing France’s action, “reaffirmed” the wartime words of one French Resistance hero: “This assault of two million men against a handful of Jews is not a just fight.”66 63  Along similar lines, see William Safran, “Ethnoreligious Politics in France: Jews and Muslims,” West European Politics 27, no. 3 (2004): 437; Mandel, Muslims and Jews, 124. 64  Cited in “Manifestation contre la politique française au Proche-Orient,” Lundi, November 4, 1974, in CDJC, MDI-159. 65  On the first issue, see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 66  “Appel du Comité de Marseille du Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France,” December 10, 1974, in CDJC, MDI-159. The discussion in this paragraph is in significant part drawn from Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood, 297–8.

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Public demonstrations of Jewish politics were proliferating. In 1976, some 100,000 Jews took part in the first-ever “Twelve Hours for Israel,” a festival made up of films, music concerts, and panels on intellectual and spiritual questions with leading Jewish figures.67 Within a few years, a group of Jews would try to organize the “Jewish vote” as a way to tip the outcome of the French presidential election and create a “Jewish voice” in national politics.68 These developments took institutional form as well. In 1977, the CRIF revised its charter in a way that illustrated how dramatically Jews’ public presence had shifted since the era of decolonization. The organization proudly declared a communal “responsibility” to “contribute its views that stem from its Jewish identity to the national debate.” At the same time, the charter stated that the French Jewish community considered Israel as “the privileged expression of Jewish existence.”69 Thus, far removed from its insistent reserve during the FrenchAlgerian War, the CRIF affirmed the need for Jews to speak publicly as Jews and framed Israel as coterminous with French Jewish identity. While the charter’s authors likely saw little potential conflict between these two imperatives, they had in fact set the stage for a revolt from within: a number of Jews were about to speak in the name of Judaism, Jewish values, and Jewish history not in support of Israel’s policies but in sharp opposition to them. In so doing, they would challenge the right of those who claimed to speak for French Jews to set the boundaries of communal political discourse. By 1982, then, Jewish activists not only felt comfortable adopting a publicly visible and particularistic Jewish politics, but the struggle for who defined the boundaries of that politics went public as well.

67  Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 60. 68  For an analysis of Jewish political organization in France, see Sylvie Strudel, Votes juifs: itinéraires migratoires, religieux et politiques (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1996). For discussion of the early 1980s efforts to organize a Jewish vote, see Kimberly A. Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 84–6. 69  First quotation from Judith E. Vichniac, “Jewish Identity Politics and the Scarf Affairs in France,” French Politics, Culture & Society 26, no. 1 (2008): 112; second quotation from Phyllis Cohen Albert, “French Jewry and the Centrality of Israel: The Public Debate, 1968–1988,” in Jacob Neusner, Ernest S. Frenchis, and Nahum M. Sarna, eds., From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism, Intellect in Quest of Understanding: Essays in Honor of Marvin Fox (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1989), 210.

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Defining the Center: French Jewish Politics in the Shadow of the 1982 War in Lebanon

With the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Jewish politics in France took a new turn. After more than a decade during which Jewish institutions fused the imperative to speak publicly as Jews with the defense of Israel, some Jewish men and women began to argue that to defend Israeli actions was antithetical to Jewish values. Like in the late period of decolonization, their usage of a ‘Jewish values’ argumentation was turned against the community leadership to critique their own co-religionists. By 1982, however, their critique was directed not at French Jewish silence on political issues, but rather at the tone and direction of Jewish political activism. And unlike in 1968, when Jewish radicals were exceptionally critical of Israel from a stance that questioned both its legitimacy and the merits of any particularistic ethno-religious politics, in 1982, the voices raised in protest defined themselves as embedded within the Jewish community. Indeed, what made June 1982 a remarkable moment in French Jewish politics is that while Jewish leftists had been voicing criticisms of Israeli policies since its birth, they had done so primarily from outside the boundaries of communal organizations and without laying claim to any ethnoreligious motivation or aim. In 1982, however, those critiquing Israeli actions began insisting that they were the Jewish mainstream. They thus adopted a politically vocal stance as engaged Jews. In less than a generation, then, French Jews had not only ‘come out’ politically as Jews, but they had begun using the public square as a space in which to debate the contours of that Jewishness.70 70  Our interpretation departs somewhat from prior historiography, which has focused on 1982 as a moment of Jewish unity forged in the face of significant media coverage that regularly drew on Holocaust imagery to compare Israelis and Nazis. Fear of a new form of antisemitism, some have argued, brought Jews together. See, for example, Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 101–4; Irvin Wall, “Remaking Jewish Identity in France,” in Howard Wettstein, ed., Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 164–70; David Weinberg, “France,” in David S. Wyman, ed., The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 29. While others have stressed Jewish leftist critique of Israel’s invasion, their framework has placed such critique in the long shadow of 1968 rather than as a new phenomenon within French Jewish politics. See, for example, Auron, Les Juifs d’extrême gauche, 163–212; Judith Friedlander, “Anti-Semitism in France,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture and the ‘Jewish Question’ in France (New York: Routledge, 1995), 63–82; Szafran, Les juifs dans la politique française, 181–88. One exception is Michel Wieviorka, “The Changing French Jewish Identity,” in Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yosef Gorny, and Yaacov Ro’I, Contemporary Jewries: Convergence and Divergence (Leiden:

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To document this shift, we begin with a letter dated June 28, 1982 by a certain Claude Katz who wrote to the President of the CRIF lambasting that organ­ ization’s 24 June declaration that French Jews stood with Israel in its war in Lebanon. “No!” Katz insisted, “I challenge the right of your organization, which represents only 20% of the community, to speak on behalf of this community.” “No!” he continued, “I also challenge your right to affirm the solidarity of France’s Jewish community with the policies of a government whose goal is the physical extermination of a population by using the most sophisticated and deadly arms.” “For centuries,” Katz insisted: to be Jewish has meant not to participate in or endorse the massacre of thousands of innocent civilians. To be Jewish has also meant not to deny to a national entity the right to live and constitute a state. He concluded by: daring to hope that to the contrary . . . the vast majority of the community maintains no solidarity with Israeli policies. Thereby the French community will be faithful to the historical traditions of the Jewish people to defend, respect and recognize human rights throughout the world, perpetuated notably by the presence of thousands of Jews in the diverse organizations fighting for these rights. . . .71 Katz’s letter is notable for two reasons: First, in defending his critique of Israeli decisions by claiming the mantle of Jewish history, he asserted—as other Jewish leftists had done before him—that Jewish identity was inherently linked to the struggle for human rights. Real Jews, the letter insisted, could not and would not deny national rights to another group. Secondly, he challenged the CRIF’s right to speak on his behalf. Far from seeing himself as marginal to communal life, Katz suggested that the majority of French Jews, like him, understood that to be Jewish meant to challenge human rights violations

Koninklijke Brill NV, 2003), 255–65, who points to (but does not develop) the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a moment when the “vitality of French Jewry . . . came to the fore,” and when “heated and emotional debates stirred the French Jewish universe.” 71  Claude Katz, Lettre ouverte d’un militant juif des droits de l’homme à Monsieur le président du Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France, June 28, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC.

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whenever they occurred, including on the part of the Israeli government.72 It was the CRIF’s responsibility to represent this mainstream Jewish perspective.73 Katz was hardly the first French Jew to criticize the CRIF, which as the primary representative body of French Jews was often taken to task for being too passive in its defense of Israel or on other matters of Jewish concern.74 Nor was Katz the first Jew on the Left to challenge French Jewish institutions for their blind support of Israel. As we have seen, while leftist critiques of Zionism diminished immediately following World War II, they returned with gusto in 1968 as a generation of Jewish radicals—many of whom had supported Algerian liberation in 1962—came of age and began vociferously defending the Palestinian cause. What was distinctive in 1982, however, was the way this critique moved inside Jewish institutional life. This echoed the internal Jewish dissent of the era of decolonization, but moved it to a new plane, that of the Middle East conflict. Unlike the preceding two decades when those critical of French Zionism threw verbal grenades from the margins, in 1982, those opposed to the Israeli invasion tried to re-set the community’s political agenda from within by claiming their politics were not, in fact marginal but mainstream. Their adversaries asserted, to the contrary, that the defining characteristic of French Jewry was its unified stance behind Israel. These developments began very shortly after Israel’s June 6 move into Lebanese territory. Within days, the French Jewish establishment rallied behind the Jewish state as it had during the 1967 war (and again in 1973). On June 9, the CRIF sent a delegation to the Israeli embassy to express its sadness for the victims of “this war imposed on Israel” and called on France’s Jewish community to demonstrate its solidarity with the Jewish state.75 Simultaneously, Jewish communities throughout France began to coordinate fund-raising efforts in 72  As Nathan Kurz, ‘A Sphere above the Nations?’: The Rise and Fall of International Jewish Human Rights Politics, 1945–1975 (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2015), argues, by the mid1970s international Jewish organizations had backed away from international human rights campaigns due to competing concerns regarding the defense of Israel. 73  For an overview of the history of the CRIF, see Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac, Le CRIF. De la Résistance juive à la tentation du lobby. De 1943 à nos jours (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2011). 74  Even in summer 1982, some critics accused the CRIF of being “relatively weak” in its pro-Israeli activities. Compte-rendu de la réunion du CRIF du 18 Juin 1982, Comité de Marseille, June 18, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC; “Déclaration,” June 23,1982, same file. It should also be noted that beginning already in the 1940s, Jewish leftist organizations such as the Bund sought to challenge CRIF discourse, often through criticism of uniformity on Israel. From 1967 forward, however, such voices were muted within mainstream Jewish institutions. 75  “Communiqué,” June 9, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC.

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support of Israel as they had in 1967 and 1973.76 Once again, the international Jewish fundraising body, Keren Hayessod, engaged in substantial activities through its French arm, Appel juif unifié pour Israël, making radio announcements, transmitting appeals to synagogues to organize special prayer gatherings on behalf of Israeli soldiers, and raising material support for Israel.77 As Keren Hayessod’s president made clear, the Jewish diaspora had to act as one: Now is the moment to close ranks and to express our solidarity through concrete action. . . . The entire community must express its responsibility by remaining united with the defenders of Israel. Be proud to be a united people strong enough to protect ourselves with God’s help.78 Appeals for unity and solidarity in the face of a common threat accompanied all calls for financial aid, as did assertions that it was incumbent on Jews living in the diaspora to support Israel unconditionally. As one flyer noted, “Jewish solidarity must express itself through our financial participation; everyone is obliged to contribute to this immense effort for Israel. Everyone is obliged to feel concerned.”79 It is difficult to quantify how widely such appeals resonated. The AUJF certainly asserted widespread support for Israel among France’s Jewish population. Moreover, in Marseille, one week of fundraising yielded as much as all proIsrael efforts combined over the preceding six months.80 Such activities intensified as journalistic coverage increasingly critiqued both Israeli p ­ olicies and

76  Numerous documents in MDI 223, CDJC, testify to this organizational effort. 77  “L’AUJF mobilise,” L’Arche, July 1982, 106. The Israeli Office of Tourism also encouraged expressions of Jewish solidarity by proposing that French Jews visit Israel on their summer vacations. “Communiqué de l’Office du tourisme israélien,” L’Arche, July 1982, 38. Also see “Chroniques de l’A.U.J.F,” L’Arche, August 1982, 90–3. 78  Dr. A. Avi Hai, “Soyons fiers d’être unis et forts,” L’Arche, July 1982, 106. 79  “Solidarité avec Israël,” MDI 223, CDJC. See also, “Le gouvernement d’Israël mérite le soutien des juifs du monde entier,” L’Arche, June 1982, 128. 80  “A Marseille : La solidarité,” L’Arche, July 1982, 106. Judging by letters from the regional CRIF section in Marseille, the organized community there was particularly invested in defending Israeli actions. On June 24, 1982, for example, its president, Rolland Amsellem wrote to the CRIF in Paris requesting the latter provide information and materials in order to defend Israel locally. He concluded by noting, “If the CRIF in Paris cannot comply, the section Marseille-Provence will commit to doing so without delay.” Rolland Amsellem to Madame Keller, June 24, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC. Numerous letters in the file document regional efforts throughout France to organize against anti-Israel coverage in the media.

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French Jewish institutional support for the invasion.81 President Mitterrand, who had previously appeared more benevolent toward Israel than any French president since de Gaulle—making the first presidential visit to Israel in March 1982—demonstrated a notable cooling in his attitudes.82 Aggressive media attacks frightened many Jews who believed that anti-­Zionism had crossed a boundary, opening doors to antisemitism. As the President of Marseille’s CRIF remarked, “The anti-Zionism of 1982 is nothing other than the antisemitism of 1935–6 that resulted in the Holocaust.”83 According to one analyst, in summer 1982, the word Zionist “became synonymous with monster, ruthless killer, Hitlerite.”84 Some Jewish communities even organized an internal security contingent based on fears of attacks.85 In this context the CRIF intensified its pro-Israel activities, protesting stories that appeared in Le Monde and on French television stations, organizing demonstrations in solidarity with Israel, and publically denouncing on June 23 “the one-sided, tendentious, and partial character of the news produced by certain media organs. . . .”86 More importantly for our purposes, the CRIF insisted that “[T]he clamor of a few marginals” did not call into question “the magnitude and depth of French Jewish support for Israel.” Indeed, “the organized Jewish community stands together unanimously to say no to Arafat in France” and

81  “Halte aux massacres au Liban, Un appel du Comité France Jérusalem,” MDI 225, CDJC. For a critique of French Jewish institutional support for Israel, see Alain Dieckhoff, “Une morale à deux vitesses,” Le Monde, 178 (June 1982), 2. For a critique of the public’s willingness to merge Jews and Israelis in this way, see Daniel Amson, “La responsabilité sans le pouvoir,” Le Monde, June 17, 1982, 2. Marie-Helene Gallay, a self-declared non-Jew, also defended the justness of Jewish solidarity with Israel in a letter to L’Arche, July 1982, 9. 82  In a piece written before the invasion of Lebanon, Annie Kriegel, “Le temps du dénigrement,” L’Arche, June 1982, 45–7, already noted a cooling of Israeli/French relations. 83  Compte-rendu de la réunion du CRIF du 18 juin 1982, Comité de Marseille, June 18, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC. Concern over such media portrayals was a constant in the Jewish press as were denunciations of comparisons of the Israeli actions with Nazi aggressions. See for example a letter to the editor from Elizabeth Natanson-Mosbah, L’Arche, August 1982, 10–1. For a developed discussion of Jewish responses to the use of Holocaust metaphors by the French media at this time, see Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust, 101–4. 84  Weinberg, “French Jewry,” 233. 85  Appel [Bordeaux], no date, MDI 223, CDJC. 86  The Conseil supérieur du rabbinat français followed suit in declaring its solidarity with Israel and its condemnation of media portrayals of Israeli aggression. Appel unifié juifs de France, “Solidarité avec Israël,” [June 1982]; “Motion adoptée par les membres du Conseil supérieur du rabbinat français,” June 29, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC. For the demonstration, see Appel du CRIF, MDI 223, CDJC.

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“proclaims its total support for Israel’s efforts to achieve a peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian people.”87 This condemnation of “a few marginals” and insistent declarations of unanimity were a direct response to Jewish leftists who had begun to criticize the Israeli invasion. On June 15, several left-leaning Jewish organizations, including the Cercle Gaston Crémieux, the Association des Juifs de gauche, and Identité et dialogue, as well as a handful of prominent Jewish intellectuals, including historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet and mathematician Laurent Schwartz, published their refusal “to accompany the Israeli government in its policies of death and conquest.” Vidal-Naquet and Schwartz, as noted earlier, had both been vocal in protesting French actions in Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Thus like many of those involved in the protests against the first Israeli-Lebanese War, they were not newcomers to leftist critique. What is notable about 1982, however, is the way in which their critique, too—unlike during the Algerian ­crisis—was now folded into a self-identified Jewish protest against Israeli actions and the organized Jewish community’s position of support for them. Many of those who signed the declaration on June 15 also participated in a demonstration in front of the Israeli embassy.88 While only 400–500 demonstrators attended (ten times more than organizers expected, it should be noted), the event caught media attention, since the right-wing Zionist organ­ ization Betar conducted a counter demonstration, taunting opponents with, “You are shameful Jews, you should kill yourselves.” In the meantime, those criticizing Israeli actions responded by insisting that their own position reflected authentic Jewish values: “Respect for human life is the true Jewish reflex.”89 Such statements echoed the critiques and dilemmas articulated by left-wing Jewish activists in the early 1960s, but now at least one of those ­activists— René Sirat—spoke from a very different vantage point, and in more muted

87  Déclaration, June 23, 1982, MDI 225, CDJC. The CRIF’s activities throughout June are listed in Conférence de presse du 1er juillet 1982, CRIF, MDI 223, CDJC. In July, the CRIF also demanded a meeting with Mitterrand to protest any official visit of Arafat to France. “Le CRIF oppose a toute visite officielle d’Arafat à Paris,” L’Arche, August 1982, 36. 88  “Un appel d’organisations juives progressistes pour une manifestation contre l’invasion,” Le Monde, June 15, 1982. Although the petition listed philosopher Wladimir Yalkelevitch as one of the signators, Yankelevitch claimed his name had been included without his permission. He nevertheless gave his blessing to the demonstration, which he called ­“opportune.” “ ‘Il faut arrêter la tuerie,’ nous déclare Wladimir Yankelevitch,” Libération, June 15, 1982. 89  Paul Balta, “Devant l’ambassade d’Israël à Paris: Juifs contre Juifs,” Le Monde, June 17, 1982, 3.

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tones.90 The previous year, Sirat had become chief rabbi of France. His office, and the war’s circumstances, appeared to lead him to emphasize, in this instance, issues other than the loss of human life. Instead, he expressed “the solidarity of the Jewish community of France with regard to Israel.” In a story in L’Express in mid-July, the journalist Alain de Penanster explained that for Sirat, “the mounting of terrorism rendered impossible the basic duty of a government to preserve the life of its citizens.” Sirat was a known “dove” and believed in negotiation toward a two-state solution, but was focused for the moment on the “here and now.” In late August, he even declined an invitation to take part in a meeting being held in the National Assembly and bringing together Israeli, Palestinian and Lebanese representatives for the purposes of promoting peace. If, in Penanster’s words, Chief Rabbi Sirat sought, like the CRIF, to “arouse the [Jewish] conscience during this war,” he did so along far more consensus-oriented and particularistic lines than he had a generation prior.91 Even if Sirat and the CRIF were on the same page, angry conflicts did erupt internally over who spoke for most Jews. On June 21, for example, the president and secretary general of the Cercle amical, one of the organizations responsible for the demonstration at the Embassy, complained that the CRIF, which “claims to represent organized Jewish life,” acted without consulting its member organizations when declaring unanimous support for Israel: “Consensus on the appraisal of these events is not as complete as the CRIF would like to believe.”92 Letters of protest to the CRIF proved such assertions to be true. Thus one man, “raised in the Jewish leftist Yiddish tradition” who “fought against France’s occupation of Vietnam and later Algeria just as my parents fought against Germany’s occupation of France,” demanded that the CRIF “also listen to the voices of those who demonstrate against war in France and in Israel.”93 Yet while leftists insisted that their voices be counted as legitimately representing a mainstream Jewish position, others expressed shock “at the demonstrations of shameful Jews,” often calling on psychoanalytic categories to marginalize and de-legitimize the positions of those who had dared question 90  Meanwhile, the other two figures discussed above at length, Lionel Cohn and Lucien Lazare, had both migrated to Israel years before the 1982 war. 91  Alain de Penanster, “Juifs français: Begin en question,” L’Express, Du 9 au 15 juillet, 1982. For the August meeting and Sirat’s decision not to attend, Letter from René-Samuel Sirat, Grand Rabbin de France, to P. Kauffmann, Directeur du CRIF, 25 August 1982, MDI 224, CDJC. 92  A. Gliksman and A. Wieviorka, Cercle amical, to President, CRIF, June 21, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC. Non-Jews also wrote to the CRIF critiquing its pro-Israel stance. 93  Lucienne Latour to CRIF, July 14, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC.

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Israeli actions.94 One man, for example, critiqued the CRIF for doing so little to confront “our Jewish brothers who bark with the wolves to try to differentiate themselves.”95 The August edition of the Jewish magazine L’Arche published ­several expressions of similar outrage. One letter, for example, noted the author’s sadness and pain that certain “highly intelligent Jewish intellectuals— writers, professors, and philosophers–join with our adversaries and chorus with them thus demonstrating their self-hatred [ennemis d’eux mêmes].”96 Or according to another, “These Jews are to be pitied for assuming their Judaism is detached from the State of Israel which gives us Jews in the diaspora a reason to live and die.”97 Still another wondered if those critiquing Israel were “intellectuals who were tormented by nature?”98 In the most developed analysis, Roger Dufour, a well-known psycho-analyst, criticized Jewish intellectuals for allowing themselves to be used by the media in their anti-Israel attacks. After accusing Jewish intellectuals of hypocrisy for criticizing Israel without equally condemning the absence of democracy and widespread violence and antisemitism in Arab lands, Dufour accused them of self-hatred, that is, of identifying publicly with the enemies of their own people: What self hatred and what profound fear of the other, what internal panic is lurking at the door and is behind these mechanisms of servility and illusion. . . . It’s fear that pushes Jews to accuse their brothers of practicing genocide when they should face up to the terrible situation of war.99 Likewise, after philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy publicly defended Israel’s invasion, the president of the CRIF, Alain de Rothschild, thanked him for having the courage to fight against a world “that pushes certain Jewish intellectuals—by misunderstood generosity, stupidity or ­hypocrisy— to self-destructively attack Israel. . . .”100 94  Georges Philippe Bloch to Alain de Rothschild, July 8, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC (Bloch, a professor of law at Nancy, offered to sign a petition of Jewish intellectuals in solidarity with Israel). 95  Raphael Assoulijne to Président du CRIF, July 2, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC. 96  R. J. Portos, “Une guerre juste,” L’Arche, August 1982, 11. 97  Claude Arfi, “Plus à plaindre,” L’Arche, August 1982, 11–2. 98  Claude Sulze, “Beyrouth-sur-Seine,” L’Arche, August 1982, 43. 99  Roger Dufour, “Intellectuels ou moralisme pervers,” L’Arche, August 1982, 74–5. This piece was written in June 1982 in response to the public stances of a number of Jewish leftists. 100  Alain de Rothschild to Bernard-Henri Lévy, July 5, 1982, MDI 225, CDJC.

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The assertion that those critiquing Israel’s choices were misguided or even psychologically off-balance reflected a wider insistence by many community leaders that “the Jewish center” felt differently. Their opponents, in contrast, believed that Jewish institutions were stifling a much broader range of voices from expressing themselves. As the president of the Cercle amical wrote after a bitter CRIF meeting on June 24: We believe that we should not allow the community to establish a poisoned climate in which everyone is afraid of each other and no one has the courage to open an honest debate over current Israeli policies. Those who scream the loudest are not necessarily right. The shouts of one, the press releases of the other do not help our image and do not move things forward. We believe that the CRIF must open a debate among its members, a debate that might allow a position more in line with that of the overall community to emerge. There is no more time for subterfuge and unanswered questions.101 CRIF representatives responded by asserting that, in fact, the organization’s positions reflected communal consensus and the “innumerable telephone calls from the provinces even from relatively moderate circles.”102 As a result, the CRIF continued to claim to speak for all French Jews. On the very day that the Cercle amical contacted the CRIF, the president of the latter held a press conference in which he defended Israel’s invasion, denounced the double standard in the French media regarding Israeli actions over those of other states, and stated unequivocally, “the French Jewish community speaks to you with one voice” with regard to Israel.103 Seven days later, when France’s former Prime Minister, Pierre MendèsFrance, joined the president of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldman, and the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Philip Klutznick, in declaring that Israel must hold negotiations with the PLO, Alain de Rothschild underscored that the former French prime minister did not speak in the name of France’s Jewish community. Subsequently André Azoulay, President of Identité et dialogue, wrote to de Rothschild noting the pride of “a certain number in the community” that Mendès-France stood with them and disassociating his

101  A. Wieviorka to CRIF, July 1, 1982, MDI 225, CDJC. 102  Jacqueline Keller to A. Wieviorka, July 9, 1982, MDI 225, CDJC. Keller did see a benefit to a wider debate, but not until war’s end, when passions would be calmer. 103  Conférence de presse du 1er juillet 1982, CRIF, MDI 223, CDJC.

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group—one of the CRIF’s many organizational affiliates—from the CRIF’s declarations on the matter.104 The CRIF was not the only Jewish organization to struggle with the fissures created in summer 1982 between those who believed the community should engage in an open and free debate on Israeli policies and those who believed Jews had to unite in light of the threats facing Israel. In a moment of high scandal, the left-leaning newspaper Libération published a letter-to-the-editor by a certain J. P. Kapel threatening that after the violence in Lebanon, The Arabs of France and our friends will not stand with arms crossed. The blood of martyrs calls for vengeance. There will be no quarter. To us Belleville and Sentier, to us Montmartre and Saint-Paul and even Sarcelles. . . .105 In response, the Ligue contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme [LICRA] cited the 1972 law repressing racism to sue the editor of Libération, Serge July, for publishing a violently antisemitic letter. Just prior to July’s trial, Jean-Luc Allouche, one of the editors of L’Arche, published a letter in Libération defending July and congratulating the newspaper for its criticism of Israeli policies during the war, through which it was “telling the truth as it is, the truth in all of its terrible and necessary nudity.” Although Allouche insisted that he had spoken in his own name and not as the editor of L’Arche, he was forced to resign due to the controversy his response sparked among those in the Jewish community angry at his stance on the affair. Meanwhile, those on the Left, such as the members of the Coordination des cercles de la gauche juive, published their own declaration affirming the legitimacy and necessity of political and ideological pluralism in the Jewish community and criticizing the campaign to impose a monolithic opinion on the Jewish community of France.106 These intercommunal debates, which intensified in mid-September after the Sabra and Shatila massacre—when Israeli soldiers guarding two Lebanese refugee camps were accused of enabling mass killings of its residents by Lebanese Phalangists—continued to pit Jews supporting Israel against those 104  A. Azoulay to Alain de Rothschild, July 7, 1982, MDI 223, CDJC. 105  J. P. Kapel, “Français, Arabe de France et fier de l’être,” Libération, July 31–August 1, 1982. 106  “Prise de position,” Libération, 19 October 1983. Allouche’s letter to July was published in Libération, June 13, 1983. His declaration that his views were his own and did not represent L’Arche appeared in that paper in July. For an overview of the controversy, see Patrick Jarreau, “Les controverses sur la politique israélienne provoquent une crise au sein de la communauté juive française,” Le Monde, October 16–17, 1983.

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denouncing its policies.107 While leftists repeatedly distinguished their critique of the Israeli government from any fundamental break with Israel more generally, they also continued to claim the support of the French Jewish street, arguing that by clamping down on the diversity of views, the CRIF and other Jewish institutions were no longer legitimately representing France’s Jewish population. Meanwhile, the CRIF and its allies asserted that support for Israel was widespread and had even grown. Sorting through the claims of each side stands well outside the confines of this chapter. Certainly more letters in the CRIF archive expressed concern for Israel and about the media surge against its policies than offered critiques of Israel. Those affiliated with community life rarely criticized Israel publicly. To be sure, 1982 marked a moment when ever larger numbers of those who defined themselves as part of the organized Jewish community challenged assertions that all French Jews supported Israel no matter what its policies. It would be fair to say, however, that despite these debates, those representatives who asserted the importance of unity and solidarity behind Israel continued to control Jewish institutional life and did little to transform their organizations to reflect the appeals of those on the Left (as the controversy around Allouche and L’Arche suggests). Indeed, we would argue that, in fact, the challenge from the Left itself forced those controlling Jewish communal institutions to defend their legitimacy all the more vociferously. Once community unity had been questioned, assertions of that unity became a mainstay of French Jewish ­political life. Conclusion While the 1982 challenges to the way French Jewish leaders articulated support for Israel did little to change organizational practices either then or in the decades to come, the debates that year point to the seismic shift that had occurred within the French Jewish political landscape from the 1940s to the 1980s. If Albert Memmi’s 1961 chastisement of his co-religionists for their political silence pointed to an historical pattern that had long shaped French Jewish approaches to national and international affairs, they obscured the fact that these patterns were in the early stages of a forty-year transformation. Driven largely by the dramatic events of the twentieth century, including the rise of 107  Catherine Garson, “Les temps incertains,” L’Arche, November 1982, 74–5. The Comité pour la paix au proche orient published a critique in Le Monde on September 26–27 calling on “our fellow citizens of the Jewish religion” to break away from Begin’s policies.

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fascism, the Holocaust, the decolonization of North Africa, and the birth of Israel (and the concomitant Arab-Israeli conflict), as well as by French domestic debates around leftist politics, French Jews increasingly reckoned publicly with what it meant to speak politically as Jews. Through a series of contentious debates, they remade themselves into a politically vocal ethno-religious minority willing to challenge their own government in the name of particularistic interests. While not all French Jews have recognized themselves within the boundaries of this self-proclaimed ‘community’ or have accepted the authority of Jewish communal leaders to speak on their behalf, the quiescent, republican Franco-Judaism of the nineteenth century has become a distant memory. What is unclear is if this more vocal politics has made it more or less possible for individual French Jews to express themselves politically in Jewish terms.

Chapter 10

A Jewish-Muslim Battle on the World Stage: Constantine, Algeria 1956 Jessica Hammerman 1

Speculations: Israélites or Israelis?

In November 1956, a Le Monde article asked whether the Algerian-Muslim “masses” were smart enough to discern Jews—or “Israélites”—from Israelis.1 Referring to the war over the Suez Canal that month, Eugene Mannoni wondered, “Will the conflict between Israel and Egypt reawaken violence between French Jews and Algerian Muslims? It’s not impossible.”2 He alluded to “confused Muslims” who could mistake Jews for Israelis. The piece appeared at a moment of new hostilities in the Middle East: in a move that was blatantly anti-colonial, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser had nationalized the Canal, which had long served as a route between Europe and the colonies in Africa and Asia. But Mannoni’s concern lay in the possibility that this conflict might shore up older tensions between Jews and Muslims within Algeria. Since the 1930s, Judeo-Muslim conflicts had erupted in Constantine, most recently in May of that year. This battle was a moment of transition in Algeria: the intercommunal violence in Constantine 1956 had already become integrated into a global conflict. Mannoni’s assessment was too late. Jews and Muslims in Algeria had already fought an international battle: It happened over the course of three days in May 1956. Many scholars have pointed to 1956 as the year when the Franco-­ Algerian War was thrust into global consciousness. It was the year that the Algerian Question entered the United Nations; the year that the FLN wrote out a ­political platform; the year that Algerian nationalists joined up with ­Egyptian Arab nationalists; the year when Israel was extremely popular 1  The use of the term ‘Israélite’ is a common and respectful way to refer to Jews in France that separates Jews (as an ethnicity) from any presumption of a belief system. The classic text that defined these terms sociologically is Dominique Schnapper, Juifs et Israélites (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 2  Eugène Mannoni, “La masse musulmane algérienne saura-t-elle toujours distinguer entre israélites et Israéliens?” Le Monde 3663, November 2, 1956.

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among Jews around the globe.3 With Nasser’s unilateral decision to support the ­Algerian cause, and the French-British-Israeli attack on the Suez Canal later that year, it is clear that by that autumn, the Algerian struggle was inextricable from other wars in the Middle East. What’s more difficult to assess is how this affected the locals in Algeria. Jews, especially, held onto an idea of peaceful coexistence alongside Muslims in their community. I argue that this vision unraveled over the course of a few days in May 1956. Jews of Algeria—about 140,000 at the outset of the Franco-Algerian War in November 1954—comprised around 14% of the French population, and just over 1% of the total population of colonial Algeria. With the exception of a small minority living in the Southern M’zab, these Jews were French citizens, living in French Algeria, which many considered to be more than a c­ olony— it was metropolitan France. Throughout its existence, most inhabitants accepted the idea that French Algeria was home to three different populations: Europeans (a.k.a. colons or Christians), Jews (a.k.a. Israelites), and natives (a.k.a. Muslims).4 Although Jews were French, they were socially distinct, sharing history, traditions, and cultures with Muslims. For the first two years of the war, many Jews vowed to stay silent about their politics, claiming that neutrality was best.5 Perceptions of who the Jews were, and where they fit within the mounting tensions between Europeans and Muslims, perplexed journalists, community advocates, politicians, and activists on both sides of the Mediterranean. Were Jews European, because they were French citizens, or were they closer to Muslims, having resided in Algeria for centuries? Did the existence of a state of Israel mean that they were Israeli nationals instead of either French or Algerian?

3  See, for instance, Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution; Malley, The Call from Algeria; Gilbert Meynier, Histoire Intérieure du FLN (Paris: Fayard, 2002); Stora, Les Trois Exiles, 151–55; Irwin Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: UC Press, 2001). 4  These broad categories flattened Algeria’s multiethnic, diverse groups into three giant swaths; this was the deep-rooted damage inflicted by the French occupation of Algeria in 1830. These groupings emerged from administrative strategies meant to create a political hierarchy based on ethnicity and religion—the widely practiced divide-and-rule method. (See Kamel Kateb, Européens, Indigènes et Juifs en Algérie (Paris: INED/PUF 2001)). 5  Anxious about the separate attention that Algerian Jews were receiving, in 1956, the Federation of Jewish communities of Algeria demanded that all Jewish organizations outside of Algeria “should avoid any declaration . . . concerning the future of North African Jewry.” “Deux Déclarations du Comite Juif Algérien d’Etudes Sociales et de la Fédération des Communautés Israelites d’Algérie,” Information juive, June 14, 1956, 3.

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In the year 1956, many French-Algerian Jews turned their attention from the antisemitic politics of the Europeans toward what they perceived to be a burgeoning Jewish-Muslim conflict. The conflict in Algeria—fought as a violent civil war since 1954—ceased to be a local one. Sympathizers from other decolonizing nations around the globe (calling themselves members of the ‘Third World’) aligned with Algeria in the brutal struggle to overthrow French control.6 Meanwhile, many of these same political Third-Worldists understood the new state of Israel as a continuation of Franco-British imperialism. They had explicitly rejected Israel’s bid to join the Third World movement in the late 1940s.7 Some activists were beginning to connect all Jews to a particularly Zionist, anti-Arab collaboration, one that went hand-in-hand with French imperialism. Thus we see the emergence of a new anti-Jewish conspiracy.8 The complex realities behind the age-old Algerian categories—European, Jew, native—were filtered once again by the end of 1956, this time through a binary template of Jews versus Arabs, East versus West, colonizer versus colonized. Describing the war’s first urban battle in May, newspapers reported a stint of violence between Jews and Muslims in the city of Constantine. Although the battle was initiated by a Muslim-Algerian terrorist in the Jewish Quarter, the reprisals, coordinated by Jewish civilians, were far more severe than the initial incident. Decades later, the Mossad, Israel’s secret service, revealed that they had sent a special team to train Algerian Jews in self-defense. By their own admission, the Constantine Jews killed several dozen Muslims under the authority of the Israeli commanders. This battle does not paint the most sympathetic portrait of FrenchAlgerian Jews, but it belongs to French-Jewish history all the same. Excellent works by Todd Shepard and Sarah Abrevaya Stein have emphasized that the Jews were included among Europeans at the last ­minute, on the eve of 6  See Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origin of the Post-Cold War Era, especially sections II and III, “The Internationalization of the Algerian Question” and “Waging the Algerian War as a World War, 1956–1958.” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 69–172; Robert Malley, The Call from Algeria: Third-worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam. (Oakland: University of California Press, 1996); Benjamin Stora, Les Trois Exiles: Juifs d’Algérie (Paris: Editions Stock, 2006), 151–5. 7  Avi Shlaim, “Israel between East and West, 1948–1956.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36: 4. (November 2004): 657–73. 8  A series of antisemitic riots in the 1890s were provoked by rumors that Algerian Jews caused the credit crisis or that they were responsible for driving up the prices of wine. (C. Iancu, “Du Nouveau sur les troubles antijuifs en Algérie à la fin du XIXème Siècle,” and E. Sivan, “Stereotypes antijuifs dans la mentalité pied noir,” in Les relations entre Juifs et Musulmans en Afrique du Nord, xix–xx siècles, Paris, Editions de CNRS, 1980.)

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independence in 1962.9 This may have been true from the perspective of French law. A closer look at Constantine in May 1956 makes a different case. As Maud Mandel has argued, Jewish community leaders anticipated the possibility of emigration.10 Observers reported on these deadly rivalries in Constantine in a way that tended to place Jews and Israel together in an anti-Arab camp. Meanwhile, Algerian Muslims were becoming ‘Arabs’ on the world stage. Ideas about Jews and Muslims circulating in 1956 foreshadowed the categories of who belonged where, at least six years before Algeria was born. 2 The Story of Constantine In 1956, about 14,000 Jews lived in the city of Constantine; most lived in the Jewish quarter. It was so close to the Casbah—the poor, crowded Muslim area of the city—that many described Jews and Muslims living in the same neighborhood, while Europeans occupied another.11 But Jewish-Muslim coexistence was more difficult than many would let on; Constantine had been the site of the most infamous riots between Jews and Muslims in the early twentieth century. Twenty-two years earlier, in August 1934, a Jewish man insulted several Muslims, propelling many Muslims to attack the Jewish community. Terrible riots, and gruesome murders ensued; twenty-eight Constantine civilians were killed—twenty-five Jews and three Muslims. The existence of such tension stemmed from manipulations by the colons.12 Among Jews in Algeria and France, “the 1934 riots became a subject of instant retelling and commemoration.” The dark moment of 1934 was etched into collective Algerian-Jewish history.13 In May 1956, there were twice as many fatalities—all of them Muslim. By their own admission, perpetrators were Jewish. Yet the event is nowhere to 9  Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 10  Maud Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: The History of a Conflict. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 40–46. 11  “Report on Algeria,” AJC Archive. Confidential Memorandum from Abromavitch to Charles Jordan, June 11, 1956, 2; Stora, Les Clés Retrouvées, loc. 314. 12  Joshua Cole, “Anti-Semitism and the Colonial Situation in Interwar Algeria: The antiJewish riots in Constantine, August 1934,” in The French Colonial Mind: Violence Military Encounters and Colonialism, vol. 2, Martin Thomas, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 77–111. 13  Ethan Katz, “Between Emancipation and Persectution: Algerian Jewish memory in the longue durée” in The Journal of North African Studies 17: 5, 793–820, 803.

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be found in the Information juive, Algeria’s Jewish newspaper; it’s only briefly mentioned in Jewish narratives of the French-Algerian War. Nonetheless, both Muslim and Jewish witnesses were haunted by the May 1956 battles, the first instance of urban warfare in the war for liberation.14 Small rivalries had erupted occasionally between Jews and Muslims since 1934’s events. Many Constantine Jews accepted fact that the Jewish quarter needed its own armed defense team. They reasoned that the French police were unreliable. The disdain of their European neighbors meant that Jewish neighborhoods were not only segregated from European ones, they were less secure. The French authorities did not offer sufficient protection for the Jewish Quarter, provoking conflict between Jews and Muslims, as in 1934.15 In the following decades, this skepticism toward French authorities led Constantine Jews to take matters into their own hands, purchasing their own handguns. At least 900 Constantine Jews had gun permits in 1956—a significant percentage when considering that not all gun-owners held a permit.16 It was easy for French citizens to obtain weapons, though Muslims were not permitted to buy them, a law that had been fiercely contested since the nineteenth century. This fact alone created an atmosphere that was more dangerous for Muslims than it was for either Jews or Europeans. Even the respected lawyer André Chouraqui betrayed his enthusiasm for armed self-defense among Algerian Jews. “Security for our communities above all else,” he intimated in a 1955 letter, “let’s give self-defense to all possible victims.” He related a telling anecdote from his youth: “I remember the joy of Yom Kippur in September 1934 [a month after the riots], when all of the men met at the synagogue carrying revolvers under their prayer shawls.”17 14  Arslan Selmane, “L’attentat de la rue Sidi Lakhdar” in El Watan, May 12, 2015, accessed June 22, 2015. http://www.elwatan.com/regions/est/constantine/l-attentat-de-la-rue-sidilakhdar-12-05-2015-294503_129.php. 15  This is a common trope, based on the Constantine riots. A clear outline of this idea from the 1950s is Raymond Bénichou, “Les Relations Judéo-Musulmans en Algérie”, in Information juive, May 14, 1952, 6. Joshua Cole, “Anti-Semitism and the Colonial Situation in Interwar Algeria: The anti-Jewish riots in Constantine, August 1934,” in The French Colonial Mind: Violence Military Encounters and Colonialism, vol. 2, Martin Thomas, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 77–111. 16  “Ibrahim”, “Document: The Misgeret’s Actions in Algeria in 1956: Protection of the Constantine Jews,” May 26, 1956, reprinted in Michael M. Laskier, “The Israeli Mossad and Muslim-Jewish Coexistence in Colonial Algeria: The Constantine Affair of 12–13 May 1956,” Pe’amim, 75 (Spring 1998): 129–42. [Hebrew], 137–42; “Outrage in Algeria” in The Jewish Chronicle, London, May 18, 1956, 1, 28. 17   A IU René Cassin. Chouraqui to Cassin, handwritten letter, 2 pages. September 9, 1955.

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When Israeli officials heard about regular bombings of Jewish cafés in 1956, they ordered a group of undercover agents to go to Constantine to organize self-defense. These Israeli agents, called Misgeret (‘framework’ in Hebrew), formalized Jewish self-defense and recruited younger fighters. Its leaders wanted to prove that Jews would not be defeated easily. One community leader told a high-ranking French officer, “I want to make sure that you know that if we die, we do so standing up.”18 Israeli agents were already in action in Tunisia and Morocco, helping Jewish refugees from those areas to evacuate toward Israel. In Constantine, where they entered undercover as Hebrew teachers, their goal was simply to protect local Jews where the French army and police did not (or would not).19 About 100 members trained with the Israeli envoys. Two of them—Avraham Barzilai and Shlomo Havilio—had served in Egypt, where they had similar secretive cells, which “destabilized Nasser’s government by arming Jewish Egyptians.”20 A third Israeli operative, code-named “Ibrahim,” directed the troops on the ground in Constantine. His report on May 12 and 13 is the most detailed source of the infamous battle.21 Early in 1956, random attacks in the Jewish quarter were increasingly common. In March, a grenade exploded under a table in a Jewish café, disfiguring the legs of ten Jewish people.22 Early in April, terrorists again placed a bomb under a table at the Bar Nessim, another Jewish bar. Victims suffering lacerations, unconsciousness, and broken bones caused widespread panic (although only eight men were injured seriously). A large crowd of Jewish civilians pursued the two perpetrators, cornering them in a nearby Muslim café, and “lynched” a few men.23 Increasingly, civilians carried personal weapons with them. As one journalist explained in late April, “People avoid certain indigène neighborhoods unless they are personally armed.” A few weeks later, after the murder of a policeman, French police (with help from throngs of local Europeans and Jews) went through the city’s central street, rounding up all Muslim men—a total of about 40,000. Constantine had fallen into a terrible pattern: “Terrorism, 18  Ibrahim, 139. 19  Stora, Les Trois Exiles, 152; Michael M. Laskier, North African Jewry in the 20th Century. (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 319–21; Sources Algeria Watch, “Les services secrets israéliens étaient à Constantine,” Investig’Action, June 29, 2009, http://www.michelcollon.info/­ Les-services-secrets-israeliens.html?lang=fr accessed July 1, 2015. 20  Algeria Watch, “Les services secrets israéliens étaient à Constantine,” June 29, 2009. 21  Ibrahim, “Document: The Misgeret’s Actions in Algeria in 1956: Protection of the Constantine Jews,” May 26, 1956. 22  “Une grenade dans un café de Constantine” in Le Monde, March 21, 1956. 23  “Ibrahim,” 138–9; “L’attentat contre le bar Nessim” in Echo d’Alger, April 7, 1956.

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The first issue of the FLN’s newspaper El Moudjahid, published in June 1956.

counter-terrorism, repression, suspicion, fear.”24 Europeans (and many Jews, too) supported a strong military response to these attacks on civilians. On May 8, 1956, a crowd in Algiers shouted at Governor-General Robert LaCoste, “No More Reforms! Repression!” After a military parade, the mob chanted, “Long live the army! The Army to power!”25 Jews felt neglected by the army, but all French citizens (Europeans and Jews) felt that the government ignored their situation. Ibrahim reported that in the spring, after several café bombings, “the rage of the Jewish people peaked.”26 3 Saturday Israeli undercover agents reported that they had a premonition that there would be an attack on the Jews on Saturday, May 12. It was the last day of Ramadan (Eïd), and Shabbat.27 As Constantine Jews—Ibrahim and his wife among them—were leaving synagogue for a drink, they heard a huge blast. Misgeret squads were active and armed; they rushed toward the damage. It was 24  Georges Penchenier, “La grande rafle de Constantine” in Le Monde, April 23, 1956. 25  Yves Courrière, La Guerre d’Algérie: Les fils de la Toussaint, Le temps des leopards, 1954–1957 (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 666. 26  Ibrahim, 138. 27  Investig’Action/Algeria Watch, “Les services secrets israéliens étaient à Constantine.”

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a grenade, which had exploded in the Café Mazia, this time injuring thirteen people.28 News reports of the attacks were muddled. It is nearly impossible to conclude who was responsible for the grenade. Officials claimed that a “terrorist rebel gang” fighting for Algeria had infiltrated Constantine; women handed off the grenades to male insurgents who would bomb targets around the city.29 The London Times reported that the attack came from uniformed rebels, implying that they were an organized force from elsewhere. Another source said that the rebels hid uniforms underneath their clothing.30 Le Monde reported that the grenade attack was coordinated with a second raid on the city.31 Adding to the confusion over who attacked the Jewish café, the FLN’s new publication El Moudjahid (see Figure 10.1) recounted that the original grenade-thrower was “dressed as a European” and, after throwing the bomb into the café, he fled toward the Jewish quarter.32 The implication was that the attacker was a French civilian (either Jewish or posing as such), and he planted the bomb to provide an excuse to attack local Muslims. It is also important to note that Jews and Europeans were presented as incompatible—that a Jew could disguise himself as a European and deny something ‘true’ about himself. On the other hand, Ibrahim noted that the perpetrators were “Arabs”—a term that French and Algerian newspapers were uncomfortable using.33 The Misgeret was importing the term from Israel, just as other Algerian-Muslim activists were cozying up to Nasser’s idea of Arab nationalism and Jewish-Israel conspiracies. “I ordered [our men] to hurt the Arabs and to rescue and evacuate those [Jews] who were wounded,” Ibrahim reported.34 A Misgeret squad arrived immediately, chased down the perpetrators, trapped them, and killed them in a barbershop.35 At the order of a Misgeret commander based in Paris, the 28   Jewish Chronicle said it was the same café as March; others made no mention of this. 29  “DIX-NEUF TUÉS SAMEDI lors d’une fusillade qui suivit le lancement d’une grenade dans un café SIX TUÉS DIMANCHE à la suite d’une panique qui s’est emparée d’un groupe d’Européens” in Le Monde, 15 May 1956. 30  “Algerian Town Attacked by Uniformed rebels: Firm Action by French Rebels” in London Times, May 14, 1956; “Outrage in Algeria.” 31  “25 Musulmanes tues en deux jours à Constantine” in Le Monde, May 15, 1956. 32  “Journée du Samedi 12 Mai 1956” from “Les pacificateurs a l’œuvre” in El Moudjahid vol. 1, June 1956, 16. 33  When reporting on violence in Algeria in the first few years, they favored ethnically neutral terms, such as rebels, outlaws, or terrorists. 34  Ibrahim, 139. 35  “DIX-NEUF TUÉS SAMEDI” in Le Monde, May 15, 1956; AJC Archives, Memorandum from Paris to New York, May 14, 1956; Ibrahim, 138.

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squad invaded neighboring Muslim cafés, opened fire, and murdered as many as thirty Muslims that day. “Our men penetrated the neighboring Arab cafés and caused them serious losses,” reported Barzilai in 2005.36 They “shattered” a Moorish café “with sub-machine gunfire.”37 Another source states that after the four perpetrators were killed, gruesome combat took over the main streets of the city. Sources are vague about whether the victims were Jewish or Muslim.38 Ibrahim was sure to document that it took twenty minutes for French officers to arrive at the scene of the bombing, justifying the necessity of a separate Jewish unit. He explained that the police were proud of (what they saw as) a random group of Jews for taking such swift action. One officer asked, “So, was Ben Gurion with you today?”39 Of course, French officers had no idea that the Misgeret had organized the action. After the initial rebels were defeated, Ibrahim wrote, “I kept getting news that a Jewish [armed] mob was planning on breaking into the Arab quarter. I didn’t want things to escalate.”40 He frowned on the civilians’ “chaotic” system of self-defense.41 While one Misgeret unit sought after the Jewish mob, another monitored the perimeter of the Jewish quarter. Other squads searched for Muslim rebels inside. Ibrahim saw the Misgeret’s role as a pacifying one—primarily guarding Jews from “Arabs” (because the French soldiers did not do enough), while protecting Muslims from wayward Jewish mobs. He feared that impulsive violence could escalate into a civil war, especially considering the widespread use of personal ­weapons.42 Ibrahim described “middle-aged” and “elderly” Jews who were shooting anyone who looked “Arab.” In these early years, criminals were known as “rebels,” “assailants,” or “outlaws” (hors-la-loi). Muslims were known as “Muslims,” or inhabitants of the Casbah. After all, a good percentage of Algerian Muslims were not Arab, but Berber. Calling them Arabs, Ibrahim thus imposed categories from the Middle East onto the Algerian context. 36  “Comment le Mossad a armé des juifs de Constantine en 1956,” trans. from Ma’ariv May 14, 2005. (http://mohsan.free.fr/spip.php?article26. Retrieved June 25, 2015; Memorandum: American Jewish Committee, May 14, 1956. 37  Michael Clark, “Algerian Rebels raid Constantine, Vigilantes rout them, killing twelve,” in New York Times, May 13, 1956. 38   A JC, May 14, 1956. 39  Ibrahim, 140. 40  Ibid. 41  Ibid., 139. 42   Ma’ariv, March 25, 2005; quoted by Stora, Trois Exiles, 153.

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Well into the afternoon Saturday, Misgeret operatives and civilians rounded up Muslims, and barricaded them into their own shops, smashing windows and doors and emptying cash registers. The manic search continued through the streets lined with Muslim-owned shops, pulling people from their stores and shooting at them. Civilians shot randomly.43 According to Ibrahim, no Jews were hurt until the French army jumped into action, and began to help in the looting of Muslim businesses and destruction of homes. He calculated that the Misgeret killed twenty Arabs and injured another ten. Le Monde contended that twenty-five Muslims had died, and fourteen “Europeans” (Jews included) were injured.44 Onlookers knew nothing of the Misgeret’s presence, though many intuited that Jews were involved in the repressions. Many French sources elided a specific mention of Jews by stating that the bombing’s location was the Jewish quarter. Others denied any Jewish involvement. A New York Times article claimed that “the Jews themselves took little part in the vigilante shooting that cost thirty-five Arabs their lives.”45 The London Times described a battle between “the police” and terrorists, “with the civilian populations joining in;” the location of the chaos happened to be in the Jewish quarter.46 An AmericanJewish worker reported that the French army actively recruited jobless Jewish men, one strategy that provoked Jews to attack Arabs.47 Rationales for the grenade attack also change according to source. The London Times explained that the attackers went to Café Mazia because its owner would not “subscribe funds toward the rebellion.”48 The Paris-Presse Intransigent reported that the rebels had heard Jews were organizing in commando groups.49 Stanley Abromavitch, who was working on behalf of the Joint Distribution Committee, contended that local “Arabs” were angry with local Jews because they believed that Jews were working with French police. Local Muslims demanded loyalty; bombing the café was a harsh w ­ arning. Abromavitch revealed that the French authorities had turned Jews and Muslims against one another.50 43   Moudjahid, 17–8, and Ibrahim, 140–1. 44  “25 Musulmanes tues en deux jours à Constantine” in Le Monde, May 15, 1956. 45  Michael Clark, “Muslim-Jewish Rift in Algeria Feared” in New York Times, May 16, 1956. 46  “Algerian Town Attacked by Uniformed Rebels,” London Times, May 14, 1956. 47  “Report on Algeria,” AJC Archive. Confidential Memorandum from Abromavitch to Jordan, June 11, 1956, 2. 48  “Algerian Town Attacked by Uniformed Rebels,” London Times, May 14, 1956. 49  Quoted in AJC, Memorandum, May 14, 1956. 50  “Report on Algeria,” June 11, 1956, 1.

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We cannot know the exact rationale for this particular attack, but it is clear that bombing cafés in Constantine’s Jewish Quarter had become a common occurrence in the preceding months. What was new about Saturday’s events was the organized retaliation, resulting in between twenty and forty dead. By the end of the day, Ibrahim reported, Jewish morale was very high. He was not shy about claiming a victory—he said that the Misgeret leaders were surprised by their own success. The next day, his pride dissolved into utter shame and embarrassment on behalf of local Jews. 4 Sunday Sunday’s story is more difficult to piece together. “It started with the elation of the day before,” Ibrahim wrote, a sense of excitement that was nonetheless accompanied by “edgy” nervousness. By the afternoon, “all was back to normal and the city was crowded,” but “you could feel the tension.”51 Sometime late that afternoon (accounts differ: 4:30, 5:30, or 6:00 PM), an officer stopped a man who was milling outside an ice cream shop in the Jewish quarter. Many customers thought he was carrying a bomb (no source verified whether this was true). A second officer killed the suspected assailant. The FLN newspaper claimed that the two shooters were not officers, but “French civilians” who encouraged their friends to leave the ice cream store so that they could begin another killing spree, as they had the day before. At the same moment, a second group of “French civilians” approached from a neighboring restaurant, and shot twice: “Le voilà! Le voilà!”52 The purpose of the shots, in this theory, was to “create a panicky climate.” When investigators arrived at the ice cream shop—located in the center of the Jewish quarter—they found six Muslim cadavers and eleven injured bystanders, two of whom were Jewish.53 According to Ibrahim, most Jews assumed the town’s Muslims were taking revenge for Saturday. The noise of gunshots set off a chaotic shooting spree in which civilians shot at Muslims all over the city, with casualties between 16 and 100. The two Jews who were injured were struck by friendly fire. In retrospect, some reporters explained Sunday’s attack by describing a “tense” and “nervous” atmosphere. A journalist in Le Monde wondered why the Europeans had been so quick to shoot; “Fear certainly played a part,” was their clipped observation.54 Another observer attributed the battle to a ­generalizable 51  Ibrahim, 140. 52  “Journée du Dimanche 13 Mai 1956” from “Les pacificateurs a l’œuvre” in El Moudjahid vol. 1, 18. 53  “DIX-NEUF TUÉS SAMEDI,” Le Monde, May 15, 1956. 54  “25 Musulmanes tués en deux jours à Constantine,” Le Monde, May 15, 1956.

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f­ eeling: “At the slightest suspicious move, people draw arms and shoot. A man pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket can be shot by a suspicious passerby who is afraid that it may be a gun or bomb.”55 The Muslim-Algerian author and activist Mouloud Feraoun described a devastating shift in the attitudes of the police and soldiers by mid-May 1956. “I hear that people are shot almost anywhere, and that the only efficient form of justice is a quick justice,” he wrote in his journal. “What is the life of a Muslim worth? For the time being, it is worth the burst of a sub-machine gun.”56 The Jewish mob was following the pace established by French soldiers that month. Muslim lives were simply not worth as much as ‘French’ lives. There was no denying that Jews were the central perpetrators on Sunday. But Misgeret leaders distanced themselves from Sunday’s events. Even Ibrahim, an undercover agent known only by his nom de guerre, believed there had been a Jewish conspiracy. Ibrahim suggested that some of the city’s Jews were attempting to seize control; he was mired in a power struggle. “Some Jewish opportunists were trying to encourage fear,” he hypothesized, “inflaming anxiety in the name of self-promotion. They wanted to gain the main posts in the Jewish leadership.”57 The Jewish Chronicle acknowledged that Jews were “quicker on the trigger” than Muslims.58 As opposed to Saturday, when squads were reacting to the detonation of a grenade, Sunday was an embarrassment for Ibrahim, and the Jewish population at large. He absolved himself of responsibility, however, blaming “the irrational reaction by a Jewish mob.”59 Many onlookers were aware of the role of the Jewish community in Sunday’s counterterrorist action. Even Constantine’s chief rabbi, Sidi Fredj Halimi, made an appeal for the Jews to calm down. “It’s our religious duty to declare that we disapprove of violence, from whatever quarter,” he declared.60 He knew that many Jews were seeking revenge. Ibrahim thought that Sunday’s overreaction could teach the Jewish community “that they needed to leave defense . . . in an emergency to the professionals.”61 He vowed that more work remained, and that Misgeret officers would be much more careful in the future. 55  “Report on Algeria,” AJC. 56  Mouloud Feraoun, “May 15, [1956],” Journal 1955–1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War, Ed. and trans. Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade. (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000), 113. 57  Ibrahim, 133. 58  “Outrage in Algeria,” Jewish Chronicle, May 18, 1956, 1. 59  Ibrahim, 141. 60  “Outrage in Algeria,” 28. 61  Ibrahim, 142.

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Figure 10.2

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 bove, the headline and photo from New York Times A May 15, 1956, shows Muslims forced up against a wall by soldiers. It indicates that the army was surrounding the Jewish Quarter. Photo courtesy of the Associated Press.

5 Monday In response to the weekend’s events, French authorities took action in three ways: they issued a strict warning to Constantine’s Europeans; they prohibited individuals from carrying weapons; and they cordoned off the Jewish quarter. Furthermore, Constantine was placed under martial law, a decision that was likely popular among many Europeans, given their demands for more repression and less reform earlier that month.62 The French government was infuriated by the Jewish reaction, but authorities did not reprimand Jews separate from Christians. An army general warned all of Constantine’s Europeans against “falling prey to counter-terrorism” and “blind vengeance.” That day, authorities scoured the streets to confiscate individually owned weapons, a form of public punishment, which amounted to a wristslap when compared with the roundup and relentless murders of the city’s Muslims. When the French military enclosed the Jewish Quarter, were they protecting or punishing the Jews? Guards forbade pedestrian and vehicular traffic, 62  Courrière, 666.

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“except to its inhabitants.”63 A New York Times article (fig. 10.2) headlined “French Cordon Jewish Quarter of Algerian City,” featured a photograph showing French officers lining up “rebels,” clearly Muslim. “The [military cordon was created] to prevent any repetition of . . . Saturday and yesterday,” the reporter indicated. “A number of European vigilantes had staged retaliatory attacks following an abortive terrorist raid.”64 Isolating the Jewish Quarter was not rationalized. Is the reader to assume that the army positioned itself to guard the Jewish neighborhood? Or were the officers protecting Muslims from the Jews? Ibrahim noted that security was increased both “within” and “around” the Jewish Quarter.65 Were the Jews victims or suspects? Apparently, others had the same question. Later in the week, The New York Times hedged: “The object [of the cordon] is not to punish . . . inhabitants of the [Jewish] quarter, but to protect them against terrorist infiltrations.”66 It is worth noting that in 1934, the police did not sorround off the Jewish quarter, and twenty-eight people died. This was a subject of debate, and would have clearly been on the minds of the authorities in 1956.67 6 Aftermath While local Jews and Muslims were both hesitant to point to a nascent JewishMuslim conflict, this is what international observers saw. Israeli envoys and the British press referred to invading rebels from outside Constantine as “Arabs.” It was clear that they saw the battle as an extension of the struggles in the Middle East. In the words of an American newspaper reporter, the May events “widened the gulf of bitterness between the two indigenous elements of the population.”68 Indeed, after May 12 and 13, local Jews and Muslims became embroiled in this international war. In the following months, Constantine Muslims boycotted Jewish businesses, which took a heavy toll on Jews there, motivating many to plan departures.69 These May days were historically transformative for a few reasons. The battle marked the first time that the Franco-Algerian war 63  “French Cordon Jewish Quarter of Algerian City to Quell Terrorism” in New York Times, May 15, 1956, 1. 64  Ibid. 65  Ibrahim, 142. 66  Michael Clark, “Arab-Jewish rift in Algeria feared” in New York Times, May 17, 1956, 11. 67  Conversation with Joshua Cole, July 20, 2015. 68  Michael Clark, “Arab-Jewish rift in Algeria Feared: Recent Constantine Events Sharpen Old Antagonism between groups,” New York Times (May 16, 1956). 69  Chouraqui to Cassin, September 18, 1956. AIU Rene Cassin files; J. Lazarus, “Situation de la collectivité juive en Algérie,” Assises du judaisme algérien (March 1958 pamphlet, AIU,

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unfolded in a large city. Second, civilians took an active part. Third, Jews fought the war as Jews, with Israeli help: since the Algerian resistance had been building, there was a perception that the war was fought between nonJewish Europeans and Muslims.70 Even still, the May events were not widely discussed in older histories of the Jews of Algeria, nor in the local Jewish newspaper.71 When they are mentioned, often only the tragedy of the attack on the Jewish café is retold; the brutal revenge is nowhere to be found. One reason for this is that the Jews involved regretted their behavior. Many Jews were upset with themselves—and, as indicated above, Ibrahim and the chief rabbi both condemned Sunday’s shooting spree.72 This shame carried over into subsequent narratives of the event. Those who sought to minimize the involvement of the Jewish community or Israel were successful. The event confused the international press as well. It was not clear who had perpetrated the attack. A few months later, after the Battle of Algiers in early 1957, most critics turned their attention to torture from the French Army, while others, such as historian Pierre Nora, criticized all pieds noirs, French citizens of Algeria.73 Israel’s involvement was controversial, and negotiations between Israel and France were kept secret. The presence of envoys from the Jewish state in Algeria could support a false idea that Jews comprised a separate political entity, or that they were untrustworthy. Some of the Jewish leaders in Algiers feared that the public might deduce that perhaps Jews no longer needed French citizenship because Israel could provide a safe haven.74 The way people reported the story reflected their particular agenda. The FLN wanted to expose the manipulation of the colonial system, and implicate international Jews, therefore El Moudjahid listed the deceased victims by name. The Israelis wanted to defend the Jewish population, to show how disorgan­ ized the local civilian armies were. Ibrahim justified Misgeret’s presence by

Laz XVI), Page 9; Maud Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: The History of a Conflict. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 46. 70  Ibrahim noted at the beginning of his report: “Until two months ago, North African Arabs were busy with their own war against the French,” 139. 71  For instance, none of the interviewees mention it in Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun and Doris Bensimon. Les Juifs d’Algérie: Mémoires et identités plurielles. (Paris: Éditions Stavit, 1998; nor did Chemouilli. The American Jewish Yearbook does not mention this episode, nor does the Information juive. 72  Ibrahim, 141. 73  Pierre Nora, Les Français d’Algérie (Paris, 1961). 74  After Mannoni’s article appeared, Lazarus argued that the idea of confusing Israelites and Israelis made Algeria’s Jewish community “susceptible to dangerous consequences.” (AIU JL, Letter Dated 7 Nov 1956, LAZ and HELER to Kaplan).

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claiming that they brought a degree of organization to the operation. They also wanted to take credit for Saturday’s shootings and absolve responsibility for Sunday’s. Le Monde, London Times, and New York Times attempted to report the news, but none were aware of the Israeli presence. As with the primary sources, historical works vary widely in the way they portray the May events. Most briefly state that there was an episode of JewishMuslim violence in May 1956; they emphasize the attacks on the Jews, rather than those by Jews.75 An exception is Gilbert Meynier, who labeled the episode a “Jewish anti-Muslim pogrom,” claiming that 230 Muslims were killed over the weekend.76 He later retracted that assessment, which was based on a single interview.77 Historical accounts from Algeria tend to discuss Israel’s involvement in disbelief; one 2005 article eagerly awaited an apology from these Israeli spies.78 Another recent article claimed that the attacks and the army’s brutal repressions are still engraved in the collective memories of Constantine residents.79 In their memories from exile, Jewish memoirists from Algeria place an “attack” on a Jewish café into a litany of FLN raids on Jewish sites.80 Most astounding about the events of May 1956 is the nagging question of why (or how) the Israelis got involved. Ibrahim wrote that part of his mission was to warn Arabs that “Jewish blood would not be spilled in vain,” in line with a common post-Holocaust trope among Zionists.81 Although he was disappointed in Sunday’s unnecessary deaths, he celebrated Saturday’s killings and the “high morale” among the Jewish squads who had avenged the bomber. Ibrahim’s discussion of Constantine Jews is similar to some Zionist ideas about European survivors of the Holocaust: they were weak, naïve, and therefore in need of guidance. Regardless of Misgeret’s stated purpose (self-defense and 75  Stora, Trois Exiles; Chemouilli, Une Diaspora Méconnue: Les Juifs d’Algérie (Paris: IMP, 1976); Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France, 46–7; Ethan Katz, “Constantine Muslim-Jewish Violence (May 1956 and May 1957).” Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Executive Editor Norman A. Stillman. Brill Online, 2015. 14 July 2015. . 76  Meynier, Histoire intérieur du FLN. (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 255. 77   G. Meynier, “Mise au point factuelle sur les événements de Constantine, 12 mai 1956 et jours suivants,” May 14, 2007. http://etudescoloniales.canalblog.com/ archives/2007/03/14/4319574.html accessed July 8, 2015. 78  Mounir B., “Le Mossad a combattu le FLN. Les services secrets israéliens étaient à Constantine,” Le Quotidien d’Oran. March 26, 2005. 79  Another Algerian account is Selmane, “L’attentat de la rue Sidi Lakhdar.” 80  For instance, Henri Chemouilli, Une Diaspora Méconnue (Paris: Imprimerie Moderne de la Presse, 1976), 283. 81  Ibrahim, 141.

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A 1956 Fraternité française illustrated series featured a greedy Jewish spy with ties to Israel (right) collaborating with an FLN militant (left).

pacification), historians cannot help but notice that the violent episodes in Constantine began only once the Misgeret arrived.82 Israel’s involvement spawned questions and conspiracy theories. One comic strip (Figure 10.3) printed in the rightwing European weekly Fraternité française featured a rich Jewish man from Algiers, Claude Zitoun, who purchased weapons from Israel and smuggled them to the FLN insurgents. This was the opposite of the truth—it was France who supplied weapons for Israel, and Israelis entered Algeria in order to protect Jews from FLN attacks. The cartoon mixed two conspiracy theories about Jews: first, the notion that Israelis were working covertly in Algeria, and second, that Jewish individuals supported the FLN. It is no coincidence that the strip was published in May 1956.83 We now know that Israelis did give covert support to local Jews, and it is true that many Jews supported the FLN.84 Because the writers used the term “caïd” (a traditional Muslim leader), they pointed to Algerian Jews’ confused ethnic provenance. Within a few months, the FLN would begin publicly proclaiming that Jews were indigenous, and that they belonged to the Algerian nation. 82  Such as Stora, Trois Exiles, 152; and Katz, “Constantine Muslim-Jewish violence.” 83  Jacques Demolay and Daniel Lamargelle, “Le Caïd des ‘Mauser’,” in Fraternité française, May 12, 1956. 84  See Hammerman, “Heart of the Diaspora,” ch. 4.

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7 1956: East and West The events of May 1956 did not unfold in a vacuum. That year was transformative, as a whole myth of Jewish-Muslim comity in Algeria came to an end. In the first few years of the Franco-Algerian War, both Muslim and Jewish groups resisted pressures from the Middle East. A strong contingent of Algerian leaders met in the Soummam Valley in August 1956 to write their platform, declaring that neither “Cairo” nor “Moscow” would direct their activities.85 They were fighting imperialism, which meant that they wanted to rid Algeria of foreign interests. Pan-Arabism was popular among exiled FLN leaders, but the local contingent did not support the idea that all Arabs should unite against Christians and Jews. Instead, in a special section devoted to the Jewish minority, the Soummam writers claimed that Jews and Europeans were fundamentally different, and that Jews belonged in their native Algeria with Muslims.86 Over the course of 1956, the FLN was growing closer to Nasser’s vision of Arab nationalism. Not only did the FLN have a powerful delegation in Cairo, they received a million francs per month from the Arab League. That summer, Nasser vowed his unconditional support to the Algerians; the FLN publicized this widely.87 In a speech given from Alexandria in August 1956, a week after he’d nationalized the Suez Canal, Nasser proclaimed his commitment to a worldwide, violent revolutionary struggle against imperialism, which would be fought in order to rid the Arab world from Western influence.88 The speech never identified the large European empires (such as France or Great Britain); instead, Nasser repeatedly condemned Israel as the enemy, labeling Israel as a “creature of imperialism.”89 Nasser portrayed Israel as an engine of future colonization, which was created in order to advance Western imperial power. He reasoned that the imperialists had “established Israel in order to annihilate our nationalism, as it has already annihilated Palestine.”90 A New York Times page from May 13, 1956, placed two photos side-by-side: one of a British patrol search for guerilla forces in Cyprus, the other of French

85  “Plat-Forme de la Soummam, telle qu’elle a été établie au congres du 20 aout et publié par El Moudjahid,” reprinted in Courrière, “Annexes,” 902–32. 86  “Appeal to our Israelite Compatriots.” 87  Courrière, 658. 88  Archives de l’armée de terre, “Le Monde Islamique: Discours prononcé par Colonel Nasser à Alexandrie,” August 1, 1956; “Change of emphasis in Cairo Propaganda campaign: Aim of ending Western influence” in London Times, May 23, 1956. 89  A. G. Nasser, Archives de l’armée de terre, “Le Monde Islamique: Discours prononcé par Colonel Nasser à Alexandrie,” August 1, 1956, 3. 90  Ibid., 4.

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The above New York Times spread is an example of the way that many observers began to see the Algerian conflict as part of a larger phenomenon in which Western powers had to curb nationalist uprisings. (NYT May 13, 1956) Photos courtesy of Magnum Photos and Gamma.

soldiers guarding a road near Constantine (fig. 10.4).91 There was an implication of a global war between colonizers and colonized, and Algeria was a part of it. Before long, French politicians blamed Nasser for provoking the Algerian Revolution, referring to him as an Egyptian Hitler.92 And what did Israel mean for Algerian Jews? Many claimed to be Zionists, but this was grounded more in sentiment than ideology. It was much different in character from political, immigration-centered Zionism that Israeli envoys advertised throughout the Islamic World. While many ardently supported Israel, even self-proclaimed Zionists had no plans to emigrate. Jews discussed their future departures “constantly” in Constantine, especially after the 1956 battle.93 Nonetheless, only 600 Jews from Constantine registered for immigration to Israel (out of a total of 14,000) after independence. Israel was far from a “homeland” to them. The homeland for Algerian Jews was none other than France; in retrospect, Constantine was remembered as an Algerian Jerusalem.94 91  Kay Lawson, “Hangings in Cyprus: Trouble in the Mediterranean” in New York Times, May 13, 1956. 92  Sylvia K. Crosbie, A Tacit Alliance: France and Israel from Suez to the Six Day War, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, 2015), 17–8. 93  Abromavitch, “Memorandum,” June 11, 1956. 94  Jean-Luc Allouche, Les Jours Innocents. (Paris: Lieu Common, 1984); Stora, Les Clés Retrouvées, Paris; Stock, 2015.

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Israel functioned either as a haven to unify secular or atheist Jews, or as a biblical land where traditional religion could thrive.95 Most diaspora Jews were proud to connect to Israel.96 As the international pressure of the Franco-Algerian War intensified, some publicly reduced their enthusiasm for Israel. The French leader of Algerian Jewry, Jacques Lazarus, asserted before the World Jewish Congress in early 1955 that Zionism was a private or spiritual issue, not a practical one. The funds raised by the World Jewish Congress, he argued, should not be spent to help bring Algerian Jews to Israel, but to educate them at home.97 Lazarus feared that Algerian Jews risked being sorted, branded, set aside . . . as many coreligionists had been during the Holocaust. By reallocating aliyah funds to local Jews, their vocal adherence to the French republic could be reconciled with their pride in being Jewish, without implying that young Jews had to leave for Israel. “Psychological aliyah,” Lazarus’s phrase, captured this paradox: to be Jewish but still live in the diaspora, supporting Israel from a safe distance. The new international binary that placed Jews and Israel together against Muslims and Arabs across the Middle East did not serve the central interests of the Jews of Algeria. Lazarus and other leaders wanted to ensure complete integration into the French Republic in the event of Algerian independence. They argued that Algerian Jews were Western, inextricable from the Republic. Their strategy was to shed indigeneity, even as FLN leaders highlighted the ethnic links between Jews and Muslims. A binary worldview was gaining popularity in many quarters, from French Jews like Mannoni to Muslims throughout Algeria. Meanwhile, Algerian Jews were cautiously planning their next steps. Lazarus was busy managing the image of Algerian Jews. He pushed for absolute equality to ensure that French citizenship was secure. Israel’s existence showed that Jews could be powerful and autonomous. However, Lazarus and other Jewish leaders in Algeria needed to underscore 95  David Myers noted that the original nineteenth-century conception of a return to Zion could “remedy the great physical debility of the Jews, dispersion, through the reconstitution of an independent nation in the ancestral homeland.” David Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 3. 96  The American Jewish Yearbook observed, “during 1956–57, more people than previously were ready to identify themselves as Jews because of the popularity of Israel in France.” Abraham Karlikow, “France,” American Jewish Yearbook 59 (1958): 246–56, 249. 97  About his constituents in North Africa, he declared, “Young Jews have no feeling for Aliyah [immigration to Israel . . . Our task therefore is to make them understand the importance of being a Jew.” WJC A95/4 Minutes. Meeting of the WJC Executive Committee @ the Washington Hotel in London. January 21–24, 1955, 41–51, 47–8.

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the ‘French’ provenance of these Jews—that they were part of the West, that they were no different from the Europeans. They pushed against the tide of the international binary that was emerging—to proceed nonchalantly and neutrally like the Jews in the Metropole, rather than taking responsibility for the aggression that had decimated Constantine’s Muslim neighborhoods. 8 Conclusion New international tensions—both literal and imagined—ripped apart JewishMuslim coexistence in Algeria by the end of 1956. All-encompassing ideologies, like aliyah-focused Zionism and pan-Arabism, were impossible to avoid when Mannoni’s article appeared in Le Monde. Politicians from France to Egypt were beginning to frame the Franco-Algerian War as a battle of civilization against barbarism, a polarized struggle that would either save the Western world, or avenge the Arab world for 200 years of European imperialism. Intercommunal violence was unfolding on a world stage. Algerian inhabitants experienced a dynamic change from a local struggle to a worldwide war.98 It was by no means easy to convince Muslims to side with Arabs, nor to convince Jews to plan to immigrate to Israel.99 By the end of 1956, however, a political consensus emerged that situated Jews with Israel and the West, placing Israel alongside former colonizers and aligning Algerian Muslims with Arabs. Tension ran high between Jews and Muslims in Constantine in the spring of 1956. But even as late as September, some Algerian Jews feared that European antisemites were manipulating Algerian nationalists, and turning them against Jews. In a confidential note in September 1956 André Chouraqui wrote, “I am asking myself if certain Machiavellis are maneuvering to provoke antisemitism out of the hostilities that cause Muslim terrorism.” He also noted that Jews felt desperately confused on how to act, pressured toward “double patriotism,” and “anti-Arab” activities.100

98  A number of other case studies about the relationship between local and global in the Maghreb is Global and Local in Algeria and Morocco: the world, the state, and the Village, James McDougall and Robert Parks, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2015). There is nothing about Jewish history in the aforementioned work. 99  Maud Mandel’s case study of North African volunteers for the Middle East in 1948 shows that this was the case in 1948. See Mandel, “Transnationalism and its Discontents during the 1948 Arab Israeli War.” Diaspora 112, no. 3 (2003): 349. 100  Chouraqui to Cassin, September 18, 1956. AIU Rene Cassin files.

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The conflict, as represented globally, was a simple continuation of the quintessential Middle East clash between Jews and Arabs. But some Jewish residents of Constantine continued to fight these assumptions in the months that followed. Also in September 1956, a group of Constantine Jews published a pamphlet in which they celebrated their connection to local Muslims. “In April–May 1956, a vicious cycle was started at Constantine, violently opposing Jews and Moslems,” they wrote. They continued: In the course of vast, bloody raids organized against the Moslem population, policemen and their Jewish helpers showed excessive zeal. . . . The tension mounted from day to day, with the result that on May 12, a grenade, thrown into a Jewish café nobody knows by whom, . . . brought about a murderous incursion of [armed] Jews into the Arab city.101 These activists apologized for bringing up past decades of intercommunal strife. They did so in order to show that it was the European “ultras” who were igniting the violence. But something had changed—their letter was viewed as a political statement. In his accompanying note, Abraham Karlikow observed, “You will note that, implicitly, this treats the Jews in Algeria as Algerians rather than as French citizens.”102 1956 ushered in an era of stark national choices. By September, drawing attention to the ways that Europeans had turned Muslims and Jews against each other was a distinctly political move, a betrayal of the French cause. And this was a month before the Suez invasion. In October, the FLN made a public plea to the chief rabbi, expressing its “hope that the leaders of the Jewish community would have the wisdom to contribute to the construction of a free and truly fraternal Algeria.”103 The FLN’s appeal was intimate, and it frequently drew on the Jews’ common heritage and “patrie”—­ calling them “dear compatriots” or even “dear Semites.”104 They emphasized how different Jews were from other French citizens—how naturally they belonged in independent Algeria. Jewish leaders may have glorified the ‘special brotherhood’ between Jews and Muslims, but, to be understood by the international audience, they had to take a stand as French citizens. Community leaders sent out a single, u ­ nified 101  Karlikow to Hevesi, “Situation of the Jews in Algeria in Light of Events in 1934 and 1956,” JDC Archive Translation of al Istiqlal from August 17, 1956, 3rd page. 102  Ibid., 1. 103  The FLN “Appeal to our Israelite Compatriots” was published in many Algerian dailies, such as L’Echo d’Oran. 104  Meynier, 255.

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response to the FLN’s plea. The Jewish Declaration insisted on neutrality, as for the globe: “The events that are currently unfolding in the Middle East will not change the sentiments that exist here [in Algeria] between Jews and Muslims.”105 The declaration marked a clear turning point on the path of Jewish history in Algeria. It attested to the Jewish leaders’ forthright intention to stay in Frenchruled Algeria. The leaders resisted the idea that the conflict in the Middle East, with its brutal, defined sides, could affect Algeria, presumably because its inhabitants were more sophisticated. But the divisions were set. In his memoir, André Chouraqui related the “inescapable predicament” that emerged in the fall of 1956, and remained true until 1962: It was impossible for us to join the side opposed to France without betraying a loyalty, without breaking faith with a gratitude inscribed in the depth of our being. But it was impossible for us to take the side of France openly without seeming, in the eyes of the nationalist rebels, not simply enemies, but traitors. To remain neutral was no longer possible.106 Following the larger trends in French Judaism, the community’s focus shifted from the internal—how to revitalize Jewish life, how to navigate relations with the Muslims and Christians—to the international. Despite the efforts of spokesmen such as Jacques Lazarus, the Algerian Jews were thrust into the spotlight. Although the 1956 massacre has been forgotten, it persists abstractly in the memories of former Algerian Jews.

105  For example, “Une Déclaration du Comité juif algérien d’études sociales,” Information juive, no. 82, November 1956, 1. The American Jewish Yearbook has an English translation of the declaration, but most of these translations are mine. “Algeria,” American Jewish Yearbook 13, 1959, 277–8. 106  André Chouraqui, A Man in Three Worlds. Kenton Kilmor, trans. (Maryland: University Press of America, 1984), 129.

Part 4 Imagining Jews, Performing Jewishness

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Chapter 11

Thinking the Jew through the Turbulent Nineteenth Century: The Idea of Rachel Julie Kalman On a hot Paris night in June of 1838, one Dr Véron, “seeking shade and solitude,” took refuge in the Théâtre-Français. Pierre Corneille’s Horace was playing, and a seventeen- year-old actress, Rachel, was enjoying her debut in the role of Camille. Véron was “stunned” by the young actress, and “fascinated” by her talent: When the twelve or fifteen people of good sense who are the source of public opinion in Paris hear and judge her, [. . .] this child will be the glory and the fortune of the Comédie-Française.1 He went in search of the celebrated critic, Jules Janin, who was also escaping the heat in the theatre, but who had remained in the foyer. A third party tells us that Véron “dragged” Janin into the theatre, sat him in a box, and announced, “Sweat, but listen!”2 History does not reveal whether or not Janin did indeed perspire, but we do know that he listened, and he watched, and that he, too, was overwhelmed by the talent of this young prodigy. Two days after the performance he published a characteristically hyperbolic review, describing Rachel as: the most astonishing little girl that the present generation has seen climb on to the stage. This child (learn her name!) is Miss Rachel. [. . .] . . . how strange! An ignorant little girl, without skill, without affectation, who falls right into old tragedy! She revives it, by blowing vigorously on its august ashes. She makes its flames and its life burn strongly! [. . .] And note well that this child is small, and rather ugly; a narrow chest, a common air and coarse language.3 1  Louis Véron, Mémoires d’un Bourgeois de Paris, 4: 196–7, cited in Eugène de Mirecourt [Eugène Jacquot], Les Contemporains. Rachel (Paris, 1854), 24, 26–7. All translations are my own. 2  Mirecourt, 29. 3  Jules Janin, Rachel et la tragédie (Paris, 1858), 53–4.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004324190_013

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Here, then, was a new, unique and brilliant actress, all the more extraordinary for her lack of beauty.4 In Janin’s eyes, she was reviving and inhabiting a neglected repertoire, intrinsic to the history of France. Yet she was an outsider: a woman and a Jew.5 For Janin, her Jewishness mattered only insofar as it enabled her insight and skill. He wrote of her Jewishness in tones of admiration. Others like him, who also admired Rachel for her talent, simply neglected this aspect of her identity. For yet others, however, Rachel’s Jewishness defined her differently. It explained her demands for ever-greater pay, the involvement of family members in her financial success, and the many lucrative tours she undertook. For a gutter journalist such as Eugène de Mirecourt, for example, Rachel was “Jewish, in the full sense of monetary rapacity ordinarily attributed to the word;”6 and her greed was “entirely Jewish”.7 In this chapter, I will argue that Rachel functioned as a point of reference in public discourses around issues such as the nature of citizenship and of French nationalism through the difficult nineteenth century. As an actress, she created fantasies for her audiences. She recreated herself, over and over, and many of her contemporaries also saw in her a figure for imagining. If Rachel embodied a positive notion of France for some, for others, she was the epitome of the negative impact of Jewishness in the modern age. Thinking about public, high profile Jews such as Rachel allowed the French to conceptualize and articulate their own thinking about the questions that held particular importance for them. In the nineteenth century, French society faced enormous challenges. The Revolution had profoundly shaken up the Old Regime. The hierarchies that had structured French life for centuries, including Church and nobility, lost the legitimacy that lent them authority. One particularly significant consequence, for many, was Jewish emancipation, and not just for Jews. Where for centuries, Jews had been subject to discriminatory measures that restricted their lives and livelihoods, they could now enjoy the privileges of citizenship, and stand together with their fellow non-Jewish French men and women. Throughout the nineteenth century, French society became a terrain for intensely ­competing 4  Lenard Berlanstein has argued that physical beauty was a “sine qua non of a stage career for females” in the nineteenth century. Lenard Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 25. 5  Anne Hélène Hoog characterizes Rachel as doubly marginal, through her chosen profession, and her belonging to a “confessional minority.” Anne Hélène Hoog, “La marge, l’exemple et l’exception. Le parcours d’Elisa Félix dite Mademoiselle Rachel,” Romantisme 125.3(2004), 94. 6  Mirecourt, 44. 7  Ibid., 74.

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discourses of nationhood, as French men and women sought to define themselves, to find a focal point for community, and assert a meaning for Frenchness in the post-revolutionary world.8 The project of defining France, and French citizenship, was intense and ongoing through the nineteenth ­ century. Jews became a symbol of what the Revolution had brought to France, and the question of what their place might be in post-revolutionary France took on great significance in ongoing debates over what France itself could or should be. This was the setting for the rise of Rachel Félix. In a time of extraordinary change, the meteoric ascent of Rachel, as she was simply known, was perhaps even more extraordinary.9 She was discovered performing on the streets of Lyon in 1829, at age eight. Nine years later she signed a contract with the most prestigious of French theatrical institutions and official state theatre, the Comédie française. Anne Hélène Hoog attributes this rapid trajectory to the determination of Rachel’s father Jacob, and to the intervention of a series of influential mentors who recognized Rachel’s ability.10 The Swiss-born daughter of itinerant Jewish peddlers was to become one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated actresses, credited with reviving the classical repertoire. She was performing Corneille when Véron and Janin witnessed her debut at the Comédie française in 1838. This slight woman, whose appearance on stage was, apparently, electrifying, rode to success, power and wealth on the basis of a repertoire that was deeply French. At the height of her career, in 1848, she became famous for her recital of the Marseillaise, and came, for many, to embody France. In many ways, Rachel personified the changes that the Revolution had wrought on French society. Emancipation had allowed her to make her way into institutions that were at the heart of France: the classical repertoire, and the Comédie-Française. Many Jews—like Rachel—were taking happy advantage of the new possibilities offered to them by the lifting of centuries of restrictions. Over the nineteenth century, Paris became the center of French Jewry. It was here that a group of Jews, keen to rise socially, established themselves in banking and finance, as well as in politics. This group gained, 8  See Jim McMillan, “Priest Hits Girl: The Front Line of the War of the Two Frances,” in Wolfram Kaiser and Christopher Clark, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9  Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). I am grateful to Professor Samuels for making his work available to me. 10  Hoog, “La marge, l’exemple et l’exception,” 97.

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as Michael Graetz puts it, “an importance far beyond its numbers.”11 The sense of opportunity that brought bankers such as James de Rothschild and the lawyer Adolphe Crémieux to Paris was equally attractive to Jews who sought to make their way in the arts. Indeed, what was particularly new about the nineteenth century, as Maurice Samuels has argued, was that Jews were now making names for themselves in the production of French culture.12 Paris in the midnineteenth century was a highly attractive destination for Jews who wished to practice their creativity freely. One such was Giacomo Meyerbeer, born Jacob Meyer Beer, the eldest son of the enormously wealthy Jewish Berlin banker Jacob Beer. Meyerbeer enjoyed extraordinary popular success in Paris with operas such as Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots. Jews such as Meyerbeer, and his fellow composer Ludovic Halévy, as well as Rachel, were participating in the creation of culture. Jonathan Freedman has described how German Romantic philosophers, including Fichte, Hegel, Herder and Humboldt, developed a new understanding of culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the expression of a particular people’s genius.13 That one who was marginal, such as Rachel, might make her way to the center of French culture was grounds for many to consider the very nature of this culture. Was Rachel an acceptable and true representative of post-revolutionary France? Such questioning was, arguably, inevitable. For Samuels, Rachel was the “most famous Jewish artist— perhaps one of the most famous Jewish people—in the world.”14 Such was Rachel’s fame that she was, in many ways, the model for Delphine de Girardin’s notion of celebrity. Rachel had met Girardin, the writer and wife of the famous newspaper editor Emil, in 1838. A year later, Girardin began to develop the idea of celebrity. According to her, society’s elites were no longer the aristocracy. In the nineteenth century, their place had been taken by the well-known, be they writers, artists, politicians or actors. Famous actresses, in particular, “now had more prestige and more power to make an impression on ordinary people than aristocrats and even members of the royal family.”15 When in September 1853 l’Illustration published what Lenard Berlanstein believes to have been the very 11  Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, translated by Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 43, 44. 12  Samuels, The Right to Difference. 13  Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 30. Quoted in Samuels, The Right to Difference. I draw on Samuels’ work in this discussion of culture. 14  Samuels, The Right to Difference. 15  Lenard R. Berlanstein, “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture: Famous Women in Nineteenth-Century France.” Journal of Women’s History, 16.4(2004), 69–70. Delphine de Girardin also wrote plays for Rachel.

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first celebrity home tour, the journal chose Rachel’s Paris home, and devoted a lavish three pages to it.16 Celebrity, as Berlanstein has argued, “is a useful tool of cultural analysis.” Who was elected to celebrity, to play the role of “intimate stranger” by the public? What meaning was given to them?17 Rachel’s fame made her an obvious choice for celebrity, but so did her Jewishness. It made her knowable, in deeply significant ways. Jews were intrinsic to the Christian narrative, as the deicide people. In post-revolutionary France, many drew on this inheritance of knowledge, and applied it to emancipated Jews. In an era when the legitimacy of Church authority had been undermined, the knowability of Jews could be adapted in myriad ways. Rachel was no exception. Moreover, her transparency was enhanced by her great visibility. As an actress, she was knowable too. Acting “was widely regarded as a dishonorable occupation for women,”18 and Rachel, with her extra-marital affairs, her two children born out of wedlock, and her sustained refusal to convert, confirmed the dishonorable nature of her chosen profession. Rachel’s outsider status due to her Jewishness was enhanced by her chosen career. The fact that her Jewishness made her knowable lent itself to the development of her celebrity, and particularly, her place as intimate stranger to her critics and observers. And the nature of that ­intimacy—the meaning of her celebrity—could vary. For some, if Rachel had been able to penetrate and ultimately come to perform French culture, this was a cynical exercise, a deliberate misuse of that culture with the aim of amassing wealth and power. The overthrow of Charles X in the July Revolution of 1830 had been greeted with great hope for France’s future. However, this hope was soon replaced by disillusionment, since those who were brought to power in the 1830 Revolution were not necessarily revolutionaries. Casimir Périer, President of the Council from 1831 until his death from cholera the following year, declared that “there was no revolution; there was simply a change of Head of State.”19 Such were the bourgeois who, in the words of one highly successful pamphleteer, “triumphed” in the July Revolution, and who were quick to dash any hope for an ideal nation.20 With the breakdown of institutional Christianity as a result of the Revolution, 16  Berlanstein, “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture,” 70. 17  Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1985), cited in Berlanstein, “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture,” 66. 18  Berlanstein, “Historicizing and Gendering Celebrity Culture,” 70. 19  Quoted in Daniel Amson, Adolphe Crémieux. L’oublié de la gloire (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 87. 20  Georges Mathieu-Dairnvaell, Guerre aux fripons. Chronique secrète de la Bourse et des Chemins de fer, 3d ed. (Paris, 1846), 3. Cited in Julie Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 132.

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many feared that French society “faced nothing less than literal atomization.”21 What could counter a competitive and individualistic society? The question was pressing because many believed that competitive individualism could easily translate to c­ apitalism, or, as the pamphleteer and polemicist Alphonse Toussenel and others were to describe it, “financial feudalism.”22 The Jew, who had benefited so visibly from the Revolution, was the perfect means to express anxieties about modern times.23 One particular obsession was with the notion of Jewish power, and the way that this was linked with wealth in the modern era. Thus, for example, gutter journalist Eugène de Mirecourt explained to his readers that Rachel’s goal was “to amass millions, many millions.” She was able to “fill her coffers by exploiting four plays by Pierre Corneille, and two by Jean Racine, six tragedies, no more.”24 This was legitimate grounds for outrage since, as Mirecourt’s colleague Charles Maurice put it, Rachel belonged “to the Public, body and soul of an artist.”25 Yet with her large salary and lucrative tours, she was betraying those to whom she belonged. The public owned Rachel, and here was the relationship of celebrity in all its intimacy. Maurice claimed to speak for the French, in admonishing Rachel for cynically taking advantage of France. In spending so much time away, she risked her health, so “dear” to the interests of her public.26 Maurice’s ironic play on words only served to underscore Rachel’s bad behavior. Rachel’s greed stood in for the greed of all Jews in the eyes of commentators such as these, and this was made particularly clear in the response of Romantic 21  Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 137. 22  Ibid. 23  Ibid., 132. 24  Mirecourt, 58. Eugène de Mirecourt was born Eugène Jacquot, but chose to ennoble himself through the town in the Vosges where he was born. He came to Paris, and made his living in the nineteenth century penning defamatory biographies of high-profile French musicians, artists and writers, entitled Les Contemporains. He published more than 100 volumes, and spent more than a little time in prison for his trouble. One critic has described his opus as “having no value whatsoever, from neither a critical nor an historical nor a literary point of view.” [F. J. Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens 2d éd, 8 vols (1881–89), 345.] 25  Charles Maurice, La Vérité-Rachel. Examen du talent de la première tragédienne du théâtre français, pour servir à l’histoire de la scène, à l’étude des artistes dramatiques, aux réflexions des journalistes, et à l’intérêt des gens du monde (Paris, 1850), 108. Charles Maurice— actually Charles-Maurice Descombes—was the founder and editor of the Courrier des Théâtres, a vehicle for theatre gossip. That Maurice pursued all Jewish artists and not just Rachel, as Samuels points out, underscores his use of Jews to make sense of post-­ revolutionary France. 26  Maurice, 109. Original emphasis.

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writer Pétrus Borel to the 1844 production of Racine’s Phèdre, staged as a benefit in support of the Jews of Damascus who had been victims of a blood libel accusation in 1840.27 Rachel filled the starring role, as the tragic heroine who falls in love with her stepson, played by her brother Raphaël. Their younger sister Rébecca also featured. Borel was a romantic, a member of Théophile Gautier’s Petit Cénacle, and he called himself the Lycanthrope, or man-wolf. He was outraged by what he saw as an abuse of French culture. “Jerusalem,” in Borel’s image, “rejoiced over the good takings that the young Hebrews, its children, would bring in.” Racine, in contrast, was beset upon his pedestal by shudders of pain at the sight of “his verses delivered up to the rabble and Phèdre sacrificed by the synagogue.” “During the murder,” or so Borel reported, “abundant tears fell from his marble eyes to the floor of the foyer. The poet appeared to beseech Israel and ask its mercy. – Useless prayer! Superfluous mourning! Israel has entrails for gold only! Israel has no pity!”28 Borel’s attack betrayed greater concerns—held by many—over the protection of virtue in post-revolutionary society. If the power of capitalism, or “the market,” was inevitable, then how to ensure that the public good was upheld? Was it possible to make the marketplace virtuous, so that making money could be seen as an honorable pursuit? Or would self-interest go against the public good, and freedom “degenerate into license?” These questions preoccupied the French in the mid-nineteenth century.29 They were resolved “in large part,” as Victoria Thompson argues, through gender.30 A virtuous marketplace mirrored the virtuous home, where women were dependent. In the public sphere, this translated to economic dependency. Women could not participate in the market. It was telling that women were not seen to possess honor, a particular preoccupation of public performance in the mid-nineteenth century. The bourgeoisie of the 1830s and 1840s, very much concerned with controlling reproduction and sex in such a way as to ensure the perpetuation of family lines, developed a combination of honorable qualities that were expected from the bourgeois male in public life.31 Man’s honor was embedded, as Robert Nye 27  On the Damascus Affair see Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 28  Pétrus Borel, Le Commerce, July 15, 1844, 2. 29  Victoria E. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace. Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 9. 30  Ibid. 31  Peter McPhee, “The Changing Contours of 1848,” in The Sphinx in the Tuileries, and Other Essays in Modern French History, Papers Presented at the Eleventh George Rudé Seminar Held at The University of Sydney, 4–6 July 1998, ed. Robert Aldrich and Martyn Lyons (Sydney: Department of Economic History, University of Sydney, 1999), 115.

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puts it, “deep in the blood and bone of his sex.”32 It follows that accusations of effeminacy directed at a man were deeply significant.33 Equally significant, in this schema, were accusations of masculinity directed at a woman. In his work on Rachel, Mirecourt reported how the Jewish actress Judith (Julie Bernat), a contemporary and competitor to Rachel, albeit less well-known, was supposedly asked why she “ranted on” about Rachel. Weren’t they coreligionists? Judith’s reported response was: “I am a Jewess, it is true, but Rachel . . . she is a Jew!”34 The French who called on Jews to think through the nature of French society in the nineteenth century generally distinguished between Jewish men and women. Jewish men generally represented notions of avarice and deceptiveness. Jewish women, on the other hand, were normally simply manifestations of sensuous beauty. They were empty physical ciphers, devoid of personality, or personal qualities.35 Yet Rachel disturbed these categories, and brought the greater peace of post-revolutionary public life into question. Rachel was powerful. After Louis-Napoleon’s coup, she helped select Arsène Houssaye as the new director of the state theatre, and then dictated the terms of her contract. Under its terms she was required to perform only forty-eight times a year, an arrangement which allowed her to undertake long, profitable tours abroad. And Rachel penetrated French life in other, equally significant ways. She had a string of high-profile lovers, including the future emperor LouisNapoleon, the Prince de Joinville (son of Louis-Philippe), Count AlexandreColonne Walewski, the illegitimate son of Napoleon by the Polish countess Marie Walewska, Louis-Napoleon’s cousin, the Prince Napoleon, Alfred de Musset and Emile de Girardin. She had two sons, both of whom she had baptized. Her son Alexandre-Antoine-Colonne Walewski was recognized by his

32  Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 71. 33  See, for example, the discourse surrounding the betrayal of the Duchess of Berry by Simon Deutz. In Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 71–89. 34  Mirecourt, 62. Rachel referred to “the less talented Mlle. Judith” who had replaced her (and achieved success) in Ponsard’s Charlotte Corday (1850) (Marvin Carlson, The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century [Metuchen, N.J., Scarecrow Press, 1972], 139.) Bernat reproduced this story in her own biography, where she reveals her competitive obsession with her famous counterpart. La vie d’une grande comedienne. Mémoires de Madame Judith de la Comédie-Française, et souvenirs sur ses Contemporains (Paris: Tallandier, 1911). 35  See Julie Kalman, “Sensuality, Depravity, and Ritual Murder: The Damascus Blood Libel and Jews in France,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 13.3 (Spring/Summer 2007): 35–58.

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father.36 Yet she never married, and never converted. Rachel upset the fragile balance between money, virtue and honor, and thus she threatened the sanctity of public life. What sort of world allowed a woman, in so many ways an outsider, to exercise such power? By the mid-nineteenth century, Jewishness, as I have argued elsewhere, was a quality that could transcend the bodily Jew. Thus, for example, Alphonse Toussenel could describe avarice as Jewish, even when the greed was being exercised by Swiss Protestants.37 Jewishness, too, could represent the disruption of virtue through unashamed self-interest. It was this that made Rachel ‘juif’, rather than ‘juive’. It was this increasingly metaphoric nature of Jewishness that allowed Borel, like the early socialist commentators, Toussenel, Leroux and Fourier, to understand the actions of Rachel—and, indeed, of all Jews—in terms of power. In the modern world, where old hierarchies and structures of belonging had been atomized, it was possible for Jews to make their way in, to the center of French life, but also up, to occupy seats of power. Thus, as Borel would have it, “the Jew” was “invading” the arts as they had already done in the city.38 “One no longer said: ‘Let’s go to the Comédie-Française,” in Mirecourt’s words; “one said: ‘Let’s go to the synagogue.’ ” Mirecourt, like Borel, wrote of the entry of Jews into French life in terms of invasion. In his version, they were invading positions and careers.39 The growing power of the Jews was such that if left unchecked, Christians would end up becoming what the Jews themselves had once been, “relegated in disgrace and destitution.”40 The picture painted by commentators such as Mirecourt, Maurice and Borel was shocking, and ultimately frightening. How to counter the logical progression, that if it was not stopped, the power of Jews such as Rachel would grow to a point where Christians would become the Jews of European society? Here, these commentators called on the centuries-old trope of the wandering Jew, and breathed new life into it. If the Jew was rootless, then a Jew such as Rachel could never truly be French; could never truly perform Frenchness. It is telling that all those who used Rachel to articulate negative understandings of Jews in modern society stressed her lack of creativity. Rachel was “an echo

36  On the Walewski family website, Rachel is very happily claimed as integral to the family tree. 37  Alphonse Toussenel, Les Juifs, rois de l’époque. Histoire de la féodalité financière (Paris, 1847). See the discussion in Kalman, Rethinking Antisemitism, 141–54. 38  Pétrus Borel, Le Commerce, July 15, 1844, 2. 39  Mirecourt, 43. 40  Borel, Le Commerce, July 15, 1844, 2.

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of her professors.”41 Her “miracles of diction, that science of delivery, those notes of passion, ironic or terrible,” were no more than “mechanical precision.” She could recall and repeat the harmonies brought to life under the master’s tutelage at will. But without those memories to draw on, she had “no creative force.”42 Borel wrote of her “almost metric precision,” contrasting this with the playfulness required in acting: An immobility of tone, a stiffness in her person, acerbity, can make up for the absence of warmth, scale, and dignity, up to a certain point, but acting, which is nourished by grace and smiles, which takes pleasure in growth and variety, rejects steadiness of expression, unnuanced sentiment, precision in speech.43 Maurice, too, described Rachel as almost robotic: [She had] only one physical shape, varied only by clothing; one sole hand to play, woven with little misfortunes, and insidious ploys. She has one sole voice, made up of acoustic wiliness, and one sole diction, furrowed with all the gusts blowing from the four corners of the globe, to make the Claquetins bellow with astonishment.44 Subheadings in his book under the section entitled “Her Faults” (this follows two pages devoted to “Her Qualities”), read: Her acting is always the same; her diction is incoherent; She has no sensibility; Her energy is more nervous than profound; On the stage, she has neither wit, nor intelligence, nor taste; She is unaware of the customs of acting; She has no creative fire.45 Rachel was not the only Jewish artist to be dismissed in this way. Much of the critical reception of the work of composer Giacomo Meyerbeer was negative. Much of this criticism incorporated Meyerbeer’s Jewishness.46 In particular, 41  Mirecourt, 50. 42  Ibid. 43  Borel, Le Commerce, July 15, 1844, 2. 44  Maurice, 125. 45  Ibid., 91–101. 46  Kerry Murphy has detailed the role of Meyerbeer’s Jewishness in criticism of his music. Kerry Murphy, “Berlioz, Meyerbeer, and the Place of Jewishness in Criticism,” in Berlioz:

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reviewers made much of Meyerbeer’s supposed lack of originality. As a composer, he was “far more talented than inspired.”47 He might have lacked his own melodic ideas, according to Louis Desnoyers, but, as Desnoyers pursued it, managing to throw in another hateful stereotype, Meyerbeer made up for this in his skill as a jeweler, making the most “of others’ melodic gems.”48 If Meyerbeer had any genius, it was in his ability to make people believe that he was a true genius. His critics knew better. Underneath all the show was a “diligent and tenacious worker.”49 (Meyerbeer was known for his capacity for hard work and endless rehearsal.) Like the original wandering Jew, he was rootless. He borrowed, like a magpie, building legitimacy. But critics such as Gustave Planche and François-Henri-Joseph Castil-Blaze could see past the effects: Meyerbeer himself had no ancestors.50 Artists such as Rachel and Meyerbeer might have managed to elbow their way into the inner circle of French creative life. They might have become icons in the production and development of a body of cultural work that represented Frenchness. They might have been brilliant mimics. But they were incapable of originality, and this betrayed their rootlessness, which in turn demonstrated conclusively that they were not truly French. If their roots were not planted in French soil, then they could ape Frenchness, and even reproduce it. However, they would never truly represent it. Depicting high-profile creative Jews such as Rachel and Meyerbeer as unable to be truly creative was a way to dismiss the perceived threat that such successful Jews posed to the sanctity of France. It was a way to negate the effect of the Revolution: Jews might be among us, but they can never truly be us, not even when they become celebrated for reciting the Marseillaise at a moment of revolution. In February 1848, the July Monarchy came to an end with revolution. Rachel declaimed the national anthem at the Comédie française and electrified her audience. The officials of the new Second Republic sent Rachel on a provincial tour so that she might elicit similar responses from citizens right around the nation.51 While these performances were greeted with wild e­ nthusiasm, Past, Present, Future: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Peter Bloom (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 90–104. 47   Gazette de France, March 10, 1836, 1. 48  Louis Desnoyers, Le National, March 16, 1836. 49  Gustave Planche, Chronique de Paris, March 1836, 1. 50  Ibid. See also Castil-Blaze, La France musicale, May 22 and 27, 1838. 51  Rachel gave a parallel performance after the short-lived Republic had come to an end with Louis-Napoleon’s coup. Ten months later, in October 1852, she read the poem “L’Empire, c’est la paix” [The Empire is Peace] to the new prince-president and the wider audience at the Comédie-Française.

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Maurice saw through the masquerade. Rachel was not “Rouget-Delisle’s woman, free and proud, grand and bellicose.” Rather, she was Tisiphone, one of the Greek furies, the avenger of murder: [Her dress was] covered in blood, snakes in her hands and froth on her lips. She did not sing. She did not speak. The sounds from that frightening mouth were more like bellowing and whistling. Her eyes were no longer those of a viper. They had taken on the look of a hyena. And her entire body exhaled dreadful memories.52 Rachel was not only false, she was dangerous. For the critic with whom this chapter began, Jules Janin, Rachel declaiming the Marseillaise was also a dangerous Fury. But she was a French Fury. For Maurice, and others like him, Rachel represented all that was wrong with modern society, where Jews could become producers of French culture, and enrich and empower themselves at the expense of France. Jews characterized the greatest evils of modernity; its competitive individualism and capitalist nature. Jews would never truly characterize France. For the man known as the prince of critics, however, Rachel’s Jewishness was not an obstacle to the performance of Frenchness. In Janin’s eyes, when Rachel spoke the Marseillaise, she became “the very spirit of the French Revolution”:53 And suddenly Mademoiselle Rachel, the flag in her glorious arms, head high, and eyes filled with a dark fire, found herself declaiming. She was a Muse . . . a Fury. It was superb and terrible. People quivered, they trembled, and a heroic fever took hold of all souls. How beautiful and valiant she was in that moment of her inflexible task, and how dangerous!54 Rachel, the Jew, could incarnate French culture, and this confirmed the brilliance of both the former and the latter. Janin adopted Rachel for France. He wrote of her in paternalistic terms: she was “our daughter”; “little Rachel.”55 Janin drew an image of purity and innocence around Rachel’s origins. It served to emphasize the extraordinary nature of her ascent, and the equally 52  Maurice, 75. 53  Janin, 470. 54  Ibid. The writer Sainte-Beuve also described her as “our Rachel.” Cited in L. Scott Lerner, “Jewish Identity and French Opera, Stage and Politics, 1831–60,” Historical Reflections/ Réflexions Historiques 30.2 (2004), 279. 55  Janin, 24, 45.

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extraordinary nature of the culture that had made it happen. He described her thus: [She was an] inhabitant of the palaces of Thebes, Corinthia or Memphis [. . .] who carried the scepter and the crown so well, that one might have said that she found them in her cradle; who purple suited so well, that her swaddling clothes must have been purple. Porphyrogenite, in fact; but cruel poverty had struck this family, and the father and the mother followed chance, carrying the little cradle that floated in all these shipwrecks. All this [. . .] is purely and simply antique tragedy.56 As a “child of poverty,” Rachel’s origins gave her authenticity.57 If she suffered “long exiles,” if she “brushed against all the brambles along the way, and broke her delicate feet on all the road’s stones,” this was something she shared “with all of the great poetic images, with the princesses of Troy, with the misfortunes of those towns, ruined, depopulated, destroyed by fire, with all of those heroes.”58 “She was born in the midst of the domains of poetry;” she already knew “all its twists and turns.”59 Thus her Jewishness was, once again, explanatory. For Janin, it explained her authenticity, and, by extension, her legitimacy. Contrary to her negative critics, he saw her inspiration as having come from within.60 She was “true”: the “true and sincere image of the passions that she recounted to the audience” . . . “the rarest and most skillful imagination,” “finesse: exquisite tact [. . .] the ring of truth.”61 Hers was the “impulsive intelligence” of “great artists.”62 Janin returned repeatedly to Rachel’s intelligence in his extensive

56  Ibid., 24. 57  Ibid., 64. 58  Ibid., 25. See, also, Anne Hélène Hoog, “ ‘Enfant du miracle’, Ambivalences du discours sur les origines de Rachel et de son génie,” in Rachel: Une vie pour le théâtre (Paris: Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, 2004), 79. Another critic, Antoine de Latour wrote, similarly, in the Revue de Paris: “Mlle Rachel est juive. Il est donc naturel aussi qu’elle ait puisé, dans des habitudes qui restent les mêmes au sein d’un monde où tout change et se renouvelle, ces amères impressions de l’exil qui ne meurent jamais chez ce people.” Antoine de Latour, Mlle Rachel,” Revue de Paris 60 (December, 1838), 271. Cited in Samuels, The Right to Difference. 59  Janin, 55. 60  Ibid., 46. 61  Ibid., 66. 62  Ibid., 97.

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work on her career. For hers was “a lively and powerful” intelligence,63 a fact that struck Janin the first time he saw her perform, when he watched her, “not without a certain movement akin to stupor.”64 Janin was not the nineteenth century’s defender. He expressed his sense of uprootedness in terms of art. In Janin’s nineteenth century, “drama had replaced tragedy,” and France was “far from Corneille and Racine.”65 Little wonder that for Janin, Rachel began nothing less than a poetic revolution when she began to perform tragedy once again. Rachel’s Jewishness, which gave her authenticity and with it, instinctive intelligence, allowed her to bring tragedy, the expression of true French culture, back to life. “She rebuilt the ancient altars,” Janin wrote, in typical language, “she gave life to dust.”66 In this, “she was entirely the daughter of Corneille,”67 the “child of the very century of Louis XIV.”68 Over the course of more than 500 pages, Janin tends to be repetitive. This means, also, that his central message is clear. Rachel was legitimately great. Her Jewishness, her modest origins and difficult childhood, gave her access to the authenticity of France’s past, and carried her directly to the heart of true French culture.69 If she was “an admirable example of what the soul and the heart can achieve in the arts, independent of their moral envelope,” this was the result of “dramatic inspiration.”70 It was, ultimately, the greatness of French art that allowed Rachel to be great. Nonetheless, Janin did clearly understand French culture and Jewishness as compatible, and Jews as capable of personifying France. For all of these commentators, the question at the heart of Rachel’s celebrity was whether her Jewishness spoke positively or negatively to her success. But Rachel was not Jewish to all commentators. Her religiosity could also be seen as largely irrelevant in her performance of French culture. This was the view, at least, of Théophile Gautier, an author, playwright, librettist, travel writer, and most prolifically, a critic. Rachel’s career spanned, more or less, Gautier’s critical career at La Presse, the newspaper founded by Emil de Girardin, the husband of Delphine. Over a long and prolific critical career, Gautier devoted

63  Ibid., 55. 64  Ibid., 16. 65  Ibid., 45. 66  Ibid., 59. 67  Ibid., 60. 68  Ibid., 57. 69  Samuels argues that that Janin emphasized Rachel’s naivety and ignorance of her material. Samuels, The Right to Difference. 70  Janin, 55.

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more columns to Rachel than to any other actor.71 Theirs was a long and mutually admiring relationship. Gautier, like Mirecourt, Maurice, and Borel, was an outspoken critic of the loss of virtue and honour in nineteenth-century society. And like his fellows, he called on tropes of Jewishness to elaborate on his concerns. Depictions of Jews penetrate Gautier’s opus deeply. Very often, these are hateful stereotypes.72 Why, then, did Gautier not follow the lead of others in perceiving the evils of modernity personified in Rachel? In Gautier’s public discussion of her, there is little or no mention of her religion. The uniqueness of his approach merits greater scrutiny. It allows us to go beyond the two poles described so far. Gautier’s reviews of Rachel’s performances abound with praise: she was “admirably beautiful;”73 “incredible perfection,”74 and an “incomparable magician.”75 Gautier was a deep admirer of Rachel’s ability to achieve what he saw as perfection. Gautier’s romanticism was in many ways a search for an ideal. Gautier was obsessed with beauty. His friend Charles Baudelaire called him “the exclusive love of the Beautiful.”76 In the preface to his Jeunes-France, Gautier stated that he preferred “the painting to the object that it represents,”77 or, later, that he preferred “marble to flesh.”78 He could give no higher praise than to state that Rachel had “a deep feeling for statuary.”79 Similar references are rife in his reviews. Gautier would watch her, “like a sculptor studying all the

71  Gautier’s critical opus includes more than 1,400 articles spanning art, literature, theatre, ballet and opera criticism. Gautier worked as a critic for La Presse for nineteen years, between 1836 and 1855, when he moved to Le Moniteur, the official government organ. 72  Julie Kalman, Orientalizing the Jew: Culture, Religion and Imperialism in NineteenthCentury France (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2017). 73  Théophile Gautier, “Revue dramatique. Melle Rachel,” [Obituary] Le Moniteur universel, January 11, 1858, 423. 74  Théophile Gautier, La Presse, March 3, 1851. 75  Théophile Gautier, La Presse, February 14, 1853. 76  Charles Baudelaire, “Théophile Gautier,” L’Artiste, March 13, 1859, 166. 77  Théophile Gautier, preface to Jeunes-France, 28, quoted in Paul Bénichou, Romantismes français II: Les Mages romantiques; L’École du désenchantement (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1964. 78  Théophile Gautier, “Sommités contemporaines. M. Th. Gautier,” in L’Illustration, March 9, 1867, quoted in Bénichou, L’Ecole du désenchantement, 1965. 79  Théophile Gautier, “Revue dramatique. Melle Rachel.” [Obituary] Le Moniteur universel, January 11, 1858, 424.

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angles of a statue.”80 Her Electra was “sculpted from pure, sparkling marble.”81 For Rachel, a role was a statue that she “sculpted from thick alexandrine block.”82 Thus, for Gautier, Rachel was art, and for this he idealized her. Gautier’s friend Pétrus Borel might have seen the 1844 production of Phèdre as a cynical exploitation of French culture in the name of Jewish greed. In Gautier’s eyes, however, Rachel’s acting represented an ideal. Whether she played Phèdre or Horace, and to what end, had no relevance. In his review of the same production, he noted simply that “the Greek tragedy was played admirably by the Jewish family.”83 This was a rare acknowledgement of Rachel’s Jewishness. In the long obituary Gautier wrote for Rachel, there is not one mention of her religious adherence.84 It is irrelevant, for the most part. Aside from the performance of Phèdre, Rachel’s Jewishness only became visible to Gautier when she represented the Orient, or when, through her choice of roles, she became ancient. Gautier took refuge from the abuses of modernity elsewhere; be it in the distant past, or in the far-off reaches of the Orient. For Gautier, there was a truth and an authenticity to these regions that stood in contrast to the evils of self-interested materialism. They were perfect. So, too, was Rachel. In his words, her Jewishness “bound her to the Orient, and the primitive world.”85 Gautier, as we have seen, did not distinguish: art was beauty, and beauty was art. Rachel’s Jewishness, in this form, became one means for communicating this notion. The Oriental, the ancient, the perfect, was Jewish. Overall, just as, for Mirecourt, Rachel represented Judaism, for Gautier, she represented the perfection of art. In 1855, at the urging of her brother, Rachel went to America. The language gap made American audiences somewhat less enthusiastic than those on the continent. Rachel had been unwell for some time before then with the tuberculosis that was to kill her, and the unsuccessful tour exhausted her. She returned to France to convalesce, spending time in Egypt as well. Her condition continued to deteriorate, and she died in January 1858. Rachel is an example of the extraordinary mobility that Jews could enjoy in post-revolutionary France. In the decades following the Revolution, many Jews—like Rachel —entered French life with great enthusiasm and optimism. 80  Théophile Gautier, La Presse, April 7, 1845. 81  Théophile Gautier, La Presse, December 8, 1845. 82  Théophile Gautier, La Presse, March 9, 1846. 83  Théophile Gautier, La Presse, December 14, 1846, 2. 84  Théophile Gautier, “Revue dramatique. Melle Rachel.” [Obituary] Le Moniteur universel, January 11, 1858. 85  Théophile Gautier, La Presse, March 9, 1846.

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French society allowed them to do so. Rachel was a peripheral figure, because she was female, because she was Jewish, because she was born outside France, and because she chose to be an actress. She was able, nonetheless, to find a path to the center of French culture, and to be widely accepted as its mouthpiece. This is reflective of the nature of French nationalism, where citizens enjoyed similar opportunities, but were required to restrict specificities to the private sphere, according to an ideology of equality that translated to an emphasis on sameness. In the very public sphere that was the stage, French nationalism allowed for the possibility of a meteoric rise. This is how a figure such as Rachel, but also Meyerbeer, was able to legitimately perform French culture. Yet Rachel was significant then—as she is now—precisely because she was not the same. Rachel was a Jew, who defiantly performed her Jewishness in the public sphere, and while she had her two sons baptized, she herself remained Jewish, notwithstanding some very public efforts to persuade her to convert. Much of Rachel’s notoriety can be understood in terms of her chosen profession. Women of the theater served, in Berlanstein’s concluding words, “as a site [. . .] for projecting dominant political ideologies.” The power that their celebrity endowed was, for men, cause for anxiety, and thus: fear and resentment, not reason, periodically came to the fore. Hence, the astounding resiliency of ancient prejudices. Men applied the classic collective techniques of evading responsibility: stereotyping, demonizing, and projecting guilt.86 Rachel’s celebrity can explain the discourses that surrounded her to an extent. As a successful and feted actress—a celebrity—she was highly visible. She was equally visible, however, as a Jew. She might fit in Berlanstein’s tale of French women on the stage. However, she is also central to the history of Jews in France. Thinking about Jews such as Rachel allowed the French to conceptualize and articulate their own thinking about the questions that held particular importance for them. It allowed commentators such as Mirecourt to situate “morality in a narrative context.”87 Insofar as someone such as Mirecourt was moral, he was looking to explain a given understanding of the world. But if Jews such as Rachel could function as totemic devices in debates around the nature of nationhood, then this was not just in negative ways. Jews could also assume positive attributes. They could symbolize authenticity, an adherence to ancient roots that enabled the bringing to light of the greatness 86  Lenard Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 241. 87  Lionel Gossman, “Anecdote and History,” History and Theory 42.2 (May 2003), 146.

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of authentic French culture. Thus, for example, in the eyes of Janin, Rachel was fully deserving of her fame. Or Rachel could transcend her Jewishness, and come to represent the purity of art itself. This, of course, was the view of Théophile Gautier. Yet Gautier, for whom the distant was always perfect, also distinguished between a distant Jewishness, fixed in perfection, and the immediate, and very much imperfect Jewishness of his own world. If a figure such as Rachel could have conflicting meanings attached to her, Jewishness itself could become a mobile quality. Commentators such as Mirecourt, Maurice and Borel were certain about the meaning of Jewishness. For Gautier, Jewishness was a malleable quality, and it could take on different meanings as required. It is telling that he never saw Rachel’s real-world Jewishness as significant. He could not allow for this to be the case, when he had elevated her to the realm of his beloved perfection. That Rachel’s Jewishness, for Gautier, was a second-order category, subordinate to her talent, becomes clear when we make space for all of the ways that Jewishness figured in commentary on Rachel. This approach allows the significance and the meaning of this commentary to become clear, and this way, it opens an important point of intersection between French history, and the history of Jews in France.

Chapter 12

Disunity in Death: Jewish Funerals in the Jewish Press in Mid-Nineteenth Century Paris1 Jeffrey Haus In the middle of the nineteenth century, many French Jews had entered—or hoped to enter—the upwardly mobile middle class. As numerous studies have shown, the process of economic integration among Jews lent itself to a degree of emulation of the non-Jewish middle class in terms of education, family organization, professional diversification, and material culture.2 These shifts in turn produced considerable ripples within the religious realm, eventually finding their way into the rituals of death. In France, changes in death practices mirrored these broader trends and marked fractures within the Jewish communal structure. The portrayal of these modifications in the Parisian Jewish press also suggests that a reconfiguration of French Jewish communal priorities and structures took place during the nineteenth century. Funeral practices in France have attracted considerable scholarly attention over the years. A significant literature developed after the 1960s, yielding important insights and frameworks concerning attitudes toward death and

1  Research for this essay was made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation New Directions Initiative and a Mellon Sabbatical Enhancement Grant. I am also grateful for the invaluable assistance of M. Philippe Landau of the Consistoire de Paris, M. Jean-Claude Kuperminc of the Bibliothèque de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, and to the staffs of the Kalamazoo College Library, the Microform Room at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Library, and The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. All translations are by the author. 2  This approach has transcended geographic borders. See, for example, David Biale, “Jewish Consumer Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective,” Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, ed. Gideon Reuveni and Nils H. Roemer (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 23–38; Paula S. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

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dying in different regions and periods.3 While the focus of these inquiries has shifted over time, it has largely concentrated on non-Jewish populations. In recent years the subject of death and dying in Jewish life has received renewed scholarly interest. This research tends to deal with the theological roots of Jewish death rites in textual sources, the significance of death as a communal concept, and the content of ritual decisions.4 Burial rituals formed important communal pillars for French Jews as they navigated the demands of modernity and citizenship. As Avriel Bar-Levav argues, death has traditionally held a dual status within Judaism. On one hand, death occupies a marginal social position in Jewish life, especially in terms of time (specifically designated periods of mourning and memorial) and space (cemeteries, usually removed from communal centers).5 During the Middle Ages, death came to occupy a more central role in Jewish life, with the hevra qaddisha (burial society) becoming a common feature of Jewish communities 3  Philipe Ariès initially set the template for the field in the 1970s with two important works, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975) and L’homme devant la mort (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977). Thomas Kselman has since tackled the issue on the level of Catholic popular religious history in Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), while Avner Ben-Amos’s Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) addresses state funerals as a means of establishing a national French historical and political narrative. For a broad overview of this phase of the historiography, see Régis Bertrand, “L’histoire de la mort, de l’histoire des mentalités à l’histoire religieuse,” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, 86: 217 (2000), 551–9. 4  Patricia Hidiroglou has studied the development of Jewish funeral practices primarily from an ethnographic point of view. Isabelle Meidinger and Zvi Jonathan Kaplan have written about the process of laicization of Jewish cemeteries during the Third Republic, but largely within the context of the relationship between Judaism and the government apparatus that oversaw it. Jay Berkovitz has explored funeral rituals among French Jews, mostly as case studies for attitudes toward the exercise of religious leadership and communal authority in modern France. See Patricia Hidiroglou, Rites funéraires et pratiques de deuil chez les juifs en France (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1999); Isabelle Meidinger, “Laïcisation and the Jewish Cemeteries in France: The Survival of Traditional Jewish Funeral Practices,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 1: 1 (2002), 36–48.; Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and Problem of Church and State (Providence RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2009), 85–9; Jay R. Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 51, 81, 142, 192, 193, 200. For an overview of recent scholarship on the pre-modern era, see Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs Among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities, ed., Stefan C. Reif, Andreas Lehnhardt, and Avriel Bar-Levav (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014). 5  Avriel Bar-Levav, “Jewish Attitudes towards Death: a Society between Space, Time, and Texts,” ed. Stefan Reif, et al, Death in Jewish Life, 6.

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in Spain and elsewhere. The rise of the hevra qaddisha, Bar-Levav notes, signaled a greater emphasis among Jews on the notion of a “ ‘proper’ or ‘good’ death” involving prescribed rites of passage and agreed upon ceremonies employing the recitation of canonical texts.6 Bar-Levav’s insightful analysis thus points to a process of evolving Jewish attitudes toward death relative to the internal context in which different Jewish communities existed. In this scenario, Jewish communities developed broadly unified concepts of appropriate ritual practice, which in turn led to greater internal cohesion. French Jewish funeral practice also developed an outer-directed dynamic during the nineteenth century, when death became a more public ritual. BenAmos places state funerals during the Third Republic within Victor Turner’s rubric of “social drama,” a distinctively public rite of passage involving conflict, controversy, and either the reintegration of the different parties or the acknowledgment of an irreconcilable breach between them.7 While one should not lump all Jewish funerals into this category, changes to Jewish death rituals at mid-century did take on the element of public displays meant to transmit images of social norms from one segment of the population to another. As French Jews began to emulate the practices of their non-Jewish social and economic counterparts, these rituals displayed changes to the norms of Jewish life as well as death. A significant point of contention regarding many of these signals involved discomfort over the increasing demonstration of economic upward mobility through Jewish death rituals, which in turn revealed the fragmentation of French Jewry along economic lines. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the social theorist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe the spending habits of what he called the “leisure class”: those who had amassed sufficient wealth to avoid the need for daily labor. Public displays of wealth, Veblen argued, illustrated the existing power structure within a society. One accumulated items to enhance one’s own “comfort and well-being,” but also as a means of establishing and maintaining one’s social superiority.8 In fact, by the time Veblen created this category, the process his term denoted had existed for some time and was no less prominent in nineteenth-century France than in the American setting of Veblen’s work. Embourgeoisement carried with it material demands, and emerging French social and economic elites used conspicuous consumption to separate themselves from the lower classes. “[French] bourgeois consumers,” the historian Whitney Walton later 6  Ibid., 12–3. 7  Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory, 252–3. 8  Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, 1953, 64.

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concluded, “promoted a standard of taste that effectively limited the acquisition of durable, stylish, comfortable furnishings and clothing to their own class.” Amassing luxury goods constituted “a visible sign of membership” in the elite directly tied to one’s economic status.9 These “standards of taste” carried with them a price tag that acted as an economic barrier protecting and distinguishing the elites from their social and economic inferiors. Consumption could also delineate other lines of distinction, such as gender.10 Following this trend, certain aspects of internal Jewish communal life also became more “conspicuous” in nineteenth-century France. This new tendency signaled an assertion of Jewish belonging in France through the legitimation of death ceremonies as public rituals. In addition to fancier funeral processions and tombstones, some Jewish death rituals began to move out of their traditional private sites in the home and assumed more visible places at synagogues and cemeteries. Through the publication of obituaries, the French Jewish press also brought the deaths of notable Jews into a visible communal sphere. Both of these modifications influenced the development of what I will call “conspicuous death” among nineteenth-century French Jews: an outer-directed dynamic in which death rituals both equated French Jews with their non-Jewish economic peers and differentiated them from their economic inferiors. Consequently, Bar-Levav’s concept of ‘good’ or ‘proper’ death took on economic as well as religious characteristics. Death could divide upwardly mobile Jews from their less wealthy coreligionists, instead of connecting them as death rituals were traditionally intended to do. The development of the Parisian Jewish press facilitated this process by ­publicizing—and again, after Bar-Levav’s term, “centralizing”—Jewish death. At times, press items expressed dissatisfaction with French Jewish funeral practices and their increasingly demonstrative nature among the upwardly mobile. At other points, the depiction of notable Jewish lives in obituaries framed an ideal image of French Jewish existence. In both instances, the Jewish press abetted the shift of Jewish death to a more central status in French Jewish 9  Whitney Walton, France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 47–8. 10  See, for example, Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France, (Berkeley: University of California, 2001); Victoria Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–70 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” Amerian Historical Review 103: 3 (June 1998), 817–44; Leora Auslander, “The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France,” ed. Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 79–112.

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life. It also provided a forum in which French Jews debated the desirability of these changes and their consequences. Through editorials, correspondence, and reportage, the French Jewish press advocated certain practices and disdained others. By introducing, praising, or criticizing modifications in death practices, press coverage helped to shape a more outer-directed template for French Jewish communal life.11 This new conspicuous character served a number of purposes. First, it sought to weave French Judaism more deeply into the French social tapestry by demonstrating compatibility between Jewish and French burial practice. Just as the goals and activities of Jewish charity and philanthropy emulated those common among middle-class French Catholics and Protestants,12 Jewish burials began to resemble those of their non-Jewish counterparts. By making these practices their own, upwardly mobile French Jews portrayed themselves as solid members of the respectable bourgeoisie. Publicizing these changes affirmed the social and political equality of French Jewry and could temper anti-Jewish prejudice. As a result, Jewish acts of charity and philanthropy received regular coverage in the two main Parisian Jewish periodicals, the Archives israélites de France and the Univers israélite, both of which emphasized the consistency of Jewish practices with respectable, mainstream French values.13 Rendering Jewish death more conspicuous similarly touted the alignment of Judaism with these ideals. Altering funeral customs to portray upward mobility, however, presented a more challenging problem than adapting new forms of charitable organization. Traditionally, lifecycle events have formed a significant pillar of Jewish religious and communal life. The need to observe death rituals according to Jewish law has often provided the impetus for the organization of Jewish communal structures. Because every Jew had to face the issue eventually, religious prescriptions surrounding burial often linked individual Jews to the larger group no matter their degree of religious observance in other areas of life. Funerals therefore could provide occasions for validating French Judaism as well as vehicles for criticizing it. 11  For a parallel example in Eastern Europe, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 5, 25, 53. 12   Archives Juives 44, no. 1 (2011). The entire volume was dedicated to exploring changes in French Jewish charity and philanthropy. 13  See my essay, “Conspicuous Charity and Jewish Unity: The Jewish Loterie in Nineteenth Century Paris,” ed. Leonard Greenspoon, Wealth and Poverty in Jewish Tradition (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2015), 185–201.

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A significant portion of both the affirmation and criticism related to economics and class. As mentioned above, traditional Jewish death rituals idealized the equalizing of rich and poor. No matter the economic status of the deceased, according to custom he or she was supposed to be wrapped in a plain white shroud and buried in a simple pine coffin. By contrast, the French system of funeral administration established a hierarchical system of ceremonies, with escalating degrees of pomp as one climbed up the fee schedule.14 Graves themselves occupied separate categories. The most affluent families could build permanent tombs, mausoleums or crypts, while more modest ones could secure permanent graves with simpler headstones. The poorest dead were consigned to temporary graves from which they would be exhumed after five years, their remains deposited in a common grave. This visible class differentiation departed from the Jewish custom of equality in death and potentially abrogated rabbinical prescriptions regarding the mixing of remains. Participating in this conspicuous, hierarchical funeral system thus separated Jews from each other economically, not only in life but in the hereafter. As Jews joined the ongoing national process of economic, cultural, and social integration in France, the religious and cultural necessity of burial became interwoven with the economic and social imperatives of conspicuous consumption. Hidiroglou notes that simplicity of graves was the rule in Alsace prior to the nineteenth century, with Jewish cemeteries manifesting little of the “social cleavages of daily life.”15 Beginning with Napoleon, however, successive French regimes legislatively modified funeral guidelines. With religious burials under the auspices of the Jewish Consistory,16 official Jewish communal organizations such as the Comité de bienfaisance de Paris found themselves compelled to conform to the developing civil burial framework. That framework itself became increasingly influenced by the practices of undertakers who provided different degrees of pomp and luxury according to the government-determined fee schedule.17 When the two main organs of the Parisian Jewish press emerged at midcentury—the Archives israélites first appeared in 1840; the Univers israélite in 1844—the tensions produced by this system occasionally seeped into the open. 14  Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 234. 15  Hidiroglou, Rites funéraires, 32. 16   The Jewish Consistory was a hierarchical administrative structure established by Napoleon in 1806 to oversee Jewish religious affairs in France. Because church and state were united in France from 1801 until 1905, the Consistory was tied to civil law even though it was a religious body. 17  Hidiroglou, Rites funéraires, 43–51.

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In such cases, concern over burial practices often conflated complaints about economic ostentation with broader worries about religious laxity and preserving traditional rituals. In 1841, for example, the Archives israélites published two concurrent articles regarding proposed government reforms of French burial practices. The first summarized a controversy surrounding an attempt by the prefecture of the Seine to reuse parts of the Jewish burial grounds in the Père Lachaise and Montmarte cemeteries for new burials and for the construction of roads on the premises.18 Doing so would have required exhuming some Jewish and non-Jewish graves not purchased in perpetuity and reinterring the remains in common graves. This announcement prompted a call from the Paris Consistory to verify the holders of titles to permanent graves (terrains à perpetuité) in Jewish cemeteries. Many members of the community objected, and loudly: the previous year, the Archives israélites had received a pamphlet decrying both the proposal and the consistorial administration’s apparent compliance with it.19 The issue of exhumation was not a new one. During the Old Regime, burials had often taken place in churchyards, crypts, and other locations internal to communes or towns. Napoleonic law—specifically, the decree of 23 Prairial an XII (June 12, 1804)—ended this practice by mandating burial outside city limits, presumably for reasons of hygiene; it also established procedural guidelines for interment and permitted the decoration of graves. The new system also ordered that those buried in temporary graves be exhumed after five years, their bones deposited in an ossuary, and the gravesite reused.20 This measure created potential problems for Jewish burials. First, it raised the possibility of civil law superseding religious practice, or at least sanctioning deviation from it. The mandate of exhumation directly contradicted Jewish religious law, which specifies minimum distances between graves and discourages burying more than one corpse in the same grave. Fortunately, the Napoleonic decree allowed for the renewal of temporary graves at an additional cost, enabling Jewish families to avoid exhumation. Renewal also appealed to the general Parisian population, at least to those who could afford it.21 At the same time, the prospects of exhumation and the possibility of renewal injected class divisions into the cemetery. As Kselman writes, by focusing more attention on the details of burial the law “succeeded . . . in encouraging a cult of the dead based on devotion to a carefully defined grave.”22 While religious 18   Archives israélites, 1842, 470–1. 19   Archives israélites, 1841, 316. 20  Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 183–4. 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid., 188–9.

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distinctions between the dead remained, the possibility of decorating graves opened the door for conspicuous consumption in the cemetery. Observing traditional Jewish death rituals conceivably could have become a matter of financial wherewithal rather than religious fealty. The editor of the Archives israélites, Samuel Cahen, responded to the budding controversy with a commentary on the relationship between exhumation and Jewish class divisions. Among Jews, he argued, respect for religious death rituals had prevailed even as French Jewry had become less observant. Even those Jews “most removed from religious practices,” he wrote, “do not fail to conform to the established custom when they die.”23 Nevertheless, Cahen also noted the growing predilection among French Jews for erecting tombs, “through which the opulent families among the Jews wish . . . to imitate the Christians.” He derided the ostentation of this practice, holding that the simple tombstone will say enough about the heart of those who cannot or will not give themselves this satisfaction; and the child [or] the friend [of the deceased], penetrated by a true sadness will pray before this stone with no less fervor than if marble decorated the tomb of those who elicit their regrets.24 This critique took broad aim, equating conspicuous burials with the deterioration of attention to Jewish ritual. Although he may have overstated the ritual fidelity of many French Jews, Cahen saw death rituals as literally the last bastion of Judaism among the upwardly mobile. Undermining the equality inherent in this tradition through a show of wealth would erode even this remnant and imperil the survival of French Judaism. At the same time, Cahen took up a popular line of thinking that associated conspicuous consumption with immorality and superficiality. During the 1830s and ‘40s, many French critics viewed the market economy as a dangerous source of social and moral corruption. Standards of bourgeois taste emphasized simplicity and restraint even as conspicuous signs of wealth gained greater prominence.25 In a similar vein, Cahen contended that grandiose tombs provided no more comfort to mourners than did simpler gravestones. What he divined as their true purpose—aggrandizing the wealthy in death—struck him as morally suspect and a significant departure from the traditional parity of Jewish burial practice (as well as from emerging criteria 23   Archives israélites, 1841, 318. 24  Ibid. 25  Tiersten, Marianne in the Market, 96–7; Thompson, Virtuous Marketplace, 9.

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of good taste). Since poor Jews often could not afford the fees for perpetual burials, the government’s proposal left them vulnerable to exhumation after five years. This situation thus created the possibility of an abrogation of Jewish burial law based upon economic inequality, the very situation that traditional Jewish practices had been designed to avoid.26 Dissatisfaction with the situation deepened over the next few years. In 1842, the Central Consistory voted not to oppose the government’s plan, as it had concluded that exhumation might not occur and even if it did, Jewish remains could be reinterred in accordance with Jewish law.27 These assurances did not placate traditionally minded Jews, many of whom worried about the dangers of exhumation. In 1844, the Univers israélite published a fictional dialogue composed by Ben-Baruch, the nom de plume of Alexandre Créhange. Créhange was a frequent contributor to the Univers israélite, championing its goal of preserving Jewish tradition and communal unity as Jews entered into modern life and condemning the divisiveness of economic class28 Ben-Baruch’s imagined dialogue criticized many aspects of Franco-Judaism, including the prospect of exhumation and its unfairness to the Jewish poor. France had long granted Jews their own burial grounds, but now the state wished to renege on this arrangement. The only way to avoid what the author saw as the defilement of Jewish graves was to pay 500f per grave to establish them in perpetuity; for 50f, the Jewish dead could rest for another five years. If not, “the tomb of an honest, charitable, and virtuous man could be desecrated . . . his bones dispersed, and in his place one would put a dead prostitute . . .[and] if this prostitute had 500 francs left over from her vile dealings, she could remain in perpetuity in the grave of the good man.”29 Moral blindness aside, the proposed system left poor Jews at a horrible disadvantage: The poor people cry out, weep, plead and protest, but in vain. Our [consistorial] representatives alone have been heard, and they have surrendered because they can pay the 500f for their tombs and they will be respected; but the poor NO LONGER HAVE A FIELD OF REPOSE IN PARIS [original emphasis].30 26   Archives israélites, 1841, 601–2. 27   Archives israéites, 1842, 478–9. 28  For a more detailed biography of Créhange and an overview of his work, see Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israélite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 112–53. 29   Univers israélite, 1844, 314–5. 30  Ibid., 315.

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The implications of the system proved difficult to ignore. By creating a tiered burial system based on fees, Napoleonic law drove a potential economic wedge between the Jewish poor and their upwardly mobile coreligionists. A later protest in the press also engaged the connection of changing customs and conspicuous death. In March of 1858, the Univers israélite published an article by Prosper Lunel, one of its regular contributors and a prominent Sephardic leader. The Univers israélite aligned with the more traditional sectors of French Jewish life, and consequently its writers often lamented the growing religious laxity among French Jews. Lunel’s letter fit this general profile in that he complained about breaches of Jewish funeral practice by the Comité de bienfaisance (the Jewish charity board) of Paris.31 Lunel’s short letter, like Cahen’s earlier commentary, linked the erosion of tradition among French Jews to economic factors. First, he complained that the present system of burial compelled Jews to pay both a funeral director’s fee and a consistorial tariff, thereby maintaining an unnecessarily high price for Jewish burials. One might have overlooked this problem, he wrote, “[I]f the [burial] services were performed in a manner conforming to religious traditions, with that propriety and exactitude that the families are right to require when they pay so dearly.”32 Unfortunately, Lunel implied, expediency and convenience had trumped religious practice. Among the deleterious consequences, he cited ritual cleansings of the deceased that no longer took place in the home, but rather at the cemeteries themselves; caskets that were opened before being lowered into the grave; the participation of non-Jews in the burial ceremonies; and the habit of one of the funeral porters soliciting charity for the committee from the funeral attendees. Dignity could be enhanced and expenses reduced, he concluded, by doing away with these new practices and adhering more closely to traditional Jewish ones. In a follow-up article in April, Lunel extended his critique of the new trends by focusing on the increasing burden of funeral expenses that weighed upon poorer Jews. The higher fees, he held, reflected badly upon the Comité de bienfaisance:

31  Because the Comité de bienfaisance operated under the auspices of the Paris Consistory, it needed to adhere to civil law even when administering a religious activity such as burials. 32   Univers israélite, 1858, 305.

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If the committee wants to make burials a business like the administration of funeral homes, [then] it is no longer a religious institution; [rather], it has become a commercial one.33 Excessive fees, Lunel asserted, compromised the religious integrity of Jewish burials. Returning to his previous article, Lunel complained that both expense and concern for the cleanliness of their homes had led many French Jews to perform the ritual cleansing of corpses at the cemetery itself rather than in the home (as had been customary). This new practice had resulted in gentile guests and passers-by gawking at the ceremony, and males and females witnessing the cleansing ritual no matter the gender of the corpse. Lunel also chastised the Paris Consistory for charging a burial fee and thereby levying what he termed a “double tax” upon bereaved Jewish families. Even though the price was determined by a sliding scale, civil law mandated that the religious service be included in the cost of a burial; the mourning family should not have needed to pay anything extra for a consistorial rabbi to perform his communal duty. Finally, Lunel pointed out that in the Sephardic communities of Bordeaux cemetery plots were free and had uniform markers that made no differentiation between the rich and the poor.34 By implication, he criticized the ongoing practice of Jews marking their graves with more lavish gravestones and tombs, the same trend that Cahen had condemned seventeen years earlier. Even as he railed against Jewish adoption of French bourgeois burial customs, however, Lunel ignored the economic and logistical barriers that made observing the ritual more difficult for the poor and lower-middle classes. Cleansing a corpse in a family’s residence assumed the existence of adequate room for the body, the attendants, and the family for the twenty-four to fortyeight hours that usually preceded a Jewish burial.35 In Paris, however, the growth of a poor Jewish population meant that many Jews may have lacked the physical space in which to carry out this ritual at home even if they wished to do so. The Paris Consistory therefore sought (and received) permission to construct maisons de purification (purification houses) on cemetery grounds in order to encourage more Jews to maintain this observance. By the 1860s, cleansing of the corpse at the cemetery became so commonplace that the Paris Consistory issued a directive against it, citing the logistical problems of having mourners waiting while the ritual was performed.36 In addition, the use of 33  Ibid., 349. 34  Ibid., 350. 35  Hidiroglou, 107–8. 36  Ibid., 114–5.

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undertakers and funeral parlors became more common as the century moved forward, marking two significant trends: the shift of traditional Jewish home ritual into alternative spaces and the creation of added layers of expense in order to observe Jewish death rituals. Because poor families were less likely to be able to engage the services of a funeral parlor, they might have still maintained the homebound custom, differentiating them further from their more affluent coreligionists. The economic demands of death also stimulated the adaptation of traditional Jewish communal structures. In Paris, for example, Jewish burial societies experienced a gradual resurgence. These groups had long operated in Jewish communities, helping to defray the cost of burial and mourning. During the nineteenth century, the Paris Consistory had assigned these tasks to its Comité de bienfaisance. The committee not only oversaw the burials, but also distributed aid to poor families to ease the hardships of refraining from work during the shiva, the initial seven days of mourning. As the financial burdens of death increased, the burial societies became more important. When the government changed the funeral laws, these groups assured that their members— and other indigent Jews—received individual graves. Some of the societies also raised funds to ensure the renewal of temporary plots for their members, and again sometimes even for indigents who were not members.37 The burial societies also helped to lobby against the reinstitution of the common grave after 1860.38 Nevertheless, their efforts did not fully turn the tide in favor of a simpler Jewish tradition. As the economic situation of Parisian Jews improved, they tended to opt for more expensive funeral arrangements.39 Upward mobility had influenced their notion of what constituted a “good” death. The Jewish press played an influential role in molding the idea of the “good” death. Coverage of notable Jewish funerals idealized certain values. Through this channel, the Archives israélites and the Univers israélite both highlighted differences between the rich and the poor even as they bemoaned the intrusion of luxury into Jewish funerals. By publicizing death within the community, the Jewish press nurtured an outer-directed template that helped to make public what was once private. For the most prominent individuals, a death notice might include an account of funeral services and excerpts from the eulogies. In effect, these articles themselves comprised public eulogies, praising wealthy individuals for their moral virtues and communal involvement. At the same time, they 37  The extent to which the Jewish poor avoided exhumation, however, remains unclear. 38  Hidiroglou, Rites funéraires, 132–60. 39  Ibid., 77.

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stressed the modesty and charity of the deceased, displaying the moral wariness of material acquisition alluded to above. In 1853, for example, the Archives israélites lauded the late Anselme Halphen for specifically forbidding excessive pomp at his funeral. At the cemetery, two eulogists extolled Halphen—a prosperous jeweler who had served as a regent of the Bank of France and a member of the Central Consistory—for his business acumen, collegiality, and charity, but also for his simplicity, his modesty, and his embodiment of “all of the biblical virtues [and] the kindest qualities of our time.”40 Later that year, the Archives israélites noted that the will of Dr. Moïse Cahen—who had been involved in consistorial affairs for more than thirty years and had played an instrumental role in establishing the Rothschild Hospital in Paris— instructed that he be taken to his final rest in a “hearse for the poor” (corbillard des ­pauvres) and buried in a common grave. In his eulogy, Chief Rabbi Lazare Isidor emphasized Cahen’s faithfulness to Jewish religious practice: while serving in the military, Cahen had carried his tefillin and mezuzah with him and always prayed regularly. He retained this moral devotion upon his return to civilian life in France, becoming a doctor for the poor.41 Alongside such glorifications of simplicity, loyalty, and faith appeared visible signs of wealth. Usually, press accounts would refer to the size of one’s funeral procession or the amount of charity donated upon one’s death. Notwithstanding the instructions of Anselme Halphen’s will, for example, “an immense number of [Jewish and Christian] mourners” had joined his funeral procession. They assembled at the cemetery, where the rabbi recited the graveside prayers in French (no doubt for the large numbers of nonJews in attendance) and a choir sang hymns appropriate to the occasion.42 Dr. Moïse Cahen’s simple hearse was also followed by a long cortège of stylish vehicles. In addition, Cahen’s will stipulated that his family distribute 1000f to different charities in the capital (both Jewish and non-Jewish).43 The article recounting the funeral of Mme. Éliza Cerfberr of Strasbourg not only reprinted a lengthy eulogy, but also noted the distribution of 1000f to the Jewish and nonJewish poor.44 David Singer of Paris, who died in 1846, left various donations, including alms of five francs each to a group of 150 poor Jews and Christians who followed his funeral procession. The Univers israélite speculated about what further charitable bequests Singer’s will might have contained, such as a 40   Archives israélites, 1853, 174–5. 41  Ibid., 346–9. 42  Ibid., 174–5. 43  Ibid., 346–7. 44  Ibid., 363–5.

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200f annuity for the Comité de bienfaisance israélite and a gift of 30,000f to the city of Paris. All of these acts moved the journal to characterize Singer’s death as “a new breach . . . in the sacred battalion of elite men which unfortunately grows thinner day by day.”45 The composition of one’s cortège also held importance. Being mourned by other notables reflected favorably upon the deceased, as well as upon the community to which he or she belonged. Consequently, the Archives israélites made sure to note that mourners for Mme. Éloise Esther Bedarride, the wife of “one of the premier lawyers of Montpellier” included “the highest functionaries of the city, the magistrates, [members of] the bar, and a great number of notables.”46 The cortège of Mme. Vidal, the wife of the cantor in Marseille included “the entire community . . . the [members of the local] Consistory, the Chief Rabbi, an aide to the mayor, and a majority of the teachers of the Lycée.”47 The death of the aforementioned David Singer of Paris in 1846 “compelled all notables, [both] Christians and Jews, to expand [his] immense funeral cortège, [thereby demonstrating] that the capital had lost one of its most dignified citizens.”48 The contents of these notices served several different purposes. First, they established their subjects both as Jews and as integrated French citizens, people who moved in both Jewish and Christian circles. The foundation of these credentials rested upon their morals, which became manifest in their charitable activities as well as their professional and social success. These qualities brought them the ultimate testament to a successful life—and thus, a “good death”—namely, a large funeral cortège comprised of other prominent French citizens. By rendering their deaths conspicuous, the Jewish press was able to trumpet communal ideals of both morality and taste. At the same time, announcing the charitable donations of the deceased made public their wealth and influence, acknowledging the economic and social barriers distancing them from poorer Jews. Conspicuous death, like conspicuous consumption, therefore contained inherently divisive elements. The publicizing of Jewish death brought what had been an economically egalitarian, internal communal process into the open as a ritual differentiated by class and social status. Death practices—which had traditionally united Jews across the lines of class—now visibly distinguished between the rich and the poor. Economic, social, and cultural integration, however, did more than weaken the old communal structure; it created new networks in new contexts. 45   Univers israélite, 1846, 13. 46   Archives israélites, 1855, 114–5. 47  Ibid., 1855, 115. 48   Univers israélite, 1846, 13.

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If ­having money encouraged French Jews to modify or depart from traditional death rituals, it also enabled participation in the new practices that remained nonetheless Jewish. Because a lack of money could impede traditional observance, the second half of the nineteenth century saw a rise in the number of Jewish burial societies to maintain the links in death between poorer Jews and their upwardly mobile coreligionists. As the anticlerical campaigns of the Third Republic gained momentum, Jewish religious leaders saw funerals as opportunities to maintain their own relevance and to connect their community to its religious traditions.49 Like Samuel Cahen in the 1840s, they considered the funeral service perhaps the last site of possible Jewish edification, if not for the deceased then for the living. Mourning rituals—notably the prayer for the dead and annual commemoration services—also began to migrate from the home to the synagogue. Traditional institutions and practices thus combined with new ones to fill the void left by the transformation of death rituals as French Jewish leaders worked to preserve communal unity. The Jewish press performed a crucial function in this didactic process, spreading the notion of a “good death” among its readership and establishing the moral, cultural, and religious ideal to which all French Jews should aspire. For some Jews, these changes might have implied a step away from Jewish tradition; for others, they represented a legitimate option within a broadening scope of authentic Jewish activity. 49  Hidiroglou, Rites funéraires, 202–3.

Chapter 13

Not as Simple as “Bonjour”: Synagogue Building in Nineteenth-Century Paris1 Saskia Coenen Snyder In September, 1871, a perturbed reader named Alexandre Weill penned a long letter to the popular French-Jewish newspaper, the Archives israélites de France, in which he complained about the agonizingly slow pace of constructing a new consistorial synagogue in Paris. Comparing the French capital to London, Weill observed that across the English Channel the process of completing a new synagogue appeared comparatively simple. In London, he wrote: When a congregation wants to build a synagogue, here is how it goes. First they vote on the budget, then they nominate a committee composed of serious men who take care of the affair themselves. This committee purchases a plot, submits plans that are examined and subject to critique by the press, [and] then, with the aid of an architect who also surveys the work himself, the synagogue is built by the end of the second year, not by a miracle, but by the accomplishments of each [man involved]. It is the work of Christopher Columbus, it is as simple as bonjour. In Paris, there is no lack of works, but Columbus is replaced by numerous Amerigos who do not personally navigate and who only provide their names . . . The Jewish community in London has built four synagogues, one more beautiful than the other, in the best neighborhoods in the city and within two years. It didn’t have to enter into negotiations over location with [the prefect] Haussmann. It didn’t accept the degrading condition of not having the principal entrance on a leading thoroughfare; and instead of allowing money to be wasted, it required strict accounting of the state of finances.

1  This essay is based on chapter four, entitled “We Want a Synagogue; the Jews of Paris Are Ready to Pay for It,” of my book Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), which analyzes synagogue building in comparative urban settings. I wish to thank Harvard University Press for granting the right to reprint a selection of this chapter.

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The most notable Jews of London . . . occupy themselves with their own affairs and don’t entrust them to intermediaries and subsidiaries.2 Presenting the London community as practical and responsible, Weill expressed discontent not merely with what seemed to be endless negotiations between the parties involved, but also with the Paris community’s “degrading” lack of autonomy. For Weill and others, London became a model; they admired what appeared to be Anglo-Jewry’s efficiency in completing building initiatives, the commitment on the part of committee members, and, most of all, their level of control over aesthetic representation in the public sphere. Paris Jews admired the dignified synagogues that appeared on the London scene, built by Jews for Jews, without the administrative meddling of the state. That French Jews did not have control over all forms of religious expression therefore constituted a source of great frustration. The aggravation expressed by Weill and contemporaries like him was understandable. The only consistorial synagogue in the city offered seats for about 1,000 worshippers, while the Jewish population had risen to approximately 25,000 by the early 1870s.3 The Central and Paris Consistories, which constituted the administrative centers of French Jewry, had promised new synagogues for decades. They had secured financial commitments from the state, issued obligations to raise funds in the Jewish community, debated possible locations, and met with the prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, at Hotel de Ville on several occasions. Yet the delays continued, 2  Alexandre Weill, “Les Juifs de Londres,” Les Archives israélites de France [AI] 32, no. 17 (September, 1871): 239–47. The article also appeared in the Jewish Chronicle: “The Jews of London,” JC no. 129 (September 15, 1871): 6. 3  In the early 1870s, approximately 25,000 Jews called Paris their home, some 26 percent of the French Jewish population, approximately 1.5 percent of the city population as a whole. Their numbers would reach 40,000 by 1891, which rendered Paris among the largest Jewish communities in the world. For statistical data on the French Jewish and Paris Jewish communities, see Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 103–7. In 1808, 79 percent of French Jews lived in Alsace-Lorraine and 6 percent in Paris; in 1861 these figures were 57 percent and 26 percent respectively. In 1872, 48 percent of Jewish men in Paris and 36 percent of women were natives of Alsace-Lorraine. See also Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1977), 3–25; Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 41–3; D. Bensimon, “Socio-demographic Aspects of French Jewry,” European Judaism 12, no. 1 (1978): 12–6.

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sometimes caused by overextended budgets and disagreements over who would pay for what, but at other times due to unexpected national crises, such as the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, which rendered Paris a city under siege and consequently halted all urban development projects. When Benoit Levy, a regular contributor to the Archives israélites, impatiently exclaimed in 1863, “My God! What does it take for us to build a synagogue?” he did not realize it would take over another decade before both the rue de la Victoire and the rue des Tournelles synagogues were inaugurated.4 A closer look at Paris within a comparative European context reveals that Weill was on to something; that in the city of light, synagogue building took on a very different dimension than in other capitals. Whereas in London, for example, the Jewish community initiated and completed building plans more or less autonomously, or in Berlin, where the city authorities were involved only to the extent of requesting and receiving permits, in Paris the local Jewish community, the Central and Paris Consistories, the Ministry of the Interior, the prefecture, the Travaux de la Ville de Paris, and other government agencies played important roles in practically the entire decision-making process.5 The French government made substantial financial contributions and donated city property that added up to millions of francs, but government support also meant handing over control to an ‘outside’ administrative power that claimed authority over matters such as location, choice of architect, size, style, finances, and visibility. Constructing a public building necessitated constant negotiations with the civic authorities and led to frequent interventions. Synagogues—in fact, all religious edifices—became essentially government property and as such, were part of the state’s pervasive bureaucracy. Consequently, synagogue building in the French capital was a complex and inevitably time-consuming undertaking. The central role of the French government in Jewish affairs, including synagogue building, was not new during the Second Empire and the Third 4  Benoit Levy, “Desiderata,” AI 24, no. 23 (December 1, 1863): 1006–9. In addition to the Victoire and Tournelles synagogues, Parisian Jews inaugurated another house of worship in rue Buffault in 1877. Designed by Stanislas Ferrand in a neo-Romanesque style, the building served the small Sephardic community. There had been efforts to mix Ashkenazi and Sephardic rites in the 1860s so as to create one rite français, but they failed to come to fruition. Since the construction of the rue Buffault synagogue was an independent project, privately funded by the prominent Sephardic philanthropist Daniel Osiris Iffla, it is not part of our discussion here. 5  For more on synagogue building in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin, see Saskia Coenen Snyder, Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

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Republic—the complex hierarchy of the French state as a whole included government involvement and oversight in religious matters, whether Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant. With roots in the post-revolutionary era, when Napoleon Bonaparte incorporated the Jews as citizens of his patrie, national and local administrations asserted a great deal of control over the population in return for the right to live as free citizens in a modern state.6 For Christians and Jews alike, this meant that liberty of conscience was guaranteed, that the state paid the salaries of religious officials, that recognized faiths had the legal right to build houses of worship with the financial support of the municipal authorities, but that the latter would determine the whereabouts, appearance, and site of the structure in question.7 6   For more on French Jewish history, see among others Arthur Herzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); Jacques Godechot, “La Revolution française et les Juifs (1789–1799),” in Les Juifs et la Révolution française: Problèmes et aspirations, ed. Bernhard Blumenkranz (Toulouse: E. Privat, 1976); Henri Lucien-Brun, Étude Historique su la condition des Israélites en France depuis 1789 (Lyon, 1900); David Feuerwerker, L’Emancipation des Juifs en France (Paris: A. Michel, 1976); Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhedrin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Simon Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l’israélite: Histoire d’une mutation, 1770–1870 (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein, eds., The Jews in Modern France (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1985), Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); David Cohen, La promotion des Juifs en France a l’époque du Second Empire (1852–1870), 2 vols. (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1980); Christine Piette, Les Juifs de Paris (1808–1840): la marche vers l’assimilation (Quebec: Presses de l’Universite Laval, 1983); Jay Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2009); Jean-Jacques Becker and Annette Wieviorka, eds., Les Juifs de France: De la revolution française à nos jours (Paris: Liana Levy, 1998). 7  According to statistics provided by Maxime du Camp in 1870, the large majority of the Paris population (1,851,792 in 1870) was Catholic: 1,760,163 declared themselves Roman Catholic. In addition, there were 19,423 Calvinists, 12,634 Lutherans, and 9,615 members of dissident Protestant sects. The non-Catholics also included 23,434 Jews and 1,572 Muslims and Buddhists. Finally, 13,905 people reported they did not practice any religion while 11,041 held beliefs that the census department was unable to define. See Maxime du Camp, Paris: Ses organes, ses fonctions, et sa vie jusqu’en 1870 (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1870), 407, 706; Adrien

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Before examining synagogue building in particular, we should briefly consider public architecture as a whole in Paris. Unlike other European cities at the time, where independent and semi-independent local bodies of authority competed and overlapped, Paris implemented urban policies through a centralized system of political and administrative control. Whereas in midcentury London, for example, the main thoroughfare between the Strand and Temple Bar was divided between seven different paving authorities, each of which had its own set of regulations and time schedules, the municipal authorities in Paris resembled a pyramid of order and efficiency: Louis-Napoleon appointed the minister of the interior, who stood in close contact with the capital’s prefect, who, in turn, made recommendations to the city council and the numerous municipal offices located in Hotel de Ville, such as architecture, sanitation, streets, river navigation, railways, hospitals, and public parks and gardens. Compared to this highly centralized system, boasted Haussmann in his memoirs, London was but “a veritable jungle of areas and authorities” that could not even keep up “the pretense of management.”8 What made nineteenth-century Paris so distinctive was precisely the dominant role of the government in building and design. Whereas in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin practitioners worked as free agents, producing a cityscape that reflected their own artistic vision, in Paris both civil and private architects were obliged to conform to strict regulations, from street width and building height to facade decorations, balcony projections, and even tree lines and ground coverage. The artistic freedom of architects was therefore limited by law. Because so many buildings fell under direct government control— including monuments, city halls, churches, and law courts, as well as prisons, hospitals, theaters, libraries, and schools—the authorities had the power to Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, vol. 1, From the Revolution to the Third Republic, trans. John Dingle (New York: Herder & Herder, 1961). 8  Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Mémoires, 3 vols. (Paris: Victor Havard, 1890–93). Haussmann is quoted in Chapman and Chapman, The Life and Times of Baron Haussmann (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957), 117–8. Chapman and Chapman explain that the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was created in 1855, had no intention of tackling administrative problems as a whole: “The existing fragmentary structure was left unchanged. The Metropolitan Board of Works was merely an additional body superimposed on the old parish councils . . . Unlike the Prefecture, the Board of Works had no powers of enforcement over the local authorities, and the vestries and district boards often ignored its regulations. At the same time, the Board itself was subject only to the very loosest general control by the central government” (118–9). For more on London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, see Gloria Clifton, Professionalism, Patronage, and Public Service in Victorian London: The Staff of the Metropolitan Board of Works, 1856–1889 (London: Athlone, 1992).

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exert great influence on urban form. Paris was therefore a city in which private and institutional architecture was strictly disciplined. Indeed, maintains art historian David Van Zanten, Never before or since in France during the years 1830s to 1870 was government control of architecture and urbanism so pervasive and powerful; never before or since was the corps of government architects so tightly organized and so dominant within the profession . . . French architecture was the state art, a circumscribed and refined arena for the expression of the character and power of the regime and the “policing” of society, parallel to ceremonial etiquette, dress, and furnishings.9 The Bâtiments Civils, which was responsible for the major government structures in the capital, exemplified the tight control of the state over building initiatives and the city’s bureaucratic complexity. It consisted of a service ordinaire, in charge of already existing structures, and a service extraordinaire, dedicated to the construction of new buildings. With regard to the latter, each project was assigned a chief architect, an architect-inspector, an auditor, an under-inspector, and an office assistant. The chief architect presented the drawings and progress reports to the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils, an advisory council that consisted of a president, a director, four inspectors, and a host of auditors and honorary members. After the Conseil had approved a construction project, it was passed on to the next official in the chain of command, the minister of the interior, and ultimately to the emperor. To make matters even more complex, the Bâtiments Civils was not the only service directly involved in construction and design; there were other parallel institutions that functioned in similar capacity, such as the Ministère de l’Instruction Publiques et des Cultes, the Edifices Diocésains, Monuments Historiques, and the Travaux d’Architecture of the City of Paris, each of which employed architects as municipal administrators. The last service, the Travaux d’Architecture, pertains to our story here as it is one of the subdivisions of the Travaux de la Ville de Paris that provided approval for the construction of synagogues. Whereas the right to public worship and to financial support was guaranteed by the state (through the Ministry of Religion), the actual construction and design of houses of worship fell under the municipal leadership of the City of Paris. The Travaux d’Architecture was one of the five subdivisions that supervised, among others, promenades, 9  David Van Zanten, Building Paris: The Architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 46.

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squares, and churches and that inspected the design plans and budget submitted by the architect d’arrondissement, in our case Alfred-Philibert Aldrophe for the Victoire synagogue. Similar in infrastructure to the Bâtiments Civils, the Travaux d’Architecture had a person in command (from 1860 to 1871 the architect Théodore Ballu), who then answered to the director, Victor Baltard, who stood in contact with the prefect of the Seine, Haussmann. We can begin to understand why Alexandre Weill was so frustrated with the building process as it took years for designs, budgets, and locations to be inspected, approved, and finally carried to completion. David Van Zanten has shown convincingly in his study of Paris that the architects assigned to public buildings had much less authority over urban form than did the advisory boards, which had the power to enforce design adjustments or to reject proposals altogether. Forced to adhere to strict building regulations and to please the superiors in the chain of command, architects were limited in what they could do. Moreover, adds Van Zanten, it is remarkable how little influence the occupants of particular buildings really had. Bureaucratic protocol required architects to consult with occupants in formulating their initial design. But surviving records about this preliminary consultation are slight, and there is little evidence that occupants were consulted after the project was sent to the advisory boards, the minister, and finally to the Chamber of Deputies for funding. It was, then, “the advisory boards who constituted the consistent, dominant patrons and overseers of French government architecture.”10 As we will see later, this pattern seems to have been consistent with regard to synagogue construction. Jewish building committee minutes reveal that members spent much more time and energy on securing approval for a suitable location and for municipal funding than on the question of architectural style. Haussmann’s power over Paris’ urban geography was considerable: he designated the members of the municipal council, he supervised a legion of engineers and architects who worked under him, and he stood in direct contact with the Emperor. The prefect, in the words of Anthony Sutcliffe, was “the senior executive of central government power in Paris and its suburbs.”11 Haussmann 10  Van Zanten, Designing Paris, 134–5. 11  Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 85. See also Henry Russel Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958); Michel Ragon. Histoire de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme modernes, I. Ideologies et pionniers, 1800–1910 (Paris: Casterman, 1986); B. Chemetov and B. Marrey, Architectures: Paris 1848–1914 (Paris: Dunod, 1983); François Loyer, Histoire de l’architecture française. De la Révolution a nos jours (Paris: Mengès, 1999).

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prided himself on this prominent position, describing himself as the emperor’s right hand who saw Napoleon on a daily basis and who conducted all his business with him directly. This is of importance to us here as the prefect became intimately involved in the construction process of the new synagogues during the late 1850s and 1860s; his name regularly appears in building committee minutes and committee members met with him on numerous occasions. Haussmann was not merely the primary mover and shaker in the transformation of Paris; he was also one of the main figures to determine the visual form of Jewish expression in the Paris landscape and the liaison between the Jewish community and the French head of state. Haussman had not been trained as a professional city planner, nor as an architect, engineer, or surveyor. Rather, he was a highly pragmatic administrator and politician who viewed the redevelopment of Paris as a technical challenge that could be solved by creating a unity of space, i.e., by connecting various railway stations and main roads, facilitating communication and movement between a functional city center and its peripheral districts, customizing architectural design to function, and linking Paris to surrounding cities in France. What is so intriguing about Haussmann is his unflinching concern for detail in order to achieve this totality of urban space. He was obsessed with exact spatial alignments and synchronization, and took his surveillance and manicuring of public spaces to authoritarian heights. Motivated by the concern that there should be order in all things, Haussmann worked energetically to realize his utilitarian concept for Paris in which every construction project falling under his jurisdiction served a purpose. He gave precise instructions to architects on the size, style, and planning of new public buildings. The construction of Jewish houses of worship, then, and Haussmann’s central role in it, cannot be assessed outside of this larger vision. Synagogues, as any other public building, were to fit harmoniously into his planned city. Let us turn to one of the consistorial synagogues under construction in the 1860s and 1870s, the rue de la Victoire synagogue. Never before had European city authorities made such a financial commitment to the construction of a Jewish house of worship as with the rue de la Victoire synagogue. Obligated by law to support organized state religions, Paris officials agreed to provide subsidies to defray expenses, not merely for the Victoire building in the ninth arrondissement, but also for the rue des Tournelles synagogue in the Marais. After years of deliberations, Haussmann communicated in a letter to Gustave de Rothschild, the president of the Paris Consistory, that he had approved plans and estimates, which would “add up to 1,580,000 francs for the first synagogue, 867,350 for the second, for a total of 2,448,000 francs.” Adding the sum of

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960,000 francs for the plot, he declared, “as well as the estimated 335,000 francs for the building in rue des Tournelles, which belongs to the city, then we see an expense that adds up to 3,743,000 francs . . . the total [of which] will be split in half by the city and the Consistory.”12 To begin the project, the prefect advised Jewish authorities to take out a mortgage of two million francs at 5 percent interest, 700,000 of which was to be paid to the city by March 1865, another 700,000 by March of the following year, and the remainder by the time both works were completed. These numbers, predictably, made people fall off their chairs, and complaints began to pour in. One former administrator named Leven wrote to the Archives israélites to “call its readers’ attention to the gravity of the financial measures adopted by the Paris Consistory,” which would put the future of the Jewish community in peril. To meet its financial responsibilities, Jewish leaders had to come up with an annual installment of 110,714 francs, a commitment, Leven argued, that could not be honored.13 Failure to do so would consequently lead to a state of affairs highly embarrassing to the larger public and hang over the next generation’s head like Damocles’s sword. Similar concerns had already been raised years earlier at communal meetings. In April 1862, a member of the Paris Consistory named Bénédict Allegri had tried to make the case that estimates were too high and that an expense of one million francs would “show a commitment to the building projects” just as well. His colleague Michel Alcan replied that “in principle he shared Allegri’s opinion,” but that efforts at economizing had come to naught and that “there [was] no going back over the issue of contribution since the Consistory [was] already 12  Baron Haussmann, “Questions Administratives: Préfecture du Départment de la Seine,” AI 26 (1865): 25–7. Earlier estimate proposals had been rejected by the municipal administration because they were deemed too high. The UI reported, “The Consistory had presented the prefect with a magnificent plan of the new synagogue at the rue de la Victoire, drawn up by our coreligionist Alfred Aldrof [sic]; but this plan was returned to the Consistory so as to reduce the estimates, which were too high to the administration . . . [It] responded with wisdom that, if one estimates 2,400,000 francs for one temple alone, not a lot will remain for the building of a second, [and] the city is not willing or able to compete in these constructions for the sum of 1,500,000 francs.” As a result, Aldrophe needed to modify his designs and budget, which eventually received approval. See Prosper Lunel, “Les Nouveaux Temples de Paris. Le Consistoire et la Communauté,” UI 19, no. 4 (December 1863): 165–7. 13  Leven, “Culte: La Question du Moment,” AI 26 (1865): 64–8. Leven made these calculations based on the assumption that the Consistory would issue 6,667 obligations of 300 francs apiece, at 5 percent interest, and refundable for 500 francs over the course of ­seventy-five years.

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engaged with the prefect about these figures . . . Under these conditions alone the prefect . . . consented to follow up on the project.”14 Moreover, warned one committee member, “the authorities could argue that any hesitation, any uncertainty, should delay aid,” which would permanently halt all building initiatives.15 Confident that the monetary support pledged by the Ministry of the Interior as well as by wealthy donors within the community would ease financial burdens, and eager to proceed with a building program that had already been debated for over a decade, the Consistory gave the green light. The Consistory was keen on moving things along now that the decision on location had finally been made. For over four years, negotiations with the municipality over possible sites had delayed construction. In the Marais, the old departmental gendarmerie at rue des Francs-Bourgeois was considered a viable option, but the site was already earmarked for the establishment of a new school. The prefect made a counteroffer with a lot at rue Geoffroy Lasmir, in the ninth arrondissement, but “this proposition met with objections” on the part of community members because it was not situated in the Jewish d­ istrict.16 A year and a half later Haussmann proposed two different sites in the Marais: the old town hall at Place Royale or the town hall at rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie, both of which were already municipal properties and therefore did not need to be acquired. While the latter option was deemed “insufficient and unsuitable,” the Place Royale plot was approved by members of the Consistory. Minutes of an 1864 meeting, however, record that Haussmann sent a letter to the Jewish community, informing officials, “[We] cannot build two synagogues for four million francs”—suggesting that estimates exceeded obtainable funds—and that the construction projects had to be postponed.17 The location of the future Victoire synagogue, too, was contentious. In 1860, Gustave de Rothschild paid a visit to Haussmann’s office at Hotel de Ville, where he informed the prefect of the Consistory’s preference for building an additional synagogue, this one in the ninth district “because [it] would find more resources there.” Haussmann responded favorably to Rothschild’s insinuation of Jewish philanthropic guarantees, although he reminded him that “the magistrate [had] the intention to treat the Jewish religion similar to all other religions on the condition that their monuments [would] be municipal.” In other words, subsidized synagogues would be city property and their 14  Association Consistoriale Israélite de Paris Archives (hereafter cited as ACIP): AA6— Procés Verbaux du Consistoire de Paris. Minutes of April 2, 1862, 262–3. 15   A CIP: AA6—Minutes of November 14, 1861, 246–7. 16   A CIP: AA6—Minutes of October 28, 1862, 281–2. 17   A CIP: AA6—Minutes of September 29, 1864, 331–2.

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c­ onstruction would be subject to building regulations. Rothschild replied, “the Jewish community has always been hesitant to make such concessions since [the powers that be] can arrange to their own liking the space of the synagogue,” a fear that the prefect “assured [him] was unfounded . . . The Jewish administration would remain free in this regard.”18 That this freedom had limitations, however, is clear from the debates over the synagogue’s location and exterior space. For instance, Haussmann rejected a proposal that situated the building on rue Olivier, facing the attractive rue de Chateaudun, because its proximity to the Notre-Dame de Lorette and Sainte-Croix de la Trinité churches (both of which were located on side streets) “could result in inconveniences.” The prefect’s objections were largely pragmatic. Haussmann, with his usual obsession with details and micromanagement, opted to avoid any chance of obstructing the flow of traffic on one of the arteries in his new city. Particularly on Christian and Jewish holidays, the mix of crowds and coaches could lead to unnecessary congestion. He discussed the matter with the director of municipal affairs, Mr. Noyon, and fellow architect Victor Baltard, the director of the Travaux d’Architecture de la Ville de Paris, neither of whom offered a solution. While l’Univers israélite scoffed at Haussmann’s objection as most Jewish worshippers walked to services—”Has monsieur le Préfet seen many carriages in front of our synagogues on the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays?”—we cannot underestimate the degree to which he was concerned with segregating functions to achieve rational order.19 The prefect thought of the city, as David Harvey has shown, “as a totality rather than a chaos of particular projects” and Paris as a totality would operate well only in unobstructed motion.20 In fact, this is precisely why the members of the Consistory bristled at Haussmann’s counteroffer, “the sad alleyway of rue de la Victoire.”21 Consistory minutes stated: 18  A CIP: AA5—Minutes of November 5, 1860, 219–20. 19  “Bulletin,” L’Univers israélite 24, no. 7 (February 1, 1869): page unknown. 20  David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2005), 13. Haussmann does not appear to have harbored anti-Jewish sentiments. Chapman and Chapman maintain that Haussmann worked well with French Jews, not only with Alphonse Alphand, a Jewish civil engineer in charge of city parks and gardens, but also with the Pereire brothers, Emile and Isaac, who were the prime movers within the Crédit Mobilier. Emile Pereire was one of the few men that Haussmann talked of in terms of “sincere friendship and affection.” Chapman and Chapman, The Life and Times of Baron Haussmann, 87. 21  A common expression in Paris at the time of the synagogue’s construction was “triste comme la Victoire” (as sad as the Victoire), which emphasized the quiet and unfashionable aspect of the street.

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These [traffic] inconveniences are the sole issue facing the Consistory. Can it accept the synagogue in these conditions? Rue de la Victoire is too narrow; there would be no passage for carriages; on days of great solemnity there would be cluttering; it would go against order, against the dignity that should be inseparable from matters of faith.22 The bourgeois members of the community attending services in the ninth arrondissement were acculturated enough that they would use transportation. For them, spaciousness, orderliness, and refinement were important qualities that affirmed their status as respectable, middle-class citizens. Obtrusive cluttering, on the other hand, would damage the public image of the Israélite Parisien. The aim was not to impress or flaunt, but rather to avoid attention and to smoothly blend into the urban scene. Rue de la Victoire posed an obstacle in this regard. But pragmatism was not the only factor. While Haussmann was primarily interested in flow and uniformity, he also knew that those qualities required, like punctuation, the contrast of a striking monument. Churches could play that emphatic role, but not synagogues. Haussmann saw Jewish houses of worship as falling into the uniformity imperative; they were not supposed to be urban exclamation marks. The Victoire building illustrates this quite well. The bottom half of the synagogue connects seamlessly to the adjacent buildings. The horizontal lines dividing étages continue uninterrupted in the synagogue facade, emphasizing the regularity and symmetry of the street block as a whole. The effect of the building’s grandiose and singular elements—such as the rose window and the semicircular gable—are muted, not merely due to the accent on horizontality, but also due to the narrowness of the street, which obstructs a proper perspective, and due to the repetition of the pale sandstone color. To explain Haussmann’s reluctance to permit Jews architectural distinctiveness as antisemitism would be too strong. The consensus among scholars is that the prefect was not antisemitic and that as a Protestant in France, he had some sensitivity to religious minorities. But it is likely that the prefect, like most Christians, had internalized prevailing attitudes that discouraged granting churches and synagogues equal visual prominence. Moreover, Haussmann’s opportunism and careerism might well have persuaded him to use only Catholic cathedrals as urban focal points. That being said, it is also true that finding city property for a monumental synagogue—property that had to be limited to the densely populated Marais or to the ninth district— was not an easy task. In the search for a suitable location, Haussmann had 22   A CIP: AA6—Minutes of October 28, 1862, 281–2.

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c­ onsidered the old town hall at Place Royale and the town hall at rue SainteCroix de la Bretonnerie, but neither came to fruition. A combination of factors, then, demoted the Victoire building to a less than ideal site. Haussmann was not the sole figure to determine location and visibility. Empress Eugénie, who assumed some of her husband’s governmental responsibilities as the latter’s health deteriorated in the 1860s, interfered in the debate as well.23 Militantly Catholic, she disliked the Jews and their plans to build two synagogues, the expenses of which would cost the empire two million francs. Her relationship with Haussmann was equally icy, not merely because he was Protestant but also because he was not obsequious enough for her taste.24 By interfering in plans and proposals, Eugénie could simultaneously annoy Haussmann and show her disapproval of the ongoing building initiatives. Claiming that worshippers coming out of the synagogue would run into those of the two nearby Catholic churches—ignoring the improbability of this occurrence due to different days of worship—the empress opposed the rue de la Victoire suggestion that placed the synagogue’s facade on rue (Olivier) St.-Georges, from which one now enters the community offices. Her meddling undermined Haussmann’s authority, delayed the construction process, and forced the congregation to accept a design that included an incorrect orientation of the ark. All the parties involved finally agreed on a site located at rue de la Victoire no. 44. In 1862 the property was owned by Jacques Staub, who was evidently displeased with the prospect of a synagogue in his street. Consistory minutes record that Staub “raised difficulties” and opposed the plans to build a synagogue in the area. The financial offer of the municipal authorities, however, must have been too enticing for him to continue his protests; Staub sold the property for 2,350,000 francs to the City of Paris later that year.25

23  A similar case where the state was involved in determining the location of a synagogue in the nineteenth century—one not to the liking of the Jewish community—occurred in St. Petersburg. For a discussion of this case, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 24  Chapman and Chapman, The Life and Times of Baron Haussmann, 74. For more on Eugénie’s meddling, see Cohen, La Promotion des juifs en France a l’epoque du second empire (1852–1870), vol. 2, 783–95; Jarrassé, Une histoire des synagogues Françaises: Entre Occident et Orient (Paris: Actes Sud, 1997), 218–25; Carol Herselle Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (The MIT Press, 1985), 247–50; Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif a l’israelite, 301. 25   A CIP: AA6—Procés Verbaux du Consistoire de Paris. Minutes of January 8, 1862, p. 257; Archives de Paris: D1.P4—1197: rue de la Victoire, 1852–62, depot 2, travée 210; Préfecture

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Although the city had purchased the property in 1862, work on the building did not start until 1865 and was completed only in 1876, after a delay caused by the Franco-Prussian War. The Jewish architect Alfred Aldrophe (1834–1895), who worked for the municipal authorities as an under-inspector, was in charge of the project. Following the pattern discernable among other Jewish architects, Aldrophe proposed a design in a highly vernacular vocabulary. In fact, it was so reminiscent of a church facade that the project’s inspecteur requested he ease up on its assimilationist character.26 Aldrophe dutifully modified the design, but he remained faithful to a neo-Romanesque idiom, for the exterior as well as the interior. The result was impressive. The building, the facade of which was 38 meters high and featured a large rose window in a semicircular gable, offered space for 5,000 people. At 44 meters deep and 17 meters wide, its scale resembled that of a monumental Christian cathedral and rendered it the largest synagogue in France at the time. The pale sandstone used for the facade, together with a lack of exterior decorations, gave the structure a dignified reticence and “elegant sobriety,” although observers regretted that “one could unfortunately only appreciate [it] through a lack of perspective” due to the street’s confined dimensions.27 For current-day observers, these Parisian houses of worship oftentimes exemplify French Jewry’s victories. Dominique Jarrassé, for instance, who describes the period between 1850 and 1914 as the golden age of synagogue building, maintains that “by their very monumentality and style, [Paris synagogues] attest to a successful integration” of French Jewry into the host s­ociety.28 du Département de la Seine, Inventaire Générale des Œuvres D’Art Appartenant a la Ville de Paris et du Département de la Seine (Paris, 1886), 397. 26  Jarrassé, Une histoire des synagogues Françaises, 71; Fredric Bedoire, The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture, 1830–1930 (Ktav Pub Inc., 2004), 118. Aldrophe was no stranger to the Jewish community; he created several buildings for the Rothschilds, including the country residence of Laversine near Chantilly and a town palace in Paris. Later he designed the synagogue built in Versaille for the Rothschild and Pereire families. His output also included pavilions at the 1855 and 1867 World Exhibitions in Paris, as well as a long succession of houses for other Jewish families. 27  D. Schornstein, “Les nouveaux temples de Paris,” AI 35, no. 14 (July 15, 1874): 435. Schornstein stated that the synagogue’s insertion between two residential buildings was an additional disadvantage, which he attributed to the Haussmann administration. 28  Dominique Jarrassé, Guide du Patrimoine Juif Parisien (Paris: Parigramme, 2003), 65. Similar interpretations are presented by Richard I. Cohen, “Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions: Jewish Culture in Western and Central Europe in the Modern Age,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 731–96.

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Others have echoed this sentiment, presenting the Victoire synagogue in a similar vein as the Oranienburgerstraße building, that is, as a symbol of a new, assertive Jewish identity that conveyed confidence and social acceptance. Yet, a closer look at the construction process suggests that this assessment needs refinement, that monumentality in and of itself does not equal integration. Proper contextualization reveals a more nuanced history that accounts, for instance, for the persistent struggle between the building committee and the municipal authorities over the new synagogues’ sites and the successful attempts on the part of city officials to relegate Jewish houses of worship to streets inferior to main thoroughfares, thereby limiting the visual impact of the buildings. This history also includes committee members’ disappointment over Haussmann’s rejection of the Victoire synagogue’s original design plan, which situated the façade on rue Olivier and the exit on the prominent rue de Chateaudun—too close to the Christian churches of Notre-Dame de Lorette and Sainte-Croix de la Trinité. There was no space in Hausmann’s pragmatic vision for congregations pouring out into a main road that should be free of ‘obstructions’ to ensure the free flow of traffic. Strategic and conciliatory in their approach, consistorial officials accepted a less attractive alternative. And, last, a more comprehensive narrative gives voice to people like Jacques Staub, the Christian property owner of the rue de la Victoire building, who sent letters to Jewish community leaders complaining that “he did not want the Consistory to engage in constructing a synagogue in the vicinity of his house.”29 The Paris Jewish community succeeded in erecting its synagogues, but it did so in an environment that regularly resisted the public manifestation of Judaism. Léon Kahn, who published a short history of French Jewry in the 1880s, perhaps said it most clearly: The firmness that the Consistory had to deploy to claim its rights, the difficulties that emerged, the delays brought about in the works, the successive disappointments on the topic of a second exit in rue de la Victoire . . . all that would one day show that neither baron Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine, nor his entourage had the right attitude when it came to the Consistory and the community’s right to be validated.30 Consequently, Paris synagogues assumed a more modest place in the urban landscape than a community that had been emancipated since the late eight­ eenth century and that felt relatively secure might have expected. Compared 29   A CIP: AA6—Procés Verbaux du Consistoire de Paris: Minutes of January 8 (1862), 257. 30  Léon Kahn, Les Juifs a Paris depuis le VIe Siècle (Paris: A. Durlacher, 1889), 167.

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to Berlin, the Jews of Paris stood at an advantage—they enjoyed state support, legal guarantees, and respectable positions in the liberal professions. Yet this status was not reflected architecturally, despite community leaders’ consensus that it was “absolutely necessary in the capital of France, and for the honor of Judaism, that the Jewish faith be represented with dignity.”31 While community leaders deemed a monumental, free-standing building with bulbous domes on a prime location in the city unnecessary and unattainable, they found it equally unwarranted to relegate new synagogues to rather inconspicuous corners. Yet this is essentially what happened. In rue de la Victoire, a narrow street in the ninth arrondissement, passersby, in the words of a contemporary observer, “risked a stiff neck” to see the façade of the newly constructed and sizable building, while the renovated Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth synagogue in the Marais, the center of Jewish settlement, remained, he said, “almost entirely masked by a wall that takes away its monumental character and that only serves as a screen [and] a hindrance.”32 This is not to say that all Jewish worshippers were dissatisfied with their new religious edifices, which were internally opulent and which met the contemporary standards of bourgeois etiquette. But it does suggest that we, as historians and modern observers, have had a tendency to read these urban additions as belle époque triumphs outside of the time and place in which they were envisioned, debated, and produced—a time and place defined as much by promise, upward social mobility, and acculturation as by political crises, pragmatism, and lingering anti-Jewish sentiments. Our analysis of synagogue building in Paris also suggests that acculturation did not necessarily require a break with Judaism or the loss of a Jewish identity. Jews could be French citizens and remain, at various levels of intensity, faithful to Jewish traditions. While religious practice, as Esther Benbassa has shown, certainly declined, many Jews in one form or another remained attached to Jewish life—either through philanthropy, through membership of defense organizations (such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle), or through attendance at houses of worship—monumental ones as well as numerous oratoires. The role that architecture and architectural style played in this scenario appears to be limited. A Jewish aesthetic presence was determined, to a great degree, by district architects, inspectors, and public works committees, all in service of the state. Paris synagogues, then, say as much about Christian perceptions of Jews and state power over representational infrastructures as about Jewish self-representation in the public domain.

31  Simon Bloch, “Bulletin,” UI 32, no. 1 (September 1, 1876): 6–15. 32  “Bulletin,” UI 24, no. 14 (May 15, 1869): 501–6.

Chapter 14

Reimagining Jewish-Muslim Relations on Screen: French-Jewish Filmmakers and the Middle East Conflict1 Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall Since the French Revolution, Jews have been amongst those French citizens most committed to republican values. When faced with antisemitism in the past, they have latched onto republican values of equality and universalism as their surest protection.2 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as the far-right National Front gained support, Jews often allied with anti-racists in the Muslim community to affirm French universalism. Yet by the 2010s, Kimberly Arkin has found, teenage Sephardic Jews in Parisian banlieues were rejecting republican universalism for racialist differentiation. Out of fear that their North African origins might taint them in a France teeming with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, these young Jews proudly proclaimed their hate for Arabs, seeking to distinguish “Arab Jews from Arab Muslims.” Not only did many young Sephardim reject universalism as a strategy for affirming Jews’ place in the French nation, but they also contested the very idea that Jews belonged in France.3 Even among those who do not think of French Jews and Muslims in racial terms, it has been tempting to imagine these groups as inexorably separate and 1  I am grateful to the leadership of the San Diego Jewish Film Festival for first inviting me to speak about Karin Albou’s films, and to Lawrence Baron for encouraging my scholarship on film. Ethan Katz and Sarah Sussman offered excellent suggestions as I developed this project, and conversations with Zahra Samir and Mehdi Dehbi inspired me to complete it. I am also very grateful to Jennifer Heuer, Nadia Malinovich, Zvi Jonathan Kaplan and Steve Goldstein for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. 2  See, for instance, Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); and Pierre Birnbaum, Les fous de la république: histoire politique des juifs d’état de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992). 3  Some insisted “on the fundamental incompatibility between Frenchness and Jewishness” and said that “Jews had no future in France.” See Kimberly A. Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 5, 15, 7.

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hostile. Amidst Islamicist violence in the 2010s (including Mohammed Merah’s 2012 killings and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo/Hyper Cacher attacks), pundits often described Jews and Muslims as antagonists; they described the growth of Muslim populations in France as a threat to established Jewish communities. Antisemitic incidents had indeed been on the rise since 2000; many of the documented aggressions were by young people whose parents had come to France from North Africa or the Middle East.4 However, beneath the narrative of Muslims as Jews’ enemies—hating them to the point of killing them—there were some inconvenient truths. Ahmed Merabet, the policeman who gave his life defending the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo (among them several Jews), was himself a Muslim. The gunman who killed four people at the Hyper Cacher supermarket was Muslim, but so was Lassana Bathily, the employee who saved many Jewish customers. Muslims numbered among those who gathered to mourn the victims, who tweeted #jesuisjuif in solidarity, or who carried similar placards in demonstrations. As one French Muslim told a CNN reporter, “Jews and Muslims shouldn’t be enemies, and they refuse to be enemies.”5 Though critics may have been tempted to dismiss these responses as atypical, they hinted at realities long predating the 2010s. Maud Mandel has challenged depictions of a “timeless Muslim Judeophobia”; she has vigorously disputed the idea that “Muslims and Jews in France are on an explosive collision course.” Without ignoring the history of conflicts between members of these communities, she has maintained that Muslim-Jewish relations in France have been much more varied. Mandel has noted also that current tensions are rooted not in Islamic doctrine or even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather in the uneven state assistance given to Jewish and Muslim arrivals from North Africa after decolonization in the 1960s. Ethan Katz has similarly sought to nuance the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in France and to highlight moments of cooperation.6 4  For more detail, see Michel Wieviorka et al., eds., The Lure of Anti-Semitism: Hatred of Jews in Present-Day France, trans. Kristin Lobel and Anna Declerck (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Marc Knobel, Haine et violences antisémites: une rétrospective, 2000–2013 (Paris: Berg, 2013). 5  “Muslims Hold ‘Je Suis Juif’ Signs in Paris,” CNN (Jan. 12, 2015), at http://edition.cnn.com/ videos/world/2015/01/12/sot-pleitgen-muslims-je-suis-juif.cnn. 6  Maud S. Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1 and passim; Katz, “Common Culture, Survival Strategy or Useful Foil? Jews and Muslimness in Modern France,” AJS Perspectives (Spr. 2012): 38–9; Katz, “Did the Paris Mosque Save Jews? A Mystery and Its Memory,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 2 (2012): 256–87; and Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Katz has shown for instance

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Jewish scholars in France, together with Muslim colleagues, have also sought to nuance their shared history. In 2006, Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias published an important work on this topic, with a team of scholars from both groups. In 2013 another high-profile group of scholars, led by Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora, published, in French- and English-language editions, the landmark tome History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day. The work’s more than 1000 pages sought to treat every facet of Jewish-Muslim relations. Meddeb and Stora expressed a hope that their work would be a “preamble” toward “exchanges and dialogue,” and that “every Jew will be able to put himself in the place of the Muslim, and every Muslim in the place of the Jew.” Noting that in the twenty-first century, the relationship between the groups seemed to be at a “dead end,” they hoped to “question some of the cultural assumptions we take for granted, particularly concerning the irreducible opposition between the two worlds.”7 Even before this wave of scholarship in the 2010s, an analogous movement was underway in film. In this chapter, I highlight a corpus of films by twentyfirst century Franco-Jewish filmmakers.8 Contesting the public discourse about Muslims and Jews being enemies, the films celebrate Muslim-Jewish friendships and the possibility of Mideast coexistence. These films have dual objectives. They illustrate that, for a notable segment of Franco-Jewry, peace between Israelis and Palestinians is imperative. They also have a domestic purpose: in a time of both rising antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment, they affirm the place of Jews and Muslims in France, as well as the general benefits of a multicultural France. By humanizing Muslims and Jews, these filmmakers challenge those who see either group as enemies. The corpus suggests evolutions in French-Jewish identity, while complicating recent narratives about the scope of these evolutions. These films vary in some respects. Some of these films are set in the Middle East, others in France. Some filmmakers are Ashkenazi; others have roots in that, under the Nazi occupation of France, Muslims helped Jews to pass as Muslim and avoid deportation. 7  Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, eds., Juifs et musulmans: Une histoire partagée, Un dialogue à construire (Paris: Découverte, 2006); Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora, eds., Histoire des relations entre juifs et musulmans: des origines à nos jours (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013), and History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 16, 20, 22 [quotations from Princeton edition]. 8  In an era of mobility where filmmakers often live abroad and French Jews may spend part of the year in Israel, I use this term broadly to mean Jews who have French citizenship and live at least part-time in France.

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North Africa. Some are more moderate in their political outlooks, others more radical. One set of these films focuses on personal relationships more directly than politics. Whether set in France or in Israel-Palestine, these dramatic films center on the promise of intimate relations (whether familial, sexual or of intense friendship) between Jews and Muslims. The filmmakers in this category include Karin Albou [(La Petite Jérusalem, 2005) and (Wedding Song, 2008)], Jean-Jacques Zilbermann (He’s My Girl, 2009), Valérie Zenatti (Bottle in the Gaza Sea, 2011) and Lorraine Lévy (The Other Son, 2012). These films seek to humanize members of both groups; their political perspectives tend toward left-wing Zionism rather than anti-Zionism.9 A second set of films, by Simone Bitton and Camille Clavel, adopt more radical political perspectives. Their documentaries seek to move beyond the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock by challenging Israeli national myths and highlighting Palestinian perspectives and suffering. I treat here Bitton’s Wall (2004) and Rachel (2009) and Clavel’s Where to, Israel? (2012) and France-Israel: The Untold Diplomatic History (2014).10 Another film combines elements of 9  While some of these films have received scholarly attention, they have not previously been discussed as a group or treated in the context of Franco-Jewish identity. Karin Albou’s work has received the most attention; see Carrie Tarr, “Community, Identity and the Dynamics of Borders in Yasmina Yahiaoui’s Rue des Figuiers (2005) and Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem (2006),” International Journal of Francophone Studies 12, no. 1 (2009): 77–90; Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, “Sexuality, Orthodoxy and Modernity in France: North African Jewish Immigrants in Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem,” in Lawrence Baron, ed., Modern Jewish Experiences in World Cinema (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 340–7; Dina Assouline Stillman, Review of Wedding Song, in Review of Middle East Studies 45, no. 1 (2011), 82–4; Kathryn Lachman, “Music and the Gendering of Colonial Space in Karin Albou’s Le chant des mariées,” MSMI 7, no. 1 (2013), 1 – 18; Stephanie Schwartz, “Double-Diaspora in the Literature and Film of Arab Jews,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Ottawa, 2012; and Nathalie Ségeral, “Frenchness, Jewishness, and ‘Integration’ in Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem,” in Jewish Culture and History 14, nos. 2–3 (2013), 87–99. On Zenatti’s Bottle in the Gaza Sea, see Thomas Buckley, “The Reasons For and Implications of Multilingualism in Une bouteille à la mer,” Linguistica Antverpiensia: New Series, no. 13 [2014]: 355–65. 10  On Wall, see Anna Ball, “Impossible Intimacies: Towards a Visual Politics of ‘Touch’ at the Israeli-Palestinian Border,” Journal for Cultural Research 16, nos. 2–3 (2012): 175–95; also brief discussions of Albou and Bitton in Lincoln Z. Shlensky, “Otherwise Occupied: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone Cinema,” in Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, ed., Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World (New York: Routledge, 2010), 105–19. Camille Clavel’s documentaries have not been screened as widely as the other films analyzed here; this chapter, to my knowledge, includes the first scholarly treatment of his films.

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the relationship films and the political documentaries; Yolande Zauberman’s Would You Have Sex with an Arab? (2011) examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by gauging the ability of individuals to imagine sleeping with the Other. These films reveal several dimensions of contemporary Franco-Jewish identity. In some ways they represent the enduring strength of FrancoJewish republicanism. Unlike the teenagers studied by Arkin, these filmmakers have retained republican values, in which all are included in the nation no matter their background. However, the films break with this tradition in other ways. Like some other French Jews in the past, and especially since the 1960s, the filmmakers are less hesitant about showcasing Jewish particularity, and of speaking in the public sphere about Jewish issues, than in classic Franco-Jewish republicanism.11 They also believe that Jews and Muslims need not abandon their cultural traditions, if they can appreciate and embrace those of others. In addition, these films show diversity in the ways that French Jews think about both the Holocaust and Israel. Whereas the Holocaust is often invoked to guard against contemporary antisemitism, several of the films refer to the Holocaust to argue against racism broadly speaking and for the necessity of solidarity with Muslims.12 The films also affirm that Israel remains a central issue of concern for French Jews.13 However, they reveal that French-Jewish views about Israel are not monolithic. The filmmakers here do not routinely defend Israel, but rather forcefully press for peace.14 Interestingly, this growing corpus has no equivalent among other Diaspora Jewish communities. American Jews, despite their historical involvement in their country’s film industry, have not created a parallel body of films.15 One 11  On this change, see especially Shmuel Trigano, “From Individual to Collectivity: The Rebirth of the Jewish ‘Nation’ in France,” in Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserman, eds., The Jews in Modern France (Hanover, NH: Brandeis/UPNE, 1985), 245–81; and Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 187–99. On earlier deviations from the classic republican Jewish model, see Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008). 12  On this tradition in the French-Jewish left, see Benbassa, The Jews of France, 189–90. 13  On the “Zionization” of French Jewry post-1967, see Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 203–5. 14  See discussion of this diversity in Debrauwere-Miller, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 11 and passim. 15  The closest American analog to the friendship films is Arranged (2007; written by Stefan C. Schaefer and Yuta Silverman); it focuses on the camaraderie between two Brooklyn teachers, one Orthodox and the other devoutly Muslim. Like the films discussed here,

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demographic difference between France and the U.S. is the higher percentage of Muslims in France—and thus the comparatively greater degree of social interaction between them and their Jewish compatriots. The fact that France has a higher percentage of Sephardic Jews whose mother tongue was Arabic also makes Franco-Jewish views of Muslims different than in the U.S., where Ashkenazim predominate. The political climate no doubt also plays a role. The U.S. and French governments have had different relationships with Israel, and criticism of Israeli policies is less controversial in the French public sphere than in the American context. While my focus here is on French-Jewish identity, I want to note parallel sentiments among filmmakers of Muslim origin. One of the best examples of the Francophone Muslim-Jewish friendship film was 2011’s Les hommes libres (Free Men), directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi. The film focused on the Mosquée de Paris and its effort to save Jews during World War II.16 Another filmmaker, Karim Miské, made a four-part documentary Juifs et musulmans: si loin, si proches (Jews and Muslims: Intimate Strangers), which aired on TV Arte in 2013. The series reexamined the history of Muslim-Jewish relations, to show that serious fractures are of relatively recent vintage. Miské acknowledged that Maghrebi Jews, in their status as dhimmi, were not treated equally; he also noted that from the start of the nineteenth century, European Jews felt forced to intervene to improve North African Jews’ standing. Notably, Miské argued that 1948 was not the most serious turning point in Muslim-Jewish relations: it was only after

Arranged pushes for coexistence. However, unlike the French films, it is resolutely apolitical; the film also celebrates religious Orthodoxy against naïve secularism. Anna Baltzer’s 2007 documentary Life in Occupied Palestine is the closest topical equivalent to Bitton’s work, but it has not been screened widely. In 2015, PBS aired 1913. Seeds of Conflict by American-Jewish filmmaker Ben Loeterman. The film reexamined Ottoman Palestine and suggested that harmony had reigned between Jews and Muslims before the influx of Zionists upset the “delicate balance.” 16  For further analysis of this film, see Katz, “Did the Paris Mosque Save Jews?”; and Katz, “Vichy France from the Margins: Les Hommes libres,” Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin 3, no. 2 (Oct. 2012), available at http://h-france.net/fffh/the-buzz/vichyfrance-from-the-margins-les-hommes-libres/. The 2011 comedy Le nom des gens (Names of Love in English) also explored a romantic relationship between a young woman of Muslim heritage and the assimilated son of a Holocaust survivor. Dinah Assouline Stillman has treated two other friendship films by filmmakers of Muslim origin in “Muslims as Jews, Jews as Muslims, and Both as the Other in Recent French Cinema,” AJS Perspectives (Spring 2012), available at http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/the-muslim-issue-spring-2012/ muslims-as-jews-jews-as-muslims-and-both-as-the-other-in-recent-french-cinema/.

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1967, in his analysis, that Jews became seen definitively as internal enemies within Muslim countries and were forced to emigrate.17 Some of the films by Jewish filmmakers have also depended on non-Jewish actors of Middle Eastern origin. The most frequent presence in these films is the Israeli-Palestinian actor Mahmud Shalaby (who played the Jewish musician Salim in Free Men; the leading role of Naïm in Bottle in the Gaza Sea; and Bilal in The Other Son). Similarly, the Belgian actor Mehdi Dehbi played leading roles in He’s My Girl (Naïm/Habiba) and The Other Son (Yacine). Dehbi has talked about how meaningful these roles have been to him as a human being and artist, in affirming that commonalities and relationships between human beings are more important than labels about identity.18 Karin Albou has been one of the pioneers of the Francophone Muslim-Jewish relationship film. Her films emphasize traditional ideals of universalism and of friendship across religious boundaries, while also highlighting obstacles to such friendships. Her 2005 film La Petite Jérusalem focused on the illicit love affair between Laura, a Tunisian-born Jewish university student, and Djamel, an Algerian Muslim. Both live just north of Paris, in Sarcelles (an area nicknamed ‘Little Jerusalem’). Laura, the main character, is Orthodox, yet as an eighteen-year-old philosophy student at university she has begun questioning her faith. Albou shows viewers that there are more similarities between North African Jews and Muslims in France that they might imagine. Both Laura’s family and Djamel’s are of modest means, and live in the same housing project. Laura and Djamel are both intellectuals; both seek to break away from restrictive aspects of their religion; both speak Arabic. Albou’s portrayal rebukes those who see Muslims as dangerous and inherently different from Jews. At the same time, Albou suggests, traditional inclinations and prejudice threaten republican cohesion. Djamel, an undocumented immigrant, is dependent on the relatives at whose home he stays. He introduces them to Laura, but 17  http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/042497-000/juifs-et-musulmans-si-loin-si-proches-1-4; and interviews by Miské on TV5Monde (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qN9iqGPgA0) and with the regional daily La Nouvelle République (http://www.lanouvellerepublique .fr/France-Monde/Loisirs/Cinema/n/Contenus/Articles/2013/10/16/Les-juifs-etles-musulmans-doivent-regarder-objectivement-leur-passe-1652552). Miské also collaborated on the Meddeb/Stora project (see the interviews he made at http://www .juifsetmusulmans.fr/bonus/en-videos). 18  Comments made to author during Dehbi’s visit to the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, February 2011.

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they declare that they cannot accept her unless she converts to Islam. To avoid being kicked out, Djamel breaks off their relationship. Laura, who would have risked estrangement from her family to be with him, is heart-broken. The film also hints at more serious signs of fissure between Muslims and Jews in France, with references to antisemitic attacks in the neighborhood. Albou’s views on universalism and particularity likely reflect her own identity as a member of a French family born of mixicité. While Albou’s father is an Algerian Jew, her mother is a French non-Jew; she has indicated that her extended family also has Afro-Caribbean members. Albou herself converted to Judaism only as an adult, after marrying an Israeli. Albou’s film offers a positive view of Orthodox holiday celebrations to non-Jewish viewers who might see them as exotic or backwards. But it also opposes the idea of religious people, whether Muslim or Jewish, shunning other members of French society. While Albou depicts Djamel’s family as villains, she also implies that Jews belong in France only to the extent that they are willing to be flexible about their religion and to freely mingle with others. As anti-Jewish violence increases, Laura’s more rigidly Orthodox family members decide that France is no longer their home and move to Israel. Albou permits only Laura, who follows the more traditional Franco-Jewish path of adopting secular French values instead of exclusively Jewish ones, to remain in France.19 After receiving acclaim for La Petite Jérusalem, Albou made a second film about Muslim-Jewish relations, Le chant des mariées (Wedding Song). Wedding Song serves as a kind of meditation on the origins of Muslim antisemitism, as Albou imagines a way beyond current tensions. The film is set in Tunis in November 1942. It focuses on the friendship between two sixteen-year-old girls, one Muslim (Nour) and one Jewish (Myriam). Nour and Myriam are like sisters. However, historical circumstances (and their impending nuptials to men of their own faiths) are beginning to separate them from each other. Like Meddeb and Stora, Albou suggests here that coexistence long reigned between Jews and Muslims in North Africa. However, where Karim Miské dated their disconnection to the period after the founding of the state of Israel, Albou pushes the historical rift earlier, to the Nazi invasion of North Africa. In her version, Zionists did not cause this split; it was the Nazis who poisoned North African Muslims’ views of Jews. Early in the film, Albou includes historical footage from World War II, showing the alliance made between the Palestinian Grand Mufti and the Nazis. Once the Nazis invaded Tunis, she shows, they were aided by local Arabs, who 19  For a more extended analysis of this film, see Sepinwall, “Sexuality, Orthodoxy and Modernity in France.”

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saw the Germans as valuable allies in their fight against French colonialism. Albou acknowledges the legitimacy of Muslim grievances against the French, but she also emphasizes the corrupting influence of Nazi propaganda. In the film, the Germans broadcast antisemitic ideas on the radio and drop leaflets from the sky; they blame Jews for the war and instruct Muslims that Jews collaborate with the French in oppressing them. This propaganda jeopardizes Nour and Myriam’s relationship. Nour’s fiancé Khaled, who needs a job before he will be allowed to marry her, begins working for the Nazis; soon he becomes fanatical about their teachings. He forbids his fiancée from associating with Myriam, whom he sees as an enemy of Islam, and he even leads the Nazis to a raid on her apartment. Soon, the girls’ relationship seems ruined forever. Albou refuses, however, to let Khaled define Islam’s view of Jews. Even as Khaled seeks to prove to Nour that the Koran sees Jews as infidels, her father offers her an alternate view. He shows Nour a Koran verse that says that Jews and others who believe in God “shall have their reward” from Allah; he approves of her relationship with Myriam. Here, Albou highlights a more historically pluralistic form of Islam. At the end of the film, the girls are reunited in a bomb shelter as the Allies bombard Tunis; they embrace and soothe each other while each prays to God, with Myriam’s Hebrew interlaced with Nour’s Arabic. Ultimately, Albou suggests, the differences in their worship pale in comparison to their deep bond. While neither film is set in Israel itself, Albou implicitly defends the legitimacy of the state. In La Petite Jérusalem, Israel serves as a refuge for Orthodox Jews who feel unsafe in France. In Wedding Song, the collusion of the Palestinians with Hitler facilitates the Holocaust; Israel looms as a sanctuary. As these films indicate, the idea of Israel as a safe haven for Jews remains strong among French Jewry, even for those who stay in France. Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s 2009 comedy He’s My Girl (La folle histoire d’amour de Simon Eskenazy) is less overtly political than Albou’s work. It does not address Parisian antisemitism, nor does it trace the roots of Muslim-Jewish tensions. At the same time, the film, set in Paris’s multiethnic 18th arrondissement, shares with Albou’s works a celebration of cross-cultural relationships. He’s My Girl centers on Simon, a gay, middle-aged clarinetist who dislikes his Holocaust survivor mother, Bella. Simon is estranged from his ex-wife, Rosalie, and son, Yankele, who live in New York; Rosalie’s Hasidic family, who disapprove of Simon’s homosexuality, have banned him from spending time with his son. The plot involves Simon’s entering into an affair with Naïm, a handsome Algerian Muslim cross-dresser and cabaret performer. Where Simon wants young Naïm only for sex, Naïm becomes genuinely attached to Simon and

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is eager to deepen their relationship. After Bella becomes ill and moves into Simon’s apartment, Naïm insinuates himself into the household as a female live-in health aide named Habiba. Habiba lovingly attends to Bella and the two become fast friends, to Simon’s shock. Soon, Simon’s fragmented family life is being repaired, thanks to Naïm. Naïm/Habiba’s enjoyment of Bella’s company helps Simon appreciate his mother in a new way. Rosalie and Yankele return from New York, announcing that they will live in Paris. Rosalie is engaged and wants Yankele not to feel displaced by her fiancé; she says she is ready for Simon to be a real Dad to their son. Suddenly, Bella dies, which threatens Naïm’s place in Simon’s home. However, in his grief, Simon decides to be open about their relationship. When Naïm comes in male clothing to Bella’s shiva, and Rosalie asks whether they have known each other long, Simon declares tenderly, “Naïm is my best safeguard against gloom.” The family unity is endangered, however, by someone who does not believe in boundary-crossing or diversity: Rosalie’s Hasidic father. While he has adjusted to Simon’s homosexuality, a “Muslim transvestite” is too much for him to bear. “If you want to see your kid, you’re going to have to make a choice,” Rosalie’s American fiancé coarsely tells Simon in English. “That’s life for ya. You’ve got to learn to make compromises.” A conflicted Simon breaks up with Naïm, claiming that it is about himself and not Yankele. But as the movie ends, Simon realizes that what he has with Naïm is not something tawdry or temporary. They set off to New York, with Simon ready to acknowledge Naïm publicly as his companion on tour. Like the other films in the corpus, He’s My Girl celebrates French pluralism. Naïm need not give up his identity as an Algerian Muslim to be accepted by Simon’s family. He freely uses terms like ‘Mazal tov’ and ‘L’chaim’ to build bridges with Jews. But he maintains his own political beliefs, as when he makes a few jokes in sympathy with Palestinians. Simon, for his part, responds playfully, asking Naïm whether Algerian Jews got compensation when they were driven out after Algerian independence. The film suggests that while two people can come from different places and have differing outlooks on Mideast politics, their humanity—and love itself—transcend labels about sexuality, politics or religion. Other recent French films by Jewish filmmakers deal with Israel and its policies more directly. The documentaries of Simone Bitton, whom Ella Shohat has called a longtime “vocal critic of Zionism,”20 are perhaps the most radical of those studied here. While Bitton lives in France and has both Israeli and 20  See Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999), 8.

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French citizenship, she has written that she “defines herself as an Arab Jew who likes neither walls nor borders.”21 Bitton’s 2004 film Wall, produced by Ciné-Sud, TV5 France, and the Centre national de la cinématographie, focuses on the miles-long concrete security barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Bitton, who served in the IDF, includes interviews with Israeli officials who defend the barrier; however, she makes clear that she herself opposes it. She notes the expropriation of Palestinian land that accompanied construction, and the way the barrier has made it difficult for Palestinians to feed their families. A psychiatrist friend of Bitton’s in Gaza tells her that the wall has rendered Gaza a prison; feeling caged makes people wish to become martyrs. In addition to Palestinians opposed to the wall, Bitton interviews like-minded Israelis. One Israeli tells her that his peace-making efforts with Palestinian neighbors were curtailed after the security barrier blocked their continuing to meet. A kibbutznik named Shuli makes an analogy between the Lodz ghetto where his parents were confined during the Holocaust and the encirclements created by the wall. He argues that the fence signals an abandonment of Zionist ideals and of the hope that Jews can integrate with their neighbors into the Middle East; Shuli sees the wall as counter-productive and “suicidal.” Bitton states that, for herself, the wall is existentially wrenching; she feels as much an Arab as a Jew, and so the effort to separate ‘Jews’ from ‘Arabs’ makes her sick. The 2009 film Rachel continued Bitton’s exploration of Palestinian perspectives and her criticism of Israeli policies. A French-Belgian coproduction, the film chronicles the life of American student Rachel Corrie, who volunteered in Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement and was killed by an Israeli bulldozer. The documentary relies heavily on interviews with Palestinians and other foreigners who worked alongside Corrie in the ISM. When Bitton interviews Israeli government officials and soldiers for their perspectives on Corrie’s death, her questions are more antagonistic. Here, too, Bitton’s sympathies clearly lie with Corrie and with others fighting the demolition of Palestinian homes. In many ways, Camille Clavel’s documentaries parallel Bitton’s. However, since Clavel grew up in France and does not speak Hebrew (he uses French or English with his subjects or relies on translators), his films are more firmly rooted in Franco-Jewish universalism and in a desire to combat racism of all kinds, whether directed against Jews or Arabs. Like Bitton, Clavel questions conventional Jewish wisdom about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His 2014 21  See statement on her website, www.simonebitton.com, under “Simone Bitton” (accessed July 14, 2015).

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film France-Israel: The Untold Diplomatic History (La France face à Israël) disputes the notion that France is anti-Israel and has been more hostile to Israel than the U.S. As a French citizen of Jewish heritage, Clavel seeks to show that France’s criticism of Israeli policies has been contingent and based on sincere political disagreements about the wisdom of ‘occupation,’ rather than arising from antisemitic enmity. He argues that France was once a closer friend of Israel than the U.S.; his film asks how this split happened between such close allies. For him, the break happened only after the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Clavel’s earlier first-person film, Where to, Israel?, challenges Zionist narratives more directly.22 Clavel is particularly interested in the conflict between Jewish and Arab historical memories. Identifying himself as the grandson of Holocaust survivors, Clavel opens the film with a visit to Yad Vashem. He brings materials to document his great-grandmother’s death in Treblinka, then interviews Israeli survivors such as Aharon Appelfeld. Appelfeld tells him of the centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli homes, where every third person is the descendant of a survivor. Clavel does not invoke the Holocaust in order to justify Israel’s founding. Rather, his interviewees refer to the Holocaust to insist on the moral imperative of recognizing and mourning Arab victims of Israeli massacres. One of the film’s central interviewees is Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University history professor and second-generation survivor who is an outspoken Israeli critic of Zionism. Sand, who speaks fluent French, argues that Yad Vashem should teach about racist persecution of Arabs, not just Jews; and that Jews must mourn “our victims,” the Arabs massacred at Deir Yasin in 1948. Another main commentator is Gadi Algazi, who like Sand is a Tel Aviv University historian fluent in French. Algazi’s mother, also a Holocaust survivor, identifies with the Arabs who were expelled from their homes in 1948. Algazi often visits Gazan refugee camps; he notes that his mother taught him never to forget that their family was once refugees too. In addition, Clavel interviews an Israeli child of survivors who refuses to be shown on camera or to use her full name because she fears being fired or persecuted for her ideas. ‘Lea’ grew up on a kibbutz which was built on the site of Arab villages; when her mother arrived there in 1948, food was still hot in the kitchen from the Palestinians who had fled, which haunted her mother for the rest of her life. Lea tells Clavel that other Israelis “don’t want to talk about the Nakba (the massacres and expulsions of 22  The difference in perspective may stem from Clavel’s having released the first film independently, whereas for the second film he had to satisfy institutional funders like the INA and France 3 TV.

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Arabs during the Israeli War of Independence)23 and they ignore it.” She argues that, until Israelis can come to term with the Nakba and the suffering they caused Palestinians, peace will not be possible. Clavel spends considerable time on the 2011 Israeli law that banned teaching about or commemorating the Nakba.24 Sand argues that such a law would be akin to criminalizing mention of the Shoah in France (though he hastens to add that the two events were not identical). He insists that Israelis must acknowledge others’ suffering; just as every American knows that whites drove Native Americans from their land, each Israeli pupil must learn about the Nakba. Where to, Israel? is more radical than other films in the corpus in that it does not see Israel’s main problem as stemming from 1967, but rather from its founding. While affirming Israel’s status as a refuge for Holocaust survivors, the film adopts Sand’s perspective that much of the country is composed of settlements on wrongly confiscated land. Still, the title of the film refers to Israel’s future rather than its past, and Clavel shares with the other filmmakers an insistence that peace is possible. He highlights the paucity of integrated schools where Jewish and Arab children can get to know each other (a bedrock tenet of French republicanism). He suggests that, if Israelis can listen to Palestinians and acknowledge the suffering their state has caused them, there might be a future for coexistence. In contrast to Bitton’s and Clavel’s documentaries, other French-Jewish films set in Israel offer a more Zionist perspective, if a left-leaning one. Bottle in the Gaza Sea, with Hebrew, Arabic, English and French dialogue, is set in Israel and the Gaza Strip. It is based on a young-adult novel by Valérie Zenatti, as well as on Zenatti’s own life. Zenatti grew up in Nice, moved to Israel as a teenager, and served in the Israeli army before moving back to France as an adult.25 The film was directed by Thierry Binisti, and co-written by Binisti and Zenatti. 23   Nakba literally means ‘catastrophe.’ Clavel notes that, although many Israelis think that the term simply deems Israeli independence a catastrophe, it refers specifically to the destruction of Palestinian villages and casualties that were part of the War of Independence. 24  See for instance, Roee Ruttenberg, “Israel’s N**** Word: Efforts to Teach It, and Attempts to Erase It,” in +972 Magazine (May 14, 2012), at http://972mag.com/israels-n-word-effortsto-teach-it-and-attempts-to-erase-it/45773/; and Roni Schocken, “Chilling Effect of the Nakba Law on Israel’s Human Rights,” Haaretz (May 17, 2012), at http://www.haaretz.com/ opinion/chilling-effect-of-the-nakba-law-on-israel-s-human-rights-1.430942. 25  Valérie Zenatti, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea [trans. of Une bouteille à la mer de Gaza], trans. by Adriana Hunter (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). On Zenatti’s army service and her leftist inclinations, see her memoir When I Was a Soldier, trans. by Adriana Hunter (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), esp. 190–2, 217. The film combines elements of the novel with the

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Like Petite Jérusalem, Bottle in the Gaza Sea features an ill-fated relationship between a Jewish student (Tal) and a young Muslim man (Naïm).26 However, their relationship is even more impossible than that of Laura and Djamel in Sarcelles; in Israel/Gaza, the main characters cannot meet in person but correspond only by email. The two become acquainted when Tal has her brother Eytan (an Israeli soldier) drop a message in a bottle into the Mediterranean while on duty near Gaza, and Naïm and his friends find it. As an immigrant from France to Israel, Tal is eager to learn what Palestinians’ lives are really like. Unlike Bitton’s work, Bottle in the Gaza Sea is careful to avoid assigning blame to either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Against the critiques of Israeli policy common in France, Zenatti is eager to show that Israelis are not brutes, and that Israel is not attacking Gaza gratuitously.27 The film begins with a terrorist incident in Jerusalem, in September 2007. The viewer hears happy noises in a café, followed by the sound of a bomb, then deadly quiet, then someone screaming for their loved ones. We learn that this café is near Tal’s house, and that a young woman a little older than herself was among those murdered. Tal has been having nightmares about the bombing.28 To understand what could drive someone toward terrorism, Tal searches for a way to communicate with Palestinians. She writes, in English, that it was supposed to be the young victim’s wedding today, but instead it is her funeral. Tal says she cannot comprehend “how life can depend on going for a quick coffee or not.” She explains that she wants to understand how someone could strap explosives to his body, choose a place, watch the soon-to-be victims and then kill them. Naïm is among a group of teens who find the bottle with Tal’s message and mock her. Naïm decides to email her secretly, at first to challenge her thinking and later to build a friendship. In his first email (also in English), he calls himself “Mohammed Bin Laden,” and taunts her that he would rather die than be Jewish like “one of your soldiers.” Tal challenges his statement as anti-­ universalist bigotry: “my brother is a soldier and he’s a good guy. What’s with memoir; in the book Bottle in the Gaza Sea, Tal is a native Israeli, but in the film version, she is a French immigrant. . 26  Interestingly, the Muslim love interests in He’s My Girl and Bottle in the Gaza Sea are both named Naïm. It is striking that both filmmakers chose a Muslim name that is also a commonly used Hebrew word, meaning ‘nice’ or ‘pleasant.’ This choice telegraphs to Jewish viewers who know Hebrew that the Muslim man is not dangerous, but kind and harmless. 27  On demonization of Israel and the conflation of Zionism with colonialism and racism in certain strains of French discourse, see Debrauwere-Miller, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 11. 28  Zenatti based this on her own reaction to a 2003 bombing near where she used to live (Zenatti, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, book jacket). The novel was set in 2003 but the film updates the story to 2007–8.

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all your generalizations?” She insists that it is important for those on both sides to get to know each other as individuals. When Naïm responds, “your people have a state and mine don’t,” she answers, “I think both sides are to blame.” To her, the opposing sides are not ‘Israelis’ and ‘Palestinians,’ but “those who want peace and those who don’t.” Another way in which Bottle in the Gaza Sea differs from Bitton’s films, which seek to resist wrong-headed Israeli policies without offering much context about what prompted them, is that it does not portray Palestinians simply as innocent victims. When we meet Naïm, he is one of a group of youths who hang out at Gaza Beach, smoke pot, and beat up little kids. The suffering Naïm and his friends endure is minimal. Early in the film, the largest problems of the Gazan teenagers are the checkpoints where they are often forced to sit and be bored when trying to deliver t-shirts to Israel for their jobs. The film does show bombing in Gaza after fighting breaks out between Israel and Hamas in 2007. Yet, rather than death, the greatest trouble for Gazans seems to be that, because some apartments have been bombed, families are forced to welcome displaced relatives, which makes for annoying fights over who can use the bathroom. Before showing the more intense Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2008, the filmmakers note the prior Hamas bombing of southern Israel, which has frightened Israeli families in the South and driven them into shelters. The film also censures Gaza’s Hamas leaders, portraying average Gazans as their captives. Naïm’s sending emails in an Internet café draws suspicion, and he is ultimately kidnapped, blindfolded and beaten, on charges of being an Israeli collaborator. For Hamas, even speaking to an Israeli is grounds for execution. However, after insisting that he has not written to anyone in Israel, Naïm is saved, mostly because his uncle is an important Hamas member. Later, when Naïm is on the brink of being able to leave Gaza, it is Hamas that almost thwarts his plans when they insist that he pay an exorbitant fee before they will give him a passport. While the film highlights Palestinian culpability to a greater extent than films like Wall or Rachel, Zenatti and Binisti do suggest that most Palestinians are innocent victims; however, most Israelis are resistant to empathizing with them, which perpetuates the conflict. Tal’s moderate assessment of the situation, in which Gazans are understood to be like besieged Israelis in the south, is something many Israelis are unable to acknowledge. Tal’s parents are troubled when she makes this analogy. They are also shocked when a French stranger shows up at the door, calling himself Naïm’s teacher from Gaza and asking for Tal. They are horrified that she is corresponding with a Palestinian and that he knows her address; they fear that he is a terrorist. Tal tells her father, “You obsess about Kassams [rockets] and Hamas, while we bomb the people who

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live there. . . . Don’t they have the right to live normally?” While allowing Tal to voice these sentiments (which, I would argue, are essentially those of the filmmakers), Zenatti and Binisti also balance Tal’s comments with her father’s views. He retorts: “You know there’s more to it than that . . . We want to live in peace. We leave Gaza, they elect Hamas and attack the South. Who is the one who is looking for war?” Bottle in the Gaza Sea is an archetypical example of the French-Jewish friendship film in many ways. One is its universalist desire to humanize individual Israelis and Palestinians and to combat generalizations about groups. The filmmakers allow Israelis, often portrayed as villains in French accounts of the conflict, to voice their fears and suffering; they also highlight average Palestinians as victims who yearn for peace. In addition, the film implies that there is something special about Frenchness: it is Tal’s being French that enables her to think differently than those around her. She recoils when she hears native Israelis yelling “Screw the Palestinians!” or “Kill them all!” after suicide bombings. Where her friends are more inured to living with bombings, she finds it shocking and is more paranoid. As one friend tells her, “it’s being French that makes you panic like that.” Tal’s outsider-ness—her Frenchness—makes her more determined to search for a way out of this situation. Her deep-seated universalism drives her to conquer her fears by seeking to know Palestinians, rather than condemning them all. Naïm resists at first her suggestion that peace is possible; he tells her, “You’re really naive, or even worse, stupid.” But Tal invokes France as a model for coexistence. In France, she says, “there is no war, no bombings, nobody who threatens to throw you off the map. Nobody accuses me of oppressing them.” Naïm decides that since Tal is French, and not “really” Israeli, she is not so bad. He says that her vision of this place—France—where peaceful coexistence is possible “will make me dream.” While the film suggests that there is no easy resolution to the problem in the Middle East, it does imply that one can be found for Naïm in France, if only he can escape there. Naïm copes with the bleakness of life in Gaza by seeking to learn French at a French cultural center. Once he can write to Tal in that language, their relationship shifts; it is as if French gives them an alternate plane on which to exist together, one where they are no longer enemies.29 Naïm sends Tal a note from the safety of the computers at his school; he tells her that “J’ai une amie à Jérusalem.” He dreams of winning a scholarship to study 29  The shift to French has been noted in the one article I have found on this film (Buckley, “Reasons”); however, that author views French simply as a neutral foreign language other than Hebrew or Arabic, without unpacking what Frenchness signifies in the film.

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in France; Tal tells him that she wants to meet him there. Their relationship relaxes; Naïm tells his cousin that he wants a French girlfriend, “just like Carla Bruni.” After a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, Naïm’s friends cheer, but he looks vexed, worrying about Tal. Even as France remains a dream, the film underscores just how intractable the situation remains for Israelis and Gazans. After Tal and Naïm find détente and amitié in French, conflict arises anew between them when violence escalates between Hamas and the IDF. Tal writes with great concern to see if he is okay; Naïm responds, “Sure you’re worried about me, and you’re worried about your brother. But it’s him and his buddies who make life hell for us. He’s the one dropping flyers telling us to flee or be bombed. But where can we go? WHERE??” Hurt, Tal responds, “I thought that our friendship was stronger than all this violence. I guess I was wrong . . . Are we condemned to live this way? . . . I hoped you and I could be different.” Naïm cuts off contact, and Tal directs her rage at her brother, returned from the war. Eytan tells her it is great that she made a “friend” in Gaza, but that war is never gentle, and “it’s a choice: us or them.” He continues, “Hamas is not a peace movement. You know what they do to their Palestinian opponents?” Tal retorts, “The problem is, we waged war on all of them. Even those who talked to us refuse to now.” The film has a happy ending for Naïm, if not for other Gazans. Naïm has won the scholarship to Paris and received his exit visa. Heading for the airport in Jordan, he must pass through the Erez Crossing into Israel. Tal waits on the other side, eager to meet him. But the instructions to the teacher accompanying Naïm are strict: they may not stop in Israel, but must keep driving until they reach Jordan. Tal and Naïm glimpse each other fleetingly as their cars pass. The film has them speaking the last (French) words of their correspondence over each other: Naïm: Thanks to you, I learned French and a lot more. Naïm/Tal [overlapping]: Knowing you did me good and hurt me too. . . . Nothing’s easy between us but everything is possible. Naïm: Stay as you are, Miss Peace. Above all, don’t change. The others have to change. Naïm/Tal [overlapping]: See you soon, I hope, in Paris maybe. We can have a coffee, you and me. . . . Inshallah. Lorraine Lévy’s 2012 film Le fils de l’autre (The Other Son) has many commonalities with Bottle in the Gaza Sea, as well as with the other fiction films studied here. First, it features some of the same actors. These include Mehdi Dehbi (Naïm/Habiba in He’s My Girl; Yacine in this film), Mahmud Shalaby (Naïm

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in Bottle in the Gaza Sea; Bilal in this film), and Loai Nofi (who played Naïm’s cousin in Bottle in the Gaza Sea and Bilal’s friend here). Second, The Other Son involves Israelis and Palestinians who forge a bond with the help of French and an admiration for Paris. Still, The Other Son differs from the other films in the corpus in a central way: its plot does not concern individuals who enter into a relationship willingly. Here, the link, between two families, is forced upon them. As in Bottle in the Gaza Sea, the film centers on a family of Francophone Israelis. The father, Alon, is an IDF colonel whose parents were French; his wife Orit (played by César-winning French actress Emmanuelle Devos), grew up in France before emigrating to Israel. Their son Joseph, nearing 18, is preparing for his mandatory army service. Joseph is quite different from his father; a genial, pot-­smoking guitar-player, he would rather be a singer than a soldier. While he is doing his pre-army physicals, he learns that his blood type (A+) does not match either of his parents (A-), which is genetically impossible. Orit assumes there is a mistake; Alon fears that Orit fathered Joseph with another man. After assuring her husband of her fidelity, Orit and Alon learn the shocking truth: Joseph is not their biological son. Orit gave birth in Haifa during the Gulf War. During the chaos, a nurse took her son to safety but inadvertently switched him with a baby born to an Arab woman. Orit is horrified to realize that her biological son has been living as Yacine Al-Bezaaz in the West Bank, while her beloved Joseph’s biological parents are named Saïd and Laïla. When reunited at the hospital, Orit and Laïla regard each other with shock and mutual sadness; the fathers look horrified and nauseated. The hospital official informs them that the boys can change their identities now. Saïd explodes: “Out of the question!” while Alon exclaims, “Joseph’s name is Silberg. Period!” No one is more shocked by this news than Joseph himself (“You mean that I am the Other, and the Other is me?!”). Confused about what this means for his identity, he says mordantly, “I’ll have to swap my kippa for a suicide bomb!” Meanwhile, his rabbi gently tells him that he can “still be Jewish if he really wants” but will have to convert. As he seeks to get to know the Al-Bezaazes, Joseph faces a major obstacle: Saïd does not want anyone, even Yacine, to know the truth. On the one hand, he resents Israelis for ejecting Palestinians from their land; on the other hand, he fears that the news will endanger his family in their own community. Yacine, meanwhile, is returning from France, where he has been studying. He passed the baccaulauréat with honors, and is visiting to celebrate. The tension between his parents is palpable; eventually Laïla tells Yacine the news, then comforts him as he cries. Yacine later laments, “I’m my worst enemy but I must love myself anyway.”

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Slowly, the families get to know each other, assisted by their shared Frenchness (whether that means having lived in France, for Orit and Yacine, or speaking it fluently, for the others). Where Saïd and Alon erupt into political debates, Joseph and Yacine find common ground, both with being in the same bizarre situation and being young men of the same age who can converse frankly in French. The mothers express enduring love for the child they raised, even as they eagerly try (in French) to build relationships with their ‘additional’ son. While the fathers eventually make a grudging peace, the main obstacle to the families’ fully embracing each other is Bilal. He rejects Yacine, his erstwhile best friend, as an Israeli who might as well go live with the “occupying forces”; he will accept Joseph only if he declares that he is an “Arab from Palestine” and that his “blood is Muslim.” As in the other films, The Other Son demonstrates that Israelis and Palestinians have different cultural traditions and views of history. But whether they wish to or not, they have been tied together by forces beyond their control, and they must find a way to coexist. Lévy and her colleagues challenge viewers to realize that humans are more than their labels, and that their hearts can be opened to each other even if it is painful. The film ends with Yacine returning to France for medical school, Bilal accepting Joseph for who he is, and Joseph continuing to forge a friendship with the Al-Bezaazes with his parents’ blessing. Mehdi Dehbi (Yacine) expresses his own view and that of the filmmakers when he says in the ‘Making of’ featurette on the film’s DVD, “I hope people will learn to live together. I know it’s possible.” Yolande Zauberman’s 2011 documentary Would You Have Sex with an Arab? tackles the question of coexistence even more directly. Zauberman, who is Askhenazi, co-wrote the film with her life partner Sélim Nassib, an Arabicspeaking Jew of Lebanese heritage. The two had heard a rumor that Golda Meir had a secret affair with an Arab businessman. However, when they spoke to Israelis about this story, they found that Israelis did not believe it, since they could not conceive of having intimate relations with an Arab.30 Zauberman and Nassib wanted to understand how Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs think of each other, through the lens of sexuality. In nightclubs and elsewhere, Zauberman posed the simple English question, “Would you have sex with an Arab [or a Jew]?” She and Nassib found that many had not even considered the possibility; the question made their subjects reevaluate their biases. Would You Have Sex explores how prejudices might be extinguished through intimate relationships, but it also acknowledges that the Israeli-Palestinian 30   See interview at 2011 Venice Film Festival (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= TNZncGAO29I).

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conflict “can’t be solved in bed.” Some of the film’s most poignant interviews are with individuals of mixed Jewish-Muslim heritage. Juliano Mer-Khamis, a noted actor and director, tells Zauberman in English that it is hard not to fit into a single tribe in such a divided place: “to be a pure molecular independent is a very frightening thing, ‘cause you have to create your world all the time. You cannot just stereotype yourself . . .” A caption follows, explaining that shortly after filming, Mer-Khamis was assassinated in front of the theater he ran in a West Bank refugee camp. Conclusion These films suggest that, for French Jews, the subject of Israel has remained important in the early twenty-first century. Yet, what Shmuel Trigano wrote thirty years ago remains true: when French Jews are ostensibly talking about Israel, they are really talking about their own place in France.31 The fact that there are so many of these films reflects the fact that the twenty-first century has been a time of anxiety for French Jewry. In this uncertain context, Jews like these filmmakers have affirmed Franco-Jewish universalism—modified by a conviction that Jews, like Muslims, need not hide their particularity if they can be open to that of others. These filmmakers refuse the choice made by Arkin’s subjects; against racism, they choose cross-cultural rapprochement.32 In Bottle in the Gaza Sea, after Israel bombs Gaza and he is kidnapped by Hamas, Naïm falls into depression; having Tal as a penpal seems ridiculously naive in retrospect. But Naïm’s mother urges him that he must still hope: 31  Trigano, “From Individual to Collectivity,” 267. 32  While a comprehensive analysis of Franco-Jewish opinion is outside the scope of this paper, the filmmakers studied here are not alone in their sentiments. Several individuals interviewed in Robert I. Weiner and Richard E. Sharpless, An Uncertain Future: Voices of a French Jewish Community, 1940–2012: The Jews of Dijon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) voiced similar sentiments. See comments by Dijon rabbi Simon Sibony (“I’m optimistic about Islam in France” and “If there is peace in the Middle East, this will calm things down even more [in France],” 19–20), and by Alan Grynberg (“I would give back some occupied areas . . . I married someone from Israel; I am in Israel three or four times a year. Those who never go find it easy to say that we should keep the land,” 180). See also Rony Brauman’s arguments in Rony Brauman and Alain Finkielkraut, La discorde: Israël-Palestine, les juifs, la France—Conversations avec Élisabeth Lévy ([Paris]: Mille et une nuits, 2006). The essays in Debrauwere-Miller, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict also show a range of French-Jewish opinion on Israel, even if formal community institutions support the Israeli government more steadfastly.

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“Despair is like the devil. It takes you over.” Similarly, Clavel’s Where to, Israel? highlights a rabbi who asserts that the conflict cannot be solved militarily. Jews and Arabs will live together or die together, the rabbi insists; he would rather live. The friendship films and documentaries treated here share these sentiments. They show that for many French Jews in the early twenty-first century, coexistence remains a priority—in France, as in Israel.

Films Discussed

Albou, Karin. La Petite Jérusalem. 2005. Directed by Karin Albou. New York: Kino Video, 2006. DVD. ———. Wedding Song [Le chant des mariées]. 2008. Directed by Karin Albou. Culver City, CA: Strand Releasing, 2009. DVD. Bitton, Simone. Wall [Mur]. 2004. Directed by Simone Bitton. Parsippany, NJ: Lifesize Entertainment, 2005. DVD. ———. Rachel. 2009. Directed by Simone Bitton. New York: Women Make Movies, 2009. DVD. Clavel, Camille. France-Israel: The Untold Diplomatic History Since 1948 [La France face à Israël]. 2014. Directed by Camille Clavel. Film festival screening. ———. Where to, Israel? [Vers où, Israël?]. 2013. Directed by Camille Clavel. https:// itunes.apple.com. Ferroukhi, Ismaël, and Alain-Michel Blanc. Free Men [Les hommes libres]. 2011. Directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi. New York: Film Movement, 2012. DVD. Fitoussi, Noam, Lorraine Lévy, and Nathalie Saugeon. The Other Son [Le fils de l’autre]. 2012. Directed by Lorraine Lévy. New York: Cohen Media Group, 2013. DVD. Miské, Karim, Emmanuel Blanchard and Nathalie Mars. Jews and Muslims: Intimate Strangers. [ Juifs et Musulmans—Si loin, si proches.] 2013. Directed by Karim Miské. Wheeling, IL: Film Idea, 2014. DVD. Schaefer, Stefan C., and Yuta Silverman. Arranged. 2007. Directed by Diane Crespo and Stefan C. Schaefer. New York: Film Movement, 2007. DVD. Zauberman, Yolande, and Sélim Nassib. Would You Have Sex with an Arab? 2011. Directed by Yolande Zauberman. [Paris]: Orange Studios, 2013. DVD. Zenatti, Valérie, and Thierry Binisti. A Bottle in the Gaza Sea [Une bouteille à la mer]. 2011. Directed by Thierry Binisti. New York: Film Movement, 2013. DVD. Zilbermann, Jean-Jacques, and Antoine Lacomblez. He’s My Girl [La folle histoire d’amour de Simon Eskenazy]. 2009. Directed by Jean-Jacques Zilbermann. Amazon Instant Video.

Chapter 15

Defining France and Defending Israel: Romantic Nationalism and the Paradoxes of French Jewish Belonging Kimberly A. Arkin In 2004, a group of French journalists1 asked the head of a major French Jewish organization—the CRIF [Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France, Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France]—what he thought about Turkey’s eventual admission to the European Union. Although the question seemed to clash with the interview’s focus on French Jewish concerns, Turkey’s relationship to Europe had recently become a French national election issue, with a number of candidates taking positions against Turkey’s admission to the European Union as a way of shoring up French nationalist credentials. Roger Cukierman, then president of the CRIF, made it clear why Turkey’s admission was also a Jewish issue: Elisabeth Schelma: The entry of Turkey into the EU? No, except? Yes, but? No? Yes? Roger Cukierman: [Sigh, provoking laughter from the audience.] I can’t respond because there is a Turkish Jewish community that would like to be accepted. But I have a sense of discomfort and doubt. If the biggest European country by its population is a Muslim country, if we add to this population . . . the millions of Muslims who live in Europe, Europe risks losing its Judeo-Christian character. Claude Askolovitch: How can a child of the Shoah have nostalgia for Judeo-Christian Europe; I can’t really understand it. Cukierman: I’m not nostalgic for . . .  1  Claude Askolovitch from the center-left magazine Nouvel Observateur, Elisabeth Schelma from the pro-Chirac and openly Zionist alternative news agency ProcheOrient.info, and Catherine Corroler from the mainstream left newspaper Libération. I was present at the interview and recorded it. All translations of oral statements and textual materials are mine.

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Askolovitch: No, when you talk about Europe’s Judeo-Christian tradition, you give the impression that the Jewish community was so happy in this Judeo-Christian Europe. Askolovitch’s evident astonishment was not surprising. Cukierman is an Ashkenazi Jew. His parents fled Poland for France in the early 1930s. As a young child, French families hid him from the collaborationist French police and the Nazi occupiers. So Cukierman’s personal experience militated against imaging Judaism as an integral part of French or European identity. But Askolovitch’s surprise went beyond the clash between Cukierman’s experiences as a Jew in twentieth-century Europe and his idealistic invocation of Judeo-Christian unity. Cukierman’s vision of a Judeo-Christian Europe represented a very public rupture with older Jewish institutional modes of imaging political and social community. For good historical reasons, French Jews since the Second World War largely have avoided publicly talking about European political communities, whether national or transnational, in ethno-religious terms. But Cukierman seemed to be grounding Europe in just such an imaginary. Rather than emphasize the way voluntary political contracts produced plural political communities, or even the way that structured class relations and engagements might produce such a community, Cukierman seemed to claim that large-scale political and social identities were ethnic and religious. How, then, can we understand the paradox of a European Jew, and a Holocaust survivor to boot, articulating what appears to be a Romantic conception of political community? And, given the close connection in contemporary French political discourse between ‘European’ and ‘French’ identities (if not politics), what might Cukierman’s comments tell us about changes in the storied historical relationship between public French Jewishness and Republicanism?2 Cukierman’s voice was just one in a growing chorus of French Jewish leaders and intellectuals who seemed to be turning toward a version of what Douglas Holmes has called ‘integralist’ imaginaries.3 In the early 2000s, many of these 2  Pierre Birnbaum, Les fous de la République: histoire politique des juifs d’état, de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992). 3  Douglas Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Holmes uses the word ‘integralism’ to describe a Europe-wide response to the rapid and bewildering political and economic changes that have accompanied European integration since the 1980s. Rooted in the tropes of Romanticism and the counter Enlightenment, Holmes sees integralism as defying traditional political divisions between left and right and as mobilizing “an organic approach to life and politics” over and against what are imagined as the morally and socially crippling effects of late modernity.

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thinkers increasingly mobilized conceptions of identity and belonging rooted in organic communities composed of culturally similarly citizens, juxtaposing what they called ‘nations’ with artificially constituted, cosmopolitan ‘societies.’ In this essay, I use the works of two major French Jewish intellectuals—Alain Finkielkraut and Shmuel Trigano—to highlight the central themes of French Jewish ‘integralism,’ contrasting it with earlier arguments (often made by the same thinkers) about the contours and nature of political community in general and Frenchness in particular. I suggest that the surprising emergence of integralism among French Jewish intellectuals is an attempt to negotiate Jewish belonging in light of contemporary French antisemitism: antisemitism that renders Jews, in contrast to Muslims, culturally French while simultaneously producing them as politically inassimilable once-and-future Israelis.4 Integralism challenges this tendency to split Jewishness across cultural and political lines by defining France and Frenchness in a way that facilitates the defense of Israel as an ethnoreligious nation-state. As we shall see, this move— defending Israel by defining an exclusionary vision of France—­creates ‘elective affinity’ between ‘Jews’ and ‘the French’ over and against ‘Arab Muslims.’ In the process, Jews, whether in France or the Middle East, become ‘isomorphic’ with ‘the French.’5 1

Antisemitism, Israel, and French Jewish Belonging

Quite a bit has been written both inside and outside France about the upsurge in symbolic and physical violence against French Jews since the start of the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000.6 Here I would like to emphasize two 4  One could make the opposite argument for Muslims: while they are incessantly produced as culturally foreign in contemporary France, diasporic politics around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict bring them politically closer to mainstream French discourse. 5  Zygmunt Bauman, elaborating on the Weberian concept of elective affinity, has written: “Elective affinity is not a causal relation. Neither is it a matter of ‘similarity.’ It is, rather, a relation of isomorphism, of ‘commutation’ between two autonomous sets of phenomena: the inner relations between phenomena of one set may be represented as replicas of those of the other.” Modernity and Ambivalence (Polity Press, 1993), 156, emphasis in original. 6  A small number of French historians and intellectuals have tried to situate contemporary antisemitism within the larger historical context of pre- and post-World War II French antisemitism and French racism, see for example Michel Wieviorka and Philippe Bataille, La tentation antisémite: haine des Juifs dans la France d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Laffont, 2005). Far more work has been done outlining the difference in contemporary antisemitism’s origin and content, focusing on its anti-Zionism and link to Muslim ‘immigrants’ (often second and

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contradictory but coexistent trends in the way many French Jews (and nonJews) perceive and characterize this violence. The first is that Jews are targeted not just because they are Jews, but also as quintessential symbols of France itself, and more particularly French Republican values. This argument has been made in a number of forms and at a number of different social locations: by officials at the very highest levels of French government, representatives of French Jewish institutions, and private Jewish individuals. In all of its forms, this argument collapses the distance between French Jews and Frenchness, insisting on the structural as well as cultural connections between Jews and France. It also locates antisemitism outside French values and dispositions, whether or not its perpetrators actually have French citizenship. In these characterizations, antisemitism is not an age-old problem implicit in the contradictions of political belonging in a nationalized Europe, but a new phenomenon embedded in populations that do not have appropriate European or French dispositions.7 In other words, antisemitism no longer comes from the French nationalist far right, it comes from ‘Muslim immigrants.’ How does this manifest itself in Jewish responses to antisemitism? Here I want to offer just a few examples from different social locations and times. At demonstrations against antisemitism in the mid-2000s, the Union des Etudiants Juifs de France (UEJF), the largest union of Jewish university students, marched with banners that read “synagogue brulée, République en danger,” a burning synagogue means the Republic is in danger. In 2005, the secular Zionist organ­ ization Hachomer Hatzaïr issued a petition denouncing, seemingly interchangeably, both antisemitism and ‘anti-white/anti-French’ sentiment among

third generation) in France, see for example Georges Bensoussan, Antisemitism in French Schools: Turmoil of a Republic ([Jerusalem]: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 2004); Emmanuel Brenner, France, prends garde de perdre ton âme: Fracture sociale et antisémitisme dans la république (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2004); Emmanuel Brenner, Les territoires perdus de la République: antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu scolaire (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002); Alain Finkielkraut, Au nom de l’autre: réflexions sur l’antisémitisme qui vient (Paris: Gallimard, 2003); Pierre-André Taguieff, La nouvelle judéophobie ([Paris]: Mille et une nuit, 2002); Shmuel Trigano, La démission de la République: juifs et musulmans en France (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003). For a critique of this debate, see Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). 7  See for example, Brenner, Les territoires perdus de la République: antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu scolaire; Brenner, France, prends garde de perdre ton âme; Taguieff, La nouvelle judéophobie.

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banlieue—read black and Arab—youth.8 Scores of Jews whom I interviewed while doing fieldwork in Paris in the mid-2000s explained that antisemitism was motivated, at least in part, by ‘Muslim jealousy’ at French Jews’ cultural and economic achievements, including social integration and socio-economic mobility.9 Even as antisemitism has changed over the last few years, shifting from racialized incidents of theft targeting adolescents and young adults10 to deadly violence against institutionalized settings of Jewish identity,11 this discourse has remained unchanged. Manuel Valls, a former Interior Minister under socialist President François Holland and, as of early 2015, French Prime Minister, responded to recent bloody acts of antisemitism by insisting on the indissoluble bonds between French Jews and France. In a speech given at a CRIF dinner, Valls remembered the Jewish day school children killed in Toulouse by Mohammed Merah, noting, “when a Jew is attacked for what he is, for what he believes, it is the Republic, France, and our values that are under attack.”12 Similarly, in January 2015, after Amedy Coulibaly’s attack on the Hypercacher on the outskirts of Paris, Valls told a crowd assembled in memoriam, “France,

8  The context for this petition against ‘anti-white’ racism was a series of demonstrations led by high school students against the center-right government’s proposed reforms to the national curriculum. Some demonstrators were viciously attacked and robbed by other teenagers and young adults, some of whom explained that their goal was to “casser du Blanc,” or maul Whites. 9  As both Maud Mandel, Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict, and I, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), have argued in different ways, there are historical reasons why the children and grandchildren of some North African immigrants may look at French Jews, who are in their vast majority also of North African origin, as signs of the asymmetrical opportunities for different groups in Republican France. While there has been considerable North African Jewish economic and social mobility since the 1960s, the same cannot be said for North African Muslims. 10  The torture and murder of Ilan Halimi in early 2006 falls into this camp; he was targeted because his attackers thought Jews were ‘rich’ and therefore his family would offer a handsome ransom in exchange for his release. 11  In March 2012, Mohammed Merah shot three uniformed French soldiers in Montauban before turning to a Jewish day school in Toulouse, where he killed four people, including three children. In May 2014, a French gunman—Mehdi Nemmouche—killed four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. And in January 2015, just after the Kouachi brothers killed 12 people at the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Amedy Coulibaly killed four people at a kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris. 12  “Manuel Valls appelle à combattre ‘l’antisémitisme virulent’,” Le Point, February 27, 2014, sec. Politique.

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without French Jews, would no longer be France.”13 Roger Cukierman then inverted this phrase, telling attendees of the 2015 CRIF dinner: “We would be less French if we were not Jewish.”14 The arguments cited above about the origins of antisemitism suggest that Jews are becoming unmarked members of the French cultural majority who are targeted by outsiders contemptuous of or excluded from a French Republican project. But at the same time, there is a parallel discourse that links antisemitism with anti-Zionism rather than anti-Republicanism. This linkage effectively ties antisemitism to the (anti-Israel) politics of the French majority, not just to the politics of Muslim minorities. As a result, in this narrative, Jews are no longer tokens of French Republican values and aspirations, but Israelis whose politics and very national existence are rejected by ‘the French.’ And indeed, in French media, Israel is routinely portrayed as systematically violating fundamental European values. It is described as a racist state, likened to apartheid South Africa, and condemned for excessive use of force against an impoverished and relatively weak population. When major national dailies, like the left-wing Libération and the left-center paper of record Le Monde, publish commentaries on Israel written by French Jews, they most often confirm these kinds of representations, despite the fact that such views are hardly representative of French Jewish perspectives. Whether intended or not, the implicit message is that being a French Jew, which is the self-identity of many of those writing these kinds of columns, requires disavowing Israel’s political trajectory and treatment of minorities.15 While this story about Jewish distance from mainstream French political values obviously has not been a significant theme for French Republican leaders, it is a leitmotif of Jewish institutional and everyday discourse. Again, 13  “Valls: ‘Il faut combattre le nouvel antisémitisme né dans nos quartiers,’ ” Le Parisien, January 13, 2015, sec. A la une. 14  Roger Cukierman, “Discours de Roger Cukierman au dîner annuel du CRIF” (Paris, February 23, 2015), http://www.crif.org/fr/lecrifenaction/%C2%ABnous-serions-moinsfran%C3%A7ais-si-nous-n%C3%A9tions-pas-juifs%C2%BB/54603. 15  See, for example, Esther Benbassa, “Pour une autre politique du CRIF: le président élu dimanche devra s’attacher à dissocier la lutte contre l’antisémitisme du soutien inconditionnel à Israel,” Libération, May 13, 2004; Esther Benbassa, “La guerre des mémoires: la polémique autour de l’héritage colonial français libère les revendications mémorielles,” Libération, January 2, 2006; Esther Benbassa, “Le CRIF, vrai lobby et faux pouvoir,” Le Monde, February 17, 2010; Edgar Morin, Sami Naïr, and Danièle Sallenave, “IsraëlPalestine: le cancer,” Le Monde, June 4, 2002. Esther Benbassa, a historian at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, is both a darling of the mainstream French media and a bête noire for Jewish institutions and community leaders.

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a few examples. At a now infamous 2005 dinner, Roger Cukierman accused former Socialist President Lionel Jospin of promoting antisemitism through ‘pro-Palestinian’ foreign policies.16 In an interview with me in 2005, a philosophy teacher at a Jewish school offered a variation on this theme, explaining that French media coverage of the Second Intifada was unabashedly pro-­ Palestinian. For him, the upsurge in antisemitic violence that followed the beginning of Intifada, as well as the general French indifference to that violence, were inseparable from this barrage of anti-Israeli propaganda. Similarly, scores of French Jewish adults in the mid-2000s told me that they had taken measures to insulate themselves from French incomprehension of Jewish political concerns. These measures included cancelling subscriptions to mainstream French newspapers and refusing to talk to non-Jewish friends about Israel. As the President of the UEJF, Yonathan Arfi, explained to me in 2005, ­“Anti-Zionism runs deep in France because French people cannot understand the existence of Israel; [they cannot understand the existence of Israel] because they cannot understand the idea of Jews as an ethnic, rather than a religious, group.” For Arfi and many others, the root of the problem was French normative society, not its poorly assimilated exterior margins. Mainstream secular French attempts to separate out ‘culture’ from ‘religion’ had rendered Jewishness as a cultural, ethnic, and religious formation incomprehensible.17 And despite continual governmental efforts to reassure Jews—like Valls’ pronouncements quoted above—this sense of Jewish isolation from the French mainstream has deepened, driven in part by French politics in relation to Israel.18 In 2014, Yonathan Arfi told me that while the ‘classe politique’ had 16  He noted: “I have to tell you about the discomfort I feel. Discomfort related to what I think is the incompatibility between France’s international politics and its internal politics around fighting antisemitism” Agence France Presse, “M. Barnier juge ‘presque décourageants’ les critiques du président du CRIF,” February 14, 2005. He added, “France’s foreign politics is often perceived as conflating America and Israel, Zionism and imperialism, globalization and oppression. Whether intended this way or not by diplomats, this confusion is very real in public opinion and fuels the amalgamations that hurt Jews.” Judith Waintraub, “Cukierman fait le procès de la diplomatie française,” Le Figaro, February 14, 2005, sec. Société. 17  For a discussion of French secularism and the splitting of ‘religion’ from other aspects of community and communal imaginary, see Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 18  There have been widespread calls for an economic boycott against Israel; pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the summer of 2014 attracted a politically and socially diverse crowd and, at times, degenerated into explicit antisemitism; and France has consistently refused

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started to combat the French Republican problems that were leading to antisemitism in all its forms, the same was not true for the general French population, which still saw Jews as the issue: “Jews don’t feel like they are allowed to speak in public space. So they have withdrawn from talking about anything other than antisemitism.” Cukierman noted in March 2014 that while being explicitly antisemitic is still not considered polite, “it is elegant to blast the State of Israel,” suggesting—despite his frequent assertions to the contrary— that he does not think France’s problem with Jews is confined only to ‘young Muslims.’19 Even after the massive public response to the January 2015 killings, which included the slogans ‘je suis juif,’ ‘juis suis policier,’ ‘je suis Charlie’ [I am a Jew, I am a police officer, I am Charlie [Hebdo]], some Jewish leaders and intellectuals expressed disappointment at the perceived lack of French solidarity with Jews. Gil Mihaely, for example, explained to Le Figaro: Lots of French Jews feel very alone. For example, after the attacks on the 7th, 8th, and 9th [of January], the leitmotif became liberty of expression; but that was not the common denominator among the victims: they were victims of terrorism. Neither the Jews of Vincennes [at the kosher market] nor the police officer from Montrouge were sacrificed on the altar of liberty of expression. For Montrouge, it was probably a botched attack on a Jewish school; at Vincennes, it was a successful attack against a kosher market. The attacks on [the Jewish school at] Toulouse and [the soldiers at] Montauban garnered far less of a reaction [than the Charlie Hebdo] attacks. During the attacks against [the synagogue] at rue Copernic in 1981 [sic], the prime minister at the time, Raymond Barre, said: ‘this odious attack was directed against Israélites going to synagogue and killed innocent French people crossing the street.’ Today, there is a sense that this slip continues to reveal something deeply ingrained in the [French] collective unconscious: Jews are never innocent victims.20

to integrate Israel into its Organisation de la francophonie despite Israel’s considerable (and now growing) Francophone population. 19  “Le CRIF implore Hollande de faire de l’antisémitisme une ‘cause nationale,’ ” Le Point, March 4, 2014, sec. SOCIÉTÉ. 20  Anne-Laure Debaecker, “Antisémitisme: les juifs sont-ils les «parias de la République?” Le Figaro Online, January 27, 2015, sec. Vox Société.

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These simultaneously deployed discourses leave Jews on opposite sides of France’s lines of ‘internal exclusion.’21 In the first, Jews are ‘the French’ targeted by an outside, primarily Arabo-Muslim other imagined as uncivilized and uncivilizable. In the second, Jews are the outside ‘other’ targeted by ‘the French.’ I would like to suggest that this is precisely the circle that French Jewish integralism attempts to square, in part by suggesting that France and Israel share a model of community and belonging that is threatened by the same kinds of forces. This turns the defense of Israel instantiated in the second discourse into a defense of France, exemplified by the first. 2

From Society to Nation

In order to show how this works, I am going to trace out the surprising intellectual convergence between two very different French Jewish thinkers, Alain Finkielkraut and Shmuel Trigano. Finkielkraut is a secular Jew, philosopher, and professor at the prestigious Polytéchnique. He has long defended progressive, humanistic universalism against what he calls the volkish cultural relativism of the post-modern world.22 He has styled himself an enemy of Montesquieu, Herder, and their post-modern heirs, who see men only in their particularist, culture and time-bound manifestations. He has championed an Enlightenment understanding of Man, defined by universal reason and a transcendent commitment to “the Good, the True, the Beautiful.”23 He has condemned nationalist, post-colonial, and post-modern thinkers for defining individuals first and foremost as members of groups, rather than as free, rational beings. And he has likened champions of cultural integrity and particularism to defenders of racialized ideas of human difference, arguing that the logic of incommensurability behind race and Herderian (read anthropological) culture concepts are identical. Thus, while lauding the collapse of the idea that nations are rooted in racialized peoplehood, he has asked: Where is the progress? Like the old advocates of race, the current champions of cultural identity reduce individuals to group belonging; they imagine difference in absolutist terms, and, in the name of particularism

21  Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), 43. 22  Alain Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). 23  Ibid., 15–18.

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and causal indeterminancy, they destroy human unity founded on either nature or culture.24 As is always the case, Finkielkraut’s universalism is hardly universal. His claims about universally recognizable standards are deeply embedded in the values and embodied practices of dominant segments of French society.25 For example, he has long advocated the ‘preservation’ of standard French over and against its bastardization in the mouths of working class, semiurban, often second or third generation ‘immigrant’ youth.26 But this did not make Finkielkraut’s thought exclusionary in ethno-nationalist terms. In fact, what Finkielkraut seemed to deride above all were the ways that Romantic thinkers and their descendants erected impenetrable boundaries of various kinds, whether ethnic, national, racial, or religious. As a result, one of the leitmotifs of his critique of post-1968 politics has been its failure to understand the great moral disparity between the colonial politics of domination and Nazi politics of extermination. For Finkielkraut, the former, however horrible in implementation, was rooted in a conception of universal human capacity. The latter, in contrast, was premised on the dehumanization and elimination of certain human groups. Refracted through Finkielkraut’s philosophical lens, colonialism leveled geographical, historical, and cultural boundaries; Nazism used dehumanization and death to create the most impenetrable boundaries possible.27 24  Ibid., 109. 25  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 26   Alain Finkielkraut and Sylvain Bourmeau, “Débat: Alain Finkielkraut et Sylvain Bourmeau,” Les Matins de France Culture (Paris: France Culture, November 28, 2005), http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-alain-finkielkraut-et-sylvain-bourmeau-2005-11-28 .html. In this radio interview, Finkielkraut called for the “reestablishment of the school as the primary means of transmitting language” in order to eliminate the ‘parlé banlieue’ or ghetto speak that he sees as a violent deformation of French. 27  Michel Feher has framed this bifurcation in a different way. He argues that the PalestinianIsraeli conflict revealed two irreconcilable understandings of ‘evil’ in French society: one reading associated with ‘domination’ and therefore colonialism and another associated with ‘phobia’ and therefore totalitarianism. From this perspective, Finkielkraut would see evil as driven by ‘phobia,’ and thus would defend Israel against an anti-colonial camp that might justify the extermination of Jews because they are viewed as dominant. “Le Proche-Orient hors les murs. Usages français du conflit israélo-palestinien,” in De la question sociale à la question raciale, ed. Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 91–105.

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This universalist Finkielkraut painted a clearer portrait of what French society was not than of what he thought it was. He condemned both left and right wing versions of relativism. He criticized post-colonial attempts to resurrect ‘pure’ national forms over and against ‘cosmopolitanism,’28 and he deplored the ‘new’ European right’s opposition to post-colonial immigration in the name of preserving ‘European’ difference.29 He also condemned the ‘pluriculturalism’ of the antiracist European left as the quickest way to foreclose upward mobility and full citizenship to those ‘enveloped’ by their own differential ­cultures.30 Rejecting the construction of France as a society rooted in ‘her’ culture, whatever that might be, Finkielkraut fantasized about a France that was rootless, tethered only to the ever-changing possibility of individual and collective transcendence provided through great literature (wherever it came from) and philosophy. Finkielkraut approvingly quoted the anti-nationalist Pole Witold Gombrowicz: A French person who pays attention to nothing outside of France, is he more French? Or less French? In fact, being French means taking into consideration other things besides France.31 This is hardly a very specific sociological vision, but it certainly suggests that Finkielkraut would have recused any attempt to attribute a specific and fixed content to Frenchness. Instead, Frenchness appears as a voluntary and yet deeply-rooted orientation toward constant self-transformation and ­progress— an idea with no territorial or firmly specified cultural boundaries.

28  Finkielkraut has, for example, likened Franz Fanon’s rejection of post-colonial elites’ embrace of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to racist German romanticism: “The German romantics said: ‘All that is foreign, all that is introduced into the life of a people without good reason becomes a vector for social illness and must be removed if the people are to remain healthy.’ In the same way, [for Fanon] it is the fear of intermixture, the obsession with purity, and the specter of contamination that cultural identity substitutes for colonial arrogance” Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée, 105–6. 29  He is a critic of what, after Samuel Huntington, has come to be called the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). Finkielkraut argues against the idea that “it’s a tragic illusion to want to make communities from different civilizations live in the same country,” deploring the expansion of such thinking into “politically respectable milieux” Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée, 122–4. 30  Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée, 126. 31  Ibid., 138.

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This is precisely where Finkielkraut’s discourse has begun to shift. Since 2001, he has acquired an entirely new public persona. In the 1980s and 1990s, he presented himself as a French intellectual, foregrounding his rejection of Jewish ‘tribalism.’ In Le Juif imaginaire,32 for example, he refused any mystical or essentialist conception of Jewishness, arguing that as European Jews shed religious practices and became fully normalized citizens of Western democracies, the category ‘Jew’ also lost its essential content and meaning. Instead, as Sarah Hammerschlag has argued, it became a past that had to be grappled with from an exterior position: “Judaism is no longer for me so much an identity, as a form of transcendence. Not something that defines me, but a culture that can’t be embraced, a grace I cannot claim as mine.”33 In contrast, today Finkielkruat seems to have reappropriated Jewishness as a defining feature of his inner being. He is a self-proclaimed ‘Jewish intellectual’ and a mainstay of the Jewish communal lecture circuit.34 He has even registered his own surprise at the transformation: To my own surprise, I was led to do a weekly program for RCJ [Radio Communauté Juive, Jewish Community Radio]. The Jewish intellectual that I was would never have thought that he could one day express himself on a community radio station. It’s the context [of resurgent antisemitism] that pushed me to do it.35 His ‘community’ engagement is far more extensive than this single radio program. He speaks on everything from foreign affairs to French sociology at Parisian Jewish community centers and is a regular columnist with Tohu Bohu and L’Arche, both Jewish monthly magazines with significant intellectual content. And, perhaps most notably, he has even claimed that he no longer feels comfortable thinking or fully expressing himself outside of a Jewish context, particularly on matters related to Israel.36 32   Le juif imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1980). 33  Cited in Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 34  Raphaëlle Leyris and Paul Bernard, “Alain Finkielkraut: ‘Je n’ai pas honte de réagir comme juif,’ ” Tohu Bohu, December 2002, 9. 35  Ibid. 36  Yonathan Arfi et al., Les enfants de la République: y a-t-il un bon usage des communautés? (Editions de la Martinière, 2004). This is somewhat ironic because some (but certainly not all) of Finkielkraut’s sharpest critics are Jewish Israelis. The Israeli film producer Eytan Sivan sued Finkielkraut in French courts for ‘defamation’ after Finkielkraut accused him on television of being “one of those actors in a particularly offensive and ­horrifying

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With this shift in public persona has come a new strain in Finkielkraut’s thinking.37 From a deep distrust of the particular in all guises, Finkielkraut has begun justifying and even lauding certain kinds of territorial and cultural boundaries. For example, in some contexts he has slipped from denouncing ‘pluriculturalism’ to deeply distrusting ‘hybridity’ and ‘métissage.’ If pluriculturalism for Finkielkraut meant too many walls, resulting in the juxtaposition of divergent and perhaps even incommensurable values and ways of being within the same polity, hybridity and métissage mean too few walls. Writing about the triumphalism of the antifascist left after the defeat of far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of presidential voting in 2002,38 Finkielkraut reminded the public that this sense of victory was in fact illusory: Having evidently voted with the Republican majority, I share their happiness . . . but you have to have a soul quite confused by the tragic past not to recognize this: hatred’s future is in their camp and not in that of those still faithful to Vichy. In the camp of the smile and not of the grimace. Among men considered human and not those thought of as barbaric. In the camp of the hybridized [métissée] society and not in the ethnic nation. In the camp of respect and not that of rejection . . . In the ranks of those who unconditionally support ‘the Other,’ not among the petit bourgeois who only love ‘the Same.’39 r­eality, today’s extensive Jewish antisemitism” “Le cinéaste E. Sivan débouté en appel dans son procès contre A. Finkielkraut,” Agence France Presse, May 23, 2007. In addition, two Francophone journalists for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz provoked an international scandal when they used Finkielkraut’s own words to portray him as antiArab and anti-black. With the subtitle “You Israelis Will Understand,” they further implied that Finkielkraut presumed Israelis could instinctively relate to his racism. Mishani Dror and Aurelia Smotriez, “What Sort of Frenchmen Are They?” Haaretz, November 18, 2005, English edition, http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2006/01/finkielkraut-haaretz-interviewand.html. 37  Eric Fassin builds the recent ‘hardening’ of Finkielkraut’s discourse into the very logic of his original positions. He argues that Finkielkraut’s universalism has always been nationally-infused, designed to fight the culturalist ideologies and politics of the ‘antiimperialist left’ with Culture. But with the growth of anti-Zionism-cum-antisemitism on the anti-imperialist and anti-racist left, Finkielkraut is now logically fighting racism (antisemitism) with racism (anti-immigration-ism). “Aveugles à la race ou au racisme? Une approche stratégique,” in De la question sociale à la question raciale, ed. Didier Fassin and Erice Fassin (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 124. 38  In the first round of voting, Jean-Marie Le Pen garnered more votes than the then sitting socialist President, Lionel Jospin. 39  Finkielkraut, Au nom de l’autre, 20, emphasis in original.

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Here, Finkielkraut seems to suggest that boundaries—whether imagined as biological, cultural, or social—are no longer the source of the most devastating and shared ideological failings on the left and on the right. Rather, the camp of the ‘smile’ has a new failing unique to the left: its desire to pull down walls. Elsewhere Finkielkraut has called this a project to emancipate “men by the generalized hybridization of cultures and identities.”40 Note as well Finkielkraut’s emphasis on the distinction between ‘society’ and ‘nation’ in the lengthy passage quoted above. Where previously Finkielkraut underlined the ideological similarities between what he called ‘pluricultural societies’ and ethnic imaginaries of the nation, here he intentionally seems to emphasize the ontological and philosophical differences between a society and a nation. He makes this distinction clearer in another context, arguing that he would regret anything that would transform the ‘French nation’ into a ‘multicultural society.’41 With this distinction, Finkielkraut seems to be self-consciously evoking the furious nineteenth-century debate between Enlightenment-inspired modernists, particularly thinkers like Emile Durkheim, intent on rationally ordering and guiding internally diverse ‘societies,’ and counter-Enlightenment Romantics dedicated to the natural telos and authenticity of the ‘nation.’42 He also seems to share the counter-Enlightenment perspective, from which it is the homogenous ‘nation’ that is organic, and therefore natural, stable and functioning; ‘societies,’ on the other hand, are a hodge-podge of unrelated elements forced into a set of ‘mechanical’ relationships, and therefore “artificial . . . devoid of the spirit of life.”43 What is all the more surprising about Finkielkraut’s inversion of Durkheim’s44 understanding of modern European societies is the way he links integralism to Jewish inclusion. If Durkheim thought the best way to argue for Jewish Frenchness was by emphasizing the primitiveness and weakness of homogeneity (‘mechanical solidarity’) as a foundation for society, Finkielkraut seems to do just the opposite. Finkielkraut deplores the transformation of a ‘nation into a ‘society’ not only because it deforms France by forcing it into an ‘AngloSaxon’ model, but also because he thinks it will be “bad for the Jews.”45 This is

40  Arfi et al., Les enfants de la République: y a-t-il un bon usage des communautés?, 27. 41  Ibid., 34, emphasis in original. 42  Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. 43  Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 53–5. 44   The Division of Labor in Society (New York, NY: Free Press, 1984). 45  Arfi et al., Les enfants de la République: y a-t-il un bon usage des communautés?, 34.

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why he also stresses the importance of both defining and defending French culture: . . . what [France] has that is beautiful deserves all our compassion because she is disappearing . . . In a France that hates herself and that is losing her heritage, Jews are in a much more dangerous position than in a France that is proud of herself.46 And what is this ‘heritage’ that France must be ‘proud of’ and work hard to save? The Judeo-Christian tradition evoked at the opening of this article. According to Finkielkraut: We have to find a way for religion to once again be part of our culture. Not religion in general. First and foremost Christianity, but also Judaism because both religions have contributed to creating this [French] culture [en tant qu’ils ont contribué a façonner cette culture].47 The excluded term is too obvious to miss: Islam, despite its considerable role in the processes that have indelibly shaped contemporary French society, has made no contribution to ‘French culture.’48 But why does Finkielkraut think Jews are endangered by ‘métissage’ or a ‘multicultural society?’ How can a France true to her national ‘heritage,’ which 46  Leyris and Bernard, “Alain Finkielkraut: ‘Je n’ai pas honte de réagir comme juif,’ ” 9. 47  Arfi et al., Les enfants de la République: y a-t-il un bon usage des communautés?, 36. 48  For an account of the way contemporary French self-understandings, political structures, and social categories are rooted in colonial dynamics in North Africa, see Naomi Davidson, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992); Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). I want to be clear. The exclusion of Islam and Muslims from ‘European history’ is currently part of the dominant mode of narrating and therefore defining Europeanness. See, for example, Talal Asad, “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). There is thus nothing particularly Jewish about this kind of exclusionary discourse. The question I am raising here is why some Jews, whose own history has also long been excluded from narratives of Europeanness, would embrace this particular model for defining community and belonging.

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has long been used to exclude Jews, be better protection for contemporary Jews than a concept of political community that accommodates and even incorporates internal differences? The answer, for Finkielkraut, is Israel. In a society built on destroying racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries, Israel’s very foundation is incomprehensible. Understanding the necessity of a ‘Jewish’ nation-state, requires embracing the notion that political communities can and perhaps even should be rooted in primordialized identities, in Herderian communities. Finkielkraut writes: The emancipation of men by hybridizing identities and cultures [implies] that no separate existence is justifiable and that we should work hard to hybridize the world. And the Jews in that story? It makes no more place for the demand for a Jewish state than the progressive narrative that calls everyone to fight against domination.49 Similarly, he argues that Jews are not now hated for their cosmopolitanism, but for their betrayal of that quality: Far from highlighting the disturbing strangeness of Jews, now we [the French] reproach their normalization just at the moment when we have rejected it; we are distressed by their untimely assimilation and the violence that pushed them to deify and sanctify the Land just at the moment when the Enlightened world converted en masse to transcending borders and nomadism.50 In other words, Finkielkraut suggests that French national imaginaries create the conditions of (im)possibility for understanding Israel as an ethnoreligious nation. Only in a France that imagines itself as a Judeo-Christian nation rather than a hybrid society can Israel and French Jewish politics around Israel become legible and comprehensible. Without seeing France as rooted in the exigencies of ethnoreligious community, Finkielkraut is convinced that the French will never be able to understand Jewish opposition to, for example, a bi-national Israel or Palestinian claims for restitution of lands lost in 1948.51 Finkielkraut’s conversion to integralism contains a certain kind of irony. Just like the incredulous reporter who wondered how Cukierman, a Holocaust survivor, could rehabilitate an ethnoreligious conception of Europe, one might 49  Arfi et al., Les enfants de la République: y a-t-il un bon usage des communautés?, 27. 50  Finkielkraut, Au nom de l’autre, 21–2. 51  Arfi et al., Les enfants de la République: y a-t-il un bon usage des communautés?, 26.

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wonder how Finkielkraut, the child of Holocaust survivors and a long-time defender of Republican universalism might find himself also imagining communities in organic, culturalist terms. There is a different kind of irony in the integralism of Shmuel Trigano, another highly visible, self-identified Jewish intellectual. Trigano is a philosophy professor at Paris X and the head of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s college-level Jewish studies program. Unlike Finkielkraut, he himself is an ‘immigrant,’52 an Algerian Jew who fled North Africa in the wake of French decolonization. He has always had close ties to the institutional Jewish community in France. Throughout the 1970s, he wrote articles for Tribune juive and L’Arche, two of the most significant organs of the French Jewish press. Unlike Finkielkraut, Trigano’s major, mainstream academic publications have always revolved around questions about Jewish identity. And he has long been a regular public panel speaker and organizer for Parisian Jewish institutions like the Alliance. In contrast to Finkielkraut, Trigano argued for decades that Enlightenment universalism was its own form of dangerous particularism. Rather than distinguishing between assimilatory and eliminatory modes of dealing with difference, Trigano saw both as equally threatening to Jews. He has linked the Holocaust to the economic and political legacies of the Enlightenment, not the Counter Enlightenment.53 He has written scathing critiques of the way French universalism disaggregates the Jewish community while nonetheless continuously interpellating individual Jews as members of a group.54 And he has accused Western, and more particularly French, Jews of responding to this impossible double bind by betraying their ‘peoplehood’ and surrendering the ‘political’ dimension of Jewishness.55 He has characterized French Jewish 52  The term is in scare quotes because most Algerian Jews have had French citizenship since the 1870 Crémieux decree. Trigano is therefore not an immigrant in terms of citizenship status; or at least he is no more of an immigrant than the French-born children and grandchildren of North African Muslims who, as we shall see, he continuously calls immigrants. However, North African Jews’ relationship to both public Jewishness and Frenchness has historically been quite different from that of Ashkenazim. Kimberly Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic; Naomi Davidson, “ ‘Brothers from South of the Mediterranean’: Decolonizing the Jewish ‘Family’ during the Algerian War,” French Politics, Culture and Society 33, no. 2 (Summer 2015). 53  Shmuel Trigano, “Untitled,” L’Arche, December 1978, 23. 54  Shmuel Trigano, “From Individual to Collectivity: The Rebirth of the ‘Jewish Nation’ in France,” in The Jews in Modern France, ed. Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985), 245–81. 55  Ibid. For Trigano, Sephardim—meaning Jews from Muslim countries—are the last repositories of this authentic mode of Jewishness, in large part because he sees them as the

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Zionism as a manifestation of this impasse and moral bankruptcy: a way of asserting a collective life without actually living one, an impotent political engagement that does not challenge French definitions of citizenship.56 All of this suggests that, while Finkielkraut’s early work evacuated any kind of essential content from the modern category ‘Jew,’ Trigano dramatically reified the term. He insisted on the absolute singularity, historical continuity, and incommensurability of the Jewish experience: Jewishness has always been movement, hope, conflict towards the realization of a different world. No other people has ever nurtured such a loving relationship with its own sense of destiny and vocation. No other people has ever produced the singular bizarreness that is the Bible . . . 57 But this reification of Jewishness did not translate into a straightforward embrace of Jewish nationalism. He has applied his critiques of the nationstate form to Israel itself, arguing that the desire to ‘normalize’ Jews within the framework of western-style secular nation-states is hardly faithful to the ‘Jewish idea’ forged at Sinai.58 But what the ‘Jewish idea’ forged at Sinai would look like in the contemporary world has never been particularly clear. After reading a piece by Trigano, a confused reader of L’Arche wondered whether he thought Jews should fight ‘the West’ in the Diaspora or ‘return’ to Israel; another seemed shocked at the link between capitalist nation-states and the Holocaust, noting that Israel was both capitalist and democratic.59 But whatever this ‘Jewish idea’ looked like, it seemed clear that it needed to be realized outside the confines of the nation-state, including perhaps the currently existing Jewish nation-state.60 But Trigano too has recently changed his stripes. From a dangerous trap for Jews whether in Israel or the West, Trigano now seems to think the integralist nation-state is the only foundation on which stable, meaningful community can be built. In an interview published by the French-language edition of the least ‘touched’ by the Western Enlightenment. Shmuel Trigano, “L’éxil des sépharades au sein du peuple juif,” Tribune juive, May 9, 1980, 15. 56   Trigano, “From Individual to Collectivity: The Rebirth of the ‘Jewish Nation’ in France,” 264. 57  Shmuel Trigano, La nouvelle question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 23. 58  Shmuel Trigano, “Les fils sont sur le point de naïtre et point de force pour accoucher,” L’Arche, March 1979, 39; Shmuel Trigano, “La question juive,” L’Arche, February 1979, 37; Trigano, La nouvelle question juive. 59  Unknown, “Letters to the Editor,” L’Arche, January 1979, 5–6. 60  There is a clear distinction, for Trigano and many others, between the nation-state of Israel and Eretz Yisrael, the biblical ‘Land of Israel’.

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Jerusalem Post (and then disseminated over the Zionist website desinfo.com), Trigano described the fait national, or fact of nationalism, as natural and even inevitable:  . . . after 70 years of communism, all the old Eastern European nations colonized by the USSR, the holy orthodox Russia have reappeared as if nothing happened, confirming the permanence of the fait national.61 He has criticized leftist Israeli historians for undermining people’s real experiences and values by adopting a ‘postmodern’ and ‘postnationalist’ perspective.62 For Trigano, these historians live in a de-structured, Benedict Andersonian world where ‘narratives’ are opposed to one another, not real groups of armed people.63 This, he suggests, does violence to the objective world and the way people live in it. Israel, for Trigano, is no ‘imagined community.’ Rather, [T]he Jews [are] a people . . . because a people has a history, is inscribed in a territory, has a place in the world. A people writes its own history . . .  It forges its own identity. No one has the right to contest the Jewish people’s biblical continuity or its historic rights to the Land of Israel . . . The negation of these rights is even more scandalous because it has emerged in the cultural universe forged by centuries of Christianity and Islam, whose practitioners cannot help but remember Israel’s antiquity—both in terms of existence and relationship to her land.64 Trigano has made basically the same argument for France. In La Démission de la Républic: les juifs et musulmans en France [The Capitulation of the Republic: Jews and Muslims in France], he has argued that France increasingly disavows ‘national identity,’ leaving the foundation of political and social order to the far-right.65 But solving France’s most pressing problems—first and foremost immigration—demands renewed attention to the nation:

61  Shmuel Trigano, Une entreprise de déligitmation de l’état d’Israël, Website, May 25, 2007, www.desinfo.com. 62  Shmuel Trigano, “Israël et la France face à la nation,” Revue internationale et stratégique 47, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 11–22. 63  Ibid. 64  Shmuel Trigano, L’ébranlement d’Israël (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 43–4. 65   La démission de la République, 26.

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[W]e have to accept the idea that the framework for the immigration problem is the nation, both its form—nationality—and its content— national identity. The sociological equation for this definition is simple: the arrival of several million foreigners into a society that already has a history, an identity, a genealogy [ filiations] has, in demographic terms, a seismic impact. The entrance of a new body into an already constituted one shakes a society’s symbolic and political morphology to its core. In order to survive, it has to redefine itself, integrating this new element according to its own laws.66 As any historian of France knows, this characterization of France as an always, already established organic entity is empirically false. As Eugen Weber beautifully illustrated decades ago, the imaginary (let alone reality) of France as a culturally-integrated—and for that matter, even French speaking—polity is extremely new.67 In addition, as Gerard Noiriel has compellingly argued, contemporary France has always been a nation of immigrants, despite state-based discursive regimes that say otherwise.68 Behind Trigano’s patently ahistorical claims about what France is, we again find some of the key elements of integralism. Trigano’s organicist metaphors—France has a history, a genealogy, and identity—underwrites his insistence that contact between variously constituted cultural groups leads to systemic disorder. For Trigano, the resulting social dysfunction might very well be ‘fatal’ if the already ‘constituted social body’ cedes to the standards of the invaders: In January 2003 we heard the head of the European Arab League, an Anvers faction that has its own militia and ‘police,’ declare (on TF1) that just as state and religion are separated, the state should be separated from any particular cultural model. In Sweden, Arab Muslims are demanding that the cross be taken off the national flag because they are as Swedish as their fellow citizens . . . [sic]. Democrats are very often willing to give into these demands right up until the moment that they realize that the beneficiaries are, in fact, resolutely anti-democratic and are only interested in damaging [ faire reculer] European identity.69

66  Ibid., 29. 67   Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). 68   Le creuset français (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992). 69  Trigano, La démission de la République, 82.

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In other words, multiculturalism in either its melting pot or mosaic modalities is a trap, a way of disarming a national public so that foreigners can impose their own cultural identities on well-meaning but hapless Europeans. Similarly, social contract theories of the nation are misguided. The ellipses after ‘fellow citizens’ suggests just what Trigano thinks about Swedish ‘Arab Muslims’ claiming equality with other Swedish nationals. They are not, he insists, like those who have long been part of the national culture and genealogy. They are perhaps constitutionally incapable of becoming full members of any European society. And this incapacity applies to all Arab Muslims, regardless of history, citizenship, and religious observance: They [Arab Muslims] belong to a religion that has not modernized and has not been part of the Republican pact. Its members are former or current nationals of foreign countries that, although very close to France geographically, have historically been competitors with the West and Christianity in general . . . Entering this identity that I call ‘France[,]’ . . . which I consider as a given necessary for emotional and political stability, would require that Arab Muslims completely reform their identity, their religion, and even their psychology.70 This may not be an appeal to Arab Muslim biological difference, but it offers an equally deterministic assessment of what they are and where they belong: outside the West in general and France in particular. Perhaps the most surprising piece of Trigano’s rendering of political community is the space it creates for Jewish Frenchness. While acknowledging that coming up with a definition of Frenchness is difficult, Trigano nonetheless attempts an answer: The whole problem is managing to define [France’s] foundation. It has to be a flexible definition, one that recognizes the legitimacy of secondary groups—voluntary associations—confined to civil society but inflected with culture, religion, or memory. These secondary identities would exist within the framework of a French identity defined by language, culture, and collective values. This might mean a form of enlightened secularism that is not sectarian, but that does not erase the historically Christian foundation of [French] collective culture . . .71

70  Ibid., 91. 71  Ibid., 123.

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A Christian-inflected, French-speaking secularism is thus the only fully embodied identity possible in the French nation. This is the assimilationist compromise Trigano seemed to denounce earlier in his career, but with a Romantic twist: certain groups may have to (impossibly?) alter their very ‘psychology’ in order to accommodate such a configuration. But if Arab Muslims will not and cannot become French, Jews—who are also overwhelmingly the children and grandchildren of North African immigrants—have always been and/ or were always destined to be French. Only an antisemite would claim otherwise by comparing Jews with Muslims: [W]hat is really a problem is the de-nationalization of the Jewish community entailed by the false theory of [Jewish and Muslim] symmetry. This implies a comparison between French Jews and newly arrived or recently naturalized immigrant populations . . . [Sephardim] thus find themselves victims of a double betrayal because [under colonial rule] they chose France by separating themselves from Islam, under which they had been dominated subjects, and opted for France at the independence of these countries. One could not find a better way to exclude them from the nation and cheapen their citizenship.72 Jews, he adds later, “are fully French, part of national life while accepting and defending what they are: the same and different.”73 3

Defining France, Defending Israel?

Unlike Finkielkraut, Trigano does not explicitly connect his change of heart around nationalism in general, and French nationalism in particular, to concerns about Israel. In order to link Trigano’s arguments about the nature and foundation of Frenchness to the French Jewish predicament and Israel, I want to draw on insights taken from anthropologist Matti Bunzl’s work on Jews in Austria.74 Bunzl has argued for a link between Austrian Jews’ relationship to Israel and European conceptions of political community. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bunzl noted declining interest in aliyah and lessening 72  Ibid., 15. 73  Ibid., 71. 74  Matti Bunzl, “Austrian Zionism and the Jews of the New Europe,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 2 (2003): 154–73; Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

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commitment to the idea of Israel as the Jewish homeland. Paradoxically, the ties between Austrian Jews and Israel started to loosen just as Jörg Haider’s antisemitic Freedom Party (FPÖ) became part of Austria’s national governing coalition.75 Bunzl explains this paradox through the diminishing relevance of national imaginaries within the context of an expanding European Union, a context that has challenged Austria’s sovereign autonomy and created unprecedented opportunities for intra-European movement. For Bunzl, the increasing ideological and empirical irrelevance of the nation-state form made Israel, as a Jewish nation-state, less central to Austrian Jewish imaginaries. In other words, Austrian Jews suddenly could be Austrian when Austria ceased to be a terminal and exclusive identity category. Bunzl writes: From the Austrian-Jewish perspective, it certainly seems that conventional Diaspora Zionism is about the recede into the past. As Europe’s nation-states are dissolving, so too are the political configurations that engendered Zionism in the first place. In the larger historical context, this would seem to put pressure on Israel’s raison d’être.76 In other words, when the nation-state as a social and political form comes to appear irrelevant or outdated, even Jewish commitments to a Jewish nationstate become harder to sustain. In many ways, I think both Finkielkraut and Trigano are attempting to reverse that equation. I have already mentioned the way Finkielkraut links French discourses like métissage—with its call for leveling cultural, ethnic, racial, and national boundaries—to the vilification of Israel. Although Trigano is less explicit, he too seems to be establishing a form of elective affinity between France and Israel; like Jews in relation to ‘the French,’ Trigano seems to imply that France and Israel are both ‘the same’ and ‘different.’ If France can be imagined as an ethnoreligious community—French speaking, Judeo-Christian, sharing both culture and consciousness—then Israel’s ethnoreligious Jewishness seems much harder to criticize as either racist or anti-democratic. Indeed, by working to rehabilitate Romantic national imaginaries in France, both men emphasize the naturalness and centrality of a certain conception of belonging. When seen from this perspective, a defense of ethnoreligious nationalism is no longer evidence that one is racist or on the wrong side of history. Instead, such a defense becomes the only way to preserve stable, functional sociopolitical communities, whether Jewish or French. 75  Ibid., 154. 76  Ibid., 170.

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For both Finkielkraut and Trigano, far from authorizing potentially dangerous (anti-Jewish) forms of politics, integralism makes Europe safe for Jews by normalizing Israel; it also makes Israel safe for Jews by justifying the State’s continued refusal to accept Palestinian refugees or to subordinate its Jewishness to democratic exigencies. But if integral nationalism helps rehabilitate Israel, it is not immediately obvious how it squares the circle I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. How does it allow Jews to be culturally and politically French? In fact, does it not do just the opposite, raising the question of whether Jews can ultimately be anything other than Jews-cum-Israelis? And if it does somehow square the circle, how does the full integration of Jews into Judeo-Christian France not negate Jewish nationalism? Here too the logic may rely on an implicit isomorphism (sameness and difference) between the French and Israeli cases. Let us return to the opposition Roger Cukierman established between Turkish Jews—who he assumed were and would want to be considered European— and Turkish Muslims—who he insisted could not be thought of as Europeans. Cukierman acknowledges that both groups have Turkish citizenship. But he does not think they are Turkish in the same way: their origins, affiliations, and allegiances are imagined to be diametrically opposed. Finkielkraut and Trigano echo this theme, placing Jews and Muslims into ontologically distinct communities. Trigano, in particular, emphasizes Jewish/Muslim distinction, notably in his refusal to even entertain the notion that Jews and Muslims—despite shared geographical and historical roots—might be compared in the French context. Remember he considered this a denigration of Jews. This same ontological opposition to Muslims grounds both contemporary Israeli nationalism and articulations of French identity.77 The links between recent debates about the content of Frenchness and (attempted and enacted) legislation against a whole host of Muslim practices, including headscarves, burqas, even ritual slaughter, is hardly accidental. As Talal Asad has suggested, if there is anything consistent about contemporary discursive invocations of Europeanness or Frenchness, it is the seemingly categorical exclusion of Muslims and Islam.78 From this perspective, Jews-cum-Israelis are isomorphic with ‘the French’ and 77  For historical accounts of this opposition in the Colonies, see Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); Joshua Schreier, Arabs of the Jewish Faith the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). For a historical and analytical account of its manifestations in the Metropole, see Davidson, Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France. 78  “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe.”

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with Europeans more generally. They can be ‘French’ politically and culturally because Jewishness, like Frenchness, is understood increasingly as having a purely negative and differential relationship with Islam. As Finkelkraut exclaimed to an interviewer: “I just realized this. Faced with the simultaneous de-dramatization of anti-French violence and the occlusion of anti-Jewish violence, I wonder if Jews are the last French people [ français].”79 4 Conclusion There have been a number of accounts, journalistic and otherwise, of French Jews’ relatively recent ‘rightward’ turn in France.80 In some ways, these accounts link contemporary Jewish politics to a profound normalization of Jewishness in France.81 Both Eric Fassin82 and Daniel Lindenberg,83 for example, situate French Jewish thinkers like Finkielkraut and/or Trigano within the larger social and intellectual context of the “new French right,” implying the erosion of the structural particularities that have helped produce overwhelmingly progressive Jewish politics since the revolutionary period.84 In a different way, the French Jewish historian Esther Benbassa makes a similar point. In her book La République face à ses minorities: les juifs hier, les musulmans aujourd’hui [The Republic and its Minorities: Jews Yesterday, Muslims Today],85 she insists that the structural position occupied by Jews in France from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century is now occupied by Muslims. Jews, in 79  Leyris and Bernard, “Alain Finkielkraut: ‘Je n’ai pas honte de réagir comme juif,’ ” 8–9. 80  See, for example, Fassin, “Aveugles à la race ou au racisme? Une approche stratégique”; Feher, “Le Proche-Orient hors les murs. Usages français du conflit israélo-palestinien”; Cécile Gabizon, “La droite progresse au sein de l’électorat juif,” Le Figaro, June 19, 2006, sec. Francepolitique; Daniel Lindenberg, Le rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris: Seuil, 2002). 81   These kinds of analyses are not only about France. See Bunzl, Antisemitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe for an account of Jewish normalization leading to public Jewish support for right-wing parties with histories of antisemitism. 82  “Aveugles à la race ou au racisme? Une approche stratégique” 83   Le rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires. 84  For an account of why Jews had few political options other than progressive and Republican parties, see Birnbaum, Les fous de la République; Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). 85  Esther Benbassa, La République face à ses minorités: les juifs hier, les musulmans aujourd’hui (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2004).

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this account, have become relatively unmarked French citizens. As a result of these accounts of Jewish normalization in contemporary France, a number of scholars have seen Jewish fears around resurgent antisemitism as paranoia or cynical politics, or both.86 Here I offer a different explanation, one that pays attention to the continued difference of French Jews and French Jewish thinkers both structurally and experientially. French antisemitism—whatever its sources—and Jewish understandings of antisemitism illustrate that Jews are (once again!) liminal in France. In some crucial ways, the construction of postcolonial France over and against Islam in general and North African Muslims in particular has placed Jews—particularly ‘Arab’ Jews—in a deeply uncomfortable structural position. As I have argued elsewhere,87 the essentialization of Jewishness has become important to the work of distinguishing Jews from Muslims, and particularly ‘Arab’ Jews from ‘Arab’ Muslims. But while opening up the possibility of Frenchness to Jews in a way foreclosed to Muslims, the foregrounding of essentialized versions of Jewishness also exiles Jews from French Republican political imaginaries. Given this, we can read the surprising embrace of integralist notions of political community among all sorts of French Jews—intellectuals, community leaders, everyday citizens—as a symptom of Jews’ renewed structural insecurity in France. From this perspective, integralism is a political imaginary that attempts to resolve an impossible bind; it turns the essentialized opposition between Jews and Muslims into a way of simultaneously claiming Jewish Frenchness and Israeliness. When viewed in this way, we not only gain deeper insight into the otherwise baffling embrace of a form of politics that historically endangered European Jews. But we also better understand the stunning resilience and longevity of national political imaginaries that bear little resem86  See, for example, Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe; Fassin, “Aveugles à la race ou au racisme? Une approche stratégique”; Lindenberg, Le rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires. I am not contesting the facts that some of these thinkers present. Matti Bunzl and, more recently David Cesarni, are absolutely right to insist that there is no institutionalized, state-sanctioned antisemitism in Europe and that previously antisemitic parties, like the French Front National and the Austrian FPÖ, now present themselves as philosemitic. Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe., David Cesarni, “There Is No ‘Wave’ of Anti-Semitism,” The Huffington Post UK, January 26, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost .co.uk/david-cesarani/anti-semitism-charlie-hebdo_b_6542550.html. I am simply contesting what Jewish fears in contemporary France mean, and resituating them within the troubled triangle that makes Jews and Muslims negotiate national belonging in France via claims about cultural, political, and civilizational distance from one another. 87  Arkin, Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic.

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blance to empirical reality. As postmodern and poststructuralist scholars laud the ways in which minority groups help deconstruct national cultural and political forms,88 French Jewish integralism calls attention to the opposite phenomenon: the sometimes surprising and often overdetermined ways in which minority groups can help reinforce exclusionary concepts of political community.

88  See, for example, Asad, “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe”; Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1994); Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism.

Index Abitbol, Michel 27 Abromavitch, Stanley 237 Action Française 120 Adhérents Orientaux de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle 116 Adler, Jacques 17 Adler, Karen 24 Albou, Karin 305–310, 322 Alcan, Michel 294 Aldrophe, Alfred 294, 299 Algazi, Gadi 313 Allgemeine Zeitung 133, 165–168 Alliance Israélite Universelle 12–13, 105, 149, 152, 161, 164, 256, 30, 339 Allouche, Jean-Luc 225–26 American Committee for the Rehabilitation of European Jewish Children 178–179 American Jewish Congress 176–178 American Joint Distribution Committee  4, 175–198 Anderson, Benedict 66 Archives israélites de France 84–85, 89, 104, 133, 142, 149, 275–277, 282–286, 294 Arendt, Hannah 9 Arfi, Yonathan 329 Askolovitch, Claude 323–324 Association Amicale des Israélites Saloniciens (AAIS) 110, 115–116, 118–119, 125 Association Cultuelle Orientale 115 Association Sioniste des Dames Juives 124 Attias, Jean-Christophe 304 Azoulay, André 224 Ballu, Théodore 292 Baltard, Victor 292, 296 Bar-Levav, Avriel 272–274 Barre, Raymond 330 Barzilai, Avraham 233, 236 Basch, Victor 118–120 Bathily, Lassana 303 Baudelaire, Charles 267 Benbassa, Esther 13, 21, 301, 304, 347 Bensimon, Doris 24 Berkovitz, Jay 11–12, 54 Bermann v. Bermann 99–101

Bernat, Julie 260 Bin Laden, Mohammed 314 Bing, Isaiah Berr 159 Binisti, Thierry 314–317 Birnbaum, Pierre 12, 29, 31 Bismarck, Otto von 166–167 Bitton, Simone 305, 311–312, 322 Blanc, Alain-Michel 322, 327 Blanchard, Emmanuel 322 Bloch, Jean-Richard 111 Bloch, Simon 142, 151, 154–155, 164–165 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon 289 Borel, Pétrus 259–262, 267–270 Buber, Martin 120, 124 Bugeaud, Thomas Robert 133 Bunzl, Matti 344–348 Cahen, Isidore 142–147, 149 Cahen, Moïse 283 Cahen, Samuel 133, 146, 278, 285 Camus, Albert 205 Carvallo, Jules 149 Castil-Blaze, François-Henri-Joseph 263 Cercle Bernard-Lazare 205 Cercle d’Etudes Juives 122 Cercle Gaston Crémieux 221 Chalom 106–107, 111, 113 Charlie Hebdo 303, 327–30 Chema Israël 104–105, 109–113, 118–120, 125 Chevalier, Michel 140 Cholvy, Gérard 117 Chouraqui, André 232, 250 Clavel, Camille 305, 312–314, 322 Club de la Jeunesse Juive 107 Club du Faubourg 120–122 Cohen, Erik 31 Cohen, Gaby Wolff 186 Cohen, Joseph 134, 164 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 212 Cohn, Albert 135 Cohn, Lionel 201, 205, 208 Comité d’Entente des Groupements Jeunes 113 Committee of Public Safety 38

352 Communauté Israélite de la Stricte Observance 85 Comte, Auguste 140 Conklin, Alice 129 Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France 97–198, 211–226, 323–330 Consistory 17, 72, 74, 76, 103–105, 108, 112, 115–117, 122–124, 130–135, 143, 148, 164–165, 197, 204, 207, 276, 279–284, 293–230 Corcos, Fernand 122 Corneille, Pierre 253–255–258, 266 Corrie, Rachel 312 Coulibaly, Amedy 327 Créhange, Alexandre (Ben-Baruch) 279 Crémieux (decree) 14–15 Crémieux, Adolphe 130–132, 148–150, 256 Crespo, Diane 322 CRIF, see Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France Cukierman, Roger 323–324, 328–330, 338, 346 d’Eichthal, Gustave 141 Danichewsky v. Danichewsky 96–97 Darmesteter, James 116, 123 Dehbi, Mehdi 302, 308, 318–320 Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie 111 Descombes, Charles Maurice 258 Desnoyers, Louis 263 Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund 167 Dreyfus Affair 3, 9, 61, 88, 103 Dubnow, Simon 9 Dufour, Roger 223 Durkheim, Emile 336 Duveyrier, Charles 140 Eclaireurs Israélites 105, 107, 109–110, 118, 178 Eclaireuses Israélites 109, 125 Ecole Rabbinique 83 Edinson v. Edinson 93, 95 Emounah 124 Fabry, Jean 114 Famin, César 137 Fassin, Eric 347 Feraoun, Mouloud 239 Ferroukhi, Ismaël 307, 322

Index Filderman, Léon 119 Finkielkraut, Alain 2, 325, 331–340, 344–347 Fleg, Edmond 103, 108, 111, 120, 123 FLN, see Front de Libération Nationale Fonds Social Juif Unifié 193 Ford, Caroline 151 Fould, Benoît 131 Franck, Henri 111 Frankel, Jonathan 12, 131 Freedman, Jonathan 256 Front de Libération Nationale 197, 201, 203–205, 228, 234–235, 238, 242–250 Gamzon, Robert 107–108, 183 Gautier, Théophile 259, 266–270 Geismar, Alain 214 Gide, Charles 119 Godart, Justin 111 Goldman, Nahum 224 Gombrowicz, Witold 333 Grégoire, Henri (Abbé) 40–41 Greilsammer, Jacques 202–203 Grobman, Alex 178–179 Groos, René 120 Guéroult, Adolphe 149–150 Guizot (loi) 66 Guizot, François 141, 145, 185 Gurvic, Lazare 185 Hachomer Hatzaïr 326 Hagani, Baruch 119 Haider, Jörg 345 Halévy, Léon 140, 150 Halévy, Ludovic 256 Halimi, Ilan 327 Halimi, Sidi Fredj (Rabbi) 239 Harry, Myriam 111 Harvey, David 296 Haussmann, Georges Eugène 290, 293–299 Havilio, Shlomo 233 Hazan, Katy 24, 189 Heine, Heinrich 160 Hertz, Henri 103–104 Hess, Moses 151 Hollanderski Léon 148 Holmes, Douglas 324 Hoog, Anne Hélène 255 Hourwitz, Zalkind 157–158

353

Index Institut des Sciences Juives 113, 124 Isidor, Lazare (Rabbi) 283 Israelitische Wochen-Schrift 155 Izoulet, Jean 111 Jabotinksy Vladimir 111 Jacques Amadée Janin, Jules 253–255, 264–270 Jarrassé, Dominique 299 JDC, see American Joint Distribution Committee Jean-Javal, Lily 122 Jéhouda, Josué 120 Jerusalem Post 341 Jeunesse Libérale Israélite 109–110, 119, 125 Jewish Chronicle 239 Jewish Labor Committee 176 Jewish Scouts, see Eclaireurs Israélites Jockusch, Laura 23 Jospin, Lionel 329, 335 Judaken, Jonathan 30 Judith, see Julie Bernat L’Arche 223, 225–226, 334, 339–340 L’Univers Israélite 71–72, 86, 89–90, 119–120, 142, 154, 165, 275–276, 279, 280, 282–284, 296 La Fraternité 110 La Jeunesse juive 107 La Nouvelle aurore 115 La Tribune juive 119, 123, 339 Lacomblez, Antoine 322 Lalou, René 123 Lazare, Lucien 199–201, 203–204, 208 Lazarus, Jacques 247–248, 250 Le Bulletin de Nos Communautés 199 Le Figaro 330 Le Monde 212, 220, 228, 235, 237–238, 243, 248, 328 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 335 Le Petit Rayon 113–14 Le Rayon 113, 123 Lecache, Bernard 106–107, 111 Lee, Daniel 20 Lefort, Claude 152 Lehmann, Joseph (Rabbi) 83–84 Lemoinne, John 138 Leroux, Pierre 140, 261

Level, Maurice 119 Leven, Narcisse 149 Lévi, Israël (Rabbi) 120 Levinçon v. Levinçon 87–93, 100 Lévy v. Toubiana 86 Lévy-Wogue, Fernand 119 Lévy, Albert (Rabbi) 108 Lévy, Armand 161 Levy, Benny 212, 214 Levy, Benoît 288 Lévy, Bernard-Henri 223 Lévy, Jacob 121 Lévy, Lorraine 305, 318, 322 Lévy, Louis-Germain (Rabbi) 111, 118, 120 Lévy, Simon (Rabbi) 64 Liber, Maurice (Rabbi) 104–105, 112–113, 122 Libération 225, 328 Lindenberg, Daniel 347 London Times 235, 237, 243 Lop, Ferdinand 119 Loubet, Emile 82 Lubetzki, Judah (Rabbi) 84–85 Lunel, Prosper 280 Malino, Frances 1 Mannoni, Eugène 228, 247–248 Manuel, Eugène 78, 149, 161 Margolis, Laura 181, 183, 191–192 Mars, Nathalie 322 Marx, Henry 11, 122 Matalon, Jacques 105 Mayer, Louis 76–77 Meddeb, Abdelwahab 304, 309 Meir, Golda 320 Memmi, Albert 194, 226 Mendelssohn, Moses 156–157, 160 Mendès France, Pierre 198, 224–225 Menorah 103, 115 Mer-Khamis, Juliano 321 Merah, Mohammed 303, 327 Meyer Beer, Jacob 256 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 256, 262–263, 269 Meyerkey (Meyer Levyne) 102 Meynier, Gilbert 243 Michaelis, Johann David 157 Michelet, Jules 142, 152, 161–162 Mihaely, Gil 330

354 Misgeret 233–239, 242, 244 Miské, Karim 307–309, 322 Mitterrand, François 220 Montefiore, Moses 130 Moro-Giafferi, Vincent de 98–99 Mortara Affair 144, 162–166, 170 Mosticzker v. Mosticzker 90–93, 95 Musset, Alfred de 260 Musset, Joseph-Mathurin 39, 51, 53–54

Index Rewbell, Jean-François 60 Roberts, Mary Louise 190 Rodrigue, Aron 13, 135 Roitstein v. Roitstein 94–95, 97 Rothschild, Gustsave 293, 295 Rothschild, Guy 206, 211 Rothschild, James (Baron) 116, 122, 256

Quinet, Edgar 139–142, 145, 152, 161

Samuels, Maurice 256 Sand, Shlomo 313–314 Saugeon, Nathalie 322 Schaefer, Stefan 322 Schelma, Elisabeth 323 Scheuer, Simon-Joseph 191 Schrameck, Jean 119 Schreier, Joshua 14–15 Schroeter, Daniel 16 Schwartz, Joseph 192 Schwartz, Laurent 198–221 Schwarz, Lotte 187–88 Schwarzfuchs, Simon 10–11 Shalaby, Mahmud 308, 318 Sharpless, Richard 32 Shepard, Todd 230–231 Shohat, Ella 311 Sibour, Marie-Dominique-Auguste (Archbishop) 136–137, 142, 152 Siegfried, André 122–123 Silverman, Yuta 322 Simon, Jules 140, 142, 147, 149 Simon, Lily 109, 125 Siney-Lange, Charlotte 26 Sirat, René-Samuel (Rabbi) 204–205, 208, 221–222 Sloutsky v. Sloutsky 95–96, 99 Spire, André 111, 120, 122–123 Stahl, Friedrich Julius 162 Stankiewicz v. Stankiewicz 89 Stein, Sarah 14–15 Stora, Benjamin 304 Sue, Eugène 161 Sussman, Sarah 26–27 Sutcliffe, Anthony 292

Racine, Jean 258–259, 266 Reinach, Salomon 123 Reinach, Théodore 72–73, 77, 119 Rescue Children Inc. 178

Taguieff, Pierre André 30 Tapia, Claude 24 Tchernoff, J. (Iouda) 97–98 Thiers, Adolphe 131–133

Nasser, Gamal Abdel 208, 228–229, 235, 245–246 Nassib, Sélim 320, 322 National Council of Jewish Women 176, 190 National Front 302 Nehama, Charles 105, 113 Neher, André 211 New York Times 237, 240–241, 243, 245–246 Nofi, Loai 319 Noiriel, Gerard 342 Nora, Pierre 242 Novick, Peter 182 Nye, Robert 259–60 Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE)  178–180, 185–189 Offenstein v. Offenstein 98–100 Offenthal v. Moscowitz 99–100 Palestine Liberation Organization 214 Pallière, Aimé 106–108, 111–112, 115, 119–120, 124–125 Paraf, Pierre 119 Paris-Presse Intransigent 237 Paxton, Robert 19 Périer, Casimir 257 Philippson, Ludwig 165 Planche, Gustave 263 Plée, Léon 147, 149 Poldès, Léo 120 Prague, Hippolyte 85, 104

355

Index Thompson, Victoria 259 Tohu Bohu 334 Torrès, Henry 111 Toussenel, Alphonse 258, 261 Treuenfels, Abraham 155, 164 Trigano, Shmuel 11, 321, 325, 331, 339–347 Turner, Victor 273 Union des Etudiants Juifs de France (UEJF) 199, 201, 204–205, 208, 326, 329 Union des Rabbins Français 83–86, 101 Union Libérale 109, 113, 118 Union Scolaire 114, 118–119 Union Universelle de la Jeunesse Juive (UUJJ) 105–113, 116, 118–121, 125 Université de Connaître 122 Vaad Hatzala 178–179 Valls, Manuel 327 Van Zanten, David 291–292 Veblen, Thorstein 273 Veuillot, Louis 136, 153 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 198, 221 Vulliaud, Paul 111

Wagner, Gloria 191 Walewska, Marie 260 Walton, Whitney 273–274 Wasserstein, Bernard 1, 9 Weill, Alexandre 286–288, 292 Weill, Julien (Rabbi) 119–120 Weinberg, David 17, 23 Weiner, Robert 32 Weiskopf, Moïse (Rabbi) 85 Wieviorka, Annette 22–23 Wieviorka, Michel 30–31 Wistrich, Robert 30 Wolf, Joan 208 Wolff, Mathieu (Rabbi) 86 World Jewish Congress 247 World Zionist Organization 106 Zahra, Tara 174 Zauberman, Yolande 306, 320–322 Zenatti, Valérie 305, 314–317, 322 Zilbermann, Jean-Jacques 305, 310, 322 Zlatopolsky, Hillel 113