Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France 0429591098, 9780429591099

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Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France

Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, the first critical biography of the leading French writer Edmond Fleg (1874–1963), explores his role in forging a modern French Jewish identity before and after World War II. Through his writings – plays, novels, poems, and essays based on Jewish and Christian texts – Fleg fashioned a minority identity within the context of French Third Republic universalism. At the heart of his work we find a radical ecumenism, a rejection of exclusive and homogeneous nationalism, and a deep understanding of the necessity of supporting vibrant minority subcultures within the context of a liberal democratic republic. This account is both individual and social, pointing to the ways in which Fleg acted within the possibilities and constraints of his milieu and used his writing to engage with and shape the discursive fabric of twentieth-century French culture. This book appeals to a number of scholarly audiences, including historians and literary critics who work on modern France and Jewish and religious studies and those who focus on issues of identity and difference, as well as a more general audience interested in modern France and/or modern Jewish history. Sally Debra Charnow is Professor of Modern European and Postcolonial History at Hofstra University. She brings together her interdisciplinary training in performance studies and history in her work on issues related to cultural production and politics. She is the author of Theatre, Politics and Markets in Finde-Siècle Paris: Staging Modernity (2005) and the editor of Artistic Expressions and the Great War, A Hundred Years On (2021). Her articles and reviews have appeared in Radical History Review, American Historical Review, French History, Modern and Contemporary France, and H-France.

Routledge Studies in the Modern History of France Series Editor Rachel Utley University of Leeds, UK

Titles in the series: French Soldiers’ Morale in the Phoney War, 1939–1940 Maude Williams and Bernard Wilkin Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France Sally Debra Charnow For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-the-Moder n-Histor y-of-France/book-series/ FRENCHHISTORY

Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France Sally Debra Charnow

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Sally Debra Charnow The right of Sally Debra Charnow to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Charnow, Sally Debra, 1955- author. Title: Edmond Fleg and Jewish minority culture in twentieth-century France / Sally Debra Charnow. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. Series: Routledge studies in the modern history of France | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021001937 (print) | LCCN 2021001938 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367186142 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429197208 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fleg, Edmond, 1874–1963. | Authors, French—20th century—Biography. | Jewish authors—Biography. | Jews—France—Biography. Classification: LCC PQ2611.L32 Z63 2021 (print) | LCC PQ2611. L32 (ebook) | DDC 848/.91209 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001937 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001938 ISBN: 978-0-367-18614-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-03674-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19720-8 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In memory of Gary Steven Henderson (1954–2006) For Ian and Hannah

Rabbi Tarfon and the Elders were once reclining in the loft of the house of Nit’za in Lod, when this question was asked of them: Which is greater, study or action? Rabbi Tarfon answered, saying: Action is greater. Rabbi Akiva answered and said: Study is greater. Everyone answered and said: Study is greater, but not as an independent value; rather, it is greater, as study leads to action. Babylonian Talmud (Kiddushin 40b)

Contents

List of figuresviii A note on the Edmond Fleg archiveix Acknowledgmentsx Introduction

1

1 Creating the self: French and Jewish

15

2 The Great War: ecumenism in the trenches and on the stage

55

3 A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris: writing networks, prophets, and personal narrative

84

4 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus: biblical legend as modern parable118 5 My Palestine? My France

146

6 Le chant nouveau: war, retreat, return

175



215

Epilogue: Edmond Fleg in the twenty-first century

Bibliography219 Index230

Figures

I am enormously grateful to both Dr. Charles Linsmayer and Georges Weill for granting me permission to use photographs from their private collections and to the Mémorial de la Shoah for permission to use their photographs. 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 4.1 5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3

6.4

6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9

Edmond Fleg, 1910 Fleg family, 1915 Edmond Fleg, 1915, with Madeleine Fleg, “cycliste du régiment” Edmond Fleg, 1915, posing in the trenches Photograph of the play Le marchand de Paris, 1929 Edmond Fleg, 1932, most likely at Beauvallon Daniel Fleg, 1939 Maurice Fleg, 1940 Group d’Éclaireurs Israélites de France dont Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, Léo Cohn et Claude Gutman rassemblés devant une maison à Beauvallon (Var), France 1941 [A group of French Jewish scouts including Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, Léo Cohn, and Claude Gutman assembled in front of a house (most likely Fleg’s) in Beauvallon (Var), France 1941] Samy Klein, Marc Haguenau, Edmond Fleg et Robert Gamzon résistants et Éclaireurs Israélites de France, Beauvallon, 1941 [Resistants and French Jewish scouts, Samy Klein, Marc Haguenau, Edmond Fleg, and Robert Gamzon, Beauvallon, 1941] Edmond Fleg at Moissac, circa 1942 Robert Gamzon, 1940–1944 Robert and Denise Gamzon, 1946 Edmond Fleg, 1955 Edmond and Madeleine at Beauvallon, 1960

28 61 63 64 121 163 179 180

183

184 186 194 198 202 206

A note on the Edmond Fleg archive

In the winter of 2014, I had the good fortune to be introduced to Georges Weill, who was the archivist to organize Fleg’s papers and copy them onto microfilm after his death in 1963. This microfilm is now under the rubric of the Fonds Edmond Fleg at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) archives and is the only extant copy of the original materials. According to Madeleine Fleg’s wishes, Fleg’s papers and manuscripts were bequeathed to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Only 20 years later did Weill learn that the archives never arrived in Jerusalem. To this day, no one knows where they are; many believe they were stolen. From Weill’s archivist perspective, the microfilm that was made previously is incomplete and does not replace the originals that have since disappeared. Fleg’s prodigious creativity and Weill’s painstaking work and commitment to microfilming it saved Fleg’s personal papers for the historian.

Acknowledgments

One of the most rewarding aspects of writing this book has been the generosity of the people who helped me along the way. I am most grateful to Georges Weill, historian and archivist emeritus and former president of the Society of Jewish Studies, who recounted meeting Edmond Fleg as a 13-year-old: He was an elegant man, a little out of fashion, wearing a tie lavaliere and speaking in a soft voice. Sneaking through the crowd, I succeeded in having him sign my copy of l’anthologie juive, one of the presents I had received for my recent Bar Mitzvah. Twenty years later, Georges Weill was the one to organize Fleg’s papers. As a living link to Edmond Fleg, his reading of parts of this manuscript was invaluable. He offered suggestions, corrections, and explanations. With his wife, Eva, he welcomed me into their home in Neuilly for engaging and far-reaching conversation and delicious meals. For the past 30 years, I have been fortunate to count on my former teacher Mary (Molly) Nolan for intellectual guidance, professional mentoring, friendship, and many glasses of wine. Through births and deaths, 9/11, tenure, promotion, and even the pandemic, Molly’s wisdom, humor, and pragmatism have sustained and inspired me. Her close reading of the entire manuscript was helpful beyond measure. Her comments clarified and focused the narrative; her critical acumen improved it enormously. Any errors are, of course, my own. I am indebted to the staffs of several libraries and archives for their assistance, particularly to Guila Cooper and Jean-Claude Kupermic at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in Paris, the Dorot Jewish Division and Rare Books Division of the New York Public Library, the Départment des arts du spectacle de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Library, and the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem. For those of us who work in France, we often have the good fortune to meet wonderful friends, new and old. My understanding of French culture and history has been deepened by my friendship with Laure Watrin and Thomas Le Grand, and their extended family from Nancy to Aix-en-Provence. Special thanks to Carolyn Johnston and Frederi Viens for sharing their small and very welcoming

Acknowledgments xi apartment in the Twentieth arrondissement summer after summer. Many thanks to Laura Hobson Faure and Nadia Malinovich, two academic historians who live and work in France, new colleagues, and friends, who helped me navigate the French Jewish archival world. My dear friend Fiona Casey has opened my eyes to the complex history of Nantes, where she lives, and to the beauty of Brittany. I thank Cecilia Bouzard and Rafael Molina for their acts of kindness and for making time to have adventures with me when I am in Paris. I am also grateful to Toby Yona Back for hosting me in Jerusalem. It is clear that a project like this is nourished by our communities. It takes a village, they say. I am so grateful to my village for our conversations, conference panels, and invitations to present my work at their institutions. For their generous comments and suggestions, my deep-felt thanks to Magnus Bernhardssson, Jane Caplan, Herrick Chapman, Venita Datta, Isabel Genest, Jeff Horn, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Daniel Lee, Phil Nord, Annelise Orleck, Tip Regan, Jeffrey Shandler, Jerrold Seigel, Willa Silverman, David Troyansky, and Julian Wright. I am especially indebted to my chosen “sisters” Carolyn Johnston, Nicole Dombrowski Risser, and Rebecca Schneider for their understanding and love. Many thanks to my present and former colleagues in the history department of Hofstra University, particularly to Johan Ahr, Simon Doubleday, Carolyn Eisenberg, Stanislao Pugliese, Katrina Sims, James Tan, Yuki Terazawa, and Susan Yohn. I would also like to thank our former dean, Bernard Firestone, and current dean, Benjamin Rifkin, of the Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, for their continued support of this project through research grants and conference funding. My Jewish community in Brooklyn and beyond has been a source of inspiration for this project from the beginning. I  am especially grateful to Sandra Abramson, Miriam Cohen, Eddy Ehrlich, Rabbi Dr. Lisa Grant, Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, Cantor Lisa B. Segal, and Arthur Strimling, who enliven Jewish life every day. I  appreciate their deep knowledge, which greatly increased my own capacity to unpack Fleg’s oeuvre. Heartfelt thanks to Mark Shefrin for his continued emotional support in the final few years of this project and for coming with me to Marseille in 2020 to visit the Centre Edmond Fleg. My deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Gary Henderson (1954–2006). Together, we learned how to love, trust, and cherish across differences of religion, culture, and upbringing. He always supported my travels to faraway waters and was a safe harbor when I returned. His is a deep presence even in his physical absence. This book is dedicated to his memory. I am blessed by the continued good humor of my children, Hannah and Ian, who came of age with Edmond Fleg as part of our household. They always help me maintain perspective and keep me laughing even during the rough patches. This book is for them.

Introduction

The death of 89-year-old Edmond Fleg on October 16, 1963, marked the passing of one of the most renowned figures in the world of French arts and letters. At the time of his death, Fleg (born Flegenheimer in 1874) was recognized as one of France’s most influential writers, having authored 17 plays and operas, ten books of poetry, four novels, as well as countless essays; he compiled anthologies and translated and adapted work by other acclaimed writers and poets. His funeral procession in Paris was attended by thousands of friends, colleagues, and admirers; Rabbi Chili, chief chaplain of the Jewish Scout Movement of France (Éclaireurs Israélites de France), led the service, and as Fleg had requested, Jewish scouts were posted as his honor guards.1 Crowds lined the streets of Paris to show their respect and veneration. One month later, there was “a moving memorial for the great poet, the great Jew, the immortal author of Écoute Israël.” The great hall of the Maison de la Chimie in Paris was “filled to capacity” by those paying homage to Edmond Fleg. Former prime minister René Mayer and socialist senator Marius Moutet attended, along with an illustrious array of writers, artists, politicians, rabbis, priests, and ministers. The well-known Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain delivered a speech, while Madame Véra Korène, an acclaimed actress from the Comèdie-Française, recited some of Fleg’s “most beautiful poems.” The well-known philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch concluded the commemoration with these words: “Edmond Fleg will never die. For those of us who have listened, there remains his memory, his message, his unequalled humor, his sense of justice and above all his spirit of freedom [liberté].”2 Fleg’s personal and professional networks were vast: he had been a member of the central committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) and recipient of their 1958 Narcisse-Leven prize for work “against the lies of antisemitism”; cofounder of the Jewish-Christian Fellowship Society (L’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France); and president of the central committee of the Éclaireurs Israélites de France (known to all as “Chef Fleg”). A laureate of the Academie française, Fleg was also a member of the French Legion of Honor (made a chevalier in 1921 and an officer in 1934) and a commandeur dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1959), an honor bestowed upon him by the Ministry of Culture under the direction of André Malraux. At Fleg’s induction into

2  Introduction the ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Jean-Jacques Besnard (president of the Society of Authors and Dramatists) described his work as that of “a great Jew and a great French man.”3 The Fleg archive is replete with hundreds of condolence cards and letters that Madeleine, his widow, received from an impressive cross-section of luminaries  – Christian and Jewish – including the secretary general of PEN International (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists); Marc Chagall and his daughter, Ida Chagall-Meyer; representatives from the Association des ecrivains combattants, the Comédie-Française, Le figaro littéraire, l’Assemblée nationale de France, the Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme, and the AIU; David BenGurion, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol, Yehudi Menuhin, Edmond de Rothschild, and the writer Albert Memmi; the president of the Protestant Federation of France; as well as family friends, devoted readers, rabbis, priests, and ministers from around the world.4 The following December Zalman Shazar, the president of Israel, presided over a memorial honoring Fleg in Jerusalem. Much beloved and deeply respected, Fleg’s poems, novels, and essays were already translated into multiple languages. Today, they continue to be readily available in French, British, and American libraries Edmond Fleg was one of France’s leading writers. He was a central figure in the reveil juif or “Jewish awakening” during the interwar years, and he was instrumental in forging a modern French Jewish identity in the twentieth century. Yet, despite his notoriety, even celebrity, few have heard of Edmond Fleg in the twenty-first century. Why has Fleg’s centrality to French Jewish self-understanding faded from memory in the years after 1945? To understand why Fleg’s version of Jewishness was eclipsed after the war and what new contours of Jewish self-understanding emerged, we need to trace the shifts in French discussions of Jewish identity. In the broadest sense, Fleg’s literary interpretations of Jewish texts and bold assertions of a rich and complex Jewish identity were overshadowed by the philosophical focus on antisemitism. Most importantly, discussions (and constructions) of French Jewish identity became firmly rooted in philosophical debate, especially in response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive). In the immediate postwar, Sartre’s landmark book was perceived at the time of its publication as a “declaration of war against antisemites.” Because of his well-known pro-Jewish stance and his steadfast support for the new State of Israel, “Sartre remained a hero to French Jews until his death and beyond.” Claude Lanzmann, who read Réflexions sur la question juive as a young man in postwar Paris, compared it to Zola’s J’accuse.5 Sartre argued that the antisemite “functions in a distorted mental space in which the Jew embodies all the anti-Semite’s fears, negativities and inadequacies.”6 He concluded that only when the “anti-Semite” Jew “will claim his rights as a citizen and as a Jew” will he achieve “over the course of time, and with the good will of Gentiles who are determined to combat anti-Semitism,” assimilation into French society; however, he will finally cease to be a Jew.7 Sartre’s loathing of antisemites was clear, but many Jewish critics writing in French decried his book for defining the Jew as an absence, a negative quality, a victim of social aggression from the antisemitic gaze.8

Introduction 3 The tight focus on antisemitism as the defining characteristic of Jewish identity began to recede, first through the work of postcolonial theorist Albert Memmi, and culminating with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Albert Memmi, a French-speaking, Tunisian-born Jew, who considered himself a disciple of Sartre and dedicated his 1962 book Portrait d’un juif to him, writes that even though Jewish identity is a consequence of centuries of exclusion: The Jew is not only one whom others consider a Jew. If he were only that, he would, as a Jew, be nothing but pure negativity. . . . The Jew is also a history and traditions, institutions and customs; he has an abundance of properly positive traits.9 French Jewish writers Robert Misrahi and Alain Finkielkraut also advocated for notions of Jewishness that were based not on apologetics, faith, or essence, but rather on existential, phenomenological, and social realities.10 But it was the influential Jewish thinker and one of France’s most significant philosophers Emmanuel Levinas who closed the Sartrian period, articulating a strong counterpoint to Sartre’s existentialist position. Levinas posits that the encounter with the “other” is the most fundamental event for the human subject. He argues that “the other makes on me a nonreciprocal demand that upends my autonomy.” Instead of a “free” subject defined by “rights and duties,” the “subject is first and foremost responsible.” For Levinas, the model for this form of subject is “already instantiated in the Torah in the person of Abraham, who is called upon, a structure that is manifested in Abraham’s response to God: Hineni [Here I am].”11 Although Levinas praised Sartre for finding a philosophical path that addressed the root causes of antisemitism, he criticized him for failing to acknowledge the internal meaning of Judaism.12 Levinas, through the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Français, consciously linked himself to Fleg. For Levinas, “The chants of Edmond Fleg” foreshadowed an expansive Judaism that shattered previous limits. Fleg’s process of constructing Jewishness from living Jewish texts was embraced by Levinas. Judaism was not about belief but about a tradition of text reading, a tradition of interpretation. Like Fleg before him, Levinas called for an exploration of the living texts of traditional Judaism as the basis for a modern Jewish identity. For Fleg and later Levinas, Judaism was a process and not a thing; it was a continual invention. They crafted their Jewishness and encouraged others to do so, as well.13 Most importantly, Fleg’s writing – poems, essays, plays – provided a condition of possibility for Levinas’ invention of Judaism in the postwar years. For both Fleg and Levinas, fresh readings of freely chosen Jewish ethical texts formed the foundation of a modern French Jewish spirituality and self-understanding.14 Like Fleg, Levinas believed Jewish identity to be an intentional act of choice and saw himself as “a voice of the renewed Jewish man.”15 The chapters that follow detail the life and work of Edmond Fleg, focusing on his seminal role in nurturing a new kind of cultural Jewish understanding in twentieth-century France. When Fleg first moved to Paris as a young man in the

4  Introduction last years of the nineteenth century, he traveled in the symbolist circle associated with Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. Deeply affected by the 12-year scandal that engulfed the nation following the convictions of Captain Dreyfus, condemned in the public eye precisely because he was a Jew, Fleg was shaken into a newfound appreciation for his Jewish identity. He embarked on a study of the tradition he grew up in and established a new literary direction devoted to reinterpreting biblical texts, legends, and liturgies for a broad popular audience. Through his writings – plays, novels, poems, and essays based on Jewish and Christian texts  – Fleg constructed the contours of a Jewish collective, if selective, memory and offered a kind of non-synagogue-based spiritual practice that allowed, even encouraged, secular French Jews to become or remain Jewishidentified and create alternative models of communal solidarity. In so doing, he fashioned a minority identity within the context of French Third Republic universalism. At the heart of his work we find a radical ecumenism, a rejection of exclusive and homogeneous nationalism, and a deep understanding of the necessity of supporting vibrant minority subcultures within the context of a liberal democratic republic. It also affirms that there was a potent place for minority writing and particular identities within the French universalist tradition throughout the twentieth century.16 Fleg’s literary project was inspired by nineteenth-century Jewish history writing, especially Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews from the Oldest Times to the Present (1853–1876), which promoted the idea of a distinct Jewish people that began with Abraham and continued unbroken until the present day. Graetz inspired writers and poets in the late nineteenth century, including Fleg, “eagerly seeking new fields of historical memory that were no longer traditional, but drew on tradition,” and sought to animate a cultural and spiritual interest in religious texts.17 Such a unified narrative of the Jewish people marked a shift from an earlier vision of Judaism as a diverse religious civilization that managed to survive despite its difficulties. For many central and eastern European Jewish intellectuals and writers at the time, this idea of a Jewish people became the basis for thinking about a Jewish national identity, especially Zionism. As a French Jew brought back to his Jewish roots precisely because of the exclusive antisemitic nationalism expressed by anti-Dreyfusards, Fleg rejected any version of exclusive national belonging – French or Jewish. In his interpretation of religious and folkloric texts he consistently reached in two directions: for the kind of humanist and universal values associated with French republicanism while also rooting his writing in the particular experience of Jewish history and practice. No doubt Edmond Fleg was an idealist of the first order, and a member of an elite Parisian class of intellectual luminaries that flourished during the Third Republic, yet his idealism was tempered by his attention to the varieties and contradictions of lived experience. Characters in Fleg’s fiction yearn for authentic spiritual fulfillment in a world they deem superficial, materialistic, divisive, and increasingly fanatical. He wrote his way into a new Jewishness, far from the dogmatic or superficial Judaism he associated with the past, yet equally far from the ideology of assimilation practiced by an earlier generation and many of his own peers. He focused on a selective

Introduction 5 transmission of Jewish memory and the reclaiming of Jewish ancestors, biblical to modern. Judaism, he believed, was an ethical stance imbued with the mission of active and creative engagement. By reintegrating this reconstructed past, Fleg animated a Jewishness that was ethnocultural and spiritual, if not traditionally religious in the sense of synagogue attendance or ritual practice. Through his writing, Fleg constituted a unique way to reimagine Jewishness through a messianic poetics, positing Jewish particularism in the context of French republican citizenship and Jewish-Christian reconciliation. Moreover, he argued for a complex understanding of universalism, nationalism, and identity, and articulated a more flexible, pluralistic concept of national belonging unique for its acceptance of the possibility of multiple attachments. This new, secular Jewish identity expressed by Fleg, according to historian Catherine Fhima, “challenged the private-public dichotomy of the nineteenth century, and affirmed a harmonious dual identity.”18 Historian Nadia Malinovich describes this kind of dualism – in which both Jewish particularism and universalist principles of French citizenship were affirmed – as akin to interwar French regionalism. Just as one could be Breton and French at the same time, one could be French and ethnically and culturally Jewish.19 Yet Fleg’s vision of a pluralist modern identity rejected bifurcation in favor of what he described as a deep continuity between his Frenchness and Jewishness based on their universal values. Influenced by Nobel laureate French philosopher Henri Bergson, himself an assimilated Jew, Fleg brought a high degree of nuance to this notion of a dual identity – of being both Jewish and French. As his mentor Bergson had done, Fleg rejected dualism in favor of a philosophical system that articulated continuity between spirit and material rather than their divergence. Bergson acknowledged a “pragmatic self” or “intellect” instrumental in function, dealing with surface impressions, helping us to negotiate our everyday lives in the material world. He postulated a second self, a “deep self” or “intuition,” that can directly apprehend “reality” without the mediating (and distorting) filter of intellect. Through the faculty of intuition it is possible, according to Bergson, to “experience the flow of reality instead of breaking it apart into stable, discrete categories, as we typically do in the realm of ordinary activity and communication.”20 This Bergsonian continuity between material and spirit undergirds Fleg’s notion of identity: it is not discrete or stable but in constant movement between intellect and intuition, between particular material aspects and universal spiritual ones. It was this understanding of continuity that shaped Fleg’s literary oeuvre. This continuum, this movement between the details of daily life and the potential of spiritual union, allowed Fleg to simultaneously engage seriously with the day-to-day workings of Jewish and French activity while maintaining a vision of transcendent universal harmony. At times, his instance on Bergsonian continuity understood as universal harmony led to his inability to see the facts on the ground, and he was criticized sharply for not taking politics seriously. At other times, his radical hopefulness or prophetic imagination inspired others, especially the young Jewish resistants during World War II. This first critical biography of Fleg in English uses the optic of an individual to see more clearly the complex, nonlinear, fluid process of French Jewish identity

6  Introduction in the making. Exploring Fleg’s social, political, and artistic world – the forces that shaped him even as they did not wholly determine his poetics or his actions – I bring the man and his ideas into broader contemporary discussions of modern French and modern Jewish identity. By animating Fleg’s world – his friends, colleagues, religious leaders, artists, musicians, and philosophers who influenced his work  – my aim is to delve into the sources of his creative life and imaginative space. As a writer he was deeply enmeshed in the field of cultural production, in terms of both structure and style, of twentieth-century France, yet he also exerted creativity in ways that influenced and acted upon that field. Viewing culture as constitutive and not merely reflective of a time and a place, I have tried to render an account that is both individual and social, pointing to the ways in which Fleg acted within the possibilities and the constraints of his milieu and used his writing to engage with and (re)fashion the discursive fabric of twentieth-century Paris. The first chapter, “Creating the Self: French and Jewish,” explores Edmond Fleg’s childhood in Geneva, his student years in Paris, and the ways in which he constructed a Jewish self in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. As a young man, Fleg fell in love with the daughter of a Protestant family friend, Marie-Claire Monnier, who was six years his senior. Threatened with being cut off, Fleg chose his family and their financial support over his attachment to her. This traumatic turning away from Marie-Claire haunted him for the next 60 years. The trials of Alfred Dreyfus unleashed a political scandal that divided the Third Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906; it also offered an opportunity for French Jewish intellectuals and writers – including Fleg – to find a sense of belonging in their communal heritage.21 Through an analysis of his diary, letters he wrote to his close friend Lucien Moreau (an anti-Dreyfusard), to his mother, to Marie-Claire, and to others touched by the Affair, we see firsthand the forging of a complex multilayered identity in turn-of-the-century Paris. In turn aesthete, sensualist, Dreyfusard, playwright, and Jew, the young Fleg engaged with explanatory narratives ranging from idealism and symbolism to spiritism, psychology, nationalism, and universalism. Influenced by the expansive ideas of Dreyfusards Bernard Lazare, Charles Péguy, and Henri Bergson, as well as the continued emotional impact of his rejection of Marie-Claire, Fleg forged and sustained a deep belief in and exploration of the possibility of Jewish-Christian reconciliation  – if not in real life, then through his writing. By 1908, after his quasi-arranged marriage to Madeleine Bernheim, the daughter of a wealthy and well-regarded Parisian Jewish family, and the birth of his first son, Fleg turned to Jewish-themed writing. In 1913, he published his first work inspired by Jewish texts, an epic biblical poem titled Écoute Israël (Hear Oh Israel) in Charles Péguy’s well-known and respected biweekly publication Les cahiers de quinzaine. When war was declared in August 1914 and President Raymond Poincaré called for national unity in the form of a Sacred Union to serve and protect the nation, Fleg, along with tens of thousands of Jews – French and foreign-born – heeded the call to fight as a way to prove their allegiance to France. Chapter 2, “The Great War: Ecumenism in the Trenches and on the Stage,” traces Fleg’s experiences at the front and his war-related writing in the immediate postwar. I am using the

Introduction 7 word “ecumenism” here to describe Fleg’s idea of unity across diverse communities – religious and otherwise – in France and Europe and beyond that was clearly inspired by the Sacred Union during the Great War. He published an epic poem Le mur des pleurs (1919), translated into English as The Wall of Weeping (1929), and produced La maison du bon dieu, a play featuring the comradeship between three chaplains at the front – a rabbi, a priest, and a minister. Both works testify to the war’s devastation, both physical and emotional, and aimed to offer a new ecumenical vision to postwar France and warn against returning to prewar hatreds. As an omniscient seer in The Wall of Weeping, the iconic figure of the Wandering Jew plays a central role in this articulation of carnage, redemption, and reconciliation. The mythic Wandering Jew warns against the threat of future war and asserts the profound continuity among the world’s people. For Fleg, the cofraternity he experienced at the front laid the foundation for his vision of a radical ecumenism that included Jews, freethinkers, and Muslims, as well as Protestants and Catholics. At times, critics found his work too idealistic and disconnected from the reality of postwar France, but nonetheless, Fleg maintained his vision of a multicultural France for the rest of his life.22 Jewish participation in the war buoyed a Jewish cultural flowering, or réveil juif (Jewish awakening), in postwar France.23 In the decade following the war, Jewish artists, writers, and scholars, many of whom had not thought so much about their Jewish identity before the war, articulated their Jewishness in a multitude of ways. Imagining Judaism to be a cultural fact akin to ethnicity, many, including Fleg, argued that what tied the Jewish people together was their shared history and traditions.24 As a central figure affiliated with the réveil, Fleg was instrumental in shaping the public discourse in his poems, plays, and stories, and as a major contributor to the journals. The third chapter, “A Jewish Awakening in Postwar Paris: Writing Networks, Prophets, and Personal Narrative,” considers the mostly male literary network that developed with Fleg in the lead and included André Spire, Léon Blum, Aimé Pallière, Gustave Kahn, Jean-Richard Bloch, Albert Cohen, and Victor Basch, to name a few. They wrote explicitly as Jews and about Jews. They sought to build a cultural Jewish identity through their work, but oddly, they seemed to be unaware of the “rich tradition of Jewish fiction in French that preceded them in the nineteenth century,” according to the literary critic Maurice Samuels. Perhaps they purposely rejected what “they held to be the strategies for negotiating Jewish identity of their parents’ generation,” or perhaps it was a desire to “believe that what they were doing was really new.”25 In either case, Jewish writers felt confident enough about their place in French society after the Great War to formulate new ways of talking about being Jewish without worrying whether their expressions would inflame antisemitism. The acclaimed writer Irène Némirovsky presents a counterexample to Fleg and his cohort. While Fleg wrote from the perspective of a Jewish people defined in a collective sense, Némirovsky  – 30  years his junior, a woman, and a Russian Jewish immigrant living in Paris – wrote from the point of view of a Jewish individual. Her stories depicted a deep pessimism about the prospect of Jewish “assimilability” or alternately painted individuals who were consumed with profound self-loathing.

8  Introduction Often accused of antisemitism, especially by Jews, because of these refrains in her writing, Némirovsky believed that the history of Jewish persecution and exclusion had an impact that was not erasable, even among those who were successful. As the literary critic Susan Rubin Suleiman explains, “Némirovsky was writing about her Jewish characters from the inside, sometimes observing them harshly and even unfairly but always from a position that can accommodate our seeing her gaze as that of a Jew.” Although Némirovsky did not see herself as a member of the “Jewish community or the Jewish people defined in collective terms, she was a Jew nevertheless, one who struggled precisely with those issues of Jewish identity and Jewish belonging.” Her characters may not be likeable, but the questions they raise continue to resonate.26 The postwar Jewish renaissance was not confined to France; German-speaking writers, painters, and intellectuals, including Hermann Cohen, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Stefan Zweig, and Ernest Bloch wrestled with what they deemed as their mixed and ambiguous identity. The literary work of French, German, and British writers on Jewish themes was published in journals like Judaisme, a series edited by Fleg from the publishing house Rieder, and La revue littéraire juive, in which he was also an editor. In this robust creative moment, writers explored nationalism, religion, assimilation, and orthodoxy; they grappled with issues of Jewish identity in their novels, poems, and plays. Taken together, these networks of writers and their published works offer an insight into the ways Jews were wrestling with the personal and political aspects of their lives and their art. Through an analysis of a treasure trove of letters and published texts, including Fleg’s Anthologie juive (1923), the play Le juif du pape (The Jew in the papal court) (1925), the autobiographical novel L’enfant prophète (The Boy Prophet, 1928), and a personal essay Pourquoi je suis juif (Why I Am a Jew, 1928), we see Fleg’s vast personal network emerge. Strangers wrote to Fleg from near and far identifying with his writing and his personal story and confessing their own. Through their letters to Fleg, many avid readers found an opportunity to talk about their own religious or spiritual concerns and probe issues of identity and faith with a sensitive and thoughtful writer. Taken together, these letters suggest that there was a large audience for accessible Jewish texts, noninstitutional forms of religion, and what felt like an authentic exploration of spirituality. With such widespread acclaim at the time, it is not hard to see why Pourquoi je suis juif and L’enfant prophète were Fleg’s most popular works, becoming classics in Jewish home libraries and beyond. For example, there were 33 editions of L’enfant prophète: 27 in French, two in German, two in English, one in Danish, and one in Hebrew. As interwar Europe became increasingly jingoistic, divisive, and Judeophobic, Fleg began to shift his ecumenical optic to focus more specifically on positive images of Jews. In one early effort, Fleg reimagined Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice as Le marchand de Paris, which opened to mixed reviews at the ComédieFrançaise in March 1929 and was published a few months later. In Fleg’s telling, the merchant is a benevolent, kindhearted Jewish businessman, full of wisdom and social consciousness. Chapter  4, “Moses, Solomon, and Jesus: Biblical Legend

Introduction 9 as Modern Parable,” begins with Shylock and then turns to Fleg’s interpretation of biblical characters – Solomon, Moses, and Jesus – depicting these figures as models of civic virtue and social justice, purveyors of ethics and law; his characters increasingly expressed caustic criticism of contemporary politics, especially the failure of the League of Nations to legislate disarmament. In the Jewish tradition of midrash, Fleg retold the story of Jesus, holding up his human qualities and his pacifism, passionately detailing the continuities among world religions and national groups, while making explicit his own critique of war, remilitarization, and what he deemed to be the hypocritical, shortsighted excesses of the world around him. The prewar foundations of French moral economy had been destroyed in the trenches, and Fleg – along with other writers and artists, including Catholic reformer Jacques Maritain and his wife Raissa – sought to construct a new moral dimension grounded in a universalized spirituality, internationalism, demilitarization, and peace.27 The presence on French soil of over 200,000 Jewish immigrants from the East, as well as many from the Levant and North Africa, led to a toxic increase in anti-Jewish sentiment. There was much disdain among French Jews of their coreligionists from eastern Europe and Russia, fearing that these immigrants, so visibly different from themselves, would challenge their own hard-won integration into French society. Fleg was one of few French Jews who bridged the divide, welcoming immigrant Jews into his circles. His conception of Jewishness and Judaism was, at its core, pluralist. An early supporter of Mouvement des Éclaireurs Israélites de France (French Jewish Scouts, founded in 1923 by Robert Gamzon), Fleg became its honorary president in 1926. With Fleg’s encouragement, the scouts were successful in generating a new space for Jewish sociability, bringing together young Jews from different walks of life  – religious, secular, Zionist, native, and immigrant – and offering a dialogue-space between practicing and nonpracticing Jews, French and foreign-born. The fifth chapter, “My Palestine? My France,” begins with Fleg’s involvement with the Jewish scouts and then explores his conflicted relationship to Zionism. At the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Fleg attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel and for the following two years he embraced Zionism, but ultimately this identification with Jewish territorial nationalism was a source of deep internal conflict. In 1930, Fleg traveled to Palestine, originally to research the historical Jesus, but what he saw moved him first to write a travelogue, Ma Palestine, about the establishment of the Jewish presence there. In it Fleg lifts up multiple voices describing the Zionist project on the ground, including kibbutzniks, scholars, and Arabs. He acknowledges the presence of various tensions in the territory, including the 1929 Hebron massacre, but he looks toward an idyllic future of fraternity between Jews and Arabs. True to his own values, Fleg warns against the extremism of irredentist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky as he finds much of the zealous Zionism he encountered as dangerous as its French variant. From his universalist perspective, politics  – British, Arab, and Jewish, as he understood them to operate under the Palestinian Mandate – only got in the way of uncovering the deep affinities between Arabs and Jews as human beings. Continually

10  Introduction affirming these deep affinities seemed to almost blind Fleg to the facts on the ground, to backroom political deals, and to violence and counterviolence. Before World War II, Fleg’s personal Zionism was spiritual; he believed that Zionism had a universal, quasi-messianic mission benefiting all humanity. Akin to Louis Brandeis’ notion that being a Zionist would make one a better American, Fleg argued that being a Zionist would make one a more humane person, a divinely inspired person. Uncomfortable with fixed, singular, immutable ethnic markers, Fleg felt doubly attached – deeply French and deeply Jewish – and this multiple attachment meant that any singular one would entail the loss of the other, which was intolerable. In November 1939, as the possibility of another war seemed imminent, Fleg’s younger son, Daniel, who struggled with a fragile constitution, committed suicide. In April 1940, his daughter-in-law Ayala, the wife of his older son, Maurice, gave birth to a stillborn baby. And only a few weeks later, Maurice was killed on the Flanders front as the German panzers rolled toward Paris. Chapter  6, “Le chant nouveau: War, Retreat, Return,” follows the Flegs through the war and into the immediate postwar years. In acute distress after Maurice’s death and the German occupation of Paris, Edmond and Madeleine sought refuge in their country house in Beauvallon (Var), Mas de Vieux Moulin, located between Marseille and Nice. Almost immediately, Fleg opened his home to the Éclaireurs Israélites or Jewish scouts, allowing them to camp out on his land; he led daily study sessions with them, which led to a publication titled Le chant nouveau (The new song, 1946) after the war. Fleg’s teachings and writings circulated through the scouts and the Jewish Resistance, inspiring and “arming” them to continue their dangerous clandestine work. Returning to Paris after the war, Fleg created, with historian Jules Isaac, the Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France (AJCF, Jewish-Christian Fellowship), an organization devoted to the rapprochement between Christians and Jews, which was affiliated with the International Council of Christians and Jews, and continues to this day. In 1957, he, along with Leon Algazi, inaugurated the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française, which sought to reestablish a Jewish intellectual community in France that was engaged in the public sphere and anchored in French Jewish history. The Colloque was conceived as a forum for reflection on Jewishness and gathered a diverse array of speakers from politics to science; Emmanuel Levinas, philosopher and Talmudist, was an active participant. Recognizing Fleg in Difficult Freedom, Essays on Judaism, Levinas explains: “In France, the poetry of Edmond Fleg, inspired by its sources, nourished an entire generation that had lost all access to Hebrew and Aramaic.”28 Fleg has had a long and vibrant afterlife. The Centre Edmond Fleg in Marseille, founded in 1964, a year after Fleg’s death, was formed to welcome and help repatriate Jews from North Africa. Today, it maintains a pluralist approach to French Jewishness and focuses on cultural forums, classes, and performances that foster intercultural and interfaith dialogue. The epilogue concludes with interviews of current leaders of the Centre Edmond Fleg as well as a sampling of its members.

Introduction 11 Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France is part of a new, more global approach to French history described by the well-known French historian Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books just prior to the 2017 French elections. Darnton explains how contemporary histories of France are recognizing that “non-French elements have always saturated French life” and have come from “all over the world” and rejects the “notion of French identity that has existed from the beginning – a beginning associated with the cliché ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ – and that has been refined over the centuries to constitute a distinct and particularly rich civilization.” Darnton is responding to the popularity of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing nationalist campaign in which even the term “national identity” has been usurped with the goal of “playing on fears about Islamic terrorists, immigration, and foreign influences in general  – even that France’s essential Frenchness will be destroyed by participation in the European Union.”29 This critical biography details Fleg’s representations of a particular “non-French element” that has saturated French life and offers a model of cultural pluralism that does not reject the imperative of universal humanist values. Like the United States, France has been and continues to be a country of immigration in which difference and diversity have been sources of strength, vitality, and renewal. Against much contemporary Jewish history that assumes the existence of a Jewish people connected genetically and forming a uniform and homogeneous Jewish nation-culture, this book underscores Fleg’s attention to a polyvocal Jewish belief-culture – a religious and moral system – in which he aims to explore the dynamic and creative tension between particular experiences and universal principles. French universalism, as the critic Maurice Samuels reminds us, not only signifies that the law applies equally to all people but has come to mean that the state accords rights only to individuals, not ethnic or religious groups, and that the individual must be shorn of all particularities in order to access those rights. Importantly, Samuels contends that French universalism is not itself a static abstraction, but has been subject to much debate and negotiation; it has meant different things to different people.30 Tracing Edmond Fleg’s life and writings offers a deep look into one such project of negotiation; we see the forming of a particular minority identity within the context of French Third Republic universalism. This understanding of complex identity and vibrant minority culture is more relevant than ever. Fleg’s work, both literary and organizational, created a foundation for a new kind of cultural Jewish identity that took root after World War II. Consciously and consistently working between two powerful intellectual, cultural, and emotional poles, Fleg articulated a modern identity that was neither discrete nor stable but in constant movement between particular historical aspects and universal ideal ones, both Jewish and French. This continuum, this movement between the messy details of daily life and the potential for spiritual union, allowed Fleg to simultaneously engage seriously with the day-to-day workings of Jewish and French life while still believing in and working for a better tomorrow. His vision constitutes an important attempt to construct a modern secular Jewishness that

12  Introduction is relevant to current efforts at Jewish self-definition and indeed to wide-ranging efforts at creating meaningful minority cultures within a broader pluralist, multicultural society. It also affirms that there was a vibrant place for minority writing and particular identities within the French universalist tradition throughout the twentieth century. For Fleg, the tension between universalism and particularism could not and should not ever be resolved; it is the dynamic reality of modern identity. His writings spoke loudly to his contemporaries during the interwar period and perhaps beckon even more forcefully in our own time.

Notes 1 In 1964, Edmond Fleg was buried near the family home in Beauvallon, in the cemetery at Grimaud. His wife, Madeleine, placed a tombstone on his grave in the beginning of 1965, as is Jewish custom. 2 Information juive, December 15, 1963, 3. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 3 “Edmond Fleg commandeur dans l’order des arts et des lettres,” Cahiers de A.I.U. 122 (February–March 1959): 2. 4 AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2, for the cards and letters. 5 Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The Jew in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexion sur la question juive: An Exercise in Historical Reading,” in The Jew in the Text, Modernity and the Construction of the Modern, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 201. 6 Seth L. Wolitz, “Imagining the Jew in France: From 1945 to the Present,” Yale French Studies 85 (1994): 121–22. 7 Suleiman, “The Jew in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexion sur la question juive,” 206–7. 8 Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 93–94. Susan Rubin Suleiman makes a different (and persuasive) claim arguing that Sartre had consciously or unconsciously deployed an antisemitic discourse in depictions of “the Jew” in Anti-Semite and Jew, especially in chapter  3. Borrowing from Roland Barthes, she calls this the “anti-Semitic effect.” Suleiman, “The Jew in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexion sur la question juive,” 215–18, 202. For another perspective, see Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 9 Quoted in Suleiman, “The Jew in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexion sur la question juive,” 207; Sarah Hammerschlag, ed., Modern French Jewish Thought, Writings on Religion and Politics (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), 125–26. 10 Wolitz, “Imagining the Jew in France,” 124–25. Memmi explores these ideas in two books devoted to exploring Jewish identity, Portrait d’un juif (1962) and La libération du juif (1966). For Alain Finkielkraut’s response to Sartre, see Stuart Z. Charmé, “Alterity, Authenticity, and Jewish Identity,” Shofar 16, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 42–62. 11 Hammerschlag, Modern French Jewish Thought, 99. 12 Wolitz, “Imagining the Jew in France,” 128. 13 Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 15–18.

Introduction 13 14 Levinas built on ideas expressed earlier by André Neher, a professor from Strasbourg, who helped to revitalize academic Jewish studies. Wolitz, “Imagining the Jew in France,” 134. 15 Ibid. 16 In a similar vein, Maurice Samuels explores the way French Jewish writers in the nineteenth century used fiction to explore their new-found identities as citizens in postrevolutionary France. Due to its imaginative nature, Samuels writes, “fiction provided nineteenth-century French Jews with a way to envision situations that had not necessarily presented themselves in the world but that could present themselves. It let them test possibilities, imagine scenarios, and work out their implications.” Through his analysis of nineteenth-century French Jewish fiction writers, including the work of Eugénie Foa, Ben-Lévi, Alexandre Weill, and David Schornstein, Samuels concludes: “Fictional narrative offered a way for French Jews to think through their new historical situation.” Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 5. 17 For a discussion of the impact of Graetz on writers and poets in the late nineteenth century, see the controversial Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), 72–88. As we note from the title, Sand deploys Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger’s widely accepted thesis that all modern national narratives were/are based on inventions or constructions of traditions, even though this argument has been appended more recently to address more regional-based histories. Many of Sand’s critics point to his lack of consistency, his selective research and uneven methodology, and his polemical rather than scholarly intentions. However, the impact of Graetz on writers and poets has not been disputed. See, for example, Michael Berkowitz, “The Invention of the Jewish People,” https://reviews.history.ac.uk/reviews/973; Derek Penslar, “Shlomo Sand’s ‘The Invention of the Jewish People,’” Israel Studies 17, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 156–68. 18 Catherine Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France: André Spire et Edmond Fleg,” Mil neuf cent 13, no. 13 (1995): 189. For regional identities, see Celia Applegate, “A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1157–82. 19 Nadia Malinovich, “Between Universalism and Particularism: Discourses of Jewish Identity in France, 1920–32,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32, no. 1 (2006): 153. For an earlier articulation of dualism in relation to Fleg and other Jewish French writers of the interwar period, see Benjamin Crémieux, “La littérature juive française,” Revue juive de Genève, no. 5 (1936–1937): 200. “Invited to de-Judaiser, the Jew refuses as he also refuses to be only a Jew.” 20 Cited in Brenna Moore, Sacred Dread, Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival, 1905–1944 (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 36. 21 Simon P. Sibelman, “Emerging Voices, Evolving Paradigms: Literary Expressions of Franco-Jewish Identity after the Dreyfus Affair,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 31, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 488. 22 Ecumenism is not (and has not been) a neutral term but rather a historically fraught position referring to pan-Christian unity. Since the Reformation, European Christian religious, political, and intellectual life has been divided along denominational lines, in which church leaders sanction legal discrimination against other Christian communities. World War I certainly sparked talk of “religious peace” in France and Germany, but it was short-lived and temporary, after which familiar patterns of distrust and animosity returned between Catholics and

14  Introduction Protestants. Ecumenism, as it became known, reached its peak in the early 1960s when the Catholic Church (in the Second Vatican Council) and the World Council of Churches (umbrella of Protestant churches) officially declared themselves brothers of faith. See Udi Greenberg, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019): 511–38. Greenberg also shows that at moments of forging peace between Christians  – the 1930s and 1960s  – they waged struggle with non-Christians: Jews in the 1930s during the rise of Nazism and Muslims in the 1960s in the context of decolonization. 23 For the “Jewish awakening,” see Catherine Nicault, ed., “Le ‘reveil juif’ des annés vingt,” Archives juives: Revue d’histoire des juifs de France, no. 39 (2006); Maxime Decout, Écrire la judéité: Enquête sur un malaise dans la littérature française (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2015), chap. 1: “La renaissance de la judéité,” 45–82. For an insightful discussion of Jewish writers and their writing, including Fleg, in 1920s Paris, see Catherine Fhima, “Au coeur de la ‘renaissance juive’ des années 1920: literature et judéité,” Archives juives, no. 39 (2006): 29–45. 24 Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France,” 172. 25 Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 242–43. 26 Susan Rubin Suleiman, The Némirovsky Question (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 41–42. 27 For a discussion of German Jewish reclamations of Jesus as a Jew, see E. Loentz, “ ‘The Most Famous Jewish Pacifist Was Jesus of Nazareth’: German-Jewish Pacifist Clementine Kramer’s Stories of War and Visions for Peace,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture 23 (2007): 127–55. 28 Emmanuel Levinas, “Jewish Thought Today,” in Difficult Freedom, Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 161. 29 Robert Darnton, “A Buffet of French History,” New York Review of Books, May 11, 2017, 40. 30 Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference, French Universalism & the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5–6. For a discussion of the laws concerning French nationality from the French Revolution to the present, see Patrick Weil, Qu’est qu’un français? Histoire de la nationalité françcaise depuis la révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), for Jews and Vichy, 143–247; Eric Savarese, “Politiques de la mémoire et modele de citoyenneté,” French Historical Studies 43, no. 1 (February 2020): 1–23.

1 Creating the self French and Jewish

Born in Geneva in 1874, the French Jewish writer Edmond Fleg (born Flegenheimer) wrestled to define himself throughout his adolescent and young adult years. As a young man, Fleg engaged with fashionable artistic cliques, especially the symbolists, and explored explanatory narratives, from idealism and symbolism to spiritism, psychology, Jewish nationalism, and universalism. His journey of self-discovery was difficult, circuitous, and at times traumatic. He oscillated broadly between secular French modernist art movements and Jewish-identified politics and humanitarianism, and between love and family. Through deftly weaving these strands together in his writing, Fleg found a way to synthesize his Frenchness and Jewishness, his politics and aesthetics. In this chapter I lead you through Fleg’s experiments in the French avant-garde art world, his challenges with his family, and his political engagement during the Dreyfus Affair. We see how he juggled complicated family relations, spirituality, and art as he fashioned himself in late nineteenth-century Paris. In the years before World War I, Fleg began to crystallize a new form of Jewish identity, neither dogmatic nor nationalist nor assimilationist. Rather than glossing over Jewish particularity, Fleg lifted it up, believing that modern French Jewishness, like modern life in general, was neither fixed nor static but a dynamic synthesis between universalist values, French and Jewish, and the particular history and traditions of Jewish minority culture in France. Born into a bourgeois Jewish family rooted in French culture and traditional Jewish observance, Fleg rejected what he felt to be the empty Judaism of his childhood and fell in love with a young Protestant woman whom, when he was threatened with being cut off from his family and financial security, he chose not to marry. What did it mean for an enormously talented, economically privileged young man to choose family and security over love? From that moment on, Fleg grappled with challenging questions  – philosophic and personal  – concerning the nature of human experience, knowledge, and the meaning of love. Leaving home to pursue his secondary schooling in Paris, Fleg was self-absorbed and oblivious to the increase of Judeophobia in Russia and then in Germany. It was the trial of Captain Dreyfus, the Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent wrongly accused of selling secrets to Germany and condemned in the public eye precisely because he was a Jew, that turned Fleg to his Jewish roots. As for

16  Creating the self so many of his peers, the Dreyfus Affair was a watershed moment for Fleg, jolting him away from aestheticism and toward political engagement.1 Although his interest in things Jewish ebbed in the years after 1900, when he wrote mainly domestic psychological dramas for the stage, by 1908, after the birth of his first son, Fleg returned to writing on Jewish-inspired themes. Two men figure prominently in Fleg’s development: the philosopher Henri Bergson and the Catholic writer Charles Péguy. Their antidualist thinking showed Fleg how to reconcile and synthesize his French and Jewish identities, and his art and politics. In 1913, Péguy published Fleg’s epic poem, Écoute Israël (Hear Oh Israel). Inspired by contemporary narratives of Jewish history that promoted the notion of a Jewish ethnos or peoplehood through historical continuity, Fleg’s poem engaged this sort of historical memory and fostered a cultural rather than a traditionally religious sense of belonging.

The Flegenheimers in Geneva At the time of his birth, Fleg’s parents, Moïse and Clara Flegenheimer, were settled in Geneva, but their familial roots were in France. Fleg’s grandfather Gaston Flegenheimer was from a small village in Alsace (then France); then the family relocated to Thairnbach, a small town near Heidelberg, where his father, Moïse, was born. Moïse moved to Geneva in 1852, and ten years later he met and married Clara Nordemann, a young French woman from Lyon. Although he was twice her age, the match was celebrated by Clara’s parents, prosperous silk traders, who had amassed their wealth speculating on silk binding tape in Switzerland. They rejoiced at the coming together of two grandes familles juives. Given their familial history and deep connections in France, the couple articulated a fierce loyalty to the emancipatory values of the French Revolution when Jews were granted full citizenship. Emancipation occurred first in 1790 for the Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne and one year later for the Ashkenazic Jews of Alsace and Lorraine.2 Emancipation had been granted to Jews in the name of liberal ideals framed in the Rights of Man and of Citizen as individuals, not as members of a distinctive group. Emancipated French Jews enjoyed full equality before the law along with full freedom to practice their religion. They were also free, if they wished, to refrain from practicing religion at all, as emancipation had ended the temporal power of rabbis and rabbinic law over Jews. With the loss of rabbinic jurisdiction and the demise of the communal structure, Jews also lost their ability to collect taxes, which had been used to fund religious, educational, and charitable institutions, but they retained their distinctive communal organization and philanthropic structures. France recognized Judaism as a legal religion, but only insofar as its specifically religious elements were concerned. Clermont-Tonnerre, deputy to the Estates General in 1789, declared revealingly: “Grant all to the Jews as individuals, nothing to them as a nation.”3 Enlightenment ideas and revolutionary action combined to offer French Jews the chance to be “Frenchmen like other Frenchmen.”4 Simon Schwartzfuchs points to the ontological shift in

Creating the self 17 Jewish identity coinciding with  – and precipitated by  – the political impact of emancipation: the move from the use of juif to designate a Jew in French to israélite to refer to a French citizen of the Mosaic faith.5 The Flegenheimers embraced the emancipation paradigm. Theoretically, it meant that Jews maintained an allegiance to Judaism that was neither public nor overt, accepting the belief that emancipation and its subsequent acculturation would enable them to become active citizens of the republic.6 French-identified Jews like the Flegenheimers found the principles of Judaism as they understood them to be identical with the liberal ideals of the French Revolution: tolerance, equality, and freedom.7 Most educated Jews proclaimed that the principles of 1789 “were one and the same as the essence of Judaism.”8 This intertwining of liberal Jewish and republican values came to be known as Franco-Judaism and predominated over the course of the nineteenth century, which led to unprecedented opportunities for social, professional, and economic integration into French society, especially in the years following 1870, which inaugurated the Third Republic. Although often accused of being “misguided apostles of assimilation” who had lost touch with their communitarian structures,9 French Jewish citizens maintained a high degree of intragroup social relations apart from religious belief.10 This was certainly the case for the Flegs in Geneva. Like many of their French counterparts, Fleg’s parents were moderately observant Jews and successful entrepreneurs, owning and operating a prosperous silk store  – Flegenheimer, Tissus et Soieries – that catered to all of Geneva’s elegant women and their dressmakers. It quickly became the most elite shop in town. Without a doubt, the Flegenheimer family represented one of the most successful Jewish families in Geneva.11 But living in Geneva, the French-identified Flegenheimers were not emancipated. It was not until the year of Edmond’s birth in 1874, under pressure from the French, that Swiss Jewish men were finally granted full emancipation, including the right to settle freely, equality under the law, freedom of religion, and citizenship.12 At that time, the Flegenheimers, following the conditions required by law in Geneva, became Swiss nationals and citizens of Geneva and Moïse “Frenchified” his name to Maurice. Aside from Edmond, the Flegenheimers had four more sons: Elie in 1867, followed by Paul, Georges, and the youngest Lucien, in 1878. After Maurice’s death in 1896, Clara shouldered their business concerns with the help of two of her sons.13 As a young boy, Edmond Fleg was already troubled by questions of God, spirituality, and religion. Maurice was a practicing Jew; covered in a traditional shawl, he recited morning prayers daily, wrapping the tefillin, or phylacteries filled with verses from Torah, around his left arm and head. But he did not pass on this ritual knowledge to his sons, as he believed that they would have the opportunity to assimilate fully into their Swiss surroundings.14 Looking back on his Bar Mitzvah, Fleg remembered thinking when he was 13, “I had no understanding of Hebrew, I didn’t understand one word.” The experience felt superficial to him, and years later he recalled, “lying in bed, my soul was searching, asking the Eternal to show me when Judaism had become so distasteful.” He became critical of his parents’

18  Creating the self inconsistencies and found the rabbi and cantor “too human,” too mundane, not inspirational nor uplifting. He was disgusted in synagogue when “the only words spoken were in order to stimulate generosity, announcing under the eye of the Holy Law the amount given for charity by each donor.”15 Refusing to blindly go through the motions of a Jewish practice he did not understand and belong to a religion that appeared merely mercenary, he “became increasingly detached from Israel.”16 And yet he seemed to experience a spiritual dimension in his life, writing in his diary at the time: I am not a believer; it is my old religion that is at fault, my poor religion, the ruin of an unfinished building. . . . It is not that I am an atheist, oh no! I say my prayers every night, but I pray to a God within me who is not a ruler. . . . God, let thy light enter within me, reveal thyself to me if thou art.17 While not drawn to his father’s Judaism, Fleg’s mother introduced him to what would become his lifelong passions: music, theatre, and all things French. “All intellectual and cultural life was turned toward France,” he remembered.18 In 1887, at the age of 14, Fleg obtained first prize in piano at the Conservatory of Geneva. Not long afterward he was invited to vacation at his schoolmate’s home in a village not far from Geneva for some fresh air. The neighboring MonnierDufour family, Genevan Protestants, warmly welcomed the young Fleg, too. He loved their easy family atmosphere free from all religious concerns; Fleg reflected that he was no longer in the ghetto, not a ghetto closed off by chains, but a ghetto nonetheless. It was the first time I left it. I experienced freedom in the air and in the sky. My spirit was enfranchised not only from Jewish ritual, but from Jewish family itself.19 During his stay, he fell in love with the young daughter of the house, MarieClaire Monnier, almost ten years his senior. They remained close, platonic, yet loyal to one another after that summer. When he announced his intentions to convert to Protestantism in order to marry her, his parents, following the Jewish practice of forbidding marriage outside the faith, threatened to disown him.20 This threat did not deter him, at least initially. In the summer of 1892, the Flegenheimers sent Edmond to Germany, perhaps to learn German or merely to expand his horizons. He stayed with a family friend in Cologne. It is not clear what part, if any, Fleg played in the planning of this trip. It may have been a strictly parental decision. His journal from that summer reveals the confidences of a candid young man, at times excited and enchanted by all he was discovering and at other times filled with longing and melancholy. As his train headed toward the Rhine, Fleg reflected on his last night at home when he “shar[ed] confidences” with Marie-Claire and he already missed her terribly. What an exquisite and profound feeling I have next to her; I feel my heart melting and something singing a melancholy song in me, and then I tremble

Creating the self 19 and all sorts of phrases come out of my mouth . . . in an ethereal language that one can’t even understand. Later, he found the landscape from the train window “monotonous, cruelly the same.” He talked half-heartedly about music and politics to a young German on the train who enthusiastically shared his devotion to “German values of vigorous exercise, prudery, and authority.” By the time he reached Cologne, Fleg “understood the profound patriotism of the German race, and their attachment to the soil.” Arriving, he mused: “How far I am from home.”21 At times during that summer he was overcome by anxiety, feeling isolated in a world of “methodical egotists.” Most disturbing for him was the lack of correspondence from Marie-Claire. She loomed large in his diary and he felt alone, “really alone.” His heart aching, he wrote eloquently and passionately about love and sex. Clearly struggling with his potent youthful sexuality, he explained how he understood “desire emerging naturally between one and another.” He yearned “to taste the fugitive charm of a passion without a past, without a tomorrow, and almost without a present, yes, I would like to experience that because it germinates naturally in our flesh and our imagination.” Such an expression of elemental desire was quickly followed by what he imagined to be a higher level of love, his hope for a “love that is found through the spirit, and not through physical pleasure, an aesthetic fantasy.”22 Attached to Marie-Claire, fearing she had forgotten him, his thoughts were full of her and the potential she represented. He was faithful to her, desirous yet disdainful of such carnal yearning. Fleg’s loneliness did not keep him from becoming enamored with German cultural icons, from Beethoven to Wagner, Schiller to Lessing. His host family was “quintessentially German,” and this new experience led him to believe that all Germans, regardless of social class, had a deep understanding of and taste for poetry, classical music, and romanticism. In his youthful romantic and almost fantastical image of Germany and Germans, Fleg wrote in his diary: the “tie maker sang the themes from two Beethoven sonatas as he worked.” From his cultural distance, the German language itself seemed coherent in a way that French was not to the young Fleg. Unlike in France, where regional patois were rooted in “German, Iberian, or Celtic and had little connection to the Latin base of French, German local patois were comprehensible to all German speakers.” Embracing a popular contemporary notion of a German zeitgeist, Fleg wrote, “German poetry and music were national because they expressed the character of the nation.”23 At this point, Fleg saw French polyvocality as a liability against what he deemed to be an authentic holistic German national expression. He savored his first taste of cultural nationalism, but in a mere six years he will find it bitter, if not toxic. During his visit to the Cologne cathedral, Fleg was drawn to “the austere beauty” and solemnity of Catholicism. He came upon “the powerful, angelic, and mysterious sounds of the organ radiating like an infinite soul in this refuge of infinite ecstasy.” He admired a faith that could unite, “a faith that brings together in a universal rhythm those which the world separates.” He felt “touched” by the “pure sentiment of faith, by the feeling of faith, without being touched by the

20  Creating the self faith itself.” In a moment of crisis, Fleg thought to himself: “I don’t know any longer if I believe in God or not, but there in front of such grandiosity I had a glimmer deep inside myself of faith.”24 Fleg’s attraction to spirituality, with its alluring and potent symbols of suffering and rebirth, offered a profound alternative to the dry, soulless world of positivism that formed the basis of his French school curriculum. Like many in his generation, Fleg criticized positivism for its naïve optimism and utilitarian materialism; “a faith that could unite in a universal rhythm” offered a countercultural force, an alternative horizon, against secular, bourgeois scientism.25 After his summer in Germany, Fleg left the silk business world of his parents, Judaism, and Geneva to complete his education in Paris. Why did he leave? It was clear that his parents were concerned about Edmond’s relationship with MarieClaire: there was the difference in age, but more importantly for them was the difference in religion. While Fleg felt constrained by his parents’ bourgeois world in Geneva, he also maintained a tender attachment to them. What is certain is that at that youthful moment Edmond Fleg felt the need to distance himself from a milieu that didn’t seem to fit him anymore. With a keen desire to study in France, which he believed to be the center of art and learning, and the country of his ancestors, Fleg stepped out into the world. He would never again live in Geneva.26

Student years In 1892, shortly after his return from Germany, Fleg moved to Paris, where he studied rhetoric at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. After completing one year at Louisle-Grand, Fleg enrolled in the Sorbonne and earned his licence de philosophie. In 1895, he registered as a foreign student at the prestigious École normale supérieure, receiving his l’aggregation d’allemand in 1899.27 While attending Louis-le-Grand, Fleg lived with Dr. Manuel Leven, brother of Narcisse Leven, one of the leaders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a Jewish organization founded in 1860 whose specific purpose was to help “Jews around the world obtain national citizenship, achieve material security, and make ‘moral progress.’ ” In its early years, the Alliance focused on “advocating for Jewish rights in other countries” besides France and “establishing the educational programs, for which it is best remembered.”28 While living at the Leven’s, Fleg encountered a Jewish community that was dominated by a successful, confident upper-middle-class element top-heavy with academics, lawyers, and doctors, and with an especially high concentration in the world of arts and letters. French Jewish trust in the republic was high and seemingly unshaken by the increase in anti-Jewish sentiment aroused by the Panama scandal, the brief reign of the nationalist General Boulanger, or the success of Edouard Drumont’s caustic Judeophobic polemic La France juive (1886) in France.29 Almost immediately, Fleg developed a yearning to be a French national. “I  feel estranged in Switzerland,” he wrote, “because all of my intellectual life I have distanced myself from it. . . . I have desired to become French for a long time.”30 According to historian Catherine Fhima, Fleg showed a deep attachment

Creating the self 21 to the French language and literary tradition; he embraced classicism and its rhyming alexandrines in his poetry and in fact was not particularly distinguishable in any way from the non-Jews in his class.31 According to the writer and Catholic intellectual Jacques Madaule, Fleg was a “triumph of assimilation.”32 The Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the Sorbonne, and the École normale supérieure were well-known centers of educational reform, with curricula based in neoKantian moral philosophy and the current trends of literary modernism. With its emphasis on moral obligation and civic responsibility, neo-Kantianism was embraced by republican scholars and would have been familiar to the Frenchidentified Fleg.33 But in contrast to the group of normaliens who coalesced around Lucien Herr, the university librarian, including Charles Péguy and Jean Jaurès, who engaged the social, political, and humanitarian issues of the day, Fleg saw himself as an aesthete and identified with the literary symbolists who promoted the art-for-art’s-sake ideal. He was described by his friend Julien Luchaire as “detached from the realities of daily life,” refusing to read newspapers and “lost in the ethereal spaces of sentiment.”34 Confessing in his journal in 1895, Fleg wrote, “I trust in art. . . . And I feel that when my life becomes even more colored by aesthetics, it will take on an even greater inexpressible flavor.”35 He recalled wondering, “Of what importance to subtle spirits were eternal principles, the Rights of Man and Citizen, the battle of parties or the form of the state? Ethics also seemed very dull.” He remembered, Good and Evil were dumbbells that one need not trouble to handle. Art alone counted, not only the art of words, sounds, forms, and colors, . . . but the art of creating from moments taken from one’s own life.36 Describing a conversation he had with a fellow student about poverty, he wrote: It is lamentable to think of how useless the efforts are to help the poor. But then, it doesn’t interest me that much. If I am going to be useful, it is not by giving crusts of bread, it will be by comforting my friends who are suffering, with my heart and my intelligence.37 While not associated with the circle around Herr, Fleg did remember being a member of a group that included Ernest Renan, Maurice Barrès, and the future renowned musicologist Louis Laloy, his closest friend.38 Fleg explained that he felt “completely transported out of contingent reality” when he was with him, “like an Ubermensch, a creature delinked from all terrestrial ties, a mythic being, colossal, experiencing the immensity of the absolute.” Fleg saw Laloy as an “infinite creature of liberty.” The moments with Laloy, he mused, “are the most beautiful of my life, perhaps they represent my essence.”39 We were under the influence of Renan, Fleg recalled, “we lived then as aesthetes in music and the dilettantism renanien.”40 No doubt, Renan’s lyrical best-selling book Vie de Jésus had a profound impact on Fleg and his friends, as it provided, according to Émile Zola, “the refuge of religious souls whom dry, bare science disturbs.”41 But others

22  Creating the self populated Fleg’s world, too, including the French Germanist Charles Andler – an ardent socialist and translator of The Communist Manifesto into French in 1901 – and the novelist and playwright Romain Rolland. Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, the incubator of French symbolist theatre and well known for premiering the work of Henrik Ibsen in France, also formed an important part of Fleg’s Parisian world.42 This odd array of mentors – from the spiritual anticlerical Renan to the socialist Andler – testifies to the complex, hybrid nature of late nineteenthcentury cultural currents surrounding Fleg in Paris. In 1896, Fleg’s self-absorbed artistic life in Paris screeched to a halt. Traumatized first by Marie-Claire’s decision to marry and then by the death of his father, that year proved to be a turning point for Fleg. With Marie-Claire’s marriage and his father’s death, Fleg’s ties to Geneva loosened. In the wake of these cataclysmic events, he found his life and world in France. Even after moving to Paris, Fleg stayed close to Marie-Claire through letters and during visits home to Geneva; he was devastated to learn that she was going to marry a much older man. Deeply conflicted, he claimed he was only “thirsty” for the world of ideas, not the realm of feelings. He explained in his diary, “My heart is empty and I am happy.” Yet she haunted his dreams: “She was there, next to me, we were talking together with all of our intimacies.”43 His heartache flared into a crisis of consciousness. He was troubled by closed-mindedness, by “systems of thought” that could only “accept something as true if it fit into a certain set of coherent ideas.” Acute discouragement overcame him: I am looking for what I really am in particular, personally, and I am finding nothing. Neither a pure professional life nor a frantic passionate life agrees with me; they overwhelm me, they terrify me. . . . I am incapable of explaining anything or understanding anything.44 In this moment of despair, Fleg’s father died. Torn between “pure intellect” and “frantic passion,” and unable to locate himself in either realm, Fleg found himself in grief over the loss of his father. Leaning over his father’s coffin, wanting to fix his father’s face in his memory, he wrote: “His long nose and soft blue eyes with their hard stare fixed on eternity.” Overcome with the existential meaning of losing a parent, Fleg reflected on his father’s attributes: Oh father, he loved life, all that he had, his soul was steady and soft . . . what delicateness and tact, what respect for people. He was so strong, so full of humility. What a calm justice and sense of well-being he embraced. In spite of all of his commercial activity, he was not merely driven by self-interest. His soul was elevated. His sons will guard that tradition of kindness and generosity. . . . I remember our last goodbye, when he squeezed me in his arms and hugged me with such strength, with such ardor, and a youthful tenderness that penetrated my soul.45 For a brief moment while reciting the Kaddish (the Jewish prayer that marks a death) at his father’s graveside, Fleg felt “something beautiful . . . an act of faith in

Creating the self 23 life.” After a few days at home, he realized that talking with his mother was difficult and unsettling and the family home milieu was not conducive for his well-being. He needed to return to Paris. Upon his arrival in Paris, Fleg acknowledged the passing of the generational torch, writing to his mother: “I hope you find some small joy and comfort in seeing your loved ones develop in their own ways, being strong and generous as the one who has left us.”46 Bereft yet inspired, a renewed fervor for work took hold of Fleg after his father’s death. No longer feeling stuck or confused, he explained in his journal, “aestheticism had not abandoned me. I want to be an artist.”47 At this moment, Fleg seemed firmly grounded in the details and power of his father’s memory and a burgeoning awareness of what he believed made his father a good man, an ethical human being; he was kind and generous, loving and humble, not driven by self-interest but rather a deep sense of justice. But Fleg’s resolve did not last long. Before spending the academic year of 1897–1898 in Leipzig, he traveled to Oxford and continued to record his distress over his relationships, his feeling of uselessness, and the unhappy contrast between his opinions and his actions. He described his daily walks in great detail: Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Radcliffe Camera, fog and rain, bearded, blueeyed men with grey hair that reminded him of his father. He was enchanted by the “college gardens, the leafy trees, the melancholy architecture,” but he could not consent, he reflected, “to what was a mere momentary fête; I find such pleasure is too short and too egoist  .  .  . what I  see is only spectacle and not really part of my life.” He felt empty, the images of Oxford were fleeting, they didn’t “endure” in him, and he didn’t want to “live in a state of seeing only a partial shadow.” He was searching for rebirth but wrote that he “did not feel capable of it.”48 Ripe for an experience or encounter that would offer him a clear direction, Fleg began his studies in German and philosophy under the guidance of Charles Andler, in Leipzig – the city of Bach, Wagner, Schumann, and Mahler.

The Dreyfus Affair In Leipzig when the Dreyfus Affair erupted into French public consciousness, Fleg was shaken out of his personal angst: “Initially the Dreyfus Affair passed unnoticed for me,” he remembers, “but later it pushed me into reality and the ‘Jewish problem.’ It became very difficult to forget completely that you were a Jew.”49 The Affair began at the end of 1894 with the captain’s first trial. Léon Blum described this moment in his well-known testimony Souvenirs sur l’affaire Dreyfus: “In the Jewish world that I frequent – that of the middle class, of young writers, of government functionaries – there exists little disposition toward dreyfusisme.” Blum explained, “Generally, Jews have accepted the condemnation of Dreyfus as definitive and as just. . . . One suffers without saying a word, waiting for time and silence to erase the effects.”50 Fleg traveled in the same circles as Blum and he perceived the same attitudes. Like Blum, he believed that in France (unlike in Russia and Hungry) “antisemitism would not manifest literally as persecution but rather as a tendency toward exclusion.”51 In fact, Fleg’s journal from

24  Creating the self 1896 only contained one reference to Dreyfus’ trial. In early 1898, following the publication of Émile Zola’s J’accuse, a second and more public Affair led to Dreyfus’ retrial and pardon in 1899 and full exoneration by a military commission in 1906. Wrestling with his feelings of emptiness and aware of the rising tide of antisemitism in France as the debate over Dreyfus intensified, Fleg wrote to his mother in February from Leipzig: “It is not the moment for a Jew . . . to choose a new country where he will hear cried out: Death to the Jews.”52 “Pushed into reality,” Fleg confided in his journal in July of the same year, “I am living with more sincerity and with less clarity,”53 and in later reflections on that period elaborated: I became a social being for the first time. . . . I felt that my dilettantism was only superficial, that I had need of justice, that those humanitarian interests that I had derided were my very own, that life would never give me sufficient proof to the contrary to cause me to doubt certain age-old theories.54 At this point, Fleg rejected aestheticism and woke up to the political and social realities around him. He saw himself as a part of rather than as separate from humanity, and whether he liked it or not, as a Jew. Along with Blum and others from their milieu, Fleg became involved in the Dreyfusard campaign. Their pro-Dreyfus activism, at least initially, they argued, was born from their loyalty to the liberal principles of 1789, their feelings about universal justice and political equality so deeply bound to the republic, not out of “Jewish national sentiment.”55 Their focus on injustice was not unique to them. As Fhima suggests, academically assimilated Jews became Dreyfusards less due to their identification as Jews and thus to antisemitism per se than to their sense that an injustice was being perpetrated in the French republic.56 As the literary critic Maurice Samuels argues, this version of French universalism embraced by many – Jews and non-Jews – in the Dreyfusard camp was antipluralist even as it defended Jewish rights. Jews were defended not as Jews but as French men and women. The road for Jewish inclusion in the republic, these Dreyfusards claimed, was based on their assimilation into the French nation; it demanded a shedding of their difference.57 Fleg’s first public action was to sign a petition in favor of releasing Colonel Georges Picquart, the military officer who discovered that the memorandum used to convict Dreyfus was a forgery, from prison.58 Picquart was an easy hero to embrace for Dreyfusards – Jewish and non-Jewish – because he represented a more “intellectual type of officer.” He was erudite, he loved music, and he was, according to historian Christopher Forth, “a bona fide man of action who was also an intellectual.”59 The antisemitism unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair pushed Fleg and other Franco-Jewish intellectuals and writers to question the emancipation paradigm of integration they had grown up with and then felt betrayed by. Ideally, that paradigm cast Jews as free and equal active citizens of the republic who differed little from their compatriots, but the shortcomings of that ideal were everywhere in evidence. Some critics argue that assimilation over the course of the nineteenth

Creating the self 25 century had left French Jews without a strong communal sense of identity, the possession of which would have helped them challenge the Judeophobic stereotypes that were externally imposed by the anti-Dreyfusards.60 Yet, as we have seen, the Affair offered an opportunity for French Jewish intellectuals and writers  – including Fleg  – to (re)evaluate their sense of dislocation from their communal heritage.61 The escalation of the Dreyfus Affair coinciding with Marie-Claire’s marriage and his father’s death put the question of national belonging center stage for the Alsatian–Swiss–Jewish Fleg. His desire for some kind of attachment intensified, which led him to Israel Zangwill’s Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), a collection of stories about Jewish “dreamers” beginning in the sixteenth century. Some of the stories focus on historical figures like Spinoza and Heine, while others were known to Zangwill personally, and many were purely fictional. In a letter to his mother Fleg revealed: “Reading this awoke in me an urge to return to this prohibited race, beautiful in spite of its miseries, by studying its history and philosophy.”62 Fleg’s use of the word “race” was neither unusual for the period nor essentialist. At the time, people used the word “race” to describe groupings of family, profession, psychological type, and the like. Firmly integrated and assimilated Jews like Fleg, as we see here, also used it to describe themselves.63 In the midst of feeling unmoored, Fleg wrote to Lucien Moreau, the son of an editor at Larousse, a close friend from their days at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where they were both influenced by Maurice Barrès. Fleg iterated his acute desire for some kind of attachment: I feel a need to reattach myself to a stimulating ensemble, to a past, to a tradition, to something that is me and more than me – to work on a piece of work begun by others and that can be continued by others. Revealing to Moreau that he had found an attachment to a certain past: The past I have discovered, asleep deep inside me, is the past of my race. . . . I regret that I haven’t studied it and now don’t have any time because of the “stupid” path I follow [referring to his studies]. Unhappy with his current scholarly direction and drawn to learn about Jewish history, religion, and Hebrew, as well as contemporary Jewish social problems, Fleg wrote: All I know is that if I devote myself to another subject, or to a life of a dilettante egoist, or to a life as father of a family without religion and without ideals to teach to his children, I would have remorse and the feeling of having failed at a task. At that juncture, Fleg reflected on his own father: “I didn’t understand all that he was.”64

26  Creating the self By identifying as a Dreyfusard and actively joining the struggle against antisemitism in France, Fleg stood apart from friends like Moreau even as they maintained their friendship through extensive correspondence. Moreau followed Barrès into the radical Right, believing that the innocence or guilt of Dreyfus was only of secondary importance to the damage done to France by Dreyfusard attacks on the church and the army. In his letters to Fleg, Moreau attacked republican universal abstract justice, arguing that justice can only be grounded “in the contingency of the all-encompassing national.”65 As an anti-Dreyfusard, Moreau adopted increasingly antisemitic views, even going so far as to argue that Jews should be excluded from French public life. By 1900, Moreau had become a follower of the nationalist Charles Maurras and was eager to introduce him to Fleg.66 However, Fleg always refused to meet him and referred to him as a “fanatic, who inspired only hatred.”67 In spite of their political differences, the two men were able to maintain a friendship, albeit strained, in part because Moreau, perhaps in a self-serving way, distinguished between his ability to have personal relationships with certain Jews, Protestants, and “intellectuals” and the political importance of limiting the influence of these groups in France.68 Recalling their friendship, Fleg explained that they did not try to “convert” each other. “And in fact, all shyness vanished; conscious of our differences we became friends who could frankly express our thoughts unreservedly to each other.”69 Their ongoing friendship underscores Ruth Harris’ point that the “mythic two Frances” were much more intertwined than previous histories have argued.70 A few years older than Fleg but of the same generation, French Jewish writer André Spire was similarly affected by Zangwill’s text, especially one story, “Chad Gadya,” which details a young man’s realization that he is trapped in a no-man’sland between rational modernity and feelings of faith, community, and wholeness he had experienced as a child in his traditional Jewish home. The young man is appalled by his own vanity, his lack of familial ties and meaning in his life. In the midst of his anguish and hopelessness, with the words of Hebrew prayer on his lips, “Hear O Israel . . .,” the young man takes his own life.71 Fleg might also have identified with the young man in the story; perhaps, the character offered Fleg a mirror through which he could see himself with greater clarity and compassion. Throughout 1898, Edmond Fleg seemed to be looking for his path through Jewishness. In November, Fleg made an important professional choice: he decided to focus his thesis on “Literary and Philosophical Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” In the wake of that decision he wrote to Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), whom he might have known from symbolist circles, because of his recent book, Antisemitism, Its History and Causes (l’antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes, 1894). Lazare, a pivotal figure in the modern history of French Jews, hardly defended Judaism against the accusations of antisemites in his book; rather, he argued that the cause of antisemitism was in fact Jewish exclusivity, self-imposed Jewish distinctiveness. Beyond Jewish “unsociability” and “exclusivity,” Lazare explained that antisemitism was born in modern societies because the Jews did not assimilate, did not cease to be a people, but when antisemitism had ascertained

Creating the self 27 that the Jews were not assimilated, it violently reproached them for it, and at the same time whenever possible it took all necessary steps to prevent their future assimilation. Lazare concluded on a revolutionary note. Antisemitism was “everywhere the creed of the conservative class,” but a new and cosmopolitan spirit would replace conservative ideologies of nationalism. Revolutionary change would fundamentally transform society and eliminate all artificial barriers between people. And Jews were predisposed to this radical mission, for they will transform the oppressive societies they live in; it was the “very essence of the Hebrew spirit.” This was Lazare’s doctrine of the “revolutionary spirit of Judaism.”72 Journalist, early symbolist, anarchist, libertarian, and nascent Jewish nationalist, Lazare initially had no sympathy for the wealthy Dreyfus family, but with urging from them he became their publicist, instituting a campaign in favor of Captain Dreyfus among writers and journalists. In 1896, he published the pamphlet Une erreur judiciaire, la vérité sur l’affaire Dreyfus, which almost uncannily presaged the arguments and tone of its much more famous successor, Zola’s J’accuse.73 Lazare made a dramatic transition from an assimilationist who was disgusted by the immigrant Jews from eastern Europe to a historian of antisemitism and the first, if short-lived, French Zionist.74 In 1898, he joined with Theodor Herzl in calling for the rebirth of Jewish national rights, and that same year he became a member of the executive committee of the Zionist Congress. His relationship with Herzl quickly turned sour as they opposed one another on fundamental issues.75 It was at this moment that Fleg contacted Lazare. In his letter, Fleg described how reading Lazare’s pamphlet on Jewish nationalism (Le nationalisme juif, 1898), in which Lazare called for Jewish solidarity, helped to clarify “a thousand confusing impressions.” Fleg continued: Until now, I have searched in vain for an intellectual occupation that would engage me entirely: I have suffered to live, not merely as a dilettante, but as a man for whom social problems weren’t a living reality. I have begun to find in the dreams of the Zionists an ideal that satisfies all of my intellectual and moral tendencies, and through this work I will become more humble . . . and if I devote myself to it, I will discover in myself new forces of will and abnegation.76 Fleg confessed to Lazare that one day he hoped he would be able to collaborate with him on this “work,” the work of combating antisemitism. Lazare must have responded positively to Fleg’s letter, as Fleg notes in a letter to Moreau a month later that he met with Lazare and they “talked for a long time.”77 The two men seemed to have shared a belief that defending against the injustice of antisemitism was not enough; it was necessary to proclaim a positive characterization of French Jewish identity, a pride in Jewish difference. At this point, Fleg “left the individualism” of his youth in search of a communal Jewishness, but unlike Barrès and Moreau, for Fleg a singular attachment

28  Creating the self to either Frenchness or Jewishness did not seem possible.78 Uncomfortable with fixed, immutable markers, he yearned for expansiveness. Fleg felt doubly attached – deeply French and deeply Jewish – and this multiple attachment meant that any singular one would entail the loss of the other. As a French-educated man, Fleg constructed his Jewish identity from memories of his father, the antisemitism unleashed by the Affair, Lazare’s critique of it, and the appeal of the positive images of Jewishness associated with nascent Jewish nationalism. It will take ten years, but Fleg will return to Lazare. At the same time, as a Jew, he continued to forge his attachment to and identification with France. By the early years of the twentieth century, with Dreyfus exonerated and the Jewish community reassured and feeling justified in their belief in the republic, Fleg too, after weathering the Affair, found greater ease and a wider canvas for his literary pursuits. From 1901 until 1910 he explored a different part of himself, writing psychological dramas filled with jealousy, desire, guilt, and the challenges of marriage fidelity after children.

Figure 1.1  Edmond Fleg, 1910. (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

Creating the self 29

Playwright, father, Jew In the early years of the twentieth century, Fleg shifted away from his resolve to study Judaism. Thanks to family money, he was financially secure and able to make his way in the Parisian literary scene. A worldly man, a man of Parisian high society, Fleg wrote literary criticism for the press and plays for the boulevard theatre, including Le message (1904), La cloisson (1905), La bête (1910), and Le trouble fête (1913). In these plays, according to one critic, Fleg grappled with the key battles of life: oppression, death, and love; his dramas were considered “lyrical, tender, sympathetic to all who suffer, and profound.”79 According to another critic, these plays “explored aspects of morality, belief, always with a penetrating intelligence, an elevation of sentiment, a delicacy of expression that is appreciated by both connoisseurs and the general public.”80 Fleg himself remarked, “In all of these plays one recognizes the concern, the anxiety of human liberation.”81 During these years, Fleg remained in close touch with Marie-Claire, seeing her on his trips back to Geneva. The thought of marriage preoccupied him and was a source of anxiety. And then, suddenly, Marie-Claire became a widow with two children, one of them quite sickly. Her real-life drama inspired Fleg’s play Le message (1901). Performed at the Nouveau Théâtre in 1904, Le message also lifts up Fleg’s interest in the study of dream states, or spiritism, as it was called at the time. The play opens with Madeleine, in mourning clothes, hunched over a Ouija board trying to make contact with her dead child. The audience learns that a doctor had told Madeleine that she wouldn’t be able to have any more children. She fears her son’s death was not natural and laments that she doesn’t believe in God anymore. She turns to the occult, but her mother encourages her to leave such “games” behind and return to her Christian faith. Madeleine’s husband George admits that he had been insanely jealous of the little one and is even jealous of his memory. In an attempt to prove to Madeleine that spiritism is a hoax, a séance is organized by George’s friend, a medical doctor, who believes that a medium picks up on unconscious messages or suggestions from the living participants in the ritual. It turns out that Madeleine had already met the medium, Dangeau, at a bookstore and had teared up when asked about her little boy. At that meeting, Dangeau gave Madeleine a copy of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s l’innocente (The Intruder), a story revolving around a jealous husband who kills a baby son, fearing he is not the father.82 During the séance, Dangeau, as the voice of Madeleine’s child, says, “Papa killed me.” It is revealed that George feared that the son was not his. In order to test George, she lies to him saying the boy was not his son. George admits that he hated him and desired his death, but he did not kill him. The damage was done. The medium had instilled the thought in Madeleine’s head by giving her D’Annunzio’s book. Madeleine, distraught and feeble, was unable to gather her wits. She loves George, but she knows she will never find peace. George fears that maybe his desire to kill their son actually killed him: “Am I responsible if I wanted him to be dead?” At the end of the play, after she tells him that she loves him, Madeleine unconsciously reaches for a knife to stab George, but, snapping out

30  Creating the self of her trance, she holds herself back and realizes that she has to leave. George laments: “It is important not to play with these things – errors or truths – they ruin our ability to reason, they ruin our happiness.” In the play, Fleg wrestled with epistemological questions of how we know what we think we know, with the relationship between “knowledge” and “action,” and how our interior/psychological selves might be influenced by the power of suggestion. Who were the spirits exactly, and what did they engender? He juxtaposed the world of “progress, science, and liberty” with that of “superstition, otherworldliness, and spirit” yet ultimately focused on the human-scale reality of intimate relationships and inner life, on jealousy and fear.83 As one critic explained, Fleg is “not a moralist and does not develop a thesis.”84 Rather, he posed questions and dilemmas, asking the audience to engage and identify with complex human feelings and fragility.85 Fleg, like his characters, was also confronted with an anguishing dilemma. Marie-Claire wanted to marry him, but he knew if he did that his family would sever ties with him permanently because neither she nor her children were Jewish. Cut off from his family, Fleg would have had to make his living strictly from his pen. Pressured by all of these factors, he turned away from Marie-Claire. Choosing family and financial security, Fleg accepted his parents’ proposal of an arranged marriage with the 20-year-old daughter of a wealthy and well-regarded Jewish businessman and real estate magnate, originally from Lorraine, Émile Bernheim. The marriage was seen as a kind of Jewish fairy tale: a “talented and already celebrated writer became the son-in-law of one of the richest and most notable Jews in Paris!” Edmond and Madeleine were married in 1907.86 A door may have closed on Fleg’s relationship with Marie-Claire, but he remained deeply tied to her and to what she represented, even while his marriage seems to have been a good one by all accounts. Originally, haunted by Marie-Claire’s marriage, he never wrote about his own decision not to marry her. One wishes he had reflected on his choices, especially because, as we will see, their relationship was profoundly generative for his work, both literary and activist. Deciding to accept tradition and remain within his faith also propelled him to seek Jewish-Christian reconciliation in art and life for the rest of his days. In 1908, Fleg had a son. Writing a journal of sorts that he called A Book for My Child, he echoed the thoughts of so many new parents: I have never experienced a more poignant moment. I had the feeling of a grand miracle when the little being appeared, when he let out his first cry and when he made his first gesture. His expression is soft and relaxed, his eyes dark blue and trying to see, his nose a little irregular. He is wise. Faced with such enormous responsibility, he anxiously wondered: “How will I raise him?”87 Two months later, continuing with his book project, Fleg changed the pronoun “him” to “you” when he wrote: I am no longer afraid of you! I  feel you with me. Your eyes are blue like mine, your cheeks are full, your hands are well designed, but a little large.

Creating the self 31 You are a big boy for your age! I watch you sleep sometimes. We talk much of you, your mother and me, we are developing a thousand projects to help you become a man. He had fallen in love with his son, claimed his fatherhood, and shifted his language from the objective other “he” to the intimate, connected, familiar “you.” This greater attachment and softer tone stand as an outward sign of Fleg’s identification with the familial roles of husband and father, an embrace of social responsibility. Before becoming a father, Fleg, like many of his peers, including André Gide, Marcel Proust, and the Catholic reformer Jacques Maritain, was an avid reader of Charles Maurras’ antisemitic nationalist journal Action française, even though he and his peers never identified with right-wing politics. They were all drawn to its incisive discussions of philosophy, as Maurras was “better known for his literary prowess than his politics.”88 After becoming a father, Fleg abruptly stopped reading Maurras’ journal so admired by his friend Moreau. Fatherhood signaled an acute need to clarify and align his own commitments and intentions – a reckoning of sorts. He interrogated himself so that he could, with a clear conscience, pass on something of value to his young son. With that in mind, he decided to (re) turn to his Jewishness through learning Hebrew, which would allow him to read Jewish texts in the original. As Fleg identified more strongly as a Jew, he often felt more acutely “his anxiety over the problem of Judaism . . . fearing he would take it to his grave without resolving it.” Writing to his friend and future collaborator, the composer Ernest Bloch, he explained that he was frustrated with what he called the “destructive egoism” of French Jews; he wondered why periods of Jewish prosperity and considerable influence – in Alexandria, Spain, Poland – were followed by expulsion and persecution. He wondered: “Was it the fault of the Jews themselves?” He continued, “Is it necessary for us to choose between two kinds of traditions: Jewish tradition and the tradition of the country within which we are established? I cannot tell you to what point these questions torment me.”89 Fleg’s sentiments echo those of Bernard Lazare’s l’antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes, written 14 years earlier. Lazare suggested that Jews were disliked, even hated, because the Jew was an “unsocial” and “exclusive” being – politically and religiously. By holding on to their religious cult and their law, they themselves brought on antisemitism.90 Fleg, clearly influenced by Lazare’s later thinking as well, poses the question to Bloch about multiple attachments: “Is it necessary for us to choose between two kinds of traditions?”91 While both Fleg and Bloch were born in Geneva, they did not share a similar social background and only met in 1901. While Fleg’s family was prosperous, haute bourgeois, and encouraged his educational pursuits in Paris, Bloch’s father owned a retail store. They shared a critique of contemporary synagogue Judaism, finding it disingenuous and lacking in spirit. Bloch was deeply influenced by Richard Wagner’s view that Jews “were misled by their ability to adapt, by their capacity to seem German in Germany and French in France.”92 For Wagner and

32  Creating the self Bloch, the only possibility of reaching the universally human was through an affirmation of the racially particular. Writing to Fleg about his own discovery of Jewishness: I have read the Bible. I have read fragments from Moses, and an immense sense of pride surged in me. My entire being vibrated, it is a revelation. . . . I find myself as a Jew, raise my head as a Jew. . . . Perhaps you and I will find a release of our bonds. The music is in us . . . we must show the greatness and destiny of this race.93 Bloch believed that his role was to create a Jewish musical style and to identify himself artistically as a Jew even though initially he was unsure what that would entail.94 Fleg, too, began to find himself more sympathetic to the vicissitudes of the Jewish life that he saw around himself: Yet, in spite of it all, [Judaism] is this imperfect cult that maintained the tradition! There is something inexplicably touching in the feeling that, in spite of the loud conversations, the newspaper – reading during prayers, the swindling of the shammes [caretaker of the synagogue], and the skepticism of the rabbi, all of the people who come together there feel themselves Jewish in some way; and because of their imperfect reunion, Judaism perseveres and triumphs. . . . If you don’t accept a religion the way it is, with its moving and ridiculous imperfections, don’t attend it; you are not yet Jewish enough!95 Fleg accepted religion as part of Jewish tradition and community with all of its flaws, but he was more attuned to affirming a different kind of Jewish identity, a non-synagogue-based, ethically informed behavior that was inspired by what he understood to be a living Judaism. For Fleg, this was a secular yet spiritual Jewishness that was driven by a universal mission of liberation. As we will see in subsequent chapters, and especially in his work with the French Jewish scouts in the 1920s and through World War II, Fleg nourished his vision of living Judaism through the ongoing exploration and interpretation of biblical texts. Bloch was searching for an essential, idyllic, unspoiled “Jewish spirit” that did not exist in the material world but could be expressed through art. They both identified their art as having the capacity to be both specifically Jewish and to “speak to all.” Bloch explained to Fleg, “In searching for our roots, we will also find those of the others for they plunge into the same ground.”96 Bloch and Fleg were not the only Jewish writers wrestling with their Jewish roots and self-understanding. A group of writers (many of them Jewish), including Léon Blum, Gustave Kahn, and Julien Benda, gathered around La revue blanche (founded by the Natanson brothers in 1889), which provided an alternative literary space for many Jews to discuss and often oppose the official assimilationist policies of the French Jewish leadership. Many, like Fleg’s friend Henri Franck (1888–1912), who was part of the revue group, struggled similarly with

Creating the self 33 reconciling their Jewish particularity with French universality.97 In 1908, Franck invited his circle to a reading of his epic poem La danse devant l’arche. The poem, acclaimed for its lucid, fresh, and imaginative style, reflected on the destiny of a young Jewish man who lived between his Jewish heritage and his French conscience. Renouncing innocence and illusion, the poem depicts a spiritual journey that resolves with the man recognizing the necessity of accepting the coexistence of both the particular/Jewish and the universal/French. At the end of the poem the Ten Commandments and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, both written on tablets, rest side by side in the Holy Ark. Franck claimed his Jewishness and his Frenchness side by side.98 According to the historian Philippe Landau, the poem celebrated “human solidarity, and the new generation looking for its destiny and expressing its faith in the future of human reconciliation.”99 Franck’s image of “human solidarity” came under siege in the years leading to World War I. The vague race language Fleg employed a few years earlier no longer offered an unproblematic way to simultaneously defend Jewish difference and promote integration into French society.100 What had been the purview of right-wing nationalists had become mainstream by the early twentieth century. Both “nation” and “race” had been reconfigured in the popular imagination; they were essentialized, rooted in the physical, and implied a hostile attitude toward the “other.” The assertion of this racialist paradigm by many in France hinged on their fear that the nation was being invaded by an alien race, by which they meant especially eastern European Jewish immigrants. A  tiny fraction of the French population in any event, the estimated Jewish population in France had grown from 60,000 in 1880 to 80,000 in 1900 due primarily to the influx of eastern European Jews. The failed 1905 revolution in Russia brought a new flood of Russian Jewish immigrants, 40,000 of them arriving by 1914. It became common for French people to think of themselves as a racially unified nation, while French Jews were subsequently seen as a “Semitic” race living among a nation of “Aryans.”101 In his 1893 pamphlet, Contre les étrangers (Against strangers), Maurice Barrès contributed to this tension between racialized Jew and French Aryan. In it he accused Jews of not blending into the nation, of remaining cosmopolites in every country: the physical signs of Jewishness were visible from a distance; the moral features of Jews were abject. For a Jew, according to Barrès, being a foreigner was not a transitory state but an essence.102 As virulent as this language was, racial and biological antisemitism were not nearly as widespread in France as in Germany in part because of French antipathy toward Germany and its occupation of Alsace-Lorraine since 1870. For Jews like Fleg and Bloch, this kind of “race thinking” was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it threatened the universalist mentalité associated with the French Revolution and laïcité, which portrayed Jews as co-citizens. At the same time, it offered a satisfying racialized self-understanding and provided tangible communal bonds that they often felt, but their official status as a purely religious group often held them back from openly expressing.103 There was a tension for French Jews between adopting and rejecting racial thought. Most were decidedly not interested in retreating into particularism or identifying with

34  Creating the self the right-wing nationalist agenda associated with Barrès. Adopting a racialized self-understanding that was tied to feelings of pride in their history and traditions also meant the possibility of the loss of and alienation from French society more broadly. Fleg and Bloch found themselves in the throes of this dilemma. In an attempt to work through the issue, they collaborated on an opera based on the biblical story of Jezebel, chronicled in 1 Kings (21:23–24) and 2 Kings (9:36–37) that was completed between 1910 and 1911. Known as the daughter of the pagan King Ethbaal of Sidon, Jezebel married King Ahab of Israel and introduced him and his people to the “orgiastic rites of her country, thereby arousing the fury of the prophet Elijah.” She also planned the murder of Naboth in order to acquire his vineyard for her husband, and that provoked Elijah’s curse. Ultimately, Jehu, the new king of Israel, ordered her assassination. Fleg’s libretto was midrashic in spirit, searching for a new and contemporary meaning in the biblical story. To that end, both Fleg and Bloch lifted up the rational capacities and moral attributes of Jews. To exonerate Israel, Fleg eliminated the character of King Ahab, Jezebel’s husband, and underscored her erotic sensuousness; she was the single villain in his story. In Fleg’s version, Jehu is in love with Jezebel and was supposed to have been a witness to the gruesome death of Naboth. Torn between his desire for her and his conscience, the prophet Elijah intervenes, telling Jehu that if he turns away from Jezebel, he will be the next King of Israel. Jehu, forgiven for his flaws, aligns himself with the prophet Elijah. By depicting the pagan murderer Jezebel as materialistic, sensuous, and as exotically “Oriental,” Fleg reaffirmed commonly held stereotypes of “bad foreign women,” of Jezebels! Contemptuously, the pagan woman is blamed for corrupting and demonizing the Jew. Fleg includes the Jew, Jehu, in the ethical world of European reason by excluding the pagan female “other.” Fleg maligned the pagan queen as she disregarded the significance of human life, while the Jew affirmed it: “[Jezebel] says: ‘a man? What does it matter?’ Israel says: ‘a human being.’ ”104 Lifting up Jehu, Fleg ennobles him with the capacity to reason and with choosing ethical behavior over the irrationality of desire. In so doing, he turned antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish men – avarice and artifice  – on their head. The opera purged Jews of their negative stereotypes, cleansed them of their “Oriental” qualities, and portrayed them as an ideal people carrying forth Judeo-Christian ethics in a world full of pagan corruption.105 Fleg did this with words; Bloch accomplished the polarization of the two worlds by sharply differentiating the kinds of music he attached to them.106 Throughout this artistic process, Fleg increasingly depicted Jewishness as an ethical path in life. Fleg continued his exploration of sexuality, writing the play La bête (The beast), which was performed in April 1910 at the Théâtre Antoine, under the direction of the well-known actor/director Firmin Gémier (who also played the lead character).107 La bête seemed to “unchain the tempest,” according to one critic.108 The script delved into the psychological dimensions of domestic violence and sexual domination. In the play, Lucienne is in love with her cousin, Guillaume, but she is seduced into marrying the “beast” Pierre Marcès, described as a sadist

Creating the self 35 and a pervert. After succumbing to Marcès’ seduction and victimized by his sexual assault, Lucienne is too proud to admit her suffering. Marcès satiates his gluttonous sexual appetite with others but keeps Lucienne on a tight leash knowing just how to “reconquer her.” Guillaume rescues Lucienne, bringing her to the countryside. Even there, Lucienne fears that “the beast” is not gone. Only when she confronts Marcès and refuses to submit to his brutality or his tenderness is she finally free of him. In the end, it is Marcès who begs Lucienne to come back.109 Writing about the play, Fleg acknowledged that many people found it daring, but he compared it to “ancient tragedies.” Fernand Nozière (Fernand Weyl), a well-known drama critic, disagreed with Fleg: “The Greek tragedies are different,” he wrote: The circumstances exalt the characters, they don’t deform them. Why couldn’t Marcès be just a regular guy and not so refined? We know some women to be slaves of stupid males, but their domination and deception is tragic . . . they are just yesterday’s mistresses.110 What seemed disconcerting to Nozière was not that women were abused and brutalized by men but that the perpetrator in this case was a “refined man” and not a “regular guy.” Being humiliated by a “regular guy” might be tragic in acutely class-conscious France, but accusing a “refined man” of such behavior seemed to be unthinkable to Nozière. Fleg explained in a letter to the audience that he was being loyal to the complexity of human emotion and inner life. His heroine, he continued: Was divided between the most noble and the most troubling instincts. She submits to her fascination with a dangerous man, a man who inspires in her a mix of pity, desire, and terror. He dominates her because of her attraction to mystery and nastiness. Many critics agreed. The play was “rich in reflections and passionate conflicts.” Another critic applauded the last scene in which Marcès’ “pathetic” vulnerability emerges. He, too, becomes a “victim of his ideas about domination.” But some critics saw in La bête only “sadistic assassins and pornography.” It reminded one critic of “nights at Lugné-Poe’s l’Oeuvre,” a theatre well known for its avant-garde productions and for its rioting audiences. After the American writer Natalie Barney saw the play, she remarked in her diary: “There was something harsh in the play which surprised me; it made me think Fleg is very precocious.”111 The play depicted a questionable relationship that lacked clear lines of consensual sexuality. Seduction was deeply tied to manipulation and abuse. The characters did not stray far from normative gender roles and expectations, until the final scene when Lucienne speaks her truth and finds her power, and Marcès his vulnerability. Fleg seems to have been mining his own emotional depth for this script, laying bare the tensions between love and power, self-destruction and abuse.

36  Creating the self A number of critics described Fleg as a neophyte. He was “a beginner . . . the material lacks maturity; it is too interior.” Similarly, “the work was incomplete,” the play “uncertain.” But many of those same writers championed the work, “but yet it is often moving and beautiful” and “I only see promise in this work.” It seems that even though critics were disappointed in the amateurish quality of the play, they admired its emotional depth and suggested that the playwright had promise. If Fleg was a beginner, Gémier was an old hand. He received accolades from many critics for mounting the play and for his “grandeur” in the title role. Gémier has the courage, one critic explained, to risk producing “new authors. Perhaps this is the theatre of tomorrow.”112 Building on the critical success of La bête, Fleg premiered his play Le trouble fête (Party pooper) at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in 1913. This script, too, turned on the messy dynamics of the psychological space of marriage, love, passion, and jealousy. The play’s protagonists, a married couple, Lise and Julien Florent, are consumed with one another. They never dreamt of having a family but found themselves suddenly expecting a child. With the birth of their baby, Lise shifts her attention away from her husband to the child. She encourages Julien to do the same, but like the father in Le message, Julien is consumed by the painful jealousy of his newly born son. He has an affair with another woman and decides to leave Lise. Halfway down the stairs, confused, distraught, and having second thoughts, he turns around and returns home to Lise and the baby. The play jumps forward two years, and the audience encounters the couple as they have settled into a new kind of family life.113 Critics agreed that Fleg’s words “caress, please, and seduce”; the dialogue was “exquisite,” the play “is not bland or denuded of truth. It contains traits of penetrating analysis and exact observation.” Yet the play was criticized for the “inconsistency of the characters” and its bookish rather than theatrical style. Its subject was “exceptional,” not the normal condition, and for one critic, “the problem of the nursery doesn’t belong on the stage.” Nozière compared Le trouble fête with Ibsen’s Petit Eyalf, and it came up wanting: “Fleg’s play, in comparison, is a bit thin.”114 Another critic disagreed, explaining that even though Fleg did not follow his analysis with the rigor of a mathematician, “by employing the notations and actions of everyday life. He proceeded from the small touches of the realistic, creating a palpable tableau.”115 Taken together – Le message, La bête, Le trouble fête, and the unrealized Jézabel – these plays grapple with the complex, deeply flawed, and profoundly passionate human emotional landscape. Guilt, despair, love, paranoia, lust, betrayal, violence, even madness form their vocabulary. Fleg created “palpable tableaus” of marriage and fatherhood that exposed the underbelly of heteronormative culture at the same moment when he himself was grappling with the constraints of commitment and parenthood. With these works, though, Fleg had made a name for himself in Paris. There was broad agreement among reviewers that he was considered “a man of the theatre and a man of letters” who plumbed the depths of the human psyche.116 Only Jézabel pointed to Fleg’s growing interest in biblical texts, in Jewish characters, and in redefining what it could mean to be a Jew in modern

Creating the self 37 France. But all of that would soon change. After this intense focus on individual psychology, Fleg returned to his concerns with community and spirituality.

Fleg and Charles Péguy Even as Fleg was immersed in playwriting, he confessed to Bloch in the fall of 1911 to having the “need, before anything else, to begin on a Jewish work. I am certain that I will do it,” he explained.117 And he kept his word, writing Écoute Israël as “a sort of Jewish epic” including long and short poems. Fleg saw his epic as a “Jewish legend of the centuries, our story, our history,” as a homage to Victor Hugo’s La légende des siècles – a lyrical poem cycle depicting the history of humanity within a biblical framework published intermittently between 1859 and 1883.118 In 1913, Charles Péguy (1873–1914) published Écoute Israël in his journal Cahiers de la quinzaine. Over its 14-year existence (1900–1914) Péguy’s journal published well-known writers – Jewish and non-Jewish – including Julien Benda, Anatole France, André Spire, André Suarès, Joseph Reinach, Robert-Jean Dreyfus, Daniel Halevy, Romain Rolland, Bernard Lazare, Georges Clemenceau, and Georges Sorel. Long-form essays on Leo Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Pascal also appeared, as did articles on the status of oppressed peoples, among them Russian Jews, Poles, and the people of the French Congo and Madagascar. In 1905, Péguy serialized Rolland’s celebrated novel Jean Christophe, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, in the Cahiers.119 Being published in Péguy’s Cahiers enhanced Fleg’s standing in Parisian literary circles by putting him in circulation with many of the leading writers of the day. Even though Fleg was not involved in Péguy’s socialist-leaning camp when he was a student at the École normale, Péguy’s openness to and inclusion of Jewish material in the Cahiers de la quinzaine drew Fleg into his circle in the early years of the twentieth century. More than any other single individual, Péguy sponsored Jewish writers and those writing on Jewish themes, helping to pave the way for their acceptance into the French world of letters. In 1898, Péguy, an ardent Dreyfusard and committed socialist, opened a bookshop in the Latin Quarter. Rather than selling books, the primary function of the shop was to organize groups of students to confront anti-Dreyfusards who tried to intimidate Dreyfusard professors at the Sorbonne. By all accounts, Péguy’s bookstore was a deeply inclusive place that nurtured a diverse community of men and women who eagerly participated in the weekly Thursday discussions. And it was there that Péguy launched the Cahiers in 1900, which was supported through subscriptions as well as through funds from friends and family. Neither the bookshop nor the Cahiers was profitable, and he was plagued with continued financial hardship. Péguy’s refusal to accept advertising meant that he was free to publish whatever he wished; it also meant that he remained poor.120 Aside from cultivating the bookshop community and publishing the journal, Péguy also introduced the whole bookshop crowd, including Fleg, to Henri Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France, which had become popular public events for intellectually curious Parisians by 1900. For Fleg and Péguy, it was

38  Creating the self Bergson who opened up their intellectual horizons and liberated them and many in their generation from the tyranny of positivism. An assimilated French Jewish philosopher, Bergson challenged the prevailing positivist intellectual milieu of the Third Republic, which in a general sense rested on the belief that all authoritative knowledge was derived from sensory or empirical experience interpreted through reason and logic; positivism emphasized experimental science as the only way to access truth. Most often associated with Auguste Comte (1798–1857), positivism held that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws. All introspective and intuitive knowledge was rejected, as well as metaphysics and theology.121 The cultural framework of positivism meshed well with republican universalism and its corollary, a form of secularism known as laïcité. From the French state’s point of view, the individual rights-bearing citizen was the same as every other citizen. Laïcité has come to mean, according to Samuels, “that the state must maintain absolute religious neutrality and the public sphere must be kept free of religion. . . . In France, laïcité implies freedom from religion as much as freedom of religion.”122 For Fleg, like Péguy, Bergson exposed the failings of trying to find solely “logical unity and finality.”123 Arguing that a purely materialist understanding of human experience was reductive, Bergson “conceived the human being as something other than a material, positive, socially, or physically quantifiable thing.”124 He set out a postpositivist metaphysical system that promised access to a deeper reality, not antimodernist but rather scientific and culturally avant-garde: “a re-enchantment of science and metaphysics.”125 Challenging dualism, Bergson acknowledged a “pragmatic self,” instrumental in function, dealing with surface impressions, helping us to negotiate our everyday lives in the material world. He called this self “intellect.” He postulated a second self, a “deep self,” which he named “intuition,” that can directly apprehend “reality” without the mediating (and distorting) filter of intellect. Through the faculty of intuition it is possible, according to Bergson, to “experience the flow of reality instead of breaking it apart into stable, discrete categories, as we typically do in the realm of ordinary activity and communication.”126 The distinction between “intellect” and “intuition” permitted Bergson to posit a second understanding: “the redefinition of ‘reality’ as the constant becoming or ‘duration’ – la durée – that underlies what is seen.”127 For Bergson, there was no radical break that separated the temporal from the spatial; instead, “they are gradations of ‘extensity’ linking the intensive and extensive, pure durée and its material manifestations.”128 Further, and critical for a writer like Fleg, Bergson argued, “Scientific determinism ignored the fundamental layer of self where imagination and creativity are located and where the roots of freedom reside.”129 Intuition enabled the artist to make contact with the most fundamental structures of reality. It required penetration beyond the surface of the everyday. Unlike other intellectuals’ assaults on the rationalist bases of French republican democracy, such as those articulated by Charles Maurras, Bergson’s own critique of rationalism was not only a celebration of the spiritual aspect of art and poetry but also a defense of republicanism and democratic principles and a fundamental attack on illiberalism and intolerance.

Creating the self 39 Both Fleg and Péguy embraced and transformed Bergson’s antidualism. For Fleg, Bergson’s metaphysics brought a high degree of nuance to his nascent ideas about identity – of being both Jewish and French. The continuity Bergson proposed between spirit and material, between intellect and intuition, between the universal and the particular, encouraged Fleg to understand identity as existing also along a continuum rather than in bifurcated segments. One could simultaneously experience universal human connection and particular histories and practices. Péguy reconfigured Bergson’s notions of “intellect” and “intuition, or surface and deep selves, into what he termed politique or surface reality and something he deemed deeper, mystique. He argued that the mystique of Catholicism, or republicanism, or even Dreyfusism did not conform to any reductive framework or political party based on interests. Rather, mystiques are living sources perceivable only by prophetic vision; they are noble, parallel realms that can even value one another, perhaps because they recognize their shared universal humanity. It is only in their politiques that they are in opposition to one another.130 And yet, he also realized that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”131 Thus, there was no avoiding the pragmatic material realities that challenge us every day. Together with the writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Fleg, and Jacques and Raissa Maritain, who gathered at his shop, Péguy forged a countercultural space aimed at combating the deterministic and superficial views they identified with positivism. The Cahiers de la quinzaine provided a vehicle to critique positivism; not only was positivism reductive and naïve, it was the viewpoint associated with a kind of lifeless intellectualism that refused to confront suffering as a central aspect of the human condition, and it failed to reckon with either “death or God.”132 It was at this moment that Péguy turned away from the atheism of his youth and became a practicing, if anticlerical, Catholic.133 While Péguy’s bookshop group was left-leaning and republican, their concern with human suffering led to long and involved discussions of spirituality and religion, especially of Judaism and Christianity. These had been taboo subjects for their leftist, positivist, and republican elders, who had been nourished by the ideals of laïcité, which they identified as the only viable source of human unity and social progress. Péguy critiqued republican laïcité in his 1910 essay “Notre jeunesse.” Comparing republican anti-Catholicism with the antisemitism unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair, Péguy explained that after the separation of church and state legislation in 1905, the same people who had turned the country upside down in order that it should not be said that in France a man [Dreyfus] had suffered on account of his race and his religion were now expelling the teaching orders and declaring war on everything religious.134 The 1905 law, he wrote, removed religious workers from hospitals and state schools and declared all religious buildings to be the property of the state. He asked rhetorically: “Had antisemitism in one party been replaced by anti-Catholicism

40  Creating the self in another?” The injustice against Dreyfus should not be a pretext for perpetrating other injustices; those who held anti-Catholic beliefs were neither true Dreyfusards nor true socialists, he concluded. For Péguy, the anti-Catholicism of laïcité was not the opposite of antisemitism; it was the same: The same action that was legitimate becomes illegitimate.  .  .  . The same action that had become such and such, departing from that point of discernment, becomes not only other, it becomes generally its contrary, its very contrary. And it is thus that one becomes innocently criminal . . . perhaps the most dangerous of all.135 Socialists had fallen prey to easy, surface politics, according to Péguy; anti-Catholicism was a betrayal of the spirit of Dreyfusism by the Dreyfusards themselves. Fleg’s mentor and Péguy’s dear friend, Bernard Lazare, was also critical of “triumphant Dreyfusisme.” Writing in 1902, a year before he died, “If we are not careful, tomorrow they [anticlerics] will require us to applaud the French gendarmes who take children by the arm for them to attend a secular school.”136 Dubbing Lazare a “Jewish prophet, an incarnation of the Jewish prophetic tradition,”137 Péguy offered a tender posthumous portrait of Lazare in “Notre jeunesse,” in which he also embedded a far-reaching discussion of Jewish-Christian relations.138 After the Dreyfus Affair, Péguy remained committed to combating antisemitism in France; he praised what he described as the Jewish tradition of literacy and held up the virtues of loyalty that he experienced in his personal relationships with Jews. In his nostalgic reminiscence of the early Dreyfus movement, he described an explosion of what he called Jewish mystique. The essence of Jewishness, its mystique, was not, according to Péguy, merely the sentimental opposite of antisemitism; it was a passionate commitment to its practices and ethical values. Beyond ethics and commitment, Péguy believed that Jewish mystique embodied the submissive ideal of suffering through persecution; this valorization of Jewish suffering allowed him to assert the holiness of all Jews and their deep solidarity with the suffering of Christians. Put in terms of social class, the socialist Péguy claimed solidarity between poor Jews and poor Christians struggling under modern exploitative conditions. “What I see,” Péguy wrote, “is that Jews and Christians together, poor Jews and poor Christians, we make a living as best as we can, generally poorly, in this bitch of a life, in this poor wretch of a modern society.”139 Despite his essentialized and ahistorical notion of Jewish suffering, Christians and Jews, according to Péguy, while two distinct religious groups, would find a cross-cultural solidarity at the level of collective humanity, which transcended differences of religion, culture, and race. They would find unity around their shared suffering and abjection. Thus, both were able to assimilate, “not to laïcité, but to the religiously inflected, suffering-centered realm of mystique and revolution.”140 The potential for common cause and solidarity between Christians and Jews articulated by Péguy spoke loudly to his friend and kindred spirit, Edmond Fleg. It helped him to shape a Bergsonian framework through which to understand and even begin to reconcile his personal anguish over his decision not to

Creating the self 41 marry Marie-Claire, his parents’ intolerance, and the antisemitism that had been so threatening during the Dreyfus Affair. Yet Péguy was important to Fleg and other Jewish writers not only because he embraced Jewish particularity and suffering but also because he did so while never disassociating himself completely from the core universal values of the French republic, including laïcité. Remaining attached to a nuanced understanding of laïcité was critical for Jews because it was the key to Jewish enfranchisement as equal citizens in the body politic. With his parallel affirmations of the universal and the particular, of republicanism and of distinct religious identities, of international, national, and local attachments, Péguy provided a model for Jewish writers like Fleg as they grappled with their own identifications.141 Unlike philosemites, especially the proconversion writer Léon Bloy, Péguy was not interested in erasing the differences between Jews and Christians through either assimilation or conversion. Fleg, along with many other Jewish intellectuals and artists, was especially attracted to Péguy for his affirmation of Jewish particularity within the greater sphere of human solidarity; they experienced Péguy’s bookshop salon as an alternative to the secular assimilationist ideology of most leftist political thought and of the mainstream Jewish community.142 When Péguy published Fleg’s Écoute Israël in the Cahiers de la quinzaine in 1913, a new literary mood was taking root in Paris. It was a second emancipation of sorts, this time for Jewish characters in poetry and fiction, and there was a resurgence in the popularity of biblical themes, with stories of the ancient Hebrews providing a new source of inspiration. Fleg’s poem formed part of this new current. Dedicated to the memory of his father, Écoute Israël was divided into three sections: “Les pères du monde,” “La maison d’esclavage,” and “La terre promesse” (“Fathers of the World,” “House of Bondage,” and “The Promised Land”). In the first poem, titled “God’s Vision,” the eternal breathes and speaks: the universe is created. At the moment of creation God sees elemental structures of the Jewish story: “the five books of Torah, the throne of his grandeur, and the Temple of his splendor, and the summit of Mt. Moriah.” Through this collection of poems, Fleg retells, in elegant rhyming verse, Old Testament stories from creation to the death of Moses. He gracefully moves through Abraham’s departure from his parents, the binding of Isaac, Jacob’s dreams and the archangels, Joseph and his brothers, Batya and baby Moses, the burning bush, the wounds of slavery, and the final plague, the killing of the first born. Surprisingly though, Fleg incorporated a poetic rendering of the “Suffering of Job” in between the tenth plague and the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Sinai. Job’s story of the “suffering innocent” does not usually factor into Jewish liturgy, as Christian theologians often interpret it as a prophecy of the coming of Christ. Fleg would have been familiar with the story – and its absence from Jewish liturgy – from his close connections to Christians, and importantly from his mentor Bernard Lazare, who had died of cancer in 1903 at the age of 38. The story of Job challenges the simple equation of suffering with punishment; rather, it depicts a righteous man’s confrontation with desperate misfortune and his subsequent suffering. It is the story of a man suddenly awakened to the anarchy rampant in the world, who, in

42  Creating the self spite of his own ruin, maintains his belief in God. He asks: “Should we accept only good from God and not accept evil?” (Job 2:10). Before Fleg’s poetic interpretation of Job was published, Lazare had been piecing together a work that contained fragments of a study on Jewish thought and history titled Le fumier de Job (Job’s Dungheap). Much of this material had been written between 1897 and 1898, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. At the time of his death, it remained unedited and unpublished.143 Written while Lazare himself was terribly ill, he was not referring to his own suffering or even to individual suffering, but his aim was to expose the suffering of the Jewish people. Part autobiography, Le fumier de Job is comprised of meditations on the Jewish people depicted through monologue and dialogue; the Jewish scholar André Neher described it as a polyphony of voices from the rationalist philosopher to the sentimental humanist, suggesting Lazare embraced a multiplicity of paths toward Jewishness.144 Lazare identified his personal fate with that of the Jewish people. I am a pariah. . . . I have overcome the pride of being a Jew, I know why I am one, and that binds me to the past of my own people, links to their present, . . . allows me to cry out for all their rights as men.145 Between 1890 and 1897, Lazare’s understanding and articulation of Jewish national identity shifted dramatically. In 1890, he wrote about the distinction between juifs, German and eastern European Jews, embodying traditional antisemitic characteristics, and israélites, assimilated Jews. He urged israélites to reject “association with ‘these moneychangers from Frankfort, Polish bartenders, Galician pawnbrokers, with whom they have nothing in common.’ ”146 Just a few years later, in Le fumier de Job he called out for Jewish solidarity that drew upon a shared history, not upon religion as its source. The Jews were a pariah people, Lazare proclaimed, an unruly and rebel people; the essence of Jewishness was the revolt of a victimized people. By calling Jews outcasts, by naming Jewishness and exposing what he deemed to be the truth, he strove to revalorize and redeem Jewish particularism and difference as a source of strength. His aim was to instill confidence and pride in those who had suffered in hostile societies and, further, to lift up the Jewish case as a model for resistance to oppressed people everywhere. Lazare believed that Jewish ostracism offered a condition of possibility for the emancipation of all. The story of Job allied Fleg to both Bernard Lazare and Charles Péguy. Embracing Lazare’s unfinished Job, Fleg claimed Jewish difference as a source of power. Including the story of Job in Écoute Israël was a way to carry Lazare’s work forward; he would be the one to continue to grapple with the tension between the deeply rooted pariah people and the struggle for human liberation. Through Job, Fleg also conjoined himself with Péguy’s concern for innocent suffering. Like Péguy, he, too, seemed to find unity between Jews and Christians through their shared suffering and abjection. For Fleg, Écoute Israël provided

Creating the self 43 a deep dive into Jewish mystique. From Abraham to Moses, he put forward a powerful set of images of what it meant to be a Jew; he wrote a poetic roadmap of Jewish values and stories meant to offer up points of identification, but the pathway included a critical stop at the story of Job. With Lazare’s untimely death in 1903 and Péguy’s in 1914, Fleg was positioned as their heir. The timing of the publication of Écoute Israël is striking. In 1913, the rightwing nationalist l’action française fomented a potent antisemitic campaign, which was fueled by propaganda echoing across Europe from the Beilis Affair in Kiev. A Jew by the name of Mandel Beilis was accused of ritual murder, a favorite myth of antisemites in which Christian boys are killed for Jewish ritual purposes. Beilis was arrested in July 1911 and under investigation until his trial in 1913. After a month-long trial, Beilis was acquitted by an all-Slavic jury due to lack of evidence, but the l’action française exploited the trial for its own political ends.147 In writing Écoute Israël, Fleg seemed to believe that a renewed connection to Jewish texts would enable Jews to resist Judeophobia in all of its forms; resistance was certainly called for at the time of publication. Beyond the content of the poem, Fleg linked himself with Péguy’s notion of participatory reading. Through Écoute Israël Fleg asked his readers to participate in what Péguy called the “eternal concert.” Careful thinkers could enter into “the concert” through the very act of reading. Péguy argued that we should read texts as if they have been sent “in a package by postal express for us.” This method of reading, according to Péguy, can draw on contextual historical knowledge, but it does not dictate our response to it. He believed that this way of reading gives readers a “frightening responsibility. The works [of past cultures and civilizations] are in our hands like hostages.”148 Fleg offered up Écoute Israël to be read exactly in this way. Fleg’s positive depiction of Jewish mystique elicited a broad response. Maurice Vernes, a specialist in Judaism and messianic ideas at the École Pratiques des Hautes Études Sciences Religieuses at the Sorbonne and a Protestant, complimented Fleg on his poetic form in Écoute Israël. Vernes explained in a letter to Fleg that in the classic alexandrines he found “the depth of the Hebrew tradition frankly interpreted. You show a humanistic aim with the highest authority and the charm of poetry.”149 Lucien Besnard, an author, drama critic, and personal friend, wrote to Fleg, “All of your poems [in Écoute] fill me with wonder by their force and their radiance. I couldn’t help but dream of the sublime form of Hugo.” Another reader began his letter: “Cher maître,” and then continued, “I felt such pride and uplift reading Écoute Israël.”150 According to one reviewer at the time, Fleg aimed to reconcile two ideals: Judaism and contemporary thought. Another wrote: This book is not only an echo of a personal spiritual experience, it is the taking of consciousness by the poet, in a religious sense, of the destiny of the Jewish people of which he is a part. It is a poetics made from reality in a profound sense, and shaped by history.151

44  Creating the self More recently, the literary critic Ralph Feigelson wrote, “Fleg sings of Judaism with a French soul and spirit.”152 With Écoute Israël Fleg’s writing turned fully toward Jewish-inspired themes, perhaps inspired by Lazare’s revalorization of Jewish difference, biblical texts, and an ongoing exploration of the shared values embraced by both Christians and Jews through their common suffering as understood and practiced by Péguy. Particularities could and should be affirmed, as was the possibility of transcending cultural differences through a shared understanding of and belief in the collective, universal human condition.

Conclusion Fleg’s journey of self-discovery began when he left home, if not before. With Marie-Claire’s marriage, the death of his father, and the antisemitic fallout of the Dreyfus Affair, the years 1896–1898 proved to be a watershed period in Fleg’s young life. Ultimately, turning away from Marie-Claire and choosing his family and financial security over love haunted Fleg for the rest of his life. Yet it was also generative. Falling in love with a Christian woman helped to forge and sustain his belief in the possibility of Jewish-Christian reconciliation – if not in his lived experience, then through his writing. Differences between Christians and Jews were cultural and valuable, but ultimately their shared suffering would tie them together in the human family. Deeply affected first by Judeophobia and then by various forms of nascent Jewish national consciousness, Fleg began to crystallize his own notion of French Jewishness. Initially, in an inchoate way, Fleg rejected the empty and rote rituals of his family and then the positivist ideology associated with republican laïcité. Moving from negative critique to positive attribution, Fleg was deeply influenced by the work of Henri Bergson and Charles Péguy throughout the ongoing process of defining and redefining his ideas. Bergson offered Fleg and Péguy a way out of their disenchantment with mainstream positivism on the one hand and traditional eternalism on the other. As Fleg recounted in an interview in 1928, it was the “thinking of Bergson that was the most influential for me. With him one leaves determinism to enter into liberty and into the life of the spirit . . . this was the miracle of Bergson.”153 Péguy’s own return to spiritual Catholicism and demands for universal justice supported Fleg’s amalgam of French and Jewish universalist values that simultaneously legitimated particular lives, individual and communal. Through his writing, Fleg forged a new kind of French Jewishness. It was explicitly nonreligious in the normative sense of religious practice and responded above all to the existence of and the desire for an expression of the past. It was an affirmation of Jewish presence. By articulating historical memory through the interpretation of biblical text, Fleg constructed a cultural way to be Jewish. In the face of a modern world dominated by markets, mass production, abstractions, and notions of progress, Fleg’s flexible Jewish identity was neither dogmatic nor assimilationist; it was based on the interpretation of a body of texts and stories held in common by the Jewish people.154

Creating the self 45 Fleg published Écoute Israël on the cusp of the Great War. His friend and patron, Charles Péguy, was killed, struck by a bullet in the forehead, on the first day of the Battle of the Marne in 1914. He was 40 years old. Following Péguy’s lead, Catholics in the bookstore group, like the Maritains, reanimated Catholicism, “picking up the broken pieces of a tradition scorned and demonized by the mainstream, embracing its symbols of grief, crucifixion, and tears,” creating what has come to be known as the movement for Catholic renewal.155 Péguy lit the flame for the postwar Catholic renaissance.156 Jewish participation in the Great War transformed French Jewish identity as well. Fleg enlisted immediately and served in the French Foreign Legion. The ecumenism of the Union Sacrée, which was so keenly felt at the beginning of the war, served as the foundation for his writing in the postwar years and during the interwar period. For many, in the aftermath of the war, Fleg became the “official poet of French Jewishness,” constructing a Jewish negotiation with contemporary French life.157

Notes 1 For a discussion of the impact of the Affair on the French Jewish community, see 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); Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 42–46; Perrine Simon-Nahum, La cité investie: La “science du judaïsme” français et la République (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1991), 285–311; Ruth Harris, Dreyfus, Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of a Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), especially 52–72, 187–200. For a discussion of the Dreyfus Affair and Jewish identity, see Aron Rodrigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 2, no. 3 (1996): 1–24. 2 At the time of the French Revolution there were approximately 40,000 Jews living in France, including 5,000 Sephardim (Jews originally from Spain or Portugal), who in the fifteenth century had fled the Inquisition and settled in the southwestern regions of Bordeaux and Bayonne, and roughly 30,000 Ashkenazim (Jews originally from Germany) living in the northeastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which had become part of France in the seventeenth century. The Papal States in and around Avignon in the south, integrated into the national territory in 1791, were home to several thousand Jews who lived in ghettos, or carriers, into the eighteenth century. Between 500 and 700 Jews lived in Paris, where they were technically not allowed to live before the Revolution. The Sephardic Jews of the southwest had achieved a certain degree of integration into French society, including an openness to Enlightenment ideas, while also retaining their Jewish communal ties. They spoke French, owned land, and participated in the economic and political life of the region. French Ashkenazim, on the other hand, were prevented from engaging in most trades; living in large towns they spoke Western Yiddish and worked in petty trades, especially peddling, horse trading, and moneylending. Their communities closely resembled Jewish shtetls in eastern Europe. Without many ties to their Christian neighbors, they remained a highly autonomous, traditional community, with their own legal and governance structures, aligned with Orthodox rabbinic Judaism. Prior to the Revolution, each of these Jewish communities had its own particular customs, forms of organization, and relationship to governmental authority; there were no official

46  Creating the self ties among the several communities. Gildas Bernard, ed., Les familles juives en France, XVIe siècle – 1815, Guide recherches biographiques et généalogiques (Paris: Archives Nationales, 1990), 78. 3 Quoted in Isabelle Monette Ebert, “The Jewish Writer in France from the Dreyfus Affair to 1939” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1980), 4; Robert S. Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897–1948),” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 4, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 62. 4 David Landes, “Two Cheers for Emancipation,” in The Jews in Modern France (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, New England University Press, 1985), 289–90. 5 Simon Schwarzfuchs, De juif à israélite: Histoire d’une mutation, 1770–1870 (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 156. Schwartzfuchs places this new formulation during year VII by the revolutionary calendar (1798–99). 6 Simon P. Sibelman, “Emerging Voices, Evolving Paradigms: Literary Expressions of Franco-Jewish Identity after the Dreyfus Affair,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 31, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 488. 7 Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3. 8 Rodrigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” 3. 9 Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1–3; Landes, “Two Cheers for Emancipation,” 288–309. 10 See Nadia Malinovich, “Between Universalism and Particularism: Discourses of Jewish Identity in France, 1920–32,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32, no. 1 (2006): 146; Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 1–3. 11 Jean Plançon, Histoire de la communauté juive de Carouge et de Genève, vol. 2 (Geneva: Skatkine, 2010), 17–18. According to Plançon, there were 1,119 Jews in Geneva at the beginning of the twentieth century, and they had been well integrated socially and economically for decades. They included doctors, artisans, workers, bankers, professors, and businessmen, like Maurice Flegenheimer. 12 Josué Jéhouda, Histoire de la communauté juive de Genève (Genève: Ed. Synthesis, 1944), 13. 13 Odile Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel: Edmond Fleg (Paris: La Pensée universelle, 1978), 10–12. 14 Ibid., 13. 15 Edmond Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, trans. Louise Waterman Wise and foreword Stephen Wise (New York: Bloch, 1929), 7–8. 16 Ibid., 9–10. 17 Fleg’s diary quoted in Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 15. 18 Frédéric Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg, poète et romancier, judaïsme et littérature,” Nouvelle littérature, August 11, 1928. 19 Fleg quoted in Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 32. 20 My deepest gratitude to Georges Weill, archivist emeritus at the Alliance Israélite Universelle, for sharing a talk with me that he gave in 2015 entitled “Edmond Fleg: Le poète de l’espérance juive.” M. Weill has been extremely generous with his time and knowledge during the writing of this manuscript. 21 Edmond Fleg, personal journal, July 1892–September 1892, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Brenna Moore, Sacred Dread, Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival, 1905–1944 (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 197.

Creating the self 47 6 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 35. 2 27 Plançon, Histoire de la communauté juive de Carouge et de Genève, 2:19. 28 Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, 159; Georges Weill, Émancipation et progrès, l’alliance israélite universelle et les droits de l’homme (Paris: Alliance Israélite Universelle, 2000), for ideological framework and expansion, 53–117; for schools, 129–40. The Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) was best known for its network of French language schools for Jewish children throughout the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran. Also see André Kaspi, Histoire d’alliance israélite universelle de 1860 à nos jours (Paris: Ed. Armand Colin, 2010). 29 La France juive was a landmark development in the history of modern antisemitism. It introduced and popularized the use of Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s terminology to distinguish the “Aryan” and “Semite” races. “While the Aryan race includes an infinite variety of organizations and of temperaments, the Jew always resembles another Jew,” recognizable by “that famous hooked nose, blinking eyes, clenched teeth, protruding ears . . . the fleshy hand of the hypocrite and the traitor.” Edouard Drumont, La France juive, vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1886), 24, 34. 30 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Lucien Moreau, July 1, 1898, in André E. Elbaz, ed., Correspondance d’Edmond Fleg pendant l’affaire Dreyfus, 1894–1926 (Paris: Librarie A-G. Nizet, 1976), 96–97. 31 Catherine Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France: André Spire et Edmond Fleg,” Mil neuf cent 13, no. 13 (1995): 174–75. 32 Jacques Maudaule, Préface, Elbaz, Correspondance, 2. 33 Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of the Intellect, French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 34–35; Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Masculinity (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 82. 34 Maudaule, preface to Elbaz, Correspondence, 16. For Fleg’s description of this period in hindsight, see Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 14–18. 35 Personal journal, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 36 Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 16. 37 Edmond Fleg, personal journal, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 38 Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg, poète et romancier.” Renan and Barrès are well known. Louis Laloy (1874–1944) was an eminent musicologist, music critic, and cofounder of Mercure musical. He began teaching music history in 1906 at the Sorbonne, then at the Conservatory, and was general secretary of the Paris Opera from 1913 to 1940. He wrote about a number of contemporary artists and composers, including his friend Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Paul Dukas, and Igor Stravinsky. He also “rediscovered” Jean-Philippe Rameau. Conversant in Chinese, he also wrote about Chinese music and culture in La musique chinoise, Editions Henri Laurens, 1903. He reflected on his friendship and school days with Fleg in La musique retrouvée, 1902–1927 (Paris: Plon, 1928). 39 Edmond Fleg, personal journal, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 40 Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg, poète et romancier.” 41 Émile Zola quoted in Robert Priest, The Gospel according to Renan, Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 192. Renan cut a complex figure after his death in 1892 (as he did before as well), holding a vexed position among both secularists and Catholics. For many, according to Priest, “Renan had ‘restored a possible Jesus’ for the nineteenthcentury,” Maurice Vernes quoted in Priest, The Gospel according to Renan, 195. 42 For a discussion of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, see Sally Charnow, Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Staging Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), chap. four.

48  Creating the self 3 Edmond Fleg, personal journal, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 4 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Letter from Fleg to his mother, 1896, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 47 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 65. 48 Edmond Fleg, personal journal, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 49 Lefevre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg.” 50 Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’affaire Dreyfus (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 25. 51 Ibid., 63. 52 Letter from Edmond Fleg to his mother, February 4, 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 69. 53 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Lucien Moreau, July 1, 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 95. 54 Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 29. 55 Rodrigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” 6. Many Jews (and non-Jews), including Joseph Reinach, defended Dreyfus in the name of republicanism and patriotism. Antisemitism, they argued, was the enemy of republican universal morality and of Franco-Judaism. Dreyfus himself does not mention his Jewishness in his long letters to Lucie, his wife. He maintains his belief in the values and principles of the French republic. See Harris, Dreyfus, 39, 94–95. 56 Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France,” 176–77. 57 Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference, French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 96; Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, “Bernard Lazare: Du franco-judaïsme au prophétisme romantique,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 101. 58 Letter from Lucien Moreau to Edmond Fleg, November 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 113 and Fleg’s response, November 27, 1898, 117–19. 59 Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 88. 60 Sibelman, “Emerging Voices, Evolving Paradigms,” 488–89. For an excellent treatment of Gyp, one of the most acerbic of all antisemites in the world of letters, see Willa Silverman, The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Racial intolerance was not exclusively directed toward Jews in this period. “Against Italians, in particular, who numbered 300,000 in the 1890s (25 percent of all the foreigners in France and nearly four times the number of French and foreign Jews combined), violent and often fatal clashes occurred frequently”: Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 14. 61 Sibelman, “Emerging Voices, Evolving Paradigms,” 488. 62 Letter from Edmond Fleg to his mother, June 19, 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 94. 63 But the term itself has its own history. In mid-nineteenth-century France, “racethinking” depicted the French nation as composed of an array of racial groups – Celts, Gauls, Franks, Jews. Nadia Malinovich, “Race and the Construction of Jewish Identity in French and American Jewish Fiction of the 1920s,” Jewish History 19 (2005): 30–31. Depicting the French nation this way aligned well with progressive thinking of the day: the Jews, like other groups, had their own distinctive racial traits, and it was the coming together of these diverse racial characteristics that gave France her strength as a nation. This definition of the French nation as composed of diverse peoples was based on Montesquieu’s conceptualization of the simultaneous existence of the unity or oneness of the human

Creating the self 49 race and the multiplicity of its peoples, the interdependence of the universal and particular. In the nineteenth century, the terms “people” and “race” were often used interchangeably and were seen as complementary. For a discussion of Montesquieu and diversity, see Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity, Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 353–98. Also see Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), 27; Eugen Weber, forward to The Dreyfus Affair, Art, Truth, & Justice, ed. Norman Kleeblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), xxvii. 64 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Lucien Moreau, July 1, 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 96–97. 65 Rodrigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” 10. The literature on Barrès is enormous. For Barrès and the Affair, see Harris, Dreyfus, especially chapters 4–6. For Barrès and nationalism, see Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1972). 66 Charles Maurras was the founder of the Action Française, a political movement that infused monarchism with Drumont’s antisemitism and xenophobia and developed the idea that ethnicity was the only genuine source of French identity and nationhood, thus providing a basis for future political movements which abandoned monarchism for modern authoritarianism. Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 199. 67 André Elbaz, introduction to Correspondence, 14. 68 Lucien Moreau to Edmond Fleg, September 14, 1899, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 143. 69 In 1928, Fleg described their relationship: “The friendship which bound me to my dear Logician [Moreau] withstood this torture. His tact had proven itself stronger than my nervousness. Why, said he, should we quarrel because we differ?” Why I Am a Jew, 30. 70 See Harris, Dreyfus, 379–80; Léon Blum’s collegial relationship with Barrès did not survive the strained and at-times broken friendships and professional collaborations of the period. See Blum, Souvenirs sur l’affaire Dreyfus, for a poignant description of the quarrelsome, rumor-filled, and uneasy mood of those years, including the deep involvement of writers, the soul searching by so many literary figures before they took a position. 71 In contrast to Fleg, André Spire came to his Jewish awakening a decade earlier when Drumont’s antisemitic La France juive was published and received much popular acclaim. Born into a wealthy, nonpracticing Jewish family in Lorraine, Spire was best known for his experimental neosymbolist free verse as well as his essays and books on literary, social, and political topics – Jewish and non-Jewish. In collaboration with fellow writer Jean-Richard Bloch, and mentored by Charles Péguy and Romain Rolland, Spire launched a literary review (l’effort libre), which focused on the social engagement of art. 72 Bernard Lazare quoted in Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 175; Also see Georges Weill, “Bernard Lazare (1865–1903) et le renouveau des études juives en France,” Revue des études juives 176 (July–December 2017). Lazare quoted in Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 176–77. For more on Lazare’s family roots in Nîmes, symbolist activity, and role in the Dreyfus Affair, see 164–86. 73 Harris, Dreyfus, 55. 74 Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 170. 75 Debrauwere-Miller, “Bernard Lazare,” 103–4; André Neher, They Made Their Souls Anew, trans. David Maisel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 102–3.

50  Creating the self 76 Edmond Fleg to Bernard-Lazare, November 26, 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 110–12. 77 Edmond Fleg to Lucien Moreau, December 19, 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 129. 78 Spire, on the other hand, adhered to the territorialism of Zangwill in 1905 and to Zionism after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, representing French Zionism at the peace conference in 1919. 79 Charles Oulment, “Un idealiste, Edmond Fleg,” Le gaulois, October 9, 1920. 80 L’écran littéraire, undated, Bibliothèque Nationale (BNF), Collection Rondel, RF 58768. 81 Interview with Fleg, Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg.” 82 Gabriele D’Annunzio, l’innocente (1892). L’innocente was quickly translated into French by Georges Herelle, which brought its author the notice of foreign critics. For an interesting discussion of death and murder in D’Annunzio’s writing, see Marja Harmanmaa and Christopher Nissen, eds., Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), especially Harmanmaa’s chapter, “The Seduction of Thanatos: Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Decadent Death.” On spiritism before World War I see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 54–57. 83 Fleg authored a less well-known play that was performed twice in 1905 entitled La cloison (The cloister) that also dealt with “spirits.” The play revolves around young newlyweds. The wife is overwhelmed by an irrational fear triggered by being in a large, seemingly empty house. She even fears her husband, who she acknowledges is also an unknown. There are noises in the house, human cries. As the husband is unwilling to go and see what is happening, she accuses him of only caring about himself, of cloistering himself away from the rest of humanity, of sitting with his arms crossed while terrible things are being done to others. The wife is vindicated when the maid comes by and explains that it is a neighbor who is crying out, unable to sleep because of a heart condition. This play also poses questions about how and what we know. See BNF, Collection Rondel, RF58748. 84 Paul-Adrien Schayé, Comoedia, May  9, 1913, BNF, Collection Rondel, RF 58747. 85 See Charnow, Theatre, Politics and Markets, chapter 3 for a discussion of the modernist move away from moral and thesis-driven plays. 86 Weill, “Edmond Fleg: Le poète de l’espérance juive,” 5. 87 Edmond Fleg, personal journal, 1908, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 88 Richard Crane, “Surviving Maurras: Jacques Maritain’s Jewish Question,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 4–5 (2008): 394. Fleg wrote to his friend and collaborator, the composer Ernest Bloch, that he found the Action Française “admirable and exasperating,” its antisemitism, although often justified, too visibly arms for combat.” Letter from Edmond Fleg to Ernest Bloch, July 20, 1908, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 153. 89 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Ernest Bloch, September 25, 1908, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 154–55. 90 In English, see Bernard Lazare, Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes (New York: International Library Publishing Co., 1903), 9. 91 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Ernest Bloch, September 25, 1908, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 154–55. 92 Klara Moricz, “Sensuous Pagans and Righteous Jews: Changing Concepts of Jewish Identity in Ernest Bloch’s Jézabel and Schelomo,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 444.

Creating the self 51 93 Bloch cited in Elaine Brody, “Romain Rolland and Ernest Bloch,” The Musical Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1982): 64. Romain Rolland heard about Macbeth and in the role of “paterfamilias” visited and encouraged Bloch in 1911. For a fuller discussion of their subsequent relationship, see Brody, “Romain Rolland and Ernest Bloch,” 60–79. 94 Moricz, “Sensuous Pagans and Righteous Jews,” 440. For Ernest Bloch and Jewish Identity, also see Alexander Knapp, “The Jewishness of Bloch: Subconscious or Conscious?,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 97 (1970– 1971): 99–112. 95 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Ernest Bloch, undated, 1911, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 156–57. 96 Bloch quoted in Moricz, “Sensuous Pagans and Righteous Jews,” 454. 97 Sibelman, “Emerging Voices, Evolving Paradigms,” 492. For discussion of La revue blanche and the forging of the “engaged intellectual” in the context of the Dreyfus Affair, see Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary AvantGarde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (New York: SUNY Press, 1999). 98 Sibelman, “Emerging Voices, Evolving Paradigms,” 497. 99 Philippe Landau, “Henri Franck, poète (Paris 2 Décembre 1888–Paris 25 Février 1912),” Archives juives 43 (2010): 145–48. Also see André Spire’s preface to Lettres à quelques amis par Henri Franck (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926). 100 On Jewish integration, see Jonathan Frankel, ed., “Israelite and Jew: How Did Nineteenth-Century French Jews Understand Assimilation,” in Assimilation and Community, the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and articles by Alain Dickenhoff and Catherine Nicault in Histoire politique des juifs en France, ed. Pierre Birnbaum (Paris: Presses de la Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1990). 101 Malinovich, “Race and the Construction of Jewish Identity,” 31. 102 Maurice Barrès cited in Todorov, On Human Diversity, 246–47. 103 Malinovich, “Race and the Construction of Jewish Identity,” 30. 104 Bloch in a letter to Fleg cited in Moricz, “Sensuous Pagans and Righteous Jews,” 458–60. 105 Never performed, the verse play Jézabel, midrash ou histoire inspire des ecritures was published in 1927 and dedicated to “Ernest Bloch, his friend,” by Librarie Lipschultz, Paris. Fleg and Bloch also collaborated on an operatic version of Macbeth in which Fleg wrote the libretto and Bloch composed the score. Premiering in December 1910 at the Opéra-Comique, Macbeth’s score, according to musicologist Klara Moricz, encompassed contemporary French and German musical models; he aimed to incorporate elements such as “Debussyan wholetone scales, augmented chords, and parallel motion.” But for many in the Paris audience, Bloch’s score was “dark, filled with shrieking dissonance, and expressive excess,” and the “harmonies were saturated with augmented triads,” creating an atmosphere “closer to that of the bloodthirsty drama in Strauss’s Salome or the psychological torture in Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov than to Debussy’s world of shadows.” Bloch’s music was chastised for being “monotone,” “ugly,” and “vulgar.” Other critics hailed Bloch as “an unknown of yesterday” who “will be a master of tomorrow.” Bloch was described as “certainly a man of great value, who knows what he wants.” The score was, “from beginning to end, unified and had a persistent severity.” Fleg’s libretto met with mixed reviews, too: “It doesn’t matter if the work pleases or doesn’t please,” one critic wrote, “It was made by a robust artistic temperament . . . the author possesses a lively intelligence of the theatre.” The text was described as “respectful, loyal to the original, maintaining its violence and the grandeur”; and alternately as “tormented, constrained, and

52  Creating the self bizarre.” Despite the show’s mixed reviews, and even though it closed after only 13 performances because the lead singer, Lucienne Bréval, refused to go on after receiving a bad review, Macbeth put Bloch and Fleg on the musical map. See Moricz, “Sensuous Pagans and Righteous Jews,” 441–43. Collected reviews of Macbeth, BNF, Collection Rondel, RI 07263/58753. 106 Moricz, “Sensuous Pagans and Righteous Jews,” 463. Although Jézabel was never performed, Bloch employed much of the music he composed for it in later work, especially Schelomo. 107 Firmin Gémier is best remembered for his role as King Ubu in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi, a play that is often cited as the touchstone for the beginning of modernist theatre. 108 Schayé, Comoedia. 109 La bête script and reviews, BNF, Collection Rondel, 4 ICOTHE 282. 110 Ibid. 111 Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 75. 112 La bête script and reviews, BNF, Collection Rondel, 4 ICOTHE 282. 113 Given the timing of the birth of Fleg’s first son in 1908, it is hard not to wonder if there was a degree of autobiography in Le trouble fête. 114 Le trouble fête, script and reviews, BNF, Collection Rondel, RF58755. 115 Le trouble fête, reviews, BNF, Collection Rondel, 4 ICO THE 741. 116 Le trouble fête, script and reviews, BNF, Collection Rondel, RF58755. 117 Edmond Fleg to Ernest Bloch, Automn 1911, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 158–59. 118 Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 57. Hugo’s La légende des siècles, a collection of poems, was conceived as an immense depiction of the history and evolution of humanity. Written intermittently between 1855 and 1876 while Hugo worked in exile on numerous other projects, the poems were published in three series in 1859, 1877, and 1883. 119 Although not Jewish, Rolland attached a romantic and universalizing aspect to Jews, investing his Jewish characters with the charge of spearheading a “new universal humanity” because he believed that was the essence of the most “profound Jewish traditions.” Throughout his oeuvre, Rolland portrayed Jewish characters as admirable for their integrity and their compassion, and deplored those who turned away from their Judaic heritage. See C. Lehrmann, L’élément juif dans la littérature française (Paris: Albin Michel, 1961), 110, 160. 120 Matthew W. Maguire, Carnal Spirit, the Revolutions of Charles Péguy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 75–82. 121 The literature on positivism in France is vast. See Auguste Comte, The Positivist Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet Martineau (Bristol: Themmes, 2001); Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 122 Samuels, Right to Difference, 3. Samuels explains that in France “universalism grants rights only to individuals and not to ethnic or religious groups, and that the individual must shorn of all particularities to receive those rights,” which distinguishes the French case from Anglo-American liberal pluralism in which minorities advocate for their collective interests. First used in 1871, laïcisme meant the removal of religious staff and theological teachings from French schools, but the philosophical underpinnings of French laïcisme were long part of French public discourse concerning religious particularity and universal citizenship. For the history of laïcité, see Emile Poulet, “La laïcité en France au vingtième siècle,” in Catholicism, Polïtics and Society in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Kay Chadwick (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

Creating the self 53 2005); Ruth Harris, “How the Dreyfus Affair Explains Sarkozy’s Burqa Ban,” Foreign Policy, May 12, 2010; Talal Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Postsecular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 494–526. 123 Robert Royal, “Péguy, Dreyfus, Maritain,” in Jacques Maritain and the Jews (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1994), 195. 124 Maguire, Carnal Spirit, 52–58, 76. 125 Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 61. Also see Robert C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988). 126 Moore, Sacred Dread, 36. 127 Schloesser, Jazz Age, 62. 128 Mark Antileff, Inventing Bergson, Cultural Politics and the Parisian AvantGarde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 12. 129 Moore, Sacred Dread, 131. 130 Royal, “Péguy, Dreyfus, Maritain,” 204. 131 Maguire, Carnal Spirit, 164. 132 Moore, Sacred Dread, 22. 133 For Péguy’s “conversion” to Catholicism, see Maguire, Carnal Spirit, 74. 134 Charles Péguy quoted in Moore, Sacred Dread, 34. 135 Péguy quoted in Royal, “Péguy, Dreyfus, Maritain,” 209. 136 Bernard Lazare quoted in Shlomo Sand, The Words and the Land, Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 200. 137 Rodrigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” 2. 138 Annette Aronowitz, Jews and Christians on Time and Eternity: Charles Péguy’s Portrait of Bernard Lazare (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 139 Péguy quoted in Moore, Sacred Dread, 42. 140 Ibid., 44. Moore writes that in the essay, Péguy introduced two of the most enduring themes of the philosemitic French Catholic imagination: the unity of Christians and Jews, and the Jew as the ideal sufferer (41). 141 Royal, “Péguy, Dreyfus, Maritain,” 198; Péguy argued that “true internationalism should enlarge upon nationalism and the history that sustains it, rather than to aspiring to an internationalism that rejects national and local attachments,” Maguire, Carnal Spirit, 77. 142 Moore, Sacred Dread, 42–44. 143 Le fumier de Job: Fragments inédits précédés du portrait de Bernard Lazare par Charles Péguy was published posthumously by Fleg in 1928 in Judaïsme, a journal he edited, under Rieder Editions in Paris. An English version appeared in 1948 with a preface by Hannah Arendt, Job’s Dungheap, Essays on Jewish Nationalism and Social Revolution (New York: Schocken, 1948), 54–79. 144 Neher, They Made Their Souls Anew, 102–3. 145 Bernard Lazare quoted in Joel Swanson, “We Spring from the History: Bernard Lazare, between Universalism and Particularism,” Religions 9 (2018): 14–15, 322. Lazare first used the term “pariah” to describe Dreyfus: “Did I not say that Captain Dreyfus belonged to a class of pariahs?,” Bernard Lazare, Erreur judicaire, quoted in Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 183. 146 Bernard Lazare quoted in Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 170. 147 Albert S. Ludemann, “Beilis Case,” in Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, ed. Richard S. Levy (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 65. 148 Charles Péguy quoted in Maguire, Carnal Spirit, 111.

54  Creating the self 149 Maurice Vernes to Edmond Fleg, February 14, 1922, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 150 Lucien Besnard to Edmond Fleg; Erneste Stern to Edmond Fleg, 1922, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 151 Reviews of Écoute Israël, René Lalou and R. P. Danielou, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 152 Ralph Feigelson, Écrivains juifs de langue française (Paris: J. Grasset, 1960), 39. 153 Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg, poète et romancier.” 154 Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France,” 184. 155 Moore, Sacred Dread, 22–23. 156 Royal, “Péguy, Dreyfus, Maritain,” 212. Royal argues that Péguy’s impact on Jacques Maritain was critical. Maritain refined and extended Péguy’s concepts, especially those concerned with integral humanism. 157 Philippe Landau quoted in Sibelman, “Emerging Voices, Evolving Paradigms,” 494.

2 The Great War Ecumenism in the trenches and on the stage

When war was declared in August 1914, President Raymond Poincaré called for a Sacred Union to unify, serve, and protect the nation. Edmond Fleg, along with tens of thousands of Jews – French and foreign-born – heeded the call to prove their allegiance to France. Even though he was already over 40 years old, Fleg volunteered for the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of war.1 Through their experiences of fraternity in the trenches and on the home front, the war provided an an integrative experience for Jews into French social and cultural life. Even Maurice Barrès, the well-known conservative writer and anti-Dreyfusard, admitted in his Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France (1917) that by having spilled their blood for France “Jews had earned the right not simply to integrate, but to express their own sense of group particularism and still be accepted as full-fledged Frenchmen.”2 In this new, more accepting atmosphere, French Jews gained the necessary confidence, according to historian Nadia Malinovich, “not only to integrate into French society, but to explore their differences without risking their sense of French belonging.”3 Or as historian Catherine Nicault writes: “The day after the war, most French Jews had the feeling that they had definitely won their “entrance ticket to the French nation.”4 Fleg was a prime example of this enhanced sense of belonging. In 1921, he was decorated as a chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for defending France and became a naturalized French citizen.5 At that point, he changed his name from Flegenheimer to the less Germansounding Fleg. It was an abbreviation that his friends had already made when he was a student at the École normale.6 The war deepened Fleg’s already acute ecumenical sensibility. This chapter begins with a discussion of Jewish participation in the Great War and Fleg’s service, and then explores his ecumenism as it informed his writing during and just after the Great War.7 For Fleg, the cofraternity he experienced at the front laid the foundation for his vision of a radical ecumenism that included Jews, freethinkers, and Muslims, as well as Protestants and Catholics. His first published writing after the war, Le mur des pleurs (1919), translated into English as The Wall of Weeping (1929), did not literally recreate any of the miserable conditions of the trenches but rather began with the iconic Wandering Jew, an omniscient seer, asleep beside Jerusalem’s ancient Wailing Wall. The mythic Wandering Jew warns against the threat of future war and asserts the profound continuity among the

56  The Great War world’s people. This classically versed poem expressed allegorically the horrors of total war, concluding with the possibility of the reconciliation of the world’s people at what he called the “Communion Table,” suggesting a shared meal, a Last Supper. Fleg’s play La maison du bon dieu, a play featuring the friendship between three chaplains at the front – a rabbi, a priest, and a minister – performed in 1920, explored the ecumenical spirit forged during the war and offered an alternative vision of a united France comprised of diverse languages, religions, classes, and communities. Fleg’s aim was to offer a new ecumenical vision to postwar France and warn against returning to prewar hatreds; his work spoke to a broad public and seemed to give voice to a certain zeitgeist in the aftermath of the war. After 1918, modern French Jewish and Catholic writers, artists, and intellectuals, inspired by their mentor Péguy, renewed their search for a spiritual antidote to the devastation wrought by four years of bloodshed. For both Jews and Christians, there was an urgency in their engagement with the messianic in their thinking and writing. Although there was a messianic cultural movement in the nineteenth century that had been part of the legacy of 1789, after World War I, new meanings were attached to a belief in the messianic that coalesced around the belief that universal social justice would form the basis for a hoped-for human progress toward peaceful reconciliation.8 Fleg’s poetics embraced exactly this kind of messianic universalism that was certainly influenced by his neo-Kantian education in France, but the French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson, as we saw in the last chapter, exerted an even more powerful influence on him and others surrounding Charles Péguy in the years before the war. Fleg’s immediate postwar writing embodied the kind of continuity between “intellect” and “intuition” articulated by Bergson. Aiming for a new kind of mystic-realism, Fleg sought to depict human experience by revealing deep continuous links between the temporal and the eternal. For Fleg, this continuity allowed him to envision a future in which Christians and Jews inhabited a “new Jerusalem” based on universal humanist values. Historian Stephen Schloesser proposes that these new kinds of realists, like Fleg, promoted a way of seeing the world. “Dialectical and not one-dimensional, the realist generation forged a different kind of 1920s modernity: a synthesis of what was given and what was dreamed of.”9 Schloesser calls their aesthetic “off modern” – “a mixture, hybrid, or dialectical synthesis of futurism and nostalgia” distinguishing them from avantgarde modernism usually associated with the interwar period.10 Rather than considering Fleg as a specifically Jewish writer, I think it is useful to see his work in this broader context of a traumatized French postwar society and Catholic modernism. In this context of both Jewish self-confidence and Catholic refashioning, Fleg’s “off-modern” writing was aimed at an “imagined community” of both Christians and Jews and articulated a kind of messianic universalism without erasing historical specificity. At times, critics found Fleg’s messianic vision too idealistic and disconnected from the messy reality of postwar France. Messianism certainly had its shortcomings in the face of painful political tensions on the ground, but the vision of Jewish-Christian reconciliation and a

The Great War 57 compelling Jewish minority subculture was also a cultural strategy many appreciated after the devastation of the Great War.

Jewish and Catholic responses to the outbreak of war When war was declared in August of 1914, President Raymond Poincaré called for national unity in the form of a Union Sacrée that necessitated all French men to put aside their differences and devote themselves to la patrie. Describing the response to Poincaré’s call, Abbé Félix Klein wrote: And in this hotbed of dissensions, quarrels, selfish desires, boundless ambitions, what trace remained of groups, of rivalries, of hates? . . . The fact is we know ourselves no longer; barriers are falling on every side which in public and private life, divided us into hostile clans.11 According to a Protestant writer, the Union Sacrée brought the churches into mutual relationships and led them to cooperate under conditions that had never previously been realized. For example, the leaders of the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities sat side by side during the meetings of the Comité du Secours National (National Relief Committee), an organization charged with taking care of on-duty military and their families.12 For French Jews and Jewish institutions, the Union Sacrée was a rallying cry. It was proof of and argument for their equality as Frenchmen. The triumph of the French cause would mean the triumph of French republican values embodying the very spirit that brought about the emancipation of French Jews.13 In response to Poincaré’s call to arms, French Jews were eager to prove their patriotism on the battlefield. In a sermon to the congregation of a synagogue in Nantes, Rabbi Samuel Korb called for Jewish service: “All Jewish hearts in France are ready for any sacrifice, for any act of devotion . . . the Jews, like all Frenchmen, take their stand as free men against them [German invaders].”14 A poster in French, Hebrew, and Yiddish addressed to Jewish immigrants was plastered all over Paris. It read: France who was the first of all nations to admit us into the body politic, is the nation of the rights of man and of citizens. Brothers: Even if we are not yet French by law, we are by heart and by soul, and our most sacred work is to put ourselves to its disposition, to participate in its defense. Brothers! This is the moment to pay our tribute to the country where we have found our moral enfranchisement and material well-being. Immigrant Jews, do your duty! Viva la France!15 Of the 90,000 Jews in France and Algeria, 46,000 were mobilized. Out of a population of 35,000–40,000 foreign Jews, 10,000 immigrant Jewish men volunteered.16 Fleg was one of them. Defending universalism, justice, and civilization,

58  The Great War Fleg explained his own enlistment in these words: “for Israel and for France.”17 He remembered, [Enlisting] was a natural thing to do, for thousands of Jews, more foreign than I was to France, they did as I did. I was still a citizen of Geneva and I joined the French Foreign Legion, and I set out for the front. I felt myself to be absolutely Jewish and absolutely French. The same was true for German Jews.18 Jews were not the only ones who rallied to the republic when war was declared. For Catholics the Union Sacrée offered an opportunity to reconcile with the republic after their “divorce” in 1901 when the religious orders were expelled and then in 1905 with the legal separation of church and state. Oddly, the years following France’s Act of Separation in 1905, which enshrined laicism as French national law and ended state funding of religion through World War II, Catholicism enjoyed an astounding and unanticipated resurgence in France. New scholarship on the law of 1905 argues that the legislation was “really an attempt to enshrine the principle of religious liberty within the State” rather than secularity. The law assured liberty of conscience and thereby guaranteed the free exercise of religion. In so doing “it marked a stage in the growth of liberty rather than the growth of secularism (closely allied though these two things are).”19 The law provided an opportunity for French Catholicism to “re-conceptualise its mission in France, to build new Churches and to engage in society on its own terms.”20 Freedom from official church restrictions brought a surge of new thinking and fervor, as evidenced in the writings of Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, and Paul Claudel. The French historian Frédéric Gugelot called the modern attraction to Catholicism “an avant-garde cultural turn” that rejected the reigning positivist ideology and ended up “introducing new aesthetic and religious forms that offered an entirely new image of Catholicism.”21 Schloesser coined the phrase “Jazz Age Catholicism” to capture the vitality of modern Catholicism in this period.22 For the Jewish community the Act of Separation also led to the growth of new institutions, organized independently of the consistories. The chief rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, anticipated this in 1904 when he told Léon Parsons, a journalist at La grande revue, that if the reform succeeded, “it would have the effect of inspiring more life, more activity in Jewish cultural life but at the same time, will risk compromising the unity of the consistory  .  .  . it will have irreparable consequences.”23 Even so, most French Jews saw the neutrality of the French state in religious matters as an incarnation of “a sort of supreme consecration of the principle of freedom of conscience, applied in an equitable fashion in all of its fullness.”24 Various groups created their own religious associations, including the Reform-leaning Union Libérale Israélite and the ultra-Orthodox, Russian immigrant-based Agoudas-Hakehillos. Such diversity resulted in religious pluralism, or denominationalism – a new thing in French Jewish life. Even before the Union Sacrée bound French Christians and Jews together, the 1905 legislation

The Great War 59 provided an opportunity for Christians, Jews, and agnostics to work together on the project of religious liberty.25 The postwar Jewish and Catholic renewals were mutually reinforcing. Inspired by Bergson and Péguy, Edmond Fleg and Richard Bloch, among others, and a number of “modern” Catholics such as the Maritains, Henri Ghèon, Jacques Copeau, Max Jacob, and Jean Cocteau believed that art had a spiritualizing function and was integral for the emotional repair of war-ravaged France. The Catholics turned “toward symbolism that channeled emotions of grief, mourning, and loss to acknowledge, consecrate, and deepen the reality of suffering and pain.”26 In their valorization of pain and grief they looked toward and asserted the holiness of iconic Jewish anguish. This highlighting of Jewish suffering enabled some Catholic revivalists, like Péguy before them, to see a “unity between Christians and Jews through the idiom of affliction” and persecution. Obviously, valuing Jewish suffering as suffering was problematic, as it ignored the reality of their historical oppression, yet this thinking was at the heart of the somewhat ambiguous philosemitism of many modern Catholic intellectuals.27 Together, many Jewish and Catholic artists and intellectuals bridged the divide between them and adopted a widespread optimism and universalism. It was their common hope that a new era of internationalism and openness would be bound to universalist values found in both religious traditions and that they had the capacity to include difference rather than erase it.28 Before the war the fragmentation of France was blamed on warring civil factions; during, its fragmentation was due to the heavy mutilations suffered from an external enemy.29 During the postwar years, Jews and Catholics alike shared in the messianic vision of inclusiveness, cosmopolitanism, and peace.

Fleg at the front Since his marriage and the birth of his two sons (Maurice in 1908 and Daniel in 1913), Fleg resided at 1 quai aux Fleurs, just around the corner from Notre Dame Cathedral, surrounded by “the entire spiritual and intellectual patrimony of Paris.”30 He was a 40-year-old married man with two small children living a financially secure and agreeable life in the heart of Paris. Even though, according to his French biographer Sister Odile Roussel, war and violence were contrary to Fleg’s temperament and character, when war was declared in August 1914, Fleg joined the French Foreign Legion, and left for the front. In October of the same year, Fleg wrote to his wife, Madeleine: In spite of the sadness of this separation for us, I could not have acted otherwise without making myself crazy for the rest of my life. . . . Your noble courage stimulates my own. They go together in this heroic time. I feel your faith as well as the hours where you doubt everything underneath.31 Edmond and Madeleine, like so many other French couples and families, found strength, compassion, comfort, and understanding through their wartime letter writing. In her elegant study of a young couple and their correspondence during

60  The Great War the war, Your Death Would Be Mine, Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War, Martha Hanna details how the war compelled the French to become a nation of letter writers, as “Four million letters made their way from or to the front every day, more than ten billion in all.”32 Like Paul Pireaud, Fleg corresponded frequently with his wife and two young sons, describing and sometimes hiding the reality of life at the front. As we see with Fleg, networks of correspondence intimately connected civilian and combatant France for the duration of the war. According to Hanna, “Letters united parents and children, husbands and wives, and kept affection alive, family almost palpably present. . . . A letter was as essential as food, as longed for as leave.”33 Fleg’s correspondence network was dense; he wrote frequently not only to Madeleine and his close friend and colleague Ernest Bloch but to a long list of family members, friends, and comrades he met during the war, including his brother-in-law, Jean Bernheim, who was killed in action in 1915. Engaged as a cyclist messenger for the colonel of the 2nd regiment of the Legion, Fleg wrote to his friend Ernest Bloch: There is relatively less danger from the war in the region where I  find myself right now; and more, as a cyclist and as someone in charge of carrying messages, there is still the craziness of chores and the perils of combat. But, he added, the enemy knows this place: “we are ever vigilant, and without rest.” It would probably be “useless to tell you,” he continued to Bloch, of our “complete indifference” and our “calm” when “we hear and see the exploding shells because you have, without doubt, heard speak of how rapidly soldiers get used to living in the trenches under fire.” Fleg evoked the danger of death lurking everywhere, of the possibility of being killed, but never of the obligation to kill, to cause death. “The acceptance of death is essential, and it must be accepted in advance; and then a certain serenity reigns in the soul,” Fleg mused. “When I see what passes through my heart, I see a sentiment, which I should have the courage and the simplicity to call the spirit of God. No other word will give the idea a more complete form.”34 As a way to cope with the constant threat of death from enemy fire and the wretched living conditions of the trenches, Fleg’s company organized weekly “distractions” consisting of cinema, sports, talks by soldiers on various topics, and performances. Among Fleg’s archived papers are a number of hand-drawn posters advertising these weekly programs and also offering humorous advice to the troops. Fleg himself was listed numerous times as the pianist accompanying theatrical and musical performances.35 Homegrown performances and newspapers written and performed by the poilus – mostly revues composed of short sketches, farce, songs, and vaudeville created at the front – were not unique to Fleg’s unit but common among all the belligerent frontline armies.36 All who knew Fleg unanimously agreed that he was “remarkably clumsy” and terribly “unsuited” for the harsh life in the “trenches.” Roussel described

The Great War 61

Figure 2.1  Fleg family, 1915. (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

photographs of him in the mud of the Aisne with his head ensconced in a heavy hood that accentuated the contrast between his awkward weighty physical body and what she deemed “the luminous gaze of his poetic soul.”37 Despite being “clumsy” and “awkward,” Fleg’s courage as a “courier completing his missions with intelligence and devotion under fire” was recognized with the Croix de Guerre on October 10, 1915, after the offensive in Champagne. In response to “a warm note” from his old friend Lucien Moreau, Fleg thanked him and remarked on the longevity of their friendship. He wrote, “What has hit me is that I keep an

62  The Great War unflappable calm in the midst of this hell, and I feel in myself all that is human that dominates the elements.” Clearly responding to Moreau, Fleg continued: In all sincerity and in all simplicity, I do not experience in myself the weaknesses that you attribute to us [Jews]. We will not hear each other through letters. I do not believe that it was an excess of idealism that drove France to the state she found herself at the beginning of the war; it was perhaps an excess of its opposite. Moreau responded by pointing to the Bible and agreeing that Jews were capable of courage in war but accusing “a good number of Jews of keeping their distance from the front.” Echoing Henri Barbusse and other critiques of those who were able to avoid the front lines by maneuvering a desk job, Moreau called elite Jews out as shirkers, but “less as Jews than as spoiled children of our social and political state, with all of the privileges of non-Jews.” Privilege itself was harmful not only to Jewish morality, he claimed, but to the politics of the nation. Moreau’s accusation of bourgeois shirking was commonplace at the time; his focus on Jews though was a strong indication that, unlike Barrès, his antisemitism had not been abated by Jewish engagement in the war and that he still saw Jews as a group a part from the French nation.38 Earlier in 1915, Fleg was completely preoccupied with the case of a soldier in his regiment who was brought before the Conseil de Guerre for refusing to obey orders. As his advocate, Fleg gave his all to the task of obtaining an acquittal. Although he had spoken little of the horrors of the war to his friends and family and seemed to exhibit a kind of external detachment, Fleg engaged the Conseil with determination during the trial. He wrote to his wife: I will always remember, before my eyes, that small room with five uniformed judges in front of me, and L. so large and so pale between two gendarmes armed with revolvers. I touched back into the soul of a society where there has been an accumulation of suffering of the condemned and the horror of skeletons. I return from this voyage with a shiver surging through my bones lasting a long time.39 This was not merely an illusion, Roussel explains; behind the soldier that Fleg was defending, a Russian Jewish immigrant, the shadow of Captain Dreyfus appeared to Fleg. He felt challenged to obtain an acquittal, the pardon of yet another Jewish soldier.40 The war reinforced Fleg’s Jewishness. Thinking, writing, and identifying as a Jew, which was interrupted by the outbreak of war, continued to sustain him. Under gunfire and exploding shells, he wrote to Rabbi Israel Lévi: It is neither pride nor taste for the game, the most terrible of games, it is for the love and honor of Israel that I have taken up arms, offering my happiness, my rest and perhaps my life. How and why does one make such a sacrifice so

The Great War 63

Figure 2.2 Edmond Fleg, 1915, with Madeleine Fleg, “cycliste du régiment.” (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

naturally and easily? I have analyzed this question in vain, I have not found the key: it remains one of the most singular mysteries, and by a strange phenomenon of immodesty, it pushes me to admire my own humanity, a humanity about which I have never felt less desperate.41 During the war Fleg became conscious of his own Jewishness in a new way, as an identity deeply tied to the retrieval of what he would later call “ancestral memory.” By fighting for France as a Jew, Fleg believed he was defending his children’s birthplace and perhaps unconsciously showing this France, a France at war, that its Jewish sons knew how to give their lives when it was necessary to

64  The Great War

Figure 2.3 Edmond Fleg, 1915, posing in the trenches. (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

defend her. Fleg concluded the war in the Ministry of the Marine where he made the rank of major in 1916. Fleg was demobilized in 1919 and immediately asked to be naturalized as French citizen. Writing to Ernest Bloch, he explained that becoming a French citizen is the “natural result of a 25-year evolution, and four and half years in a French uniform. I feel the Jewish tradition and the French tradition forged in me; I have felt them take shape in my work, and in my sensibility; and I sense that they will continue to be forged in the soul of my children. It is a great moment in my life.” In the same letter he described a long poem that he had just finished: Le mur des pleurs (The Wall of Weeping). “I have never before expressed so completely,” he concluded, “my desire to evoke, in the form of a dream, apocalyptic war and universal peace.”42

The Wall of Weeping During the war years and afterward, historian Jay Winter explains, “the dead returned to the living in prose and poetry.” Fleg, like many of the soldier poets explored by Winter in his now-classic Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning,

The Great War 65 reformulated and reinvigorated older tropes and traditional images about loss of life in wartime. The language Fleg employed in his classically versed Le mur des pleurs was halfway between lyricism and realism, bitterness, and anger; it fused elements of the “old” and the “new”; this language, hovering somewhere between conventional and modern, added dimension to Fleg’s poem. His poetry, like that of his fellow soldier poets, was neither “simply patriotic” nor “straightforwardly pacifist”; it was a “quest for the sacred,” an attempt at aesthetic redemption. The desire was to open up a meditative space in which to reflect on war (and the possibility of peace) more generally.43 As the poem opens, we encounter the Wandering Jew sitting by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Fleg’s Wandering Jew, after acknowledging the carnage of the Great War, comes to the “place of Lamentations” and falls into a deep sleep. He becomes a dreamer, and his dream is narrated to the reader: Sleep O unsleeping, eternal pilgrim, momentary guest, rest, only rest. And through your dream renew. The terrors that earth knew, Here in Jerusalem, Dream out your dream.44 By employing the iconic image of the Wandering Jew, Fleg joined with many twentieth-century Jewish writers and artists who were reclaiming what historically had been seen as an anti-Jewish character. The myth of the Wandering Jew originated in a medieval Christian legend about a Jew who met and refused Jesus as he was walking toward certain death; the Jew was thus condemned to walk the earth until the Second Coming. Throughout the early modern period the myth of the Jews as a “God-killing” people destined to eternal wandering permeated Christian literature. Even throughout the nineteenth century, the eternal rootlessness associated with the Wandering Jew gained particular traction due to the uptick in territorial nationalism and the notion that “all real people belonged to a people and a land.” Jews were described as the quintessential landless people, as wanderers, not citizens.45 By the twentieth century, and especially after the Great War, Jewish writers and artists transformed the Wandering Jew into a sympathetic character designated as an all-seeing historical narrator; his eternal wandering was deployed as a historiographic device. This reimagined image of the Wandering Jew represented and promoted the idea that a distinct and eternal Jewish people or ethnos – beginning with Abraham and continuing unbroken until the present day – had existed for 4,000 years. Historian Shlomo Sand refers to this new definition of Jews as an ethnos as opposed to an earlier understanding of Judaism as a diverse religious civilization that managed to survive despite its difficulties, as the “invention of the Jewish people.”46 In his poetic use of the Wandering Jew, Fleg engaged this new field of historical memory to establish a sense of continuity in the narrative of Jewish exile.47 As was the case with other contemporary artists, including his friend Marc Chagall, Fleg converted the Wandering Jew into a positive archetype, a humanist symbol, a means for, in Fleg’s case, expressing not

66  The Great War only Jewish historical consciousness and suffering but also that of the European world more broadly. In the poem, the dreamer Jew is haunted by the inferno of crumbling civilizations. He sees the “Cities of Corn, Machinery, and Ships.” There he finds the heartlessness of a machine age, of an industrial rationality in which destruction is the inherent outcome. The cities where: crowbars not hands that feel, not fingers, but pliers of steel, . . . O grim and scarlet where, whose blood is the smelted ore, whose lungs of iron choke the word with thy breath of smoke, whose nerves are belted wire, whose veins electric cables sparking fire. Say who thou art, monster, that hast an engine for a heart?48 The material conditions of the industrial age called forth a new era of total war. The dreaming Jew hears a voice bringing the guns into action: Action stations! Ready! Fire! Jesus, what a game! Poets and philosophers praise Thy Holy Name! Action stations! Ready! Fire! As it is in heaven, Stations of the Cross, brave lads, and may God be forgiven!49 The narrative voice proclaims: “Three deaths in one, and one death in three! Thou shalt have no other God, says War, but me.”50 The Wandering Jew beholds the whole war in his dream. He died for each soldier killed, over and over, by shrapnel, by gas, by submarine, or by airplane. In order to evoke war culture Fleg followed this invocation with seven short poems referencing ancient war-torn cities symbolic of the destructive nature of revenge: Memphis, Ephistea, Carthage, Sodom and Nineveh, Troy, Sharon, and Sidon. Troy stands out as the iconic symbol of a civilization obliterated by war. The figure of Achilles reveals the values of Greek war culture: violent death as a way of achieving immortality, where glory and heroics were determined by the quantity of pillage. But Fleg turned this interpretation on its head, writing: “I [war] am that Troy that Priam and Hector cried on.”51 Rather than glorification of war, Fleg underscored its pointlessness; glorification was only the means of justification for its continuation. The ancient cities cry out to warn the “cities of today” but to no avail. Look on us, cities, as we dead look at you: We were the corn, the sailing ship, the statue; We were the embattled armies, we have been the human soul of the machine. Each of us sought to pluck the stars from heaven. Men have forgotten us, but God has not forgiven.52

The Great War 67 They continue: And you with your skyscrapers that you twist to be a bracelet for your iron wrist, with railway metal for your garment’s hem, and factory chimneys for your diadem; And you the whore, to whom the world has pandered, trailing the brothel’s lantern like a standard; And you, and you, and you. Whither do you go? What would you do?53 But the new cities, the “new beasts of steel” persevere in their warmongering ways. The forests cry: The shrapnel howls, the mortar whines and slinks the viler counterpart of wolf and lynx. The volley rips, the salvo tears and wrenches, deep in my heart, the leaves and all my branches, and the hawk-shrapnel, stooping on my breast, with brazen talons raids the trembling nest. The dreamer muses: “And the Maxim gun riddles my heart as though my blood were the sap of a tree.”54 He moans: O world that bleeds! O bleeding crowd! Beauty is slain and cries aloud. You have stolen the hills and no one heeds. O bleeding crowd! O world that bleeds! I – it is I – the slayer and the slain! I die and kill, and die again. O hosts of the dead that sink and smother! My name is Cain and you my brother.55 Four years later, Fleg reflected on the blood sacrificed by the young soldiers during the war, conjuring the imagery of the well-known contemporary film j’accuse (1919) by Abel Gance. In the film, at the end of the war soldiers rise up as a multitude of ghosts from their battlefront graves to haunt civilians throughout the villages of France. Fleg described how in his poem: The mothers wept for their sons, all the dead of the Great War were rising from their graves, lifting their putrid fists, cursing with their broken lips the anti-Christ who armed their dead bones for a war of the dead throughout eternity.56

68  The Great War The theme of the return of the dead from the field of battle, captured so brilliantly by Gance, permeated the work of soldier poets. Evoking the fallen, according to Winter, they “frequently took the form of giving the dead the capacity to speak or see or go home again,”57 or in the case of Fleg’s poem, to express their rage and cry angrily out against the anti-Christ. In The Wall of Weeping, after all of the carnage, it is the mothers who have lost their sons – exemplified by Mary taking her son from the cross, washing and dressing him in a cool linen smock – that embody human suffering. The dreamer, facing the dead, mourns: Your flesh is my flesh, and your tears my tears. But still I seek, between a dream and a waking, half my heart across the universe to heal the half that with your heart is breaking. Call therefore, as I call, on those who wait beyond the years to save and consecrate.58 A universal call from the dreaming Wandering Jew conjures a space of mutual understanding: And on the Table of all wood they lay the cloth of brotherhood, the linen woven of the sun for the Table of Communion, When from the forest, wave and jungle, all God’s creation mix and mingle, the proof (if there were need to prove) of universal peace and love. Arise! Arise! Adam and take thy place at the Last Supper of the human race.59 Fleg’s human-centered messianic dream concluded with communion/reconciliation at the table of the “Last Supper of the human race.” Even the Jews who are heard weeping will “see the end of sorrow” in a new Jerusalem, a universal homeland where all peoples will have a place at the communion table.60 But the dream ends and the Wandering Jew awakens at the base of the destroyed wall – the Jews still weeping; their time had not yet come. They recite: “O Lord of distance, and yet we see the day of Your glory behind them, the nightfall a step on the path to Thee.”61 Fleg detailed a surreal dreamscape of crowbar hands, plier fingers, and skyscraper bracelets juxtaposed with weeping mothers, their sacrificed sons, and reconciliation at the communion table. He employed a Jewish icon, the Wandering Jew, and drew on Christian narrative and imagery with its deeply held notion of redemption through suffering. Other war poets also engaged biblical references, especially images of the Passion of Christ. Péguy, Jean-Marc Bernard, and the British poet Wilfred Owen sanctified the trenches. In his poem “De profundis,” Bernard proclaimed: dead soldiers lie “clothed in their

The Great War 69 sacramental blood.”62 Reflecting on artistic expressions of the war, historian Annette Becker asks: How could the war be shown with artistic weapons inherited from the past, recent or remote, applied to the radical modernity of the war? How could the impossibility of the future be represented, how could the sky, the ruined cities, the landscapes, be shown when they were empty, perhaps forever? Becker points to the ways visual artists turned to religious imagery to depict atrocities without losing sight of mourning and compassion.63 Fleg, like Becker’s artists, embraced religious iconography, Jewish and Christian, of apocalypse, despair, suffering, messianism, hope, redemption, and sacrifice, in his verse. Fleg embraced biblical imagery but modified it. For Fleg, pain was never glorified. As the literary critic Micheline Herz explains Fleg’s poem, “suffering is supported as being the last drop that fills the cup of bitterness, as if necessarily the crucifixion were followed by the dawn of the third day.”64 His whole body of work was expectant with hope and possibility; in essence, it was life-affirming. Fleg had an almost uncanny trust in the creative force of life, the élan vitale in Bergson’s language, and that is what bears up the messianic message. Although his message was messianic, it was not only mystical. Rather his images were infused with a deep humanism that was anchored in the material facts of life; he transformed and animated the material. Fleg’s poetry, according to Herz, focused on “concrete themes, which his poetic fervor had suffused with life.” He aimed to speak directly with his readers, persuading them that “universal human and tragic elements lay enclosed in each man’s anguished solitude” but that it was imperative to hang onto “savage hopefulness.”65 The poet Czeslaw Milosz described the period 1914–1944 as “an encounter with the hell of the twentieth century, not hell’s first circle, but a much deeper one.” Bearing witness and participating in the ordeals of the Great War seemed to make for Fleg, as for Milosz, “poetry . . . as essential as bread.” For the soldier poets of the Great War, poetry’s metaphors, short lines, missing links, and stark images seemed to offer an open-ended way to access and articulate the collapse of the Europe they had known.66 In Le mur des pleurs the surreal imagery was articulated in traditional meter and rhyme schemes suggesting Fleg’s embrace of neoclassicism so prevalent especially in visual art in the immediate postwar years.67 Art historian Robert Herbert has argued that “modern classicism,” as a dominant trend in French art, offered respite following the terrible chaos of the war and a “personification for a nation in rebirth.” Prewar Cubist fragments were literally reassembled, forming more durable bodies and things and a sense that the world could literally be put back together again after the war.68 The dramatic arts also veered toward classicism, especially productions of seventeenth-century French tragedies, with Racine and Corneille dominating the Parisian stage. Classicism offered an “invaluable moral solace to a nation in mourning” as well as a distinct French identity.69 Fleg’s classical form not only conjured the ancient city of Jerusalem, the biblical Nineveh and

70  The Great War Sodom, and the classical world of Memphis, Carthage, and Troy, the warmongering of Achilles, Priam, and Hector, but also described the modern machinery of destruction. One reviewer in 1919, referencing the classical Greek myth of Pegasus and Bellerophon, wrote: The hero of the poem is the Wandering Jew, crossing time and space. . . . He [the Wandering Jew] dreams of establishing the reign of love and justice among all men. But the eternal chimera of humanity gallops on because neither Pegasus could recapture her nor could Bellerophon destroy her. This chimera beast, too, is in the heart of all men.70 Fleg’s poetics, according to Herz, centered on the “gravity of language.” His rhythms were extraordinary in their vitality and variety and go from “Oriental Jewish and Arab melody to that of our old French songs,” and sometimes he chose a deliberately discordant modern tone. But, like modern atonal music, Fleg’s rhythms “hide a solid substructure beneath their seeming license.” He was a master of the “French poetic line, from alexandrine to free verse, and including lines of an unequal number of syllables along with the more usual balanced lines.”71 Israel Zangwill, after reading the poem, wrote to Fleg and commented on his poetic style: “I  don’t remember another contemporary work that demonstrated such vigorous imagination. . . . Your verses are more free in their regular rhyming pattern than they would be if unstructured, or irregular.”72 The French physician, Arnault Tzanck, known for pioneering the use of blood transfusions when he was an ambulance doctor during the war, wrote to Fleg in 1919 after reading the poem: “Dear friend,” he began, “The form [of The Wall of Weeping] is impeccable, evocative, . . . this poet is really a musician.” In reading the poem, Tzanck concluded, “I refound an imprint of philosophical truth.”73 After reading The Wall of Weeping, Pastor Jules Brei­ tenstein, a family friend in Geneva, confided in a letter to Fleg that “Christian civilization is making me sick. We have not learned our lessons from the past.” Comparing Fleg’s poem with those of the symbolist Maeterlinck, the pastor continued, “I read your poem slowly. There is music in the syllables, magic in the images. . . . Your pity and hope remind one of the greatest prophets.”74 For Rabbi A. Back, Fleg’s poem stirred up the 120th psalm, of which the last lines read: “My soul has long dwelt with him who hates peace; I am for peace, but when I  speak, they are for war.” In a letter to Fleg the rabbi described an old Hasidic tale about a tzaddik [wise man] who explains to his community: “Mitzvot [good deeds] are the stones that will be used to construct the celestial temple, but only through awakening ourselves can we build the Temple on earth.”75 Rabbi Back seemed to suggest that Fleg pointed to such an awakening in his poetry. However, Fleg’s notion of peace was not only tied to consciousness; it was also pragmatic and based on what he called in a letter to Ernest Bloch, “the formation of an international organization committed to disarmament.” Unlike his

The Great War 71 colleague, fellow writer Romain Rolland, Fleg did not identify as a pacifist. In the same letter he explained to Bloch: I deplore the profound error committed by R. R. [Romain Rolland] by staying in Switzerland during this unparalleled upheaval; that man could not experience physically what happened in his own country, and this lack of contact, in my opinion, distorted his whole mentality and all of his judgments. It is impossible to think in a sane way about the war when one is French and staying on the other side of the border. He went on to criticize Rolland as a hypocrite. By supporting the Bolsheviks Rolland is buttressing a doctrine of tyranny and war. I don’t see how those men who are horrified by war and tyranny, but accept them when they dress themselves up in revolutionary tinsel. There is surely need for an upheaval in Russia; but those who have destroyed the old government employed the same methods as those who they have overthrown.76 While critical of Rolland and others for their ideological myopia, Fleg himself held on to his messianic optimism: “I have not renounced any of my grand dreams for humanity. . . . I remain messianic, but I don’t believe that the reign of the messiah will be established tomorrow.” Such optimism seemed to resonate for others. Writing to Fleg, Zangwill was touched by his messianic message: “I don’t know whether you are Jewish but in your verses on the universal Temple you have reanimated the great dream of the ghetto. The world really needs your voice, your creative originality.”77 Fleg continued to explore the continuities between Judaism and Christianity in his play La maison du bon dieu, which struck a comic tone rather than a tragic one, while exploring a similar theme of reconciliation and hope in the postwar future.

La maison du bon dieu Employing a very different kind of “dialectical realism” – more social than mystical – La maison du bon dieu was written in 1918 and performed in 1920 at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris. The play ran for 100 performances, a significant run in those years (and even now) and in 1921, the play toured Nantes, Tours, Angers, Nice, and Lausanne, among other French-speaking towns. La maison du bon dieu (a colloquial expression referring to a place, a home that feels warm and welcoming; gemutlich in German) posited a multicultural, pluralistic vision of France. The play focuses on a conversation between a priest, a rabbi, and a minister who are all billeted in the same house in Alsace during the Great War. The three clerics tell jokes, reminisce, play chess, and discuss the continuities among their various belief systems. Fleg remembered coming across three chaplains in his regiment having tea as the impetus for writing La maison du bon dieu.78 The play, or more

72  The Great War precisely the house itself, echoed the Union Sacrée, the unification of France against her German invaders. The house literally engendered the possibility of reconciliation between French Protestants and Catholics and between Christians and Jews. Fleg’s play was clearly informed by actual experience during the war, in which chaplains – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish – were engaged in the same work of consolation and encouragement. They took pleasure in the company of their “colleagues” whom they had mostly disliked before the war. Ecumenism was lived every day among the soldiers as well as the chaplains.79 The play was set in Alsace, not far from the front. But the experience of war is all but absent from the play, except when the audience occasionally hears its sounds in the distance. The loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870 loomed large for French citizens, but there was a special resonance for Jews, because it had been the heartland of their community. As the French troops were moving into Alsace in 1914, Abbé Félix Klein wrote: Exactly 44 years ago, and exactly at the same date – between the 14th and 19th of August – the French and the German troops were at grips as they are today. But thank God, with what a difference! Then we were leaving Alsace, which now we are about to re-enter.80 He explained further: “The memory of 1870 has eaten into her life. And now there is the grip of the foe upon her fairest vineyards and on her rich and prosperous industries.”81 In the play Fleg comments on the Jewish connection to the region through the character of the rabbi, Ségal. Gredel and Kasperl, two elderly household employees, reminisce about when the Ségal family left Alsace in 1870 and how the children were waving adieu holding their large handkerchiefs. Kasperl fondly remembers: “And Yankel . . . the third son . . . each time he passed me he pulled my hair!” And then the chaplain Ségal speaks up: “Guess what he has become, the little Yankel. . . . He isn’t far from here . . . the little Yankel: it’s me!!” After a warm welcome, Kasperl asks if he still raises livestock. “No,” Ségal responds, “I am professor at the École des Hautes Études, a Jewish chaplain, and a rabbi in Paris.”82 Through Ségal, Fleg made visible the possibility of a French Jew being successful on both French and Jewish terms. There are two narrative threads woven through the play: the ongoing conversation among the chaplains and the developing love story between a robust male school teacher with a defiantly secular world view and a young pious Catholic woman. Each character embodies a particular idea or position in French society; together they make up the Union Sacrée. There are not only the priest (Goello), the minister (Martigue), and the rabbi (Ségal) but also the freethinking anticlerical schoolteacher, Jean, who had been accepted to the prestigious École normale supérieure (Fleg’s alma mater) just as the war erupted. There are, too, the pious young woman, Françoise Brion, her mother, M. Brion, Gredel, who, because of the war’s carnage, doubts the existence of God, and Ben-Omar, a young Moroccan man (representing French colonies in North Africa) who fought for France and speaks with a stereotypically thick accent.

The Great War 73 The play coalesces around three themes: religion, the consequences of war, and love. Religion is central to most of the characters’ lives, and with humor Fleg reaches for that which connects the three chaplains and their beliefs. At one point, Ségal begins to tell a story and refers to the main character Sara/Sorlé as a schlemiel. Goello doesn’t understand; Martigue says, boasting his own familiarity with Yiddish, “You don’t know what a schlemiel is in Jewish jargon? It is an imbecile.” Ségal responds, “Not exactly, there is a nuance,” and he turns to Jonas (a Greek Jew who is in the French Foreign Legion as Fleg himself was) and asks him to translate. Jonas thinks and then says, “andouille,” literally translated as a spicy sausage. Ségal continues the story: Sorlé is a bit of a schlemiel, but because of her many virtues after her death she is admitted to heaven. The angels surround her, the stars dance a welcome, but she cries, and cries, and cries. Finally, God says to Sorlé: “Why are you crying in the midst of my splendor?” And Sorlé responds: “I have a great sadness, King of the Universe, I have only one son and he became a Christian.” “Mine, too, schlemiel,” God responds, “and I am not crying!”83 Fleg’s depiction of chaplains drinking tea was echoed by an American Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Levinger, who described a scene almost identical to one in Fleg’s play: Every evening the six of us [chaplains] gathered about our grate fire and relaxed from the grim business of the day. If we had allowed ourselves to dwell on it, we would have been incapable of carrying on the work. . . . We sang, played checkers, argued on religion . . . imagine us discussing the fundamentals of Judaism and Christianity for several hours!84 La maison du bon dieu created a concrete if romantic expression of the Union Sacrée. In one poignant scene the chaplains reflect on the extraordinary nature of their current union. My friends . . . when I look at you and when I see myself . . . and when I remember . . . it is extraordinary. Ségal: Very well! Goello: At the time of the Crusades, our knights, on their way to the Holy Land, didn’t miss an opportunity to roast some Jews. Martigue: Helas! Goello: On Saint Bartholomew, your Huguenots of Provence drank more water from the Rhône than the wine of Muscat. Ségal: Helas! Goello: Under the Terror, the guillotine cut the tongue from the poor priests who would have said the mass. . . . And here we are reunited together at this table. And one sees a priest blessing the Protestants who are marching with the canon, a minister reciting Hebrew prayers after the death of a Jew, and on the lips of a Catholic in agony the rabbi places a crucifix. Goello: God willing the war will pass and our union will live on.85 Gaello:

74  The Great War The image evoked by Goello echoes the most famous episode of battlefield camaraderie between Jews and Christians that happened on August 29, 1914, in the Vosges mountains.86 The rabbi of Lyons, Chaplain Abraham Bloch, held a crucifix to a Christian soldier as he lay dying and then died in his turn in the arms of a Catholic chaplain. An American priest who served in France at the front wrote: The relations between the non-Catholic men of this command and myself are quite identical in friendliness as those between Catholics and myself. . . . I never yet found a mortally wounded soldier who disdained my help. The padre at the front means something quite different from the peace time chaplain who was a mere supernumerary.87 Rabbi Levinger made the same point over and over again in his memoir, “I think these men [chaplains] were a unique aggregation – devoted to their country and its army, yet loving men of all nations; loving each his own religion, yet sharing equal service and equal friendship with ministers of all faiths.”88 In 1920, after having seen Fleg’s play in Lausanne, Israel Zangwill underscored that image in a letter to Fleg: “You are the only playwright to promote the confraternity produced by the war.”89 Zangwill also commented on the production: “Aside from your lyricism, you also have a great sense of theatre.” Zangwill continued: “Georges Pitoëff (the director and in the role of Ségal) did not play a very Jewish rabbi even if he was a good actor. His wife Ludmilla was exquisite in the role of the heroine.” The Pitoëffs were well known to Fleg’s family, who were generous donors to the arts, especially theatre. They did not hesitate to invest their money to support the work of young artists, and along with other Genevan patrons, they created a fund to support the Pitoëffs’ theatre in Plainpalais, a suburb of Geneva. At the age of 18, Pitoëff, an Armenian born in Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), studied acting in Moscow with the famed method actor/ director Constantin Stanislovski. Along with his wife Ludmilla, also from Georgia, Pitoëff founded his first company in 1918, and in 1920 they performed Fleg’s play in Paris before taking it on tour the following year. Fleg had left Geneva by the time Pitoëff arrived there in 1915, but they might have met in Paris when Georges and Ludmilla lived there briefly in 1913, or his family could have made the introduction.90 Although La maison du bon dieu can seem almost parodic to twenty-firstcentury readers, and one critic at the time feared that audiences might take the conversation between the chaplains as vaudeville, many, if not most critics, were appreciative and moved by the play. They point to its simplicity, tender irony, and infinite tact; to the humanity of the characters, delicate dialogue, and lack of rhetoric; to its touching detail and serene frankness. “Finally, a play that is honest and healthy, not about adultery or hystero-sentimental,” one critic declared, The characters are normal, human, not pathological; they are clear thinking and heartfelt. We will think that if an author brings three chaplains

The Great War 75 together it is to show which one will convince the others that their doctrine can explain the silence of God when faced with the monstrous crimes of man called war. But that is not the case. We stay on the ground. Theatre reviewer André Dumas wrote: “The author convinces us that we need a Union Sacrée even when the danger has passed. But he does it without pretense or too much philosophy.” The well-respected theatre critic Edmond See wrote in reference to the play: “The moral of the heart! A superior moral to all of the dogmas of the world.” Famed director André Antoine exclaimed that the play was “a remarkable, ingenious piece, noble and with a simplicity of irresistible emotion . . . one of the most original pieces I have seen in a long time.” It is an image not a fresco; another critic explained, “this work is about war and it is also a play about peace.” The well-known American writer and salonnière Natalie Clifford Barney remarked that since the war Fleg “has perhaps done more to reconcile the antagonists than any tedious propaganda. He has simplified his mind to the point of seeing God, and he no longer leaves him.”91 But some reviewers were not so convinced. For them, Fleg’s representation of the Union Sacrée was not critical enough; he should have condemned war more fully. He was accused of sappy optimism, of the play being “too simplistic like a patriotic song. One has the sense that the clergy are separated by trivial issues. We must remember that each religion has its own reality and is entrenched; they are irreconcilable.” “He [Fleg] could have dug deeper,” according to another critic, given how we know the impact of the sounds of the canon; we haven’t forgotten the wounded. He must have thought people come to the theatre for distraction not reflection, thinking would be tiring. It would be better to touch their heart than their spirit. Maybe he is right. It seems like Fleg was intentionally evoking the “simple,” the naïve, and the folkloric. The set designs he chose for the play were in the style of the image d’Epinal. Referring to the Lorrainean town of Epinal, where the name was coined, images d’Epinal were prints depicting popular subjects and character types in lively colors; their message was kindhearted, optimistic, and uniform. Then and now they were considered a bit of a cliché. Fleg would certainly have known this and played with their naïve and folkloric qualities, while challenging them by forging an image of modern France composed of Jews and Catholics, nonbelievers, and North Africans with a fraught and violent history. Other criticisms of the play focused on the impossibility of maintaining a Union Sacrée without a common external enemy. A pessimist could argue, one critic wrote, “that men are nasty beasts and don’t suspend their interior voices even when they fight against a common enemy. If tolerance is not solid, it will disappear with the peril.” Adolphe Brisson echoed that position: “The play preaches the Union Sacrée but it was difficult to realize. Everyone has retrenched in their social class, their habits and prejudices.” “La maison du bon dieu of Mr. Fleg,” the

76  The Great War reviewer in La matinée wrote, “is the only place that has the power to reunite figures from different religions, everywhere else it is a dog eat dog world.” And the daily Figaro critic wrote: La maison du bon dieu is a house full of graces. But we live in apartments of six floors and we are too closely packed one against the other for the nastiness and prejudice of hate not to live among us. Another reviewer described his impression as dissonance: “There was a disconnect between the tone and the object of the play one has the sensation of a distorted note, of an instrument badly tuned.”92 At one point in the play, the characters actually play musical instruments: Françoise at the piano, the curé plays a flute, the rabbi a violin, and the pastor on viola. Literally, according to one critic, their playing was far from harmonic. Another reviewer suggested that the musicians played with a “good will” and a “delicious indulgence” and suggested that Fleg used this cacophony as a mischievous symbol of how difficult it is to literally play well together, to create a tolerant society. One of the play’s reviewers noted that the play underscored the difficulty of tolerance as a behavior: “Tolerance is not indifference or neutrality. It is active, a charity of intelligence. Everyone says they practice it but few succeed.”93 If tolerance was a choice and active for Fleg, so was citizenship. He struggled over his own sense of national belonging, and his decision to become a French citizen was not taken lightly. It was both personal and social. As a Swiss-born Alsatian Jew, Fleg’s understanding and experience of France was not as a homogeneous nation as proclaimed by prewar nationalists but one of particular peoples and complex histories. He drew his characters, according to one critic, “as diverse as possible by origin from different provinces of France conserving their particularity of temperament and language.” The “maison du bon dieu” was France, but a decentered France made up of Jews, German-speaking Protestants, Moroccans, freethinkers, regional accents, and more – an array of particular identities all getting along under one roof. This France took work to harmonize, and had a long and sometimes uncomfortable memory, but it also had the potential for a welcoming spirit – as the name suggests. The Union Sacrée knitted Christians and Jews, freethinkers, and agnostics together under the French national banner. Hostility and distrust between priests and avowedly secular schoolteachers had been a marked element of French life during the Third Republic, particularly after the 1905 law separating church and state that made “militant clergy feel that they had been branded as pariahs.”94 But the war challenged even the division between believers and nonbelievers. In the play Jean, the freethinking schoolteacher, not only is committed to his secular values but also reflects on that which he cannot seem to explain. When describing the sensation of seeing his comrades fall beside him, he muses: “At these moments, it’s strange, one sees death and one doesn’t believe in death.”95 But then he questions the chaplains: Do you find that freethinkers, who wait for nothing of another life, die for their country with less grace than your believers? I infinitely admire those

The Great War 77 of you who practice religion, but why should I imitate them? I weave my own tapestry.96 In the face of death even agnostics and freethinkers found themselves confronted with faith. A  soldier wrote: “The Union Sacrée, this divine miracle of the war, is the schoolmaster fallen on the field of honor for his country, cared for by the priest, dying under his eyes and in his arms.”97 Historian Joseph Byrnes explains that while priests and schoolteachers shared the national sentiment during the war, neither were a solid bloc before the war. Nor did that shared sentiment preclude maintaining their parallel ideological differences – as we see with Jean – even as they fought side by side.98 For Fleg, the war forged deep human bonds, friendships that transcended differences of belief, accent, origin, or cultural practice. Fleg’s humor and irony kept the play from sinking into an idealistic romantic rant, according to most critics. By the end, all the characters rally around the love between Jean and Françoise. Even though Jean was never baptized, remains a freethinker, and even though they become lovers out of wedlock before Jean leaves for the front, each character puts religious doctrine aside and realizes that the love these two young people share is universal and is what will ensure the continuation of humanity. But not everyone thought the cofraternity among the clergy was admirable. A critic from the right-wing Action française condemned the three clerics in the play for “hastening the marriage between two lovers who were separated by the question of religion.” But another reviewer disagreed, remarking, “This is really a maison du bon dieu because there is tolerance and love. The three preachers are in accord favoring a marriage that will receive three benedictions.” And a third explained that in this maison du bon dieu what brings people together is not “serving God but love.”99In response to a negative review in Le journal de Geneve, Marie-Claire wrote to Fleg, “The critic did not understand the ‘idealism’ of your play. You passionately follow a line in your work: humans have the capacity to love.”100 That must have been bittersweet for Marie-Claire, as Fleg was able to realize that claim on the stage but not in their relationship. Even though he himself could not claim love, he understood that, as Marie-Claire articulated so clearly, it was the practice of everyday life, the omnipresent possibility of love, that binds people together and nurtures them to make connections even to those who they deem as different. Fleg depicted doctrine as narrow and confining and human connection as flexible and expansive.

Conclusion But that was in the play. In reality, the Union Sacrée was at best a pragmatic, partial, and evolving unity that lost its power as “national sentiment” as the old political ideologies remerged after the war.101 The intellectual debates of the war years among noncombatant intellectuals and academics suggest that “neither the bitterness nor the bipolarity” of the post-Dreyfus republic ever completely disappeared between 1914 and 1918.102 Although the Union Sacrée remained intact

78  The Great War discursively by 1917–1919, it had unraveled on the ground. The constant company of death led to greater indifference and demoralization. Antisemitism did not disappear either. Although the Libre parole and Action française became less popular and more muted, both continued to identify Jews with Germans.103 The Jewish Union Sacrée also disintegrated. With the United States closing its doors to immigrants from eastern Europe in 1924, many went to France, creating a network of independent institutions, press, and political activity. The increase in Jewish immigrants from the East escalated the conflict between native and immigrant Jews, especially over Jewish minority rights for eastern European Jews at the peace conference. In 1921, Maurice Goguel reflected on the spiritual revival in France during the war and the division between the Christian churches soon afterward. Certainly, the shock produced by the war provoked a reawakening of religious life and an intensification of religious practice among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The crisis brought on by the war, Goguel continued, developed “in certain souls” religious forms, “which although not specifically Christian have, nevertheless, a very high value.” But Goguel was deeply troubled that the rapprochement between Protestantism and Catholicism so poignant during the war did not last afterward, citing a decision by the “Holy Office forbidding Catholics to participate in any way in the moral and religious undertakings of non-Catholics.”104 Writing to Fleg in 1923 after reading the play, Abbé Brigerette wondered: “Why doesn’t our France resemble it [the play] since the war? Why doesn’t all of France feel like you do and live in the maison du bon dieu? All my life I have worked toward this ideal.”105 Fleg, too, was certainly aware of the unraveling of the Union Sacrée even as religious leaders in their commemorative speeches consciously invoked it by referring to “interdenominational pilgrimage, where the prayers of all will mingle.”106 In that regard, La maison du bon dieu offered a vision of France as a patchwork of religions, regions, and accents and reads as a warning against a return to any nationalist doctrine that advocated for a homogeneous French identity; as such, it was a play about the possibilities of French society itself and not the war. Fleg’s image of France was not one of “difference” being subsumed by some transcendent notion of Frenchness but rather his Union Sacrée was a celebration of the different subcultures that comprised France. La maison du bon dieu offered a dialectical realist vision of “what was given and what was dreamed of.”107 Fleg’s confidence in the liberal republic was not shattered by the war like those a bit younger, known as the “generation of 1905.”108 Fleg was unflinching in promoting his ecumenical beliefs during the Union Sacrée, after it dissolved, and even as Europe was arming itself for another war, as we will see in the following chapters. For Fleg, the friendship and camaraderie between Christians and Jews that many experienced at the front, in hospitals and canteens during the Great War found voice in his writings and his actions. Shaped by the universal and idealistic values of Franco-Judaism, calling upon his neoKantian education, and the powerful influence of Bergsonian metaphysics, Fleg forged his position as a humanist committed to the belief that human beings had

The Great War 79 the capacity for compassion and connection through shared (ecumenical) values. One might criticize Fleg as being trapped in his own idealism and his messianism certainly may have blinded him from fully identifying the political and social tensions felt so keenly in daily life, but his ideal was not the stuff of dreams: it was, as he showed, only feasible through hard work and commitment – like harmonizing in a quartet. In 1920, Fleg wrote the screenplay for a silent film directed by Léon Poirier, protégé of Léon Gaument, one of the pioneers of French cinema, titled Le penseur (The thinker), perhaps after the Rodin sculpture. Described as a philosophical drama, the story focused on a young man who has the power to read his contemporaries’ thoughts, and much to his disappointment, discovers the pervasive hypocrisy of society. Although forgotten today, the film played broadly. Writing to Fleg from Salonika, Saby Pelosef, on behalf of the local Association of Young Jews, confessed that the group admired Fleg because at a “moment of moral depression, a period of discouragement when material life was not rewarding, we were moved by your film Le penseur. Your words are a balm expressing the formidable power of humanist philosophy.”109 As we will see in the next chapter, Jews and non-Jews, young and old, friends and strangers, wrote letters to Fleg because he seemed to have his hand on the pulse of interwar social malaise and his poetry and prose touched a deep cultural nerve offering many, like the young Jews in Salonika, a soothing balm.

Notes 1 For an overview of the French Foreign Legion, see Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). 2 Quoted in Nadia Malinovich, “Between Universalism and Particularism: Discourses of Jewish Identity in France, 1920–32,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32, no. 1 (2006): 151. 3 Nadia Malinovich, “Le ‘reveil juif’ en France et en Allemagne: Éléments de comparison en manière d’introduction. Le ‘reveil juif’ des annés vingt,” Archives juives: Revue d’histoire des juifs de France 39 (2006): 6. 4 Catherine Nicault, “L’acculturation des israélites français au sionisme après la Grande Guerre: Le ‘reveil juif’ des annés vingt,” Archives juives: Revue d’histoire des juifs de France 39 (2006): 14. 5 Aaron Rodigue, “Rearticulations of French Jewish Identities after the Dreyfus Affair,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 2, no. 3 (1996): 11. 6 Odile Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel: Edmond Fleg (Paris: La Pensée universelle, 1978), 136–37. 7 For a discussion on the history and contours of ecumenism, see the introduction, note 22. 8 Catherine Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France, André Spire et Edmond Fleg,” Mille neuf cent 13, no. 13 (1999): 186. 9 Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 116. 10 Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 137. Fleg has been described as a “religious poet” and a “poet witness” engaging “innovative poetics” in Micheline Herz, “A  Prophet of Israel: Edmond Fleg,” Yale French Studies, no. 21 (1958): 107;

80  The Great War and as “wholly opposed to that of the schools of Modernism” in Humbert Wolfe, “Translator’s Note,” in The Wall of Weeping (New York: Dutton Press, 1929), 5, English translation. Schloesser’s notion of the “off modern” seems more exact for understanding his writing. 11 Abbé Félix Klein, The Diary of a French Army Chaplain (Chicago: AC McClurg & Co., 1915), 24–25. 12 Maurice Goguel, “The Religious Situation in France,” The Journal of Religion 1, no. 6 (November 1921): 566. For an American example of the public display of collegiality between Jews and Christians, see Samuel C. Shepherd, Jr., “No ‘Summer Holiday’, the Chaplaincy of Richmond’s Walter Russell Bowie in World War I,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 112, no. 3 (2004): 266–302, 271. 13 Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, the Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 49–50. 14 Rabbi Samuel Korb quoted in Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1998), 20. 15 Poster cited by Edmond Fleg, Anthologie juive (Paris: G. Cres, 1923), 296. 16 Of that 46,000, 6,500 were killed. Bernard Blumenkranz, et al., Histoire des juifs en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1972), 373; André Spire, Les juifs et la guerre, cited in Fleg, Anthologie juive, 2:177. For a broader discussion of Jewish participation in the Great War, see Edward Madigan and Gideon Reuveni, eds., The Jewish Experience of the First World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 17 Edmond Fleg cited in Philippe E. Landau, Les juifs de France et la guerre, un patriotisme républicain 1914–1941 (Paris: CNRS, 1999), 40–41. 18 Edmond Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, trans. Louise Waterman Wise (New York: Bloch, 1929), 58. 19 Julian Wright, “Review of H-France,” Vers la liberté religieuse: La séparation des églises et de l’état. Actes du colloque organisé à Créteil les 4 et 5 février 2005 par l’Institut Jean-Baptiste Say de l’Université Paris XII-Val-de-Marne 8, no. 88 (June 2008): 348. 20 Ibid., 346. 21 Gugelot quoted in Brenna Moore, Sacred Dread, Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival, 1905–1944 (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 3. 22 Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism. 23 J. Laloum, “La séparation au regard de la presse israélite,” in Vers la liberté religieuse: La séparation des églises et de l’état, ed. P. Bouty and A. Encevé (Paris: CNRS, 2006), 67. 24 Ibid., 87. 25 P. Bouty and A. Encevé, eds., Vers la liberté religieuse: La séparation des églises et de l’état (Paris: CNRS, 2006), 17. 26 Moore, Sacred Dread, 22. 27 P. Chenaux, “Léon Bloy et sa postérité,” in Juifs et chrétiens: Entre ignorance, hostilité, et rapprochement, 1898–1998, ed. A. Becker, D. Delmaire, and F. Gugelot (Lille: Éditions du Conseil Scientifique de l’Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2002), 47. 28 Moore, Sacred Dread, 106–7. 29 Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 53–54, 86, 95. 30 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 132. 31 Edmond Fleg, letter to Madeleine, October 24, 1914, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 32 Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine, Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 8–9. 33 Ibid., 288, 295.

The Great War 81 34 Edmond Fleg, letter to Ernest Bloch, November 16, 1914, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 35 Fonds Fleg, AIU, bobine 3. 36 A. Winograd, “Ten Minutes of Anthrax! Some Notes on French Combatant Trench Scripts of the First World War,” Theater 1 (Winter 2001): 51–69. In Italy, behind Carso’s front line, another form of distraction emerged when the Soldier’s Theatre Project, organized by professional actors and the Army High Command, built three wooden theatres and offered performances for 600,000 soldiers in 1917. Teresa Bertilotti, “The Soldiers Theatre,” in Artistic Expressions and the Great War, a Hundred Years On, ed. Sally Charnow (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020). 37 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 135. 38 Lettre from Lucien Moreau to Edmond Fleg, March 11, 1916, in André E. Elbaz, Correspondance d’Edmond Fleg pendant l’affaire Dreyfus, 1894–1926 (Paris: Librairie A-G Nizet, 1976), 164. 39 Edmond Fleg, letter to Madeleine Fleg, February 12, 1915, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 40 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 135. 41 Edmond Fleg, letter to Rabbin Israël, September 20, 1915, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 42 Edmond Fleg, letter to Ernest Bloch, February 7, 1919, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 43 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 204–5. 44 Edmond Fleg, Wall of Weeping, trans. Humbert Wolfe (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1929), 13, 21. 45 Moore, Sacred Dread, 49. 46 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), 17, 72–77. 47 Matthew Hoffman, From Rabbi to Rebel, Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 178–79. 48 Fleg, Wall of Weeping, 26. 49 Ibid., 28. 50 Ibid., 34. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 37. 53 Ibid., 39. 54 Ibid., 52–53. 55 Ibid., 69–70. 56 The original French version was published in 1923. Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 60. 57 Winter, Sites of Memory, 210. 58 Fleg, Wall of Weeping, 90. 59 Ibid., 93. 60 Ibid., 99. The notion of Jerusalem as a site of reconciliation and welcoming seemed to be in circulation. In 1918, at a conference in the Copernic synagogue in Paris entitled “Jerusalem, A  Religious Centre for Israel and for Humanity,” Aimé Pallière, a Catholic philosemite and colleague of Fleg’s, made the case that Jerusalem should be an open city, welcoming all three monotheistic religions. For a discussion of Aimé Pallière’s unique experience as a “Judeo-Catholique,” see Catherine Poujol, Aimé Pallière (1868–1949): Itinéraire d’un chrétien dans le judaïsme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2003); Catherine Poujol, “L’expérience particulière d’Aimé Pallière,” in Becker, Delmaire, and Gugelot, Juifs et chrétiens, 131–36.

82  The Great War 1 Fleg, Wall of Weeping, 101. 6 62 See Winter, Sites of Memory, 218. 63 Anette Becker, “Arts,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, ed. Jay Winter, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 520–21. 64 Herz, “A Prophet of Israel,” 108. 65 Ibid., 107. 66 Czeslaw Milosz quoted in Moore, Sacred Dread, 125–26. 67 Catherine Fhima, “Au coeur de la ‘renaissance juive’: littérature judéité Le ‘réveil juif’ des années vingt,” Archives juives 39, no. 1 (1er semestre 2006): 39. Rightly, Fhima explains that Fleg and Henri Franck were drawn toward neoclassicism even before the war. 68 Robert Herbert, “New Wine in Old Bottles: French Art following World War I,” Chaos & Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 (New York: Exhibition Catalogue, Guggenheim Museum, 2011), 141–43. On post–World War I neoclassicism, also see Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 69 Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of the Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 143. 70 Le Compte Rendu, “Mur des pleurs,” June 20, 1919, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 71 Herz, “A Prophet of Israel,” 113. 72 Letter from Israel Zangwill to Edmond Fleg, 1919, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 73 Letter from Arnault Tzanck to Edmond Fleg, 1919, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 74 Letter from Jules Breitenstein to Edmond Fleg, 1919, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. In 1930, Breitenstein became chair of the New Testament at the University of Geneva. 75 Letter from Rabbi A. Back to Edmond Fleg, 1919, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 76 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Ernest Bloch, February 7, 1919, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 77 Letter from Israel Zangwill to Edmond Fleg, 1919, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 78 Fleg quoted in Jean Toulat, “Une heure avec Edmond Fleg, ‘le Claudel du Judaïsme’,” La renaissance, 1964, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 79 Becker, War and Faith, 32–33. 80 Abbé F. Klein, Hope and Suffering: Memories and Reflections of a French Army Chaplain (London: Forgotten Books, 2019), 43. 81 Ibid., 11. 82 Edmond Fleg, La maison du bon dieu (Lyon: L’Illustration théâtrale, 1920), 190. 83 Ibid., 202–3. 84 Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain in France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1921), 51. 85 Fleg, La maison du bon dieu, 209. 86 This scene was captured in a painting by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. See Becker, War and Faith, 46; Barrès, Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France, 73. 87 Sean P. Adams and M. E. Stevens, “The Padre at the Front: World War I Letters of Chaplain Walter Beaudette,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 79, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 219. 88 Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain in France, 8–9. 89 Letter from Israel Zangwill to Fleg, December 2, 1920. AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 90 Jean Plançon, Histoire de la communauté juive de Carouge et de Genève, vol. 2 (Geneva: Skatkine, 2010), 18. Pitoëff was also a member of the Cartel des Quatre (1927) along with directors Gaston Baty, Charles Dullin, and Louis Jouvet, named after the failed Cartel des Gauches, a coalition of left-leaning political parties that consolidated electoral power under Edouard Herriot in 1924. The four directors formed a coalition of sorts aimed at creating an artistically avant-garde and commercially viable theatre in opposition to the “monopoly” of the boulevard theatres.

The Great War 83 91 Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 75. Every Friday from 1909 to 1968 Barney’s salon was home to Parisian artists and writers, including Colette, Isadora Duncan, Maz Jacob, Djuna Barnes, Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Solomon Reinach, Gertrude Stein, Gabriel d’Annunzio, Truman Capote, and beginning shortly after it began, Edmond Fleg. It was, according to her biographer, “the most brilliant international salon of its day.” 92 All the reviews of La maison du bon dieu are from the Collection Rondel, Arts et Spectacles, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), RF 58.757. 93 BNF, Collection Rondel, RF 58.757. 94 Becker, War and Faith, xii. 95 Fleg, La maison du bon dieu, 226. 96 Ibid., 228. 97 René Gael, Dans la bataille (1916) quoted in Becker, War and Faith, 33. 98 Joseph F. Byrnes, “Priests and Instituteurs in the Union Sacrée: Reconciliation and Its Limits,” French Historical Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 287–89. 99 Reviews of La maison du bon dieu, BNF, Collection Rondel, RF 58.757. 100 Letter from Marie-Claire to Edmond Fleg, 1920, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 101 Jean-Jacques Becker, “l’Union sacrée, l’exception qui confirme la règle,” Vingtième siècle 5 (1985): 116. 102 Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellectuals, 20–21. 103 Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 55. 104 Goguel, “Religious Situation in France,” 566, 568–69; Becker, War and Faith, 4. 105 Letter from L’Abbé Brigerette to Edmond Fleg, 1923, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 106 L’univers israélite, 1932, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 107 Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism, 116. 108 See Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War, 1914–1915, trans. Carole Fink (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 109 Letter from Saby Pelosef to Edmond Fleg, November 21, 1921, AIU Fonds Fleg, bobine 2.

3 A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris Writing networks, prophets, and personal narrative

Jewish participation in the Great War nourished a Jewish cultural flowering, or réveil juif (Jewish awakening), in the decade following the war.1 Jewish artists, writers, and intellectuals felt confident enough about their place in French society to formulate new ways of talking about being Jewish without worrying whether their expressions would inflame antisemitism. Imagining Judaism to be a cultural fact akin to ethnicity, Fleg, among many others, argued that what tied the Jewish people together was their shared history and traditions.2 He was a central figure affiliated with the mostly male literary network that developed and included André Spire, Léon Blum, Aimé Pallière, Gustave Kahn, Jean-Richard Bloch, Albert Cohen, and Victor Basch, to name a few. They wrote explicitly as Jews and about Jews and focused on creating a cultural Jewish identity through their work. They explored biblical themes, Jewish folklore, and issues of identity in their novels, poems, and plays, constructing an interwar Jewish identity adapted for their contemporary moment. Disengaged from dogma, they believed it was imperative to reread Judaism through the “prism of modernity.” Their cultural Jewishness had a “humanist and laic face.”3 While French Jewish writers aimed to establish links with their readers by claiming a sense of Jewish difference, they did not reject the nineteenth-century ideal of Jewish integration and acculturation completely. Rather, they sought to fashion a new identity that would legitimize Jewish particularism while also affirming principles of French citizenship based on republican universalism, which had brought their emancipation in the first place. While lifting up nineteenthcentury French Jewish values, these writers did not reference the rich tradition of nineteenth-century Jewish fiction that preceded them. Perhaps their aim was to reject the strategies for negotiating Jewish identity of their parents’ generation, or perhaps it was a desire to “believe that what they were doing was really new.”4 In his poems, plays, and stories, Fleg was influential in shaping this new public discourse on Jewish identity. Robust debate took place in the emerging Jewish press, which included journals such as Menorah, Chalom, La revue juive, and La revue littéraire juive (superseded by La revue juive de Genève in 1931), as well as in the mainstream French press, over the successes and failures of acculturation and integration, the role of Zionism in France, Orthodox and Reform religious practices, intermarriage, and

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 85 possible modes of reconciling Jewishness and Frenchness in the postwar period. Non-Jews as well as Jews wrote on Jewish themes and read Jewish publications, and the resulting diverse crossover reading public created a new and dynamic interwar culture exemplified by Natalie Clifford Barney’s Friday evening salon, of which Fleg was a regular. In 1923, she wrote to him, “You have elevated poetry to God.”5 As a leader of the Jewish renaissance, Fleg articulated a Jewish form of identification in his writing that braided together his ecumenical sensibility, his attachment to Jewish history and legend, and his belief in and commitment to French universalism. By interpreting biblical texts, from the well known to the esoteric, he literally “translated” them and made them accessible to a broad, nonreligious readership. He also developed and maintained close and critical relationships with other writers, artists, academics, clergy, and his broad reading public in France and abroad. This chapter explores four of his works dating from the 1920s and their reception. In his writing, Fleg set out his values and convictions and offered a positive articulation of Jewish principles and practices that portrayed Judaism in universal terms. Anthologie juive (1923), a two-volume set, composed of excerpts from Jewish texts chronologically arranged, showed the historical development of Jewishness  – religious, moral, political, and social. The choice of texts and their organization in the Anthologie served to underscore Fleg’s understanding of Judaism as inherently tolerant, universalistic, and deeply aligned with Christianity. In his 1925 play, Le juif du pape, Fleg continued these themes through his characterization of the shared sensibility between a pope – Clement VII – and a Jewish mystic, Salomon Molcho. Together, the pope and the Jew imagined a world free of war and fanaticism, a world that understood what they had each come to realize: the central principles of Christianity and Judaism were not at odds with one another but were essentially the same. In his quasi-autobiographical novel in 1926, L’enfant prophète (The Boy Prophet), and his 1928 personal essay, Pourquoi je suis juif (Why I  Am a Jew), Fleg explored his own complex processes of constructing a Jewish identity that affirmed Jewish particularism while simultaneously lifting up humanist universal values. Inspired by Bergson, Fleg posited a continuous linking between a cultural and ethical Jewishness, based in history and experience, and a spiritual Judaism that transcended surface reality and found communion with other religions, especially Christianity. In this formulation there was no radical break that separated temporal Jewishness from spiritual Judaism; instead, there was, in the Bergsonian sense, the constant becoming or “duration” – la durée – that “linked the pure durée and its material manifestations.”6 The messianic exemplified that linking for Fleg; it was both ethical and cultural, transcendent and universal, while always demanding creative human engagement. His messianism was deeply rooted in the here and now, in human existence; spirit did not exist apart from material. Through an analysis of letters written to Fleg, we see his vast personal network emerge. Strangers, friends, and colleagues wrote to him from near and far identifying with his writing and his personal story and confessing their own. Through their letters to Fleg, many readers found an opportunity to talk about their own

86  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris religious or spiritual conflicts in the context of the modern transactional world of markets and industry they inhabited. Letter writers probed issues of identity and faith with a sensitive, educated, intelligent writer. These letters suggest that there was a large audience for noninstitutional forms of religion and spirituality. With such reactions at the time and since, it is also not hard to see why Pourquoi je suis juif and L’enfant prophète were Fleg’s most popular works, becoming classics in Jewish home libraries and beyond.7 The Jewish awakening in France that Fleg helped to initiate and sustain looked quite different from its counterpart in Germany. German-speaking writers, painters, and intellectuals, including Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and Ernest Bloch, wrestled with their “mixed and ambiguous” identity.8 Benjamin declared, “We are bifurcated – Jewish and German.”9 The postwar German Jewish renaissance, like its French counterpart, touched almost every aspect of Jewish life. In both, a generation of young Jews was poised to express their Judaism differently from their parents and took advantage of the expansion of associations, artistic and musical activities, and print media to do so. However, there were significant differences between the Jewish cultural flowering in France and the one in the German-speaking lands. In Germany the awakening led to the creation of a network of Jewish schools, the Lehrhaus movement, geared to both children and adults, offering Jewish learning and Torah study under the tutelage of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber,10 while in France Jewish parochial schools declined in number after the war even as Jewish youth movements and conferences geared to Jewish youth proliferated. Well-known religious philosophers like Rosenzweig and Buber dominated German culture, influencing modern Jewish theology and philosophy. There was no exact equivalent to that in France. The French secularist ideology known as laïcité was the key to this difference, especially in the sphere of education. Republican education (free, public, secular) was considered the lynchpin to membership in the French nation, and unlike in Germany, the study of theology was disassociated from the study of philosophy, and it remained external to the university. So, it was not surprising that there was neither great knowledge of nor enthusiasm for religious schools or big thinkers in the field.11 The cultural context was different, too. During the war, German and AustroHungarian Jews, though patriotic and ready to sacrifice themselves for their nation, endured severe antisemitism, which continued and escalated afterward. Jewish young people realized that they would never be accepted as fully German, and their alienation played a significant role in the creation of a Jewish subculture.12 As I have noted earlier, the French Jewish soldier found great camaraderie in the trenches, which led to a significant decline in antisemitism immediately after the war, and a general sense of optimism about expressing Jewishness throughout the 1920s. French Jewish self-confidence encouraged an exploration of difference without risking a deep sense of belonging to France.13 Lastly, the German Jewish writers or Literatenjuden, including Buber, Benjamin, and Rosenzweig, were overwhelmingly writing for an audience of assimilated German Jews, much like themselves, whereas French Jewish writers, like Fleg, reached out to a broader

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 87 French audience. Although differences abounded, French and German-speaking Jewish writers forged professional and personal relationships with one another and with their peers across Europe, in England, and across the Atlantic, creating a complex network of Jewish writers and non-Jews writing on Jewish themes. In response to this outpouring of literary work, the publishing house Reider issued Judaïsme, a book series edited by Fleg. Taken together, this network of writers and their published works offer an insight into the ways Jews were wrestling with personal and political aspects of their lives and their art.

Drawing the contours of modern Jewish ecumenism In his 1923 Anthologie juive, Fleg sought to portray an image of Judaism through the medium of literary extracts – a kind of modernist pastiche. He included elements of spiritual and religious practice, moral codes, as well as the political, social, legislative, literary, and philosophical expression of Jewishness from its ancient beginnings to modern times, over 25 centuries. “The people of Israel,” Fleg wrote in the introduction, traverse all time, all peoples; they speak all languages; their history, without cessation, is in line with all of human history, and it has never completely separated the religious from the worldly, nor is the moral distinct from the sacred.14 Fleg’s mission in compiling his anthology of Jewish texts was to evoke and detail a tradition that was multilingual and polyvocal. The original languages of the entries were Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, English, German, Italian, and Yiddish. He included some of the best-known literary material along with lesser-known work, but each extract was chosen to depict debates within the history and arranged so as to support his overarching message that Judaism was fundamentally based on tolerance toward all, Jew and non-Jew alike. With some passages, Fleg discarded the original form (especially when the form was tedious or cumbersome) employing a tremendous freedom in his adaptations; with others, he remained closer to the original. Most Hebrew anthologies, according to the religious studies scholar Yaniv Hagbi, were pedagogical in nature. They were geared, most often, toward Hebrew readers and scholars, and a predominately Jewish readership.15 Fleg imagined the broadest possible reading public; his book, he wrote in the introduction, was an offering to “Jew and non-Jew, even those who had no prior knowledge of Judaism.”16 Toward that goal Fleg provided extensive notes for each of the passages he cited. Commissioned by the publisher Georges Crès for a series of anthologies on literature and religion, Anthologie juive was divided into four historical sections: “The Biblical Epoch,” “The Talmudic Epoch,” “The Rabbinic Epoch,” and “The Modern Epoch.”17 Hagbi warns of a tension between the chronological and thematic axes of the compilation, resulting not only in repetition but also in the anachronistic use of sources, especially the Talmud for the Hellenistic period, because of the need to

88  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris continue certain themes.18 In spite of this tension, we see clearly Fleg’s conscious creation of a modern Jewish assemblage that integrated selected traditional Jewish principles and practices with modern values of tolerance, fashioning a spiritual and moral guide for the modern age. To prepare for writing the Anthologie, Fleg studied the traditional 613 commandments of Jewish practice that associate God with every act of life, from the humblest to the most elevated. The importance of these commandments, or mitzvot in Hebrew, for Fleg was that they transposed quotidian life onto a spiritual plane.19 The infusion of spirituality into the fullness of daily life was at the heart of Fleg’s evolution, allowing him to envision human work, human activity, as always potentially holy. With that in mind, the Anthologie opened with two verses: “You will love, the eternal your God, with all of your soul, with all of your heart, with all of your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5) and “You will love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). The first speaks to how one should engage with the divine and the second with how one should engage with other human beings. Together, they linked the love of God with that of humanity; they formed the touchstone of Jewishness for Fleg. Significantly, the verses would have been equally familiar to Christians (Mark 12:28–33), thereby forming a shared imperative at the heart of both Judaism and Christianity – one might add, of any spiritual life. These words were meant for everyone, as was the book they prefaced. Across the two volumes of the Anthologie, Fleg highlighted stories of peace, equality, justice, and social solidarity found in early Hebrew and Christian texts. Often the narrative of the Hellenistic period (330 BC–AD 70) focuses on the nationalistic and religious revolt of the Maccabees against the Hellenization of Judea. In Fleg’s section, “The Hellenistic Epoch,” he mentioned the Maccabees early on20 but then turned his attention to the more pacific and communitarian qualities of the Hebrews, especially the Essenes. In the section titled “Les sectes et les écoles” (“The Sects and the Schools”), Fleg chose excerpts from Josephus Flavius’ Jewish War, in which he described the Essenes favorably: they were a just, socialist community; they had greater affection for one another than the other schools, shared their possessions, and were true to their values of peace and equality.21 The Josephus text was well known, especially as Ernst Renan (1823– 1892), the highly influential historian of ancient languages and civilizations and one of Fleg’s early mentors, also cited Josephus in his Histoire du peuple d’Israël and described the Essenes as sharing many values with early Christianity.22 Such a description certainly highlighted Fleg’s intention of revealing the shared sensibilities of Judaism and Christianity. Even so, he did not ignore the other two schools of thought in the period, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but was keen to dispel the common assumption that Judaism was dominated by their legalistic teachings and revengeful ideology, or what he called elsewhere, their “eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth” leanings.23 As Renan linked the Essenes to early Christian monastics, he also compared Hillel to Jesus. Fleg followed suit. Juxtaposing the two houses or schools – Hillel and Shammai – he employed sources on the house of Hillel that accentuated its overall leniency, empathy, gentleness, and humility, as well as its tolerance toward the non-Jew; whereas the house

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 89 of Shammai was depicted as strict and even violent. As a selective rendering, Fleg left out evidence from the Mishnah that would have complicated any such assessment.24 Maintaining a powerful focus on ecumenical ethical values, Fleg concluded the chapter titled “The Three Aspects of Modern Judaism” with an extract from A Jewish View of Jesus (1920) by Rabbi H. G. Enelow (1877–1934). “It is understood,” Enelow wrote, “that Jews do not acknowledge the divinity of Jesus.” Even so, he noted, The modern Jew realizes the ethical power and spiritual beauty of Jesus. . . . The Jew cannot help glorying in what Jesus has thus meant to the world; nor can he help hoping that Jesus may yet serve as a bond of union between Jew and Christian, once his teaching is better known and the bane of misunderstanding at last is removed from his words and ideal.25 For Enelow, the originality of Jesus, “the love he has inspired, the solace he has given, the good he has engendered, the hope and joy he has kindled,” was unequalled in human history; he had a profound imprint on human conscience.26 In 1931, Fleg, too, will take up the story of the historical Jesus in his book Jesus raconté par le juif errant. Along with portraying the commonalities between early Jewish and Christian values, Fleg aimed to disarm antisemites by creating a bulwark against Judeophobia through the positive depiction of Jewish history, ethics, and practices. “I eliminated,” Fleg wrote a few years later, “the so-called Christian antisemitism. Christ commanded that the Jews be forgiven. If Christians have persecuted Jews (and they have hideously done so, and still do) it is because they neither possess Christian virtues nor Christian beliefs.”27 In the section on the rabbinic period (797–1789) he strategically juxtaposed texts depicting violence against Jews  – the burning of Jews during the First Crusade, accusations of ritual murder, texts describing the massacre of Jews by Cossacks in Poland, and the expulsion of the Jews of Spain during the Inquisition – with copious examples of Jewish ethical humanism. By organizing the anthology in such a fashion, Fleg emphasized Jewish virtue in the face of erratic yet unrelenting antisemitic violence, even suggesting that such virtue was perhaps a result of persecution.28 The section on modern history is remarkably optimistic in tone and focused on the emancipation of the Jews in France and later Russia, the development of the AIU and their educational programs, as well as the active participation of Jewish soldiers in the French Foreign Legion during the Great War.29 There was only a brief mention of the Dreyfus Affair.30 In a section titled “Social Critique” Fleg pointed to prominent modern Jewish figures: an excerpt from Karl Marx criticized Jews for their “egotism” and chastised them to work for the emancipation of all people; one by Bernard Lazare explained how restrictive laws in the past led to the preponderance of Jews in contemporary business, finance, and industry. Walter Rathenau’s writing on the increase of antisemitic street violence in prewar Berlin was followed by Sylvain Lévi’s (Alliance Israélite Universelle)

90  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris proposal for recognizing the case of French Jewry as the “best proof” for Jewish assimilation into modern society and their “particular contribution” to modern society overall. The last two pieces in the section – the first a refutation of the Protocols of the Elders Zion by Maurice Liber and the second a response by Stephen Wise to an antisemitic provocation by Henry Ford – employed powerful Jewish voices refuting long-held antisemitic stereotypes.31 Perhaps intending to highlight Jewish progress and the decline of antisemitism, Fleg did not mention the Kishinev pogrom or other well-known and obvious examples of violence against Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; he located the majority of violence against Jews in the Middle Ages and wrapped the modern period in the overall French Jewish optimism of the early 1920s.32 Tensions between religious belief and modern philosophic thought based on science and reason abound across the two volumes. Fleg, not surprisingly, concluded the section called “Philosophical Critique” with his mentor Henri Bergson, who provided the bridge from science, reason, and the Enlightenment, to the messianic, mystical, prayerful, and poetic in Judaism. Bergson’s notion of la durée, or constant becoming, describing the continuity between the material and the spiritual, offered Fleg a way to fully recognize the Jewish doctrine of creative evolution, the collaboration between man and God.33 Prayer, ritual, art, poetry – religious and nonreligious – song, story, fable, and acts of social justice and human kindness all provided those collaborative mechanisms. Literary and poetic representation seemed to penetrate below the surface of the everyday, accessing a spiritualizing, even messianic power to repair the world. References to the messianic proliferate throughout the compilation of texts in the Anthologie. At one point, Fleg turned to Hasidism and praised their transcendent spiritual experience as a counterweight to highly legalistic rabbinic parsing of Talmudic interpretation. Relying on Heinrich Graetz’ well-known History of the Jews to describe the origins of Hasidism, Fleg compared them to the Essenes: “Like them, they made frequent ablutions, wore white garments, offered healing miracles and predicted the future.” Rabbinic Judaism, as it was practiced in Poland, did not satisfy the desire for an authentic religious experience. Focusing too much attention on subtle interpretations, the rabbis were “not concerned enough with that which moved the heart and helped the soul communicate with the heavens.” Hasidic mysticism “responded to certain needs of human nature” but ultimately led to a schism within Polish Jewry. Following Graetz, Fleg also criticized Hasidic leaders for exploiting their leadership positions, creating a form of personality cult, and imposing their will on a superstitious crowd; “they saw themselves as equal to a pope, a God on earth.”34 If the Anthologie was somewhat critical of the Hasidim, it was not because of their passionate prayer but rather due to their cult-like behavior, which harbored the possibility of demagoguery. Fleg employed a wide range of texts to depict the biblical land of Israel, Zionism, and the diaspora in the Anthologie. For the biblical period Fleg first cited Jeremiah (29:4–7) describing the “work of exile.” In the excerpt, God said to Israel: go and build homes, plant gardens in Babylon. Be fertile and multiply. Israelite settlement in Babylon offered an image of well-being, prosperity, and

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 91 peace, a diaspora of plenty. Following Jeremiah, Fleg moved to an excerpt from Ezekiel (38:1–14) and then one by Ezra (1:1–4), two proto-Zionists.35 The first, titled “The Hope of Return,” included the famous story of the Valley of the Dry Bones and God’s promise to “carry them [the Hebrews] to the land of Israel”; in the second, “The End of Captivity,” God commands the people to “build a house for the Eternal in Jerusalem.” The biblical land of Israel was depicted more as a spiritual homeland than a material one, whereas the diaspora of Babylon was composed of houses, farms, and demographic growth. Fleg’s more complex reflection on Zionism appeared in the modern period. The Balfour Declaration was reprinted in the historical section,36 and the section “Three Aspects of Modern Judaism,” was devoted entirely to Zionism. In it there were entries by Zionists  – Moses Hess, Max Nordau, Theodor Herzl, Samuel Mohilever, Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am, Nahum Sokolow, Chaim Weizmann, André Spire, and lastly Albert Einstein.37 These excerpts offered views on the political and social history of the colony, from Rothschild’s funding, the founding of Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in 1918, to the already-existing agricultural projects. Early Zionists, Fleg explained, were a minority and pushed to resettle by antisemitism; they were young, hardy, and idealistic. The excerpts on Jewish national consciousness by Pinsker and Ahad Ha’am offered Zionism as a renaissance of spiritual solidarity with a colony to serve as its center. Zionism was not the only form of Jewish national identity discussed by Fleg. He cited the historian Simon Dubnow, who advocated for Jewish minority nationality status in the diaspora. Dubnow claimed that Jewish history, traditions that developed over thousands of years, engendered “a miraculous past that attached us to it like a lover.”38 He argued for a Jewish soul, a Jewish identity, even a Jewish nation built on its spiritual and cultural strength and conscious of its roots but not for a territorial state. Fleg cited Dubnow’s description of Jewish spiritual nationhood but omitted his better-known notion of diasporic-based autonomism, or self-rule, that envisioned Jews residing in their respective states and claiming their minority rights in situ.39 Fleg concluded the section on Zionism with an excerpt from a 1921 article by Albert Einstein in which he explained that thousands of Jews in the world were “locked up in a Ukrainian hell” or “ruined in Poland.” Zionism opened a new perspective for them, the “possibility of an existence compatible with human dignity.” Palestine assured them “a way to return to a life of economic health and morality, and as such it would enrich all of humanity . . . adding to the spiritual progress of the world.”40 Fleg closed with Einstein because his notion – that a Jewish state would first and foremost aid the suffering Jews of eastern Europe – most closely mirrored his own view (and that of French Jewry more generally) that a Jewish state should exist for those in need of it. As we will see in chapter 5, Fleg embraced a messianic form of Zionism, envisioning a Jewish homeland that was not narrowly nationalistic in any sense but a broadly universalist state that would exist alongside diasporic Jewish communities. His Zionist vision not only was concerned with the Jewish people but was a universal movement that would ultimately bring redemption for all of humanity. That said, the section

92  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris in Anthologie on Zionism was polysemic in the way that Fleg presented a broad array of ideas coalescing around the notion of Jewish nationhood – spiritual, territorial, political – yet urging the reader to identify with Einstein’s position and that of Fleg himself. A full one-third – 100 pages – of “The Modern Epoch” was devoted to “The Jewish Life in Jewish Literature” illustrating an homage to the writers of the postwar réveil juif in France and abroad. Poets and writers including Hayim Nahman Bialik, Henri Franck, Martin Buber, I. L. Peretz, Shalom Asch, Israel Zangwill, André Spire, Jean-Richard Bloch, Aimé Pallière, Sholem Aleichem, Saul Tchernichovsky, Marcel Schwob, Gustave Kahn, and Fleg himself graced the pages. By concluding the Anthologie with Jewish literature and poetry, the stuff of Jewish experience, Fleg highlighted the deep creative layers of Jewish artistic expression. The Anthologie abounds with references to the messiah and the messianic throughout all four epochs; this was made manifest through a clear articulation of the continuity between the spiritual and the material and back again, as the excerpts in the Anthologie moved from ancient to modern, from liturgy to philosophy, from law to poetics. When it first appeared in 1923, Jews and non-Jews embraced Fleg’s Anthologie juive as an ecumenical text. Maurice Vernes, a professor of religion at the École Pratiques des Hautes Études Sciences Religieuses at the Sorbonne and a Protestant, wrote to Fleg shortly after publication exclaiming that it was a “masterpiece, reaching beyond his expectations. . . . You put forward a vision of justice and of love for all,” he continued, and what is wrong with this poor world that has lost its compass, not to embrace you. No one else is doing what you are doing here. I encourage you because I find that you really are on the path of liberation, of consciousness. He noted: Protestants only know the Bible through Greek translations and Luther, even the Old Testament. It is a singular freshness to learn [the Old Testament] through the mouth and pen of a Jew. I sincerely would like to see a rapprochement between the synagogue and the Protestant church.41 Another Protestant, family friend Pastor Breitenstein, agreed, writing to Fleg: “It [l’anthologie] is so rich, so precise. It will be a precious source of learning and of knowledge for all.”42 Fleg also maintained a long correspondence with the Catholic writer Maurice Vaussard, director of the Bulletin catholique international. Vaussard, too, recognized Fleg’s work as “a new kind of expression” that underscored a broad understanding of human relations and saw in it a critical lesson for leading a “sympathetic life.” He found Fleg’s understanding of Judaism to be “kindred to the spiritual foundation of Catholicism.”43 Julien Weill, writing in the Revue des études juives, praised the collection as a kind of “Talmudic gospel” that illustrated the vitality of Jewish thought throughout the ages.44 The

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 93 writer Israel Zangwill wrote to Fleg after receiving his copy: “Its publication, by the illumination it will bring to both Jews and Christians, is bound to mark an epoch in French Judaism.”45

Jewish folklore and legend: Fleg’s Le juif du pape At the same time as Fleg compiled the Anthologie, there was a growing inter­ est in and collecting of Jewish folklore in France. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and escalating after the Great War, regional literature was in vogue in France, folklore itself became an academic discipline, and numerous authors treated regional popular traditions and local histories in their work. Especially popular were stories from Brittany and Provence that portrayed distinct characters and cultural traditions they deemed authentic.46 Jewish folklore emerged in certain measure as the Jewish version of the more general French phenomenon, as Fleg, Armand Lunel, Gustave Kahn, and others looked to describe the particularities and nuances of Ashkenazic or Germaninfluenced Jewish culture. They sought to create a mythic heritage for urbanized French Jews, to reconnect with a Jewish past outside of the realm of their own personal experience.47 In that vein, two years after publishing the Anthologie Fleg translated Sholem Aleichem’s famed Tevye der Milkhiker (Tevye the Milkman) and titled it L’histoire de Tévié. Yiddish48 literature in translation offered French Jews an opportunity to connect with the regionalist revival in France on their own terms. Yiddishkeit characters like Tevye  – poor artisans and peasants from Poland and Ukraine  – animated mundane anecdotes from daily life that were comic, ironic, tragic, and at times satirical.49 Tevye the dreamer contemplated his bad luck through an “ironic metaphysics”; according to Fleg, he was waiting for “justice and good fortune like Israel waits for the messiah.”50 Jewish folk stories offered French Jews a glimpse into the “vanishing” world of eastern European shtetl life, where, unlike contemporary French society, Judaism pervaded all aspects of daily life. For one reviewer of L’histoire de Tévié in L’univers israélite, what was most inter­ esting about the story was its penetrating portrait of Tevye’s state of mind: a pious and simple Jew who functions within a completely Jewish universe.51 The writer Jean-Richard Bloch wrote to his friend Fleg that he read Tévié with “enthusiasm.” He was especially moved by its language. “It is a great success, what a work! In some measure, it is perfect,” Bloch concluded.52 The kind of honesty portrayed in the story, combining tragedy and comedy, according to André Spire, was only possible for someone who had grown up in a “wholly Jewish environment,” and it was “impossible for French authors to create, even if they wrote on Jewish themes because they had never experienced the atmosphere of a real ghetto.”53 Yiddish stories were not only compelling because they vividly depicted an apparently authentic, if disappearing, Jewish world, but they also dealt with many of the same issues that Jews were struggling with in France  – intermarriage, the temptations of a modern secular culture, and the heavy counterweight of Jewish tradition and history.54

94  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris Armand Lunel, a Jewish writer from Avignon, was the most prominent Jewish folklorist at the time. He traced his family roots back to the fourteenth-century papal protectorate, when the papacy was located in Avignon and Jews living in the papal city were subject to special laws, including economic restrictions, forced baptisms, and the obligatory wearing of a distinctive yellow hat. On the other hand, they were free of the threat of expulsion and enjoyed a certain degree of communal autonomy. Before the French Revolution, the rites and liturgies of Provençal Jews combined Sephardic (Spanish), Ashkenazic (German/eastern European), and Italian practices, and after 1791, their mixed rites were replaced by Portuguese Sephardic ones. Twenty years younger than Fleg, also a graduate of École normale, and a professor of philosophy, Lunel wrote about the Provençal Jews of Carpentras in a folkloric, playful, and picturesque manner. His fiction was acclaimed in both the Jewish and broader French literary world. In 1926, his novel Esther de Carpentras, a take on the traditional Purim story, appeared in installments in Europe, a journal founded by French Zionist sympathizers, and later served as the libretto for an opéra bouffe composed by the Darius Milhaud, also from an old Jewish Provençal family.55 Like Lunel, Fleg, too, took up Jewish legend in his play about a Jew in the Roman papal court, Le juif du pape, which premiered on October 1, 1925, sharing a bill with George Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc at the Théâtre des Arts, under the direction of Georges Pitoëff. The play revolved around two historical characters, Pope Clement VII (1478–1534, pope from 1523–1534) and a Portuguese Marrano, Salomon Molcho (born Diego Pires, 1500–1530). Clement was a member of the powerful Medici family, and as a cardinal under his relative, Pope Leo X, he directed papal diplomatic policy. Although he had a reputation for political savvy under Leo X, as pope he was described as indecisive and timid, failing to develop a clear alliance with Europe’s royalty; instead, he flip-flopped between aligning with France’s Francis I  and then with the German emperor Charles V. This lack of coherent policy ultimately led to Charles V’s sack of Rome in 1527 and a year’s imprisonment of the pope. History has not been kind to Clement, describing him as failing to understand the threat of the Protestant Reformation to the Vatican and lacking in overall judgment because, as a Medici, he was too concerned with worldly affairs and seemingly indifferent to the needs of the church. While perhaps not concerned enough with church matters, Clement VII was known to give asylum to Marranos, allowing them to practice Judaism openly in Rome. This policy irritated the cardinal inquisitor, who believed Marranos to be Christian and therefore heretics if they outwardly observed Jewish customs. Fleg relied on Heinrich Graetz and Philipp Bloch’s History of the Jews (1897) for many of the details of Salomon Molcho’s life and his relationship with Clement VII for the play text.56 The delineation between history and legend is difficult to discern in the case of the Portuguese Marrano Salomon Molcho.57 According to Graetz and Bloch, Molcho initially fell under the influence of David Reubeni, a Jewish mystic “activist” who proposed an alliance between Jews and Christians against the Muslim

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 95 Turks to deliver the Holy Land to Christendom. After hearing the voice of a maggid, or itinerant Jewish teller of religious stories, in a dream, Molcho left Reubeni and Portugal, traveled to Turkey, and decisively threw off the cloak of Christianity to return to his Jewish origins. He studied Jewish mystical texts with passion and enthusiasm; and as a charismatic orator, Molcho gained many followers. He preached words, according to Graetz and Bloch, “that flowed like a torrent from his lips.”58 When Rome fell in 1527 to the Catholic German emperor, Charles V, Molcho took it as an apocalyptic sign, signaling the coming of the messiah, encouraging his departure for Italy in 1529. Molcho was said to have traveled through Greece and Italy announcing the coming of the messiah in order to ward off the Turks and unite Christians and Jews against them. In this telling, Molcho seems to evoke a series of Sephardic Jewish mystics from Joseph Caro, a few years Molcho’s senior, to the more well-known messianic mystic Shabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), who lived a hundred years later. Like the biblical Joseph, Molcho was widely known for his predictive visions and dream interpretations. Pope Clement VII, publicly humiliated when forced to crown his then enemy, Charles V, as King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor, recognized Molcho in the crowd because he, too, had heard of Molcho’s prophetic skills. So impressed by him, the pope protected Molcho with a pontifical passport guaranteeing him against harm from the papal police. With that Molcho traveled safely to the Jewish quarter and preached every Saturday to a growing audience of devotees. While he was developing a following in Rome, Molcho “dreamt” of an earthquake in Lisbon and a flood in Rome before they actually occurred; he became known as the Jewish Savonarola, a fifteenthcentury Dominican friar legendary for his prophecies of civic glory and natural disaster.59 As the pope drew closer to Molcho, the moderate Jews of Rome began to fear him, believing he would endanger the community and Judaism. Molcho was persecuted by his coreligionists, who even betrayed him to the Inquisition as a “Christian preaching against Christianity.” The Inquisition stole his pontifical passport and accused the pope of harboring a “scoffer of Christianity.”60 After several more attempts by the pope to save Molcho, he was sentenced to be burned to death. The funeral pyre was built, but in the last moments the pope substituted someone else in Molcho’s place, saving him and subsequently sending him out of Rome. Ultimately, Salomon Molcho was captured by Charles V and executed. Clement believed that the Inquisition supported by Charles V branded the church as bloodthirsty and fueled the Lutheran opposition. In 1532, the pope lessened the impact of the Inquisition bull; two years later, Clement died of poisoning. For Graetz and Bloch, even though Clement was motivated politically against Charles V, the pope defended the Marranos in the name of humanity, against the murderous spirit of the Inquisition; they often lived better under the shadow of the Vatican than elsewhere.61 We do not know how much of Salomon Molcho’s story is fable, but we do know that early modern popes, like kings, counted eminent Jews in their courts, as literary men, Kabbalists, astronomers, and especially doctors. Molcho certainly would have fit the bill.

96  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris The friendship between Pope Clement VII and Salomon Molcho, set against sixteenth-century war-torn Europe, forms the basis of Fleg’s play. A  pope and a Jew find one another, understand one another, and together recognize the foundational ethics shared by Christianity and Judaism. Fleg positions the pope and the Jew against the emperor (Charles V), the French king (Francis I), the Roman Jewish ghetto, and the Inquisition tribunal. The Jew saves the pope from poison (the first time) and the pope saves the Jew from an auto-da-fé (the first time). They envision the potential for eternal peace, but it is not to be; they separate from one another while still hoping for their dreamed-of future to become a reality. As a veteran of the Great War committed to peace and diplomacy, Fleg shaped the tale to express the more contemporary reality of postwar Europe, the tensions between France and Germany, as well as his continued hope for reconciliation between Jews and Christians. Writing in the introduction of the published play, Fleg explained, “It [Le juif du pape] is not a strictly historical work; it presents a drama of great hope, as old as Isaac, as modern as Wilson.”62 More of a dramatic poem than a play, it was composed of three acts, a series of tableaus make up each act, 11 in all. Each tableau represented a specific milieu – the Vatican, the synagogue, the Jewish ghetto, the cardinal inquisitor’s court. One critic wrote of Pitoëff, the director and the lead actor, as presenting the tableaus in the manner of “a church fresco, singularly expressive.”63 Another reviewer described it as a “vast historical and religious fresco” driven by “vigorous thought and a singular evocative power. It forces one to embrace two religions, two races, two civilizations that serve as the framework for a great tragedy.”64 It was written in verse with much repetition and alliteration, “reminding us,” according to another critic, “of the manner of Charles Péguy.”65 In the first tableau, cardinals meet in the Vatican to choose a pope. Behind them a shadow of the Wandering Jew appears and grows larger, and moves toward the gate to enter the city. In the second, the pope sits in his apartment, surrounded by cardinals; Cardinal Vicaire paints an alarming image of their “precarious days” fraught with thousands of “turban-headed” Turks marching on Vienna, armed with pikes, lances, canons, and halberds. Not only are Turks poised to attack, but also Rome faces the double menace and political maneuverings of Francis I and Charles V. The pope states that he wants no feast and no soldiers; moreover, he refuses to sacrifice the Marrano Jews to the Inquisition. The third tableau takes place in the synagogue, Hebrew lamentations are heard, Molcho pleads his case to a mass of tallis-wearing Jews, he preaches, and his eloquence enraptures the community. The beginning of act 2, tableau 4, occurs outside the coliseum, where Molcho meets the pope, who has already heard of Molcho’s prophetic dreams of “fierce water and trembling ground”; Molcho seemed to see beyond sight. Together, Molocho and the pope envision what they believe to be possible and not just what is in their present. They recognize in one another men who share a vision of a new world, based on universal peace; they dream of remaking it together: “Both Jews and Christians living the same peace seeing the same

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 97 light.”66 Molocho’s close relationship with the pope is feared by the Jews, who question his motives: “Will Molcho pull us toward the church?”67 The cardinal inquisitor also perceived it as a threat and hatched a plan to override Molcho’s papal passport and imprison him. As all of this transpires, the pope ruminates over the wars on the ground between the German goliath, Charles V, and the feebler Francis I of France. “How do I bring peace to the world when war is everywhere?” he wonders.68 By focusing on the threat of war, the pope of Fleg’s play was also pointing to contemporary tensions between Germany and France; the play text hinted at the negotiations unfolding at Locarno. The pope was no mere dreamer; he had his eyes opened to the present and also to the future. The play opened on the October 1, 1925; later that month the Locarno Treaties were signed in Geneva, although they were not ratified until the following year. But leading up to Locarno, while Fleg was developing the play, tensions had escalated between Germany and the former allied powers because of Germany’s inability to pay reparations, as required by the agreements of 1921. By 1923 German inflation had hit astronomical proportions, and French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr Valley to ensure German repayment of its war debt. In this atmosphere there was little hope for international understanding or cooperation. It was Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, foreign ministers from France and Germany, respectively, who created new conditions for rapprochement during the treaty negotiations and at the League of Nations. In 1924, the Dawes Plan instituted currency stabilization; and through the continued efforts of Briand and Stresemann, greater Franco-German understanding developed leading to the Treaties of Locarno. “The spirit of Locarno,” as it was referred to, signaled a wave of enthusiasm for Franco-German reconciliation and to a peaceful, united Europe. The treaties called for Germany’s inclusion in the League of Nations and the beginning of the withdrawal of Allied troops from the Rhineland. They also opened up the “logjam” at the League more generally.69 Fleg’s play, like the negotiations in Geneva, situated the need for security against the desire for peace. After the Great War, Fleg, like others of his milieu, identified with the League of Nations and saw it as the bulwark against communism on the Left and strident nationalism on the Right. Through the League they hoped diplomacy would become the means to settle international conflicts. Fleg was only interested in waging one kind of war: a war against waging war. The play focused on this dream of peace but not on its realization. In fact, one reviewer suggested that the play should be performed for the “ministers of the Conference of Locarno. . . . A French poet would animate the grand dream of peace.”70 In act 3, the pope lays dying in his apartment, poisoned by the papal doctor, Vitelli. Molcho resuscitates him. In the midst of despair, “in the hour of profound darkness,” Clement muses, asking Molcho, “Where is the world going?” Molcho replies: “To its end! At the end its form is fragile. . . . Moses and Jesus, the two mediators, in Love and Law, are equally defeated. . . . Man has denuded, leaf by leaf, the work of the Creator.”71 After a heated, heartfelt dialogue about religion, they come to a mutual understanding: both the Jew and the Christian are waiting for the messiah; the difference is merely that for the Christian that

98  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris means the Second Coming. And the time is not yet ripe: it is too soon. At that point, the Wandering Jew, as a shadow on the stage floor, enters the tableau and calms them both by recounting his story of wandering, his continual walking, his coming and going, his thinking, his memories, his vision of the messiah. To Molcho Clement utters, “To you, he is coming.” Molcho whispers back, “And to you, he comes again. But it is the same peace that you are asking of him; and your two hands reach toward the same love. Either way, he arrives!”72 The scene concludes with their utterance: “We are brothers and we suffer.”73 The play ends with an immense shadow of the Wandering Jew approaching Molcho and slowly carrying him away.74 As tied as the play was to religious imagery, Fleg did not, according to one critic, “intend to give Catholics a lesson, or be a master of theology. He is not focused on the past, the Middle Ages of Claudel, rather Fleg is reaching toward the future, a clearer tomorrow. He married the power of classical form and the romantic to the familiar, creating not an aesthetic plaything but a bridge between Mount Sinai and Montagne Ste. Geneviève,”75 a reference both to the site of the Sorbonne and the guardian saint of Paris. Another writer compared Fleg himself “to a cultivated preacher enlightened by Christianity and sensitive to human frailty.” He has “conviction, wisdom, philosophy. When his arms rise up, they could be lighting a menorah or tracing the cross in the air like a preacher absolving confessed sins.”76 Photographs of the original tableaus reveal Pitoëff’s deep visual, painterly talent as a director.77 For example, the ghetto tableau was composed of Jewish men with tallises draped over their heads; huddled together, they appeared as white mounds with flowing stripes running along their edges; Molcho is at the center, arms crossed over his chest. Another image depicts Molcho curled up in his tallis on the floor next to the ailing pope’s bed. The design was stark and purposeful. Together, Fleg and Pitoëff employed large numbers of people, creating a Greek chorus of sorts, repeating the same design across the stage, reminiscent of a dance piece by the choreographer Martha Graham from the same era. One reviewer commented on this device: “Fleg loves the movement of groups, collective reactions, the Jewish community, the Christians of the 16th century, he is willing to go to the limit of melodrama because that is rarely absent in reality.”78 The theatre critic Pierre Brisson pointed to the “wonder of the composition, the style, and the simplicity of the twelve tableaux,” while the renowned director André Antoine found the play “imposing by its beauty and nobility.”79 Fleg’s Le juif du pape drew enthusiastic responses from far and wide among artists and writers concerned with ecumenism. The response clearly showed both his influence and international network and also what was distinctive about his position within the broader debate about Jewishness and Judaism and its relationship to Christianity. Aside from reviews, Fleg received letters from friends and strangers alike that discussed the play’s content and form; some correspondents were eager to see the play translated into German and English. One wrote: “A beautiful subject, a magnificent realization. The rhymes accentuate the characters’ melancholy in a Racinean and Oriental way at the same time.” Another letter writer

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 99 commented: “The characters are full of wisdom, they are serene. We should try to imitate them.”80 In 1927, Berta Zucherkaure, a mutual friend of Fleg and the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, recommended Fleg translate Le juif du pape into German, as Romain Rolland had recently done.81 Two years later, Rabbi Lewis Newman from Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco wrote thanking Fleg for sending him a translation of The Wall of Weeping, which he found “poignant,” and offering to help with the translation of Le juif du pape. Newman expressed his gratitude to Fleg for his work, as “it is very inspiring to my own sermons” and invited him to California.82 In 1931, Fleg received a letter from Nachum Zemach, one of the three directors of the famed Habima theatre (originally founded in Bialystok in 1912), asking to direct Le juif du pape in English in the United States. He was currently living in California, and he reminded Fleg that they had met backstage at one of Habima’s performances in Paris and had spent time together in Fleg’s “beautiful and artistic apartment.” Most likely, their meeting occurred in 1926 when Habima performed S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk at the Théâtre Madeleine.83 Zemach had directed plays in English, he explained, with “good results” and was convinced that Fleg’s play would be “an event in literary and theatrical circles.” If Ernest Bloch returns to California, Zemach offered, “he could write a musical score.”84 It is not clear if an English version of the play was ever produced, but Fleg and Zemach shared a keen interest in Jewish-themed theatre and modernist production values. Habima’s mission, like Fleg’s, was representing affirmative models of a Jewish past, what the poet, Hayim Nahman Bialyk, called “a theatre of prophetic pathos.”85 Stefan Zweig also wrote to Fleg about Le juif du pape. Zweig had recently read a novel by the German-speaking Jewish Czech writer and composer Max Brod titled Reubeni, Prince of the Jews (1925) that engaged many of the same characters as Le juif du pape. Finding Fleg’s rendering “much more interesting,” Zweig was convinced that the play would be “a big theatrical success.”86 The two writers found common cause in their ardent antimilitarism during the interwar years. Afterward, they corresponded regularly, especially about translating and publishing their work.87 As the general editor of the series Judaïsme for the Reider publishing house, Fleg brought out a French edition of Zweig’s Jeremiah in 1929, an antiwar, antimilitarist play written in 1917.88 The play embodied a message of European reconciliation and unity even while European blood was soaking the trenches of the Western front.89 In another letter to Fleg, Zweig wrote, “Your writing is a kind of Jewish creative renaissance of our epoch.” He continued, “There is an identical movement here in Germany and Austria, where figures such as Martin Buber, Richard BeerHoffmann, and Franz Viktor Werfel,” the German-speaking Czech novelist and playwright, “represent the ardor and ideals of the race.”90 Zweig did not associate himself closely with the Jewish renaissance in Austria and Germany that he wrote to Fleg about, although he knew many, if not most, of the Jewish writers personally and professionally.91 Like Fleg, Zweig wrote about Jewish-Christian reconciliation, but his writing was not rooted in traditional Jewish texts. In The Miracles of Life (1903), he offered a tale set in mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp

100  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris when the Low Countries were still under Spanish rule but beginning to rebel under the Prince of Orange; clashes between Catholics and Protestants form the background for the story. It is a poignant tale of a Jewish girl, Esther, who was rescued from a pogrom in Germany by a rough-mannered but good-hearted soldier on his way back to Antwerp to open an inn. An old painter, the central character of the story, sees her as the perfect model for a painting of the Virgin Mary that he is commissioned to create for a cathedral altarpiece. A devout Christian, he sees it as his duty to convert her, the mention of which horrifies her and unlocks memories of her Jewish past filled with fear of Christian violence. Even so, a genuine friendship develops between the old painter and Esther, and she agrees to pose for the painting. The painter places a local baby in Esther’s arms; cradling the child day after day awakens a passionate love and a profound life force within Esther. In the midst of it all, Protestants riot and loot inside the cathedral. In an attempt to save the painting from the violence, Esther is killed. In the end the painter realizes that God and love know no creed. Zweig wrote: He [the painter] felt that he had wandered alone between God and earthly life all these long years, trying to understand them as twofold when they were one and yet defied understanding. Had it not been like the work of some miraculous star watching over the tentative path of this young girl’s soul – had not God and Love been at one in her and in all things?92 In the story, Zweig orchestrated the reconciliation between Jews and Catholics in human terms: two individuals – one locked in fear and the other in dogma – find friendship and understanding with one another. Perhaps it was this spirit of resolution and union between Jews and Christians, between God and love, that drew Zweig and Fleg together as writers. They shared a deep ecumenical sensibility and a profound belief in the transformative power of human connection. Fleg also worked with Martin Buber, who, with Franz Rosenzweig, was one of the key Literatenjuden, German-speaking Jewish writers, in the early twentieth century, associated with the German Jewish renaissance Zweig alluded to in his letter. Beginning in 1922, Buber and Rosenzweig opened the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Jewish House of Free Study). While they worked closely together in the Lehrhaus movement, their notions of Judaism were quite distinct. Buber’s early Hasidic stories, published as Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (1906) and Die Legende des Baalschem (1908), inspired many to feel a new pride in their Jewishness and experience an appreciation for Jewish spiritual imagination and sensibility.93 Most importantly, though, his literary review Der Jude (The Jew), founded in 1916, seemed to signal a profound change in German Jewish selfconsciousness. Even the name would have evoked shame among German-speaking Jews just a generation earlier and been “considered somewhat of an obscenity.” Der Jude emblazoned on a masthead “was thus nothing short of revolutionary.”94 It soon became one of the foremost literary and political reviews of its day even in the face of intensifying antisemitism.95 The periodical Der Jude symbolized a “readiness to be identified as Jews . . . what was popularly called Trotzjudentum,

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 101 ‘a Judaism out of defiance.’ ” It marked a dramatic shift in German Jewish selfunderstanding and self-representation.96 Kindred to Fleg’s Anthologie in content and published the same year, Buber’s Reden über das Judentum (On Judaism, 1937) was drawn from a series of lectures he gave between 1909 and 1919.97 The essays probed deeply into biblical texts (Old and New Testaments), Talmud, Jewish mysticism, Sayings of the Fathers, as well as modern and early modern German writers. Titled “Judaism and the Jews,” “Judaism and Mankind,” “Renewal of Judaism,” and “Jewish Religiosity,” to name a few, Buber explored, what his son-in-law, Ludwig Strauss, described as the “impermeable core of Jewish spiritual sensibility” and the ever resilient “substance of the Jewish soul.”98 Both Buber and Fleg were captivated by Jewish spirituality, folk traditions, and mysticism, which led some to accuse them of romanticizing the Jewish past.99 In 1928, Fleg brought Buber’s ideas on Jewish mysticism to a French audience in a public talk as part of the Chema lecture series titled “The Tendencies of Modern Judaism.”100 Described by many as ecumenical in his outlook, Franz Rosenzweig’s ideas contrasted with Fleg’s universalist perspective in which Judaism was deeply aligned with Christianity. Rosenzweig maintained the distinct particularity of Jewry in both history and religion. In Star of Redemption (1919), Rosenzweig assigned Judaism and Christianity distinct but equally important roles in the spiritual structure of the world; both biblical religions, he posited, anticipate eternity and are grounded in the experience of love.101 For Rosenzweig, Jewry was both a people and a spiritual vocation; Jews were deeply bound to their history and needed to reassert themselves, against their liberal principles, as a people of a “special order,” as a people devoted to a divine covenant with a transcendent God; he reclaimed the life of traditional Jewish religious practice as the means through which to assert Jewish “specialness.”102 Although Fleg and Rosenzweig are often discussed together, there is no evidence suggesting a personal relationship between them, as was the case with both Buber and Zweig.

Fleg, the child prophet On November 29, 1926, a banquet was held in honor of Edmond Fleg’s birthday at the Hotel Continental. It was presided over by the former prime minister (1917, 1925) and mathematician Paul Painlevé. French luminaries from government, the arts, journalism, and assorted clergy attended: from Edouard Herriot, president of the Chamber of Deputies, to the editors of the publishing giants, Gallimard and Nouvelle Revue; from the directors of the Opèra Comique, the Odéon, and the Comédie-Française to the president of the League of the Rights of Man, Salomon Reinach, and the painters Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz. The American writer Natalie Clifford Barney commented on the banquet: “All came to hail this honest writer, each from their own field. And he [Fleg] was unpretentious beneath their praises.”103 The banquet’s guest list suggests that Fleg was deeply integrated into the weft and warp of French society and that he had made a name for himself in the world of Parisian arts and letters. Yet the array

102  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris of attendees reveals more than just his rising notoriety as a writer in literary Paris. Replete with representatives from Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant clergy, academia, and the national government, the banquet provided a concrete expression of Fleg’s wartime ecumenical spirit, reflecting a new openness toward Judaism within liberal Christian circles.104 The guest list also mapped the writers and artists involved in the ongoing “springtime of Jewishness” in France.105 In 1925, Rieder, a general publishing house, launched a book series titled Judaïsme, a literary endeavor that would have been unthinkable 50 years earlier. The writer Jean-Richard Bloch was instrumental in forging the series, and Fleg oversaw the “Oeuvres” section while “Études” was overseen by Paul-Louis Couchoud, a controversial Christian Bible scholar.106 The series published works by Bernard Lazare, Israel Zangwill, Sholem Aleichem, and the poet Hayim Nahman, among many more.107 Fleg’s own Tévié and Le juif du pape were published as part of the series. The Rieder series seemed to be a response to the popularity of Jewish-themed art after the war, which included an outpouring of novels, essays, and documentaries that challenged traditional depictions of Jewish characters or stories based on long-held stereotypes. Jewish writers were enormously encouraged by the extensive interest in their work, their culture, and their history in French literary circles, evidenced by the expanding reading public. In 1927, Fleg, along with other Jews and non-Jews, launched La revue littéraire juive. Edited by Pierre Paraf, the journal featured contemporary French fiction on Jewish themes and international writing in translation. Stefan Zweig, Martin Buber, Shalom Asch, Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Israel Zangwill, among many others, were regular contributors.108 The unparalleled number of works published in France by Jewish writers and/or on Jewish themes in the twenties was due in some part to the support and interest of non-Jewish writers. Jewish writers were making an impression on the broader French literary world, as the Mercure de France claimed: “When we take stock of the fiction of this century, we must consider the discovery of the Jewish soul as one important element of it.”109 Shortly after compiling the Anthologie, which delineated the contours of an ethical, humanist, and universal Judaism for the postwar age, Fleg turned inward examining his own, very personal, journey toward becoming Jewish in his quasiautobiographical novel L’enfant prophète (The Boy Prophet). Published in 1926, dedicated to the memory of Israel Zangwill, the story follows the spiritual quest of Claude Lévy, a young Jewish Parisian boy, the only child of emancipated, cultivated parents. Like Fleg himself, Claude yearns for a spiritual life that his family home could not satisfy. Throughout the story Claude grapples with being a Jew. “I am always afraid that someone will say ‘Jew’ in front to me. I always think they think it. But no one ever says that word when I am there. How can I correct such a fault? I have tried; I can’t.”110 He encounters antisemitic phrases covering the front pages of the newspaper: “The Jews and Bolshevism . . . America is delivered to the Jews. . . . France was betrayed by the Jews.” Confused, he wonders how his father, “wounded during the war, could have betrayed France?”111

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 103 Compelled by the devout Catholicism of his childhood friend and imagined future wife, Mariette, and living just around the corner from Notre Dame, Claude was drawn to the ritual and grandeur of the great cathedral. Mariette encourages Claude to convert “because my priest has said that a Christian and a Jew are not allowed to marry.” Claude’s father, a member of the Ligue des droits de l’Homme (The League of the Rights of Man), his library overflowing with books on science, math, geography, history, literature, dictionaries, and encyclopedias but nothing on Jews, weighs in with a classically laic response: Christians and Jews can marry, my little man, and they should. Remember that when you are grown, for the rest of your life: there will no longer be Jews, there will no longer be Christians. There will be only men.112 Fleg had transposed his real-life relationship with Marie-Claire, a Swiss Protestant woman, which had lasted 15 years, into this fictional account of Claude, but unlike his real father, Claude’s father encouraged such a marriage. Tormented by his passion for the church, and full of questions, the young Claude read the story of Jesus and realized that he, too, was a Jew, that the Scribes and Pharisees were Jews. That “Jesus” was a “Jew, like me!”113 Shortly afterward, Claude had a dream in which he and his parents were the ones responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. Afterward, he went to confession and explained to the priest: I feel so happy in your church. I would like to be a priest, so that I could stay in your church forever! . . . And I love your Jesus. . . . I love him so dearly. . . . I hate those that crucified him. . . . But as for believing he is in the Host, believing that he is God. . . . I can’t! So, what am I to do, Father? . . . What am I to do? The priest responds that at the age of 14 Claude was too young to convert. “Our Lord would not allow us to make you a Christian at your age, little man,” the priest explained.114 In many ways Fleg’s character Claude followed his own move toward Jewishness, even exploring the process of preparing for a Bar Mitzvah. When Claude told his mother that he wanted to have a Bar Mitzvah, he had to explain the ritual. She warned him that his father would not be happy. He would prefer him to become a scout. Claude had already joined the French scouts, but even though he learned how to tie slip knots, he bemoaned that they were not spiritual enough. “There was no Jesus to guide them,” he lamented.115 His father responded: “Two notes of music and three words of Hebrew and now a child has taken a plunge into mysticism! You are smart, I am calm. This nostalgia for the ghetto will pass.”116 Even though his father thought it best to encourage Claude rather than to try and dissuade him, going to shul, studying for the Bar

104  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris Mitzvah and not understanding the Hebrew, even talking to the rabbi about Jewish beliefs, all disappointed the young boy. Zionism initially offered Claude an answer. His school friend Styrinovsky (a Jew from Palestine) introduced him to Zionism. “Being Jewish isn’t a religion,” Styrinovsky explains, “it is a fatherland! Jerusalem . . . Palestine!” Claude responded that he was French. “Then you are no Jew,” Styrinovsky retorts, “you are a French Israelite.” When Claude asked him about God, Styrinovsky replied that the Jews in Palestine were building schools, making roads, and planting vines. “We don’t harm God. He may help us if he likes. . . . We aren’t waiting for him though!” Claude concluded from this exchange that he had a country, and what he needed was a God.117 In a dream Claude saw the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, Jews of all sorts, modern and traditional, moving toward “the land,” he wanted to follow them there, he wanted to cry out to them, but no sound came from his lips.118 When he finally called out, he said: “Israel, Israel, your Law is not my law, the Fatherland is not my fatherland. What must I do to be a Jew? What must I do?”119 Confused, standing alone in the Jewish quarter of Paris, the Marais, in the evening rain, Claude recognizes the bearded Orthodox Jewish men, like phantoms, emerging from the alleyways and disappearing into their houses of prayer. Listening to the Jewish chanting from the shul, he muses, “Their prayers are beautiful. But I do not want to live like them [Orthodox Jews]. . . . Does it matter to be a Jew or not to be a Jew?” Claude finds beauty in Jewish law, in loving the stranger as yourself, and yet cannot abide by those laws that forbid him to eat, dress, and marry as others do. If those restrictions are necessary in order to love God, he thinks to himself, “I prefer the laws and good deeds of the French scouts.” Claude is deeply torn between the beauty and emotion of tradition and the open, expansive yet spiritually deficient culture of modern life. At the end of the story, it was both Jesus and a contemporary rabbi who compelled Claude to be a Jew. But before his final reconciliation, Claude raged at Jesus about antisemitism’s link to Christianity: “Do you see them, Jesus? Those processions of ragged, famished outcasts on the roads? And whole nations deriding them: Sorcerers! Lepers! Birds of ill-omen! To death with the Jews!”120 Finally, though, Jesus soothed Claude and compared the 15-year-old to Joan of Arc, assuring him that by being a Jew he would hasten the coming of the messiah. When Claude returned to the rabbi, he explained that he had decided not to have a Bar Mitzvah yet, as he felt unworthy: “It is too difficult to live as they do, in the Ghetto behind the Hôtel de Ville, following all of the laws, holidays, and customs.” The rabbi responded: “The law is not everything. It is the spirit of the law that is everything. You observe as much as you can, my child. Our God is not exacting.”121 Embracing Jesus’ messianic vision and the magnanimous kindness of the rabbi’s God embedded in the spirit of the law, Claude located his Jewishness, a Jewishness that transcended its particularity and resonated with the universal. Claude welcomed his “mission to serve France, to serve Israel, to serve the world! . . . To work for the coming of the messiah of Peace

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 105 and Justice.” Both the rabbi and Jesus recognized a “boy prophet” in the young Claude. Through Jesus/the rabbi Claude/Fleg reconciled Christianity and France with Judaism. Through the Jewish Jesus, the prophet of Peace and Justice, Fleg made Judaism catholic, claiming its universal messianic mission. Mariette could not accept Claude’s ring, believing that it would be a sin for a Christian to marry a Jew; she retreated to a convent. But through his journey, Claude/Fleg had found a spacious, even flexible Jewish identity. He was a Jew, a Frenchman, and a human being in search of justice and peace.122 Fleg’s L’enfant prophète won critical acclaim in the press and his personal correspondence is replete with letters from readers, Jews and non-Jews, alike. The critic Mauris Lena, writing in L’égalité explained that Claude, after experiencing Jesus, the suffering of the Evangeline, and the blood of the passion, was moved, even indignant. . . . He couldn’t pray, he couldn’t believe in a man-God; he couldn’t believe in the formalism of Jewish orthodoxy, or in Zionism. Fleg depicted “an exact miniature of the big troubles we face. Claude’s disillusionments are the naïve charms that come from having the will to try.”123 The writer Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar was 18  years old in 1927 when she read Fleg’s story. Expressing the feelings of so many readers, she wrote: I believe that almost all Western Jews of my era, the extremely assimilated ones, the ones who renounced it all together, those who had totally forgotten, those whose parents were atheists or who don’t even care enough to be that, yes, I believe they were all, in but an instant, transformed into the little Claude Lévy of Edmond Fleg. The historian and archivist Georges Weill remembers reading the story in 1943 when he was nine years old and having exactly the same impression. For French Jews Claude’s dilemma vividly illustrated, according to Weill, “the difficulties of reconciling the constraints of Jewish practice with the exigencies of contemporary life wrought by the increasing demands of assimilation.” On the other hand, Weill suggests, “many Christians saw and continue to see, in the spiritual quest of a little boy, the true recognition of the word of Christ, considered as the last prophet of Israel.”124 An English critic wrote in the Manchester Guardian, “The Boy Prophet is a perfect little masterpiece, peculiarly French in its direct simplicity of conception and utterance.”125 Letter writers identified personally with Fleg’s story. “I  felt like I  found my autobiography,” Violette Poyse exclaimed. “I identify with you. Like you, I am from Geneva, I was tormented by the [Dreyfus] Affair,” Norbert Heirschenschen confided, “I have read and reread your book. Both Jews and Zionists will find in it what they need. We will all find in it what we need.” The writer asked permission to translate it into Romanian. “Claude and Mariette are two children on their way to the Jerusalem of Wall of Weeping, you have posed a possibility, now

106  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris the shofar can sound,” his friend Jean Blum-Klein wrote. The author and drama critic Lucien Besnard read L’enfant prophète as a personal confession; it touched my heart deeply. It is not by chance that I connect your name with Tolstoy. You have the same honesty of spirit . . . and you share the same search for God through the Human. In a similar vein, Madame Lucie Delarue explained: L’enfant prophète brought tears to my eyes. Never has the story of the Evangeline been told soberly, frankly, tragically. You make Jesus sympathetic, pure, a true miracle. Also, the eternal, you make us one. Your charming scout boys do not make me a Zionist. I love your Jewish Jesus so much more. R. P. Van Asseldank addressed Fleg as “grandpère” and spoke of Christ as the messiah that has already come. “We have all been delivered by Christ. Already Man has become one!” A letter from a cardinal in Rome was addressed “Dear Child Prophet,” and after applauding Fleg’s depiction of Jesus encouraged him to go to Palestine to find him, which as we will see, he did. Other letters focused on the way Fleg reinvigorated Judaism. “When I was a child,” Alexander Benzion explained: I read a small book in my father’s library, Leben Abrahams by Beer, a kind of biography. I have thought of this profound book often. In your book I have found Judaism with a heart, Judaism for a real life, a life loved. It is a recipe to help us establish the life of our great ones by giving us an example of a ‘rescue’ for these times. Yours is a rare book that surprises. Betty Bergson Spiro, an 18-year-old Englishwoman, corresponded with Fleg. She explained that her family belonged to the New West End Synagogue, “the richest and most aristocratic in London, almost atheist.” For her birthday she received a copy of Fleg’s book and she had a revolution inside. I want to reconnect to my race. I have been searching for the living truth of my religion but I found only a religion of routine and convention. My parents noted that I needed a change and sent me to a Catholic pension in the Pas de Calais, France. Everyone in France wants to show me the path, they pray for me, and take me to church. Naturally I was dazzled by the candles and the music at midnight mass. They save your soul by way of your senses. For them, religion is true, alive. And for us in London, it is dry and cold. I want very much for you to respond because I believe you can help me. And he did invite her to visit him. She accepted his invitation and responded: “Judaism does have a reason to exist! We have a mission across all countries to

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 107 create unity. Jews are the best Christians. To remember our mission, we must read our Israel Zangwills and our Edmond Flegs.”126 These letters suggest that there was an audience for noninstitutional forms of religion and spirituality. Through their letters to Fleg many readers found an opportunity to talk about their own religious or spiritual concerns and probe issues of identity and faith with someone who had himself experienced such tumult. A couple of years later, Fleg published a nonfiction recounting of the process of forging his Jewish identity titled Pourquoi je suis juif (1928). It was part of a book series titled Leurs Raisons, directed by the writer and literary critic André Billy (1882–1971). Pourquoi je suis juif joined other volumes in the series, including Pourquoi je suis catholique (Jean Guiraud) and Pourquoi je suis radical-socialist (Edouard Herriot).127 Pourquoi je suis juif did not address a theoretical problem but rather a question concerned with how to live a Jewish life.128 The essay is divided into three sections: “Israel Lost,” “Israel Regained,” and “Israel Eternal.” The first section details his childhood disillusionment with Jewish practice and a chastisement of his days as an aesthete: “I was pretentious in this period.  .  .  . My chief function was to admire myself.”129 The Dreyfus Affair and his friend Moreau pushed him toward his burning question: “What then, is Judaism?” Although thrilled by the ideal of Zionism, Fleg doubted its efficacy in solving the Jewish question. For the 12 million Jews who will remain in the diaspora, “for all of these and for me, what is Judaism? What might the Jew do? How to be a Jew? Why be a Jew?”130 As concerned as Fleg was to sort out his own feelings about his own identity, he was keenly aware of this need for future generations, including his own children, to ensure the continuity of Jewish identity. The pressing question was how to pass on Jewishness to future generations in a meaningful way. “I  may not teach my children the religious practices of my father,” Fleg wrote, “Nevertheless, I  would transmit to them something of Israel.”131 Rather than traditional practice, Fleg pointed to memory, ancestral memory, as the key to transmitting Jewishness. All that he has learned, he explained, “seems not have been learned at all, but to have been remembered.” For Fleg, this kind of mystical ancestral memory was embodied in the Hebrew language itself. The strange syllables “the meaning of which remained a mystery, suddenly opened out to me as doors to a treasure house. The sounds that emanated from Hebrew reflected a whole world,” he continued, “the world of my father, my own world.”132 Even though Fleg was not as proficient in Hebrew as he would have liked, he was aware of a number of key aspects of its construction as a language based on root word systems (houses). Hebrew offers up these worlds in the evident relation of derivatives from the same root; in the rudimentary structure of the phrase, in the illogical coherence of images; in the lack of power to express pure abstraction, in the uncertain contours of the verb hardly distinguishing past, present, and future, which yet seems to move in the realm of eternity.133

108  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris For Fleg, Hebrew texts could not be purely abstract or universal yet there were only vague temporal distinctions which were only clarified in context. In his discussion of God, too, Fleg hypothesized a universal wholeness juxtaposed with a diversity of parts. God “is at the same time outside of the world and within the world,” transcendent and very close to us, within us. There is a unity in the universe (a oneness, like God), and it “shows us in the structure of the atom and in that of the solar system one and the same plan, one and the same thought.”134 And that very unity of God, which was broken by being refracted in the diversity of human beings, Fleg believed, “can be restored through prayer and justice,” because it is both spirit and law that ultimately unites men.135 With this notion of divine unity broken and refracted, Fleg referenced the sixteenthcentury mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria. In Luria’s Kabbalistic iteration creation begins with ten vessels carrying divine light, the light was too heavy and the vessels broke open, split asunder, and the holy sparks were scattered like sand, like seeds on the earth. In some versions, each human contains within themselves a spark of this divine light. As each one of us becomes conscious of our “sparks,” and we gather our sparks together, we restore the broken vessel and mend the broken world.136 Fleg concluded that “there must be some relation between our minds” (and our capacity for thought) and “real presence,” by which he meant spirit/ God. For Fleg, there was a deep continuity between the material structure of the atom and the capacity for our brains to comprehend the oneness of the universe without mediation. Jewishness, then, was the particular, and it resided in culture, in specific traditions, and in ancestral memory. Judaism, the religion, was universal, a transcendent ethical system, in line with Christianity. Fleg embraced both Jewishness and Judaism simultaneously and saw them as interdependent: If this spirit [God] dwelt in me, and in the world, would it not also dwell in world-history? In the history of nations, in the history of Israel? It is conceivable that certain races felt its presence more keenly than others, that that one that felt it most felt the mission to proclaim it. Fleg proclaimed Jewish “chosenness” and then turned it on its head: “All anthropological types are found in Israel: broad, long, yellow, black, white. Could Israel then be only a race in a spiritual sense? Could all these bloods form but one blood because there flowed in them but one thought?”137 From different bloods developed one universal spirit. Judaism, then, was a spiritual race composed of all “different bloods.” Through a kind of intellectual calculus, we see Fleg working out how to hold both universal moral precepts and particular codes of differentiation in his hands at the same time. And, so he proclaimed: Man being the image of God, to love man is to love God. Thus, God being One, man must be One. . . . In his divisiveness here on earth man destroys the Divine Unity . . . man must recreate man created by God, until the unity of man reflects and recreates the Unity of God upon this earth.138

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 109 In the final section, “Israel Eternal,” Fleg moved from the mystical to the historical. He detailed and refuted various stereotypes of Jews exploited by antisemites across the generations. It was perplexing to Fleg that even after Jews had fought in the Great War, had spilled their blood for their nations, and their loyalty and heroism had been inscribed in their national histories, antisemitism reared up from Germany to Hungary, from Austria to Romania. Jews were accused of being Bolsheviks, Shylocks, Christ-killers, capitalists, and harboring an international conspiracy devising to conquer the world. Minorities in every country, Fleg asserted, are “suspected by the majority which holds those who make up this minority to be like one another and more united than those of the majority.”139 Thus, Fleg made two contradictory claims, stating that, on the one hand, the majority creates the minority, and, on the other, that there was a Jewish experience, a specific Jewishness, that existed separate from antisemitism. This contradiction was not recognized nor reconcilable. Yet Fleg emphasized that Jews, as a minority, were shaped by their suffering, a suffering essential for nurturing their compassion. The Jewish mission, as the universalist Fleg understood it to be, was a spiritual one: Jews were charged with bringing all people into a universal human family based on equity and justice. Jews would remain Jewish but only until all of humanity was united as one. Purely political attempts to bring about human unity  – Jacobinism, Marxism, Wilsonism  – could only be partial, or “pragmatic,” for Fleg, in a Bergsonian sense, “because unity cannot be fully realized through revolution, class warfare, or harmonious interests of nation-states.”140 It had to occur in a different dimension. As spiritual as Fleg understood Israel’s mission to be, he also argued for human agency. Man, all men together, regardless of religion, “will create the world to come.”141 Pourquoi je suis juif set out an ethical code based on obligatory moral and social duties, not on rights or interests but duties of the privileged toward the disinherited and of nations toward one another. Duties were governed by an overarching understanding of justice that shaped the acts of individuals as well as of peoples.142 As inspiration, Fleg’s messianic vision of the human capacity for ethical regeneration and union was profound, but his disregard of politics and the safeguarding of rights relegated even his notion of human agency to the mystical realm. It was not that he did not recognize complex political realities and tensions; he did. Yet blinded by his insistence on potential spiritual resolution he refused to recognize immediate and pragmatic needs for compromise or negotiation. As with L’enfant prophète, readers responded to Fleg with their own stories, many of them attesting to a transformative engagement with the text. Several letters attested to “having read Pourquoi je suis juif without stopping.” One reader added, “I found your confession more moving than L’enfant prophète, which I loved. It will appeal to non-Jews, too.” One woman wrote that it had been her spiritual calling to become a Jew when she was growing up, but “my father didn’t understand.” After reading Fleg’s essay she visited her ailing father and “he saw in me a wonderful serenity.” Lucien Besnard wrote: “Pourquoi

110  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris je suis juif is among your most beautiful works. Autobiography is hard. You are more certain of this, I am waiting to understand.” Another correspondent penned: Pourquoi je suis juif will make the ink flow. Nothing you write is indifferent but this one is less so than any other. It touches the life of the divine conscience, which develops only through the effort of man and in the conditions of balance. One can’t be anti-Jewish without being anti-Christian. Translations broadened the readership. From Berlin, Fritz Aronstein wrote to Fleg: “Certainly you know that your books have a huge impact on young German Jews, L’enfant prophète and Pourquoi je suis juif offer a path to rediscover Judaism.” In Argentina, sections of the book appeared in Spanish, encouraging one reader to write: I read Pourquoi je suis juif in Spanish translation, but it wasn’t very good. Christians in South America have no idea about Judaism. I encourage you to find a publishing house in Madrid or Barcelona to create high quality translations of Pourquoi je suis juif and L’enfant prophète – for the good of humanity!143 Pourquoi je suis juif was never fully translated into Spanish, but there were full translations published in German, English, Romanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Italian, and Hebrew. To this day, these two volumes, Pourquoi je suis juif and L’enfant prophète, are Fleg’s most well-known works.

Conclusion By the mid-1920s Fleg had imagined and created a powerful Jewish identity that also found communion with other religions, especially Christianity. By translating both known and arcane biblical works usually reserved for rabbinic exegesis into an accessible format removed from their clerical context, Fleg’s work generated an élan dynamique among his readers and colleagues.144 Through his interpretation of Jewish (and non-Jewish) texts and reflection on his own process, he constructed a flexible French Jewishness that was based on the transmission of cultural memory, a genealogy of common ancestry, an identity rooted in history and experience.145 He posited no radical break that separated that temporal Jewishness from his vision of a universal ethical spiritual Judaism, instead as we have seen, Fleg drew on Bergson’s notion of “duration” – la durée – of constant becoming that linked the pure durée and its material manifestations.146 In this version of modern Jewish identity French Jews could be proud of their complex origins and, theoretically, no longer experience internal or external conflicts with the forces that had shaped them.147 Fleg articulated a dialectics of Jewish identity encompassing continual

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 111 movement between the universal/Judaism/oneness and the particular/Jewishness/history. Expressing this movement, he concluded Pourquoi je suis juif with the affirmation: I am a Jew because Israel places humanity and its unity above the nations and above Israel itself. I am a Jew because, above humanity, image of the divine Unity, Israel places the unity which is divine.148 Fleg’s engagement with real-world “material,” with human agency, deepened in the following decade. His 1930s work on the iconic biblical figures of Moses, Solomon, and Jesus all carried calls to action and intervention while lifting up positive images of Jewish patriarchs. As we have seen, French Jews thrived in the postwar years of the 1920s, but their confidence and comfort gradually receded as the decade progressed. The 1930s were marked by the decline in Jewish optimism. They experienced heightened anxiety in the face of rising antisemitism attributed to the steady uptick of Jewish immigration from the east, economic crises, and political instability. With the darkening political and economic landscape of French life, these issues permeated Fleg’s writing during “the hollow years.”149

Notes 1 For the “Jewish awakening” see Catherine Nicault, ed., “Le ‘réveil juif’ des années vingt,” Archives juives: Revue d’histoire des juifs de France 39 (2006), especially Catherine Fhima, “Au coeur de la ‘renaissance juive’ des années 1920: Littérature et judéité,” 29–45; Maxime Decout, L’écrire la judéité: Enquête sur un malaise dans la littérature française (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2015), chap. 1: “La renaissance de la judéité,” 45–82. 2 Catherine Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France: André Spire et Edmond Fleg,” Mil neuf cent 13, no. 13 (1995): 172. 3 Decout, L’écrire la judéité, 72. 4 Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 242–43. 5 Correspondence from Natalie Barney to Edmond Fleg, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. Beginning in 1909 Barney’s salon was home to Parisian artists and writers, including Colette, Isadora Duncan, Max Jacob, Djuna Barnes, Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Solomon Reinach, Gertrude Stein, Gabriel d’Annunzio, and Truman Capote. Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 5. 6 Mark Antileff, Inventing Bergson, Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 12. 7 For example, there were 33 editions of L’enfant prophète: 27 in French, two in German, two in English, one in Danish, and one in Hebrew. 8 Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 75. 9 Walter Benjamin quoted in Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 59. 10 Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 63–64.

112  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 11 Nadia Malinovich, “Le ‘réveil juif’ en Allemagne et en France, éléments de comparaison en manière d’introduction,” Archives juives 39, no. 1 (1er semestre 2006): 5–6. 12 Peter C. Appelbaum, Loyal Sons: Jews in the German Army in the Great War (Elstree: Valentine Mitchell, 2014); on the German Jewish feminist writer Clementine Kramer’s writing on antisemitism after the war and her Jewish readership, see Elizabeth Loentz, “ ‘The Most Famous Jewish Pacifist Was Jesus of Nazareth’: German-Jewish Pacifist Clementine Kramer’s Stories of War and Visions of Peace,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature  & Culture 23 (2007): 127–55. 13 Malinovich, “Le ‘réveil juif’ en France et en Allemagne,” 5–6. Also see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 14 Edmond Fleg, Anthologie juive: Des origines au moyen âge, vol. 1 (Paris: G. Crès, 1923), ix. 15 Yaniv Hagbi, “The Book of Edmond: Manifestations of Edmond Fleg’s Worldview in His L’anthologie Juive,” www.academia.edu/6852377/the_book_of_edmond_ manifestations_of_edmond_flegs_worldview_in_his_lanthologie_juive_yaniv_ hagbI, 226. 16 Fleg, Anthologie juive, 1:ix. 17 An English translation was published in 1925, translated by the novelist Maurice Samuels. The English version omits “The Biblical Epoch” because, as Samuels wrote, “The Bible is so much more familiar to the English-reading world that the inclusion of biblical extracts would merely give academic balance to the anthology without adding anything of value to it.” Edmond Fleg, The Jewish Anthology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), v. 18 Hagbi, “Book of Edmond,” 220. 19 Odile Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel: Edmond Fleg (Paris: Pensée universelle, 1978), 140–41. 20 Fleg, Anthologie juive, 1:98. 21 Ibid., 134–36. 22 Ernest Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël, vol. 5 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1889), 55–66. For Fleg’s connection with Renan, see Frédéric Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg, poète et romancier judaïsme et littérature,” Nouvelle littérature, August 11, 1928. 23 For Pharisees and Sadducees, see Fleg, Anthologie juive, 1:133–34. Cited in Edmond Fleg, L’enfant prophète (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), 50–51. 24 For Renan, see Histoire du peuple d’Israël, 5:320–22, cited in Hagbi, “Book of Edmond,” 220. For Hillel and Shammai, Fleg, Anthologie juive, 1:136–39. 25 Fleg, Anthologie juive, 2:274–77. 26 Ibid., 275. 27 Edmond Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, trans. Louise Waterman Wise (New York: Bloch, 1929), 76. 28 Fleg, Anthologie juive, 2:13–33. 29 Ibid., 163–81. 30 Ibid., 176. 31 Ibid., 212–23. 32 Catherine Nicault, “L’acculturation des Israélites français au sionisme après la Grande Guerre,” Archives juives 39, no. 1 (1er semestre 2006): 15–19. 33 Fleg, Anthologie Juive, 2:203–9. 34 Ibid., 144–47. 35 Hagbi, “Book of Edmond,” 225. 36 Fleg, Anthologie Juive, 2:183.

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 113 7 Ibid., 241–60. 3 38 Ibid., 243–44. 39 For Dubnow’s discussion of autonomism and especially in the Jewish political party, the Bund, see Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews of Russia and Poland (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1918). 40 Fleg, Anthologie juive, 2:259–60. 41 Maurice Vernes to Fleg, June 6, 1923, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 42 Pastor Breitenstein to Fleg, no date, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 43 Maurice Vaussard to Fleg, March 1928, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 44 Julien Weill cited in Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish, Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 172. 45 Israel Zangwill to Fleg, April 28, 1923, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 46 For the late nineteenth-century regional movement in literature and theatre, see Sally Charnow, “Le Théâtre du Peuple: Modern Theatre, Regionalism, and the Search for the Authentic in Fin-de-Siècle France,” in Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Staging Modernity, ed. Sally Charnow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 183–203; Anne-Marie Thiesse, Écrire la France: Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre le Belle Époque et la Libération (Paris: Presse universitaires de France, 1991); Julian Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France, 1890–1914: Jean Charles Brun and French Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 47 Nadia Malinovich, “Littérature populaire et romans juif dans la France des années 1920, in ‘Le réveil juif’ des années vingt,” Archives juives: Revue d’histoire des juifs de France 39 (2006): 48. 48 Yiddish is derived from High German, historically spoken by German and eastern European Ashkenazic Jews. It originated in the ninth century by the nascent Ashkenazic community as a German-based vernacular fused with elements from Hebrew and Aramaic, and, later, with those from Slavic and Romance languages. 49 Malinovich, French and Jewish, 167. 50 Edmond Fleg, L’histoire de Tévié (Paris: Rieder, 1925) (mise en judéo-français d’Alsace), “Avant propos,” 8. 51 Cited in Malinovich, French and Jewish, 167. 52 J. R. Bloch to Edmond Fleg, 1925, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 53 Cited in Malinovich, French and Jewish, 167. 54 Ibid., 168. 55 Lunel’s most well-known work, Nicolo Peccavi ou l’affaire Dreyfus à Carpentras (1926), centered on the title character Nicolo, a staunch Catholic and leader of the anti-Dreyfusard movement in Carpentras. When Nicolo traced his familial roots back to a Jewish convert, he was ostracized by both the Christian and the Jewish communities. Lunel’s story moved between the crisis that Nicolo faced in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair and the history of the papal Jewish community. Awarded the Renaudot literary prize in 1926, Lunel’s story was the first “profoundly Jewish work” to receive a major literary prize. Malinovich, “Littérature populaire et romans juif dans la France des années 1920,” 47. 56 Heinrich Graetz and Philipp Bloch, History of the Jews, vol. 4 (New York: Jewish Publishing Society, 1897), 500. Fleg previously employed the story of Molcho and Clement VII for the section on the Inquisition in the Anthologie juive. 57 For a discussion of Jewish conversions, see Martin Mulson and Richard Henry Popkin, eds., introduction to Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Brill, 2004). 58 Graetz and Bloch, History of the Jews, 497.

114  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 9 Ibid., 504. 5 60 Ibid., 506. 61 Ibid., 510, 512. 62 Edmond Fleg, preface to Le juif du pape (Paris: F. Rieder & Cie, 1925), 7. 63 Review, October 26, 1925, BNF, Collection Rondel, 4 Col. 17 (99). 64 Review of Le juif du pape by Robert de Flers, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 65 Review, October 26, 1925, BNF, Collection Rondel, 4 Col. 17 (99). 66 Fleg, Le juif du pape, 60. 67 Ibid., 66. 68 Ibid., 90. 69 Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights, from the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 58; Philippe Bernard and Henri Dubief, The Decline of the Third Republic, 1914–1938, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 115–20. 70 Review of Le juif du pape by Regis Gignoux, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. For French Jewish writers in support of the League of Nations, see Nicault, “L’acculturation des israélites français au sionisme après la Grande Guerre,” 15–19. 71 Fleg, Le juif du pape, 96–97. 72 Ibid., 104. 73 Ibid., 105. 74 Ibid., 156. 75 Pierre Paraf, “En l’honneur d’Edmond Fleg,” Droit et liberté, 1955. 76 “Fleg, Edmond, Critique,” BNF, Collection Rondel, RF 58768. 77 For Pitoëff’s critique of boulevard theatre and austere visual aesthetics, see Philip Nord, France’s New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 221–25. 78 Yves Sandre, “Du ‘vicaire’ au juif du pape,” AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 79 “Fleg, Edmond, Critique,” BNF, Collection Rondel, RF 58768, Antoine was no stranger to work of Jewish playwrights. In the late nineteenth century, his experimental Théâtre Libre was an outlet for Jewish playwrights, including Catulle Mendès, Romain Coolus, Pierre Wolff, and Georges de Porto-Riche. At that time, while the French theatre counted many Jewish playwrights among its ranks, the plays they penned were most likely witty satires, light comedies, or romances (théâtre d’amour), not ones on Jewish themes. It was only after 1920 that le thème juif became a popular source of inspiration for the stage. Audiences in Paris saw productions of Sholem Asch’s Dieu de vengeance (God of Vengeance) in 1925, S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, and Chajim Bloch’s Golem, both in 1926. 80 Ludmilla Bloch-Savitskey to Fleg, 1925; Thoraud to Fleg, 1925, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 81 Berta Zucherkaure to Fleg, 1927, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 82 Lewis Newman to Fleg, 1929, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 83 “Habima Players Arrive in the United States, December 7, 1926,” JTA, www.jta. org/1926/12/07/archive/habima-players-arrive-in-united-states. 84 Nachum Zemach to Fleg, 1931, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 85 Gad Kaynar, “National Theatre as Colonized Theatre: The Paradox of Habima,” “Theatre, Diaspora, and the Politics of Home,”Theatre Journal 50, no. 1 (March 1998): 3–5. 86 Letter 86/87, November 4, 1925, from Stefan Zweig to Edmond Fleg, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 87 Stefan Zweig to Edmond Fleg, 1924, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2, for reference to their meetings in Paris and Austria. Also see Stefan Zweig, Journeys (London: Modern Voices, 2011), 55–61. Zweig also explained to Fleg that it was because

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 115 of “increased antisemitism in Germany” that is making it more difficult now for Jews to publish and that is why Fleg is having difficulty finding a German publisher. 88 Malinovich, French and Jewish, “Appendix II, Titles in the Rieder Series,” 243. On Rieder, Malinovich, French and Jewish, 162–63. 89 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 259. Zweig wrote two other stories set during World War I, “Compulsion” (1920) and “Wondrak.” See Stefan Zweig, Wondrak and Other Stories, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin, 2009). 90 Letter #87, Stefan Zweig to Fleg, 1925, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 91 Zweig had a particularly warm friendship with Theodor Herzl, the founding father of political Zionism. Although a confirmed internationalist and Europeanist, never a Zionist or any sort of nationalist, Zweig’s connection with Herzl began when Herzl was still literary editor of the Neue Freie, then Vienna’s main newspaper. Beginning in 1901 Herzl accepted some of Zweig’s early essays for publication. See Zweig, World of Yesterday, 101–8. 92 Stefan Zweig, “The Miracles of Life,” in The Governess and Other Stories (London: Pushkin, 2011), 156. 93 Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 80. 94 Ibid., 56. 95 See Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). On the relationship between German Jews and eastern European Jewish immigrants, see Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 139–84, 215–52. 96 Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 22, 56. 97 See Martin Buber, On Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 3–174, for the eight early addresses. 98 Ludwig Strauss cited in Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 49. 99 For Rosenzweig’s critique of Buber, see Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 80. For a critical read of both Rosenzweig and Buber, see Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), “Martin Buber’s Interpretation of Hasidism,” 228–50, and “On the 1930 Edition of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” 320–24. 100 Malinovich, French and Jewish, 133. The issue of Jewish identity was a common focus of lectures, conferences, and debates. Malinovich writes that there was a conference in 1924 on “The Jew in Contemporary Society,” and an article in 1928 entitled “What Is a Jew?” 101 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), part 3, “The Configuration of the Eternal HyperCosmos,” especially 348–79. During a Yom Kippur service in 1913, Rosenzweig had a religious awakening realizing that it was possible to “be alone with God” to “feel a closeness with God” within contemporary Judaism. He then turned away from his academic scholarship of Hegelian thought and devoted himself to an extensive study of classical Jewish texts. 102 Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, 80–82. 103 Barney, Adventures of the Mind, 76. 104 Malinovich, French and Jewish, 151. 105 Decout, Écrire la judéité, 47. 106 On Rieder, see Malinovich, French and Jewish, 162–63. 107 Fhima, “Au coeur de la ‘renaissance juive,’ ” 37.

116  A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 108 Malinovich, French and Jewish, 143. Jewish members of the editorial board included Yvonne Netter, Henry Marx, J. Ernest Charles, Raymond-Raoul Lambert, and Léon Filderman; non-Jewish members included André-Ferdinand Hérold, vice-president of the League of the Rights of Man, and the Protestant writer Gaston Riou. 109 Mercure de France, December 15, 1925, 713, cited in Malinovich, French and Jewish, 163–64. 110 Fleg, L’enfant prophète, 31. 111 Ibid., 32. 112 Ibid., 41. According to Georges Weill, archivist of Fleg’s papers at the Alliance Israélite Universelle, very few people, apart from some close friends, knew that Claude’s relationship with Mariette was based on Fleg’s own life. Interview with Georges Weill, Paris, July 5, 2015. 113 Fleg, L’enfant prophète, 50. 114 Ibid., 78–79. 115 Ibid., 92. 116 Ibid., 93. 117 Ibid., 98–99. 118 Ibid., 184. 119 Ibid., 157–58. 120 Ibid., 145. 121 Ibid., 191. 122 Ibid., 196. 123 Review, Maurice Lena, “L’enfant prophète,” L’égalité, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 124 Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar and Georges Weill quoted in a talk given by Georges Weill, “Edmond Fleg, Le poète de l’espérance juive” (Public lecture, at the Synagogue Copernic, Paris, June 17, 2015), 4. I am very grateful to Georges Weill for sending me his talk. 125 “Books of the Day: New Novels, the Boy Prophet by Edmond Fleg,” Manchester Guardian, June 22, 1928, 7. 126 Letters concerning L’enfant prophète, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 127 Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg, poète et romancier.” 128 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 150. 129 Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 16. 130 Ibid., 38. 131 Ibid., 40. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid., 49. 135 Ibid., 50. 136 Benjamin Adler, “Introduction to Kabbalah: The Creation Myth,” www.sefaria. org/sheets/32246?lang=bi. 137 Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 52. 138 Ibid., 66. 139 Ibid., 73–75. 140 Ibid., 72–75. 141 Ibid., 78. 142 Ibid., 87. 143 Letters related to Pourquoi je suis juif, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 144 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 151. 145 Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France,” 184.

A Jewish awakening in postwar Paris 117 46 Antileff, Inventing Bergson, 12. 1 147 Fhima, “Au coeur de la ‘renaissance juive’ des années 1920,” 43. 148 Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 95. 149 Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).

4 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus Biblical legend as modern parable

France in the 1930s became “increasingly morose and ill at ease,” according to historian Eugen Weber; it was the l’avant-guerre in contrast to the lively and optimistic l’après-guerre of the 1920s.1 The disillusion of the 1930s was profoundly linked to the demographic impact of the Great War. Approximately 1,400,000 French men lost their lives; over a million had been gassed, disfigured, mangled, amputated, and permanently disabled. Half of the 650,000 men who survived the war had sustained injuries. A whole generation of men were lost or maimed, cut down at the Marne, on the Somme, at Verdun, and “it is estimated that during the four years of total war, 1,400,00 souls had been left unborn.”2 The memory of war haunted its survivors and profound war weariness brought forth a call for demilitarization across the political spectrum. Fleg, along with the majority of France’s intellectual and artistic elite, embraced such an antimilitarist stance. But, while most French intellectuals, fearful of another war with Germany, thought in terms of Franco-German reconciliation and minimized the Nazi menace, Fleg responded to the rise of antisemitism in Germany and in France by broadening his ecumenical narratives to more purposefully focus on encouraging Jewish confidence. In one such early effort, Fleg reimagined Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice as Le marchand de Paris (1928), which opened at the Comédie-Française in March 1929. In Fleg’s telling, the merchant, Samuel Brizach, was a benevolent, kindhearted Jewish businessman, full of wisdom and social consciousness. Fleg’s well-meaning businessman character met with mixed reviews from the French press. That same year, rising unemployment in France brought with it a dramatic increase in antisemitism and xenophobia. France welcomed immigrants after the Great War to work in factories starved for manpower after the war’s demographic devastation. Foreign workers including Jews, Italians, Spaniards, Belgians, Poles, and to lesser degree Russians, Greeks, and Armenians were recruited.3 The French encouraged foreigners while times were good and unemployment low but resented them once jobs were scarce. They blamed the employment crisis on the “now-unwanted strangers, intrusive, parasitic, speaking in strange accents and cooking with strange smells.”4 By the end of 1931 a toxic wave of xenophobia was spreading across France.

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 119 In an effort to combat this rising tide, Fleg turned to animating biblical characters – Moïse (Moses, 1928), Salomon (1930), and Jésus raconté par le juif errant (The Story of Jesus as Told by the Wandering Jew) (1933). In the Jewish tradition of midrash, a form of retelling biblical narrative, Fleg depicted these figures as models of civic virtue and social justice, purveyors of ethics and law; his characters increasingly expressed caustic criticism of contemporary politics, especially the failings of the League of Nations to legislate disarmament. These stories passionately detailed the continuities among world religions and national groups, while making explicit his critique of war and remilitarization. He unabashedly pointed to what he deemed to be the hypocritical, shortsighted excesses of the world around him. The prewar foundations of French moral economy had been destroyed in the trenches and Fleg – along with other writers and artists including Catholic reformer Jacques Maritain and his wife Raissa – sought to construct a new morality grounded in universal principles of justice and equality, internationalism, demilitarization, and peace. In the 1930s, when Jewish-Christian relations were unraveling, these writers sought to forge an ecumenical spirituality and reimagine Christian-Jewish relations.5 Their works were reviewed widely in the secular, Jewish, and Catholic press. On balance, reviews were favorable. Most importantly, Fleg, along with the Maritains, helped to circulate ideas and lift up awareness; they contributed to critical ongoing conversations regarding pressing issues in politics, society, and philosophy. Not propagandists nor art-for-art-sakers, these writers forged a third way. They wrote as a form of social engagement.

Antisemitic tropes reframed In March  1929, Fleg’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice as Le Marchand de Paris (The merchant of Paris) opened to mixed reviews at the Comédie-Française. It was published a few months later by the Petite illustration.6 The timing of his play was significant. It opened just a few months before Black Friday – the crash of the American stock market – in October; the Union Sacrée was still a memory, if no longer a fact. When Wall Street did crash, France seemed financially stable, with high productivity and low unemployment. To most French citizens, there appeared to be genuine social harmony and government stability. French Jews, for the most part, believed that they had integrated successfully into French society, even with the resurgence of “old prejudices” associating them with capitalist exploitation and greed or alternately as a revolutionary threat fomenting class warfare. Even with this increase in anti-Jewish sentiment, in 1929 mainstream antisemitic tropes were not inflected with racial or biological overtones but rather carried the tinge of an earlier period. In this context of stability, there was room in French society for Fleg’s merchant character, Samuel Brizach, who, like other well-to-do French men, suffered from “noble diseases: rheumatism, heart trouble, indigestion.” Fleg’s depiction of Brizach was meant to challenge contemporary antisemitic stereotypes, especially of “Jewish rapaciousness, opulence, exploitation of others, clannishness,

120 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus and rootlessness” through laughter. He portrayed Brizach as an “anti-Shylock,” a benevolent, kindhearted Jewish businessman, modeled after his own fatherin-law.7 We meet Brizach, director of the Compagnie Française d’Exportation (French Export Company), in the midst of a frenzy of business deals, brazenly signing contracts without reading them. At the same time, he was enmeshed in human problems  – paying the debts of a gambler he decided was recoverable, helping a distant relative, a tailor, by placing a large order. It was clear from the outset that Brizach delighted in the luxury of doing good; he was generous beyond measure. His pleasure in working hard was not to make money, although he amassed a fortune, but to give it away, to make those near and far happier, to create social peace. The moral of the story seemed to be the economy of the gift; in fact, much to his family’s chagrin Brizach gave his five factories to his workers, claiming: Me, what do I make? I import, I export, I buy the work of others. . . . Who makes the factories work? My directors  .  .  . with my workers. 50% of the earnings to the workers, 25% to the directors, and 25% for me.8 Fleg’s critique of market capitalism and socialist spirit was infused with JewishChristian ethical values, as Brizach exclaims: “This bolshevism? Excuse me, to take the factories, perhaps that is bolshevism . . . but to give them, that’s Christianism. You have the eye of Moscow,” he calls out to the young leftist journalist, “I have the eye of Jerusalem, and I see more clearly.”9 Brizach’s family begins to think he is crazy and tries to fool him into signing over the business to them. In the end, Brizach outsmarts them all, maintaining control of his company, all the while adding to his fortune and affirming his mix of Marxist analysis, Christian socialism, and a bit of paternalism in his ethical equation. Fleg’s class consciousness and references to economic redistribution were not gratuitous. By 1930, the Jewish population had more than doubled from less than 90,000 in 1900 to close to 300,000 (0.7  percent of the population of France).10 At least 150,000 Jews or roughly half of the Jewish population – native and immigrant – lived in Paris.11 About 90,000 Jewish immigrants were from eastern Europe, and they tended to settle in neighborhoods where their friends and family were already established. The more religious crowded into the Marais, the area informally labeled the Pletzl, while less observant Jews moved to Belleville, in the northeast, near to the furniture workshops of the Faubourg St. Antoine, or alternately to Montmartre, Clignancourt, or Gobelins. Separated from the native Jewish population by language, geography, employment, and economic and social organizations, most eastern European Jewish immigrants were artisans in the garment industry, while others made jewelry, furniture, or watches. Many belonged to mutual aid societies and independent Jewish trade unions under the auspices of the Bund, or special Yiddish-speaking sections of well-established French trade unions affiliated with the national Confédération générale du travail (CGT).12 Many Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe embraced the radical politics they learned in “rough left-wing schools”;

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 121

Figure 4.1 Photograph of the play Le marchand de Paris, 1929. (From the private collection of Georges Weill.)

they spoke, performed, and sang in Yiddish. The lyrics of one song read: “We are workers’ children . . . our father is on strike: the police fire on workers in the streets . . . when I grow up I’ll be a hero, a soldier, a Communist.” Such overt public agitation led French pacifists, including assimilated native Jews, to distance themselves from the left-wing immigrant groups and offered right-wing nationalists ammunition against foreigners they claimed were moving France toward class warfare.13 French Jews disdained their coreligionists from the East and feared that immigrants, so visibly different, would challenge the gains they had worked so hard for since the Revolution. French Jews themselves worked to distinguish themselves from the recent immigrants, emphasizing differences between Frenchborn and immigrant, bourgeois and proletarian, religiously orthodox and liberal, those who accepted Zionism and those who did not. Edmond Fleg was one of a handful of native French Jews who bridged the divide, welcoming immigrant Jews into his circles. With Fleg’s encouragement, new opportunities for Jewish sociability opened up in the world of French Jewish scouting, which created a dialogue-space between practicing and nonpracticing Jews, French and foreignborn. Fleg’s conception of Jewishness and Judaism was, at its core, pluralist. Perhaps Brizach was based on his father-in-law, as he claimed, but we also see a good bit of himself in the character, from his understanding of the workingclass immigrant Jewish world in Paris to the desire to square his idealism with

122 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus real-world familial demands. According to many reviewers Le marchand de Paris was pièce à thèse, a thesis play, responding point by point to long-held classic antisemitic stereotypes. Yet Samuel Brizach was not a two-dimensional character but rather a complex man who juggled difficult familial relationships, an international trade network, and a commitment to French economic security. An idealist, yes, but neither ridiculous nor unbelievable; even if he was unlikely to exist in real life, his human qualities balanced out his more abstract ones.14 The same year, 1929, that Fleg’s Le marchand de Paris premiered in Paris, Irène Némirovsky, the Russian Jewish immigrant writer, published her breakout novel, David Golder, which also centered on a Jewish businessman. Némirovsky, a woman 30  years younger than most of the male writers associated with the réveil, depicted a deep pessimism about the prospect of Jewish integration into European society, rather than celebrating Jewish particularity and history. The antithesis of Fleg’s story, David Golder depicts a Russian Jewish immigrant who was ruined by his obsession with material gain. Though he achieved financial success, Golder was left at the end of his life with a greedy, spiteful wife and a daughter whose only interest in him was his money. By all accounts, David Golder was an immediate bestseller and made Némirovsky an overnight success.15 Often accused of antisemitism, especially in the Jewish press, her characters in David Golder were criticized for not having any “sympathetic qualities to temper” their “decadent materialism.”16 The book had literary qualities, a Jewish newspaper in Tunis wrote, but this paled before the fact that it presented a “ ‘modern Shylock’ who would please antisemites and described only ‘odious Jews and Jewesses.’ ”17 Other reviewers found the Golder character sympathetic and the story “universal and tragic.” As David Golder highlighted, Némirovsky believed that the history of Jewish persecution and exclusion left a permanent mark, even among those who believed themselves successfully assimilated. If in a different key, like Fleg, Némirovsky felt confident in her choice of theme: “That is how I [Némirovsky] saw them.”18

Moses and Solomon: What does ethical leadership look like? In addition to developing his anti-Shylock model of Jewish social justice, Fleg turned his attention to Jewish biblical figures, retelling their legends with an eye toward popularizing and reimaging the Jewish patriarchy while offering critical contemporary teachings. In his biographies of Moïse (1928) and Salomon (1929), Fleg drew on Kabbalistic visions of the messianic, of a shattered world made whole again through human acts of repair, coupled with Bergson’s philosophy of the continuity between spirit and matter, while delineating a practical ethical code that was at once rooted in Jewish legend and universal. The messianic, as Fleg understood it, was key to the survival of Judaism because it was a divinely inspired human enterprise; the messianic only existed as human action in social life. It was the capacity to inspire and enact the ideals of social justice in our own lives and environments.19

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 123 The quasi-mystical explanation of the role of the Jewish people was not Fleg’s alone; it permeated throughout the renaissance littéraire juive. It infused the social writings of Jean-Richard Bloch and André Spire, the “Orientalism” of Gustave Kahn, and the Zionism of Henri Hertz. Whether writing about prophets, revolutionaries, or farmers, a “Jewish spirit” deeply animated their understanding of Jewish values, especially the messianic call to save humanity through example. Each understood that their mission was to revitalize and reappropriate Jewish mysticism. Although each writer employed notions such as “Jewish spirit,” “Jewish sensibility,” “Jewish anxiety,” and even, at times, “Jewish blood,” these terms were always vague, intangible, and abstract, and not racialized or essentialized in the ways we would read them today. There was a sense that all of these concepts were completely understood by all Jews, if not all people, and there was no need for further development or definition. Their literary milieu was built on this implicit and informal understanding, binding Jewish writers together not to a shared aesthetic but to a creative enterprise – the invention of a new Jewish being, at once comfortable in French society and language and proud of his or her origins and religion. The writers of the renaissance littéraire juive did not construct a common literary form – and that was not their intent; rather, each writer engaged a specific form and project.20 Fleg struggled with the messianic mission of the Jewish people throughout his writing, in each case resolving the uniqueness of Israel with its union with all of humanity at the end of days. The notion of Jewish chosenness was a complex one for him. Singling out a particular people from the great sea of humanity did not mesh easily with his ecumenical world view based on cofraternity and interconnectedness. In Moïse, when God acknowledges the covenant with Israel, Fleg wrote: Behold I am the God of every people, yet with Israel alone I make a covenant, that through Israel I  may be joined to all peoples. Not only Israel heard these words but the seventy nations of the earth heard them, uttered in seventy languages simultaneously.21 The specificity of Israel remained at most a conduit; the emphasis here was not on its special nature but rather on the covenant itself as creating the condition of possibility for universal human uplift. When the Nouvelle revue française (NRF), an imprint of the well-known publishing house Gallimard, issued a book series titled Biographies légendaires, they looked to Fleg. He agreed to include his Moïse and Salomon in their series. Fleg approached these two works in the Jewish tradition of midrash. Midrash is an interpretive act, seeking the answers to religious questions (both practical and theological) by plumbing the meaning of the words of the Torah. As a genre of rabbinic literature, midrash contains early interpretations and commentaries on both written Torah and oral Torah (spoken law), as well as nonlegalistic rabbinic literature and religious laws. When capitalized, the Midrash refers to a specific compilation of these writings that proposes to resolve problems in the interpretation of difficult passages of the text of the Hebrew Bible, using

124 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus rabbinic principles of hermeneutics and philology to align them with the religious and ethical values of religious teachings. These date primarily from the first ten centuries of the Common Era. But midrash, when not capitalized, is a broad category of biblical interpretation, exploring questions of ethics or theology that are meant to respond to contemporary problems and craft new stories, making connections between new social and political realities and the fixed biblical text. In his preface to Moïse, Fleg pointed to the nature of midrash and his own practice of it: In the manner of our rabbis, I have imagined and created, or added variants to the occasionally numerous versions they give us of a single episode. . . . The religious, moral, poetical, satirical exegesis of our rabbis has, with its symbols and its anachronisms, drawn the prophet closer to us from century to century. My desire is to continue in the tradition that they have perpetuated, in the end, to write a history, this history, the one that lives in me, today. . . . We will never know scientifically the life of Moses, but over time, we have imagined, interpreted, and felt, isn’t that history, too? This is an effort to bring the past into the present, I don’t believe I have betrayed the spirit of the texts, but I am not concerned to have followed them word by word.22 The Moses epic from slavery to freedom – the exodus, the wandering, the receiving of law – is one of the master narratives of our time, as it was when Fleg was writing in the late 1920s. Through Moses, Fleg reflected on the qualities of leadership. To make Moses a human figure yet the connection to the divine, Fleg scanned all of the legends and fables, the rabbinic literature and Kabbalah, including the Zohar, from the mystical to the pragmatic and the juristic. Choosing a clear, simple prose, he recast, regrouped, rearranged, and reimagined the texts to form a novel with a hero and a few villains. The story is built on layers of texts and includes a visit to the supernatural world of the angels arranged in semicircles, where Moses sits above them and learns Torah directly from its source. The story includes revolt and hard fighting, but ultimately, a vision of unpretentious ethical leadership emerges. True to form, Fleg’s Moses is both practical and mystical. The story of this legendary prophet turns on the interdependence of a number of key couplets: mercy and justice, spirit and body, history and transcendence, water (Miriam) and rock (Moses), humility and arrogance. The interdependence of justice and mercy take center stage in Fleg’s understanding of what made Moses an iconic leader. To begin, he posited two of the multiple Hebrew names for God: Mercy and justice are the two faces of God, Elohim, justice and Adonoi, mercy . . . even God’s voice parted into two streams and spoke to Moses and Aaron at the same moment directing them toward one another; each obedient, they met and embraced.

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 125 In the image of the two faces of the divine, drawing on Psalm 85, Fleg described their meeting: “Mercy and truth meet, justice and peace embrace. Moses is truth, Aaron is mercy. Aaron brings peace, Moses justice.”23 This is not merely an image of reconciliation, but these attributes – mercy and truth, peace and justice – are shared among human beings, exist within God, and between humanity and God. They form a reciprocal action between earth and the transcendent. Fleg saw these qualities braided together and inseparably linked, delinking them would be disastrous. Fleg deployed the sage Rabbi Akiva (50–135 CE) to explain this coupling further: “In my Torah justice and mercy are commingled. For if it were all mercy, how would sin not destroy the world? And if it were all justice, how would justice not destroy the sinner?”24 Rabbi Akiva cuts a significant figure in Moïse, even though according to Jewish narrative he lived in a much later time period. Following a well-known Jewish legend, God transported Moses into the future, into Rabbi Akiva’s school. Hearing Akiva teach the Torah to his disciples, Moses realized that he could not understand this Torah, “for the Torah Akiva taught was full of new thoughts, which God had not taught to Moses in his Torah.” When asked by his students how he had received Torah, Akiva responds, “From the Torah given by God to Moses, upon Sinai.” Moses was perplexed. He asked God, “I do not recognize the Torah you gave me. Is this new Torah your Torah?” And God responded: “There are fifty gateways of understanding; I have opened for you forty-nine, but the last is closed, for no man, not even Moses, can know everything.” Pointing to Torah as a living text both historically specific and transcendent, he wrote: The Torah you understand has a thousand senses which you don’t understand, and which others, in the course of the ages, will come to know; for in each century it will speak the language of that century: but what each century will find is already there, and each new Torah will still be My Torah. Promoting historical consciousness, Moses asked: “And why, God, choose a Moses when you have an Akiva?” God replied: “Moses is proper to the days of Moses, Akiva to the days of Akiva.” At that moment, Moses saw Akiva being flayed by the Romans with iron combs.25 By choosing a story that underscored the relevance of Jewish texts to their contexts and encouraged historically specific interpretation, Fleg made clear his own intentions. Rabbi Akiva provided a kind of touchstone for Fleg, an alter ego of sorts. Like Fleg, Akiva only began to study Torah late in life, when he was 40 years old. He went on to become known as an erudite scholar recognized for his capacity to synthesize and systemize Jewish commentary and give a clear arrangement to a large array of rabbinic texts. Referencing Akiva’s midrash in which the Israelites “heard the lightning and saw the thunder” at the moment of receiving Torah, Fleg described that moment in Moïse: On that day they [Israelites] could hear what is seen and could see what is heard . . . each word of the Ten Commandments after touching the ear of

126 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus each of the children of Israel, rested upon his mouth and kissed him. At one and the same time they could hear and see the words and the vision of the divine.26 Both Fleg and Akiva understood this as a moment when the senses took on miraculous powers and the spiritual became as tangible as the physical, literally an embodied spirituality. Moses’ leadership skills were tested even before the exodus. From the beginning of Fleg’s Moïse, Korah was depicted as the enemy within. Portrayed as a wealthy Israelite and not in bondage himself, the reluctant Korah “feared Moses taking the slaves out of Egypt, feared that he, too, would be exiled.” Korah attempted to sabotage Moses before the exodus.27 Resolved to turn the Israelites against the leadership of Moses and Aaron, Korah accused the Israelites of being weak: “You will all weep like that widow” under his leadership. Continuing to sew discord, Korah and his henchmen Abiram and Dathan ask why Moses “should alone speak His [God’s] name? Does Abraham’s blessing rest upon you alone? Are we not all children of Israel? Children old enough to choose a leader, and not to choose one if we do not desire one?” Inflamed by Korah’s populist rhetoric, the Israelites cry out: We no longer desire a leader! You [Moses] have stolen from us the joys of Egypt, the flesh-pots, the sure bread! You have desired to become all-powerful through our slavery! You have lied to us, with your Promised Land that exists nowhere, that we shall never see!28 Striking out against the demagoguery of Korah, Moses detailed the role he has played in their redemption – the miracles he fed them, his fasting and meditating on the mountain to receive Torah for them, the stoning and anguish he weathered to face God and ask for their pardon not once but 40 times. Moses accused Korah and his followers of envy: “They are the proud, the scoffers, the slanderers, the rich.” When God asked Moses, “What would you have me do?” In the past, God reflected, “It was you who would demand pardon when they rose up against Me, and now, because they rise up against you, would you not pardon them longer?” In this conversation between Moses and God, Fleg returned to the coupling of justice and mercy: God remarked, “When My face is justice, yours will be mercy, and now when My face is mercy, yours is justice.”29 Moses realized, against his past acts of compassion, that the rebels must die or the Torah would be dead before it has a chance to live; there needs to be a new generation. In an instant an abyss with “fiery teeth” and “thundering jaws” opened up to swallow Abiram and Dathan; “five hundred lightening bolts entered the nostrils” of Korah and the other traitors and “extinguished their souls within their unscathed bodies.”30 Moses’ decision to destroy Korah marked the climax of the novel. Moses, who never asked to be a leader, understood that moral leadership must be guided by law and principle, not demagoguery, and it depends on more than compassion. It demands humility paired with the courage to recognize

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 127 real danger when it threatens to destroy the ethical foundation of the community. In killing Korah and his accomplices, the aged Moses opened up space for the next generation of leaders, a generation that had not known slavery (or perhaps those who had not known the trenches of the Great War). Fleg’s Moïse was described by critics as a “fierce” and “passionate” rendering, about “work, pain, and prayer.” It attests to a “rebirth of Jewish consciousness.”31 Another critic wrote: “[Moïse] is an elegant pastiche of the Bible, bringing us a legendary life.” It is “original” and written with an “acute sense of biblical poetics.” Moïse is a portrait of “the bitterness of a suffering nation and its persecution, even its obedience.” Concluding, “M. Fleg has written more than a beautiful page, it is a painting of humanity, of a humane Jewish people.”32 Henry James Forman, a New York Times critic, reviewing the English translation, depicted Fleg as an “exceptionally gifted scholar.” “Those old rabbis [of Torah commentary],” Forman explained, “were not so far behind some of the most modern of philosophers.”33 This story of Moses, another reviewer explained, “reveals the history of the prophet, imagined and rich, as interpreted and felt today. . . . It is epic and familiar in all of its grandeur and humanity.”34 Fleg’s Moses “is a figure of the past and of the present at the same moment.”35 That was Fleg’s intention. He aimed to tell a story that spoke to his moment, which engaged and contributed to contemporary social and political conversations happening around him. Not all reviews recognized Fleg’s relevance or expansiveness. Reinforcing rather than expanding religious boundaries, one Catholic critic demurred, “Fleg’s Moses will charm those loyal to Israel. It goes without saying that this book, in spite of its inspired storytelling could not find a place in Catholic libraries or bookstores.”36 While Moses recognized the need for a new generation of leaders in Fleg’s story, France, too, faced the prospect of aging leaders. It was the European country with the fewest young people and the most elderly ones. In 1928, the wellrespected prime minister Raymond Poincaré was 74  years old. In his capable hands, the franc had been stabilized through devaluation, which avoided bankruptcy but resigned France to the loss of her prewar wealth. Aristide Briand, minister of foreign affairs, was 70. Known as the “pilgrim of peace” due to his role in negotiating the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a universal pact outlawing war, Briand worked tirelessly for a rapprochement with Germany. Optimistically, Briand also proposed the idea of a European federation at the League of Nations that would establish economic links and collective security agreements.37 By underscoring the vanquishing of Korah, perhaps Fleg was pointing to this new stability in Europe, while also suspecting its fragility and future volatility. Poincaré resigned in 1929 due to poor health and died shortly afterward; Briand was dead by 1932. They were replaced by new leaders who did not have broad support, especially on the Left. As Fleg seemed to anticipate, the loss of these trusted politicians underscored the government’s weak executive and the political parties’ lack of discipline. While parliamentary instability marred other periods of French history, there were 15 cabinets between 1924 and 1931. Chronic political instability was combined with diplomatic tension and economic insecurity, and a general loss of confidence. Government majorities were fragile and transitory, preventing them

128 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus from coping vigorously with the myriad problems they faced, especially financial ones, including widespread income-tax evasion.38 While the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war certainly spoke to concerns over remilitarization, the years immediately following its negotiation extinguished those hopes.39 No doubt aware of the changing political landscape, Fleg’s Moses offered a complex portrait of effective leadership for troubled times. From Moses, the leader who never asked to be one, Fleg turned to the legend of Solomon. Most people have some familiarity with the wise King Solomon of the Bible, but few know the Solomon of legend. The legendary Solomon was a contradictory character, a tragic figure of great power and great weakness, Faustian, superhuman and all too human. In the introduction to Salomon, Fleg wrote, “Solomon unites Israel to the nations, he appears here as a Faust, at once Hebraic and universal, in whom life, as it unfolds and amplifies, sums up the whole of human experience.”40 In other words, all humans to some degree – real or imagined – are vulnerable like Solomon. We are tempted and we yearn; we overindulge and make deals with the devil; and yet hopefully, we find redemption through our reconnection to our humility and to a life moored in ethical values. Fleg explained in the introduction: Solomon has been made a hero not only by Jewish and Arab storytellers, but of those from Ireland to Ethiopia, from Britain to Persia and the Indies, the most diverse people have made a hero of him in fables beyond number, where he appeared to be alternately a wise man or a fool, a prince or a beggar, a cook or a philosopher, a master of demons or their dupe, a model of faith and humility, or a monster of impiety and arrogance, a warrior and a tyrant or an apostle of peace, an incarnate of justice, of the Messiah. Fleg’s Solomon was drawn from legend; he is the Solomon of Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, the Proverbs.41 Many of Solomon’s well-known attributes appeared in Fleg’s story. As a child, Solomon rendered justice to a woman with seven jars of honey filled with gold. He also witnessed immoral acts in which there were no consequences, and he asked his father, “Where is justice. . . . This fear of God, is it only a madman’s whim?”42 In a dream God asked Solomon what he wanted, and the child-king asked merely “for an intelligent heart capable of judging, with wisdom for justice, and with discernment to act for peace; the glory of the Eternal is wrapped in mystery, but that of the king must be surrounded by clarity.”43 This boy-king prayed that he would have the wisdom to never use the many powers bestowed on him by the divine, but at the heart of Fleg’s story was a man tempted, tormented, and trapped by lust and luxury, a man who could not resist abusing his power. Fleg described Solomon alternately as a kind of St. Francis of Assisi, filled with gentleness and kindness for all living things, and as Louis XIV, the Sun King.44 Following legend, Fleg’s Solomon was led astray by his wife, the Pharaoh’s daughter, a woman who remains nameless in the traditional texts but whom Fleg called Nagsara. Initially, this marriage was celebrated for its political alliance

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 129 unifying the “flesh of Israel” with that of the “stranger.” Having spent his youth sealing the “peace between all of the animals,” Solomon began to sow discord in order to “please every whim of the stranger,” his new wife. It seems that this very political act of unification and alliance ultimately led to Solomon’s corruption and episodic downfall. Perhaps it was Fleg’s loyalty to traditional sources that encouraged him to accept such an “othering” of the “stranger.” But, in the story, Nagsara’s foreignness was not nearly as problematic as her gender. Like Eve and Jezabel, Nagsara caused Solomon’s downfall. Pushed by his tumultuous marriage, Solomon fell into “unreasonable pleasures” and became insatiable, tearing down and building palaces, taking hundreds of concubines, becoming a slave to pleasure. Uncomfortable stereotypes of women abound in Fleg’s Solomon; he juxtaposed his greedy and demanding wife and his 300 concubines with the wise and powerful Queen of Sheba, relying on the well-worn saint/whore dichotomy to categorize and demean women. As Solomon’s voracious appetite for material things increased, his wisdom abated. Where he once taught “peace,” he now taught only “discord.”45 His wealth led him to ruin; he abused his workers; he descended into a fiery abyss. From “lust to lust, drunkenness to drunkenness,” from “madness” to “cruelty,” he sacrificed his wisdom to his greed and his kingdom to the demon; he “no longer understood the bird song of peace” and with “bullets and arrows,” he brought “terror to the world.”46 He could not “understand the language of man,” nor could he “hear the voice of God.”47 Relinquishing his throne to the “demon,” Solomon, now a beggar in exile, was arrested, lashed, and tortured for stealing. At that point, he began to ask questions: “Were the weak persecuted?”48 As a wanderer, he experienced poverty and misery, mockery, wretchedness, and grief. Embracing Péguy’s notion of redemption through the catharsis of suffering, Solomon finds his salvation. While working as a mason, he found humility. Finally, a miracle restored this newly repentant Solomon to the throne. Made new and chastened, Solomon’s first action was to redistribute his wealth on chariots sent in the four directions of the wind.49 Describing Fleg’s narrative scope, one reader wrote to him from Berlin: You get at the truth of things, exemplified in this king of Israel who first chose wisdom as the supreme gift of God, then allowed the love of power and pleasure to steal away his sanity and wit, and finally through pain and loss was disciplined into a deeper wisdom and a purer love of God.50 Fleg meant to get at the truth of things. While his Solomon was a work of imagination, it was meant to speak to the “temper of our time.”51 Notably, favorable reviews predominated, focusing on Fleg’s depiction of Solomon as “amplifying all human experience . . . and embodied the advance of justice.” Fleg’s Solomon was “Hebraïque and universal.”52 It was “a great pleasure to read,”53 “profound and precious,”54 and “a poem in prose. It is magnificent proof of his [Fleg’s] interpretive skill.”55 The critic in La tribune juif wrote: “Fleg resists the temptation to reduce the spirit of Israel to a formula. He seeks to spread Jewish things through poetic

130 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus interpretations of sacred texts . . . rendering them accessible to young people.”56 One French journal noted that “Solomon was a best seller in the United States.”57 The New York Times book reviewer agreed, “No brief review can convey adequately any idea of the richness of the texture, the wealth of color of this singular picture. M. Fleg, moreover, is no less happy in his translator than in his own work.”58 A critique of materialism, gluttony, and insatiate desire, Fleg’s story spoke to the heady 1920s when all sectors of the French economy, except for agriculture, rebounded, reaching production levels unknown since 1913. The Treaty of Locarno secured the French, German, and Belgian borders, and “Germany’s membership in the League of Nations further promoted confidence and prosperity.” This prosperity suggested that France was overcoming its wartime devastation and adjusting to a new postwar era, but such economic well-being was short-lived. Even before the Great Depression began, there were warning signs that economic recovery was fragile; prices remained unstable, deficits continued unabated, and global trade ceased to expand.59 While Germany and the United States were already in the throes of the Great Depression, the economic slump hit France only slowly and unevenly by the end of 1930.60 Even with the delay of the worst in France, “hard work and thrift could not prevail against inflation or the collapse of investments made with the greatest prudence.” To make matters worse, economic depression in France was marked by a complex web of financial failures deeply tied to widely publicized political scandals. Ministers and deputies resigned in disgrace; businesses were disrupted, making a bad economic situation worse.61 With stability, security, and confidence in decline, tempers were shorter, nerves frazzled, and ideological divisions sharper. The republic, parliament, parties, and politicians were connected in the public’s mind with scandal and corruption. The term “decadence” came to describe the prevailing experience of the last decade of the Third Republic.62 Fleg wrote Moïse and Salomon as commentary on and a warning against such decadence. Connected to both Germany and the United States through friends, colleagues, and readers, Fleg was keenly aware of what was happening abroad. In 1931, a German reader wrote to Fleg, noting: “Your Solomon moves in an Arabian nightmare of splendor and debauchery. . . . Certainly, you know that your books are well read in Germany. For many young German Jews they offer a path to rediscover their Judaism.”63 Fleg’s tales of redemption must have offered a glimmer of hope during those desperate years of massive unemployment and the opportunistic rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.64 Salomon was also comforting for Abbé Jean Brierre from Narbonne. In it he found “beautiful rabbinic literature and legend from the Middle Ages, the bright colors of the Zohar and Kabbalistic literature.” Aside from complimenting Fleg on his story of Solomon, the Abbé was writing to ask for Fleg’s book on Jesus, “I know Jesus is one of your old friends.”65

Jesus: teacher and man In 1931, Fleg traveled to Palestine to research a book he was planning to write on the life of Jesus. Continuing his search for role models, the Jesus that emerges

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 131 in Fleg’s book Jésus raconté par le juif errant (1933, The Story of Jesus as Told by the Wandering Jew) was neither judge nor God but rather Jesus the man, embedded in the Judaism of his own time. Fleg’s fictional account drew on contemporary scholarship of Jesus of Nazareth as well as from the Gospels, especially the Fourth, to reconstruct many of the episodes.66 As Fleg bore witness to the rise of virile antisemitism and militarism across Europe, he posed his story as a literary reconciliation among the European states as well as between Christians and Jews. As evidenced by the title, the iconic image of the Wandering Jew remained a central figure in Fleg’s writing, an omniscient seer of his vision of redemption and reconciliation. Jesus, as a Jew, played a large role in this text, binding Jews and Christians together in the work of forging a common human project. Jesus was no stranger to European Jewish intellectuals. By the turn of the twentieth century there developed a widespread fascination with the figure of Jesus because the “Jesus question” was so entangled in the larger Jewish question precisely because of Jesus’s dual status as a figure who simultaneously embodies the West and is associated with all that is not Jewish, while historically originating as a Jewish figure, a product of the first-century Palestinian Jewish world. This essential duality of Jesus made him an ideal “border figure,”67 one that crossed between Jewish and Christian scholarship. The search for the Jewish Jesus, like Jewish intellectual life more broadly, involved Jewish academics and writers from distinctive regional, national, and political environments, and working in various genres. Fleg was drawn to Jesus as a border figure. His Jesus as Told through the Wandering Jew fit into a long tradition of Jewish writing on Jesus dating back to the late eighteenth century. In From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew Hoffman details Jewish perceptions of Jesus and their dynamic relationship with Jewish notions of self-understanding from the Enlightenment through the trauma of World War II. The essential duality of Jesus, Hoffman argues, allowed a small, but significant, subset of Jewish writers, historians, and artists who engaged him as a legitimate subject of Jewish discourse and cultural expression to embrace the civilization that worshipped him and at the same time persecuted Jews in his name.68 Predating Fleg, the German Jew Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) claimed in Judaism and Its History in 1864 that Jesus was a Jew, a Pharisean Jew with Galilean coloring – a man who joined the hopes of his time, who believed that these hopes were fulfilled in him. He did by no means utter a new thought; nor did he break down the barriers of nationality. . . . He did not repeal the smallest title of Judaism; he was a Pharisee who walked in the way of Hillel.69 Walking in the way of Hillel invoked a Jesus figure that “captured the essence of Judaism, making its prophetic and ethical traditions primary, and relegating

132 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus halakha [religious practice] to secondary status.”70 By making such an assertion Geiger not only intentionally criticized the anti-Jewish biases in contemporary New Testament scholarship but, more importantly, sought to reposition Jewish history from the margins to the center of Western history and notions of civilization. By muting the differences between Judaism and Christianity, and ultimately stressing Jewish integration into modern Western culture, Geiger attempted to legitimate a kind of hybrid Jewish German identity, articulating a synthesis of Judaism and modern Western ideals.71 Fleg certainly followed in this tradition of Jewish writers, and perhaps was also inspired by Albert Schweitzer’s 1911 study that chronicled the origins and devel­ opment of European critical scholarship on Jesus, titled The Quest of the Historical Jesus. His aim was to clearly distinguish between the Jesus of history and the Christ of dogma. Schweitzer’s critical insight was that “each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus.”72 In other words, theologians and historians found their own likeness in Jesus, who helped them legitimize their own ideas or movements. Like his Moses and Solomon, Fleg also wrote his story of Jesus engaged in the issues of his own time; for him, there was a clear parallel between the events unfolding around him and the apocalyptic fears of the first century. By writing the Jesus story Fleg meant to open up the possibility for renewed Jewish-Christian relations and what he imagined would be the consequence of that reconciliation: disarmament and world peace. But Fleg consciously wrote his book on Jesus in response to the French scholar Ernest Renan’s 1863 enormously popular, if controversial, work La vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus).73 Renan was a Breton of humble origins who had trained to be a priest but ultimately abandoned the seminary. He subsequently pursued a successful career as a Parisian academic. Renan remarked after his visit to the Levant that “the Holy Land was ‘a fifth gospel, torn but still legible,’ where the experience of reading the Gospels in its birthplace had transformed the abstract idea of Jesus into a true, human, historical figure.”74 Contemporary readers experienced Renan’s Life of Jesus as “religious in the broadest sense of the term.”75 Although “Renan stripped Jesus of his divinity, rejected accounts of his miraculous powers, turned his death into a legal formality, and found a dark depression at the heart of his psychology,” the human figure that “Renan claimed to rescue from beneath the weight of Christian dogma was nonetheless a ‘sublime’ moral genius, the greatest of great men and founder of Western civilization.”76 The Vatican’s response to Renan was unambiguous. In 1864, Pope Pius IX denounced all rationalist approaches to the Bible in the notorious Syllabus of Errors.77 Catholic critics – from ultraconservative to liberal – were infuriated by Renan’s proposition that the Bible could and should be subject to the same critical analysis as other texts; many attacked Renan’s scholarly credibility, accusing him of writing fiction and not history.78 Liberal critics were often “foggier” in their responses than Renan’s devout ones but some accused him of “reinvigorating the Gospels rather than destroying them.”79 Many (if not most) Jews were enraged by Life of Jesus because Renan described Judaism as foolish and illogical, and insisted that through Jesus Christianity

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 133 overcame any vestigial aspect of Judaism, marking it as a superior creed. Renan claimed that Jesus and therefore Christianity emerged purified of any Jewish traits; Jesus was a Galilean who was transformed from a Jew into a Christian, from a particularistic monotheism to a universal one. In his words, “Far from being the continuator of Judaism, Jesus represents the rupture with the Jewish spirit.”80 Through the historical person of Jesus, Renan’s Life of Jesus promoted ideas about racial superiority, infusing race into theology.81 But Renan’s antisemitism was not of the usual sort. He did not regard European Ashkenazic Jews as a Semitic people; rather, they had their origin in Turkic refugees (known as the “Khazar theory” or “myth” to its many critics) that had converted to Judaism and migrated west to the Rhineland.82 Renan did not view the Jewish people as a unified racial entity in a biological sense and was an outspoken critic of German ethnic nationalism and European antisemitism.83 His notion of race was not physical but linguistic. In his view, the Aryan language was highly superior, containing the seeds of metaphysics that would be developed by the “Indo-European race.” The Semitic language, according to Renan, was imperfect and lacked the capacity for complexity or nuance. Renan employed a cultural determinism, rather than a biological one, to come to the conclusion of Aryan superiority.84 The rhetoric of racial determinism in Vie de Jésus “oscillated between clarity and ambivalence, as well as between geographical, cultural, and biological definitions.”85 His lessthan-enthusiastic reception among his academic peers, condemnation by the pope, and disdain by French Jews did not stop Renan’s work from generating enormous interest and public debate.86 Fleg’s story of Jesus, like Renan’s Life of Jesus, focused on him as a man. The sheer popularity of and high-profile debate over Renan’s radical biography as well as its antisemitic overtones was a catalyst for Fleg, and he overtly distinguished his work from his predecessor’s. According to Fleg, Renan probed minutely into the soul of Jesus to get down to what you call his psychological make-up, in order to trace . . . the evolution of his messianic consciousness!  .  .  . I do not even attempt to explain Jesus to you: in the first place, I should have to understand him! I merely describe the effect he has had on me, on others . . . and on his friends and enemies. . . . Jesus is a mystery, just as Israel is a mystery! And when you put these two mysteries together, shall I tell you what they make? A third mystery, even more mysterious in itself than the sum of the two!87 Against Renan’s reproach of Judaism, Fleg focused on the relationship between Jesus and the Jews. That relationship was central to his project. Fleg held up Jesus as a Jew, as a rabbi, and then sought to trace the critical continuities between Judaism and Christianity. He asked, “What did Jesus mean? What does Jesus still mean to Israel? What is the secret that divides them and still links them together?”88 In doing so, however, Fleg was clearly acquainted not just with Renan’s work but with studies of the historical Jesus, and as one review stated, “and in general builds upon the basis provided by modern scholarship.”89

134 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus Like Renan, Fleg went off to Palestine to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. Fleg’s story of Jesus is told by an eyewitness, the omnipresent Wandering Jew who meets Fleg in Palestine, in the garden of Gethsemane, and tells him his tale. The Wandering Jew explains that because he refused to carry Jesus’ cross, preferring to help his cousins who were crucified at the same time, he was condemned to walk upon the earth until the return of Jesus/the messiah. Born a paralytic, the Wandering Jew was raised by his Aunt Sephora and Uncle Simeon, a devout Pharisee, who delighted in Torah and in taking care of his helpless nephew. After learning about the miraculous healings being wrought by Jesus, the narrator joined the crowds who had flocked to hear him, and was ultimately cured. As he was being healed, he shouted, “I am forgiven! I shall be healed!”90 When he heard Jesus bless the peacemakers on the shores of the Sea of Galilee near Tiberias, he explained, “As I listened, I was filled with such tenderness as I had never yet known.”91 Fleg’s portrayal of Jesus as a peacemaker, as the one who recognized the sacred qualities of all God’s creatures, and spent his time with “swindlers, pimps, and streetwalkers, often shocking even his most faithful followers,” evoked the Franciscan tradition.92 Uncle Simeon’s devotion to Torah and his view that it embodied love, charity, and redemption found a parallel in Jesus’ teachings of compassion for the downtrodden. Even as they seem to be separating, Fleg underscored the close proximity of the two discourses. But Simeon, even though he recognized deep congruity between Jesus’ practices and Torah, remained perplexed. For him, it was inconceivable that Jesus could bring about the messiah without observing the laws of Torah.93 So the question for Simeon was: How to remain Jewish and accept Jesus? The Wandering Jew wondered: Why must the messiah be burdened with Torah? I had no knowledge of the Torah. . . . The Torah was a book, but Jesus was a being! It was because he was living, visible, and pitiful that he drew to the God of Israel all of those millions of idolatrous hearts that a book could scarcely touch – even a sublime one.94 The Wandering Jew described meeting both St. Francis of Assisi and Maimonides, and both “explained that Jesus spread the concept of the messiah and by doing so was making the world ready.”95 For Fleg, there was a clear continuity between the life force of Torah, its élan vitale in Bergson’s terms, not its legalistic interpretation, and that of Jesus. It was this radical vitality of love and compassion that would lead to reconciliation. Fleg’s focus on Torah as life force, on ecstatic experience over rabbinic interpretation, conjured the eighteenth-century world of Hasidism, known for stressing the power of joyous communal prayer – almost rapture – and a mystical experience of God. In a similar vein, Fleg drew heavily on the Gospel of John to reconstruct some of the episodes in his story, admitting that John was a dreamer and, according to most Christian critics, “knew nothing and saw nothing.” Fleg identified John as a poet of the symbolist school, “the poet who knew nothing and saw

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 135 nothing is more exact, more realistic in all his records than the three prose writers [Mark, Luke, and Matthew] put together!”96 For Fleg, the symbolist poet had access to a deeper current of knowledge than the narrative storytellers. His deep knowledge, or truth, was itself a form of spirituality, and as such it was more congruent with the life force of Torah/Jesus.97 In Fleg’s story, the Wandering Jew struggled to understand why and how the Jews remained Jews for 2,000 years. As Fleg’s spokesperson, he wondered: Why did the Jews persist in their difference? And then he reflected, “Oh, many attempts were made to baptize me – as well as the others – more than a hundred attempts, as you can imagine, in the course of twenty centuries!”98 At this point, the conversation between Fleg and the Wandering Jew focuses on what had and would sustain the Jewish people. Fleg dreamed “of a Judaism that will be the very spirit of the prophets . . . and of a day when all mankind will be one, like God.”99 The Wandering Jew argued that commitment to Torah provided the key. Even Zionism was not an alternative to Torah because although it was “a miracle – the orange groves at Ain Harod, the bringing together of Jews from around the globe at the Zionist Congresses  – the journey did not end there.” The Wandering Jew mused, “If only the Wandering Jew had reached the end of his wanderings!”100 For him, national hearth would not provide the sustenance needed for Jewish survival; it would be only momentary. The task of Israel was to exist beyond earthly limits, and only Torah offered that possibility.101 At this juncture, both Fleg and his character the Wandering Jew embraced notions of the universal. Jews were to exist beyond earthly limitation; all mankind was to be one. In Fleg’s messianic vision Jewish difference and universal humanity existed in a double helix, in a dynamic relationship with one another. But in real life, mankind was hell bent on war and violence. After establishing the powerful union of Jesus and Torah, Fleg took on the threat of war. The Wandering Jew pointed to the line “sell your garments and buy swords!” as the touchstone for his memories of bloodshed over the last 2,000 years.102 First, he pointed to Hitler “the messiah of brute beasts, who has restored torture”; then he listed the victims of war, the blood of non-Christians shed by Christians  – the “Red Indians and Chinese,” the Mexicans by Cortez, the Indians by Warren Hastings, and so on. Finally, the Wandering Jew described the Christian-onChristian bloodbath of the Great War. He mused: “I am harder to kill than war itself! Only, I’ve been slightly wounded in every part of myself!”103 Through the Wandering Jew, Fleg denounced the delegates to the League of Nations as even worse than the Scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus condemned, because no one of them was willing to commit to disarmament. The Delegate of God speaks: Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, ye hypocrites who do lip service to disarmament, but within are full of bombs and torpedoes! Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, who stick to the letter of pacts, conventions, and scraps of paper, and who scoff at the good faith, justice and honour of the spirit. . . . Therefore, all of the blood of the ten million killed in the last war, and the ten million that will be killed in the next war,

136 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus and then the ten thousand million that will be killed in the wars to come – the wars that you are all preparing!104 Fleg held all nations responsible for refusing to disarm. “Both Jews and Christians, rabbis, clergy and popes, were held to task for the machine guns and shrapnel.”105 At the same time, Fleg interpreted the thorny problem of Jewish chosenness politically by singling out Jews in the diaspora and charging them with a leadership role, a mission in saving the world from war: Jews, wherever you are, take the lead! The others will follow you! Urge disarmament wherever you are, as patriots in each country, as patriots of the world! Mankind will not secure peace unless it is willing to die for it! Be foremost in this, O Jews! For you will be working for the Kingdom! In saving your countries you will save the world!106 In lifting up the issue of disarmament, Fleg was responding to the failure of multiple efforts of the League of Nations after the economic crisis of 1929. René Cassin, lawyer, professor of law, and fellow Jew, served as part of the French delegation in Geneva; his main focus was on disarmament issues in the Third Commission of the League. Cassin worked diligently on the preparation of an international conference in the mid-twenties, and the conference opened in February 1932. In November of the same year Cassin spoke out against the use of chemical and biological weapons and the possible interdiction of their preparation. He pointed to the work that needed to be done on the proper modes of investigating claims as to their use and the sanctions to be applied if such weapons had been in fact deployed. Cassin, like Fleg, saw the effort to limit the category of weaponry to be used in warfare as secondary, if crucial, to the banning of war itself. By 1934, the International Disarmament Conference was adjourned with all parties blaming other parties for its failure. For men such as Fleg and Cassin, who shared a fervent commitment to French republicanism and its history of universal rights, these were discouraging days, with the rise of fascism in both Germany and Italy. Democratic governments were failing under the pressure of economic depression. The Soviet Union was besieged by Stalin’s reign of terror, although world opinion was not fully aware of it at the time.107 The failure of disarmament and the crises of liberal democracy across Europe further inflamed Judeophobia. Blaming Jews for the killing of Christ, Fleg explained in his story of Jesus, has led to “everlasting hatred between Jews and Christians, a hatred completely antithetical to the teachings of Christ.”108 Fleg argued that “the whole of Israel” was not guilty for the death of Christ. “In the same way that not all Christians, past and present, were guilty of the burning of St. Joan.”109 It was the Romans who condemned and crucified Christ; the cross was a Roman invention.110 But Jews, too, have failed in their divine mission of forming a link to hold together the people of the earth; they have “clung to their idols, shared in their luxuries, and taken part in their conflicts.”111 And in a rather unexpected twist he held Christianity to its moral high ground

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 137 by saying: “When Christians are Christians, then Jews may become Christians too!”112 Fleg’s assertion turned an earlier claim by the German Jewish writer Emil Hirsch (1815–1889) that “the Jews are indeed the ‘true Christians’ and the sole bearers of ‘Christian morality’ ” on its head. Whereas Hirsch muted the differences between Christianity and Judaism in an attempt to facilitate acceptance for Jews in Christian Europe, he simultaneously asserted the superiority of Judaism in terms of philosophy, ethics, and theology.113 Fleg was certainly cognizant of Hirsch’s earlier writing, and he was not alone in trying to combat the rising tide of antisemitism through his writing. With the growing polarization of European politics and the increase in anti-Jewish violence after massive right-wing antiparliamentary riots in Paris on February  6, 1934, Jews and Jewish converts close to the Maritains took up Jewish themes in their work. Raissa Maritain, an eastern European Jewish woman who converted to Catholicism and was married to the Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain, and an acquaintance of Fleg’s, was committed to finding a “living bond” between Jews and Christians, between the Old and New Testaments, as a way to help Catholics forge new understandings of Judaism. In her Histoire d’Abraham (1935), she claimed that Abraham united the two Testaments; her emphasis was on unity rather than on the more typical Christian supersessionist notion of the “New Law replacing the Old” that was taken up by Father Réginald Garigou-Lagrange in his 1931 Le judaïsme avant Jésus-Christ (1931).114 In her text, Maritain linked Abraham with Mary, Joseph, and the apostles of Christ, even with Joan of Arc, and her temporal salvation of a people. Maritain’s Abraham, like Fleg’s Jesus, argued against legalism as not just a temptation of Jews as Jews but suggested that any community that honored the law of God could fall victim to it. “Love is not Christianity’s gift to Judaism,” according to Maritain’s reading of the tradition; “rather, it is at the heart of the Jewish Scriptures themselves.”115 She wrote citing Deuteronomy, not the Gospels, nor the Pauline Letters: “Hence the very soul of the law is the commandment of love. . . . You shall love the Lord your God. . . . Paul having known both the Mosaic law and the law of Christ.” She emphasized the inextricable bond between “love and the law.”116 Along with Raissa Maritain, many Jewish converts to Catholicism who formed part of the Maritains’ salon at Meudon, including the poet/painter Max Jacob, the poet Jean-Pierre Altermann, essayist René Schwob, the writer Maurice Sachs, the journalist André Frossard, and the actress Suzanne Bing, did not see themselves as “true converts” but as “creative combiners of Judaism and Christianity.”117 The future cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, also a convert in the Maritain circle, thought in terms of the juifs-chrétians (Jewish-Christians) in the Catholic Church, seeing them as “guardians of both the Old and New Testaments who would never completely sever their ties with their [Jewish] tradition.” Like Péguy’s bookshop 30 years earlier, the Maritains’ salon offered a space in which “intellectuals could ground a new epistemological, ethical, and religious community, forged as an alternative to laicized universal citizenship.” The “living bond” experienced there between Judaism and Catholicism “allowed Jews an alternative way not only to maintain their identities but to actually discover religion and

138 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus ultimately, a particular kind of Christian philosemitic Judaism.” At Meudon, the Maritains advocated for a kind of Jewish-Christian spiritual solidarity. Raissa Maritain explained: If such a Jew becomes a Christian he begins only then to understand the depths of his debt to Judaism – the idea of a God at once transcendent and personal; the revelation of the supernatural universe, the roots of his new theology, the beauty of his new liturgy; and then does he do justice to his people’s greatness, and become proud to belong to it. The writer Tereska Torres, daughter of the Jewish Polish sculptor Marek Szware, also a convert, remembered thinking, “I was Jewish. . . . I was a Sephardic, Jewish, Polish, Catholic, French girl!”118 Fleg’s dear friend Marc Chagall and his wife Bella, although never converts, were also members of the Maritains’ salon. Profoundly affected by Moses Ezekiel’s bas-relief, Israel (1903), a portrayal of the Jewish Jesus that had been inspired by the Kishinev pogrom, Chagall created his first of dozens of paintings of the crucifixion, titled Calvary, in 1912.119 Like Fleg’s Jesus, Chagall explained that “the symbolic figure of Christ was always very near to me. . . . I wanted to show Christ as an innocent child.”120 Two strongly identified Jews, Fleg and Chagall, depicted Jesus as both a Christian and a Jew. This dual depiction of Jesus was noted in reviews of Fleg’s The Story of Jesus as Told by the Wandering Jew and was often found disquieting. In the Jewish press, Fleg’s Jesus was difficult to understand, “painful” in fact. He was compared to a “knight with his spear and sword replaced by a daisy chain.”121 While in the Catholic press, Fleg was also criticized for “excessive idealism and too pacific.”122 The academic Assyriologist Edouard Dhorme, reviewing the book in Le temps recognized this tension: “Christians will find a Jesus that is too Jewish and Jews will find a wandering Jew that is too Christian.” Both Christians and Jews, in all good faith, should recognize that which is truly rare, to see the same man sympathetic to both Judaism and Christianity. And many will wonder with me, when will the Wandering Jew come and go between synagogue and church?123 The critic André Billy, writing in L’oeuvre littéraire, remarked that Fleg is independent of all dogma, social and political, religious and metaphysical. He went to Palestine to find traces of Jesus from the Galilee to the gates of Jerusalem. For Fleg, the answer to the Jewish question is not assimilation as it is for liberal Christians and Jews, but universal peace.124

Conclusion By the mid-1930s many in the Meudon community, including Fleg, the Maritains, and Chagall, began to feel a deep sense of betrayal of the ideals of

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 139 the 1920s. There was a sense that their interecumenical experiments, the experiments of being both Jewish and Catholic, were ephemeral, fragile, naïve, and inadequate in the face of growing antisemitism across Europe.125 In their works on Jesus, Fleg, Chagall, and Raissa Maritain frequently (and purposefully) called upon the iconic Jesus as a way to draw Jews and Christians together, lifting up their shared values, but more importantly alerting them to dangers that were engulfing European society. In her poem “Chagall” (1939), Raissa reflected on Chagall’s depiction of Jewish suffering and persecution in his paintings: Then he has a Christ, Spread across a lost world . . . At the corners of the horizon, Fire and flame, Poor Jews everywhere go their way, No one asks them to stay, They have no place left on earth . . .126 In 1931, when Fleg wrote The Story of Jesus as Told by the Wandering Jew, he, like Jewish writers before him, detached Jesus from his Christian paternity as a way to challenge Christian antisemitism and moral complacency more broadly. In the text he argued that neither Jews nor Christians were acting in a truly Christ-like manner. In his words, “When Christians are Christians, then Jews may become Christians too!” Fleg posited that Jews becoming true Christians would mean that they would become better Jews, Jews like Jesus, a true Jew. Thus, in his formulation, ethical Christians and Jews would be one; they would coalesce in the name of Christ, the Jew of Nazareth. Judaism and Christianity would merge rather than diverge and a new kind of Judeo-Christian universalism would evolve when both Christians and Jews acted ethically. Fleg, like the Maritains, believed in the spiritualizing and civilizing function of art. Through refashioning Jesus the man and the mythic Wandering Jew, Fleg constructed a modern morality tale deeply rooted in ecumenism and reconciliation among nations that would usher in a messianic age.127 Through his stories of Moses, Solomon, and Jesus, Fleg aimed to speak to the French (predominantly Catholic) public, even though most French people had never even seen a Jew. By contributing to ongoing political and philosophical conversations, Fleg circulated ideas that challenged Jewish stereotypes and offered up attributes essential for ethical leadership. In the French imagination, Jews were the long-term resident aliens and increasingly associated with fears of capitalist exploitation or low-paid competition.128 Fleg’s Jesus story made visible what Fleg believed to be the hidden truth of Christian-Jewish relations  – that they are inextricably knotted together in spirit if divided by dogma and practice. But it was also a Jeremiah – a call to action from an increasingly marginal element of French society. Fleg reanimated Jesus in order to shake the world around him out of its moral stupor. Like Jesus he imagined the apocalypse to be immanent. And it was.

140 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus

Notes 1 Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994), 6. 2 Ibid., 11–12. 3 Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 23. 4 Weber, Hollow Years, 88–89. 5 For an interesting discussion of German Jewish reclamations of Jesus as a Jew see E. Loentz, “ ‘The Most Famous Jewish Pacifist Was Jesus of Nazareth’: German-Jewish Pacifist Clementine Kramer’s Stories of War and Visions for Peace,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature  & Culture 23 (2007): 127–55. 6 Edmond Fleg, Le marchand de Paris, comédie en trois actes (Paris: Imprint de l’Illustration, 1929). 7 Marie-Claire Viguier, “L’anti-Shylock: Edmond Fleg et Le marchand de Paris,” in Les juif et l’économique, Miroirs et mirages (Toulouse-Le-Mirail: PUM, 1992), 287, 291. 8 Fleg, Le marchand de Paris, 18. 9 Ibid., 19–20. 10 To put this number in perspective, Napoleon’s consistorial census of 1808 revealed only 46,663 Jews living in France, barely 0.16 percent of the French population. The Jewish population increased to 89,047 by 1866, but only 49,439 remained in France after 1872 when Alsace-Lorraine was ceded to Germany. Between returning Alsatian Jews and a few thousand eastern European Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, the Jewish population in 1897 rose back to just 71,249, still less than 0.19 percent of the total population. 11 Stephen A. Schuker, “Origins of the ‘Jewish Problem’ in the Later Third Republic,” in The Jews in Modern France, ed. Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, Brandeis University Press, 1985), 147, 165–66; Philippe Bernard and Henri Dubief, The Decline of the Third Republic: 1914–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), put the total number of Jews in France in 1939 at 350,000. One-third of them of French descent, 259. Also see Michel Roblin, Les juifs de Paris: Démographie, économie, culture (Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1952), 73–74. 12 Zuccotti, Holocaust, 19–20. Other immigrants involved their entire families working from their homes making goods on a piecework basis and were further isolated from even mainstream immigrant life. Immigrants set up new social structures, including soup kitchens and health clinics; they also brought new ideas and a new vigor to the community. They published scores of Yiddish newspapers, started libraries, theatre groups, lecture series, and schools, including the Université populaire juive; Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris, Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1986). 13 Weber, Hollow Years, 107. 14 Reviews of Le marchand de Paris, Collection Rondel, BNF, RF58762. An English adaptation entitled “Mr. Samuel” premiered at the Little Theater in New York City the following year; Edward G. Robinson played the leading character. The adaptation focused on Samuel the merchant, a large-scale business magnate, and his family loyalties. He has a “genius” for making money, but none of the social justice elements of the original were translated into the English version. See Brooks Atkinson, “The Play,” The New York Times, November 11, 1930, 31. 15 Susan Rubin Suleiman, The Némirovsky Question (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 59. Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942) was born in Kiev into a cosmopolitan merchant family forced out of Russia by the Revolution. The family

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 141 moved to France in 1919, where she studied literature at the Sorbonne. David Golder was her breakout novel, marking the beginning of a successful literary career. Her two daughters survived World War II; she and her husband, neither of whom were French nationals, were murdered at Auschwitz. Her unfinished novel Suite Française, which she wrote in hiding before her arrest by the Nazis in 1942, was published posthumously. 16 Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 184. 17 Suleiman, Némirovsky Question, 139. 18 Malinovich, French and Jewish, 184. 19 Personal notes on Jewish philosophy, Fonds Fleg, bobine 3, “Jewish mysticism.” 20 Catherine Fhima, “Au coeur de la ‘renaissance juive’: Littérature judéité,” Archives juives 39, no. 1 (2006): 41–42. 21 Edmond Fleg, Moïse (Paris: Gallimard, 128), 90. 22 Ibid., 9–10. 23 Ibid., 42. 24 Ibid., 101–2. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 90. 27 Ibid., 43. 28 Ibid., 163. 29 Ibid., 164–65. 30 Ibid., 166. 31 “Essais, Vie de Moîse” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6450493k/ f3.item.r=edmond%20fleg%20mo%C3%AFse.zoom?fbclid=IwAR0dq1Rn_ T11H3WIfB1Nj_p6X2REWYzV0L_KdaGJ0DF1fjhSYsWSuulLeec. 32 René Pinard, “Au fil des livres: Écrits juifs,” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k5688878v/f34.image.r=edmond%20fleg%20mo%C3%AFse?rk=21459% 3B2&fbclid=IwAR11HK-LHRTI8if7p71N9gkPf0Lme672h5JqTEUv9HvGf Y28jOr0pZSpHs4. 33 Henry James Forman, “A Human Moses Who Yet Is Close to the Eternal,” New York Times, December 23, 1928. 34 La renaissance politique, littéraire, artistique, “Moîse” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k56978530/f9.image.r=edmond%20fleg%20mo%C3%AFse ?rk=278971%3B2&fbclid=IwAR2ZXuJ7wMKp7tHV2jWULWZgqxH59VCpb N6N-eopbmbwwtQVV3FPEvCMsss. 3 5 Paul François de Tonquat, “Moîse” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k57 035789/f302.image.r=edmond%20fleg%20mo%C3%AFse?rk=171674% 3B4&fbclid=IwAR07bNScQELqnQ3rL9kKIJnxfhiON7ufi49PXuKYX-0JWNJh fYKG5cAYbis. 36 “Moîse” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57418122/f242.item.r=edmond% 2 0 f l e g % 2 0 m o % C 3 % A F s e. z o o m ? f b c l i d = I w A R 1 Q d j Z D 4 PA m V n M n D uhm_V9qna2QHSadOkFMZcPJviHaATnBQdtskzhpY3o. 37 Bernard and Dubief, Decline of the Third Republic, 175; Weber, Hollow Years, 27. 38 Weber, Hollow Years, 111–12; Bernard and Dubief, Decline of the Third Republic, 169–75. 39 Weber, Hollow Years, 19. 40 Edmond Fleg, The Life of Solomon, trans. Viola Gerard Garvin (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929), 10. 41 Ibid., 8. 42 Ibid., 27–30. 43 Ibid., 43. 44 Ibid., 71, 129. 45 Ibid., 129.

142 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 6 Ibid., 168, 181–82. 4 47 Ibid., 182, 189. 48 Ibid., 195. 49 Ibid., 203, 225. 50 Letter to Edmond Fleg from Fritz Aronstein, 1931, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 51 Viola Gerard, forward to, Fleg, Life of Solomon, 9. 52 L’Hygiêne sociale, “Salomon” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6456211w/ f22.image.r=edmond%20fleg%20solomon?rk=278971%3B2& fbclid=IwAR0yjVX6HSnpIQa2L2wmsn0bmAmAyYRGyGSUZMi1SInzYszaSeY Zx0uziMg. 53 “le gaîtés de la semaine” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k55046290/ f11.image.r=edmond%20fleg%20solomon?rk=343349%3B2&fbclid=IwAR2yrLz 2aNzmWkU20AP-5RO3Yl_xPAcfrj-3i46I05qba3ZmcMKc6tOl_rU. 54 Le Petit Journal, March 25, 1930. 55 “Les livres: La boîte aux lettres” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k63 20990/f4.item.r=edmond%20fleg%20solomon.zoom?fbclid=IwAR3_FBEy5J WPCyZ0g_XnoOkzSsL-dN0pGfk4QmS3bMH2R9sMVGY-wjgj108. 56 “Bibliographie” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62387895/f6.image. r=Edmond%20Fleg%20et%20Salomon?rk=85837;2. 57 G. N. “Bulletin” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5760118c/f304.image.r= edmond%20fleg%20solomon?rk=321890%3B0&fbclid=IwAR 15i-5Alkcj7BTAoycoqthnk50AfBGFedrwLQeDVR_jz8Qrqi3DdRHgq7I. 58 “M. Fleg Views Solomon in All His Glory,” New York Times, March 16, 1930. 59 Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century, Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 81. 60 Although the economic depression was less severe in France than in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany, it notably lasted longer  – until 1938  – three to four years longer than in the states cited here. Historians have widely agreed that there were a number of reasons for the particular trajectory of the economic slump in France. In the first place the capitalist system was less developed there than in other industrialized countries and France was less involved in the world economy; France was also underpopulated from the war, leaving fewer unemployed. However, the economic depression was more serious in the long run because recovery did not reach France before the onset of war in 1940. Its economic activity in 1938 was still lower than 1929. Bernard and Dubief, Decline of the Third Republic, 179. 61 Weber, Hollow Years, 37. The most famous of these, the Stavisky scandal, occurred after Fleg published The Life of Solomon – “a tale of low life in high places” – which involved a Ukrainian Jew (Serge Alexandre Stavisky, a naturalized French citizen) who issued millions of francs of fraudulent bonds and pocketed the proceeds. In 1933, his police record revealed that he had been pursued but not indicted for the past six years because Radical politicians and journalists had intervened to keep him safe. With his disappearance and death in 1934, the Radical Party, the parliamentary system, and the judiciary were all tainted with corruption. The Stavisky Affair provoked massive right-wing demonstrations that coalesced in a march on the Chamber of Deputies on February 6, 1934; the government fell and antiparliamentarianism once again flourished. Bernard and Dubief, Decline of the Third Republic, 222–25; Weber, Hollow Years, 133–34. Also see Paul Jankowski, Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 62 Weber, Hollow Years, 112–13. Also see Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Politique étrangère de la France, La décadence, 1932–1939 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1979), especially 29–53. 63 Letter to Edmond Fleg from Fritz Aronstein, 1931, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2.

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 143 64 In 1932, at its worst point, unemployment in Germany hit 44 percent; see Nolan, Transatlantic Century, 107. 65 Letter to Edmond Fleg from Abbé J. Brierre, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2. 66 Edmond Fleg, Jésus raconté par le juif errant (Paris: Albin Michel, 1933). 67 Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 3. 68 Ibid., 19–20. 69 Geiger quoted in Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 42. Ziva Amishai-Maisels suggests that Geiger built on the work of Christian scholar David Friedrich Strauss, who had rejected most of the New Testament as myth and turned to Jewish sources in locating the historical Jesus in his Life of Jesus (1835); see “Origins of the Jewish Jesus,” in Complex Identities, Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, ed. Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 51–52. 70 Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 235. 71 Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 40. 72 Schweitzer quoted in Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 13; for a discussion of Schweitzer’s Jesus and first-century beliefs in an apocalypse, see N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997), especially 19, 83–109. 73 See Robert Priest, “Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France: Popular Reception of Renan’s Life of Jesus,” Journal of Modern History 86, no. 2 (2014): 258–94. Many thanks to Dr. Robert Priest for allowing me access to the article before its publication. For a more in-depth discussion of Renan and his work see Robert Priest, The Gospel according to Renan, Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 74 Priest, “Reading,” 7–8. Priest contextualized Renan’s “historical” Jesus within nineteenth-century French examples. Historian N. T. Wright explained that Albert Schweitzer was concerned to “restore the conception of Jesus” and his “overwhelming historical greatness” against those who, like, Renan and Schopenhauer, had “stripped off his halo and reduced him to a sentimental figure.” See his Jesus and the Victory of God, 4; chapter 1: “Jesus Then and Now” for a fuller discussion of the quest for the historical Jesus beginning as early as the sixteenth century. Early German Christian historical reconstructions of Jesus’ life include Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples (1778) and David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus (1835), as well as the Jewish Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1838). All of these stressed Jesus’ Judaism. See Amishai-Maisels, “Origins of the Jewish Jesus,” 51–52. 75 Priest, “Reading,” 7. 76 Ibid., 8. 77 Ibid., 12. 78 Ibid., 13. 79 Ibid., 14–15. 80 Ernest Renan quoted in Priest, Gospel according to Renan, 88. 81 Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 34. 82 To date there has been no substantive genetic evidence tying Ashkenazic Jews to a Khazar origin. Most contemporary scholars dismiss the Khazar theory as myth. As such, it has been mostly deployed as a polemical issue. See Peter B. Golden, “Khazar Studies: Achievements and Perspectives” and “The Conversion of the Khazars to Judaism,” in World of the Khazars, ed. Peter B. Golden, Haggai BenShammai, and András Roná-Tas (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 7–57.

144 Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 83 Shmuel Almog, “The Racial Motif in Renan’s Attitude to Jesus and Judaism,” in Antisemitism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 255–78. 84 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity, Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 140–53. 85 Priest, Gospel according to Renan, 88. 86 After Renan, Sholem Asch, the modern Yiddish writer, embraced the Jesus figure as a move toward secularization and modernity. In 1908, Asch set off on a trip to Palestine to gather material for a work on Jesus, in his case, a novel. His journey resulted in a story entitled “In a Carnival Night” in which, like Geiger, Asch depicts Jesus in a Jewish manner and describes the Jews themselves as a “people of Christs.” American Jewish writer Emil Hirsch, quoted in Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 58. For a discussion of Jewish visual artists who were drawn to the Christ image in the nineteenth century, see Amishai-Maisels, “Origins of the Jewish Jesus,” 51–80. 87 Fleg, Jésus, 170. 88 Ibid., 7. 89 Carl E. Purinton, “Review of Edmond Fleg, Jesus,” Journal of the National Association of Biblical Instructors 3, no. 1 (1935): 1. 90 Fleg, Jésus, 53. 91 Ibid., 47. 92 Ibid., 84. 93 Ibid., 90. 94 Ibid., 93, 138. In the introduction to the 1993 French edition of Fleg’s Jésus raconté par le juif errant, Rabbi Josy Eisenberg suggests that in 1932 Fleg anticipated questions over the historical Jesus and his trial, and above all, asked all of the relevant and contentious questions concerning Judeo-Christian culture, including the meaning of Torah (Paris, 1993), v. 95 Fleg, Jésus, 138–39. 96 Ibid., 192. 97 For a discussion of symbolism, see Sally Charnow, Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Staging Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), chap. 4. Edmond Fleg was an active member of the symbolist theatre community around Lugné-Poe in the 1890s. 98 Fleg, Jésus, 96. 99 Ibid., 97. 100 Ibid., 98. 101 Ibid., 99. 102 Fleg’s narrative follows Renan’s in this case, in which he postulated a shift in Jesus’ life from the “Galilean springtime,” in which Jesus is popular and successful, to a “cooler, and darker, period when it seems as though his demands are too heavy to be met.” Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 102. 103 Fleg, Jésus, 210–11. 104 Ibid., 235–36. 105 Ibid., 314–15. 106 Ibid., 237. 107 Jay Winter, René Cassin and Human Rights, from the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 76–77, 302. 108 Fleg, Jésus, 283. 109 Ibid., 267. 110 Ibid., 271. 111 Ibid., 313. 112 Ibid., 96.

Moses, Solomon, and Jesus 145 13 Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi, 31, 58. 1 114 Brenna Moore, Sacred Dread (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 116. Garrigou-Lagrange was an old friend of the philosemites, Jacques and Raissa Maritain. He turned against them in the early 1930s. Unlike Raissa and others who turned to scholarship about Judaism, he marshaled his writing toward antisemitic ends. 115 Moore, Sacred Dread, 112–14. 116 Raissa Maritain quoted in Moore, Sacred Dread, 114. 117 Moore, Sacred Dread, 107. 118 Ibid., 108–9. 119 Amishai-Maisels, “Origins of the Jewish Jesus,” 73. For an in-depth discussion of Chagall’s crucifixions, see Kenneth E. Silver, “Fluid Chaos Felt by the Soul, Chagall, Jews, and Jesus,” in Chagall, Love, War, and Exile (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), museum catalogue, the Jewish Museum. Chagall exhibited one of his most famous paintings of Jesus Christ on the cross, White Crucifixion (1938). In the middle of Chagall’s painting a Jesus-figure is bathed in a shaft of white light; he is depicted as both a Christian and a Jew, a crucified Jew. His loincloth is made from a tallis (prayer shawl) and a halo encircles his head replete. In White Crucifixion Chagall made the essential connection between the Christian savior and Jewish martyrdom, between the death of the cross of Jesus and the contemporary plight of European Jews. 120 Chagall quoted in Silver, “Fluid Chaos Felt by the Soul, Chagall, Jews, and Jesus,” 108. 121 L. D., “Edmond Fleg / Jésus raconté par le juif errant” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k6229476j/f11.image.r=Fleg%20et%20Jesus?rk=150215;2. 122 C. Barthas, “La pensée et l’actualité religieuses” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ 12148/bpt6k413945x/f4.image.r=Fleg%20et%20Jesus. 123 Edouard Dhorme, Le Temps, February 10, 1934. 124 André Billy, “Les livres de la semaine” https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k46191472/f5.item.r=Fleg%20et%20Jesus. 125 Moore, Sacred Dread, 120–21. 126 Poem quoted in Moore, Sacred Dread, 137. 127 Catherine Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France: André Spire et Edmond Fleg,” Mille neuf cent 13, no. 13 (1995): 186–88. 128 Weber, Hollow Years, 103.

5 My Palestine? My France

Zionist ideology, as we have come to know it, is associated with “statism” and nation-state nationalism. That was not always the case. From Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (1896) and the First Zionist Congress (1897) until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism encompassed a rich diversity of responses to general questions about the relationship between nation and state. There were many Jewish intellectuals, like Edmond Fleg and Bernard Lazare, who, as historian Noam Pianko explains, “conceptualized nation beyond state as the central teaching of Jewish nationalism and the future organizing principle of international relations and world politics.”1 After briefly engaging with Herzl’s vision of political, territorial Zionism, Fleg and Lazare moved toward a more expansive form of cultural Jewish nationalism that acknowledged Jewish particularism and an allegiance to French republican values.2 Influenced by Bergson’s antidualist philosophy, both men struggled to theorize a Jewish national identity that renounced “binary choices – such as homeland versus diaspora, political autonomy versus individual assimilation, and ties based on consent versus descent – imposed by the logic of nation-state nationalism.” They sought to articulate an understanding of Jewish national identity in relation to contemporary concepts of collective solidarity in terms of race, ethnicity, and religion.3 Before World War II, Fleg’s Jewish nationalism was diasporia-centered and cultural in the vein of the Ukrainian-born Ahad Ha’am (Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856–1927) and historian Simon Dubnow (1885–1934). Believing that the diaspora was an enduring fact of Jewish life, Ahad Ha’am and Simon Dubnow promoted variations of minority nationality rights for Jews in their home countries along with a distinct Jewish cultural identity that crossed political boundaries, paving the way for the fusion of Jewish nationalism and internationalism. For Ahad Ha’am, Palestine was the center for Jewish cultural renewal, suggesting that a Jewish national culture would radiate out from there to the majority of Jews who would remain in the diaspora. Fleg, like most French Jews, recognized the territorial Zionism of Theodor Herzl as a possible solution for oppressed eastern European and Russian Jews but unnecessary for emancipated French Jews like himself. He, too, favored a diaspora-centric Jewish national identity that allowed for multiple attachments, for minority cultures with full political and civil rights.

My Palestine? My France 147 Fleg also believed that Zionism had a universal, quasi-messianic mission benefiting all humanity. Akin to Louis Brandeis’ notion that being a Zionist would make one a better American, Fleg argued that being a Zionist would make one a more humane person, a divinely inspired person. In this formulation, we see that his universalism was discursive. He seemed to be able to write his way into resolving tensions that were so keenly experienced on the ground by Christians, Arabs, and Jews. As such, it certainly had limitations, but it also had strengths as a cultural strategy, offering a discursive emancipatory challenge to fixed, singular, immutable ethnic markers. In 1930, when Fleg traveled to Palestine to conduct research for his book on Jesus, he was deeply moved by what he witnessed of the Jewish presence there. In Ma Palestine, the travelogue he published upon his return, Fleg presented multiple voices describing the Zionist project on the ground.4 Inspired by the hard work and resilience of those who were building Jewish agricultural settlements, Fleg was equally disturbed by tensions between Jews and Arabs and the duplicitous role of the British Mandate authorities. True to his critique of exclusive nationalism, Fleg found much of the zealous Zionism he encountered in Palestine as difficult as its French variant, especially the extremism of irredentist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. In a sense, politics  – British, Arab, and Jewish, as he understood them to operate under the Palestinian Mandate – only got in the way of uncovering the deep affinities between Arabs and Jews as human beings. Distraught by the eruption of violence, Fleg held tight to his vision of an idyllic future of fraternity between Jews and Arabs. His messianic hopefulness often blinded him to the very real political scenarios unfolding around him.

French Zionism from the Dreyfus Affair to the Great War The anti-Jewish campaigns waged in France over the fate of Captain Dreyfus between 1897 and 1899 nourished a small, mostly immigrant, group of Jews that identified with the nascent Zionist movement affiliated with Austrian writer and journalist Theodor Herzl. During the Dreyfus Affair, Herzl, known as the “father” of modern Zionism, worked as a foreign press correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse in Paris and wrote Der Judenstaat (1896, The Jewish State). Even at the height of the Affair, Herzl understood that most French Jews embraced assimilationist doctrines espoused by the French state and its liberal-republican consensus rejected the Zionist insistence that Jews constituted a people apart. The very existence of a separate nation populated by Jews would reinforce the idea of difference that they had worked hard to erase. French Jewish “antipathy” toward Zionism was rooted, Herzl contended, in their radically different emancipation history from that of Jews in central and eastern Europe. The historical essence of Israel, for French Jews, was its progressive denationalization and its capacity to transcend particularist nationalism. In 1897, in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair, Herzl called together and chaired the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Although Zionism appealed

148  My Palestine? My France to only a small percentage of European Jews at the time, 208 delegates from 17 countries attended this inaugural Congress of the Zionist Organization (renamed the World Zionist Organization in 1960). Half of the delegates were from eastern Europe and a quarter from Russia; Fleg’s mentor Bernard Lazare was part of the 12-member French delegation. Lazare’s stories, along with the international coverage the meeting received from 26 members of the press who attended, described how Jews from around the world, including all social classes and 17 women, a large representation for the time, convened a kind of symbolic parliament in Basel.5 All of this reporting inspired Fleg. Under Herzl’s leadership the Congress formulated and approved a Zionist platform that prioritized establishing “for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” Toward that goal they also encouraged developing “steps toward governmental grants which are necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose” and promoted the “settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine.” They also called for the “strengthening of Jewish feeling and consciousness.”6 For Fleg, this feeling of connection with so many different Jews widened his perspective; Jewishness was no longer just a reaction to antisemitic venom, but became itself an affirmation, a new consciousness. His vision of the “space of Israel” expanded; “what a past and what a future,” he remembered. His “heart was moved.”7 Oddly, the nascent Zionist movement found strange bedfellows in rightwing antisemites, including Fleg’s long-time friend, the anti-Dreyfusard Lucien Moreau. Moreau joined a broad swath of French right-wing nationalists who embraced Zionism precisely because it defined the Jews as a people apart. And as such, Jews were not and could never be full-fledged members of the French nation. Edouard Drumont hailed Theodor Herzl as a “clear-sighted, if unexpected, ally” in his antisemitic newspaper La libre parole.8 Herzl’s call for a mass Jewish exodus from Europe and a Jewish state in Palestine was seen by Drumont and other antisemites as a “prophetic inspiration.”9 In a letter written in 1898, Moreau encouraged Fleg toward Jewish nationalism as the answer to Jewish unrootedness. Fleg responded: I find in Zionism the calm and the force that I have been missing for a long time. . . . I find an endpoint to which I can apply my intellectual effort which is necessary to direct my life, to give it social significance. And I feel, like you, that I have definitively left individualism.10 Fleg’s belief that the Jews constituted a nation apart like Moreau did was momentary and inextricably linked to the rise of antisemitism in conjunction with the Dreyfus Affair. His assimilationist assumptions were certainly challenged and, as we saw in chapter 1, he began a lifelong exploration of his Jewish genealogy. Fleg explored his nascent interest in Zionism in a letter to Moreau, outlining the plot of a novel he planned to write. Though brief, and hitting many autobiographical notes, the story gives us a sense of the complexity and bifurcation of Fleg’s struggle with understanding his Jewishness at this moment. The story

My Palestine? My France 149 focuses on a young Jew who grew up in Alsace: his mother is French Alsatian and indifferent to Judaism; and his father is a religious German Jew but wants his children to assimilate with ease. The young Jewish protagonist tries, at first, to become German but does so without success. Instead, like so many of his coreligionists, he finds himself drawn toward France because of its universalistic values and its history of Jewish emancipation. In love with and engaged to a Christian woman, he experiences anti-Jewish hostility in the world around them. Like Fleg himself, the protagonist draws toward his Jewish roots in response to an external threat. In some ways mirroring Fleg’s own real-life experience, the protagonist renounces his marriage and his fiancée sadly accepts his sacrifice. He ends his days in the Palestinian colony employed as the head of a school and as an agricultural worker. Fleg understood his story to be about a young Jew who rejects his Jewishness as only a religion: “The young man only returns to Judaism when he finds in it a ‘nation.’ ”11 Fleg’s farmer/teacher character in the Palestinian colony, embodied a new, more robust image of Jewish manhood that included embarking on risky adventures and courting danger, against the current antisemitic stereotype of Jews as cowardly intellectuals, unfit for manual labor.12 Fleg created an image of a young Alsatian Jew, neither wholly German nor French, who fashioned a hardy Jewish identity, but one that could only survive in the Palestinian colony, not in Europe. There was no place in France for this kind of Jew and no place in the Jewish “nation” for intermarriage. Fleg’s depiction of the robust Jewish farmer in Palestine offered an antidote to the “crisis of Jewish masculinity” unleashed during the Dreyfus Affair. AntiDreyfusards profusely inscribed Dreyfus and thereby all Jewish men as effete and effeminate, cerebral, sedentary, weak, and even cowardly, “lacking honor and physical prowess,” as not really “men.” Taking these criticisms to heart, Jewish reformers like Max Nordau, a Hungarian Jewish psychologist living in Paris who would have been familiar to the young Fleg, sought to rehabilitate Jewish manhood and challenge these characterizations with competing images of ancient Hebrew soldiers. For Nordau, physical strength would lead to the “moral regeneration of a demoralized people.”13 Toward that goal, he proposed that Jews partake in a rigorous gymnastics program in order to develop discipline and to learn to act with a singular and collective goal in mind. Nordau explained: If the Jew sees himself honoured and possibly admired as a gymnast, as a fencer, etc., the good opinion which he will have of himself will help him all the more to lift himself up because his gymnastic exercises will have made him conscious of his dexterity, of his strength. Nordau seemed to believe the antisemitic diatribes accusing Jews of degeneration and effeminacy and he unfairly accused the Jewish leadership in France for the tragedy of the “Dreyfus Case” because of its belief in the “false liberalism of the French Republic.”14 Like Nordau’s gymnast, Fleg’s farmer/teacher fit well with calls for a new “muscular Jew.”15 Inspired by the self-defense techniques that immigrant Jews

150  My Palestine? My France brought from Russia and eastern Europe, Fleg, along with other French Jewish writers, including Henri Franck, André Spire, and Jean-Richard Bloch, met to study sword fighting and learned to fire a pistol in case of a violent anti-Jewish outbreak.16 Jewish men turning toward physical training and armed modes of defense was part of a much larger cultural malaise in France. Christopher Forth, in his study of French masculinity, explains that “force, energy, and action were asserted as cultural values” after Dreyfus’ retrial and pardon in 1899. The celebration of health, willpower, character, and courage was related to a notion of order, both internal and social, and suggested that “physical strength could serve as the bedrock of character and national regeneration” after the Affair. Sportive and fighting values were increasingly celebrated in French culture; by 1905, “character-building team sports” occupied a central place in French society. The rhetoric of “force culture” permeated both the French and Jewish press and was deployed to describe the health (or lack thereof) of the individual and the nation as a whole.17 In their martial training, Fleg and his friends were responding to this new culture of physical cultivation and renewal, Jewish and French, to combat negative stereotypes and fears of degeneration. At the same time as he was engaged in martial training and identifying with Herzl, he was also rejecting all forms of irredentist nationalism, writing to Moreau, “I understand your spirit, your traditional soul, your statist, rationalist, reactionary positions . . . but I am not anything of all that, or at least, I am of it in a totally other way and not essentially.”18 For two years Fleg and Lazare embraced Herzl’s political Zionist platform, but by 1899 they had distanced themselves from his statist project in Palestine. They were disenchanted and grieved by the way political Zionism had developed, especially the policy of courting the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II, who was responsible for targeting and murdering Armenians between 1894 and 1896, now referred to as the Hamadian massacres. In 1903, Lazare chastised the Zionist Congress for paying public tribute to Abdülhamid II, calling him “the worst of assassins.” One people could not be made free at the expense of another, Lazare lamented. His stance led him to participate in the pro-Armenian congress held in Brussels in 1902.19 Beyond courting the Ottoman sultan, Lazare condemned the Palestinian experiment as “bourgeois and antidemocratic.”20 The left-leaning Lazare argued that Herzl’s Zionism was “bureaucratic” and was built on a “plutocratic politics that had contempt for the people.” It “was capitalist and antidemocractic,” funded by a “Jewish colonial bank,” and refused to consider “the social condition of the Jewish proletariat.” Territorial Zionism, Lazare believed, was “bourgeois” at its core.21 Lazare remained on friendly terms with Herzl personally, but he had nothing but scorn for what he believed was his elitist, tyrannical, and condescending vision of a Jewish state.22 Fleg began to understand political Zionism as yet another form of chauvinistic nationalism, and he found himself leaning into Enlightenment principles embodied in the revolutionary Rights of Man. He felt a deep connection to the ideas of liberty and humanity, which lay at the heart of emancipationist doctrine.23

My Palestine? My France 151 Together, Fleg and Lazare continued to grapple with the meaning and contours of a Jewish nationalist identity. They moved toward a “mystical” vision of Jewish nationalism that focused on the diaspora.24 Imagining the Jewish people, Lazare wrote: Where is our homeland? Where have we suffered? Then it is everywhere. . . . It is made up of so many things, so many memories, regrets, joys, tears and pains that a small parcel of desolate, uncultivated land would not be enough and Jerusalem, like Judea, is only one of the pieces of our homeland.25 In their insistence on the diaspora as Jewish homeland, of deterritorializing and decentralizing Jewish nationalism, Lazare and Fleg were inspired by the ideas of two well-known (at the time) and widely published nineteenth-century Zionists, the Hebraist Ahad Ha’am (Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856–1927) and historian Simon Dubnow (1885–1934). Known as the founder of cultural Zionism, the Ukrainian-born Ahad Ha’am believed that the diaspora was an enduring fact of Jewish life. Given that, he considered the relationship between various national groups living within a shared territorial and political boundary. He argued for a middle path between the twofold dangers of assimilation and radical national separation. His aim was to preserve distinct national groups, often across political boundaries, and promote interactions of diverse nationalities within a single polity that would ignite both groups toward greater degrees of cooperation and cosmopolitan aspirations. He paved the way for the fusion of Jewish nationalism and internationalism through a process he called “imitation” that widens the nation’s scope to become “intersocial or international.”26 For Ahad Ha’am, Palestine was the center for Jewish cultural renewal and a Jewish national culture would radiate out from there to the majority of Jews who would remain in the diaspora. The Russian historian Simon Dubnow, originally from Belarus, did not embrace the “center/periphery” national culture associated with Ahad Ha’am. Rather, his theory of Jewish nationalism, known as “autonomism” or “diaspora nationalism,” sought cultural, social, and educational autonomy for Jews, along with civic equality. He advocated for extraterritorial autonomy through his political party, the Folkspartei, and its monthly journal. The central issue for Dubnow was the confusion between nation and state in Western political thought. Fearing a threat from the merging of the concepts of nation and state, Dubnow believed that a multicultural state represented the best hope for normalizing Jewish life. Jewish nationalism, for Dubnow, was built on shared language and culture, which together created collective solidarity and introduced a more ethical alternative to the nation-state model. Jewish nationalism revealed the possibility of thriving without political sovereignty.27 Like Dubnow, Fleg and Lazare embraced a cultural Jewish nationalism but rejected Ahad Ha’am’s center/periphery theory of Jewish national culture. Palestine was not central to their visions of Jewishness, but culture was at its heart. Fleg conceived of diasporic Zionism as a “dynamic and laic process of identity

152  My Palestine? My France regeneration” rooted in a modern sensibility that acknowledges Jewish particularism and an allegiance to French republican values.28 Modern Jewishness, he believed, would be forged from the Jewish past, the historical present, and the future. His “credo of integration” assumed a new dual identity. Reaching for a mystical, idealistic Zionist vision, Fleg imagined that “Israel” would become the incarnation of cosmopolitanism and the antithesis of protectionist patriotism and chauvinism or exclusivity that one would find in “ordinary nationalism.” Lazare believed that the modern state could and should integrate different cultural communities that carry on their national affinities. Any tendency to erase intellectual differences between them would be both harmful and even impossible. “Jews in the world today are a nation without a land,” Lazare wrote: They have a unity that confers on them a nationality; they possess individual traits that it is absolutely legitimate for them to keep. . . . As long as they fulfill their duties of human solidarity, how could one refuse them the right to retain their personality? It is an old statist and governmental prejudice that has been passed down into minds that sometimes seem emancipated.29 Lazare’s thinking on Jewish nationalism was imbued with revolutionary and internationalist concepts of “federation and group autonomy” in a diasporic orientation.30 Jewish national identity, according to Lazare, could just as well lead to emigration to Palestine or staying in place. In an unpublished note written in 1902, Lazare lamented: You want to send us to Zion? We do not want to go. . . . We do not want to go there to vegetate like a dormant little tribe. Our action and our spirit lie in the wider world; it is where we want to stay, without abdicating or losing anything.31 First and foremost, Lazare believed that “Jewish national identity must consist of adopting Jewish self-consciousness, maintaining Jewish self-respect and organizing collectively around these ideas.” Dilution or assimilation was undesirable and doomed to failure. Moreover, it would ultimately contribute to antisemitism. For Lazare, persecuted Jews “had to assert their Jewish origins and heritage without renouncing their claim to political rights” in their home countries.32 Lazare saw a modern Jewish identity within a pluralist framework that would not be limited by a single principle or territory. For Fleg and Lazare, the modern state could and should be a space of integration where different cultural communities carry their own national affinities. Fleg articulated this pluralist form of identity when he remembered: “I felt that I was a Jew, essentially a Jew, but I also felt myself French, a Frenchman of Geneva, but French.”33 Moreover, both Fleg and Lazare believed that Zion itself was a form of liberation that would reach all of humanity. When Jews asserted their Jewishness and their claims for political rights, when they broke free from tyranny, all people would follow suit. The cosmopolitanism of “Israel will represent

My Palestine? My France 153 the legitimate continuation of French universal republican values as opposed to the particularism of territorial Zionism.”34 Messianic and revolutionary, Fleg and Lazare’s diasporia-centered Zionism was meant to inspire liberation movements around the world. Fleg and Lazare were two of a relatively small number of French Jews to identify even loosely as Zionists. But others shared similar ideas and concerns. While not supporting a Jewish state, the French grand rabbi Zadoc Kahn did encourage some funding for Jewish settlements in Palestine, believing it was the responsibility of French Jewry to take care of deprived and destitute Jews. French Jewry more broadly supported such philanthropic and humanitarian projects and were likely to make financial donations to Zionist charities such as Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (KKL) but not to political Zionist movements such as the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress (WJC). Interest in a Jewish Palestine, if not a Jewish state, took many forms and is now recognized to have been more widespread than was previously thought.35 While Kahn believed that antisemitism was the cause of Zionism, he argued that Judeophobia was destined to pass away as human fellowship would continue to progress. Echoing Fleg, the French Jewish historian Maurice Bloch also believed that progress and French republican values were destined to succeed. When discussing the question of Zionism in 1907, he explained, I  am “for Zionism,” but a Zionism which “is more expansive, more open, which would unite not only Jews, but all the people of the earth.” When that messianic dream was realized, he continued, the triumph would be due as much to France as to the ancient Hebrew faith. When Zionism is finally realized “the new Jerusalem will exist everywhere that the Declaration of the Rights of Man prevails.  .  .  . The new Jerusalem will be there with the principles of 1789.” For French Jews the values of 1789 were so revered they were almost a religion in themselves and experienced as part of Judaism itself. Integration was defended as natural, as just, as consistent with the fundamental principles of Jewish history.36 As they affirmed their robust patriotism, there was no doubt for French Jews, including Jewish nationalists like Lazare and Fleg, that they were an integral part of French society.37 While Lazare turned away from territorialism all together, Fleg imagined a messianic rationale for a Jewish state, its mission benefiting all of humanity. The Jews in Palestine would create a “new type of Jew” and “new type of man.”38

Zionism in interwar France After serving France in the French Foreign Legion during the Great War, Fleg was more committed than ever to nurturing such a pluralist understanding of national affinities. His close connections with Jewish young people living in France – French and immigrant – through his involvement with the Éclaireurs Israélite de France, or French Jewish Scouts, also nourished a more nuanced position toward Zionism. But the British government’s Balfour Declaration (1917) in favor of a Jewish national home in Palestine came as an unwelcome surprise to the French Jewish leadership, including Sylvain Lévi, professor of Sanskrit and

154  My Palestine? My France Indian religions at the Collège de France, and future president of the AIU, the preeminent French Jewish philanthropic organization. Calling the creation of a Jewish polity in Palestine “singularly dangerous,” Lévi believed that Zionist objectives in Palestine would result in accusations against Jews of holding a dual allegiance. A Jewish national home in Palestine, Lévi warned, could not solve the burning problem of millions of eastern European Jews facing poverty and persecution, and it was also likely to provoke Muslim fanaticism and hostility across the Arab world. Fleg urged Lévi to embrace a more pluralistic position toward Jewish national identity and encouraged an open dialogue between Zionists and assimilationists in France. Fleg was asked by Sylvain Lévi, soon to be president of the AIU, to become involved in a “discrete Jewish propaganda” effort organized by the French High Commission for Palestine to distribute materials in Paris, at army depots, and the Foreign Legion. In a letter to his wife, Madeleine, on August  25, 1918, Fleg recounted his interest in undertaking such a task. He explained that Lévi “thought of me because I had been a Jewish volunteer for the French Foreign Legion” and that maybe becoming involved in this mission “would help show me my path forward. This will interest me enormously.” He continued, “I have a feeling that I will be useful.” While Fleg penned this letter, the French government sent Lévi, Bergson, and the philosopher Lucian Lévy-Bruhl as “French Jews” (italics in the original) on a propaganda mission to the United States to prepare for the Paris Peace Conference. Bergson, in particular, was charged with a number of missions in Washington, DC. Agreeing to Lévi’s propaganda mission, Fleg concluded, “will enable me to be of service to France to which I am so deeply attached.”39 After the Jewish propaganda mission, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, under the direction of Sylvain Lévi, maintained its anti-Zionist stance. The French Jewish leadership and the Alliance in particular had never embraced Zionism, even though, beginning in the 1880s, the Alliance played an important role in philanthropic and colonization activity in Palestine, founding and operating a few agricultural schools for the training of future colonists.40 The Alliance had numerous objections to a Jewish state in Palestine, according to internal reports. They vehemently argued against any proposition that defined Jews as a “race or a nation.” Only Russian and Polish Jews consider themselves as such, they believed, “because they speak a common language and practice a common religion. Doesn’t defining Jewishness as an irreducible spirit incompatible with the spirits of others only justify antisemitism?” By this logic, they warned, “Western governments could revoke the laws of equality.” The answer to antisemitism, they believed, was to defend liberalism. In fact, the Alliance believed that Zionism was subverting its model and understanding of emancipation.41 In January 1919, after Lévi had returned from Palestine with the commission, Fleg wrote to him criticizing the Alliance’s hardline position against Zionism. The “English and Americans have not turned away from Zionism,” he explained, making French Judaism and the Alliance “irremediably unpopular” with the rest of the Jewish world.42 Refuting the Alliance, Fleg, along with other academic and

My Palestine? My France 155 literary Jews and non-Jews joined the Ligue des amis du sionisme (The League of Friends of Zionism) initiated by André Spire in 1917. The Ligue claimed its French patriotism loudly; we are as “patriotic as Sylvain Lévi and the Reinach brothers,” they announced.43 Rather than seeing Zionism as a threat to emancipation, Fleg imagined himself and others like him as “ambassadors” of sorts, interpreting the “message of Israel.” These ambassadors, he reflected, would need a “double love” as they will be torn between “a homeland for all and one for some.”44 Defending the Zionist movement, Fleg, along with other French Zionists, insisted that they were not “rejecting” Jewish “loyalty and attachment to France or their commitment to ‘universal’ human values” but that “these ideals were perfectly compatible with support for Zionism and the ethnic understanding of Jewish identity that it entailed.”45 Where Fleg envisioned a “double love,” the Alliance, which had multiple Jewish schools across the Ottoman Empire, detailed numerous practical and political objections against any sovereign Jewish state in Palestine. First, it was highly unlikely that the Ottoman sultan would allow even any partial dismemberment of his empire or give Jerusalem over to Jewish “infidels.” Zionist ambitions in Palestine also led to increased restrictions over Jewish residence and land acquisition, especially for Jews who were not Ottoman citizens. Zionism, they feared, would compromise Jewish Ottomans.46 The Alliance leadership, in line with French governmental concerns, feared Zionists’ close connection to Germany. French diplomats, too, were concerned that German influence was growing in the Ottoman lands at the expense of French interests. The Alliance exploited French government suspicions of Zionism as an “agent of Germany” to gain official support for the network of Alliance schools in the Balkans. For Sylvain Lévi and the Alliance, Zionism in all of its aspects contradicted the French “civilizing mission as well as its best interests of international Jewry.” Lévi’s convictions that Zionism was both dangerous to Western Jews and unsuitable to solving antisemitism in eastern Europe fit well with French government policy.47 Neither Fleg nor the Alliance expressed any critique of French government policy and its imperial enterprise based on resource extraction and settler communities. The Alliance was also deeply concerned that the Arab Muslim and Christian populations would be deprived of their rights under a Jewish state. There were 500,000–600,000 Muslim farmers and agricultural workers and 100,000 Christians living in Palestine. Jews are a feeble minority of 100,000 in a population of more than 700,000 souls and only own a small portion of land created artificially and at great cost. They asked: “What will happen when Jews are successful in buying up a large part of the land? Will they face resistance when dispossessing the Muslims and Christians? Isn’t it difficult to imagine Jewish colonization under these circumstances?” They compared a hypothetical Jewish state to the creation of other states after the Great War, arguing that “it is not the same as the other created states with majority populations; take Bulgaria who, in 1880, became free from Ottoman

156  My Palestine? My France rule and independent. But they were the majority and they owned and cultivated the land.” The situation is the opposite in Palestine; do you only give rights of citizenship to a minority? For the liberals of the Alliance, “all Jews who want to establish Palestine must accord the same rights to Christians and Muslims and give up their former nationality.”48 The Alliance leaders also feared the radicalism of Zionist leaders Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow. They “have the same mentality as the Jews who are part of the Bolshevik government,” the Alliance warned. These Zionist revolutionaries, according to the Alliance, trick the British into believing that they will respect “the rights of all populations including non-Jews” in their Jewish state. But really, their aim is to “create a sovereign state” in which “no entente with the Arabs is possible.” The Alliance leaders asked, “Why was England so blind?” At this point in the report, the French Jewish leaders pointed to the Evangelical millenarian beliefs embraced by key British government officials, including Lloyd George, who saw Jews as historically significant. For these Christian Zionists, settling Jews in Palestine was a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. They believed that the restoration of the Jews in Palestine would pave the way toward biblical prophecy.49 This brand of Christian Zionism continues to effect, especially American policies toward Israel in our own time. Fleg was deeply troubled by the vehement anti-Zionist stance taken by the Alliance, but he never addressed their clearly articulated political concerns. Rather, he lifted up what he believed to be the benefit of a hypothetical Jewish state to Judaism. Fleg asked: “Imagine the state is created. Will the diaspora cease to be? Were the German, French, of English Catholics obliged to renounce their religion or to emigrate to Rome when there were Papal States?” Fleg explained: “The constitution of a Jewish state would end the equivocation that makes Judaism simultaneously a religion and a nation.” Not insignificantly, for Fleg and other French Jewish allies, the Zionist movement was first and foremost about providing a land of refuge for Jews persecuted elsewhere. Without mentioning the thorny issue of Arab and Christian rights in such a state, Fleg continued, “Palestinian Jews will constitute a Jewish nation of themselves.” Jews who remained in their countries would increasingly disengage from ethnic traditions to “develop Judaism’s universal character, its universal mission.”50 Fleg foregrounded what he deemed to be the universal character of Judaism, signaling that Jews in their various homelands would take the lead in creating a peaceful world order, guiding all nations to embrace liberal values like tolerance, equality, and freedom.51 Along with imagining the role Jews would play in disseminating liberal values world-wide, Fleg’s pragmatic priority was Jewish pluralism and inclusion. As one of the few French Jews to move between the native French Jewish world and that of eastern European immigrants residing in Paris, Fleg understood the importance of Zionism for eastern European Jews. He made the case to Lévi that the Zionist program did not in fact preclude assimilation. Furthermore, the Zionists, Fleg explained, “have accepted assimilation, why haven’t the assimilationists accepted Zionism?” The future exists, he continued, in the “harmony between these two movements. I am not proposing a neutrality, but an alliance, an alliance

My Palestine? My France 157 not in words but in actions.” Proposing a pluralist vision of Jewishness, Fleg concluded his letter to Lévi, “you are the only one who can make this union between the two grand parts of Israel, we must go forth without losing our strength in vain discussions and hostilities.” Dear maître, Fleg admits, “believe me, I know skepticism, but I am not afraid.”52 Most importantly, Fleg believed the Alliance was out of touch with Jewish youth. “To rejuvenate the Alliance,” Fleg wrote, “we need to make a pact with those who currently hold the youth and life of Israel.” And by that, Fleg meant young French and foreign Jews, many of whom identified with some version of Zionism. There is nothing to be gained, he added, “by being against Zionism.” Although a “Jewish state is only a faraway hypothesis,” he cautioned Lévi, “the Alliance must not sacrifice the success of a movement that has really awakened the Jewish soul from the most dangerous torpor merely because it might pose the theoretical danger of inciting antisemitism.”53 Through his commitment to and leadership of the French Jewish scouts, Fleg played a critical role in forging a broad and inclusive movement for Jewish youth in France.

Jewish pluralism and the French Jewish Scouts, Éclaireurs Israélites de France Fleg pursued his pluralist vision of Jewishness as a leader of the French Jewish Scouts, Éclaireurs Israélites de France (EIF). In 1923, Robert Gamzon, the 17-year-old grandchild of the grand rabbi of France, Alfred Lévy, and the son of an immigrant engineer from eastern Europe, organized the first Jewish scout troop in Paris. Inspired by Fleg’s story, L’enfant prophète (discussed in chapter 3), Gamzon decided to ask Fleg to become the president of the scouts. He remembers timidly entering the well-known writer’s “library with its large cushioned chairs” and being welcomed with “a broad smile.” Fleg demurred, explaining that he was “a poet and not capable of being a man of action.” Hesitatingly, he proposed taking on the role of “honorary president.”54 He served in that role until 1934. Officially established in 1924, the EIF was under the wing of the Consistoire,55 or Central Jewish Committee, composed of wealthy Parisian Jews. Its original purpose was simply to provide a scouting experience for young native and immigrant French Jews, to give Jewish traditions to young assimilated French israélites and give French culture to immigrant children in France. With these goals, the EIF would simultaneously serve Judaism and France. In its early years, the Central Committee looked favorably on the EIF because it was seen as a purely religious organization that meant to guide young people back to the synagogue. This approval was easily gained due to the social reality that most of the early scouts were from the “old” native French bourgeois families that lived in the most well-to-do districts in Paris.56 Under Fleg’s “honorary” leadership, however, the ideological space of the EIF expanded, becoming increasingly pluralist and accepting young men and women who identified as religious, secular, Zionist, or liberal (assimilationist). According to Fleg, “All youths who declare themselves to be Jews, including

158  My Palestine? My France Zionists and even freethinkers, should be accepted in a Jewish scout movement.”57 Although the scouts met in co-ed groups, the organization was predominantly male and certainly “gendered male.” Early on, the scouts embraced the kind of “new masculinity” we saw associated with the Dreyfus Affair. Gamzon, inspired by Max Nordau and the labor Zionist A. D. Gordon, strove to reinvigorate young Jews, toughen their bodies, and later on provide them with new agricultural and manual skills, creating the “strong and virile new Jewish man.”58 Beginning in 1927, Fleg also helped to establish a federation with local Zionist scout groups and with the Union universelle de la jeunesse juive (UUJJ), which had started a number of its own scouting groups.59 The scouts held joint activities with the Zionist group Chomrim, comprised of kids originally from Transylvania and affiliated with the leftist youth group Hachomer Hatzaïr.60 In addition, as the Éclaireurs became more concerned with antisemitism, they broke with the political neutrality and acquiescence of the native adult leadership. Although the scout leaders remained “neutral” as a movement, as individuals they asserted their rights as Jews to protest against every instance of antisemitism. While the group did not officially join the Ligue Internationale contre l’Antisémitisme (LICA) – International League against Antisemitism  – that was established in 1927, members successfully supported and aided the organization, much to the chagrin of many of their elders. By 1930, the EIF had expanded to 1,200 members from 600 the previous year, mostly in Paris but with sections also in Alsace-Lorraine, Marseille, and North Africa, and developed its Jewish educational and cultural functions. Ideological debates continued between the young leaders of EIF’s Directing Committee and the older advisers of the Central Committee who proposed that “a purely national Judaism be excluded from the purview of the Éclaireurs.” With the support and encouragement of Fleg, diversity won out. Gamzon explained that the movement had evolved “in a much more Jewish direction. . . . Orthodox Jews from Alsace have become tolerant of Zionist leaders, while the latter, for their part, understand the strictest religious observances.”61 The intermingling of various forms of Jewishness was seen by Gamzon and Fleg as benefiting everyone. Under their leadership, the scouts strove to develop a consciousness of the manifold varieties of Jewish identity. The same year, Fleg depicted the “future scout” in an article he wrote for the journal l’univers israélite. Future scouting would include diverse activities for Zionists and non-Zionists alike: The future scout will narrate a verse of the Bible and relate it to the life of a scout; he will read and translate a Hebrew text, will recite a prayer in Hebrew; he will draw a map of Palestine and mark the Jewish colonies on it, or he will describe the principal Jewish holidays and their significance.62 This, he argued, was living Judaism. In Paris, far removed from the realities of Mandate Palestine, Fleg could engage a map of the Jewish colonies in Palestine without confronting the difficult political questions that were unfolding there. All of that was about to change.

My Palestine? My France 159

Ma Palestine Through his leadership of the EIF, Fleg began to redefine the contours of his own Zionism from the cultural and mystical version he developed alongside Bernard Lazare to the more pragmatic support of Jewish colonies and projects in Palestine and the inclusion of Zionists in the French Jewish scouts. Through it all, he maintained a powerful commitment to Jewish pluralism and to his vision of the messianic mission of Judaism. As he was becoming more engaged with proZionist activities, Fleg decided to go to Palestine in 1930. Initially, he envisioned this trip – or maybe pilgrimage is a more appropriate term – primarily as a mission to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. As we saw in the last chapter, his biography of Jesus was subsequently published as Jésus, raconté par le juif errant.63 Upon his return to Paris, and before turning to his story of Jesus, Fleg wrote and published his reflections on Palestine itself in a travelogue titled Ma Palestine. Over the arc of 27 short chapters that make up the book, Fleg presented multiple and conflicting voices describing the Zionist project on the ground. The text is constructed around a series of dialogues between Fleg and those he encountered along the way: luminaries including Chaim Weizmann and Marc Chagall as well as regular folks like a cab driver proudly touring him through the cultivated landscape and a painter, Rubin, who preferred the vitality of the new and modern city of Tel Aviv to the “museum” quality of Jerusalem. Arabs were represented in the narrative, but they did not speak for themselves, as was so often the case in colonial literature. In a letter to Stephen Wise in 1931, Fleg called Ma Palestine “more of a confession than a travelogue.”64 Like a confession, it is a tortured account, and reading it is unsettling even now. Fleg was at once enraptured and dismayed by what he saw and how he felt in Palestine. In turn poetic, biblical, messianic, journalistic, and psychological, Fleg offered up a series of complex narratives with no resolution or overarching message, with more questions than answers. The problem of nationalist extremism remains front and center for Fleg. While still in Egypt on route to Palestine, he reflected on hearing a speech given by the right-wing revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. In it Jabotinsky relentlessly attacked Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization, for kowtowing to the British and to the Arabs. Fleg, referring to Jabotinsky’s militant stance, asked: “This nationalism, is it not the fatal consequence of Zionism itself?”65 True to his long-held fear of nationalist extremism from the days of Dreyfus, Fleg warned against Jabotinsky’s “integral” version of it in Palestine. A  young poet Fleg met early on in his travels explained the Zionist revisionist program this way: “The Arabs only understand force. The Arabs are the Arabs, you will not change them.” Fleg warned the revisionist poet not to label all Arabs with “one word” as had been done to Jews. The poet escalated his position, saying that Jews, upon the establishment of the Mandate, should have “immigrated en masse and expelled the Arabs, transferred them elsewhere, installed ourselves everywhere on the land that is ours by every means.” Fleg compared this kind of thinking to that of the Zealots, senseless Jewish fanatics in Roman-ruled Palestine who refused all

160  My Palestine? My France entente with the Romans, patriots without limits, who, through their patriotism, lost their country.66 Unlike the revisionist poet, Fleg depicted the local Arab population with care and nuance. In a complicated story that pointed to the contradictions of daily life in Palestine, Fleg recalled his taxi driver recounting the horrors of the recent massacre of Jews in Hebron that was followed by his commitment to defend Jewish Palestine to the end. The driver was referring to the riots that broke out in Palestine in August 1929 in response to a long-running dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. On August 14 and 15, 6,000 mostly Jewish young people waving the Jewish national flag, marched in Jerusalem around the Wall. The marches gave rise to violence, which, for the most part, took the form of Arab attacks on Jews. Between August 23 and 29 riots broke out across Palestine, including in Safed and Jerusalem, and a number of kibbutzim were evacuated by the British. Hebron was the site of the bloodiest incident: Arabs targeted a yeshiva and murdered 42 teachers and students. When calm was finally restored, a total of 133 Jews had been killed, with 65–68 in Hebron alone; 198–241 Jews were injured. At least 116 Arabs were killed, mostly by British police, and 232 Arabs were injured. According to the British Shaw Report, an investigation conducted afterward, the violence escalated because the local Arab population feared the economic impact of Jewish immigration to Palestine and Jewish nationalist aspirations threatened their own political and national desires with regard to the British Mandate. Palestinian Arabs feared the Jews as not only “a menace to their livelihood but as a possible overlord of the future.”67 Reflecting on the 1929 riots, Fleg was troubled by what he understood as British duplicity in Palestine. “In the latest events,” he asked, “what is the exact share of English responsibility? Why did the colonial administration permit the pogroms?”68 After the driver described the brutal massacre of men, women, and children in Hebron, he stopped the car to help an old Arab woman who was in tears squatting by the side of the road. He began to help her pick up her scattered barley and then drove her to the market, Fleg explained, “as though it were quite a natural thing to do, grain by grain, the enemy of the Arabs helps an old Arab woman to gather up her barley.” Then the driver invited the old woman to ride in the car and, as it turned out, the driver laughed and said: “It’s the first time she travels in an auto.”69 In the very next chapter, Fleg asked an agricultural engineer if he was “personally friendly” with the Arabs. The engineer explained: “I am fine with the Arabs. My work as an agricultural engineer obliges me to travel everywhere, I  know everyone, I live with them, eat with them; I spend the night with them.” The engineer also illustrated further the “friendly relations” that existed between Jews and Arabs. Before the 1929 riots, “some Arabs warned their Jewish neighbors to take shelter during the massacres. They often took them into their homes and defended them.” “After the riots,” he continued, “there were reconciliations; they ate halves of mutton together.” There were significant resolutions between “Jewish and Arab workingmen at Haifa, between Arab and Jewish agriculturalists

My Palestine? My France 161 at Tul Kerem, Zichron Jacob, Beth Schean, Benjamina.”70 Fleg asked the engineer whether he supported the Brit Shalom (also known as the Jewish-Palestinian Peace Alliance), an organization founded in 1925 by a group of prominent Jewish universalist intellectuals in Mandate Palestine that sought peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews.71 “Politics is not my domain,” the engineer replied. Through these stories and their placement at the heart of the text, Fleg suggested that bonds of compassion and friendship were forged through everyday life and work. For Fleg, one critical way that we affirm love and connection in our lives is through work. As we saw in his play, La maison du bon dieu, it was work and common cause during World War I that broke down the barriers between Catholic, Protestant, and Jew. Human hands picking up barley, Arab and Jewish working men breaking bread together, sheltering one another, these are the images Fleg lifted up as signs of hope and understanding. In his mentor and friend Charles Péguy’s terms, Fleg animated the deeper mystique or living sources in Palestine – in this case, the ordinary, quotidian routines of farmers and engineers, because they forged the critical connection to historical action and agency. Only through mystique do they  – Jews and Arabs  – recognize their common humanity. The reductive, abstract mechanics of politics, or surface politiques, only served to pit people against one another. In that sense, politics – British, Arab, and Jewish, as Fleg understood them to operate under the Palestinian Mandate – obscured the deep intuitive affinities between Arabs and Jews as human beings and their potential for a shared future. In fact, Fleg continuously pointed to the British as those who had stirred up the strife between Arabs and Jews, who sowed divisiveness in order to maintain their rule, and looked toward a future of fraternity between Jews and Arabs. When he saw a young Arab boy being jostled by an English officer on horseback he wanted to cry out from his balcony: “Brother Arabs, brother Arabs, when shall we become brothers?”72 Fleg’s friend, Edwin Samuel, a member of Brit Shalom and the son of an English minister, was likeminded. He told Fleg, “This will never become a Jewish ghetto: between Jews and Arabs, the differences are only accidental.” Samuel concluded, “It is necessary that in this country, two brother-peoples must fraternize.”73 Finally, forced to reckon with the political issues that had concerned the Alliance a decade earlier, from Arab rights to British duplicity, Fleg still relied on his belief in a messianic future of reconciliation, a radical hopefulness as a way to sidestep the ongoing tensions on the ground. While he recognized the British role in fomenting strife between Arabs and Jews, he dismissed the world of politics altogether in the name of a transcendent future where Jews and Arabs will celebrate their cofraternity. That position would not have been reassuring to Arabs who feared Jewish overlords or economic dislocation. Rather than ask the hard questions, the ones about life and death, violence, and disenfranchisement, Fleg turned his gaze to the Jewish pioneers and their hard-won cultivation of the land, the vitality of their villages and kibbutzim (communal, self-governing, agricultural settlements), and the depth and breadth of their educational institutions. From the orange groves and eucalyptus trees to the Hebrew University and its archeological collections, Fleg found beauty and pride. He described

162  My Palestine? My France Jewish pioneers with the well-trod hyperbole: they turned the sand to gold, they drained the swamps, cleared the roads, banished malaria and trachoma from the land, built modern industries, and developed forms of commerce. He also wondered if “this spirit of adventure,” which attracted “these dreamers,” would drive away their children. Was it a “dream of university men with university degrees?” His questions were prescient.74 Jews and Arabs, revisionists, and idealistic kibbutzniks, the question of Palestine weighed on Fleg. At times he felt at home there, and at other times, like a stranger. At one point in his narrative, he was perplexed by his feelings of belonging in Palestine. During a Passover Seder with “high officials, Judeo-English professors at Hebrew University, writers, doctors, business men, financiers,” Fleg thought to himself: “Little by little, I began to feel like I was settled here. I felt like I was chez moi.”75 Seemingly delighted by celebrating Passover, the holiday of liberation from the “narrow place,” in Palestine, he mused: “Am I, who in Paris can’t suffer nationalism, going to become a nationalist in Jerusalem?” With dismay at this internal tension, he wondered: “Where will I be me? Without any of myself destroyed?”76 At other times he felt estranged, especially when it came to language. Fleg, a man of letters, a language-crafter, was frustrated when surrounded by those who spoke Russian or Yiddish or Hebrew and not his native French. During a reading, the Hungarian poet József Patai spoke in Hebrew, Chagall, who was staying at the same hotel as Fleg, replied in Yiddish. And Fleg thought to himself: Ah, how well I  then understood how much the familiar spoken language reflects unlooked for harmonies, vibrant sympathies, secret contacts, revealed mysteries in every syllable! How completely they were Jews, these two men! How much less a Jew was I than they! As a scholar and a writer, he had compiled a wide assortment of Jewish texts borrowed from Talmud and legend. His plays brought “the church nearer to the synagogue”; as a messianist, he worked for peace. In Palestine, he felt the anguish of solitude. “I feel myself lonely in their midst, quite alone,” he concluded. But then he asked: “If it requires nobility to be oneself among one’s own, is it not equally noble to remain oneself in the midst of others?”77 Fleg’s dilemmas of belonging led him to develop an understanding of the possibility of a parallel attachment, or, to echo the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, a double consciousness.78 Fleg wrote: “One can be French and Jewish in Palestine. There is a harmony in being Jewish and French! One enriches the other.”79 He was not alone in turning the idea of a “double loyalty,” so criticized by right-wing French nationalists, into a positive attribute for French Jews. The socialist minister Anatole de Monzie, an active non-Jewish member of the Zionist organization Franco-Palestine, praised the spiritual benefits that he imagined the establishment of a Jewish homeland would bring the Jews of the diaspora. The possibility for Jews “to feel the same visceral connection to their history and ancestors as other Frenchmen would in fact enable them to be more genuinely French.”80 Zionism,

My Palestine? My France 163 like Judaism itself, and French republicanism, for Fleg, had a universal and messianic mission benefiting all humanity with its message of uplift and possibility. The Jews in Palestine were preparing a new mode of life, he believed, creating “a new type of Jew, a new type of man.”81 Like de Monzie’s assessment that being a Zionist would make one a better Frenchman, Fleg argued that being a Zionist would make one a more humane person, a divinely inspired person. These discussions of Zionism and French Jewish identity more broadly underscored the ways in which French Jews understood French republican values as the fundamental basis of their own emancipation. Their insular Jewish-centric vision did not lead them to question the impact of French imperialism, or the “civilizing mission,” on subject populations in the French empire.

Home? Fleg’s experiences in Palestine, his encounters with the facts on the ground, reshaped his Zionism. While still holding on to a messianic role for Judaism-Zionism as the harbinger of a future peace, Fleg could no longer remain completely oblivious to Palestinian politics and his Zionism became more pragmatic. After his trip to Palestine, Fleg was cognizant of the contradictory reality of the Jewish colonies there: tensions in their financial backing, their internal politics – socialist,

Figure 5.1 Edmond Fleg, 1932, most likely at Beauvallon. (From the private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

164  My Palestine? My France nationalist, colonial; stresses and hostilities with the Arab population and their own aspirations for self-government and fears of Jewish expansionism; the complex and often incendiary role of the British; and not least of all, their enormous creativity and innovation. In spite of the contradictions he recognized, Fleg remained aligned with French Zionists who supported a future Jewish state as a necessity for persecuted Jews from eastern Europe but believed it unnecessary for emancipated Jews like himself. But he also moved even further away from the mainstream anti-Zionist positions taken by the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Consistoire. By the early 1930s, increased violence and the rise of fascist movements generated a wave of eastern and central European Jewish immigration to France. By 1939 about 110,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Paris, almost three times the number of native Parisian Jews.82 A  large number of young eastern European Jewish refugees affiliated with the French Jewish scouts soon after their arrival. Young native French scouts were attracted to the new, more dynamic and passionate forms of Jewish culture, practice, and Zionism that the immigrant youth brought to France, finding in them a “living Judaism” in contrast to what they called the “dead Judaism” of their families. The EIF, moving further away from their liberal religious beginnings, became more open toward Zionism, but also to the exuberance of Hasidism.83 Inspired by the increased participation of Zionistleaning central and eastern European Jewish immigrant youth in the EIF, Fleg and Gamzon incorporated the use of Hebrew, as well as pioneering activities into EIF culture. In 1934, with the right-wing antiparliamentary riots of February and an increase in antisemitic incidents across France, Gamzon and Fleg, who was becoming the active president of the Éclaireurs Israélites de France (EIF), and known by all as Chef Fleg, refashioned the ideology of the scouts with the Hebrew slogan Simhah va-avodah (joy and work). Fearing that immigrant Jews would be seen as a drain on the French economy, Gamzon hoped that a return to collective manual labor would act as a counterforce to rising Judeophobia. He encouraged Jews to learn new skills and become producers instead of intermediaries. Their focus on manual labor was surely inspired by Fleg’s recent pilgrimage to Palestine as well as by the work of A. D. Gordon, a Russian Zionist philosopher and the spiritual force behind labor Zionism, a Jewish back-to-the-land movement that was establishing collective farms in Palestine. In 1935, with the hope of forging social solidarity, the EIF opened a community center on the rue Vital in the sixteenth arrondissement, Notre Cité. The Cité provided a social space for young Jews to meet one another while also functioning as a cultural center with a library where they studied Jewish texts. Former scout Frédéric Chimon Hammel remembered the Cité as modeled after a “small town,” with a “municipal council, a mayor,” and even “guards.” When the German Jew Leo Cohen first emigrated to Paris at the age of 14, he was warmly welcomed at the Cité. One Shabbat afternoon, Hammel recalled, Leo, who came from a musical family, surprised the whole community by getting up and singing a “pure, simple, beautiful,” psalm. We were all “charmed.” Afterward, Leo gathered a

My Palestine? My France 165 diverse array of scouts around him and formed a first-time scout choir, along with a small instrumental ensemble.84 Along with the Cité, the leadership also created a woodworking studio to teach technical skills to their young Jewish students and a farm-based, or Hahsharah, school near Saumur (Maine-et-Loire) for Jewish men and women. At the start, there were 22 students at the farm school, half of whom were French and came from Paris and Strasbourg; the other half were refugees from Germany and Poland. The young people learned to plant and harvest their grain crops and to tend their vegetable garden. They also studied Jewish history and current events.85 All of these changes did not sit well with the Central Committee members who oversaw the EIF, especially its funding. They were antagonistic toward Fleg’s pluralistic vision of the movement as it challenged their purely religious and “assimilationist model.” The tension between the “elders” of the Central Committee and the scouting movement, including Fleg, Gamzon, and the youth leaders, resulted in acrimonious debates over the nature of movement. All of this came to a head when the National Council of the EIF resolved that the “EIF tends henceforth to a conception of Judaism that is both a religious ideal and a Zionist ideal,” thus breaking with the past. The inclusion of Zionism, a national movement as an aspect of Judaism, was so distressing to the Central Committee it refused to ratify the vote. Committee members blamed this policy shift on the leadership, especially the young troop leaders who were at the helm, many of whom came from the Zionist Hachomer movement and brought their inspirational halutzique (pioneering) back to the land activities with them to the EIF. In his attempts to reconcile with the Central Committee, Gamzon underscored the scouts’ patriotic loyalty to France, but the members of the Central Committee feared that the scouts’ public expression of Jewishness would be misunderstood by French Christians as a form of ethnic particularism. These Jewish members of the native establishment, advocates of assimilation, saw French culture as a product primarily of the revolutionary-national consciousness, which was the same for all citizens of la patrie. The scouts, on the other hand, accused them of overlooking or denying that French secularity was derived, in some part, from French Christian culture, that French history and literature were profoundly imbued with Christianity. The reality of this was exemplified by the fact that the national Bureau interfédéral du scoutisme (BIF) refused to accept the Jewish scouts as an affiliate organization when they asked to be included in 1928, even though they accepted the Catholic, laic, and Protestant troops. The Jewish group was considered “too sectarian.” Even so, while the Jewish scouts were not accepted by the French scouting umbrella on the state level, they maintained good relations and shared activities with other French scouting groups and participated in international scouting activities that were affiliated with the BIF. This lack of recognition by the French state left the Jewish scouts in a precarious financial situation, unlike the other scouting organizations, without any access to state support or subsidy. It was clear that French society in theory and in practice did not consider the assertion of Jewishness completely parallel to the expression of Catholic interests and did not support the development of an ethnic Jewish identity. France had

166  My Palestine? My France welcomed immigrants as long as they recognized and adopted French culture as their own. The scouts, with Fleg’s support, were adamant and insisted on recapturing their “originality as Jews.”86 A compromise was reached between scout leaders and the Central Committee in which they agreed to leave the goals of the movement as those defined by Fleg in 1926: open to all young Jews, but without specific mention of Zionism. The Central Committee ultimately realized that the Éclaireurs served as an acculturating force, especially in the scout camps that brought scouts together from different social classes and ethnic origins. At camp, immigrant youth mixed with native youth and found an accessible bridge into the French Jewish community. They sang French songs along with Hebrew ones. The Jewish scouts sought to serve France and French values as Jews, rather than as individuals of the Jewish faith, modifying the ideology of emancipation and Jewish integration into French society as it had been defined a generation earlier.87 By the end of the 1930s, the EIF had changed dramatically from its israélite beginnings. Zionism and eastern European Jewish culture had reshaped the movement by transforming how Judaism was seen by its 2,500 members. Under Fleg’s leadership, a pluralized definition of Jewishness emerged, which nourished a broad-based membership from a range of social, political, and religious backgrounds. The scouts generated a new space for Jewish sociability in Paris and at camp, bringing together young Jews from different walks of life – religious, secular, Zionist, native, and immigrant. As historian Daniel Lee shows, the EIF put the “New Jew” at the center of its ideology, similar to the ways in which fascist and communist movements deployed the “New Man.”88 Co-ed but gendered male, the EIF aimed to convert Jewish youth from what it considered to be a mundane urban bourgeois existence to one which prioritized physical self-improvement and collective responsibility. Yet their broader, more inclusive notion of Jewishness and pro-Zionism did not undermine or contradict young French Jews’ commitment to France. As was argued at the time, the French Jewish scouts sought to give equal service to France and to Judaism. The EIF remained a staunchly French movement that, like its president Edmond Fleg, considered Palestine first and foremost as a place for persecuted Jews who needed a home.89 By 1938, the EIF was granted official affiliation with the BIF, thanks to the intervention of Baron Robert de Rothschild, a personal friend of the new president of the Scouts of France, General Lafont.90 A few years earlier, in 1936, Rothschild proved helpful to Fleg in another endeavor. According to Joseph Ariel (originally Joseph Fisher), a Zionist from Odessa who worked for the Jewish National Fund in Paris, Fleg was instrumental in securing financing from Rothschild for the Haganah (“defense” in Hebrew), a secret Jewish military organization at the time, to buy arms. According to Ariel, in the spring of 1936, Eliyahu Golomb, a founding member of the Haganah, came to Paris to raise money for arms in order to fight against an Arab revolt in the Yishuv (the Hebrew name for Mandate Palestine). Later known as the “Great Revolt,” the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine was a nationalist uprising against British Mandate authorities, demanding Arab independence and the

My Palestine? My France 167 end to unrestricted Jewish immigration and land acquisition in Palestine aimed at establishing a Jewish national home. The uprising was triggered when Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader, declared May 16, 1936, “Palestine Day” and called for a general strike. When Golomb arrived in Paris, Ariel took him to meet Fleg, not “a Zionist officially,” Ariel remembered, but “always a great friend of the Palestinian Jew.” Fleg understood that officially the French Jewish leadership maintained an antiZionist stance, but as individuals they were often sympathetic to helping Jews establish settlements in Palestine, especially if their aid ameliorated the plight of persecuted Jews.91 Golomb, like many Jews in the Yishuv, labeled the Arab revolts as immoral and terroristic, but David Ben-Gurion, leader of the labor Zionist movement and future prime minister of Israel, was one of the few who had a more nuanced understanding. He described them as a reaction to growing Jewish economic power, mass Jewish immigration, and the identification of the British with Zionism. In private he went even further in recognizing anti-British Palestinian national aspirations, “the Arabs were fighting dispossession. . . . The fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn into the homeland of the Jewish people.”92 While the first phase of the Arab revolt revolved around strikes and other forms of political protest, the second phase, beginning in late 1937, was a violent, peasant-led resistance movement provoked by British efforts to suppress the initial strike in 1936. Confirming Arab fears, the Haganah supported British efforts to suppress the Arab uprising from the beginning. Even though the British did not officially recognize the Haganah, they cooperated with it by forming, maintaining, and financing Jewish police squads. By 1939, 20,000 armed Jewish policemen were authorized to carry arms in Palestine. This unofficial British recognition of the Haganah allowed it to acquire arms and Fleg proved to be influential in this endeavor. With the help of the grand rabbi of France, Israel Lévi, Fleg introduced Golomb to Rothschild and other wealthy French Jews, which produced “not an insignificant amount of money” for the Haganah.93 It is not clear from the extant documentation how Fleg interpreted the Arab revolt, but clearly his help in procuring arms for the Haganah signaled a new phase in his support for a Jewish state, one that embraced violence. By the time the revolt had been put down in September 1939, 50,000 British troops, along with 15,000 Haganah fighters, had killed 5,000 Arabs and wounded over 15,000. More than 10 percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between the ages of 20 and 60 were killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. There were 262 British troops and 300 Jews killed over the course of the revolt.94 The revolt did not achieve its objectives but has been credited with the symbolic birth of the Arab Palestinian identity and the issuance of the British White Paper of 1939.95 No one involved found satisfaction in the White Paper. While it represented a British retreat from its support for a binational state in Palestine, the League of Nations held that the White Paper was in direct conflict with the terms of the Mandate. Jews regarded it as incompatible with the British commitment to a Jewish homeland as it had been articulated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.96

168  My Palestine? My France According to historian Tom Segev, there was a growing feeling among British officials that there was nothing left for them to do in Palestine. They were sick of Palestine. In a prescient comment, Major-General Bernard “Monty” Montgomery concluded, “The Jew murders the Arab and the Arab murders the Jew. This is what is going on in Palestine now. And it will go on for the next 50 years in all probability.”97 For the British, the Arab revolt revealed the seemingly endless cycle of violence in Palestine and their inability to contain it. The ongoing Arab-Jewish violence in Palestine showed in no uncertain terms the changed nature of Fleg’s pro-state Zionism. Whatever future brotherhood his messianic Zionist vision entailed, Fleg was willing to be an active participant in financing a secret army focused on creating an independent Jewish state, in working with the British, and in putting down an Arab revolt. Perhaps, Fleg’s ecumenism worked as a literary device in the 1920s, but a decade later and under very different conditions, its aspirational message paled in the face of his more active Zionism.

Conclusion Up until his pilgrimage to Palestine, Fleg’s Zionism was discursive, and his discourse was profoundly shaped by Bergsonian antidualist philosophy. Fleg claimed that Zionism, like Judaism (and French republicanism), in its highest spiritual form offered a humanitarian, internationalist vision and was imbued with a prophetic messianic mission of spreading liberty, tolerance, freedom, and justice across the globe. For Fleg, the spiritual, Judaism, and the spatial, Zionism, were not separate; they did not suppress or replace one another; they were inextricably linked. As the values he associated with Judaism-Zionism mirrored those of French republicanism, Fleg could easily identify as a Jew while being a loyal Frenchman. With the surge of antisemitism across Europe and the proliferation of eastern European immigration to France, Fleg became a more pragmatic and activist Zionist in his leadership of the scouts and in his efforts to secure arms funding for the Haganah. In the face of such a changing political landscape, Fleg maintained his commitment to Jewish pluralism in France and to advancing Jewish minority rights globally. In writing, he supported Zionist initiatives on the ground while eschewing any conflicts with Palestinian Arabs, without realizing the profound political contradictions inherent in such a position. In reality, he helped to finance arms for the covert Jewish army in Palestine whose mission was to occupy Arab lands and create a Jewish state. Fleg relied on his ability to write his way into resolving tensions that were so keenly experienced on the ground by Christians, Arabs, and Jews. His Jerusalem was a haven for all, “a return toward the Future,” in his words, with no checkpoints or barbed wire. By the mid-1930s, Fleg had stepped up his leadership of EIF in France. There were powerful connections between the Jewish scouts and the broader French Jewish community. Often, people wore “two caps,” one as a scout leader and the other as a member in other Jewish institutions like synagogues or the Zionist federation. At times, their dual roles created conflicts, but they also contributed

My Palestine? My France 169 to the scouts’ pluralist character – from halutzim (pioneers) to Hasidim – and were the reason that the movement remained open to an array of ideas and philosophies. Criticized as “too much of this or not enough of that,” the EIF was not always appreciated for its partnering with various organizations and groups, but its “broad sweep” was perhaps its greatest attribute and originality.98 Fleg was one such important connective link between the scouts and the mainstream Jewish community. While president of the scouts, Fleg, along with his brotherin-law, Léonce Bernheim, was also a member of the Congrès juif mondial (World Jewish Congress), an international federation of Jewish organizations founded in 1936 in Geneva. The Congrès defined itself as the diplomatic arm of the Jewish people and welcomed all Jewish groups under its umbrella regardless of ideology or host country. As we will see in the next chapter, after the German occupation of northern France in 1940, Fleg’s role in the EIF took on a new dimension aided by his connections with the broader Jewish world. Just before Paris was overrun by the Germans, Edmond and Madeleine Fleg made their way to their home in Beauvallon (Var), located between Marseille and Nice. Together with Robert Gamzon, Fleg created a “camp-school” where he gave daily lectures on Jewish thought to the EIF leadership and to others who had lost their jobs at universities or government as a result of the Vichy regime’s Jewish statutes issued in October 1940.99

Notes 1 Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 3. I am grateful to Dr. Lisa Grant for introducing me to Pianko’s work on alternative Zionist narratives from the interwar period. 2 Catherine Nicault, “L’acculturation des israélites français au sionisme après la Grande Guerre,” Archives juives 39, no. 1 (Septembre 2006): 10. 3 Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, 4. Pianko describes the Zionism of three other Jewish intellectuals, but his descriptions apply equally well to Bernard Lazare and Edmond Fleg. 4 Edmond Fleg, Ma Palestine (Paris: Les Éditions Rieder, 1932). 5 In 1897, at the First Zionist Congress the women in attendance did not have voting rights. Those rights (full membership) were accorded the following year. 6 Taken together, these goals were adopted by the Congress and became known as the Basel Program (1897). The platform gave clear expression to Herzl’s political vision in contrast with the more loosely organized Hovevei Zion’s call for settlement-oriented activities without a state structure. Hovevei Zion, under the leadership of Leon Pinsker, was comprised of number of Russian Jewish organizations that came together in 1881 in response to anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. 7 Edmond Fleg, Why I Am a Jew (New York: Bloch, 1929), 57. 8 Robert S. Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897– 1948),” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 4, no. 2 (Winter 1998), 63, 65. 9 Ibid., 102. 10 Edmond Fleg to Lucien Moreau, December 19, 1898, in André E. Elbaz, ed., Correspondence d’Edmond Fleg pendant l’affaire Dreyfus, 1894–1926 (Paris: Librarie A-G Nizet, 1976), 128.

170  My Palestine? My France 11 Edmond Fleg to Lucien Moreau, December 19, 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 128–29. For an exploration of the trope of intermarriage in French literature after the Great War, see Nadia Malinovich, “Race and the Construction of Jewish Identity in French and American Jewish Fiction of the 1920s,” Jewish History 19 (2005): 44. 12 Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), “Part III: Remaking the Male Body,” 169–234. 13 Ibid., 19, 63. 14 Michael R. Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, a Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 267. 15 Max Nordau, “Discours d’introduction (texte de) ‘Sur le relèvement moral, matériel, physique et économique des juifs,’ donné au 5ème Congrès Sioniste, le 26 décembre 1901 à Bale en Suisse (Premier jour),” Echo sioniste, January 15, 1902, 28. 16 Catherine Fhima, “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France: André Spire et Edmond Fleg,” Mil neuf cent 13, no. 13 (1995): 178. 17 Forth, Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, 204, 207–12, 214–15. 18 Edmond Fleg to Lucien Moreau, December 19, 1898, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 128. 19 Shlomo Sand, “Bernard Lazare, the First French Zionist,” in The Words and the Land, Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 199–200. 20 Ruth Harris, Dreyfus, Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of a Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 51–56. Lazare claimed that his Zionism was neither nationalist nor territorial but rather based on an ideal of full emancipation. 21 Harris, Dreyfus, 51–56. On Bernard Lazare also, see Jean-Denis Bredin, Bernard Lazare: De l’anarchiste au prophète (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1992). Lazare claimed that his Zionism was neither nationalist nor territorial but rather based on an ideal of full emancipation. Also see Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, “Bernard Lazare: Du franco-judaïsme au prophétisme romantique,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 89–116. 22 Debrauwere-Miller, “Bernard Lazare,” 103–4; André Neher, They Made Their Souls Anew, trans. David Maisel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 102–3. 23 Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897–1948),” 64; Catherine Nicault, “Sionisme et judaïsme français avant 1914: Les causes de l’échec,” Pardès 8 (1988): 58–67. 24 Debrauwere-Miller, “Bernard Lazare,” 106–7. 25 From Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, quoted in Sand, The Words and the Land, 197. 26 Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken, 45–46. 27 Ibid., 38. 28 Nicault, “L’acculturation,” 10. 29 Bernard Lazare quoted in Sand, The Words and the Land, 196. 30 For Lazare see Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897– 1948),” 64. 31 Bernard Lazare’s “Contre le nationalism du sol” quoted in M. Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, a Study in Elective Affinity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 196. 32 Sand, The Words and the Land, 197. 33 Fleg, Why I Am a Jew, 37. 34 Debrauwere-Miller, “Bernard Lazare,” 107. Interview with Fleg, Frédéric Lefèvre, “Une heure avec M. Edmond Fleg, poète et romancier: Judaïsme et littérature” Nouvelle littérature, August 11, 1928.

My Palestine? My France 171 35 Nicault, “L’acculturation,” 14. Outside of the mainstream, small enclaves of primarily working-class immigrant Jews with Zionist sympathies emerged in France even before the upheaval of the Dreyfus Affair. The Groupe des Ouvriers Juifs adopted a form of Jewish nationalism associated with early Zionism. The group clustered around a Jewish labor library on the rue de Cécile where Jewish workers gathered in the evenings to read newspapers and talk. Unlike their French counterparts who emphasized their patriotism and their Frenchness, the Jewish workers and Zionists perceived their Jewishness in terms of alienation; they stressed being a part of an age-old community of suffering that bound Jews together over the course of time; see Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 251. 36 Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 273, 276, 280–81. 37 Sand, The Words and the Land, 196. 38 Fleg, Ma Palestine, 273. 39 Edmond Fleg to his wife, Madeleine, August 25, 1918, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 166–67. For the Alliance, see Georges Weill, Emancipation et progrès: l’alliance israélite universelle et les droits de l’homme (Paris: Nadir, 2000); André Kaspi, Histoire de l’alliance isréalite universelle de 1860 à nos jours (Paris: Ed. Armand Colin, 2010). 40 Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, 252; André Chouraqui, Cent ans d’histoire: l’alliance israélite universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine, 1860–1960 (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1965), part 3. 41 Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Discussions on Zionism, 1917–1918, AIU, I.G.3. 42 Edmond Fleg to Sylvain Lévi, January 11, 1919, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 168–71. 43 Michel Abitbol, Les deux terres promises, les juifs de France et le sionisme (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1989), 82–83. 44 Edmond Fleg, Pourquoi je suis juif (Paris: Éditions de France, 1928), 212. 45 Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 203. On the particular humanitarian and pacifist values of French Zionism, see Nicault, “L’acculturation,” 9–28. 46 Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897–1948),” 65–66. Moreover, the Alliance was engaged in a fierce rivalry with the Zionists in Turkey and the Balkans to protect their educational programs aimed at spreading French culture in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean basin. As a way to strengthen Alliance influence, it actively sought to undermine and even to completely discredit the Zionists with Turkish authorities, with the Quai d’Orsay, and with the Allied governments during the war. For more on the Alliance in Turkey, see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Isréalite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 121–44. 47 Wistrich, “Zionism and Its Jewish ‘Assimilationist’ Critics (1897–1948),” 67. For more on Lévi and the Zionist Commission to Palestine, see Roland Lardinois and Georges Weill, Sylvain Lévi, le savant et le citoyen, Lettres de Sylvain Lévi à Jean-Richard Bloch et à Jacques Bigart, secrétaire de l’alliance israélite universelle (1904–1934) (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2010), 25–30. 48 Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Discussions on Zionism, 1917–1918, AIU, I.G.3. Aside from the politics, Zionism was expensive. They calculated that it would take a minimum 10,000 francs per family. “A few thousand we can manage,” they explained, “but 10–20 million it is impossible, especially a mass of poor, ill-equipped, unskilled people.” 49 Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Discussions on Zionism, 3 May 1918, AIU, I.G.3. On British Mandate officials and their

172  My Palestine? My France pro-Zionism see Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete, Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); Eitan Bar-Yosef, “Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture,” Israel Studies 8, no. 2 (Summer 2003). 50 Edmond Fleg to Sylvain Lévi, January 11, 1919, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 168–71. 51 This form of Jewish “chosenness” was popular in the nineteenth century; see Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, the Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3. 52 Edmond Fleg to Sylvain Lévi, January 11, 1919, in Elbaz, Correspondence, 168–71. 53 Ibid. 54 Robert Gamzon, “Edmond Fleg et les E.I.F.,” Revue de la pensée juive 1, no. 2 (January 1950): 19. 55 Under Napoleon I  a Jewish consistory was instituted in 1808–1809 and given state funding in 1831. Through the consistory Jewish leaders hoped to consolidate the gains of emancipation; it became the main instrument for effecting reforms in the organizational and cultural structure of French Judaism. The Jewish consistory was a quasi-official, hierarchical administration, composed of rabbis and laymen, which derived its power from the government and was responsible to the Ministry of Cults. After an internal struggle between the rabbinic and lay factions, the laymen obtained control and tried to use their power to mold a modern Jewish practice through redesigned ceremonies. They introduced sermons, orderliness, choral music, organs, confirmations, funeral orations, ceremonies honoring the birth of girls, and a modern kind of rabbi whose work was largely pastoral. See Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1977), viii–ix. Cohen argues that the consistory was the single most important and comprehensive French Jewish institution throughout the nineteenth century, and through much of the twentieth. 56 Abitbol, Les deux terres promises, 121–22; Alain Michel, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scout juif? L’éducation juive chez les éclaireurs israélites de France, de 1923 au début des années 1950,” Archives juives 35, no. 2 (September 2, 2002): 77–101. 57 Edmond Fleg quoted in Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 192. Also see Alain Michel, “Les éclaireurs israélites de France, 1923–1939,” in Mouvements de jeunesses, chrétiens et juifs, sociabilité juvénile dans un cadre européen, 1799–1968, ed. Gérard Chovy (Paris: Cerf, 1985), 334–35. 58 Sara Fishman, review Pétain’s Jewish Children, French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942, by Daniel Lee, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, no. 2 (2016): 342. 59 Established in Salonika in 1921, the Union universelle de la jeunesse juive (UUJJ) moved to Paris in 1923 when its founders, Charles Nehama and Jacques Matalon, emigrated to France. There were sections in North Africa, Italy, and Palestine, but Paris, with Aimé Pallière as its guiding spirit, remained the central chapter, with 600 members in 1928. Their mission was to “forge lines of solidarity between young Jews around the world who were at least 15 years of age and were ‘proud to be Jews.’ ” See Abitbol, Les deux terres promises, 119; Catherine Poujol, “Aimé Pallière, The Paradox of a Christian President of the Union Universelle de la Jeunesse Juive,” Bulletin du centre de recherche français de Jerusalem 5 (Autumn 1999). 60 Abitbol, Les deux terres promises, 122. 61 Gamzon quoted in Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 193. 62 Edmond Fleg, “Judaïsme et scoutisme,” l’univers israélite, December 26, 1930.

My Palestine? My France 173 3 Published as Jésus, raconté par le juif errant (Paris: Albin Michel, 1933). 6 64 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Stephen Wise, May 29, 1931, Papers of Stephen S. Wise, boxes 132–33, American Jewish History Society. 65 Fleg, Ma Palestine, 35–37. 66 Ibid., 85–89. 67 Shaw Commission (1930), Report of the Shaw Commission on the Palestinian Disturbances of August 1929, 150–57. UK National Archives, CMD 3530. As a result of the Shaw Commission Report, the colonial secretary, Lord Passfield, issued the Passfield White Paper in 1930, a formal statement placing restrictions on Jewish immigration and land acquisition in Palestine. The statement was regarded as “anti-Zionist” and Zionist organizations world-wide mounted a campaign against its implementation. The Zionist resistance led to the MacDonald Letter, which negated much of the White Paper and facilitated the increase in Jewish immigration during the 1930s when antisemitism in Europe was on the rise. On the White Paper, see Anita Shapira, Ben-Gurion, Father of Modern Israel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 86–87; also see for the 1929 riots: Tom Segev, “The Nerves of Jerusalem,” in One Palestine Complete, Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); Michael Cohen, Britain’s Moment in Palestine: Retrospect and Perspectives, 1917– 1948 (London: Routledge, 2016); Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (New York: Beacon Press, 2006); Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). For the French Jewish response to the 1929 riots, see Abitbol, Les deux terres promises, 138–45. 68 Fleg, Ma Palestine, 110. 69 Ibid., 102. 70 Ibid., 100–103. 71 Brit Shalom renounced a Jewish state in favor of a Jewish cultural center in Palestine, echoing the ideas of Ahad Ha’am. It also supported a binational state in which Jews and Arabs would have equal rights. Members included Gershom Scholem, Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Judah Leon Magnus (rector of Hebrew University), and Henrietta Szold. It was influential among European and American Jews as a counterweight to nationalist Zionism. 72 Fleg, Ma Palestine, 136. 73 Ibid., 77. 74 Ibid., 181–83, 206–8. A large percentage of children born on kibbutz decided to leave and, in some ways following in their parents’ radical footsteps, carved out their own independent paths; see Paula Rayman, Kibbutz Community and Nation Building (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 140–41. 75 Fleg, Ma Palestine, 129. 76 In Hebrew the word for Egypt (mitzrayim) means the narrow place. Fleg, Ma Palestine, 136, 143. 77 Fleg, Ma Palestine, 191–95. 78 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903). Du Bois stated that “he simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.” 79 Fleg, Ma Palestine, 163. 80 Malinovich, French and Jewish, 215. 81 Fleg, Ma Palestine, 273. 82 Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 19–20. 83 Michel, “Les éclaireurs israélites de France, 1923–1939,” 339. 84 Frédéric Chimon Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, Témoignage sur la lutte des Juifs en France, 1938–1944 (Paris: CLKH, 1982), 328, 284–85.

174  My Palestine? My France 85 Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children, French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40; Michel, “Les éclaireurs israélites de France, 1923–1939,” 341; Abitbol, Les deux terres promises, 122–23; Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, 328–29. 86 Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, 196–97. 87 Ibid., 194–95, 198. 88 For a discussion of Far-Right French intellectuals and the “New Man,” see Sandrine Santos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 89 Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children, 40. 90 Michel, “Les éclaireurs israélites de France, 1923–1939,” 344. In 1940, Lafont tried to defend the EIF against the discriminatory measures of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives. 91 Joseph Ariel, “Comment Edmond Fleg aida en 1936 la hagana” Souvenirs et évocations, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 92 David Ben-Gurion quoted in Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (London: John Murray, 1999), 136. 93 Ariel, “Comment Edmond Fleg aida en 1936 la hagana,” Fonds Fleg, AIU, bobine 3. 94 For the Arab revolts of 1936–1939, see Matthew Kelly, The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Rashid Khalidi, “The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure,” in The War for Palestine, ed. Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12–36; Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (2009): 314–54; Ted Swedenberg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2003); Segev, One Palestine Complete, 427–59; Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2008). 95 See Esmail Nashif, Palestinian Political Prisoners: Identity and Community (Milton Park: Taylor & Francis, 2008). 96 Morris, Righteous Victims, 159. 97 Segev, One Palestine Complete, 442–43. 98 Michel, “Les éclaireurs israélites de France, 1923–1939,” 345–46. 99 Sarah Hammerschlag, ed., Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), 66.

6 Le chant nouveau War, retreat, return

In November 1939, as the possibility of another war seemed imminent, Fleg’s younger son, Daniel, who struggled with depression, committed suicide. In April 1940, their daughter-in-law Ayala, the wife of his older son, Maurice, gave birth to a stillborn baby. And only a few weeks later, Maurice, the elder son, was killed on the Flanders front as the German panzers rolled toward Paris. Filled with grief and in acute distress after Maurice’s death and the imminent German occupation of Paris, Edmond and Madeleine sought refuge in their country house, Mas de Vieux Moulin, in Beauvallon near Grimaud in the Var region of southern France. Soon afterward, Fleg opened his home to the leaders of the Éclaireurs Israëlites, or Jewish scouts, allowing them to camp out on his land; he led daily study sessions with them, which led to a publication titled Le chant nouveau (The new song, 1946) after the war. “Learning is what makes us human, what gives us the strength for the struggle,” one scout reflected. Through his interpretations of Jewish texts, Fleg aimed to transmit a messianic hopefulness, a form of prophetic imagination to inspire and support the scouts in their clandestine activity. Forging a discipline of hope was Fleg’s act of resistance. In 1943, after the Italians withdrew from eastern France, and the Germans occupied the region, the Flegs went into hiding with the help of a Capuchin father, “Père Marie-Bênoit, the father of the Jews, as Fleg dubbed him.”1 After France was liberated by the Allies, the Flegs returned to their home in Paris, where Fleg worked tirelessly as a leader of the French Jewish community. In 1948, Fleg created, with historian Jules Isaac, the Amitiés Judéo-Chrétienne (AJCF), which was affiliated with the International Council of Christians and Jews, and continues to this day. He, along with Léon Algazi, inaugurated in 1957 the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française, which sought to reestablish a Jewish intellectual community in France that was involved in the public sphere and anchored in French Jewish history. The Colloque was conceived as a forum for reflection on Jewishness and gathered a diverse array of speakers from across the world of French letters; Emmanuel Levinas, philosopher and Talmudist, was an active participant. As we will see and Levinas confirmed, the writings of Edmond Fleg, inspired by a broad spectrum of Jewish literature from rabbinic to Kabbalistic, nourished an entire generation of Jews in France. For Fleg, Judaism was not about belief or doctrine but an exploration of the living texts of

176  Le chant nouveau traditional Judaism; it was a practice of text reading and interpretation. Starting with his very first Jewish-themed poem, Écoute Israël, interpreting and recasting Jewish texts for a broad contemporary readership has characterized Fleg’s career since the early twentieth century. Fleg merged personal, ancestral, and collective memory in his interpretive practice. In this compiling and layering of texts, Fleg was influenced by Bergson’s notion that the past becomes available to consciousness only when it is useful for understanding the present and integrating it with action. Memories survive, Bergson wrote in his well-known Matière et mémoire, to “complete out present experience, enriching it with experience already acquired.” Fleg employed remembrances, including textual traces, as constructive, as a way to interpret new sense data, rather than as just repositories of an antiquarian past.2 Fleg and later Levinas crafted their Jewishness through this process of interpreting and compiling Jewish texts. Fleg’s writing – poems, essays, plays – provided a condition of possibility for Levinas’ invention of Judaism in the postwar years.

Crises: personal and global Born in 1913, Fleg’s younger son Daniel always struggled with what was then called a “nervous disposition.” At best, he was emotionally fragile, but when faced with the polarization of European politics, economic depression, and the French antiparliamentary riots on February  6, 1934, Daniel was seized by devastating anguish and bouts of depression. His diary entries from that period reveal profound mood swings ranging from acute mania to debilitating depression.3 Although undiagnosed as such, Daniel most probably suffered from a form of bipolar disease. Between 1935 and 1938, Daniel vacillated between hope, self-confidence, and despair. In 1935, he spent time in a sanitarium in Cranssur-Dionne, writing in his diary: “With sane people, I have a sense of being abnormal; in the midst of those who are ill, I experience an inconceivable strength and balance.”4 In 1935, feeling “exclusively French” Daniel also worried for the “feebleness of parliamentary democracy.”5 He wrote: Because of Hitler, the German Jews are surging toward Paris and France. I find in myself a sincere instinct – I have nothing in common with them. My blood is revolted. I remain French. I don’t disown my race but I love my country more.6 In fact, in 1933 alone France welcomed 25,000 refugees from Nazi Germany, 85 percent of whom were Jewish, out of the 60,000–65,000 persons who fled the reich that year.7 Daniel was certainly not alone in feeling alienated if not “revolted” by his coreligionists, especially those from eastern Europe. Often separated by their language (Yiddish), politics (often left-wing), the neighborhoods they lived in, their employment and social organization, as well as their Jewish practices, a mutual antipathy developed between French and foreign Jews

Le chant nouveau  177 since the late nineteenth century. French Jews generally regarded immigrants as “old fashioned, if not positively anachronistic.” They were afraid that Jewish immigrants, so different from themselves, would provoke antisemitism and efface the gains the French Jews had worked hard to achieve. His father, Edmond Fleg, as we saw with his insistence on pluralism in the French Jewish scouts, was a notable exception.8 In fact, along with the wave of eastern European refugees, antiforeign sentiment with a strong accent of antisemitism burgeoned in France. In response, in 1935, a Jewish Popular Front (Mouvement Populaire Juif, MPJ) emerged parallel to the broader French Popular Front. The MPJ included most worker parties, the Ligue Internationale contre l’Antisémitisme (LICA), Jewish veterans’ organizations, as well as those of Jewish merchants and artisans, and few other Jewish societies. As a war veteran and as a prominent figure associated with LICA, Edmond Fleg was no doubt also affiliated with MPJ. The MPJ asserted that it was the most powerful and effective way for Jews to organize and combat antisemitism; it also offered enormous emotional support to immigrant Jews as they experienced dislocation and hardship due to their exposure to both capitalist exploitation and the rise of fascism. Importantly, the cooperation between Bundists (Jewish socialists) and Jewish communists with their larger French parties to which they were tied helped to integrate a significant number of Jewish immigrants into the French political structure. Analogous to the French Popular Front, which came to power in May 1936 and was headed by the Jewish socialist Léon Blum and fell in June 1937, the precarious alliances of the MJP also dissolved the same year.9 Alarmed by the rising tide of antisemitism, the reformist French Catholic Jacques Maritain, Fleg’s contemporary and colleague, as well as the most influential interwar Catholic intellectual, coauthored and signed an antifascist manifesto titled “Pour le bien commun” (“For the well-being of all”). The manifesto deplored the divisiveness of French politics and urged a common stance for the disenfranchised. It boldly articulated the kind of broad ecumenism that Fleg had envisioned more than a decade earlier. In the manifesto, Maritain actively aligned himself with the Catholic philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Mounier, the guiding spirit behind the French personalist movement and the founder of the journal L’esprit. Like both Fleg and Maritain, Mounier had also been profoundly influenced by Charles Péguy. As a response to the “soulless world” of interwar Europe, Mounier’s personalism was a philosophy in which each human person is understood to be made in the image of God, each human being valued but not necessarily equally; it advocated a politics of personal responsibility as a way to navigate a path between individualism and collectivism.10 Following up on his initial manifesto, Maritain wrote a second essay, “L’impossible antisémitisme,” in 1937 on the Jewish question. In it he argued for the need to embrace both Jewish distinctiveness and a shared, common humanity. For Maritain, the Jewish question was not to be “solved” but rather to be reconceptualized. “Only a pluralist and personalist willingness to accept Jewish distinctiveness in the framework of a common humanity, the opposite of the absurd Hitlerian medievalist parody, stood a chance of preventing ongoing tragedy from becoming a total disaster.” Maritain

178  Le chant nouveau believed it was an impossibility for one to be an antisemite and a Christian. Like Fleg imagined for Judaism, Maritain evoked the hope of a “new Christendom animated by a humanism that does not worship man but really and effectively respects human dignity and does justice to the integral demands of the person.”11 In 1938, in step with Maritain’s humanism, Fleg reissued his epic poem Le mur des pleurs (The Wall of Weeping) with a new title, Apocalypse. Its dedication reads: “to peace in the world 1914–1938.” The only change to the text was in the last scene in which all the world’s people were depicted as forming one human being: “A community in the same faith.”12 Fleg reissued the Great War poem the same year as the Munich Agreement was signed. Just at that moment, Daniel confided in his journal that he admired his dad; he described him as a model of a man who keeps going against all of the odds, a model of determination and commitment. Moving from veneration of his father to his own insecurity, he wrote that he felt “shame in his heart.”13 Humiliated by his lack of academic success14 and his emotional fragility, Daniel felt himself less than, not measuring up to his father. After spending five months in California with a family friend, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, where he tried to overcome his emotional demons, Daniel decided to leave his office job in Paris and take refuge at Beauvallon. In a radical turn, he decided to embrace the traditional life of a French peasant and become a farmer. Toward that end, Daniel was taken under the wing of a local farmer named Monsieur Cigalou. While learning to care for peach, lemon, and plum trees, Daniel also trained as an amateur pilot at the Aero-Club of Cannes. His journal entries in 1938/39 move between farming anecdotes featuring “père” Cigalou, reading books on cultivating fruit trees and fishing techniques, the satisfaction of and delight in learning to fly, and the frightening politics of the world moving toward war. From the occupation of Czechoslovakia to the arrival of more than 400,000 Spanish refugees on French soil, Daniel closely tracked the dramatic shifts in the political landscape.15 Beauvallon proved to provide a nurturing and tender enclave for Daniel and his parents. Inspired to take up the pen, Daniel asked his father for instruction. “After dinner, a new session would begin, literary studies with papa. He showed me point by point, image by image, how to take the simple idea” and develop it. He “encouraged me to make a pilgrimage across forms of expression. We compared a phrase of Proust with one of Bossuet and then with one of Montaigne.” By linking them together we could create a new “dreamscape” and a “new way of thinking”; we could see how they “unfolded in our minds.”16 “It seems like I am making progress,” Daniel confided in his journal, “pruning trees and pruning sentences. It gives me great pleasure.”17 Fleg’s son seemed to have found himself in the world of letters, in the orchard, and warmed by the Mediterranean sun. For three months Edmond and Madeleine committed themselves to their son. Away from their habitual life in Paris, all of their attention was focused on trying to help Daniel find a reason to live. And it seems that for a time they were all successful. But as he watched German troops occupy Bohemia, Moravia, and Lithuania and the Soviets sign a nonaggression pact with Germany, Daniel succumbed to depression that was coupled with physical ailments difficult to diagnose. Saying

Le chant nouveau  179 goodbye one by one to those closest to him – his brother, Maurice, his uncle, Léonce Bernheim – as they left to join the French army, Daniel felt bereft of not being able to serve his country. As the French army mobilized after the invasion of Poland in September, 1939, Daniel returned to Paris to seek medical help in the hope of recovering his strength, which would enable him to sign up for active duty. But it was not to be. In November he wrote this letter to his parents: “For ten years this illness has taken me away from the normal path of life. I  would have wanted joy and happiness but I had only anguish and deficiency.”18 Stricken physically and emotionally, Daniel took his own life. Daniel’s fragility had been a constant source of anxiety for his parents, and maybe particularly for his father. Edmond Fleg felt that he had failed as a father and as a Jew in nurturing the next generation. For months there was no sign of Daniel’s body. Fleg searched for his son all over Paris: in parks, at the Prefecture de Police, at the military recruitment office, at the city’s homeless shelters. He even consulted tarot cards. It was only in March 1940 that the river Seine gave up Daniel’s body. The Flegs were bereft. The death of a child, especially in modern times, is often experienced as reversing the natural order of things. In this case, Fleg was also overwhelmed with guilt and even fear that the family line would end with him. And he was not wrong.

Figure 6.1  Daniel Fleg, 1939. (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

180  Le chant nouveau His older son, Maurice, only survived a few months longer. Maurice, who had enlisted voluntarily for the front as a simple soldier, had been nominated to the rank of brigadier, according to his last letter home, dated the day before his death. In the same letter, he urged his parents to “make the necessary arrangements to leave Paris, if it becomes a necessity. Stay calm: I am only telling you the truth.”19 Maurice was killed in action on May 21, 1940, in Flanders. Only one month earlier, Maurice’s wife, Ayala, lost their baby during childbirth. Reflecting on her losses, Ayala wrote to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York, where she and Maurice had once visited, “Nothing is left to me, no future, no hope. Only hearing de Gaulle on the radio gives me a glimmer of life.”20 In less than a year, the Flegs were struck with multiple losses, and the extinction of something so dear to him – his descendants.21 “We are parent-orphans” was the expression Fleg used to describe himself and Madeleine. They suffered side by side, in each fiber of their bodies. According to Fleg, Madeleine, with her “Lorrainian strength, came back to life first with a will to live and to struggle.” It was Madeleine’s courage that helped to ease his own overwhelming grief. Even so, Edmond Fleg “hardly spoke about all that happened during those difficult months.” He spoke even less about “the years during which he had tried to relieve Daniel’s afflictions.”22

Figure 6.2  Maurice Fleg, 1940. (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

Le chant nouveau  181

Retreat: Mas de Vieux Moulin, Beauvallon, and the scouts As Maurice had recommended, the Flegs left Paris a few days before the Germans occupied the city. Fleg wrote to his friend, Rabbi Stephen Wise, after the deaths of Daniel and Maurice, “We have no more sons. I can say nothing more about this.” Clearly unable to articulate his grief, he explained that they were staying in Montpellier for a few days with friends. “From here,” he wrote, “we will go to our property by the sea. I don’t know if I will be able to find the Europe I know again, it is so changed, or if I will find the atmosphere necessary for my work.” His brother-in-law, Léonce, and his wife, Renée, and their two boys, Philippe and Antoine, were also with them.23 Beginning on July  17, 1940, soon after the Flegs arrived at their home in Beauvallon, and less than a week after it was formed, the French government at Vichy promulgated a flurry of laws aimed at excluding and defining Jews. These laws and decrees were applicable in both zones, the Nazi-occupied north and the unoccupied south. The law first limited employment in the public sector to individuals born of French fathers. Laws on August 16 and September 10 similarly regulated the practice of medicine and law. The July 22 measure authorized the minister of justice to establish a commission to review all grants of French citizenship awarded under the liberal law of 1927. On August 27, the DaladierMarchandeau decree from 1939, which prohibited antisemitic propaganda and prohibited attacks on individuals in the press based on race or religion, was abrogated; laws on September 3 and 27 gave prefects the power to intern individuals considered dangerous to national security, in the first case, and all male immigrants between 18 and 55 were deemed “superfluous in the national economy,” in the second.24 On October  3, 1940, the Vichy regime promulgated its first Statut des Juifs (Law concerning the status of Jews), which actually broadened the German definition of who was Jewish, as it applied in the occupied zone, to include anyone with just two grandparents of the Jewish race who was also married to a Jew. In addition, the same law barred Jews from employment in a broad array of jobs, including civil service, the officer corps of the armed forces, education, journalism, the theatre, radio, and cinema. On the October 4, an ordinance authorizing the internment of the “excessive numbers” of all foreign Jews was decreed; on October 7 the Crémieux decree of 1870 that had granted Algerian Jews French citizenship was abrogated, which resulted in depriving roughly 115,000 Jews of their citizenship. From the beginning of October 1940 to September  16, 1941, the Journal official (legislative gazette) published the texts of 26 laws, 24 decrees, 6 orders, and 1 regulation concerning the Jews. This legislative fever, 57 bills in less than a year, was “quite an antisemitic accomplishment!” according to Pierre Chaillet, a Catholic cleric who protested the persecutions.25 All of these measures had the same objective: the exclusion of Jews from the national community. Fleg’s friend, the theatre director Gaston Baty, wrote to him with disdain about the current state of affairs. “The defeat is not the worst thing,” Baty lamented, “but it is the obligation to relearn what is bad and what is ‘good,’ I will never accept this service to ideology.”26

182  Le chant nouveau After the initial disruption of what has become known as the “exodus” in June 1940, French Jews returned to Paris in lesser numbers than immigrant Jews, due to their financial and social advantages, thus the percentage of those returning to Paris decreased as their social category rose.27 The Flegs settled into their house, Le Vieux Moulin, in Beauvallon (Var), and the leadership of the Jewish scouts, or EIF, made their way to the Flegs’ home and surrounded the grieving couple. According to many accounts, the young scouts revitalized Edmond. One scout leader remembered that even in the face of such sadness, Fleg had a “superhuman” capacity for serenity.28 In his “blackest hour and in the darkest days,” Fleg was described by those who knew him as “a man of hope.” It was “inked in him, woven into his very fabric” part of his DNA.29 But it was also hard won. As we have seen, Fleg was devastated by the magnitude of his losses and only nurtured back to his capacity for hope through the support of Madeleine, and probably many others. Reflecting on this period shortly after the war, Fleg wrote: “Never will I refuse hope. I see rising from afar, generations of unknowing children, who starting their lives also start mine again.”30 In response to Vichy’s October 1940 Statut des Juifs that had eliminated Jewish intellectuals from their positions at universities, national education more broadly, and in public professions, Fleg and EIF leader Robert Gamzon (a.k.a. Castor, his nom de guerre) invited 25 principal leaders of the Jewish scouting movement along with a comparable number of newly “unemployed” intellectuals who had been victims of the statutes to a school-camp adjacent to his house. Gamzon had ulterior motives as well. He felt that Fleg needed concrete tasks at this point, as a way to bring him out of his emotional distress. With the support of rabbis Samy Klein and Léo Cohn, and the Yiddish educator/writer Isaac Pougatch,31 Fleg embraced the project of working with this group of scout leaders and intellectuals as the only possible way to ease his sadness and to address the acute problems of the hour. He remembered: These young intellectuals thrown out of their schools, polytechnics, training schools, were born Jewish but were strangers to Judaism. They came camping in the countryside near our Vieux-Moulin, where the scouts, touched by my mourning, had the idea to invite me to work alongside them with these novices.32 Between April 28 and May 12, 1941, Fleg and Gamzon jointly led the “campschool” to help reorient the young Jewish intellectuals who had lost their positions. Their goal was to open these intellectuals up to knowledge of Jewish history – ancient and modern – and instill a Jewish consciousness, a sense of Jewish belonging. The camp-school also became a recruitment tool for scout managers, as there was a tremendous need for scout managers in the newly forming rural and village groups, as well as at the maisons d’enfants (children’s houses) that the scouts had begun operating. Former scout Frédéric Chimon Hammel (a.k.a. Chameau, his nom de guerre), a university chemistry professor at Clermont-Ferrand

Le chant nouveau  183 until the October laws, explained that “[the camp] opened new horizons for those of us who experienced it. We learned how to distinguish between what was essential and what was not.” Often, as “we convinced another, we convinced ourselves.” The ambiance was quite unusual, Hammel explained; connections were made between “novices” and “leaders,” the “young” and the “old”; we all “profited from being exposed to the conversations”; many “discovered a joint patrimony that had not been known before.” Fleg’s personality dominated all of us – men and women. While Fleg and Gamzon seemed to have a seamless rapport, “the presence of a poet, a thinker,” Hammel insisted, “softened and multiplied the influence of Gamzon.”33 One day while looking at the scouts, Fleg told them: “You have given me a third paternity.”34 At Beauvallon, Gamzon was moved by the natural world around him. As we saw in the last chapter, the scouts valued manual labor and the natural world, believing both to be important for Jewish renewal in France. From this vantage point, Gamzon articulated the scouting movement’s philosophy of Judaism as one of “harmony,” seeing it as the leitmotif threaded through Jewish history, texts, and values. Harmony, a vague and all-encompassing term for Gamzon,

Figure 6.3 Group d’Éclaireurs Israélites de France dont Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, Léo Cohn et Claude Gutman rassemblés devant une maison à Beauvallon (Var), France 1941 [A group of French Jewish scouts including Edmond Fleg, Robert Gamzon, Léo Cohn, and Claude Gutman assembled in front of a house (most likely Fleg’s) in Beauvallon (Var), France 1941]. (Ml_1177: Mémorial de la Shoah).

184  Le chant nouveau

Figure 6.4 Samy Klein, Marc Haguenau, Edmond Fleg et Robert Gamzon résistants et Éclaireurs Israélites de France, Beauvallon, 1941 [Resistants and French Jewish scouts, Samy Klein, Marc Haguenau, Edmond Fleg, and Robert Gamzon, Beauvallon, 1941]. (Ml_967: Mémorial de la Shoah).

was the “ideal of a Jewish life, of all human life.” In 1941, while at Beauvallon, Gamzon first presented a draft of his text, Harmony, writing: Man is one, flesh and spirit. . . . Man is a social being. This one life, in which flesh and spirit will both be satisfied, will be possible only in a harmonious and unified society guided by laws that will bring or facilitate this harmony.35 Fleg lifted up Gamzon’s sense of harmony and social cohesion at the camp-school in his forward to the published version: The landscape amplified an invisible presence that wove us all together, together with the land. A  clarity emerged, like an ancient stone under an old olive grove. Blue sea, blue sky, all blue. Invisible connections united us, creating a harmony.36 Not only were the scouts and intellectuals transformed by the camp experience, but, according to Hammel, a “new Gamzon,” a “new Fleg,” and a “new National Team” emerged from Beauvallon. Hammel wrote, “the leadership, strengthened by its work together in the spiritual realm, was ready to face antisemitism straight on.”37 Emboldened by their training, this new stronger leadership team composed

Le chant nouveau  185 of many younger Jewish scouts fiercely debated an array of ideological positions in Sois-Chic, a journal that circulated among their different groups from fall 1941 until June 1944. Writing on issues such as returning to the land, debates within Judaism, questions concerning Zionism, education, utopian dreams, morality, liberty, truth, justice, even chastity testified to the rich intellectual life of the scouts. Inspired by Fleg’s teaching, their aim was to develop a “critical spirit.”38 It is impossible to overestimate the enormous role played by the EIF during the war, especially their clandestine networks that saved thousands of Jewish children from deportation and almost certain extermination. Early on, the EIF established about ten settlements that were run entirely by older scouts and their adult supervisors. The largest and best known of these farms were at Taluyers (Rhône), near Lyon, established under the supervision of Hammel and his wife, and at Charry, under the leadership of Issac and Juliette Pougatch, near Mossaïc (Tarn-et-Garonne), the national headquarters of the EIF that included a children’s residence, and at Lautrec (Tarn), directed by Gamzon, Léo Cohn, and Gilbert Bloch. Jewish teenagers lived full time in these communities, farming, studying, and learning a trade. Some of the residents were French and joined a settlement because they were orphans or to escape raids during the first few months of the war, but most of the children were either foreigners or children of foreigners. When the scouts first arrived, they found abandoned farms that were in various states of disrepair. Within a year, they were viable economic units, “with cows, hens, and grain production.” Many farms also offered training in manual skills, such as metalwork and blacksmithing, wood working, sewing and dressmaking, and shoe repair.39 On November 29, 1941, not long after Fleg’s first camp-school at Beauvallon, the Vichy regime announced another anti-Jewish measure. They established the Union générale des juifs de France (UGIF), an umbrella organization to handle Jewish affairs with separate branches in the northern and southern zones.40 The measure was a response to a German ultimatum for a single coordinating council of Jewish affairs. Under the law that created the organization, membership was compulsory for all Jews, both citizens and alien residents, and all Jewish organizations, except the consistory, were dissolved and their functions and assets were turned over to the UGIF. In January  1942, Gamzon became minister of the UGIF’s youth division, making him responsible for all Jewish youth in the unoccupied zone. As such, he supervised a number of farm schools, including Taluyers and Lautrec. The farms, later sites of great suffering and hardship, initially gave Gamzon an opportunity to realize his vision of Jewish collective agricultural life. Early on, Jewish festivals were celebrated with fervor, and for some, it was their first experience of Jewish ceremonial life.41 Also under his jurisdiction were numerous children’s homes maintained by the UGIF for orphans and children separated from their parents due to internment and, after August 1942, deportation. In the south, the UGIF operated with relative autonomy. Its legal cover allowed some agencies, especially the EIF and the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), a child welfare organization, to drift more and more completely into clandestine and illegal rescue work after August 1942, even while officially the UGIF

186  Le chant nouveau was committed to “obedience to the law.”42 Gamzon was a case in point. His continued association with the UGIF came under fire by other leaders who chose not to maintain their alliance. In response, Gamzon explained that maintaining his membership in the leadership council of the UGIF allowed him to accomplish his “illegal work” more easily, especially clandestine publishing, which he could pass under the cover of his position.43 Fleg continued to host young scholars, professionals, and scouts at Beauvallon after the initial camp-school in 1941. When EIF leader Emmanuel Eydoux met the Flegs at Beauvallon, he found them “sad and but also with smiles. I saw so many young Jews,” Eydoux recalled, “crossing the fields coming from all directions  – old Jewish professors, engineers, and us, the leaders of the scouts, the Éclaireurs Israélites – we were all welcomed as his sons.” Fleg “gave us his knowledge of Israel and he still had trust in and loyalty to his France of tolerance, respect, righteousness.” With great resolve due to the events unfolding around him, Fleg’s powerful message to his “sons” was “loyalty leads to loyalty, love leads to love. Be men of love and of loyalty.”44 Fleg was surrounded by scouts and scholars, young and old, some fervent descendants from the Hasidim, other conservers of the emancipation of 1791, liberals guarding the social justice claims of the prophets, but rejecting religious practices, and Zionists who saw in Judaism a nationality. Here it was, the pluralist Jewish community he had advocated

Figure 6.5 Edmond Fleg at Moissac, circa 1942. (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

Le chant nouveau  187 for so fiercely. In the midst of it all, perhaps in an act of defiance, Fleg published Daniel’s journal under the Vichy censor, concluding its final page with these words: “He fell like his brother but in another combat.” As is well known, Vichy officials pursued foreigners, especially Jewish foreigners, more vigorously in the south than their German and French counterparts did in the occupied north. The appalling internment camps, meant for foreign Jews, in the south, including Gurs, Rivesaltes, and Le Vernet were “shameful creations of an antiforeign and anti-Semitic regime.” In these camps foreign Jews suffered under dreadful conditions of neglect and deprivation, conditions that barely supported life, revealing “not mere bureaucratic indifference but active and deliberate ill will.” Three thousand Jews died in the camps because of French, not German, persecution.45 In late July 1942, as Vichy was preparing to round up and deliver thousands of foreign Jews to the Nazis in the occupied zone, Fleg, perhaps suspecting the imminent expulsions, wrote: “Judaism felt from the inside is our only refuge.”46 For Fleg, study was not only a means of resistance, enabling Jews young and old to find strength in their Jewishness, but it was a way to remain not only Jewish but human. A month earlier, upon the initiative of the Zionist Organization of France, a conference on Jewish education was held at a synagogue in Lyon. The groups present  – including the OSE, the EIF, the Professional Retraining and Reorientation Organization (ORT), the Federation, the Central Consistory, the Zionist Organization, and the Zionist Youth Movement – all agreed to coordinate their efforts in this domain by forming a new committee on Jewish education. At this juncture, in the face of unknown but increasing peril, the French Jewish leadership all agreed that focusing on learning Jewish history and culture together would lead to greater Jewish solidarity. They were right. Edmond Fleg’s wartime teaching and writing, as we will see, inspired thousands of scouts who were in hiding, operatives engaged in clandestine child rescue, and young Jewish resistants in charge of producing false papers indispensable for Jews and non-Jews alike. With the goal of helping young Jews find refuge through feeling their Jewishness from within, Fleg taught daily classes in Jewish history, literature, and culture under the trees of Beauvallon. Together, his teachings became known as Le chant nouveau (The new song) and La souffrance d’Israël (The suffering of Israel).47 Facing the dissolution of all he held dear, Fleg asked: “In the ruins of this present moment, what will be the stones that will reconstruct the spirit of Israel and the world?” This was the central question in his teachings, which were typed up by the leaders of the EIF and disseminated to their groups on farms and in hiding. Fleg’s writing circulated broadly first through the networks of scouts and then later across the Jewish Resistance. Encouraging the scouts to make critical decisions, Fleg wrote in the opening section: “Your work is immediate, you know it, you practice it: help those who can be helped; save those who can be saved; conserve all in your healthy joy and be ready for all sacrifices.” Pointing to the suffering around them, he maintained the need for hope: “Around you people are suffering and dying for France and

188  Le chant nouveau they understand the meaning of that, but they are also suffering and dying for Israel, often without knowing what it is.” Fleg’s mission here was to lift up Jewishness, “not in its superficial aspects,” but proposing the possibility of deep connections through an “indispensable study to learn about Israel, to learn Hebrew and become familiar with Torah, Talmud, and all of the traditions and our sages. Centuries and centuries of our history,” he continued, “can only be told as part of the entire history of humanity.” Clearly, Fleg did not see Jewish history as separate from history, but rather as an aspect of history that had been forgotten or only studied by a select few. Understanding, for Fleg, was “the only way to find hope.” Confronted with internment and deportation, Fleg offered these Jewish youth a call to study and learn; he wrote for them a “new song of courage and hope.” Taking the title from Psalm 149, this “new song,” Fleg explained, will discover the notes spread among the immense symphony of past songs. It will resonate for youth from across the different horizons of Judaism  – Orthodox, Hasidim, conservative, universalist, nationalist, even those who have forgotten the soul of Judaism. It will be capable of moving all Jewish souls.48 Fleg’s embrace of the diversity of Jewish thought and practice was not merely literary. Jewish solidarity depended on pluralism, he argued, and that pluralism was being lived everyday by “Jewish youth living side by side in peace and friendship” on the farms, in the children’s centers, even in hiding.49 Throughout his teachings in Le chant nouveau Fleg transmitted two interrelated fundamental values: respect for diverse opinions and education, each carrying the potential for reciprocal enrichment. He urged his readers to push themselves, to search beneath all of the divergences and differences for that which can unite. He found a profound richness in human diversity within the singularity of humanity; diversity was, he insisted, a strength not only within the Jewish community but in French civil society and in the world. Throughout the text Fleg lifts up his ideal version of France, a France far removed from the Vichy regime in power or the catastrophic defeat of 1940. Most importantly, Fleg lifted up the primacy of educating Jewish youth. In this dark hour, he wrote, “teaching Judaism will lead to the resurrection of the Jew, the country, and of humanity.”50 In the section titled “Les amis d’Israel,” Fleg traced Jewish history with an emphasis on periods of prosperity and acceptance. From the four centuries Hebrews lived in Egypt before the exodus to Jewish citizenship in France in 1791, Fleg pointed to periods of fraternity and rapprochement with non-Jews, especially with Christians, aiming to draw more conscious lines of connections between them in France. Recognizing the very real threats around them, Fleg reminded, “Don’t forget the light of our past is as real as our current darkness.”51 At that very moment of the first massive deportations from the southern zone at the end of August 1942, Fleg was underscoring the help and support of hundreds of thousands of French civilians, even some police, and numerous churchmen. There were those who hosted and hid Jews, fabricated

Le chant nouveau  189 documents, ignored regulations that threatened the survival of others, or merely looked the other way and did nothing when no doubt they noticed the “new face in town.” Across the country, “shopkeepers, teachers, priests and pastors, mailmen, bus drivers, municipal employees . . . helped by asking no questions, by minding their business. They created an environment conducive, with a strong dose of good luck, to survival.”52 Jewish education, Fleg believed, was not simply an abstract historical study, but rather, in the tradition of Torah study, learning was based on interrogation, confrontation, acts of interpretation of the text. It was meant to speak directly to the contemporary moment and to diverse listeners. The law, he explained, was “evolutionary not static, it develops from age to age.”53 In the face of unprecedented persecution, Fleg was anxious as never before to promote Jewish unity through rigorous, original, and powerful interpretations of Jewish texts from the statutes of justice to the more arcane mystical and philosophical ones.54 To try and realize this enormous task “the love of God is not enough; one must practice the law, one must animate it.”55 As he did in his earlier writing, L’enfant prophète, Fleg argued against the vain formalism of ritual and the empty minutia of tradition. For Fleg, it was imperative to never degenerate to an “empty mechanism with no emotion or reflection.” In order to discover the “soul of the traditions,” he explained, “to feel connected to Jewishness, one must find joy in studying itself, discover in it a life force, akin to the creative energy that artists search for their process.” When one becomes conscious of their Jewishness, he claimed, study will become a lifelong endeavor. Learning “Torah will be infinite.”56 Most importantly, one cannot study texts without applying them, without interpreting them, without using their intelligence and imagination.57 Fleg, the lifelong Bergsonian, insisted that there was no Torah without specific applications of it in the world; the Talmudic was not separate from the universalizing traditions of mysticism. What gives Judaism its originality and grandeur is that “one doesn’t separate a life in God and life among men. Practicing mitzvot (acts of kindness) is the veritable union of man with God.”58 Fleg was never a practicing Jew in the traditional sense, yet he held a certain nostalgia for the Orthodox while at the same time recognizing that their “sublime” choices of practice also meant they were isolated from modern society. Noting their contradictions, he described them as “heroic and obstinate.”59 Le chant nouveau was spiritual and moral nourishment for the scouts; it was meant as a guide and a moral code; it was conceived to inspire the will to live, to believe, to hope. Through his teachings, Chef Fleg aimed to show young Jews the “routes of life through which a broad spectrum of Jews could join together as Jews and as an integral part of humankind.” Facing the “persecution of Israel, of France, and of the world,” Fleg concluded, “we ask ourselves if it is possible to discover in the treasures of our history and our traditions a valuable message for the present and for the future.”60 It was clear to him that these young people, those who survived, would become the foundation of a new generation of French Judaism, a living Judaism, a new élan religieuses. In Fleg, the scouts knew they were meeting someone true and sincere, and they were not mistaken. He became

190  Le chant nouveau their “spiritual father” and taught them as he would have his own grandchildren.61 Anne-Marie Gentily, a pioneer in women’s Free Masonry, remembered Fleg’s house at the time “was always open,” and he gave “each one the sense of being important.” Fleg did not live “in an ivory tower.” People turned to him in their grief and he always responded. Even later when he was tracked by the Gestapo, she wrote, Fleg was “never out of touch with his adopted sons, the scouts.” He fought both “with arms and with spirit.”62 The well-known doctor and close friend of Fleg’s, Arnault Tzanck, confirmed this sentiment: Each of us could find a place with Fleg, a place in his warm understanding that comforted without preaching, without dispensing counsel. He knows how to talk! But he also knows how to listen, which is the most difficult thing.63 While Fleg was teaching and writing at Beauvallon, his writings, especially those that became known as Le chant nouveau, were typed and distributed throughout the Jewish resistance network by Rabbi Samy Klein, president of the religious movement Yechouroun before the war and chaplain to the scout camp at Lautrec; as such, Fleg’s stories and interpretations empowered the scouts and the broader Jewish Resistance. Significantly, they became “a source of a new Jewish education” that would come to fruition after the war.64 The French police were planning to carry out mass arrests of foreign Jews on August 26, 1942. For his part, Gamzon used the two-day warning he received due to his official role in the UGIF to warn foreign Jews against the sweep. With his advance notification, children and adolescents, especially young foreign Jews who were targeted for the roundups, were scattered and hidden in the surrounding areas. As we have seen, many young Jews were living at the agricultural settlements organized by the EIF or in children’s houses under the auspices of the OSE.65 In August 1942, the decision to disperse was inevitable. “It was to be a methodical, progressive dispersal: those who had had to take refuge in neighboring forests for a few days or rather a few nights were the first to leave, and the girls were next.”66 The August roundups made it clear that concealing one’s Jewish identity was absolutely necessary for survival. But up until that point, the Jewish scouts had oscillated between the desire to continue in the “most authentic way, to be proud Jews, to affirm their Jewish identity,” and their obligation to survive through clandestine activity, which meant the opposite: hiding their Jewishness and learning to lie. Lying presented a moral problem for the EIF not only because of the traditional scouting emphasis on morals, service, and discipline but because their Jewish pride conflicted with their need for camouflage. In his attempt to convince the scouts that there was a “higher order,” Gamzon told the scout leadership: “You must try to show the youngsters that if they have a duty to lie in order to save themselves, they must make a distinction between this lie, which is unfortunately justified, and their real sense of honor.”67 Inspired by Jewish history, perhaps learned from Chef Fleg, one scout, writing in the underground

Le chant nouveau  191 journal Sois-Chic, compared their clandestine lives to those of the Marrano Jews of fifteenth-century Spain: “We are Christians by day and Jews at night.”68 Endangered foreign scouts were hidden in woods and later with French Jewish families and then non-Jewish families or institutions. Illegal rescue networks emerged, like the EIF’s division known as the Sixième (the Sixth) and the Garel circuit, named after Georges Garel, an OSE representative, to hide and provide for children under 16  years of age who were living in the OSE houses. Fleg would have been a guiding light in these efforts to hide and provision children. Under the sage guidance of Andrée Salomon, certainly well known to Fleg, who held leadership positions in both organizations, not only was critical contact maintained between the EIF and OSE, but they collaborated closely to save Jewish children in France.69 The story of the make-shift camp at Venissieux, a suburb of Lyon, offers a particularly poignant example of the ways the EIF, OSE, and Amitié Chrétienne, a joint Catholic-Protestant Jewish assistance group worked together to save thousands of children from 1942 on.70 Between 1,200 and 1,500 arrested foreign Jews were deposited at Venissieux, a camp of abandoned barracks. Screening was so chaotic that desperate and overwhelmed camp officials allowed representatives from the EIF, OSE, and Amitié Chrétienne to help identify those qualified for exemption. EIF and OSE social workers “advised, urged, indeed even pressured parents to leave their children behind.” Parents ultimately agreed to leave between 84 and 108 children behind. Officially, the camp director turned the children over to Abbé Alexandre Glasberg of Amitié Chrétienne and Gilbert Lesage of the Service Social des Étrangers, both Vichy representatives. The two men arranged for the children to leave the camp on the same busses that had brought them there earlier. They also secreted away additional children, slightly above the age limit, onto the buses or hid them in their government car. Accompanied by Claude Gutman of the EIF, the children were taken to EIF headquarters in Lyon. When the camp director noticed that the children were “missing” from the transport of 544 adult Jews who were deported the next day, a phone call to the EIF social workers revealed that the children had left for an “unknown destination.” The whole ruse was made possible because a telegram announcing a change in the criteria for deportation was delayed in arriving to the Lyon region. According to the new rules, it was no longer an option to leave children under 18  years of age in the free zone. One last-minute telegram did reach the prefect, prohibiting adults expelled to leave their children behind. But it seems that while the camp director was out of the office, Abbé Glasberg picked up and hid the telegram in his robe.71 Venissieux was but one example of the collaboration it took to save Jewish children in August and September 1942. Approximately 1,200 children, theoretically under 16 years of age, but often older, were taken from tightly guarded camps and placed in OSE children’s houses.72 Armed with Fleg’s words and their own reconnaissance, the scouts were instrumental in protecting vulnerable Jewish children. According to scout leader Hammel, even in the activist division of the scouts, the Sixième, “Education is critical. We must never forget that.”73

192  Le chant nouveau The clandestine work of the EIF, the OSE, and the Amitié Chrétienne initially challenged the determination of the Vichy police to round up and deport foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone. According to the Ministry of the Interior report of September 1,1942, 6,701 foreign Jews were arrested in the unoccupied zone on that day; of this 5,293 were retained after screening. Another 592 were arrested in the following days. While each one of these individuals represents unspeakable suffering and tragedy, this number represented only about half of the foreign Jews that were eligible, according to the specific categories,74 to be deported from the unoccupied zone in the late summer of 1942. Just before the Nazis occupied most of southern France, the French government sent 17 trains carrying 11,012 foreign Jewish men, women, and children from an independent French territory to Drancy in the occupied zone. Within a few days of their arrival at Drancy, 9,383 of those expelled were deported to Auschwitz on the same convoy; nearly all of the others followed the same route on undetermined trains. Only between 200 and 300 returned from deportation.75

The Italians and then the Germans in eastern France On November 11, 1942, four days after the Allies landed in North Africa, the Italian army occupied eight departments in southeastern Vichy, east of the Rhône, including Beauvallon, while the Germans invaded and subjugated the rest of the southern zone. The Italians, even though allied with the Third Reich, prevented the deportation of native and foreign Jews from their country and actively intervened to protect foreign Jews in Italian-occupied France, Greece, and Croatia. Refusing to cooperate with the Nazis in rounding up Jews in their controlled areas, those eight French departments became a beacon for Jews. Thousands migrated there from Marseille, Toulouse, Pau, and Lyon, increasing the Jewish population from 15,000–20,000 Jews to 50,000 in July 1943, with most gravitating to Nice and Grenoble.76 For the moment the Flegs were safe. Fleg had known the activist priest Père Marie-Benoît even before they worked together on a plan to save 30,000 Jews residing in Italian-occupied Nice. With Angelo Donati, an Italian Jew, Père Marie-Benoît tried to organize a massive rescue operation with funding from the American Joint Distribution Committee. To that end, Père Marie-Benoît consulted with Fleg and Gamzon, as well as leaders of the Consistoire, including the grand rabbi Isaïa Schwarz, to collect information that he could present to the Italian government and the Vatican in the name of refugee Jews in France.77 The Italians agreed to provide four ships and the British and Americans had permitted the Jews to land in North Africa. All of the pieces were in place, but the plan failed to materialize because the armistice became public a month before it was scheduled to and the Italian zone fell immediately under German control.78 Before the Italian zone fell to the Germans, Père Marie-Benoît, who was based in Marseille, was instrumental in helping the EIF/OSE networks move Jewish children from the German-occupied zone to safety. Almost immediately after the Germans moved south, the EIF set up their headquarters in the Italian-controlled

Le chant nouveau  193 city of Grenoble, but then spread out rapidly into all seven regions of the southern zone beginning in the spring of 1943. At the time, there were still some 300 youths, most of them French, in the EIF rural worksites. At Taluyers, one of the largest of the EIF communities, under the direction of Hammel (Chameau), ORT-France (Organization-Reconstruction-Travail) continued its worker-training operation and helped to open a forge.79 Aside from their training programs and farm work, the scouts, boys and girls, fabricated false identity papers, mobilized food ration cards, and checked in regularly with the hidden children. All the while, the scouts pursued their “regular” scouting activities, especially their “vacation camps,” which they called “mass camouflages,” that allowed them to hide, move, and protect vulnerable children. As their cover, the scouts used “the profession of commercial traveler, which was one of the very few jobs that Jews could still hold.”80 Mostly “French-looking young girls” were chosen to escort children to safety through clandestine EIF/OSE networks across the border to Switzerland, Spain, and on to the United States, because they would not be betrayed by a physical examination.81 Often with the help of Père Marie-Benoît, the girls also accompanied children to Catholic, Protestant, and laic institutions across southern France, especially to Le Chambon sur Lignon (Haute Loire), where pastor André Trocmé and his wife would disperse them across the vast formidable terrain and to villages in the Massif Central.82 Young Jewish women also participated as messengers, liaison agents, propagandists, spies, and saboteurs. They also carried guns and bombs in their handbags, shopping baskets, or skirts to pass off at the right moment and then retrieve after an attack was completed. Such work required nerves of steel, as one survivor explained: “The women who carried arms performed much more dangerous work than those who used them.”83 Between all of these Jewish rescue efforts from 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish children survived with the help of non-Jewish hosts.84 Fleg’s commitment to the scouts never wavered. Upon his request, chaplain Samy Klein brought news of the Jewish scouts scattered throughout the southern zone. As often as he could, Fleg visited the farms at Lautrec, including the children’s houses, where he asked about their ongoing work. While there, he brought his message of living Judaism through informal teaching and conversation. Through Klein, Hammel remembered, Fleg’s living Judaism was received regularly through the resistance networks.85 Even when the EIF came under scrutiny by the General Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Fleg stayed deeply connected to scout activity. On January 5, 1943, the commissioner decreed that the scouts be disbanded because they had, he charged, “since November 29, 1941 been using a fictitious integration into the UGIF as a cover for their activities that had been banned previously.” Angered by this decree, Fleg protested to Marshal Pétain. He did not request any favor or reversal of the decision; rather, he stated clearly and unflinchingly that the scouts rendered service to France, and refused to accept illegal status. Fleg wrote: In subjecting themselves to preliminary training in wholesome agricultural and handcraft activities aimed to prepare for the future, in seeking to relieve

194  Le chant nouveau all present forms of human misery in a diligent and effective manner, in helping their fellow scouts of foreign origin to become more and more deeply integrated into the French tradition, in providing for our armed forces a larger than normal contingent of soldiers and officers (many of whom figure among those decorated, taken prisoner, wounded, and killed in this war), in stirring up and deepening their religious faith through ritual and prayer, the Israelite Scouts of France have, in their modest place but with all their soul, served their religion and their motherland in keeping with their promise.86 Gamzon informed the scouts of the ban: “My dear Scout brothers, [our scouting has no need to be] displayed by any uniform or insignia. Each of us has freely and personally made before God the promise to serve Judaism and France, to obey the scout’s law, and to serve in every occasion: this promise is still totally valid, and no human force shall ever be able to tear it away from our hearts.”87 With the decree, Gamzon’s membership in the UGIF ended. He could no longer exploit it as a means to support the EIF’s clandestine activity.88 Unsurprisingly, it took André Lavagne, Pétain’s civilian chief of staff, three months to respond to Fleg, and then hiding behind Vichy bureaucracy he wrote, “such matters were being handled outside the domain of the chief of state.” On September 9, 1943, a day after the Italian government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio, prime minister after the fall of Mussolini, signed an armistice with the Allies, the Germans entered Nice and took control over the entire former

Figure 6.6  Robert Gamzon, 1940–1944 (Ml_1183: Mémorial de la Shoah)

Le chant nouveau  195 Italian zone. Jews who believed for a few moments that they were in Allied territory were now trapped, desperate and terrified. In the area around Nice, which counted 250,000 inhabitants, there were between 25,000 and 30,000 Jews. About 15,000 of them were foreigners. The Nice roundup was one of the most vicious episodes of the Holocaust in Western Europe.89 In response to the Nazi occupation of the entire southern zone, the scouts disbanded and joined the newly formed L’Union des Juifs Pour la Résistance et l’Entraide (UJRE, Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid), an umbrella organization to gather all Jews in the Resistance regardless of ideology. In the UJRE no distinction was made between “ ‘French and foreign, workers or middle class, Zionists or communists, atheists or believers,’ for all were ‘simply Jews,’ that is, people condemned to extermination.”90 Gamzon noted that the “youngsters” had been transformed into “men” with “submachine guns and rifles on their shoulders. They were no longer slaves being hunted down.”91 The first maquis of the EIF itself was formed in November 1943 in La Malquière, a mountainous and Protestant region. While the scouts dispersed and joined the Maquis across France, Edmond and Madeleine Fleg, with the help of Père Marie-Benoît, went into hiding in the Alpine region of Grésivaudan near Roanne. Fleg recognized Père Marie-Benoît with his own and Madeleine’s survival. Living from one day to the next, uncertain about their safety, the Flegs were never discovered or betrayed, imprisoned, or deported. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the Flegs, like thousands of other displaced Jews, returned home to recuperate their dwellings, their personal possessions, and mourn their losses; many hoped to rebuild their lives. The Fleg’s home on the quai aux Fleurs, an elegant apartment in central Paris, had been appropriated during the war, probably by high-ranking German soldiers or administrators.92 They arrived home only to find that their apartment had been pilloried by its German occupants. Much to their horror, their library had entirely vanished. To add to their losses, Fleg’s brother-in-law Léonce Bernheim and his wife, Renée, did not return after liberation. It took the Flegs two years to learn that they had died in Auschwitz. Fleg grappled with his personal tragedy in a short essay he wrote curiously titled “Nous de l’espérance” (We of hope), in which he described the death of his two sons and included excerpts of Daniel’s letters to his parents, the murder of Léonce and Renée, and the deportation of close friends, many of whom never returned. In the same text, Fleg refused to concede “posthumous victory to Hitler,” yet unable to express the magnitude of the massacre, Fleg relied on Ezekiel 37 to evoke the extermination of European Judaism as “reduced to a pile of bones.”93 For Fleg, the hope of the title seemed more like an imperative than a reality at the moment, a necessity for facing overwhelming grief, loss, and despair.

Return: building bridges Even before the war ended there were already heated discussions over the contours of French Jewish identity in the newly created Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF, Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of

196  Le chant nouveau France). Various organizations were represented in the meeting minutes, including the AIU, the consistory, the Zionist Organization of France, something called the Defense Committee (which included communists), and the Comité d’Action et de Defense de la Jeunesse juive (CADJJ, Committee for Action and Defense of Jewish Youth), which included both Zionist and communist members. Most likely, Fleg would have been involved as part of the CADJJ. Debate erupted over the fundamental differences between French Jews, who identified their Jewishness through religion, and those of eastern Europe, who experienced it as an “ethnoreligious community.” If for the former “ ‘national’ meant French, for the latter the term signified the unity of the Jewish people.”94 It was not surprising that these disputes occurred, as they had emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and were often amplified during the early years of the war. Within a few months, however, these positions were reconciled through the notion of a “multidimensional Jewry” that was articulated in the final version of the CRIF charter passed on September  5, 1944, in liberated Lyon. The charter recognized the spiritual as well as other dimensions of Judaism, but most importantly, demanded “constitutional guarantees against any attack on the principles of equality of race and religion” and to restore “the civic, political, economic, and nationality rights to Jews through the abrogation of all exclusionary laws.” The charter also called for the free immigration to Palestine, adding a formulation proposed by the leftwing Zionists and communists that “promised ‘the establishment in the broadest democratic spirit of the most complete accord between the Jewish and Arab populations of Palestine.’ ” Balancing the Zionist clause, the charter also iterated that the “national status of the Jews in Palestine will in no way affect that of the Jews of other countries nor the ties that attach them to their fatherland.”95 Along similar lines, Fleg, Gamzon, and the EIF, too, sought to (re)define the goals of their movement after the war. “We have a mission to fulfill,” Gamzon argued in the first EIF journal after liberation: Before the war we were a movement of leisure, that didn’t claim to change the life of its members, but only to ameliorate it. Now, after four years of living together, working and struggling together, we have transformed our Movement of leisure into a Movement of total life. We have become a SOCIAL and a RELIGIOUS CONGREGATION.96 But, as with the CRIF, important ideological differences developed within the ranks of the EIF. Fleg maintained his commitment to the pluralism he initially proposed in the 1920s, a movement in which anyone who identified as a Jew was accepted, Zionist or not, religious or not. “All would be treated with compassion and respect . . . and would find unity within the community of scouting.” Former scout and resistant, Hammel, put forward a more specific notion of pluralism based on scout leaders becoming examples of an “ideal type” of Jew. This “ideal type” was one whose “Judaism included all of its aspects: religious particularism, attachment to Palestine as well as to one’s country, spiritual aspirations aligned with humility.” Fleg’s vision was significantly more “liberal” and

Le chant nouveau  197 less “demanding” than Hammel’s, but in the chaotic immediate postwar environment, a majority of scouts preferred Hammel’s more rigid, Zionist-leaning identification. At the national council in 1946, attended by close to 300 people, including, for the first time, a strong representation of scouts from North Africa, the final motion shifted the ideological orientation of the movement. For the first time, the Jewish Scout Movement was defined as “religious and pluralist” narrowing its “defined ideological axis,” clearly excluding atheists and other nonbelievers.97 Alain Michel, historian of the French Jewish scouts, attributes this shift in ideology to the absolute and concrete needs of the scouts when they were living clandestinely and to the impact of the scouts’ two chaplains, Samy Klein and Léo Cohn, neither of whom survived the war.98 As rabbis, Klein and Cohn brought their faith-based practice to the scouts during the war. Faced with the material deprivations while in hiding, scouts often found respite from their constant persecution in religious ritual and faith. The war raised immeasurably the stakes of what it meant to be a Jew, and so in the immediate postwar they rallied around Hammel’s vision of a more clear-cut religious definition of Jewish identity over the more liberal vision that included nonbelievers. Rabbi Klein, like Fleg, believed in an uncanny mystical connection between Jews and France. In 1944, just before he was captured and executed, he wrote a moral testament. His first wish was for his two daughters to be brought up as Jews and as Frenchwomen: “When Israel and France are together suffering the most terrible martyrdom of history, is it not normal that a French rabbi pay his tribute?”99 When Fleg published Le chant nouveau after the war, he dedicated it to Samy Klein. The two were kindred spirits. But the new religious and Zionist-leaning direction proved too difficult to follow. With key EIF leaders, especially Gamzon, moving to Israel shortly after the establishment of the state, and others immersing themselves in Orthodox yeshivas in France and elsewhere, a new team emerged focused on its original initiative as a youth movement.100 Fleg’s more pragmatic and inclusive approach supported the new team’s subsequent decision to put “much more effort into scouting than into religion.”101 As such, in the immediate postwar years, and with funding from the American Joint Distribution Committee (The Joint), the EIF participated in the reconstruction of the French Jewish community. With numberless wounds to bandage and the huge needs of individuals and institutions, the former Sixième became the Service Social des Jeunes (Youth Social Service) and focused on the needs of adolescents and young adults whose parents had been deported or who had arrived at the DP camps. In March 1945 they had 500 children under their protection.102 Children’s houses were reconstituted, scouts from the cities organized a publishing house, which was named Éditions du Chant Nouveau in honor of Fleg’s teachings. In reinvigorating their prewar community centers, the EIF also started a chorus, a theatre troupe, and a vocational training school. Beyond the EIF, Fleg’s belief in the power of Jewish cultural transmission and Jewish pluralism influenced other critical postwar Jewish organizations, including ORT (Organization-Reconstruction-Travail). Along with helping Jews attain economic stability and integration in France through occupational

198  Le chant nouveau

Figure 6.7  Robert and Denise Gamzon, 1946 (Mla _A_30: Mémorial de la Shoah).

training, ORT programs added a new dimension focused on the transmission of Jewish culture, “reanimating and safeguarding” Jewish history and tradition. As part of this project, ORT lifted up Fleg’s works as “classics of Jewish French literature.”103 Fleg was also asked to join the Central Committee of the AIU. Writing to Yehudi Menuhin about his work with the Alliance, he explained, “Against this age of blasphemy, the Alliance Israélite Universelle stays committed to its values of justice, liberation, and human dignity, under the quiet enthusiasm of its president, René Cassin.”104 Through his increased involvement in the AIU, Fleg helped to create and was the first president of the French section of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), an affiliated organization.105 As part of the Central Committee, Fleg was tasked with editing the AIU manifesto of November  11, 1945, demanding that “all Jews who wish be able to immigrate to Palestine.” This manifesto was the first to officially recognize the new, pro-Zionist direction of the Alliance. While supporting the AIU’s demand for Jews to be able to immigrate to Palestine, Fleg’s stance toward Zionism remained complex. In 1948, when the United Nations declared the independence of the state, Fleg hoped for “a miracle.” In the face of certain Zionists, he argued that “Judaism is not a simple nationality. It was not in the past, it isn’t in

Le chant nouveau  199 the present; nor will it be in the future. There is still, and there always will be, a Jewish religion.” For Fleg, the “national dream” and the “religious” were always intertwined with the “messianic” until the creation of the state, a “laic state, open to all religions, all races, in which all citizens will have equality in front of the law.” Above all, Fleg was concerned that “if Jewish nationals in Israel enjoy some sort of religious privilege, what will happen to Jewish citizens in other countries?” He did not believe that the State of Israel would bring about a Jewish spiritual renaissance. Pointing to the power and significance of the diaspora, Fleg wrote, “Abraham did not come from Palestine, the Torah was not born there, Moses was never even allowed to enter it. Spain, France, Poland, Germany gave us the commentaries, Zionism was born in the heart of Austrian Jewry.” Rather, the Jewish renaissance will come from “among us and by us.” It will be animated by a “living spirituality.” Universal values of justice, equality, and peace were, Fleg insisted, the essence of Judaism. “It is the Judaism of the diaspora, the Judaism of France that underscores this universalism, and meets the requirement of a religion free from any national affiliation.” He concluded by saying: “Our work is to define what we owe to our countries and to the State of Israel, to understand what lives in us at home and in Israel, and everywhere.” If we fail to be loyal to Judaism in all of its universalism “we will undoubtedly remain French, but as Jews we will be nothing more.”106 The following year, in the midst of the Palestine War (1947–1949), today known as Israel’s War of Independence and as the Nakba or Catastrophe by Palestinians, Fleg appealed for the end to Arab/Christian/ Jewish hatred in Jerusalem in the journal Écho sioniste. Likely inspired by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, coauthored by his colleague from the Alliance, René Cassin, and profoundly influenced by his long-time friend, Jacques Maritain, Fleg, naïvely, at least in hindsight, beckoned internationalism to transcend the nationalist rivalries erupting on the ground.107 In 1947, Fleg joined forces with the French historian Jules Isaac and a group of Jewish and Christian intellectuals to create the Amitiés Judéo-Chrétiennes (Jewish-Christian Fellowship).108 The organization’s prewar roots reached back to 1937 when a group of Jewish and Catholic intellectuals, including Fleg, the Yiddishist Isaac Pougatch, and the Catholic reformer Jacques Maritain, as well as numerous priests, met together to develop strategies to combat the rise of antisemitism. Abbé Monchanin of Lyon presided over their regular meetings, which lasted until 1943. Each session began with a psalm in Hebrew and French, which was followed by studying Jewish prayers and elements of the Catholic mass.109 After the war, the Centre d’Information Israélite asked a similar activist group of five Jewish and Catholic intellectuals with Fleg and Isaac at the helm, and including F. Jean Daniélou, Henri Marrou, and Samy Lattès, to study ways to reform Catholic religious education, which in France was within the jurisdiction of the French episcopate and not the Vatican.110 The object of their work was to purify Christian teaching of its anti-Jewish rhetoric, which they argued had over centuries created negative images of Jews and Judaism. It was this cultural inheritance, they believed, that had been exploited by the promoters of racial antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

200  Le chant nouveau In 1947, Isaac attended a week-long conference at Seelisberg in Switzerland. At the time, Jacques Maritain was France’s ambassador to the Vatican and sent a letter to be read aloud at the conference. It concluded, “Like strange bedfellows, Jews and Christians are making their way together on the road to Calvary.”111 The Christian participants at the conference produced a program of ten points that, if adopted by the churches, would eliminate the anti-Jewish bias associated with Christian teaching. Although Fleg was not able to attend the conference, his ideas were well represented in the Ten Points of Seelisberg, which remained the most important document of Christian-Jewish relations until it was eclipsed in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council declaration on the Jews and Judaism.112 The first three points focused on the continuity between the Jews and Christians: Remember it is the same living God who speaks to us through the Old and New Testaments; Remember Jesus was born of a Jewish mother of the seed of David and the people of Israel, and that his everlasting love and forgiveness embrace His own people and the whole world; Remember that the first disciples, the apostles, and the first martyrs were Jews.113 On the heels of the Ten Points, the initial study group founded the organization Amitiés Judéo-Chrétiennes, whose mission was to “replace misunderstanding and hostile traditions between Christians and Jews with respect, friendship and mutual understanding, active cooperation, and working together to repair the inequities of which Israel, for centuries, was a victim and to avoid its return.” The Amitiés had no missionary nor proselytizing component. Nor were they interested in “fusing the churches or the religions.” Theirs was a “vigorous effort of purification.”114 Importantly, both Fleg and Isaac were surrounded by Christian and Jewish friends, and, in Fleg’s case, had been saved through the help of a priest. They had also been transformed by Charles Péguy’s alternative Catholicism, as was discussed in the first chapter, which was at odds with the Catholic establishment, before World War I. All of this activity, including the ridding of Christian teaching of its anti-Jewish rhetoric and the formal creation of the Amitiés, occurred during the custody battle over two baptized Jewish children orphaned by the war, known as the Finaly Affair. The two children had been raised by a French Catholic woman, Antonine Brun. Between 1945 and 1953, tensions mounted between the children’s Jewish relatives and the Catholic institutions, along with Brun, claiming the children as their own. By the end of the trial and a shift in public opinion, with the support of the Catholic Church, Brun was forced to deliver the two children to their relatives in Israel.115 This was not an isolated case, if the most sensational and long-lasting one. Conversion was a sensitive issue and the experience of children fostered by Catholic institutions or families during the war varied greatly. Children placed in Catholic schools or orphanages by Jewish organizations had some protection against such abuses because there was an understanding that conversions would not occur. Social workers checked and even moved children if the terms were not honored.116 For Fleg and Isaac, the intent of the Amitiés was

Le chant nouveau  201 not “a Christianized Judaism” but rather to persuade Christians to think about Christian complicity in the Holocaust. Catholic novelist and Nobel Prize winner François Mauriac was a powerful supporter of the Amitiés.117 Mauriac, among other Christians, encouraged Jews to raise their voices and engage in fruitful dialogue with Christians.118 As we have seen, Fleg had been involved over and again in Jewish-Christian dialogue since the 1920s, writing on the continuity between them, on the potential for interfaith collaboration, and most importantly on their shared ethical values. Between the two wars Fleg mobilized a large part of his energy toward building a bridge between Judaism and Christianity.119 But the war profoundly transformed Fleg’s connection to Christianity. In the wake of the Holocaust, he was still convinced of the possibility of reconciliation, but he did not hesitate to fiercy criticize antiJewish-Christian thought.120 While still deeply committed to human solidarity and unwilling to remain locked in a polemic of blame, he was determined to expose Christian collusion in the horrors of the Nazi genocide and to advocate for reform within the churches. Fleg asked Father Daniélou in 1946: “Don’t you see the source, both distant and close, of this antisemitism that you condemn?”121 In the years after the liberation, Fleg’s work, with the support Christian intellectuals like Mauriac and Daniélou, gained a larger Christian audience than ever before. In 1954, Fleg celebrated his 80th birthday surrounded by friends and colleagues. He was feted by many near and far. The well-known journalist Pierre Paraf characterized Fleg assiduously and with great affection. “Humanism and humanity are at the heart of Edmond Fleg,” he wrote. He inspired young Jews; Fleg, the poet, was always on our side. This dreamer could have been content to play with rhythm and rhyme, but he knew when it was time to be a man of action. He cried no to racism, no to all violations of liberty, no to clericalism, no to the rearmament of Germany. The work of Edmond Fleg in its entirety bends toward the exultation of humanity. For Fleg, God is integrated into human beings and is always realized little by little through our daily struggles, and our liberating revolutions accelerate its concretization.122 Reckoning with Paraf’s assessment, perhaps the term spiritual humanist comes closest to defining Fleg’s profound belief and commitment to the ethical ideals he associated with biblical religion. With that in mind, we can more fully appreciate Fleg’s belief in the constant adaptation of Jewishness to modern conditions. Israel understands itself as a function of its history, of time, of memory. But history only as it is conceived and meaningful in the present. The world is not an illusion that is necessary to deny or run away from, but a reality that is necessary to change.123 For Fleg, Judaism, even messianism, was never disconnected from human experience, from daily life, from the struggle for a more just and equitable world. As

202  Le chant nouveau someone who tried to effect change, Fleg worked in his full capacity with the Amitiés and as the president of the French section of the WJC until his health failed him. Fleg’s last work at the WJC focused on two issues. The first dealt with reconciling the often fraught relationship between diasporic Jewish communities and the State of Israel. His 1953 La terre que dieu habite (The Land in Which God Dwells) detailed his commitment to the need for diasporia Jewish communities to exist and thrive alongside the reality of the new State of Israel. In an effort to reconcile the diaspora with the state he wrote: “Many in the diaspora are against the ingathering, many of the ingathered are opposed to the existence of the exile. Is it not inconceivable that one spirit, old and new, might unite them once again?” But these two traditions – galut (exile) and eretz (land) – also “approach each other, touch, and mingle.” Tracing Jewish history from ancient to modern, Fleg wrote, “the history of exile was also the history of asylum,” where islands of Jews both suffered and flourished. He called for a single spiritual Jewish consciousness, not based on religion, since so many Jews identified as freethinkers, as a challenge to the duality of Israel versus the diaspora. A Jewish consciousness, he believed, was based on the constant striving for a better world, for the implementation in our own lives, in Israel and in the diaspora, of the ideals

Figure 6.8  Edmond Fleg, 1955. (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

Le chant nouveau  203 of social justice. That is what he meant by a “messianic ideal” binding Jews together from the Hebrew prophets to contemporary Jewish social reformers.124 In 1958, Fleg addressed the Executive Committee of the WJC, reiterating his call for a unified Jewish consciousness between the diasporic communities and the State of Israel, tasked with working for justice and peace.125 Probably his last act as president of the French section was sending a letter in 1962 that sought to organize “patrons” for the event “Judaïsme et la Diaspora” to be held in Israel the following year. The event meant to “help bridge the gap between the Jews of Israel and those in the Diaspora.” He asked for all heads of Jewish organizations to be patrons. Supporters, indicated by their signatures on the document, included Marc Chagall, Raymond Aron, Emmanuel Levinas, René Cassin, Jules Isaac, as well as the president of the AIU Louis Kahn, and Edmond de Rothschild, among many others.126 On August 12, 1952, 13 Soviet Jewish intellectuals, five of whom were Yiddish writers (Perets Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Itsik Feffer), were executed for invented crimes against the Soviet state. In 1956, these murders became public knowledge; in the socialist but anticommunist Yiddish cultural world, August 12 has become known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.127 The demand for recognition and rehabilitation of those writers was a deeply personal issue for Fleg. In a handwritten letter to the European Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress, he expressed his grief at hearing the news explaining that the cultural committee of the French section advocated for the “rehabilitation of the Jewish intellectuals.” He continued: “Jewish culture should be reestablished in the Soviet Union, in Hebrew and Yiddish in schools, institutions, the press, and the theatre.”128 The European Executive Committee rejected the French views because at the time “the World Executive Committee was in delicate negotiations on the matter of Soviet Jewry which was of a higher concern.”129 Not until 1976, many years after Fleg’s death, were the writers and intellectuals recognized and commemorated as martyrs by established Jewish communal organization. Only in 1989 was the Soviet crime officially admitted and the 15 Jewish intellectuals rehabilitated.130

Conclusion: a prophet of daily life Suffering unspeakable loss before, during, and after the war, Edmond Fleg, explained his younger colleague and intellectual heir André Neher, “dwelt in the heart of Job’s furnace.” And yet, in the face of such devastating grief and contrary to all expectations, “Fleg turned on an axis of hope.”131 Even in September  1945, Fleg wrote to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York, “We find strength in your unflappable optimism and new reasons for hope despite all of the tragedies we have suffered.”132 Fleg held out for hope, a radical kind of hope. “In spite of myself,” he wrote, “in spite of my losses, I feel compelled to pursue Israel’s dream. . . . There is a continual return to the Future.”133 And that future, for Fleg, was embodied by the young. The scouts surrounding him at Beauvallon were his spiritual children and he became their guide and

204  Le chant nouveau inspiration. Through Rabbi Samy Klein and others, Fleg’s teaching circulated through the scouts in the southern zone and on to the Jewish Resistance. While overcome with the terrible sorrow of his own loss, he wrote Le chant nouveau for a rising generation of survivors. In this work for the young French Jews who formed part of the Resistance movement, Fleg stressed the idea of renewal, the dynamic creativeness of Judaism, which he believed appeared in all of its aspects – religious, social, and historical. Dividing Le chant nouveau into 15 chapters was not arbitrary. As André Neher explained, 15 in the Jewish tradition literally means “beginning anew.” He continued: On the fifteenth of the first month [holiday of Sukkot] and the fifteenth of the seventh [Passover], man begins once more the apprenticeship of his miserable and stripped existence; he breaks the bread of affliction, dwells in the tent of frailty and, emerging from the exposure of his soul to chaos, regains both freedom and peace. And further, the difficult task of asking on Passover  – why this night of “the fifteenth is different from all other nights” – is given to the child.134 The fifteen of Fleg’s Le chant nouveau was the symbol of childhood itself, of creative youthfulness. He looked to the young as a source of renewal, and it is not surprising that they saw him as their figurehead.135 The Algerian-born former scout Léon Askenazi confirmed, “Fleg preferred children, they had not yet failed or succeeded; he believed that one day a generation of children would arrive and they would bring a brighter future.”136 For Fleg, hope was messianic and did not preclude suffering. Rather, hope and suffering and redemption all existed simultaneously, in a kind of Bergsonian continuity. This messianic hope was pragmatic; according to Fleg, it gave one energy to navigate difficult circumstances, animated one to act for social justice, and mitigated against depression. Yet, it seems that messianic hope potentially engendered complacency and bred facile and simplistic responses. Viewing the Jewish Palestinian experiment in 1930 through the lens of messianic hope or Péguy’s mystique prevented Fleg from thinking seriously about political solutions and/or political compromise because such political considerations, or Péguy’s politique, merely reflected the surface of things and not the deeper universal spirit of human connection. But the surface of things really matters. Yet, in a different context, the messianic hope Fleg expressed in his wartime teachings, along with other forms of Jewish mobilization, energized and inspired the scouts and other Jewish resistants to continue their clandestine work. Subsequently, it nourished a renewed Jewish culture in France in the postwar years. Versed in the study of traditional texts and Jewish history, or “biblical resistance,” a generation of young Jews forged a movement to redefine Jewish identity in France. Marginal in the beginning, the enterprise culminated in 1957 with founding of two organizations – the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française (Colloquium of French Jewish Intellectuals) and the

Le chant nouveau  205 Centre Universitaire des Études Juives (CUEJ, University Center of Jewish Studies) – that together became known as L’École Juive (The Jewish School). Intellectuals and educators created collective institutional structures through which they could engage in productive dialogue.137 After the war, many Jews who had no background in Judaism felt a keen need to learn about that which had led to their persecution. Under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress, Léon Algazi, composer and choral director of the Rue de la Victoire synagogue, had the idea of bringing together Jewish teachers and intellectuals who were interested in learning about their heritage. Algazi tapped Edmond Fleg as his collaborator and together they created a forum where secular intellectuals could meet with the country’s most distinguished scholars of Jewish thought, including Fleg himself, André Neher, Léon Askenazi, Emmanuel Levinas, and Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi, among others. In May 1957, Fleg delivered the inaugural lecture titled “The Significance of Jewish History” with 30 people in attendance.138 Many in the group were seeking to reassess their Jewish identity after the Shoah. It was a space of reckoning with Jewish culture and religion in France as well contemplating and discussing contemporary world problems. In a sense, the objective of the Colloque was to offer a path to Jewish history, culture, and religion either for those who were newly discovering it or for those who were seeking an experience of Jewish affirmation and consciousness. First and foremost, the Colloque created a network, a community for engaging with Jewishness. It responded to a deep need among intellectuals, but it was not in any way a homogeneous group and included participants who identified along the continuum from religious to laic. In spite of their disagreements, André Neher explained, the participants found an effective and stimulating intellectual space to grapple with texts and issues within a structured community.139 After his first lecture, Fleg became too weak to present at the Colloque that followed. Neher succeeded him as president of the French section of the WJC and as chairman of the subsequent colloquia.140 Two years later, Algazi organized a second meeting. As interest grew, the group moved to Paris and began running annual sessions focused on topics such as politics, history, religion, and Jewish consciousness in the modern world. Early on, the Colloque attracted between one and two hundred participants, but by the 1980s, after the revival of Jewish studies in France, more than seven hundred people were attending these events, to hear in particular Emmanuel Levinas give his annual talk on a Talmudic text. As we have seen, Emmanuel Levinas, philosopher and Talmudist,141 was an active participant of the Colloque and counted Fleg as one of his mentors.142 Pointing to Fleg in Difficult Freedom, Essays on Judaism, Levinas explained: “In France, the poetry of Edmond Fleg, inspired by its sources [rabbinic literature], nourished an entire generation that had lost all access to Hebrew and Aramaic.”143 Fleg’s writing – poems, essays, novels, plays – provided a condition of possibility for Levinas’ invention of Judaism in the postwar years. For Levinas, as for Fleg before him, Judaism was not about belief or even practice,

206  Le chant nouveau

Figure 6.9  Edmond and Madeleine at Beauvallon, 1960. (Private collection of Dr. Charles Linsmayer)

but focused on a tradition of text reading. Both called for an exploration of the living texts of traditional Judaism as a basis for Jewish identity. Both Fleg and later Levinas crafted their Jewishness; their Judaism was an invention of tradition. By 1958, Fleg’s health had declined dramatically. For the next five years he receded from public life and there are but few traces in his archive of these final years. In name, he remained president of the French section of the WJC until his death in 1963. After he died, tributes and discussions of his work proliferated.

Le chant nouveau  207 Acknowledged as the most accomplished writer of Jewish culture in the French language, Fleg embodied a kind of moral authority in the literary world that was respected by audiences that extended far beyond the Jewish world in France and abroad; he was lauded as an “engaged witness of his time.”144 François Mauriac wrote: “All of the spiritual families in France were in mourning. [Fleg] was a prophet, he stood at the border between two Testaments.”145 The moral philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch credited Fleg with restoring an awareness of his own Judaism.146 He was Fleg’s disciple in the broadest sense, as well as his dear friend and neighbor. Remembering Fleg, Jankélévitch wrote with great insight and tenderness: Fleg was against all forms of narrowness, conformism, clericalism, fanaticism, obscurantism, tyranny, torture, micro-psychoanalysis, and meanness. He was preoccupied with this world, our here and now. He loved the world, life, and nature. Spirit, for Fleg, did not exist otherwise except as incorporated in the senses. He was full of irony, humility, and humor. And André Neher, who followed in his footsteps, articulated Fleg’s legacy, During the last years of his life after the war, Edmond Fleg was the conscience of French Judaism after having been its poet and its prophet. There is no French Jew who grew up in the twentieth century, matured, acquired their identity, their reasons for being, whose pride, joy, and hope was not inspired by Edmond Fleg. We are all, in one way or another, Fleg’s children.147

Notes 1 Edmond Fleg quoted in Jean Toulat, “Une heure avec Edmond Fleg, ‘le Claudel du Judaisme,’” La renaissance, 1964. For all of Père Marie-Benoit’s work with the Resistance, see Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue, How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2013). 2 Bergson quoted in Brenna Moore, Sacred Dread, Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905–1944) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 182–83. 3 Daniel Fleg, Journal (Paris: Bushet, Chastel Corrêa, 1940). 4 Ibid., 16. 5 Ibid., 23. 6 Ibid., 24. 7 Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 153. 8 Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 19–21. 9 Gerben Zaagsma, Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades, and the Spanish Civil War (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 34. 10 See Dries Deweer, “The Political Theory of Personalism: Maritain and Mounier on Personhood and Citizenship,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 74, no. 2 (2013); Jonathan Sozek, “The Politics of Personalism” (PhD diss.,

208  Le chant nouveau Brown University, 2016), 113–14; Maritain and Mounier went their separate ways in 1940. Mounier’s form of antimodernist Catholic personalism aligned with Vichy’s hierarchical corporate policies, while Maritain was a vocal critic of the regime and spent much of the war in the United States. On Mounier’s antimodernism, see https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/Truth/Truth305.pdf; Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 11 Richard Crane, “Surviving Maurras: Jacques Maritain’s Jewish Question,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 4–5 (2008): 404–7; Philip Nord, France’s New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 36–37. 12 L’univers israélite, 1938, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 3. 13 Fleg, Journal, 147. 14 Daniel Fleg failed his baccalaureate and was not accepted to the École des Sciences Politiques. Fleg, Journal, 134. 15 Fleg, Journal, 141–82. Susan Zuccotti argues in The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 27, that the influx of 400,000 refugees from Spain in 1939 “pushed antiforeign sentiment to the breaking point [in France]. Thousands were interned in camps near the Spanish frontier – camps that would soon be filled with foreign Jews as well.” 16 Fleg, Journal, 174–76. 17 Ibid., 189. 18 Ibid., 249–50. 19 Maurice’s letter quoted in Odile Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel: Edmond Fleg (Paris: La Pensée universelle, 1978), 187–88. 20 Letter from Ayala Fleg to Stephen S. Wise, June 1942, Stephen Wise Papers box 132, Jewish Historical Society. 21 Ayala Fleg Zacks-Aramov (1912–2011) was born in Jerusalem as Ayala BenTovim. She studied in London and Paris, where she met Maurice Fleg in 1938. After Maurice was killed at the front, she joined the French Resistance and later worked for the British Intelligence Service. In 1943 she was undercover in Munich. After the war she worked tirelessly to help European refugees settle in Palestine. She is remembered as a patron of the arts and of Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion. 22 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 190–91. 23 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Stephen S. Wise, July 8, 1940, La Colline, Montpellier, Stephen Wise Papers, boxes 132–33, 74–88, American Jewish Historical Society. 24 Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 53. 25 In the German definition a Jew was every person descended from three grandparents of the Jewish race. Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 56. In terms of restricted employment, some posts remained open for Jews – those who were veterans of 1914–1918 or those who had been decorated in the 1939–1940 campaign. See Adam Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy, between Submission and Resistance, trans. William Sayers (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 13–14; Claire Zalc, Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 26 Letter from Gaston Baty to Edmond Fleg, August 29, 1940, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 2, 2379. 27 With the German invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands in May  1940, well over a million refugees poured into France, including an estimated 40,000 foreign Jews, mostly without papers. When the French government fled first to Tours and then to Bordeaux about four million French men, women, and children, including hundreds of thousands of Parisians and from 100,000

Le chant nouveau  209 to 200,000 Jews, joined the foreigners on the road. Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 37–40; Nicole Dombrowsi Risser, France under Fire, German Invasion, Civilian Flight, and Family Survival during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially part 1, “Civilians in the Line of Fire,” 15–139. 28 Frédéric Chimon Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, Témoignage sur la lute des juifs en France (1938–1944) (Paris: C.L.K.H., 1982), 329. 29 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 194. 30 Edmond Fleg, Vers le monde qui vient (Paris: Albin Michel, 1960), 238–39. 31 Isaac Pougatch was a Yiddish specialist, writer, and teacher, who directed one of the sout farms, Charry, during the war. Alain Michel, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scout juif? L’éducation juive chez les éclaireurs israélites de France, de 1923 au début des années 1950,” Archives juives 35, no. 2 (2ème Semestre 2002): 85, n.39. 32 Fleg, Vers le monde qui vient, 231. 33 Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, 333–34. Hammel became a scout in 1928. During the war he was responsible for the agricultural branch at the Taluyers scout farm. In the Ardèche, he collaborated with the Zionist Youth Movement (MJS) to save Jewish children by moving them secretly to Spain. A part of the leadership team of the scouting movement immediately after the war, Hammel moved to Israel in 1947. 34 Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, 317. 35 Sarah Hammerschlag, ed., Modern French Jewish Thought, Writings on Religion and Politics (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), 70. Hammerschlag offers an English translation of an excerpt of Tivliout in Modern French Jewish Thought, 67–77. Throughout Gamzon’s reflections on this ideal, Gamzon cited sections of Torah and Prophets to make his case for the centrality of harmony, justice, and equality across Jewish thought. 36 Robert Gamzon, Tivliout (Paris: EIF Press, 1945), “harmony” in Hebrew. Fleg cited in Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, 333. 37 Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, 333. 38 Michel, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scout juif?,” 87–88. 39 Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 219–20. Also see Alain Michel, Les éclaireurs israélites de France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, Septembre 1939–Septembre 1944: Actions et évolution (Paris: Éditions des EIF, 1984). 40 The UGIF’s role and structure developed gradually and separately in the north and the south and changed over the course of the occupation. Generally, the UGIF-North remained legal to the end, operated openly and met most German demands. UGIF-South remained far more independent of German control. Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 64. 41 Hammerschlag, Modern French Jewish Thought, 66–67. Hammerschlag also suggests that while Gamzon’s vision did not have a lasting impact on modern French Jewish thought, his role in organizing the scouting movement in wartime France had a profound impact on Jewish youth, as we will see in this chapter. Also see Daniel Lee, Pétain’s Jewish Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), for a discussion of the farm complex at Lautrec. Lee looks at how the Jewish farms were (surprisingly) not at odds with Vichy’s policies of cultural renewal based on manual labor and pastoral life. 42 Georges Weill, “Andrée Salomon et le sauvetage des enfants juifs (1933–1947),” French Politics, Culture & Society 30, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 100; Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 64. 43 Emmanuel Eydoux cited in Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, 332. 44 Quoted in Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 198. 45 Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 79, 67–68.

210  Le chant nouveau 46 Fleg quoted in Renée Dray-Bensousan, “L’éducation juive à Marseille sous Vichy (1940–1943): Une renaissance circonstancielle,” Archives juives 35, no. 2 (2ème semestre 2002): 51. Also see Renée Poznanski, Les juifs en France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2018), 179; Zuccotti argues that “although details were unclear to the public, the likelihood of a massive delivery of Jews from south to north had been suspected for weeks.” Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 119. As an official in the UGIF, Gamzon might also have known, as many were given advance warning of such events. 47 Le chant nouveau (The new song) was published by Éditions EIF in 1946. 48 Fleg, Le chant nouveau, 18. 49 Ibid., 21–22. 50 Ibid., 18. 51 Ibid., 33. 52 Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 286–88. 53 Fleg, Le chant nouveau, 74–76. 54 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 208–9. 55 Fleg, Le chant nouveau, 123. 56 Ibid., 125–26. 57 Ibid., 130. 58 Ibid., 147. 59 Ibid., 149–50. 60 Ibid., 235. 61 Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 222. 62 Anne-Marie Gentily, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 63 Arnault Tzanck, “L’ami,” Revue de la pensée juive, no. 2 (Janvier 1950): 24. 64 Johanna Lehr, La Thora dans la cité, L’émergence d’un nouveau judaïsme religieux après la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris: Le bord de l’eau, 2013), 17. 65 For the L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), see Sabine Zeitoun, L’oeuvre de secours aux enfants sous l’occupation en France: Du légalisme à la résistance, 1940–1944 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990); Laura Hobson Faure, et  al., L’oeuvre de secours aux enfants et les population juives au XXe siècle, prévenir et guérir dans un siècle de violence (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014); Katy Hazan and Georges Weill, “L’OSE et le sauvetage des enfants juifs, d’avant-guerre à l’après-guerre,” in La résistance aux génocides: De la pluralité des actes de sauvetage, dir. Jacques Sémelin, Claire Andrieu, and Sarah Gensburger (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2008), 259–76; Weill, “Andrée Salomon et le sauvetage des enfants juifs,” 89–112. 66 Poznanski, Les juifs en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, 477–78. 67 Gamzon quoted in Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 172. 68 Michel, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scout juif?,” 88. 69 Weill, “Andrée Salomon et le sauvetage des enfants juifs,” 96; Katy Hazan and Georges Weill, eds., Andrée Salomon, une femme de lumière (Paris: Le Manuscrit, Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, 2011). 70 For Jewish/Christian relations in France, see Annette Becker, Danielle Delmaire, and Frédéric Gugelot, eds., Juifs et chrétiens: Entre ignorance, hostilité et rapprochement (1898–1998) (Lille: Conseil Scientifique de l’Université Charles-deGaulle, 2002), especially part 3, “La solidarité et l’amitié: 1940–1960.” 71 Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 131–32. 72 Weill, “Andrée Salomon et le sauvetage des enfants juifs,” 98. 73 Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, 210; Michel, Les éclaireurs israélites de France, 63. 74 All Jews from specific countries who had entered France after January 1, 1936, were to be rounded up and transported to the occupied zone before September  15, 1942, whether or not they had been naturalized. Exceptions included elderly Jews over the age of 60; unaccompanied children under 18; parents with

Le chant nouveau  211 a child under five; pregnant women; people incapable of being moved; veterans and their families; men or women with French spouses or children among others. These categories of exemption diminished over the course of the war, leaving increasing numbers of foreign Jews vulnerable to arrest, internment, and deportation. Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 118–19. 75 Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 135; Zuccotti, Père Marie-Bênoit and Jewish Rescue, 67–71. 76 Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 194–95. 77 Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoït and Jewish Rescue, 121. 78 For the Père Marie-Benoît and Donati plan see, Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 196–200; Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 180–81. 79 Michel, Les éclaireurs israélites de France, 100. Unfortunately, the realization of the forge caused tension between the ORT leadership and the scouts at Taluyers. In a letter to Fleg, as chef of EIF from ORT testified, the relationship was “a bit stormy.” The EIF was accused of being “amateurs suddenly launching into reclassifying themselves as professionals.” 80 Poznanski, Les juifs en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, 477–78. 81 Weill, “Andrée Salomon et le sauvetage des enfants juifs,” 101–2. Jewish boys would be found out during a body inspection due to their circumcision. For the United States, see Laura Hobson Faure, “Attentes européennes, réalités américaines l’émigration des enfants de L’oeuvre de secours aux enfants de la France occupée vers les États-Unis, 1941–1942,” in Oeuvre de secours aux enfants et les populations juives au XXe siècle: Prévenir et guérir dans un siècle de violence (Paris: Colin, 2014), 166–83. 82 Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue, 80–81. On Chambon-sur Lignon and Jewish rescue, see Annette Wieviorka et al., eds., La Montagne refuge: Accueil et sauvetage des juifs autour du Chambon-sur-Lignon (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013). 83 Arsène Tchakarian quoted in Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 271. 84 Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 237. 85 Hammel, Souviens-toi d’Amalek, 318. 86 Fleg quoted in Poznanski, Les juifs en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, 479. 87 Gamzon quoted in Poznanski, Les juifs en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, 479. 88 The role of the UGIF and Gamzon’s decision to remain a member of the umbrella organization has been debated by historians. The question that arose concerned the efficacy of remaining “legal” with regard to the welfare of French Jews, especially those who were poor and/or sick. Gamzon had been a member of the UGIF since 1941, technically respecting its legality, and stopped attending meetings in October 1943 when he believed the scouts were no longer safe in their communities. At that point, EIF was illegal and the scouts joined the Resistance. See Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 59–71, 230–33, 260, 310–11. 89 Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 180–87; Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 198–201. Of the large number of Jews trapped in Nice, however, approximately 1,800, were caught and deported. As Zuccotti explains: “The combination of active rescuers and a vaguely benevolent populace kept people alive in Nice, in the face of the Nazi onslaught,” 187. 90 Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 229. 91 Gamzon quoted in Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 260. 92 The homes of a vast majority of Paris’ Jewish residents, whether mansions or one-room apartments, had been appropriated by the occupying Germans.

212  Le chant nouveau High-ranking Germans used the more luxurious homes while the lesser dwellings went to lower-ranking military or were seized by non-Jewish Parisians. Leora Auslander, “Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 244. 93 Edmond Fleg, Nous de L’espérance (Anger: Au Masque D’Or, 1949), 44–48; 52. 94 Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 292–94. 95 Charter quoted in Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 299. 96 Robert Gamzon quoted in Michel, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scout juif?,” 90 (emphasis in original). 97 Ibid., 92–93. 98 Samy Klein was betrayed in St. Etienne/Lyon and executed by the Gestapo in 1944 one month before liberation. 99 Rabbi Samy Klein quoted in Rayski, Choice of the Jews under Vichy, 304. 100 Michel, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scout juif?,” 96. Michel argues that it is only with the influx of Algerian Jews in 1962, the Six Day War in 1967, the events of 1968 that the French Jewish Scouts would rekindle their earlier ideals. 101 Michel, “Qu’est-ce qu’un scout juif?,” 93–94. 102 Laura Hobson Faure, Un “plan Marshall juif,” La présence juive américaine en France après la shoah, 1944–1954 (Paris: Arman Colin, 2013), 119. Seen as a charismatic figure for his role with the scouts, in 1945 Gamzon was sent to the United States by the Joint to raise funds for the general campaign of the United Jewish Appeal, to summon American Jews to become “the Uncle America of the Jewish child in Europe,” Faure, Un “plan Marshall juif,” 153. Between 1944 and 1954 American Jews sent $26.9 million to Jews in France. Faure iterates a complex history of the paradoxes and intended and unintended consequences of philanthropy, of points of intersection between givers and receivers both individual and communal. 103 Emmanuelle Polack, “Les écoles professionnelles de l’O.R.T.-France et la transmission du Judaism, 1921–1949,” Archives juives 35, no. 2 (2ème semestre 2002): 70. 104 Letter from Edmond Fleg to Yehudi Menuhin, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 3. 105 Fonds Fleg, AIU, bobine 3. He was relieved that the WJC took a neutral stance in the Cold War. 106 Edmond Fleg, “Le problème d’aujourd’hui” quoted in Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 224–27. Fleg developed his ideas concerning the interconnectivity of diaspora and the newly created State of Israel in a “single Judaism.” In the face of Jewish nationalists calling for all Jews to live in Israel, Fleg lifts up the vibrant cultures of Jews around the world and the necessity of the survival of diasporic Judaism. See Edmond Fleg, The Land in Which God Dwells (London: LincolnsPrager, 1955), published for the World Jewish Congress. 107 AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 3. For Jacque Maritain’s influence on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see Andrew Woodcock, “Jacques Maritain, Natural Law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Journal of the History of International Law 8, no. 2 (January 2006): 245–66. 108 Jules Isaac was a well-known historian in France whose books were used in public schools during the interwar period. In 1957, he wrote Jésus et Israël, analyzing and denouncing anti-Jewish discourse in Christian preaching. His intervention through the book and beyond stirred up Catholics and set off a theological movement within the Catholic Church that influenced the Second Vatican Council. As a survivor of the Holocaust, he spoke with authority on Jewish suffering, after losing his wife, the younger of his two sons, and his daughterin-law, who were sent to the death camps in Poland and did not return. For Isaac’s influence on the Second Vatican Council, see Norman C. Tobias, Jewish

Le chant nouveau  213 Conscience of the Church, Jules Isaac and the Second Vatican Council (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Imprint of Palgrave, 2017). 109 Catherine Poujol, “L’expérience particulière d’Aimé Pallière,” in Becker, Delmaire, and Gugelot, Juifs et Chrétiens, 134–35. 110 Tobias, Jewish Conscience of the Church, 95. 111 Ibid., 109. 112 Ibid., 104–17. 113 Ibid., 109. 114 Extraits des Statuts de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne in Roussel, Un itinéraire spirituel, 233. Also see www.ajcf.fr/. 115 See Joyce Block-Lazarus, In the Shadow of Vichy: The Finaly Affair (London: Peter Lang, 2008); Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth Identity in Postwar France, Rebuilding Family and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 74–117. 116 Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews, 241. 117 François Mauriac, “Une commune attente,” AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 3. 118 Philip Nord, “A Christianized Judaism? Religion in Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit and Andree Schwarz-Bart’s Le Dernier des Justes,” 27–29 (unpublished manuscript). I am grateful to Philip Nord for sharing this work with me. 119 For a discussion of Fleg’s dialogue with Christianity, see Jean Daniélou, “Edmond Fleg et le christianisme,” Revue de la pensée juive 2 (January 1950): 43–46. 120 Olivier Rota, “La pensée d’Edmond Fleg, Coopération judéo-chrétienne, messianisme et sionisme,” Sens 361 (July–August 2011): 502–6. 121 In a letter from 1946 from Fleg to Father Jean Daniélou, he asked: “Et n’y voyez-vous pas la source, à la fois lointaine et proche, de cet antisémitisme, que vous réprouvez?,” in “Dialogue avec les juifs, christianisme et judaïsme,” Sens 361 (July–August 2011): 564. 122 Pierre Paraf in Droit et liberté, 1955, AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 123 Edmond Fleg, Fonds Fleg, AIU, bobine 4, “Le monde n’est pas une illusion qu’il faut nier ou fuir, mais une réalité qu’il faut changer.” 124 Fleg, Land in Which God Dwells, 15–17, 25–27, 42. 125 Edmond Fleg, “La survivance juive dans la dispersion,” in Problems juifs actuels, session pleniere de l’exécutif au congrès juif mondial, Genève, 23–27 juillet 1958 (Algiers: Éditions du Bureau Nord-Africain du Congrès Juif Mondial, 1958), 21–25. 126 Edmond Fleg, “Journées du Judaïsme 1963,” Central Zionist Archive, C10\1637, Patrons and Participants. 127 Rokhl Kafrissen, “The Night of the Murdered Poets,” August 14, 2019, Tablet Magazine, www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/night-of-the-murdered-poets. 128 Edmond Fleg, letter to European Executive Committee of the WJC, Central Zionist Archives, C\3198, 1956. 129 Minutes from European Executive Committee meeting, March 29, 1956, Central Zionist Archives, C\3198, 1956. 130 Gennady Estraikh, “The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 139–48. 131 André Neher, They Made Their Souls Anew, trans. David Maisel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 135. For more on André Neher see, David Banon, ed., Héritages d’André Neher (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2011). 132 Edmond Fleg to Stephen Wise, September 10, 1945, Papers of Stephen S. Wise, box 133, American Jewish Historical Society. 133 Edmond Fleg, quoted in Joseph Sungolowsky, “The Relationship between Edmond Fleg and André Neher,” European Judaism 35, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 95.

214  Le chant nouveau 134 André Neher, “The Work of Edmond Fleg  – Through the Rhythm of Numbers,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal, no. 8 (1958): 223. 135 Robert Weil, “Edmond Fleg, écrivain juif de langue française,” http://hdl.han dle.net/2042/34390. 136 Léon Askenazi, AIU, Fond Fleg, bobine 4, 137 Lehr, La Thora dans la cité, 172–75. 138 Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 192. 139 Lehr, La Thora dans la cité, 176; Sandrine Swarc, Éliane Amado Lévy-Valensi: Itinéraires (Paris: Hermann, 2019). 140 Sungolowsky, “The Relationship between Edmond Fleg and André Neher,” 94. 141 On Emmanuel Levinas see Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), especially chapter 6: “The Ethical Turn: Philosophy and Judaism in the Cold War,” 195–237. 142 Rota, “La pensée d’Edmond Fleg,” 499. 143 Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficult Freedom, Essays on Judaism (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 161. 144 Emmanuel Bulz, “Edmond Fleg, témoin engagé de son temps,” in Jüdische Selbstwahrnehmung – La prise de conscience de l’identité juive, dir. Hans-Otto Horch and Charlotte Wardi (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997). 145 AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4. 146 Hammerschlag, Modern French Jewish Thought, 105. 147 AIU, Fonds Fleg, bobine 4.

Epilogue Edmond Fleg in the twenty-first century

On Monday afternoon, January 27, 2020, we, my traveling companion, Mark, and I, made our way to the Centre Edmond Fleg in Marseille. After meandering around the old Jewish quarter for a bit, stopping in Judaica shops, and passing by storefront prayer houses, we found the Center at 4, impasse Dragon, a small cul-de-sac in the heart of the neighborhood. I wasn’t sure what to expect because Carine Benarous, the program director, had not replied to my most recent email. Security was tight; the guard was hesitant to let us in, but after Carine arrived and we established the reason for my visit, we were warmly welcomed. The Centre Edmond Fleg, founded in 1964, a year after Fleg’s death, was initially formed to help welcome Jews from North Africa. Since then, the project has evolved, according to the website, to “facilitate” Jewish identity in France and develop a “veritable laboratory of ideas.”1 Today, it maintains a pluralist approach to French Jewishness, where, as Carine noted, “each one should have their space to be Jewish” and a respect for differences. It offers cultural forums, classes, and performances that foster intercultural and interfaith dialogue. Through its commitment to perpetuate the memory of the Shoah, the Centre Edmond Fleg engages in the struggle against racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and all forms of discrimination. As we entered the large versatile space on the ground floor used for conferences, performances, and receptions, Carine pointed to the photography exhibit, Pain (bread), that graced the walls. All of the photographs were of bread – French, Jewish, Arab – ceremonial and daily. There were images of wheat in the fields, of dough in the making, of loaves being braided, of rolls and baguettes. A kneading hand here or one there, otherwise few human traces. Some of the photographs resembled geometric abstractions of space or cellular close-ups of leaves or sand. These sensual images evoked the symbolic and cultural meanings of bread and the power of communal meals. I asked if the exhibit was related to the idea of “breaking bread together” or creating “social solidarity” and “safe spaces for dialogue.” Carine explained: “Yes, the photographs were commissioned for the Center for that reason.” The images were intimate, personal, and universal; they conjoined food, sustenance, and life to family, culture, and work. She added that there would be a meeting that very evening bringing together Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders to begin work on a cultural project called “We Are All

216  Epilogue Marseillaise.” It is precisely this kind of intercultural dialogue that is at the heart of the Center’s mission: “a place to practice dynamic listening and exchange that partners with a broad array of associations across the city.”2 Carine is committed to the Center’s mission. She is fierce and determined to make a difference. With a raspy laugh and a sharp wit, she described her grandmother. “She was a union worker/organizer in Algeria and told me when I was young: ‘You have to get up, fix your hair, put on lipstick, and go out get things done!’ ” We shared a sensibility even though we had just met! Upstairs, drinking coffee, we talked about Fleg. “He is not well known anymore,” she lamented, “yet he is the very soul of French Judaism.” By the end of our conversation, Carine invited me to the interfaith gathering that night. I went. Upon arrival that evening, I  was ushered to a seat around a large table. We went around and introduced ourselves – there were Christian clergy, an Armenian couple who worked with their community, a Muslim woman who was involved in securing social services for recent Muslim immigrants, a number of Jewish leaders from various backgrounds (Tunisian, Algerian, Italian, Parisian). I was surprised by the diversity of the Marseillais Jewish world. As Carine explained, each community of Jews in Marseille lives in their own enclave with its synagogue(s) and communal organizations. And according to Carine, French Jews, who embrace republican values, “who feel French do not identify strongly as Jews, if at all.” There is little intracommunal dialogue; they are “siloed,” which makes it difficult to find common ground. Speaking to that point, a man at the table said: “Talking has been replaced by communicating.” By that he meant that talking as an intimate shared experience is being replaced by “texts” and other forms of “abstract communication” whereby so much connection is lost. He thought this added to the breakdown of cross-communal understanding as well. As the evening ended, there was broad agreement to continue their work together. It was moving to be with this group of faith/cultural leaders who were committed to creating a cultural exposition that would represent all of Marseille’s cultural–ethnic–religious communities, especially in the face of rising support for the right-wing National Front in Marseille and the surrounding region.3 Little did we know then that only a few weeks later the pandemic would close the Centre Edmond Fleg to the public. Still closed as I write this, the Centre’s website points to online activities, including a homage to the well-known historian of fascism Ze’ev Sternhell, who died on June 21, 2020, and a recording of a talk by Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur that had been given at the Centre, titled: “How Do Rabbis Make Children? Sex, Transmission, and Identity in Judaism.” Writer, editor of the journal of Jewish thought Tenou’a – atélier de pensée(s) juive(s),4 feminist, and coleader of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France, Rabbi Horvilleur is somewhat of a celebrity or a scandal, depending on your perspective. As Carine described, “Delphine and her congregation, along with probably a few other instances of a more familiar (to Americans) kind of Jewish expression are in a challenging position here. They are not accepted by the religious but are seen as primarily Jewish by the antisemitic nationalist right.” Delphine and others are trying to nurture a Franco-Judaism that weaves together universal values of justice and

Epilogue 217 liberty and an appreciation of difference. Well known in France and beyond, Delphine Horvilleur is a Reform rabbi in a mainly Orthodox Jewish world in France and a political progressive in a largely conservative Jewish milieu. In her words: “I am marginalized much more as a woman than anything else. As a Reform rabbi and a leftist, I am considered irrelevant. But as a woman rabbi and activist, I pose a threat to the conservatism of our community.”5 Those words were part of an interview conducted in 2018 by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, with the headline “Madame le Rabbin: France’s Star Female Rabbi Fights a Lonely Two-Front Battle against Antisemitism and Islamophobia.” I have had the pleasure of attending Shabbat services at Delphine Horvilleur’s synagogue in Paris and, on November 28, 2018, I heard her speak at Columbia University’s Maison Française. The hall was filled to capacity; her talk – “What (Jewish) Identity Is Not . . .” – focused on identity as a navigation “in-between counter narratives, in-between opposing versions of our history or origins. These narratives are often irreconcilable, or don’t fit well with each other, but they tell something about our truths, or what we call our identity.” Horvilleur, in a Flegian way, challenges the notion that “identity” is something fixed or internally unmovable, “a story that is supposedly transmitted over time and generations as some kind of sameness.” Rather, she explains, “Each one of us is the product of dissonance, whether cognitive or emotional, the fruit of multiple anchorings, or competing narratives, that supposedly guarantee, for each generation, the possibility of a non-identity to their origin.” I do believe, she affirms, “we are always the subtle product of irreconcilable versions of our past, and that we build ourselves upon this in-between.” Following her understanding of “in-betweenness,” at another point, Rabbi Horvilleur explains that the word “Hebrew,” ivrit, literally means to “cross over” or to “pass.” When “someone says they’re Greek, it means they come from Greece.” But to say you are a “Hebrew” says nothing about the place of your origin but everything about the “fact that you LEFT it, as Abraham left Ur. The Hebrew identity,” she continues, “is an identity of no longer being where you were. You are what you are because you’re not what you used to be.” There is nothing essential, nostalgic, or backward-looking here. For Horvilleur, Jewish identity is as paradoxical as it sounds: “Identity according to Judaism cannot replicate, simply because it cannot stand still.” It is defined by movement itself; “it is essentially a non-essence. It is a becoming.” To conclude, Horvilleur acknowledges that out of fear we crave certainties, like the golden calf: We worship certainties, casted in unbroken shapes. And we forget that our identities are always just like us: wandering in the desert, on a journey, like a nomadic experience that enables us to say we are not settled yet. There is always something else we can be, somewhere else we can go, a promised land of what we have yet to reach.6 I attended the talk with my friend, Rabbi Dr. Lisa Grant, who was one of Delphine Horvilleur’s teachers at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of

218  Epilogue Religion (HUC-JIR). Afterward, Lisa introduced me to Delphine, explaining that I was writing a biography of Edmond Fleg. I commented that I was moved by her discussion of identity as a process, a journey, a becoming. It seemed to echo and bring forward Fleg’s own ideas of the last century. She responded: Oh, yes, we need Edmond Fleg’s expansive ideas of Judaism and Jewish identity right now! His writing is at the spiritual center of my own work as well as the ongoing discussions of liberal French Jewishness at this complicated moment. In Marseille, in Paris, and in New York I found Edmond Fleg’s grandchildren, and there are many more.

Notes 1 www.centrefleg.com/qui-sommes-nous/. As the cultural arm of the Le Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU; The United Jewish Social Fund), the Centre Edmond Fleg occupies part of the Centre Communautaire Culturel Juif de Marseille (Jewish Community Center of Marseille). Created in 1950 and recognized as a public utility, the FSJU is the principal federation of Jewish associations that engage in social action, education, and culture. They also act as the information gateway for Holocaust victims with regard to procedures for indemnification, other social services, and Jewish care facilities. 2 www.centrefleg.com/qui-sommes-nous/. 3 “Where France’s National Front Is on the Rise,” March 2, 2017, The Economist, www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/03/02/where-frances-nationalfront-is-on-the-rise. 4 https://tenoua.org/. 5 Etta Prince-Gibson, “Madame Le Rabbin: France’s Star Female Rabbi Fights a Lonely Two-front Battle Against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” 5/23/2018, Haaretz; Gabrielle Birkner, “This Rabbi Is an Elle Cover Model,” January 28, 2020, Kveller, www.kveller.com/this-rabbi-is-an-elle-cover-model/. 6 Delphine Horvilleur, “What (Jewish) Identity Is Not . . .,” Maison Française de Columbia University, November 28, 2018 (unpublished paper).

Bibliography

Archives American Jewish History Society, New York City, Papers of Stephen S. Wise Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris (AIU) Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (BNF), Collection Rondel Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem New York Public Library Dorot Jewish Division Manuscript Collection Prints and Photographs Collections Rare Book Division

Works by Edmond Fleg Theatre and opera 1903 1904 1906 1906 1910 1910 1913 1920 1920 1921 1925 1927 1929 1936 1936 1937 1941

La cloison Le message Le démon Narcisse La bête Macbeth Le trouble fête La maison du bon dieu Le penseur (film scenario) Les dieudieux (never performed) Le juif du pape (performed by the Comédie-Française in 1965, broadcast on France-Culture) Jézabel, midrash ou histoire inspire des écritures Le marchand de Paris Oedipe (with Georges Enesco) Sainte-Jeanne Faust Sainte-Lise

220  Bibliography

Poetry 1913–1954 1919 1919 1924 1938 1943 1946 1958

Ecoute Israël (1954 definitive edition) Le mur des pleurs (English translation, The Wall of Weeping, 1929) Le psaume de la terre promise La terre de promesse Apocalypse. A la paix du monde Et nous vivrons. La colonne de fumé Le sel de la terre Idées de Paris

Novels and legendary biographies 1926 1928 1929 1933

L’enfant prophète Moïse (English translation, 1928) Salomon (English translation, 1929) Jésus raconté par le juif errant (English translation, 1934)

Essays, translations, anthologies 1923 1925 1925 1925 1928 1932 1946 1948 1949 1953

Anthologie juive (volumes I and II) L’histoire de Tévié Le livre du Zohar La haggada de Pessah Pourquoi je suis juif (English translation, 1929) Ma Palestine (English translation, 1933) Le chant nouveau Le problème d’aujourd’hui Nous de l’espérance La terre que dieu habite (English translation, 1955)

Other sources Abitbol, Michel. Les deux terres promises, Les juifs de France et le sionisme. Paris: Olivier Orban, 1989. Albert, Phyllis Cohen. The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1977. Algazi, Léon. “Un entrtien avec Edmond Fleg.” Revue de la pensée juive 2 (July 8, 1951). Almog, Shmuel. “The Racial Motif in Renan’s Attitude to Jesus and Judaism.” In Antisemitism through the Ages, edited by Shmuel Almog. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Amishai-Maisels, Ziva. “Origins of the Jewish Jesus.” In Complex Identities, Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, edited by Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

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Bibliography 223 Faure, Laura Hobson, et al. L’oeuvre de secours aux enfants et les population juives au XXe siècle, prévenir et guérir dans un siècle de violence. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Feigelson, Ralph. Écrivains juifs de langue française. Paris: J. Grassin, 1960. Fhima, Catherine. “Aux sources d’un renouveau identitaire juif en France: André Spire et Edmond Fleg.” Mil neuf cent 13, no. 13 (1995). ———. “Au coeur de la ‘renaissance juive’: Littérature judéité.” “Le ‘réveil juif’ des années vingt.”Archives juives 39, no. 1 (1er Semester 2006). Fleg, Daniel. Journal. Paris: Bushet, Chastel Corrêa, 1940. Ford, Caroline. Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Forth, Christopher E. The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Masculinity. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Frankel, Jonathan, ed. Assimilation and Community, The Jews in NineteenthCentury Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Friedlander, Judith. Vilna on the Seine, Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Gamzon, Robert. Tivliout. Paris: EIF Press, 1945. Goguel, Maurice. “The Religious Situation in France.” The Journal of Religion 1, no. 6 (November 1921). Graetz, Heinrich, and Philipp Bloch. History of the Jews, vol. 4. New York: Jewish Publishing Society, 1897. Green, Nancy. The Pletzl of Paris, Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque. New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1986. Greenberg, Udi. “Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious Pluralism.” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019). Grogin, Robert C. The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988. Gugelot, Frédéric. La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France, 1885–1935. Paris: Editions CNRS, 1998. Hammel, Frédéric Chimon. Souviens-toi d’Amalek, Témoignage sur la lute des juifs en France (1938–1944). Paris: CLKH, 1982. Hammerschlag, Sarah, ed. Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018. Hanna, Martha. The Mobilization of the Intellect, French Scholars and Writers during the Great War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. Your Death Would Be Mine, Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Harmanmaa, Marja, and Christopher Nissen, eds. Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Harris, Ruth. Dreyfus, Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of a Century. New York: Henry Holt, 2010. ———. “How the Dreyfus Affair Explains Sarkozy’s Burqua Ban.” Foreign Policy, May 12, 2010. Hazan, Katy, and Georges Weill. “L’OSE et le sauvetage des enfants juifs, de ‘avantguerre à l’après-guerre.” In La résistance aux genocides: De la pluralité des actes de sauvetage, edited by Jacques Sémelin, Claire Andrieu, and Sarah Gensburger. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2008.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to photographs. Abddülhamid II (Ottoman sultan) 150, 155 Abraham (biblical) 137 Act of Separation 58 Action française (journal) 31 Agoudas-Hakehillos 58 AIU see Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) Akiva, Rabbi 125 – 6 Aleichem, Sholem 92, 93, 102 Algazi, Léon 10, 175, 205 Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) 1, 20, 89, 154 – 6, 164, 196, 198; Central Committee 198; and Jewish youth 157; Manifesto 198; in Turkey 171n46 Altermann, Jean-Pierre 137 American Joint Distribution Committee 192, 197 Amitié Chrétienne 191, 192 Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France (AJCF, Jewish-Christian Fellowship) 10, 175, 199, 200 – 1 ancestral memory 107 Andler, Charles 21, 23 Anthologie juive 85, 87 – 93 anti-Dreyfusards 4, 6, 25, 26, 37, 55, 148, 149; see also Dreyfusards antidualism 16, 38 – 9, 146, 168 antisemitism 8, 23 – 4, 27 – 8, 31, 39 – 40, 89, 90, 109, 133, 154, 215; and the Dreyfus Affair 147 – 9; in Europe 139, 168; in France 111, 164, 177, 216 – 17; German and AustroHungarian 86, 114 – 15n87; and the Jewish scouts 158; racial 199; and

Sartre’s book 2 – 3; tropes reframed 119 – 22; and Zionism 153 anti-Zionism 154, 167 Antoine, André 75 Arab Muslims: and the Jewish State 155 – 6; in Palestine 159 – 61, 164; Palestine revolt 166 – 7 Ariel, Joseph (Joseph Fisher) 166 – 7 Armenians, massacre of 150 Aron, Raymond 203 Asch, Sholem 92, 102, 144n86 Askenazi, Léon 204, 205 autonomism 91, 151 Back, A. 70 Badoglio, Pietro 194 Balfour Declaration 91, 153, 167 Barbusse, Henri 62 Barney, Natalie Clifford 35, 75, 83n91, 85, 101 Barrès, Maurice 21, 25, 26, 33, 55 Basch, Victor 7, 84 Baty, Gaston 181 Becker, Annette 69 Beer-Hoffmann, Richard 99 Beilis Affair 43 Ben Gurion, David 167 Benarous, Carine 215 – 16 Benda, Julien 32, 37 Benjamin, Walter 8, 86 Benzion, Alexander 106 Bergelson, Dovid 203 Bergson, Henri 5, 6, 16, 38 – 9, 44, 56, 59, 90, 109, 110, 146, 154, 168, 176 Bernard, Jean-Marc 68 – 9 Bernheim, Antoine 181 Bernheim, Jean 60

Index  231 Bernheim, Léonce 169, 179, 181, 195 Bernheim, Madeleine see Fleg, Madeleine (Bernheim) Bernheim, Philippe 181 Bernheim, Renée 181, 195 Besnard, Jean-Jacques 2 Besnard, Louis 43 Besnard, Lucien 106, 109 – 10 Bialik (Bialyk), Hayim 92, 99 Billy, André 107, 138 Bing, Suzanne 137 Black Friday 119 Bloch, Abraham 74 Bloch, Ernest 8, 31 – 2, 34, 37, 51 – 2n106, 59, 60, 64, 70 – 1, 86, 99, 122 Bloch, Jean-Richard 7, 84, 92, 93, 102, 123, 150 Bloch, Maurice 153 Bloch, Philipp 94 Bloy, Léon 40 – 1 Blum, Léon 7, 23, 32, 49n71, 84, 177 Blum-Klein, Jean 106 Brandeis, Louis 10, 147 Breitenstein, Jules 70, 92 Briand, Aristide 127 Brierre, Jean 130 Brisson, Adolphe 75 Brisson, Pierre 98 Brit Shalom 161, 173n71 British White Paper 167, 173n67 Brod, Max 99 Brun, Antonine 200 Buber, Martin 8, 86, 92, 99, 100, 101, 102 Bundists 177 Bureau interfédéral du soutisme (BIF) 165 Cahiers de la quinzaine 6, 37, 39, 41 Caro, Joseph 95 Cassin, René 136, 198, 199, 203 Catholic modernism 56 Catholics and Catholicism 19 – 20, 39, 45, 137; alternative 200; Catholic renewal 45; Jazz Age 58; Jewish converts to 137 – 8; and religious education 199; response to the outbreak of war 57 – 9; resurgence of 58 – 9; see also Christianity Central Consistory 187 Central Jewish Committee 157 Centre Communautaire Culturel Juif de Marseille (Jewish Community Center of Marseille) 218n1

Centre d’Information Israélite 199 Centre Edmond Fleg 10, 215 – 16, 218n1 Centre Universitaire des Études Juives (CUEJ, University Center of Jewish Studies) 205 Chagall, Bella 138 Chagall, Marc 65, 101, 138, 145n119, 162, 203 Chaillet, Pierre 181 Chema lecture series 101 Chili, Rabbi 1 Chomrim 158 Christ see Jesus Christianity: and antisemitism 178; and French culture 165; and the Holocaust 201; see also Catholics and Catholicism Christian-Jewish relations 6, 56 – 7, 119, 137 – 9, 200 – 1 civilizing mission 155, 163 classicism 69 Claudel, Paul 58 Clemenceau, Georges 37 Clement VII (pope) 94 – 8 Clifford, Natalie see Barney, Natalie Clifford Cocteau, Jean 59 Cohen, Albert 7, 84 Cohen, Hermann 8, 86 Cohn, Léo 164 – 5, 182, 197; photographs 183 Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Français (Colloquium of French Jewish Intellectuals) 3, 10, 175, 204 Comité d’Action et de Defense de la Jeunesse Juive (CADJJ, Committee for Action and Defense of Jewish Youth) 196 Comte, Auguste 38 Congrès juif mondial see World Jewish Congress (WJC, Congrès juif mondial) Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF, Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France) 195 – 6 Copeau, Jacques 59 cosmopolitanism 27, 59, 152 Crès, Georges 87 Cubism 69 Daladier-Marchandeau decree 181 Daniélou, F. Jean 199, 201

232 Index D’Annunzio, Gabriele 29, 50n83 Darnton, Robert 11 David Golder (Némirovsky) 122 Declaration of Human Rights (UN) 199 Delarue, Lucie 106 demilitarization 9, 119 denominationalism 58 Der Jude (literary review) 100 – 1 Dhorme, Edouard 138 dialectical realism 71 Donati, Angelo 192 Dreyfus, Alfred 4, 6, 15, 23 – 24, 27, 28, 39 – 40, 48n55, 62, 147, 149, 150, 159 Dreyfus, Robert-Jean 37 Dreyfus Affair 6, 9, 15 – 16, 23 – 8, 39 – 42, 44, 89, 105, 107, 113n55; and antisemitism 24, 147 – 9; and Jewish masculinity 149 – 50, 158; and Zionism 147 – 8 Dreyfusards 6, 24, 26, 37, 40; see also anti-Dreyfusards Drumont, Edouard 20, 148 Du Bois, W.E.B. 162 Dubnow, Simon 91, 146, 151 Dumas, André 75 Echo sioniste (journal) 199 Éclaireurs Israélite de France (EIF, French Jewish Scouts) 1, 9, 10, 32, 97, 153, 157 – 8, 164 – 6, 168 – 9, 175, 187, 197; at Beauvallon 10, 169, 175, 182 – 7, 183, 203 – 4; Central Committee 165 – 6; efforts to save Jewish children 190 – 3; Service social des jeunes (Youth Social Service) 197; Sixième division 191, 197; and the Union des juifs pour la résistance et l’entr’aide 195; wartime farms 185, 209n41 ecumenism 13 – 14n22, 56, 78; modern Jewish 87 – 93; radical 4, 7; during WWI 6 – 7 Einstein, Albert 91 Enelow, H.G. 89 Enlightenment ideals 16, 90, 150 European Union 11 Eydoux, Emmanuel 186 Ezekiel, Moses 138 Feigelson, Ralph 44 Fhima, Catherine 5, 20, 24 Finaly Affair 200

Finkielkraut, Alain 3 First Zionist Congress 9, 146, 147 – 8; see also Zionist Congresses Fisher, Joseph (Joseph Ariel) 166 – 7 Fleg, Ayala (Zacks-Aramov) 10, 175, 180, 208n21 Fleg, Daniel 10, 59, 175, 176, 178 – 9, 187, 195; photographs 61, 179 Fleg, Edmond: and the AIU 198; banquet honoring 101 – 2; childhood and family 6, 16 – 18; critical reception of 35 – 6, 43 – 4, 70, 74 – 6, 92 – 3, 98, 105 – 6, 127, 129 – 30, 138; education 6, 20 – 3; in the French Foreign Legion 45, 55, 57 – 8, 59 – 64, 153; and the French Jewish Scouts 1, 9, 10, 157 – 8, 168 – 9, 175, 182 – 7, 193, 195, 203 – 4; illness and death 206 – 7; journey to Palestine 9, 106, 130 – 1, 134, 138, 144n86, 147 – 8, 159 – 64, 168; Levinas’ admiration for 3; marriage and children 30 – 1; “off modern” writing of 56; and Péguy 37 – 44; photographs 28, 61, 63, 64, 163, 183, 184, 186, 202, 206; as playwright 29 – 30; reader response to 98 – 9, 105 – 7, 109 – 10; relationship with Marie-Claire Monnier 18 – 19, 22, 29 – 30, 40 – 1, 44, 75, 103; struggles with Judaism 17 – 18; and World War I 6 – 7; during World War II 10, 175, 181 – 92; after WWII 196 – 207; and Zionism 9 – 10, 146, 148 – 57, 159 – 69 Fleg, Edmond, works of: Anthologie juive 8, 87 – 93; Écoute Israél (Hear O Israel) 1, 6, 16, 37, 41 – 3, 45, 176; Iezabel, Midrash ou Histoire Inspire des Ecritures 34, 36, 51 – 2n106; Jésus raconté par le juif errant 189, 119, 30 – 8, 139, 159; La bête (The beast) 29, 34 – 6; La cloison (The cloister) 29, 50n84; La maison du bon dieu 7, 56, 71 – 8, 161; La terre que dieu habite (The Land in which God Dwells) 202; Le chant nouveau (The new song) 10, 175, 187 – 8, 190, 197, 204; Le juif du pape (The Jew in the Papal Court) 8, 85, 93 – 101; Le marchand de Paris (The merchant of Paris) 8 – 9, 118 – 22, 121; Le message 29 – 30, 36; Le mur des pleurs (The Wall of Weeping) 7, 55 – 6, 64 – 71, 99, 140n14, 178; Le

Index  233 trouble fête (The party pooper) 29, 36; L’enfant prophète (The Boy Prophet) 8, 85 – 6, 102 – 10, 157, 189; letters to Bloch 60, 64, 70 – 1; letters to Madeleine 59 – 60, 62, 154; Literary and Philosophical Anti-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (thesis) 26; Ma Palestine 9, 147, 159 – 63; Moïse 119, 122 – 8, 130, 139; Nous de l’espérance (We of hope) 195; Pourquoi Je suis juif (Why I Am a Jew) 8, 85 – 6, 107 – 9, 111; Salomon 119, 122 – 3, 128 – 30, 139 Fleg, Madeleine (Bernheim) 2, 10, 30, 169, 175, 178, 180, 195; photographs 61, 63, 206 Fleg, Maurice 10, 30 – 1, 59, 175, 179, 180, 195; photographs 61, 180 Fleg archive 2 Flegenheimer, Clara Nordemann 16, 23 Flegenheimer, Gaston 16 Flegenheimer, Moïse (Maurice) 16, 22 Forth, Christopher 24, 150 France: in the 1930s 118; aging leadership in 127 – 8; German occupation of 169, 192 – 5; history of 11; internment camps 187; Italian occupation of 192; Jewish consistory 172n55; Jewish refugees in 208n15, 208 – 9n27; Le statut des juifs 181 – 2; liberation of Paris 175, 195; Vichy regime 169, 181, 185, 187, 191 – 2 France, Anatole 37 Franck, Henri 32 – 3, 150 Franco-Palestine 162 Frank, Henri 92 Free Masonry 190 Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus 100 French Popular Front 177 French Revolution ideals 17, 33 Frossard, André 137 Gamzon, Denise 198 Gamzon, Robert “Castor” 9, 157, 158, 164, 169, 182 – 6, 190, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 209n41, 211n88, 212n102; photographs 183, 184, 194, 198 Gance, Abel 67 Garel, Georges 191 Garigou-Lagrange, Réginald 137, 145n114 Gaument, Léon 79

Geiger, Abraham 131 Gémier, Firmin 34, 36 Gentily, Anne-Marie 190 Germany: Jewish renaissance 100; occupation of France 169, 192 – 5 Ghéon, Henri 59 Gide, André 31 Ginsberg, Asher Zvi Hirsch (Ahad Ha’am) 91, 146, 151, 173n71 Glasberg, Alexandre 191 Goguel, Maurice 78 Golomb, Eliyahu 166, 167 Gordon, A. D. 158, 164 Graetz, Heinrich 4, 13n17, 90, 94 Great Depression 130 Great Revolt 166 – 7 Great War see World War I Groupe des Ouvriers Juifs 171n35 Gugelot, Frédéric 58 Guiraud, Jean 107 Gutman, Claude 183, 191 Ha’am, Ahad (Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg) 91, 146, 151, 173n71 Habima theatre 99 Hachomer Hatzaïr 158 Hahsharah school 165 Haganah 166, 167, 168 Hagbi, Yaniv 87 Haguenau, Marc 184 Halevy, Daniel 37 Hamadian massacres 150 Hammel, Frédéric Chimon “Chameau” 182 – 3, 184, 191, 193, 197, 209n33 Hanna, Martha 60 Harris, Ruth 26 Hasidism 164 Hebrew language 10, 17, 31, 87 – 8, 104, 107 – 8, 123, 158, 162, 164, 188, 199, 205, 217 Hebron massacre 9, 160 Heirschenschen, Norbert 105 Herbert, Robert 69 Herr, Lucien 21 Herriot, Edouard 101, 107 Hertz, Henri 123 Herz, Micheline 69, 70 Herzl, Theodor 27, 91, 115n91, 146, 148, 150, 169n6; and the First Zionist Congress 147 – 8 Hess, Moses 91 Hirsch, Emil 137 Hitler, Adolf 135, 176 – 7, 195

234 Index Hoffman, Matthew 131 Holocaust 195, 201, 215 Horvilleur, Delphine 216 – 18 humanism 78 – 9, 178, 201 al-Husseini, Mohammed Amin 167 Ibsen, Henrik 22, 36 identity: ambiguous 8; dual 5, 10, 15, 16, 27 – 8, 33; French 69; minority 4; mixed/ambiguous 86; national 11; see also Jewish identity imperialism, French 163 International Council of Christians and Jews 10, 175 International Disarmament Conference 136 internationalism 9, 119, 199 Isaac, Jules 10, 175, 199 – 200, 203, 212 – 13n108 Islamophobia 217 Israel 147; declaration of independence 198; and the Jewish diaspora 202 – 3; War of Independence 199; see also Zionism Jabotinsky, Vladimir 9, 147, 159 J’accuse (film) 67 Jacob, Max 59, 137 Jacobinism 109 Jankélévitch, Vladamir 1, 207 Jaurès, Jean 21 Jazz Age Catholicism 58 Jesus 8 – 9, 111; as a border figure 130 – 1; Chagall’s portrayal of 138, 139, 145n119; in Fleg’s writings 103, 104 – 6, 130 – 8; Jewish view of 89; Jews blamed for killing 65, 136; Moses Ezekiel’s portrayal of 138; Raissa Maritain’s biography of 139; Renan’s biography of 132 – 3; Sholem Asch’s depiction of 144n86 Jewish Agency 153 Jewish Christian Fellowship Society (L’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France) 1 Jewish community: assimilation of 24 – 5; emancipation of 16 – 17; in France 197; in Paris 20 Jewish culture 151, 204, 205, 207; Ashkenazi 93, 94, 133, 143n82; Eastern European 166; Germaninfluenced 93; Italian 94; Kabbalistic 95, 108, 122, 130, 175; Marranos 94; minority 15; Sephardic 94, 95

Jewish diaspora 90 – 1, 107, 136, 146, 151, 156, 162, 199, 202 – 3 Jewish folklore 93 – 101 Jewish history 187 – 8, 204, 205 Jewish identity 3 – 4, 15, 17, 25, 31 – 2, 48 – 9n64, 84, 105; and the Centre Edmond Fleg 215; concealment of 190; cultural 7, 11, 85, 146; ethical 85; ethnic 165; Fleg’s awareness of 24, 63 – 4, 110; Fleg’s writing about 107; in France 204; French 2, 5 – 6, 44, 163, 195; and French identity 5; and Jewish texts 206; in literature 8, 13n16; minority 11; modern 6, 11, 110 – 11; national 4, 146, 154; nationalist 152; post-war 7; Rabbi Horvilleur’s talk 217; secular 5, 11; spiritual 85 Jewish immigrants 33; in France 120 – 1, 140n12, 164; from North Africa 215; to Palestine 160, 167, 173n67, 198 – 9; and World War I 57 – 8 Jewish mystique 40, 42, 161, 204 Jewish National Fund 166 Jewish particularism 152, 196 Jewish pluralism 156 – 7, 159, 186 – 7, 188, 196, 197 Jewish Popular Front (Mouvement Populaire Juif, MPJ) 177 Jewish refugees 208n15, 208 – 9n27 Jewish renewal (réveil juif ) 2, 7 – 8, 59, 84, 86, 84, 86, 92 Jewish Scout Movement of France see Éclaireurs Israelite de France (EIF, French Jewish Scouts) Jewish-Christian reconciliation 6, 56 – 7, 119 Jewish-Christian relations 6, 56 – 7, 119, 137 – 9, 200 – 1 Jewish-Palestinian Peace Alliance 161 Jews: assimilation of 90, 105, 152, 156, 157; blamed for killing Christ 65, 136; Central European 147; Central Jewish Committee 164; converts to Catholicism 137 – 8; Eastern European 78, 115n95, 146, 147, 150, 154, 156, 164; in France 120 – 1, 140n10, 181 – 2, 195, 211n89, 216; German 165, 176; in Germany 208n25; Hebron massacre 9, 160; immigrants in France 9; living in France 45 – 6n2; as minority nationality 91; as minority subculture 57; Ottoman 155;

Index  235

Kabbalism 95, 108, 122, 130, 175 Kahn, Gustave 7, 32, 84, 92, 93, 123 Kahn, Louis 203 Kahn, Zadoc 58, 153 Kellogg-Briand Pact 127 – 8 Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (KKL) 153 kibbutzim 161 – 2 Klein, Félix 57, 72 Klein, Samy 182, 184, 193, 197, 204 Korb, Samuel 57

Leo X (pope) 94 Les cahiers de quinzaine (biweekly journal) 6, 37, 39, 41 Lesage, Gilbert 191 L’esprit (journal) 177 Leurs Raisons (Billy) 107 Leven, Narcisse 20 Lévi, Israel 62 – 3, 167 Lévi, Sylvain 89 – 90, 153 – 4, 155, 156 Levinas, Emmanuel 3, 10, 175, 203, 205 Lévy, Alfred 157 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucian 154 Lévy-Valensi, Éliane Amado 205 Liber, Maurice 90 Life of Jesus (Renan) 132 – 3 Ligue des amis du sionisme 155 Ligue Internationale contre l’Antisémitisme (LICA) 158, 177 Lipchitz, Jacques 101 Literatenjuden 86, 100 Luchaire, Julien 21 Lugné-Poe 4, 21 Lunel, Armand 93, 94, 113n55 L’univers israélite (journal) 158 Luria, Isaac 108 Lustiger, Jean-Marie 137

La France juive 20, 47n29 La revue blanche (journal) 32 La revue littéraire juive (journal) 8, 102 L’action française 43 Lafont, General 166 laïcité 38, 39 – 41, 52 – 3n123, 58, 86 Laloy, Louis 21, 47n38 L’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France (Jewish Christian Fellowship Society) 1 Lanzmann, Claude 2 Lasker-Schuler, Else 102 Lattès, Samy 199 Lavagne, André 194 Lazare, Bernard 6, 26 – 7, 31, 37, 40, 41 – 2, 89, 102, 148, 150, 151 – 3; on Zionism 146, 152, 159 Le fumier de Job (Lazare) 42 Le Pen, Marine 11 Le penseur (The Thinker) (film) 79 League of Nations 9, 119, 127, 130, 136 L’école juive (The Jewish School) 205 Lehrhaus movement 86 Lena, Mauris 105

Madaule, Jacques 21 Malinovich, Nadia 55 Malraux, André 1 Marie-Bénoît, Père 175, 192, 193, 195 Maritain, Jacques 1, 9, 39, 58, 59, 119, 137, 177 – 8, 199, 200 Maritain, Raissa 9, 39, 59, 119, 137 – 8 Marranos 191 Marrou, Henri 199 Marx, Karl 89 Marxism 109, 120 masculinity: French 150; Jewish 149 – 50, 158 Mauriac, François 58, 201, 207 Maurras, Charles 26, 31, 38, 49n67 Mayer, René 1 Memmi, Albert 3 Menuhin, Yehuda 178, 198 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) 8 – 9, 118, 119 messianism 56, 78 – 9, 122, 201 midrash 9, 34, 119, 123 – 4, 125 Milhaud, Darius 94 Milosz, Czeslaw 69 Miracles of Life, The (Zweig) 99 – 100

Palestinian 156; Polish 91, 154, 165; popular stereotypes of 109; refugees in France 192 – 3; response to the outbreak of war 57 – 9; Russian 146, 150, 154, 169n6, 203; Ukrainian 91; violence against 89, 160, 164, 166 – 8 Joan of Arc (saint) 136 – 7 Josephus Flavius 88 Judaism: Fleg’s approach to 5; Hasidic 90; Levinas’s approach to 3; messianic mission of 159; rabbinic 90; see also Israel; Jews; Zionism Judaïsme (book series) 87, 102 Judaisme (journal) 8 Judeophobia 8, 15, 25, 43, 44, 89, 136, 153, 164; see also antisemitism

236 Index Misrahi, Robert 3 Mohilever, Samuel 91 Molcho, Solomon (Diego Pires) 94 – 8 Monchanin, Abbé 199 Monnier, Marie-Claire 6, 18 – 19, 22, 25, 29 – 30, 40 – 1, 44, 75, 103 Montgomery, Bernard “Monty” 168 Monzie, Anatole de 162 Moreau, Lucien 6, 25, 26, 107, 148; Fleg’s letter to 61 – 2 Moses (biblical), Fleg’s biography of 119, 122 – 8, 130, 139 Mounier, Emmanuel 177, 207 – 8n10 Mouvement des Éclaireurs Israélites de France see Éclaireurs Israelite de France (EIF, French Jewish Scouts) Mouvement Populaire Juif (MPJ, Jewish Popular Front) 177 multiculturalism 7, 12 Munich Agreement 178 Muslims see Arab Muslims mystic-realism 56 nationalism 6, 11, 27; chauvinistic 150; diaspora 151; extremist 159; French 148; Jewish 9, 15, 44, 146, 148, 151, 152, 162, 171n35; nation-state 146; particularist 147; right-wing 34; territorial 9, 65; Zionist 159 Neher, André 13n14, 41 – 2, 203, 204, 205, 207 Némirovsky, Irène 7 – 8, 122, 140 – 1n15 neo-Kantianism 21, 56, 78 Nicault, Catherine 55 Night of the Murdered Poets 203 Nordau, Max 91, 149, 158 Notre Cité 164 – 5 Nouvelle revue français (NRF ) 123 Nozière, Fernand (Fernand Weyl) 35 Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) 185, 187, 191, 192 orientalism 123 ORT-France (OrganizationReconstruction-Travail) 187, 193, 197 – 198 Owen, Wilfred 68 Painlevé, Paul 101 Palestinian Mandate 9, 147, 158, 159, 160 – 1; Arab revolt 166 – 7 Pallière, Aimé 7, 84, 92, 172 – 3n59 Paraf, Pierre 102, 201

Paris Peace Conference 154 Parsons, Léon 58 Patai, József 162 Péguy, Charles 6, 16, 21, 37 – 45, 59, 68, 161, 177, 200, 204; bookstore 37, 137; Les cahiers de la quinzaine 6, 37, 39, 41; lectures at Collège de France 37 Pelosef, Saby 79 Peretz, IL 92, 102 personalist movement 177 Pétain, Marshal 193 Pianko, Noam 146 Picquart, Georges 24 Pinsker, Leon 91, 169n6 Pitoëff, Georges 74, 94, 96, 98 Pitoëff, Ludmilla 74 Pius IX (pope) 132 Poincaré, Raymond 6, 55, 57, 127 Poirier, Léon 79 positivism 38 – 9 Pougatch, Isaac 182, 199, 209n31 Poyse, Violette 105 propaganda: antisemitic 181; Jewish 154 psychology 6, 15 race thinking 33 – 4, 48 – 9n64 racial intolerance 48n60; see also antisemitism racism 215 Rathenau, Walter 89 Reden über das Judentum (Buber) 101 Reinach, Joseph 37 Reinach, Salomon 101 religious pluralism 58, 78; see also Jewish pluralism renaissance littéraire juive 123 Renan, Ernest 21, 47n41, 132 – 3 Reubeni, David 94 – 5 réveil juif (Jewish renewal) 2, 7 – 8, 59, 84, 86, 84, 86, 92 Rights of Man and of Citizen 16, 21, 150, 153 Rolland, Romain 21, 37, 52n120, 71 Rosenzweig, Franz 86, 100, 101, 115n101 Rothschild, Edmond de 203 Rothschild, Robert de 166, 167 Roussel, Odile 59 Sachs, Maurice 137 Sacred Union 6 – 7, 55, 57, 58, 72, 75 – 8, 119

Index  237 Samuel, Edwin 161 Samuels, Maurice 7, 11, 13n16, 24 Sand, Shlomo 65 Sartre, Jean-Paul 2 – 3, 12n8 Schloesser, Stephen 56 Schwartzfuchs, Simon 16 – 17 Schwarz, Isaïa 192 Schweitzer, Albert 132, 143n74 Schwob, Marcel 92 Schwob, René 137 Second Vatican Council 200 secularism 38, 58 Segev, Tom 168 Service Social des Étrangers 191 Shakespeare, William 8 – 9, 118, 119 Shaw Report 160, 173n67 Shoah see Holocaust socialism: Christian 120; Jewish 177 Sois-Chic (journal) 185, 191 Sokolow, Nahum 91, 156 Soldier’s Theatre Project 81n36 Solomon (biblical), Fleg’s biography of 119, 122 – 3, 128 – 30, 139 Sorel, Georges 37 Spire, André 7, 26, 37, 49n72, 84, 91, 92, 123, 150 spiritism 6, 15, 29 spirituality 20; universalized 9 Spiro, Betty Bergson 106 – 7 Stalin, Joseph 136 Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig) 101 statism 146, 150 Stavisky scandal 142n61 Sternhell, Ze’ev 216 Suarès, André 37 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 8 symbolism 6, 15, 21, 26, 134 – 5 symbolist theatre 22 Szware, Marek 138 Tchernichovsky, Saul 92 Ten Points of Seelisberg 200 Tevye der Milkhiker (L’Histoire de Tévié ) 93 Théâtre de l’Oeuvre 4, 21 Torres, Tereska 138 Treaty of Locarno 130 Trocmé, André193 Trotzjudentum 100 – 101 Tzanck, Arnault 70, 190 Union des Juifs Pour la Résistance et l’Entraide (UJRE, Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid) 195

Union générale des juifs de France (UGIF) 185 – 6, 190, 193 – 4, 209n40, 211n88 Union Libérale Israélite 58 Union Sacrée see Sacred Union Union universelle de la jeunesse juive (UUJJ) 158, 172 – 3n59 United Jewish Appeal 212n102 United Nations: Declaration of Human Rights 199; independence for Israel 198 universalism 6, 12, 15, 33, 44, 52 – 3n123, 57, 59, 199; French 4, 11, 24; messianic 56 Van Asseldank, R.P. 106 Vaussard, Maurice 92 Vernes, Maurice 43, 92 Wandering Jew 7, 55 – 6, 65 – 8, 70, 89, 98, 119, 130, 134 – 5, 138, 139 Weber, Eugen 118 Weill, Georges 105 Weill, Julien 92 Weizmann, Chaim 91, 156, 159 Werfel, Franz Viktor 99 Winter, Jay 64, 68 Wise, Stephen 90, 159, 180, 181, 203 World Jewish Congress (WJC, Congrès juif mondial) 153, 169, 198, 202, 205; Executive Committee 203 World War I 6 – 7; artistic expressions of 65 – 9; Fleg’s participation in 45, 55, 55 – 8, 59 – 64, 153; Jewish and Catholic response to 57 – 9; Jewish participation in 45, 89, 109; lasting influence on France 118 World War II 10; efforts to save Jewish children 190 – 3 World Zionist Organization 148; see also Zionist Organization xenophobia 215 Yiddish language 57, 73, 87, 93, 120 – 1, 162, 176, 203 Zangwill, Israel 25, 70, 71, 74, 92, 93, 102 Zemach, Nachum 99 Zevi, Shabbatai 95 Zionism 4, 9 – 10, 27, 84, 91 – 2, 104, 107, 115n91, 121, 123, 146; cultural

238 Index 151; diasporic 151 – 2, 153; and Fleg 9 – 10, 146, 148 – 57, 159 – 69; French (from the Dreyfus Affair to the Great War) 147 – 53; French (in interwar France) 153 – 7; and the French Jewish Scouts 166; Labor 164; messianic mission of 91, 147, 168, 199; opposition to 154 – 6, 167; political 150, 153; pro-state 168; territorial 146, 150, 153; in Turkey

and the Balkans 171n46; after WWII 196 – 7; see also Israel Zionist Congresses 9, 135, 146, 147 – 8, 150 Zionist Organization 159, 187, 196; see also World Zionist Organization Zola, Émile 21, 24, 27 Zucherkaure, Berta 99 Zweig, Stefan 8, 99 – 100, 102, 115n91