The Jews of Modern France [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520919297

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The Jews of Modern France

JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN THE MODERN WORLD

David Sorkin, editor This series seeks to provide students and general readers with up-to-date accounts of the history of the Jews in individual countries throughout the world. The volumes offer broadly based history that uses the social structure and political situation of a community to help explain its cultural and religious self-understanding. They will provide both factual material and interpretation in a manner intelligible to the lay reader while maintaining the highest standards of scholarship. i . The Jews of Modern France, Paula E. Hyman

The Jews of Modern France

Paula E. Hyman

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1998 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hyman, Paula, 1 9 4 6 The Jews of modern France / Paula E. Hyman. p. cm.—(Jewish communities in the modern world) Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 0-52.0-20924-9 (cloth : alk. paper).—ISBN 0-520-20925-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1 . Jews—France—History. 2. France—Ethnic relations. I. Title. II. Series. DS135.F8H96 1998 944'.0049 24—dc21 97-39349 CIP

Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of American Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution toward the publication of this book provided by the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation.

Contents

Foreword

ix

Preface

xi

1 . Before the Revolution 2. The French Revolution and the Emancipation of the Jews 3. The Napoleonic Synthesis 4. Acculturation and Mobility 5. French Jews and World Jewry 6. Antisemitism and the Dreyfus Affair 7. Immigration and the Remaking of French Jewry, 1881-1918 8. Between Two World Wars: The Inescapable Impact of Economics and Politics 9. The Holocaust in France 10. A Renewed Community

i 17 37 53 77 91 115 137 161 193

Conclusion

215

Notes

219

Bibliography

257

List of Illustrations

273

Index

275

Foreword

JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN T H E M O D E R N W O R L D This series represents the first attempt to provide a systematic overview of the major Jewries of the modern world. Such an overview is a fundamental enterprise for any branch of historical scholarship. That it has not previously been undertaken for Jewish history is hardly surprising. While Jews struggled to gain equal rights in the Diaspora or to build their own state, scholarship had more pressing concerns. Now that emancipation appears secure and the State of Israel nears its fiftieth anniversary, the central issues of the modern period can be approached as historical processes to be interpreted rather than struggles to be waged. The volumes in this series will offer the general reader interpretive histories that address the central issues of the modern period: emancipation and assimilation, nationalism and antisemitism, secularization and migration. And they strive to investigate how all Jews—rich and poor, female and male, religious and secular, rural and urban—experienced those issues. Each volume in the series will present a synthesis of the current state of knowledge about the history of the Jews in one country or region. In the past three decades there has been an explosion of scholarship in Jewish history. These volumes will utilize that scholarship to offer a broadly based history that analyzes a community's social structure and political situation to illuminate its cultural and religious self-understanding. ix

Foreword

X

T H E JEWS OF M O D E R N

FRANCE

Since 1789 France has been at the center of modern European history and therefore, not surprisingly, of European Jewish history. Of the symbols that crowd our imaginations and thus shape our understanding of the modern Jewish experience, a plethora come from France, and all of them challenge our interpretive skills with their incontrovertible ambiguity. The debates in the revolutionary National Assembly and the Parisian Sanhedrin stand for successful emancipation yet also for the contraction of Judaism and Jewish life that emancipation exacted. The Paris Rothschilds personified not only economic and social success but also the delusional Jewish conspiracy theories then dominant in France, Europe, and the world. The Dreyfus Affair represented the vicious nadir of the new political antisemitism yet, in its conclusion, the resiliency of emancipation and the Republic. With both indispensable facts and masterful interpretations, Paula Hyman has given us a splendid, balanced account of modern French Jewry, from its origins in four separate communities in the eighteenth century to its present status as the largest and most vibrant Jewish community in Western Europe, enabling us to unpack the ambiguities of those salient symbols and thus to turn that imposing history into a useable past. David

Sorkin

Preface

T

his book reflects the developments that have occurred in the historical writing about French Jewry in the past two generations. Although the history of the Jews of modern France has often been eclipsed by the history of German or Polish Jews, the emergence after World War II of France's Jewish community as the largest and most vibrant in western and central Europe has stimulated considerable scholarly attention. I have been interested in French Jewish history since my last year in college, when I wrote my senior thesis on Napoleon and the Jews. In the past thirty years the study of French Jewry has enabled me to hone my skills as a social historian and to reflect on many of the issues that intrigue modern Jewish historians: the impact of state policy on Jewish status, the nature of antisemitism, the choices of Jews in redefining their identity and reforming Judaism, their political ideologies and activism, the experience of immigration. Although I have drawn liberally on the available historical literature, and have pointed out conflicting approaches and conclusions, the interpretation of the history of French Jewry offered here is my own. I am most grateful to David Sorkin, the editor of the series, for giving me the opportunity to reflect on the shape of French Jewish history. Because this general history is aimed at an American public, whenever possible I have made reference to works written in English.

xi

xii

Preface

N o book is written alone, and I am happy to have this opportunity to thank those who have facilitated my work. A book such as this depends on the scholarship of many other historians, whose names appear in the footnotes. I am grateful for their research even when I dissent from their conclusions. In the years that I have pursued the history of French Jewry, I have also benefited from the assistance of countless archivists and librarians in the United States, France, and Israel, who graciously assisted me in finding relevant information. In particular, the Y I V O Institute for Jewish Research, the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the Jewish Museum, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, and the French Embassy Press and Information Service made available their visual resources. This book originated in David Sorkin's idea to create a series on the history of the Jews in different countries. Given the story that it relates, it is a fitting coincidence that the volume on the Jews of France is the first to appear in the series. Three friends who are also colleagues took time from their busy schedules to read a draft of this book and offer suggestions that have been incorporated into its final version. M y former student from whom I have learned so much, Vicki Caron, carefully read each chapter and drew upon her extraordinary expertise to catch errors and to challenge me to sharpen my arguments. Richard Cohen continued our two decades-long conversation on French Jewish history with his wise comments on my manuscript. And I cannot imagine completing a book without the benefit of the keen editorial eye of Deborah Dash Moore. Finally, the University of California Press has given my work the careful attention that every author desires. It has been my good fortune to work with my editor, Stanley Holwitz, project editor Rachel Berchten, and copy editor Kathleen MacDougall, and it is my pleasure to thank them. New Haven February 1998

CHAPTER

ONE

Before the Revolution

S

ome forty thousand Jews lived within the borders of what would become the modern French state in the years immediately before the French Revolution, but there was no "French Jewish community." Instead, four very different settlements of Jews, with few contacts among them, made up the small Jewish population of France. With the exception of a tiny unauthorized settlement of several hundred Jews in Paris, all lived on the periphery of the kingdom: in the southwest, the southeast, and the northeast. Their separate geography reflected their disparate origins: the Sephardi culture of the Iberian peninsula; the Provençal communities of the papal states in France; and the traditional Ashkenazi world of central Europe. Irrespective of the origins of these communities, neither the authorities nor the local populace would have considered them French; indeed, few of these Jews would have deemed themselves so. In the eighteenth century the Jews of France were preoccupied with matters other than their national identity. As heirs to the medieval legacy of Jews in Christian Europe, they were worried about maintaining their right of residency, an expensive privilege for which they paid each ruler dearly. Because of the division of sovereignty among the king and local seigneurs, Jews had to negotiate with many different authorities for that right. Jews were also eager to reduce their tax burden while expanding I

z

Before the Revolution

their limited economic opportunities, yet they accepted the conditions under which Jews had lived throughout Europe since the Middle Ages. In return for a variety of fiscal payments, assessed upon the local Jewish community as a whole, Jews were permitted to reside in specific places and to engage in a limited number of commercial pursuits, especially moneylending and the sale of secondhand goods. Because they were generally not permitted to own land or to join artisan guilds, they filled a particular economic niche, differing substantially in socioeconomic terms from the Christian masses, who were overwhelmingly peasants. As a tolerated alien group, Jews formed a separate corporation, or self-governing community, in a society in which membership in a social order determined individual status, whether nobility, clergy, or the commoner classes of urban bourgeoisie or rural peasantry. Belonging to the Jewish community was yet another form of social and legal identification, not exactly part of the general social order but parallel to it. The Jewish corporate community was entitled to maintain a range of religious and philanthropic institutions and to govern itself according to its own law (halakha) in all matters involving its members. Although they suffered societal antipathy, Jews were free to practice their Judaism, a relatively recent right in some parts of France. Despite their diverse origins and culture, in the eighteenth century the Jews of France all lived in one variation or another of this traditional kahal (community). 1 The French crown valued most the Jewish merchants of the southwest, whose two major communities were located in Bordeaux and Saint-Esprit (a suburb of Bayonne). By the second half of the eighteenth century the dominant figures in these communities engaged successfully in international commerce that contributed to France's Atlantic trade. The Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne enjoyed the most advantageous legal status and were the most acculturated of all of France's Jews in their dress, language, and general culture. Both these distinctions were due to their Marrano origins and their arrival in France under the guise of Portuguese merchants. 2 The Marranos, or New Christians, were fifteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese Jewish converts to Christianity, many of whom retained a private identity as Jews and secretly practiced aspects of Judaism. Watched vigilantly and persecuted by the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, they frequently left the Iberian Peninsula for less dangerous spots within Europe. Not all Marranos were actual Judaizers or eager to return to Judaism. However, even many sincere New Christians felt the need to emigrate since all Christians of Jewish origins were suspect in

Before the Revolution

3

the eyes of the Inquisition. Among the Marranos the Portuguese were the most likely to be secret Jews, for they were the descendants of the most loyal Jews of Spain. When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, in the throes of their conquest and unification of all of Spain, in 1492 had given Jews the choice between exile and apostasy, the greatest number of those who chose exile settled in neighboring Portugal. Five years later, ironically, they were forced to accept baptism, with no option for voluntary exile. The Marranos who formed the nucleus of France's Sephardi Jewish communities emigrated from Portugal and received commercial and residential rights initially as members of the "Portuguese Nation." 3 The first Portuguese merchants arrived in Bordeaux in the early sixteenth century when, in the aftermath of war with England, the king of France was encouraging foreigners to settle in the depopulated city. In 1 5 5 0 King Henry II officially recognized and endorsed their presence by issuing the first letters patent to the "merchants and other Portuguese called New Christians." 4 Renewed by successive monarchs, the letters patent did more than ensure the Sephardi Jews the right to reside and do business in France; they also provided the basis for the later Sephardi claim that their civic equality preceded the Revolution. By the second half of the seventeenth century the Portuguese Marranos felt secure enough to cast off gradually the mask of their Catholicism. The acquisition of separate cemeteries for the group enabled them to take the first steps of emerging openly as Jews. Thus, in Bayonne, for example, the last entry of a Marrano's death in the local parish register and the first biblical name inscribed in a Hebraic transliteration on a tombstone in the cemetery allocated to the Portuguese merchants both occurred in 1659. Gradually, the Marranos ceased to mark all their rites of passage in the Church, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century they were generally recognized to be Jews. Indeed, in 1 7 2 3 Louis X V renewed the privileges of the earlier letters patent, specifically acknowledging that the Portuguese merchants were actually Jews. 5 Why did the Catholic kingdom of France, that had expelled its Jews in the fourteenth century and its Protestants less than forty years before the 1723 letters patent, agree to recognize the presence of Jews on French soil and confirm their rights to remain there and conduct their business? The answer lies primarily in their economic utility. Local Jewish merchants of the southwest provided an important credit function as bankers and brokers. The French state's growing willingness to privilege economic utility over religious conformity led to an appreciation of the Jewish contribution to a region then in straitened economic circumstances

4

Before the Revolution

but of considerable potential. Indeed, the lesson derived from the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes was the heavy price that religious conflict exacted from the French economy. Royal acceptance of Jewish merchants because of their economic utility, as well as crucial support in Bordeaux of the local parlement (a court with jurisdiction over civil and criminal matters), thus enabled the "Portuguese merchants" to consolidate their privileges as Jews on French soil.6 In their transition from Portuguese to Jewish merchants, the Jews of Bordeaux and Saint-Esprit established the institutional structure that would govern their communities until the Revolution. The central communal body in Bordeaux, the most influential Sephardi settlement, was the sedaca (communal charitable fund), set up in 1699 to enable Jews to care for their own poor. The parallel organization in the larger community of Saint-Esprit, established somewhat earlier, was called the hebera. Although philanthropic in its origins, the sedaca, as well as the hebera, developed most of the characteristics of a full-fledged self-governing Jewish community. Dominated by an oligarchy of officials called syndics, the sedaca levied substantial taxes on its members, including direct levies and the traditional tax on kosher meat, and controlled entry into the community. Though there were no public synagogues, it provided for the religious needs of the Jews with prayer groups in private homes, a ritual bath (mikveh), ritually fit meat and matzah, primary schools, and cemeteries. Like all Jewish communities, particularly where Jews were a vulnerable minority without fixed rights, its wealthy leaders assumed the responsibility to bargain with the appropriate authorities to secure legal privileges. Unlike a typical premodern Jewish community, the Sephardi communities never acquired the right to judge cases involving Jews according to their own law. In the southwestern communities Jews took their civil cases to French courts.7 On the eve of the Revolution the Sephardi Jews of the southwest numbered about five thousand. Approximately two thousand Jews lived in relative security in Bordeaux and twenty-five hundred or so in somewhat less security in Saint-Esprit, with tens of Jews in smaller settlements in the region.8 Although most Sephardim were small or middling merchants, the image of the community in its own eyes as well as in the mind of governmental officials was set by its most successful members, the 30 percent in banking and large-scale commerce, who served as its leaders. According to available documents, they seem to have earned the respect of the Gentile elite, who often attested to their honesty and probity. Moreover, at least one observer commented that at one Jewish wedding

Before the Revolution

5

"the majority of the guests were Christians of the best families." 9 Prosperous bankers and large-stakes players in trade with the New World, members of the Jewish upper classes seem to have had a more relaxed attitude toward strict religious observance than was the case among other Jews in France. They were also open to the secular culture around them and by the third quarter of the century had introduced French and arithmetic into their communal schools while excluding the study of Talmud. The Sephardim also boasted a number of intellectuals and professionals who had achieved respect in society at large, including physicians and a noted teacher of deaf-mutes. They were, in short, acculturated to the urban bourgeoisie among whom they lived. 10 The Sephardim saw themselves as an acculturated elite among Jews, and certainly among the Jews living in France. In a document which they prepared in 1788 when the status of the Jews of the kingdom was under discussion in Paris, the Jews of Bordeaux made clear their claim to be distinguished from non-Sephardi Jews, and especially from the Ashkenazim of the northeast, because of their legal status, level of acculturation, and manner of living as Jews. Thus, the Bordeaux Jews contrasted themselves to good advantage with the Ashkenazim (whom they called Germans): The Germans almost everywhere have long beards; their dress distinguishes them everywhere they live; the Portuguese, on the other hand, except for their religious belief, differ in no respect from the peoples among whom they live; they adopt their manners and customs. A Portuguese J e w is English in England and French in France, but a German J e w is German everywhere with regard to his customs. . . . 1 1

The Sephardim even attributed these differences to their noble lineage: The Spanish and Portuguese Jews are persuaded that they are the issue of the tribe of Judah; it is known that this tribe held the highest rank among the others . . . The idea [of being descended from Judah] . . . could only confer upon them that distinction and contribute to that elevation of sentiment that have been remarked in them and that their brethren of other nations seem to have recognized. 12

Governmental officials confirmed the self-image of the Sephardi Jews. In 1 7 8 1 in response to an inquiry from the Conseil d'État in Paris, then considering ways to diminish the Jewish population of the northeastern provinces, the intendant of the province of Guienne, the home of the Sephardi communities, wrote of the Jews in his district that "despite the reigning prejudice of long-standing, most pursue their business with probity and there was nothing more to say on their account than about Catholics and Protestants of similar standing." He also communicated

6

Before the Revolution

to the Conseil d'État a subsequent letter from the Bordeaux subdelegate confirming the irreproachable behavior of the Jews, their care of their own poor, who were never seen begging, as well as their considerable economic utility.13 For men of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment the Sephardim were the model to which all Jews should aspire. For the Sephardi Jews themselves, the assertion of the distinctiveness of their cultural heritage and legal status in France became a central plank in the political arguments they presented in defense of their status both at the end of the ancien régime and during the years of the Revolution. The Sephardim of the southwest attempted to maintain their distinctiveness even from the other Jews who lived in southern France, the "papal Jews" of the four urban communities of Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, and l'lsle-sur-Sorgue, which were under the control of the pope from the end of the thirteenth century until 1 7 9 1 . 1 4 When Jews from these communities tried during the eighteenth century to join their fellow Jews in Bordeaux and Saint-Esprit, they encountered resistance from Sephardi leaders, who feared they might lose control over the community and might have to support the indigent among the newcomers. Yet the Jews from the papal states succeeded, particularly in the last half of the century, in planting themselves within the established Sephardi communities and in extending Jewish settlement, without legal support, into provinces contiguous with the papal states. By the end of the century Jews originally from the papal states could be found in Paris and Lyon, in Nîmes and Montpellier. So eager were the papal Jews to break out of their restricted area of residence and take advantage of economic opportunities elsewhere that the Jewish population of the four communities declined precipitously by the end of the century. No more than twenty-five hundred Jews lived in the papal states on the eve of the French Revolution. Although the papal Jews did not live under French sovereignty until the area was annexed during the Revolution, they shared many of the characteristics of their Jewish neighbors dwelling on French soil in the southwest, though they retained some distinctive ritual customs. Relatively well integrated into their local milieu, they spoke the local Provençal dialect as well as a Jewish version of it. Although they had been restricted, like most Jews in France, to petty commerce and moneylending, they had expanded and diversified their economic activity in the course of the eighteenth century. Many Jews prospered through commerce in horses and donkeys and trade in raw silk and jewels. They spent greater periods of time pursuing their economic interests outside

Before the Revolution

7

of their communities at fairs in the French provinces, sometimes rousing the opposition of local Christian merchants. Their new wealth permitted all four of the papal Jewish communities to reconstruct their synagogues during the eighteenth century. Most importantly, with commercial growth came increased economic contact with members of the French bourgeoisie and the nobility. With time these Christians expressed less contempt for their Jewish economic contacts. The very eagerness of the Jews of the papal states to extend their economic activity in the neighboring French countryside and to markets in the interior of France, and to settle in new areas, suggests their sense of connectedness to the larger geographical entity of France even though they were not French subjects.15 Their heightened awareness of the disparity between their economic and social success and their legal status also encouraged Jews of the papal states to emigrate. In their four communities the Jews lived in horribly overcrowded ghettos called carrières that were closed at night. They were also subject to a variety of disabilities imposed by the Catholic church to demonstrate Jewish social inferiority. They were legally constrained, for example, to wear distinguishing marks upon their clothing—a yellow hat for males—and to refrain from working publicly upon Sunday or employing Christian servants, though in practice enforcement of these regulations varied. Because of Church policy they had to hide their Hebrew books, and they feared the secret baptism of their children by zealous servants. As late as 1781 an edict reinforced the system of a closed ghetto with a Christian gatekeeper paid by the Jews. Like the Sephardim of Bordeaux and Bayonne, the Jews of the Comtat and Avignon maintained organized, self-governing communities whose philanthropic development was far more impressive than their contribution to traditional Jewish learning. As their population declined in the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the communities encountered financial difficulties and were unable to find sufficient personnel to staff their institutions. Jews planning to slip into the neighboring provinces of France simply refused to pay their communal taxes, and on the eve of the Revolution the carrières were deeply in debt.16 The newest of France's Jewish settlements existed in a semi-clandestine, but increasingly secure, situation in Paris.17 Migrating from the three established centers of Jewish life in France, a handful of Jews arrived in Paris at the beginning of the eighteenth century; on the eve of the Revolution the Jewish population numbered some five hundred individuals. However, this multiethnic Jewish group did not constitute a

8

Before the Revolution

community like those found among the Sephardim, the Ashkenazim, or the papal Jews. Parisian Jews lacked formal recognition and therefore could not maintain the institutional infrastructure that characterized their communities of origin, although they doubtless maintained modest houses of prayer; moreover, they owned three cemeteries by the second half of the century. Most Jews plied their petty trades in the streets of Paris, seeking to blend into the urban population. Their presence in Paris was to prove important when the city became the political center of the Revolution. If the Sephardim and the papal Jews provoked little public discussion due to their small numbers and their relatively high level of acculturation, the overwhelming majority of the Jews of France—about thirty thousand persons—living in the northeastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine attracted considerable attention from both Enlightenment thinkers and royal officials in the last years of the ancien régime. The Jews of Alsace and Lorraine were Ashkenazi Jews, the westernmost outpost of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of central Europe, part of a cultural community that extended eastward to Poland. Even in the eighteenth century many of the Jews in the two provinces had come originally from German lands. France had acquired these Jews as a consequence of the expansion of her territorial holdings on the northeastern frontier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially through the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. 1 8 The Jews of the northeastern provinces lived scattered among hundreds of small communities under the protection of many local authorities, both secular and clerical. On the eve of the Revolution, the vast majority made their home in Alsace, in more than 180 communities. Although exact numbers are hard to determine, because Jews without fixed or legal residence evaded the census takers in 1784, it has been estimated that at that time there were at least 22,500 Jews in the province. 19 Cities in Alsace jealously guarded the right to exclude Jews; consequently no Jews resided in Strasbourg, for example, although they entered the city on a daily basis, and paid a tax—also levied on animals—to conduct business there. The city of Metz, which hosted the largest Jewish community of Lorraine, was the cultural center of Ashkenazi Jewry in France. In the eighteenth century Jews had also settled in the city of Nancy. Yet most Jews of the northeastern provinces lived in villages and small towns, primarily in Alsace but also in the countryside of Lorraine and the neighboring region. Only a few dozen Jewish communities numbered more than two hundred persons, and in the majority of communes in Alsace

Before the Revolution

9

and Lorraine where Jews resided they made up between 10 and 50 percent of the total population. The milieu of village and small town provided the predominant Jewish social experience and enabled Jews to maintain strong social and cultural bonds while reinforcing their particular economic role in the countryside. Although they traded daily with local peasants and borrowed from local culture, for example in their folk art, Jews constituted a separate society capable of establishing its own norms and enforcing them. Through such diverse means as fines and various forms of social ostracism, including excommunication by the Jewish court, the Jewish communities maintained social order and policed the boundaries of their society. Residential patterns reinforced Jewish separatism. In Metz they lived in a virtual ghetto that was locked at night, and in Jewish communities of any size they occupied their own quarter. 20 Despite their concentration in particular neighborhoods of cities and towns, the Jews of the northeastern provinces regularly dealt with the region's rural population in a way that enabled them to carve out a particular economic niche. Legal constraints and the generations-long development of their commercial skills determined their specific economic role. Like most Jews living under Christian rule, the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine were forbidden to own land, to conduct business in public on Sundays or Christian holidays, to join artisan guilds, or to sell new merchandise. Consequently, most male Jews earned their living by peddling in the countryside, bearing in the sacks they carried on their backs a host of small manufactured items that they sold to rural customers who could not make frequent visits to town markets. Other Jews sold old clothes or other used goods in the marketplace. A significant proportion of the Jewish population was involved in cattle trading, and to a lesser extent in the more lucrative trade in horses—an occupation that made them particularly useful as army purveyors in garrison towns like Metz. Because they regularly traversed the countryside, Jews also served as commercial brokers, bringing together peasants with the complementary needs of buying and selling. These instrumental contacts did not lead local peasants, or nobility or bourgeois for that matter, to value or respect Jews, unlike the attitudes of Christian authorities in the south. As traders, Jews amassed capital on a modest scale that they lent at interest to their peasant customers as one component of a transaction such as the sale of a cow or the purchase of grain. In the absence of banking facilities Jewish moneylenders were a ready source of credit for the peasant. They made small loans, conducting transactions in secret, without recourse to the local notary public, thus enabling the peasant to keep

IO

Before the Revolution

the details of his financial situation from curious neighbors. Providing credit to peasants in the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, however necessary in economic terms, earned for Jews the image of "the usurer" par excellence in a society in which all moneylending was deemed morally suspect and all interest, no matter how modest, usurious. Peasant resentment of Jewish moneylenders exploded in 1777 when Alsace was flooded with forged receipts for debts owed to Jews, and the Jewish leadership of the region defended its constituents by appealing to the courts as well as by mounting a public relations campaign. More importantly, the cultural construction of the Jew as usurerfiguredprominently in public opinion on the Jews in France from the end of the ancien régime into the twentieth century and fueled anti-Jewish attitudes.21 Despite legal restrictions on Jewish economic activity in Alsace and Lorraine, the law recognized their presence in the region and guaranteed their freedom of worship. The Jews of Metz and parts of Alsace, for example, had been granted letters patent by Louis XIV in 1657. 22 Subject to different legal jurisdictions, the Jews of the two provinces were permitted to maintain autonomous communities according to the system that had emerged under medieval Christendom, although their population growth was regulated. Because of their size and their unbroken connection with the central European Ashkenazi tradition, the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine maintained institutionally diversified communities. With its synagogue or place of prayer, its mikveh, school, cemetery, and court, the Jewish community provided fully for the religious needs of its members, saw to their education, assumed responsibility for the resident poor, and adjudicated civil cases between Jewish litigants. Since taxes were imposed upon corporate groups rather than individuals, the various Jewish communities were responsible for paying to the appropriate authorities the numerous charges to which the Jews were subjected. For the authorities, of course, this was the primary function of the Jewish communities, followed by maintaining order among the Jewish population. As late as 1769, for example, the Jewish community of Metz issued sumptuary legislation to limit public displays of luxury. Such edicts aimed to diminish the antisemitism that the demonstration of Jewish wealth might provoke by controlling the personal behavior of the community's members. Like other communities and corporate groups, the Jewish communities of the ancien régime were not democratic. Voting privileges depended upon gender, marital status, and wealth; in general, prosperous married men selected the communal leadership. The wealthiest laymen, an oli-

Before the Revolution

il

garchy of Jewish notables, led the community, serving as its syndics. Usually merchants, bankers, or industrialists on a grand scale, they exerted the most influence with both local and national authorities because of their contributions to the economy. They also bore the bulk of the communal tax burden. Sophisticated and somewhat acculturated, they often had international commercial contacts and access to French governmental representatives. Thus, at the end of the ancien régime a rich army purveyor and merchant named Cerf Berr led the Jews of Alsace; a banker and tobacco manufacturer from Nancy, Berr Isaac Berr, was among the most important leaders of the Jews of Lorraine. Although communal rabbis possessed the authority of Jewish tradition, they actually served at the will of the lay leaders. Secular currents of the eighteenth century scarcely touched the Jewish communities of Alsace and Lorraine. From all accounts the practice of traditional Judaism was widespread among the Jewish leadership as well as the masses. Still, the Jews of northeastern France contributed little to elite Jewish culture. Few rabbis served the scattered communities, and many of them were recruited from centers of Ashkenazi scholarship in central Europe. There were several small yeshivas (academies of advanced study in rabbinics) in Alsace, but only the Jewish community of Metz could lay claim to being a regional center of Jewish culture. It was home to a widely respected yeshiva with a sizable student body drawn from the broad Ashkenazi orbit, its rabbinical office was of sufficient prestige to attract candidates of repute within the Jewish world, and in 1764 a Hebrew printing press was established there.23 Fiscal constraints limited the cultural and institutional development of the Jewish communities of Alsace and Lorraine. Jewish rights of residence depended on the payment of duties that weighed increasingly heavily upon the communities during the eighteenth century. The Jews of Metz and the surrounding region, for example, owed a large sum of twenty thousand livres per year to the Duke of Brancas. To meet their annual payments, the Jewish communities, under the direction of their syndics, had to borrow funds; on the eve of the Revolution they were deeply in debt. Not surprisingly, the syndics of Metz restricted entry into the Jewish community to those who would be able to contribute to the tax burden and help defray the accumulated debt. Probably the straitened financial situation of the Jewish community hastened the decline of the city's Jewish population in the second half of the century. The tax burden also complicated the relationship between the growing number of Jews who lived in the surrounding region and Metz Jewish leaders.

12

Before the Revolution

Not only did the latter speak for the entire Jewish population of the province of Lorraine and the Trois-Évêchés vis-à-vis the authorities, they also allocated the sums that the outlying communities were expected to pay as their share of the interest on the accumulated debt and the current tax bill. As Jewish communities in the region grew in size, they increasingly resented this taxation without representation. By the end of the ancien régime the authority of the traditional Jewish community had begun to erode, especially in the Ashkenazi settlements of the northeastern provinces, where it had reached its fullest expression. Disaffected communal members turned to non-Jewish courts and thus contributed to the loss of authority of the Jewish community. The status of the Jewish court of Metz, for example, became an issue in the struggle of the local parlement to assert its authority vis-à-vis the king, the traditional protector of the Jews. In 1743 the parlement, as a court of appeal, had demanded and received a French translation of the code of Jewish civil law, the Hoshen Mishpat, in order to be able to judge cases involving Jews that came to its attention.24 Although the Jewish community in general had long proscribed bringing disputes among Jews into Gentile courts, in the eighteenth century a few Metz Jews, drawn from the affluent strata of the community, appealed to the Metz parlement. They challenged rabbinic jurisdiction over civil matters because they came away empty from the bet din (Jewish court) or were subject to such extreme sanctions as the herem (excommunication) to compel compliance with court decisions. As a result of one case, involving a widow whose husband had left her a greater part of his estate than she was entitled to under Jewish law, the parlement issued a decree in 1 7 5 9 that banned the use of the herem. In response, paid agents of the community successfully lobbied the king. They argued for the indivisibility of religious and secular matters in Jewish law and pointed to the deleterious impact of the erosion of rabbinic authority on the ability of the communal leadership to maintain social order. In 1 7 6 7 the king condemned the parlements incursion upon royal authority, supporting the Jewish community's assertion of its traditional judicial prerogatives. In the last years of the ancien régime the parlement suspended its attacks upon the judicial privileges of the Jewish community. However, as a consequence of the struggle the community had conceded the right of its members to seek recourse in the parlement in serious cases or where judicial passions were enflamed. Furthermore, challenges to communal authority in Metz, while infrequent, did not cease.

Before the Revolution

13

Growing restriction of Jewish communal autonomy in eighteenthcentury Metz confirmed the fragility of traditional patterns of Jewish self-governance in France at the end of the ancien régime. The Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne had always taken their disputes to French courts. And the five to eight hundred Jews living in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution had no system of judicial autonomy, indeed no legal community whatsoever, because their presence in the capital had never been officially recognized. Their existence in a legal limbo offered a silent, and as yet unacknowledged, challenge to the communal autonomy of the rest of French Jewry. Not only had weaknesses in the traditional structure of Jewish corporate autonomy developed, but among the more prosperous Ashkenazi and especially Sephardi Jews signs of new intellectual currents also appeared that would subvert the social and cultural hegemony of rabbinic tradition. While the Sephardi Jews of the southwest, because of their Marrano experience, had always been more acculturated than the Ashkenazi Jews of the northeastern provinces, in the last years of the ancien régime some observers noted a significant decline in religious observance in Bordeaux, particularly among the Sephardi elite. Rabbi Haim David Azulai, an emissary from the Jewish community of Palestine who periodically traversed Europe in search of contributions for the upkeep of the Jews of the Holy Land, remarked in his account of his 1 7 7 7 - 1 7 7 8 visit to Bordeaux that many of the leaders of the community held heretical ideas; some even ate forbidden foods in public and did not obey the laws of menstrual purity.25 Such aspersions were not cast upon the Ashkenazi leadership, yet a stratum of that elite found attractive the doctrines of Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) emanating from the cosmopolitan center of Berlin.26 Knowledgeable in Hebrew, French, and German (as well as Yiddish), the wealthy Jewish merchants and bankers of the northeastern provinces, particularly those who resided in the urban communities of Lorraine, maintained contact with the new ideas emerging among the modern intellectuals of the Berlin Jewish bourgeoisie. Cerf Berr, the most important leader of Alsatian Jewry, and Berr Isaac Berr of Nancy, along with a dozen other Jews primarily of Metz and Nancy subscribed in the 1780s to the Hebrew Haskalah periodical Hameassef, published in Berlin. In 1 7 8 2 Berr Isaac Berr had translated into French the Haskalah pamphlet Divrei Shalom ve-Emet (Words of Peace and Truth). The pamphlet promoted secular culture and urged Jewish schools to introduce secular

14

Before the Revolution

subjects into their curriculum. Characteristic of Haskalah writing, it called for a revolution in Jewish self-understanding and definition of culture: Jews were to privilege secular Western culture over traditional Jewish learning and were to seek social integration rather than separateness. Several years later Isaie Berr Bing of Metz published a Hebrew translation of one of the philosophical works of the outstanding figure of the Berlin Haskalah, Moses Mendelssohn. 27 Although the number of French Maskilim (followers of the Jewish enlightenment movement) was quite limited, their wealth and leadership position within the organized Jewish community allowed them to disseminate their ideas. Their openness to the doctrines of the German Haskalah suggests their desire for significant social and cultural change in their own communities and their recognition of the potential to succeed in their own time. Alongside hints of social and ideological change within the Jewish communities of the northeastern provinces on the eve of the Revolution came potential changes in Jewish legal status. Although the developments affected only a few exceptional individuals, they breached the wall of manifold legal restrictions on Jews. They were the first crack in the system that had traditionally maintained Jews in a condition of subordination. Thus, for example, Cerf Berr successfully challenged the right of the city of Strasbourg to forbid the settlement of Jews within its jurisdiction. By securing a royal decree in support of his right to live in Strasbourg, he was able to move his large household, including his retainers, into the city.28 Similarly, a few wealthy Jews in Lorraine secured letters patent enabling them to purchase property outside the Jewish quarter of their commune or to buy land in the countryside.29 One Jewish banker and army purveyor who lived in Paris even acquired letters of naturalization from Louis XVI and bought the barony of Picquigny, with its accompanying feudal rights, including the right to appoint priests.30 Although such instances of deviation from the normal status of Jews occasioned intense public debate and lawsuits, they brought attention to the anomalous situation of Jews in France, as long resident but foreign subjects of the king. The favors extended to prominent and economically valuable Jews potentially subverted the legal status of all Jews by invalidating the hegemony of existing legislation. Despite challenges posed to the traditional status of the Jews in France—to their legal subordination and judicial autonomy—and to the persistence of traditional observance of Jewish law, Jews living in France on the eve of the French Revolution remained a distinct and largely unacculturated group. Partially segregated by law, by socioeconomic sta-

Before the Revolution

15

tus, and by choice, Jews lived on the margins of French society and culture. In agreement with those French who thought about Jews at all, they saw themselves as a separate group—Jews living under French rule but not French Jews. As yet there existed no social space for the construction of a French Jewish identity. Only a small sector of the Jews of France—many in the Sephardi population but only a handful of the elite in the Ashkenazi communities—knew enough French to read French literature or to converse with their French neighbors. By the end of the eighteenth century the first hesitant steps had been taken toward eroding the traditional status of the Jews in France, but it would take the force of revolution to transform their legal position and to create a French Jewish community whose members defined themselves in ways scarcely imaginable during the ancien régime.

CHAPTER

TWO

The French Revolution and the Emancipation of the Jews

T

he French Revolution transformed the status of the Jews in modern France, even as it shaped so much of what we understand as modern political culture. For the first time in Europe Jews were granted equal citizenship. Their position as members of autonomous communities governed by their own leadership according to Jewish law and subject to discriminatory taxation and restrictive legislation gave way to individual citizenship with all the rights and obligations attached to that status. From a community of minor importance in both size and cultural achievement among the larger Jewish populations of central and eastern Europe, the forty thousand Jews of France were thrust into the forefront of modern Jewish history. They were the first to confront the opportunities and challenges offered by emancipation, the first to grapple with the problem of reconciling a modicum of Jewish particularity

17

i8

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

with the proclaimed universalism of citizenship in a modern state. The civic equality they attained became a model for other European Jews during much of the nineteenth century and an object lesson for some Jewish critics of the consequences of emancipation at the end of that century. For the modern historian, the process of their emancipation reveals the ambivalent situation of the Jews in French society before, during, and after the Revolution. Their emancipation clarifies both the possibilities and the precariousness of Jewish existence in the modern world. 1 The "Jewish question" emerged upon the agenda of European intellectuals and publicists with the dissemination of Enlightenment thought by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In developing the doctrines of natural rights and natural religion, Enlightenment thinkers argued that the common humanity of (at least) male members of society was more important than their particular religious or historic differences. They posited as well that human behavior derived from environmental influences. In this rationalist concept of the individual and society, the Jews of western and central Europe appeared as an anomaly. Separated from their fellow men, they were deprived of the happiness that the Enlightenment sought to confer upon all individuals and were unable to contribute to the social good. On the contrary, their neighbors saw them as economically rapacious and socially detrimental. Yet, to Enlightenment thinkers there existed a potential for regenerating the Jews and transforming them into useful citizens. After all, the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), celebrated by his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his play "Nathan the Wise," proved in his very being that Jews could enter into the society of the "Enlightened" and contribute to European thought. Indeed, in Berlin a small circle of acculturated Jews mixed socially with some of their Gentile peers. Jews thus offered a test case for the use of Enlightenment doctrine in governmental administration to improve society.2 To be sure, not all Enlightenment thinkers were convinced that the Jews were susceptible to improvement. As Arthur Hertzberg has demonstrated, Voltaire, for all his calls for religious tolerance, spoke of the Jews in terms suggesting innate negative qualities: "They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair." 3 Yet the dominant message in Enlightenment thought, including Voltaire's writing, suggested new and tolerant ways to treat the Jews, despite their many unpleasant character traits. Unlike Hertzberg, I do not see in Voltaire's antipathy toward Jews the origin of modern racial antisemitism.

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

19

In the 1780s topical debate highlighted the "Jewish question" in Enlightenment circles and spurred interest in the issue in France. The first full-scale treatment of the situation of the Jews, Christian Wilhelm Dohm's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the civic improvement of the Jews) was published in Berlin in 1 7 8 1 and quickly translated into French, with an appended memorandum about the Jews of Alsace. The project actually originated in France, in that the wealthy Alsatian Jewish leader Cerf Berr had indirectly initiated it. Cerf Berr, who maintained contact with Berlin Maskilim, had sought the aid of Moses Mendelssohn in response to the flooding of Alsace with false receipts to Jewish loans and with anti-Jewish propaganda in 1 7 7 7 . Mendelssohn in turn asked the enlightened Prussian scholar and governmental councilor Dohm to address the issue of the status of the Jews. Mendelssohn correctly assumed that a Christian would receive a more sympathetic hearing than a Jew. Dohm's argument in favor of granting Jews civil rights and his prediction of the salutary impact of civic equality upon their behavior framed the subsequent debates. Although the book was not permitted to be distributed in France, it received wide publicity when its argument was summarized by the liberal noble, Count Honoré de Mirabeau, in his 1 7 8 7 work entitled Sur Moses Mendelssohn, sur la reforme politique des juifs . . . (On Moses Mendelssohn and the political reform of the Jews . . . ).4 Progress also occurred in governmental circles. In January 1 7 8 2 the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, a self-styled "enlightened" monarch, issued his Edict of Toleration for the Jews of Lower Austria. Promulgating a doctrine of religious tolerance, the edict promoted secular education by permitting Jews to study in Christian schools, removed restrictions on Jewish participation in crafts and commerce, and eliminated discriminatory taxation. It also signaled the need for Jews to acculturate, at least linguistically, by banning the use of Hebrew and Yiddish in their business records. Joseph IPs initiative was not lost upon his brotherin-law, Louis XVI, who in January 1784 issued a progressive, though less far-reaching, measure. It abolished the humiliating body tax, a tax levied only on Jews and animals, and promulgated letters patent in July that extended new opportunities in commerce and industry to the most downtrodden of France's Jews, those of Alsace. However, the letters patent were preoccupied not with integrating the Jews into French society but with restricting the growth of the Jewish population in Alsace and minimizing opportunities for Jews to practice usury there.5

zo

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

The culmination of the prerevolutionary public debate about the Jews in France occurred in the last years of the decade when the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Metz announced an essay contest on the subject "Are there means of making the Jews happier and more useful in France?" The question itself was double-edged. Like Dohm's ambivalent usage of the term "Verbesserung," which carried a message of both improvement and self-improvement, the phrasing of the Metz essay contest presumed that the status and behavior of the Jews were both deficient and linked one to the other. Of the nine entries received, seven were written in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Three—by the Abbé Henri Grégoire, a liberal curé in Lorraine who would be among the foremost champions of the Jews during the Revolution; the Protestant lawyer Thiéry of Nancy; and the enlightened Polish-Jewish immigrant writer Zalkind Hourwitz—were awarded prizes in 1787. Published in 1788 and 1789, they appeared in time to contribute to public opinion on the eve of and during the Revolution.6 All three prizewinners argued for the possibility and the necessity of "regenerating" the Jews. Like all others, Jews could be reformed; their defects were not innate. As Grégoire put it, "The Jew is born with the same dispositions as we." 7 Justice called for an end to their disparagement and degradation. To be sure, their current economic, social, and cultural conditions were lamentable. The three essayists perceived the Jews as laboring under the burdens of a tradition that was out of step with the requirements of the age. Indeed, some of the most trenchant criticism of the deleterious impact of traditional Judaism on the behavior of its adherents came from the pen of the sole Jewish participant in the contest, Zalkind Hourwitz, though he defended the Jews from attacks on their character. Yet, all three attributed Jewish vices primarily to the hostility of the larger society. To cite Thiéry, "Let us no longer accuse the Jews, let us no longer accuse a holy Law of having delivered them to the insatiable greed that devours them; let us accuse only ourselves, our error and the vice of our conduct towards them." 8 Or as Grégoire phrased it succinctly, "He [the Jew] was despised, he became despicable; in his place we would perhaps have been worse." 9 Although Grégoire, Thiéry, and Hourwitz absolved the Jews of responsibility for their economic and moral lapses and affirmed in no uncertain terms that a change in governmental policy and social attitudes toward the Jews would lead to a dramatic improvement in their behavior, their construction of the "Jewish question" and its resolution reflected the basic ambivalence of the Enlightenment toward the Jews. The

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

2.1

Jews merited equality not for what they were but for what they might one day be. The shabby Jewish old-clothes peddler or shrewd cattle dealer who drove a hard bargain on a loan deserved better treatment because he would respond to the blandishments of equality by becoming a different person, an acculturated and productive member of society. As Thiéry stated confidently, "we can make of the Jews what we want them to become." 10 Those spokesmen of progressive opinion who favored improving the lot of the Jews promoted the thorough transformation of the Jews as they were brought closer to their Christian countrymen through governmental policy that deterred Jewish self-segregation and solidarity. What Jewish identity or belief would remain once Jews responded favorably, as nature and reason dictated they must, to the welcoming overtures of their fellow human beings remained unspoken. Perhaps it was assumed that little of the distinguishing characteristics of the Jews would survive. In fact, Grégoire looked forward to their conversion as an inexorable consequence of their encounter with the tolerance of their fellow French citizens and the impact of modern Western culture. 11 Despite the legislation of 1784 the status of the Jews in France did not change appreciably before the Revolution. The debate had been joined, but its consequences were to be realized only when the politics of regeneration found both symbolic and concrete expression in the discourse and action of revolution. At the end of the 1780s each of France's Jewish "nations" was following a different strategy. The Jews of Marrano origin living in Bordeaux and Saint-Esprit basked in the privileges they had received in their letters patent of 17Z3, renewed in 1753. The small number of Jews living without formal regulation in Paris kept a low profile. On the other hand, the leadership of the more than thirty thousand Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace and Lorraine actively sought redress from heavy tax liabilities and lobbied to expand their limited rights. The vigorous efforts of the wealthy army purveyor, Cerf Berr of Strasbourg, however, had yielded disappointing results in 1784. In 1788 a new opportunity for presenting the case of the Jews to the authorities appeared when the minister Chrétien Guillaume de Malesherbes was entrusted with reviewing the situation of the Jews. A year earlier Malesherbes had prepared two memoranda on the status of Protestants in France. 12 These memoranda had culminated in a royal edict declaring that civil rights could not be limited to Catholics. Although aimed at France's Protestants, who were mentioned explicitly in the introduction, the edict's phrasing of the question in its title and text in terms of

22

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

"non-Catholics" raised the issue of whether Jews could also aspire to citizenship. Despite the government's intention that the Jews not be included in the edict's provisions, the government initiated an investigation into their situation in France. Historians label the review the "Malesherbes Commission," but there was no formal commission. Rather, Malesherbes attempted through correspondence and interviews to amass as much information as he could on the current situation of the various Jewish communities in France. He saw the root of popular hostility to the Jews in their remaining a foreign "nation within a nation" and planned to recommend their integration in France as a religious minority parallel to the Protestant minority. Because of their different legal status and goals, the Sephardi Jews of the southwest and the Ashkenazi Jews of the northeast responded differently to Malesherbes's project. The wealthy leaders of the Ashkenazim of Alsace and Lorraine, Cerf Berr and Berr Isaac Berr, sought civic equality for their constituents and proposed the amelioration of the situation of the Jewish poor through education. As syndics of their respective communities, they presumed the survival of their communal structures. The prosperous and acculturated Jewish leaders of Bordeaux and Bayonne shared some of these goals but displayed other concerns as well. They assumed that Malesherbes planned to promote a single legal status for all the Jews in the realm in conferring upon them an état civil—civil recognition with an authorized registry of their births, marriages, and deaths. However, they feared their linkage with the maligned Jews of Alsace and Lorraine. Since Sephardi Jews already had a recognized registry of their life cycle events, enjoyed legal privileges beyond those of other Jews living in France, and had experienced a measure of respect from and social integration with their Christian peers, they felt they had more to lose than to gain from Malesherbes's activity. Thus they sought to maintain their distinctiveness and their communal organization in the face of plans to amalgamate them into the masses of French Jewry, with whom they felt no social or ethnic, and only a minimal religious, bond. Under the leadership of Abraham Furtado, a follower of the Enlightenment, a deputation went to Paris to meet with Malesherbes in the spring of 1788. Historian Frances Malino argues that the Sephardim "hoped to achieve both an extension of their privileges consistent with the new rights granted to non-Catholics, and a retention of their separate and unique status." 13 This separatist strategy, as we shall see, was to characterize the Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne when the "Jewish question" appeared upon the agenda of the Revolution the following year.

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

The Malesherbes "commission" led to no immediate change in the status of the Jews of France. The political crisis that began in the summer of 1788 diverted Malesherbes's attention from the Jews and ultimately changed the institutional framework, though not the ideological parameters, in which the "Jewish question" would be discussed. The developments of the 1780s reveal a diffusion of interest in the condition of the Jews among broader strata of elite public opinion and articulation of a rationale and a program for the transformation of the status of the Jews as well as their social regeneration among those influenced by the Enlightenment. The decade also testifies to the responsiveness of Jewish communal leaders to perceived opportunities to expand Jewish rights within the context of Jewish communal autonomy. The events of 1789 would lead inexorably, though with some hesitancy, to a radical redefinition of Jewish rights that eliminated Jewish communal autonomy. It is no surprise that the French Revolution created a dramatically new status for the Jews of France that became a model for Jews of western and central Europe and for some within the Russian empire. As the historian Lynn Hunt has pointed out, the rhetoric of the Revolution broke resoundingly with the past, abnegating its legacy and consciously striving to create a new man and a new nation through the political process. 14 The regeneration of the Jews, then, could be viewed as part of a larger process involving the entire French people as a consequence of their participation in making a revolution. 15 Given the congruence between prevailing Enlightenment discourse on the way to resolve the "Jewish question" and the rhetoric of the Revolution, the surprise is not that the Jews were emancipated but that they were not immediately emancipated. Instead, the French followed a tortuous path in emancipating their Jews. Revolutionary rhetoric and Enlightenment attitudes could not immediately overcome traditional sentiment that proved stronger than ideology nor eliminate the sources of friction that persisted in daily life. Moreover, the ambivalence that supporters of Jewish emancipation expressed toward the Jews could only reinforce popular prejudices against them. Despite the radical rhetoric, then, Jews had to wait for emancipation. The two years' delay in conferring civic equality upon the Jews also reflected the fact that the revolutionaries had more pressing problems to solve than the status of a tiny, unpopular minority concentrated primarily on the periphery of the new nation. The Jews scarcely figured in the prerevolutionary ferment surrounding the establishment of electoral assemblies to select representatives for

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

the Estates General, convoked by the king for the spring of 1789. To be sure, leaders of each of the major Jewish communities interpreted the decree about participation in the electoral assemblies as permitting Jews a role. Despite some local resistance, the Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne did take part in the elections, the former completely integrated in the process and the latter in a separate assembly to choose their own electors. The Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, however, were rebuffed. Responding to the intense local antipathy toward them and fearing the outbreak of disorder, the government determined that they did not meet the requirements of electoral participation, despite their birth on French soil and their payment of taxes. 16 Ever persistent and vigilant, Cerf Berr petitioned the government and received permission for the Jews of the northeast to draw up their own cahier de doléances (list of grievances), to send two representatives to Paris, and to seek support for their cause among Christian delegates. In response, Cerf Berr's son Marx Berr convened a meeting in May of thirtyseven hand-picked Jewish notables from Alsace to select the delegates to Paris and to draw up a cahier that would be collated with similar documents from the Jewish communities of Metz, Lorraine, and the TroisEvêchés. The cahier of the Jews of Alsace vividly displays their perception of what was politically possible to demand and desirable to achieve to improve their situation. In nine paragraphs the leaders of Alsatian Jewry sought civic equality without political emancipation. Aware of the contemporary public debate on the "Jewish question," they adopted the prevailing liberal rhetoric. The conclusion of the cahier stated that "the general wish of all the members of the corps of the Jewish Nation in Alsace tends to its absolute regeneration in a manner that would make it useful to the State. . . . " To accomplish that task, they demanded an end to discriminatory taxation, to restrictions on their right of settlement in Alsace, and to the expression by public officials of humiliating epithets against them. They asked for parity with their Christian neighbors in several areas: the right to practice all occupations, to marry freely as long as they could support a family, and to own property, including land. And, finally, they desired the right to remain different through the free exercise of their religion and the retention of their autonomous community and its institutions.17 The presentation of the Jewish case did not take place, however, until the summer, and the development of the Revolution's ideology would quickly make clear the irreconcilability within revolutionary thought of the right to equality and the right to be different.

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

2

5

The local representatives of the various estates had prepared their cahiers de doléances long before the Jews of northeastern France were ready to present theirs. Of the more than forty thousand cahiers drawn up, only some three hundred, virtually all from Alsace and Lorraine, discuss the Jews at all. Although a few of these cahiers took a liberal position on the "Jewish question" (with eight in Lorraine and the TroisÉvêchés even suggesting emancipation), the vast majority expressed a profound antipathy toward the Jews, couched in terms of resentment of their economic role as moneylenders and petty traders. Rather than seeking the amelioration of the status of the Jews in light of humanistic Enlightenment tenets, some of the cahiers went so far as to suggest the imposition of tried-and-true restrictive measures of the past, such as ghettoization or expulsion. Popular opinion was not yet ready to accept the Jews as equal citizens. 18 On several occasions in the first months of the Revolution the democratic and egalitarian thrust of revolutionary action and discourse might have included the Jews, but the combined force of conservative ideologues and resistance by Alsatian revolutionary leaders prevented it. On the night of August 3, Abbé Grégoire rose in the Constituent Assembly to deplore the continuing anti-Jewish riots that had erupted in Alsace from the end of July. He thereby raised the "Jewish question" for the first time in a revolutionary forum, but his intervention elicited no response. Later that month the issue of civic equality itself took central stage. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on August 26, proclaimed in its first and tenth article that "All men are born, and remain, free and equal in rights" and that " N o person shall be molested for his opinions, even such as are religious. . . ," 1 9 Jewish spokesmen and some of their Christian supporters assumed that this declaration signaled the inclusion of Jews in the ranks of citizens. Pressure from the Alsatian delegates and ongoing popular violence there led the authorities to interpret the text as making no claim as to the legal status of the Jews. Similarly, the debate that took place at the end of December on the subject of conferring the right to vote and be elected to office on all non-Catholics resulted in a favorable decision for France's Protestants but not for her Jews. 20 Despite the Constituent Assembly's reluctance to include the Jews as equals in the new French nation, during the summer of anti-Jewish violence and the autumn of legislative footdragging the process of lobbying for civic rights amidst revolutionary rhetoric changed the terms

26

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

upon which Jews could acquire citizenship. On August 31 the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine presented their demands to the Assembly in the form of an address. The original nine articles found in the cahiers of the Jews of Alsace had been reduced to four demands: the title and rights of citizenship; the right of settlement throughout the kingdom; parity in taxation; and the maintenance of Jewish communal autonomy. 21 By the time the address was delivered, however, it had become obsolete, for representatives of the small Jewish community of Paris, the Jews closest to the revolutionary events, had submitted their own address five days earlier. Proclaiming their patriotism and calling for citizenship in the name of justice, they renounced any claim to "the privilege that had been accorded us to have our particular leaders, drawn from our midst. . . ," 2 2 With that clause the Jews of Paris disavowed and delegitimated the communal autonomy that had characterized European Jewry from the Middle Ages and proclaimed its inappropriateness for the future. For them it was a small price to pay since their community had never enjoyed the privilege of communal autonomy. Having experienced the "revolutionary days," the Jews of Paris had doubtless internalized the consciousness that characterized revolutionary actors—that they were living through, in the words of the historian François Furet, "a radical change and the origin of a new era." 23 Imbued with the revolutionary sense of the break with the past and the "politicization of the everyday," the Jews of Paris recognized that the times demanded sweeping changes in the way they and their fellow Jews represented themselves to the general society. Indeed, in their address they had commented that "the past must answer to the future." 24 This privileging of the future over the past authorized the reconceptualization of the Jewish community. Just as "French revolutionary rhetoric broke through the confines of past politics by positing the existence of a new community . . . and by insisting that it could be realized through politics," 25 so the address of the Paris Jews broke through the limits of received concepts of the place of Jews within society by positing that as citizens, a status to be achieved through political action, Jews would form a new community, no longer legally separate from civil society. Although the Jews of Paris were few in number, their proposed redefinition of the nature of the Jewish community found a responsive audience among the liberal supporters of Jewish emancipation because it transformed the focus of political change from the Jewish "nations" to Jewish individuals. In liberal thought of the eighteenth century, as François Furet has observed, "the individual [was] not only a concept

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

27

but a value." 26 In seeking to confer an individual public identity upon Jews by legally dissolving the autonomous corporate Jewish community, the Revolution followed the general policy it had applied to all corporations that mediated between the individual and the state. As the historian Mona Ozouf has remarked, "The Constituent Assembly set out to eliminate systematically anything that might impede free individual expression: religious orders or corporations and all private organizations in which men banded together 'in the name of their so-called common interests' were seen by the deputies as erecting a much-feared screen between the individual interest and the general interest." 27 Indeed, a passionate supporter of equal rights for Jews, the liberal Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, in the December 23 debate on the eligibility for citizenship of the Jews along with other non-Catholics, rebutted the arguments of the opponents of Jewish emancipation by focusing precisely on the claim of Jews as individuals to equality. In a famous speech he declared, "To the Jews as a Nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything. They must renounce their judges; they must have none but ours. . . . They must not form a political corps or an Order in the state; they must be citizens individually." 28 The Count went on to affirm his confidence that the Jews would be prepared to accept citizenship under these conditions. If they chose not to, they would have to be expelled. To the conservative clergy and the delegates from Alsace and Lorraine who opposed the extension of equal rights to Jews, the Jews could not legitimately be seen simply as individuals but only as members of a collective whose very essence was defined in their shared historic experience and religious culture. They had always lived as a "nation within a nation," refusing to assimilate with the peoples among whom they dwelled. Although they resided in France, they were not French but eternal foreigners.29 Moreover, their religious tenets created insuperable obstacles to assuming the obligations of citizenship. As Bishop Anne-Lois Henry de la Fare of Nancy declared in the December debate, One must not admit to public employment, to administration, to the prerogatives of family . . . a tribe whose religion, customs . . . and morality differ essentially from those of all other people; a tribe whose eyes turn ceaselessly to the common homeland that must reunite its dispersed members . . . If he [the Jew] is faithful to his law, he can fill only imperfectly the first duty of the citizen, that of bearing arms, because on the sabbath day his law prevents him from traveling, working, and fighting . . . [The Sabbath also prevents him] from actively filling any magistracy, civic employment, or municipal charge . . . from exercising, usefully for society, the professions of medicine,

28

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

surgery, or pharmacy . . . If he is faithful to his law, he forbids himself all common meals and consequently all intimate society with Christians because he must neither eat meals they have prepared nor use the same u t e n s i l s . . . . 3 0

To his catalog of impediments to citizenship purportedly imposed by Judaism the Bishop also added the religion's many holy days, on which Jews could not work. Since French law would not permit them to work on Sundays and Christian holidays, it was inconceivable that they could contribute productively to society. As far as the Bishop was concerned, as long as Jews retained their Judaism, they could not be citizens. As his concluding rationale for denying the rights of citizenship to Jews, the Bishop pointed out that conferring citizenship upon the Jews would be no kindness to them. It would only expose them to increasing violence from their neighbors who would reject such equality. Prudence dictated anticipating the possible misfortune that could result from failing to consider the feelings of those populations that best knew the Jews. 31 In sum, the Jews were an alien people, whose religion perpetuated their foreignness, prevented their utility wherever they settled, and stirred up popular hostility against them. This being the case, the Bishop's remarks implied, the burden fell upon the Jews to prove that they could indeed assume the responsibilities of citizenship before the government took so radical a step as their emancipation. Both proponents and opponents of Jewish emancipation thus agreed that the behavior of the Jews was reprehensible and that their separation from society must end. Where they differed was on the causes of Jewish behavior and segregation and on the relationship of emancipation to the regeneration of the Jews. Building upon Enlightenment doctrines, proponents of emancipation asserted that Jewish behavior resulted from centuries of persecution and discrimination: a change in societal attitudes would of necessity regenerate the Jews. To what extent such regeneration would occur spontaneously or would require sustained state intervention varied with individual spokesmen. Opponents of Jewish emancipation doubted the possibilities of refashioning human behavior through social engineering. They took the weight of the past seriously and believed that Jews could not lightly cast off their own traditions. Moreover, they were unwilling to see Christian society shoulder the blame for Jewish defects of character and culture. The emancipation of the Jews would occur only after they themselves ended their alienation from Christian society and transcended the impediments to citizenship embedded within their faith. In December 1789 these divergent points of view, and

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

29

the vehemence with which the deputies from the northeast opposed Jewish emancipation, led to tabling the issue of Jewish citizenship. Ever concerned that they suffer no loss of status and privilege through linkage with their Ashkenazi coreligionists, the Sephardi Jews of the southwest continued to follow a strategy of separating their interests from those of their fellow Jews. 3 2 Following the inconclusive December debate, they felt even more strongly the need to secure ratification of their contention that on the basis of their previous letters patent they were already citizens. Lobbying on their own behalf, at a time when the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine were pressing the issue of citizenship for all the Jews of France, they gained the support of two influential political figures, Jacques Necker and Charles-Maurice, due de Talleyrand. Talleyrand presented the case for the Sephardi Jews on January 28, 1790. Responding to the charges of the opponents of Jewish emancipation in the previous month's debate, he demonstrated their inaccuracy as far as the Jews of Bordeaux were concerned. They were French subjects, who paid the same taxes as other Frenchmen and took part in the elections for the Estates General and who "served at this moment in the national militias . . . and fulfilled their functions without distinction to the day of the week." 3 3 The tactics of the Sephardim and their well-placed supporters succeeded. The decree that the Constituent Assembly passed on the day the issue was placed before them accepted the Sephardi Jews' argument, specifying that "[a] 11 of the Jews known in France as Portuguese, Spanish, and Avignonese Jews shall continue to enjoy all the rights they have enjoyed until the present time, and which had been accorded them by letters patent. Consequently, they shall enjoy the rights of active citizen. . . . " The papal Jews of Avignon thus shared in the good fortune of the Sephardim, and after the majority of communities of the papal states expressed their loyalty to France, civic equality was extended to their Jewish residents in June 1791. 3 4 With their citizenship affirmed, the Jews of the southwest retired from the fray to enjoy their good fortune. For the Jews of Alsace the struggle for civic equality continued for more than another year and a half. Its culmination in emancipation depended largely upon the growing radicalization of the Revolution and the ability of the Jews of Paris to interest the local Jacobins, concentrated in the Paris Commune, in their fate. As early as February 1790 the Paris Commune sent an address to the Constituent Assembly pointing out the anomaly of one status for Portuguese Jews and another for German Jews, when both types lived in Paris and expressed equally their patriotism.

3o

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

Moreover, the address pointed to another paradox, the "consecration among the Jews of a sort of aristocracy" at the very time when the legislative body had destroyed it among the French citizenry. Despite the linkage of the issue of equal rights for Jews with the antiaristocratic rhetoric of the Revolution, the hostility of the deputies from Alsace— and the anti-Jewish violence that had erupted again in the province— carried the day. 35 Although the Jews of Paris and of Alsace-Lorraine continued their lobbying throughout 1790 and 1 7 9 1 , and the Paris Commune offered its strong support, only as the Constituent Assembly was bringing its work to conclusion in the fall of 1 7 9 1 did the Jews of France finally obtain full rights of citizenship. In an unanticipated intervention, on September 27, the Parisian deputy Adrien Du Port pointed out that the Jews remained the only group in France whose right to equal citizenship was not regulated by the newly adopted constitution. Du Port then called for the revocation of all measures that limited Jewish rights. No distinction should be made among the political rights of citizens because of their religious beliefs, he resoundingly declared. When the Alsatian Jacobin deputy, Jean-François Rewbell, a long-standing opponent of the Jews, sought the floor for rebuttal, he was effectively undercut. A moderate deputy stated simply that to combat Du Port's motion was to combat the constitution. The motion carried without debate, and all the Jews of France became French citizens.36 Their Alsatian antagonists, however, did have their say the following day. They succeeded in amending the emancipation decree by adding a clause mandating that the civic oath Jews were to swear specifically include a formal renunciation of all prior privileges in their favor (such as communal autonomy). In response to a passionate speech by Rewbell, an additional decree was adopted. It ordered the Jews to furnish local authorities with a statement of their loans to Christians to ascertain whether the latter could pay their debts.37 Emancipation thus resolved the Jews' legal status, but not their social situation. The leadership of the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine welcomed the opportunities that emancipation offered them, despite their neighbors' evident hostility. On October 2 1 , 179 z in the Metz synagogue Jews sang a Hebrew version of the "Marseillaise," written by a local Maskil, to soldiers at a civic festival celebrating the republican victory at Thionville. Historian Ronald Schechter argues that this event marked the "attempt of a traditional people to embrace the values of their liberators without losing their ancient identity."38 Jewish leaders recognized, though, that their identity and their culture must be transformed in the wake of eman-

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

31

cipation. Berr Isaac Berr took the occasion of the emancipation decree to call upon his fellow Jews to help realize an idyllic future of social harmony, in part by sending their children to French schools: Through this union in the schools, our children, as well as those of our fellow citizens, will note from their tender youth that neither opinion nor religious difference prevents fraternal love, and t h a t . . . in fulfilling their religious obligations they can equally fulfill those of citizenship . . . with no more hatred or antipathy one to the other . . . They will know that, returning to their kin, some will g o to church, others to temples or synagogues to worship under different forms and dogmas the true God. . . . 3 9

In his appeal to his fellow Jews to welcome their new status as citizens and accept responsibility for self-regeneration, Berr Isaac Berr was among the first to articulate a project of assimilation, not only for the Jews of France but also for all Jews of western and central Europe who lived with the promise of emancipation. This project assumed that Jews would recognize the value of secular culture and strive to adopt the language, manners, and culture of the societies in which they lived. Although they would not renounce a particularist Jewish identity, they would define it in terms of a religious self-expression that would serve as the basis of Jewish solidarity. Berr Isaac Berr denied any conflict between civic responsibilities and the obligations imposed by Judaism that the opponents of emancipation thought inevitable. Instead he asserted the compatibility of civic responsibilities and Jewish obligations. 4 0 The project of assimilation, as framed by the lay elite of the Jewish community, was clearly influenced by Enlightenment pronouncements on the Jews and by the debates surrounding emancipation. Yet, in at least one respect, the Jewish project of assimilation differed from that of the French who promoted their emancipation. Many of the non-Jewish proponents of emancipation envisioned the ultimate merger of Jews with the rest of the French population. They accepted Jewish religious difference but assumed that the salutary influence of French culture upon the emancipated Jews would erode Jewish particularist loyalties and reveal the superstitious nature of Jewish religious tradition. 41 In contrast, Jews saw no conflict between civic and religious obligations, and no tension between what the historian Uriel Tal has called "integration and identity." Jews imagined that they would acculturate to the majority society but still retain a particularist ethnic or communal as well as religious identity.42 Unlike the men of the Enlightenment, the Jews had no intention of solving the "Jewish question" by disappearing within the majority.

32.

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

The immediate impact of the emancipation upon France's Jewish community was not easy to distinguish during the turbulent years of the Revolution. True, once those Jews of Alsace-Lorraine and Paris who had the necessary financial means had sworn the civic oath, all the Jews living in France were recognized as French citizens. As the historian Simon Schwarzfuchs has pointed out, the Revolution created the French Jewish community, for emancipation eradicated the legal distinctions that had existed among the very different Jewish communities located upon French soil.43 Yet, most Jews were too busy dealing with the growing anticlericalism of the Revolution and with the precariousness of their social situation to act, or reflect, upon their new status. The radicalization of the Revolution harmed Jewish interests even though the primary target of the Jacobin assault on the historic religions was the Roman Catholic church and not the synagogue. Still, the substitution of the ten-day for the seven-day week transformed the observance of the Sabbath into an illegal act. During the Terror individual Jews were arrested for refusing to engage in commerce on Saturday or for strolling in public dressed in festive clothing on that day. An Alsatian Jewish melamed (traditional primary school teacher) named Jessel Lehman recorded in his Yiddish diary that Jews in the province had been forbidden to celebrate the Sabbath and compelled to keep their stores open and help local farmers with their chores. Some Jews, as in Haguenau and Paris, looked to such secret places as an oil factory or a cellar to hold clandestine religious services. Ritual slaughtering and circumcision came under attack, and it was difficult to gain permission to bake matzah for the Passover holiday. Although Jews had been permitted to establish new synagogues during the early years of the Revolution, during the Terror synagogues were ordered closed and their silver ritual items confiscated. Yet, synagogues were not singled out for maltreatment. Revolutionaries viewed the Church as the enemy—as one source, along with the aristocracy, of antirevolutionary conspiracy.44 Although the revolutionaries did not direct their antireligious policy against synagogues in particular, they did continue to distinguish Jews in other ways. They clearly opposed signs of Jewish particularism that were not explicitly religious. To radical Jacobins, for example, the Jewish man's beard and sidelocks (along with the Anabaptist's beard) and the married Jewish woman's wig were unacceptable, for they signified religious fanaticism and hence lack of support for the Revolution. Jessel Lehman commented in his diary in 1795 that several Jewish men were compelled to have their beards and sidelocks publicly shaved (and at

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

33

their own expense). Jewish men were also ordered to remove their hats when they swore the oath of allegiance to the republic.45 Thus the Revolution banned customs that differentiated the Jews from the model of the loyal citizen. This opposition to symbolic aspects of Jewishness is not surprising, for the revolutionaries took symbols seriously and sought through symbolic action to achieve a measure of civic uniformity. Under the leadership of Grégoire, the Revolution conducted an assault on regional dialects, seeking to achieve linguistic uniformity as a prelude to cultural homogeneity.46 In May 1794 the Committee on Public Safety commissioned the artist Jacques-Louis David to design a national civil uniform that would eliminate social distinctions between individuals. As Lynn Hunt has remarked, "During the Revolution, even the most ordinary objects and customs became political emblems . . . You could tell a good republican by how he dressed." 47 The particular signs of Jewishness, because they symbolically separated Jews from the new national community the Revolution sought to create, were expected to yield before the revolutionary vision. Although revolutionaries tried to integrate Jews into the national community by forcibly eliminating aspects of their culture, real social integration of Jews occurred only sporadically during the years of the Revolution. Most Jews, like most Christians, were less than eager to serve in the army, but many did volunteer both for the regular army as well as the National Guard. In some cases, such as Nancy, Metz, and Wintzenheim (Upper Rhine), local authorities refused to accept Jews into the National Guard. Even in Saint-Esprit, where the Jews of Marrano origin were better integrated than in Alsace and Lorraine and had become citizens by January 1790, the city council created two all-Jewish companies of volunteers for the National Guard in November 1790 to prevent tensions between the Christian and Jewish volunteers.48 The Revolution did not allay the hostility that had long characterized popular attitudes toward Jews in Alsace and Lorraine. Indeed, the conspiratorial climate of the Revolution as well as the new expectations about Jewish behavior generated by the debates surrounding their emancipation at times exacerbated Jewish-Christian relations. In the northeastern provinces, and particularly Alsace, the traditional economic role of Jews as moneylenders, cattle dealers, and intermediaries between rural and urban markets had long provoked peasant resentment. During the summer of 1789 anti-Jewish violence had erupted in twenty Jewish communities in Upper Alsace, as peasants interpreted revolutionary freedom

34

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

as license to liberate themselves from their debts. To the Alsatian peasants, the persistence of Jews in their customary economic positions belied the presumption that emancipation would regenerate the Jews. Moreover, the commercial background and credit activities of the Jews enabled them to play a visible part in the sale of nationalized land. Although the historian Roland Marx has found that Jews acquired only 2 percent of the total nationalized land sold between 1789 and 1 8 1 1 in Alsace (and no more than 1 0 percent if the land they acquired for Christians is included), rumors were rampant that one-third of Alsace had fallen into Jewish hands. During the Revolution, rural Alsatians became increasingly indebted to Jews; in some communes up to half the money owed by rural residents was owed to Jews. Some local governments responded by violating the civic equality conferred on Jews by taxing them at a higher rate than their non-Jewish neighbors. Perhaps because they spoke Yiddish and had international contacts, Jews in the northeastern provinces were also suspected of spying and counterfeiting money. Given their continuing status as a disparaged minority, it is no surprise that they were often blamed for the difficult times.49 The revolutionary activists who had emancipated the Jews anticipated their rapid regeneration and assimilation into the general population. Indeed, in 1793 a member of the Nancy municipal council took the ideology of assimilation to its ultimate conclusion by suggesting that any Jew who would not marry a non-Jew should be regarded as suspect.50 Yet the authorities were unwilling themselves to assimilate the Jews in one respect. Although the government had decided to nationalize the debts of corporations abolished by the Revolution, it refused to do so regarding the substantial debts incurred by Jewish communities under the anden régime in order to pay their discriminatory taxes. The Jewish communities had been disbanded, but their former members, who had petitioned that the Jewish corporations be treated no differently than the Church in this regard, were held responsible, along with their descendants, for the defunct communities' financial obligations. This legal "segregation" of the Jews reinforced the sense of differentness that emancipation presumably was designed to eradicate. 51 The revolutionary act of emancipation may have had little perceptible impact upon the Jews of France during the years of the Revolution itself. There were few incentives for Jews to restructure their own economy at a time when economic conditions in general were precarious. Tried-and-true commercial pursuits appeared more promising to Jews than farming or artisanry. Promises of social integration seemed illusory,

French Revolution and Emancipation of Jews

35

and perhaps frightening, to a population that had recently experienced violence, was still the target of popular hostility, and was finding it difficult to follow its customary way of life. Yet, the French Revolution initiated a process that would lead to the transformation not only of the external appearance and behavior of the Jews but also of their self-concept. The Revolution presented, first to the wealthy elite of the Jewish population, a new vision of what was socially and culturally possible. Through the power of the state and the Jewish institutions that would succeed the disbanded autonomous communities, that vision would be translated into methods of socialization designed to produce patriotic French Jewish citizens, fully at home in French culture and loyal to a Judaism consonant with French citizenship. Because even a political event that assumed the mandate of creating a new national community and regenerating human beings as citizens was unable to emancipate the Jews with one stroke of the pen, the process of Jewish emancipation in France in the last decade of the eighteenth century revealed much of the ambivalence that Jews would encounter in their confrontation with the modern nation-state. The logic of Enlightenment thought, which promoted both religious tolerance and the essential sameness of all human beings, necessitated conferring civic equality upon the Jews, but the dominant voices in the Enlightenment often confused equality with uniformity. Since cultural pluralism was not a value among most thinkers of the French Enlightenment, with the notable exceptions of Montesquieu and Count Mirabeau, even the proponents of Jewish emancipation advocated emancipation confident that Jews would dissolve their particularism in the universalist culture of the new society. Jews thought otherwise and sought to retain elements of Jewish particularism consonant with French citizenship. It fell to Napoleon, building upon the Revolution's ambivalence regarding the status of the Jews, to attempt to clarify the Jews' position in modern French society. In response to the Revolution and Napoleon the Jews of France would begin the ongoing task of defining the measure of differentness appropriate for themselves and acceptable to their fellow French citizens.

CHAPTER

THREE

The Napoleonic Synthesis

T

he Revolution was the turning point in the history of French Jewry in modern times, but its emancipation of the Jews of France did not solve the "Jewish question." Two issues raised by the emancipation debates continued to disturb public opinion at the beginning of the nineteenth century. First, the Jews' persistence in their customary economic pursuits seemed to fly in the face of articulated expectations that their new civil status would swiftly regenerate them. Conservative opponents of emancipation felt that the absence of change vindicated their claims that Judaism was an insurmountable obstacle to citizenship. Second, the elimination of communal autonomy as the price of emancipation left the Jews of France in a state of institutional anarchy. After 1802 they were the sole religious group in France without a legally recognized structure. Seeking an orderly conclusion to the Revolution with regard to the Jews as with so many other matters, Napoleon addressed both of these issues and thereby provided the institutional and symbolic framework for modern French Jewry. Although idiosyncratic in style, his resolution of the "Jewish question" drew upon those aspects of revolutionary 37

3«

The Napoleonic Synthesis

thought that presumed the need for sustained state interference to achieve regeneration. Just as Napoleon crystallized tendencies toward the centralization of state power begun under the ancien régime, so he carried to new heights efforts at state supervision of the Jews pioneered by enlightened eighteenth-century monarchs. Because he confronted a postemancipation situation, he directed his efforts at eliminating what he considered to be impediments among the Jews that prevented fulfillment of their duties as French citizens. For Napoleon the formal emancipation of the Jews had not yet eradicated their self-concept as a separate people. Like the opponents of emancipation during the Revolution, he continued to assert that the Jews were a "nation within the nation." Only their whole-hearted identification with, and ultimate assimilation into, the French people would justify the decision to include them within the ranks of French citizens. Yet, in his zeal to remake the Jews' economic activity, Napoleon was willing to violate the very concept of civic equality by introducing exceptional legislation that would restrict them in moneylending and commerce. His policy toward the Jews, therefore, was characterized by an inner tension. Its ultimate goal was the complete assimilation of the Jews within French society, but the methods adopted paradoxically reinforced the Jewish solidarity that Napoleon deemed necessary to suppress in the name of French national identity. State discrimination and the establishment of a state-recognized institutional structure violated civil equality and encouraged Jewish separateness.1 Two very different sources inspired Napoleon's consideration of the status of the Jews some fifteen years after their emancipation. The leaders of the Jewish communities of Alsace and Lorraine were dismayed by the legal limbo into which all Jewish communal expression had fallen with the termination of communal autonomy. In 1804 Jewish leaders in Metz petitioned the government to restore order to their community by regulating the selection of communal leaders and restoring their power to constrain dissent and raise funds through taxation. They could not rely upon voluntary contributions to sustain their religious institutions and hospital and pay their rabbi's salary. Other Jewish communities also turned to the Minister of Religions for assistance. By the beginning of 1806 the Minister of Religions had solicited and received from the traditional notables of French Jewry a plan for the reorganization of the Jewish community, based on parity with the other recognized faiths in France, Catholicism and Protestantism. Napoleon recognized the possibility of harnessing religion to serve the needs of the state, and he had

The Napoleonic Synthesis

39

officially integrated both Catholicism and Protestantism into the Empire through the 1 8 0 1 concordat with the Vatican and the 1802 organization of the Protestant faith, both of which assured governmental payment of clerical salaries. Given these initiatives, it was evident that he would have to address the anomalous position of Judaism. Furthermore, governmental influence on the Jews through their organization could only hasten their regeneration.2 Of far greater importance to Napoleon than Jewish petitions was the public debate on their behavior and fitness for citizenship. This discussion reemerged with vigor in the first years of the new century. Complaints forwarded to Paris by local authorities about the proliferation of Jews in Alsace as well as their usury and peddling practices captured Napoleon's attention. While passing through Strasbourg in January 1806 on his return from the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon met a delegation of bourgeois. They complained to him that Alsace was being strangled by debts owed to Jews and that they feared the dispossession of the peasants. They probably resented the competition and rising prices for nationalized land that ensued when peasants with cash entered the market. Sharing the view that moneylending was a reprehensible pursuit, Napoleon listened to these protestations. He rejected the countervailing arguments presented by Jewish spokesmen.3 The specific charges against Jewish usury soon acquired national prominence. Pamphlets and articles written by conservative intellectuals saw the emancipation of the Jews as a symbol of revolutionary excess and of lack of understanding of the Christian roots of French national culture. They dismissed the idea of a secular state in France. The antirevolutionary Catholic philosopher Louis de Bonald took up the old argument that adherence to Christianity was a prerequisite of citizenship and claimed that granting citizenship to the Jews undermined their role as witnesses to the truth of Catholicism. He therefore argued for a revocation of emancipation. An 1806 pamphlet by the lawyer Louis Poujol accepted the possibility of regenerating the Jews but asserted that the Jews apparently could not do so themselves. Because Jews engaged in usury, had not reformed their religious law, did not send their children to public school, and refused to serve in the army, they should be subjected to exceptional measures, even though these were incompatible with the title and prerogatives of citizenship. They should be temporarily stripped of their civil rights because they had not fulfilled the obligations of citizenship. Carrying the conservative argument to one logical conclusion (the other being expulsion), Poujol demanded that the

4°

The Napoleonic Synthesis

state enforce total assimilation of the Jews as a prelude to their receiving citizenship, for, he noted, "their own interest commands them to draw closer to the entire nation, to mix with it in order to soon form one and the same people." 4 This conservative line of thought impressed Napoleon. His personal attitudes toward Jews were complex. He seems to have combined a traditional antipathy toward Jews prevalent in Catholic culture with an Enlightenment critique of Jewish economic activity. Most importantly, he viewed the bonds of solidarity among Jews as antithetical to their social participation as individual citizens of France. At a discussion with his Conseil d'État in April 1806 Napoleon explicitly referred to the Jews as still constituting "a nation within a nation." Yet Napoleon did not advocate revoking their emancipation. Instead he sought to utilize his considerable power to realize the vision of the regenerated Jewish citizen anticipated by proponents of emancipation. Indeed, Napoleon's action toward the Jews would have been more difficult to implement had the ideology favoring emancipation considered citizenship an unconditional natural right and had the proponents of emancipation put forth more limited objectives. Unrealistic expectations had bred hasty reproaches. As Berr Isaac Berr commented in an 1806 pamphlet, Hardly had the decree which granted the Jews the title of citizen been handed down than they were reproached with not yet having become worthy as a group of this great favor . . . H o w could one expect that fifteen years, six of which were passed amidst the convulsions of the Revolution, should have sufficed to efface the disastrous and deep-rooted effects of several centuries of oppression and degradation which had weighed upon the Jews. 5

Turning to his Conseil d'État with the vexing problem of Jewish usury in March 1806, Napoleon sought its advice on whether it was possible to implement exceptional measures banning Jews from holding mortgages. After studying the issue for some weeks, the council rejected the idea of enacting discriminatory legislation against the Jews as a violation of the constitution. The problem of usury, it concluded, was not specific to the Jews and could best be solved through general legislation. The council thus remained committed to the Revolution's concept of equality. Napoleon rejected this response, declaring, "The French government cannot regard with indifference a . . . degraded nation, capable of all forms of baseness, taking exclusive possession of the two beautiful departments of Alsace." Napoleon decided to convene a meeting of Jewish notables in Paris to discuss the issue and propose suggestions to eliminate the problem. He also drafted and promulgated an imperial decree,

The Napoleonic Synthesis

4i

published at the end of May, that suspended for one year debts owed to Jews in Alsace and Lorraine. 6 Napoleon convoked an Assembly of Jewish Notables to bring together Jewish leaders who would endorse the Emperor's goals of assimilation and thereby legitimate them. He also wanted them to support specific measures designed to achieve his goals. Ordered to select appropriate representatives from among the wealthy and educated Jews of their departments, the prefects turned to those among the traditional leadership who seemed most responsive to the challenges of citizenship. Eventually eighty-two delegates convened in Paris, representing the Jews of France, the German territory annexed to the Empire, and the kingdom of Italy. The most prominent members of the assembly included Abraham Furtado, leader of the Jews of Bordeaux, who was chosen its president; Berr Isaac Berr, the former syndic from Lorraine; and Rabbi David Sinzheim of Strasbourg, a noted rabbinic scholar and the brother-in-law of the late Cerf Berr. Napoleon presented the assembly with a set of twelve questions that probed what he considered to be the problematic aspects of Jewish citizenship.7 The questions dealt with Jewish marital law, with the sentiment of the Jews toward France and its people, with the role of the rabbi, and with Jewish attitudes toward usury. By focusing on the relationship between Jewish law and French civil law, the questions ultimately explored the nature of Jewish identity in the modern state. All of the delegates recognized the nature of the challenge. They acknowledged the need to accept the primacy of civil law in all matters that were not explicitly religious. They declared their loyalty to France and defined Frenchmen as their brothers. Yet there were significant differences among the notables. These appeared between those who were most acculturated to secular values (mostly from the southwest, from Paris, and from Metz) and those who sought to preserve tradition while accommodating to the demands of citizenship.8 The decisions of the assembly reflect a willingness of all parties to achieve a compromise that would not violate the stipulations of Jewish law. However, the assembly did expand one of the central concepts of Jewish law. In recognizing that civil marriage and divorce must precede religious ceremonies, the delegates relied upon the rabbinic concept of "dina d'malkhuta dina" (the law of the land is the law). Unlike premodern interpreters of this precept, however, who limited its applicability to laws dealing with monetary issues, the assembly extended it to the sector of personal status, an area that previously had been regulated solely

The Napoleonic Synthesis

according to the norms of Jewish law. The assembly also affirmed that emancipation had eliminated the traditional power of rabbis to adjudicate cases among Jews, except as instances of voluntary arbitration. The duties of rabbis, declared the Jewish delegates, were now "limited to preaching morality in the temples, blessing marriages, and pronouncing divorces." Like Christian religious leaders, the modern rabbi was to be a preacher and pastor rather than a judge.9 In its answers to the questions about usury the assembly vigorously defended Judaism by suggesting that the questioners misunderstood the rules of lending at interest within Jewish law and erred in translating the biblical Hebrew word "neshekh" as usury rather than interest. Asserting that Jews and fellow citizens were treated equally in Jewish law, the delegates explained that all lending at interest (whether to Jew or nonJew) was forbidden when the matter was seen in terms of charity and permitted when seen as a commercial transaction. They concluded with a strong refutation of collective guilt in the matter of usury: It cannot be denied that some . . . [Hebrews] are to be found, though not so many as is generally supposed, who follow that nefarious traffic condemned by their religion. But if there are some not over-nice in this particular, is it just to accuse one hundred thousand individuals of this vice? Would it not be deemed an injustice to lay the same imputation on all Christians because some of them are guilty of usury? 1 0

Napoleon's aspirations for Jewish assimilation appeared most vividly in the third question: "Can a Jewess marry a Christian and a Jew a Christian woman? Or does the law allow the Jews to marry only among themselves?" Napoleon hoped for a Jewish endorsement of intermarriage as the most effective form of Jewish integration within French society, indeed as the best means to end the Jews' status as "a nation within a nation." The question provoked the most acrimonious debate among the delegates, with the most acculturated willing to hand Napoleon the endorsement he desired. In the end the views of the rabbinic authorities prevailed, a victory for David Sinzheim, their most influential representative. The compromise response reflected the reduced authority of Jewish law. The delegates acknowledged that it was now possible for a Jew to marry a Christian through recourse to civil law and still remain a Jew. They recognized the creation of a secular space over which religion held no sway. However, the Jewish notables hardly gave a ringing endorsement of intermarriage. Their response included the statement that the rabbis opposed such unions and could not bless them. 11

The Napoleonic Synthesis

43

Taken together, the responses of the assembly constituted a new definition of Jewish identity in the modern world. Premodern Jewish identity fused religious and national (or ethnic) elements, embracing all aspects of life. By declaring that their primary identification was with their fellow Frenchmen—asserting that a Jew in England felt himself a stranger though among Jews—the delegates to the assembly formally split the religious and ethnic elements subsumed within traditional Jewish identity. By validating only the ritual aspects of Jewish law, they admitted their Jewishness to be partial and theoretically limited to voluntary membership in a religious community alone. They declared their nationality to be equivalent to their citizenship. In their view, the Jews no longer constituted a nation. The assembly steered a steady course under difficult circumstances. Summoned to Paris by imperial decree and supervised by three governmentally appointed commissioners who served as intermediaries to the Emperor, the Jewish notables recognized that they were expected to prove that the Jews were both willing and able to be the kind of citizens the Emperor desired. They had to balance their concern for preserving Jewish rights with their desire to maintain their self-respect. Although they have been criticized by some subsequent historians and polemicists as cowardly assimilationists, that characterization does not do justice to their accomplishment. To be sure, they redefined Jewish identity and the role of the rabbi; and they subordinated Jewish law to French civil law. The process of emancipation into a state with little tolerance for particularist identities, especially in the public sphere, left them no other alternative short of rejection of citizenship. But they also defended themselves and their potential persistence as a religious community, even while subject to public scrutiny and attack. In order to reap the greatest benefit from the stated commitment of the Jewish notables to promote civic loyalty, patriotism, and economic utility among their constituents, Napoleon determined to give the responses of the assembly wide publicity. Ever the showman, he hit upon the idea of reconstituting under his own aegis the Sanhedrin, the ancient legislative body of the Jews, to lend rabbinic authority to the decisions of the Assembly of Notables. Following ancient custom, the Napoleonic Sanhedrin would consist of seventy-one members, at least two-thirds of whom would be rabbis. Its membership would be drawn primarily from the Assembly of Notables, supplemented by additional rabbinic figures. It would be as decisions of the Sanhedrin that the responses of the Assembly of Notables would make their impact.

44

The Napoleonic Synthesis

With the issues having been debated at length by the Assembly of Notables, the Sanhedrin found its task a simple one: to ratify the assembly's responses, with the exception of the responses about rabbinic authority, which were deleted. Convoked in February 1807, the Sanhedrin completed its assigned task within one month. Elaborating on the doctrine of "dina d'malkhuta dina," the Sanhedrin added a stipulation that the needs of army service took precedence over religious law. Jewish soldiers were permitted to suspend those religious observances that conflicted with military duties. A symbol for Maskilim of the adaptability of Judaism to the demands of modern citizenship, the doctrinal decisions of the Sanhedrin were printed in the German Haskalah journal Sulamit. In 1844 the first German Reform synod held in Brunswick adopted them.12 Before disbanding in the spring of 1807 the Assembly of Notables confronted one last demand from the Emperor. He asked them to endorse the use of governmental measures to end moneylending by Jews. That economic activity had led to an 1806 decree suspending debts owed to Jews. Although the delegates were reluctant to support such a call for state intervention, Furtado secured their assent after a protracted and vehement debate. Knowing that Napoleon was committed to an interventionist program, Furtado apparently felt that the assembly's acknowledgment of the abuses of some Jewish traffickers, when combined with a call for the expiration of the 1806 decree, would result in no wholesale discriminatory measures but only in suppression of those Jews who practiced usury. In this he was sadly mistaken.13 Napoleon chose to implement an activist program that brought Jewish institutions under state supervision and subjected Jews as a class to exceptional laws that hampered their right to engage in commerce. Indeed, Napoleon's penchant for discriminatory measures against the Jews did not sit well with the Conseil d'Etat. It tried unsuccessfully to substitute general regulations on usury for the exceptional laws. On March 17,1808 Napoleon issued three decrees that dealt with Jews. Based upon the assembly's 1806 ordinance for the reorganization of the Jewish communities, the first two restored order to the informal Jewish communities that had survived the Revolution by establishing a hierarchical, centralized organization, under the aegis of the Ministry of Religions, for the Jewish religion in France. Following the precedent of the organization of French Protestantism, Napoleon mandated the founding of a system of consistories for Judaism. A Central Consistory with its seat in Paris coordinated all of French Jewry. It would regulate regional consistories to be formed in any department or group of contiguous depart-

The Napoleonic Synthesis

45

ments with at least two thousand Jewish inhabitants. The regional consistories were to supervise the religious and philanthropic needs of the local Jewish communities, or synagogues. To carry out these tasks the regional consistories appointed commissaires-surveillants, agents to implement consistorial regulations, in each local community. Under this system the consistories wielded a legal monopoly over the expression of Judaism in France; only consistorially approved public worship was authorized. Initially there were seven consistories located within France: Lower and Upper Rhine, Moselle, and Meurthe in the northeast; Seine in the center; and Gironde and Bouches du Rhone in the south. A fiveman board, composed of one rabbi (or, where available, two) and the rest laymen who resided in the consistory's seat (which was the largest city in the district), served as the leaders, or members, of the regional consistories. Only in the Central Consistory in Paris was the leadership vested in three rabbis and two laymen. The struggle between lay and rabbinic authority, built into the consistorial system from its beginning, was to become increasingly fierce in the course of the nineteenth century, as the power of rabbis in the consistories was progressively restricted. The final tier of consistorial leadership consisted of twenty-five notables, selected by the prefect from among the wealthiest and most respected Jews. They in turn elected the members of the consistory boards. By conferring upon the central government's representative the right to pick the notables, the 1808 ordinance permitted the state a direct role in shaping the leadership of the Jewish communities.14 From the government's perspective the consistories performed a number of important tasks. They maintained order in the synagogues and administered funds collected for religious purposes. Unlike the Catholics and Protestants whose clergy's salaries were paid by the state, the consistories had to pay the rabbis and other religious functionaries from dues levied upon Jewish residents. Thus, the ordinance establishing the consistories discriminated against the Jews. Jews were doubly taxed: their state taxes helped to support Christian clerics while they were charged with a second "tax" to maintain their own religious leadership. The consistories were also expected to be the primary agents of the regeneration of the Jews, encouraging the adoption of "useful professions" and reporting to the authorities those who had no evident means of support. To promote civic rectitude the rabbis were enjoined to disseminate the doctrinal decisions of the Sanhedrin, "to hark constantly upon obedience to the laws . . . [and] to endeavor to make the Israelites consider military service to be a sacred obligation. . . , " 1 5 The predominance of

46

The Napoleonic Synthesis

laymen, preferably acculturated laymen, on the consistory boards was a means to counter the presumed superstitiousness and cultural backwardness of the traditional rabbinate. The last of the consistories' mandated tasks—supervision of Jews—was, for Napoleon certainly, their central raison d'être. The consistories were designed to serve as conduits between the government and the Jewish population, channeling governmental regulations to Jews, enforcing those regulations, and providing information about the Jews to the government. For example, during the Napoleonic empire the government, through its prefects, solicited from consistories regular reports with statistics about Jewish youth, including the number without any professions, the number of brokers and peddlers, the number engaged in "illicit dealing," and the number with useful professions or apprenticed to craftsmen. It also requested the consistories to suggest ways the government might intervene to assist the economic regeneration of Jewish youth and to indicate the methods they were using to overcome obstacles to regeneration. As the archival evidence indicates, the consistories complied with these regulations and tried as well to enforce state rules banning almsgiving by individual Jews to Jewish beggars. 16 While the formation of the consistorial system established Judaism on an almost equal footing with the other faiths in France, the third decree published on March 1 7 , 1808 struck a blow at French Jews' claims to equal citizenship. Labeled the "Infamous Decree" by French Jews, this ordinance presumed all Jews guilty of chicanery unless proven innocent and restricted Jewish commerce and moneylending for a period of ten years. In the decree Napoleon reflected his confidence in the efficacy of social engineering through law, expressing the hope that at the end of the ten-year period "there would no longer be any difference between . . . [the Jews] and the other citizens of our empire." 17 The decree canceled the 1806 suspension of the payment of debts to Jews but severely regulated their future as well as their past transactions. Despite the fact that many loans had not been notarized and hence were poorly documented, Jewish creditors had to prove that they had given full value. If the interest on a loan exceeded 5 percent, the debt was to be annulled. This provision was retroactive, even though a general law declaring legally acceptable interest rates had not been adopted until September 1807. Loans to "incapables," that is, to minors, married women, and soldiers, would be invalid unless they secured the consent of their parents, husbands, or superior officers. Finally, each Jew had to apply annually for a patent, or license, to engage in commerce of any kind; otherwise his

The Napoleonic Synthesis

47

commercial transactions would be null and void. To secure a patent he had to supply testimony from his municipal council that he had never engaged in usury and from his consistory as to his good conduct.18 The Infamous Decree also placed Jews in an exceptional class with regard to their freedom of movement and army service. Although freedom of movement had been a prized consequence of emancipation, the 1808 legislation banned the settlement of new Jewish residents in the two Alsatian departments. It permitted Jews to migrate to other parts of the Empire only if they acquired rural land to farm and refrained from engaging in any form of commerce. The measure clearly implied that only demonstrably regenerated Jews made good citizens and that there were already too many Jews in Alsace, although they comprised only 3 percent of the population. The decree also demanded personal army service of all Jewish conscripts to facilitate their assimilation. Unlike other Frenchmen, they would not be permitted to provide a replacement. Since the Infamous Decree was a response to the specific socioeconomic role of the Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, the law exempted from its provisions the Jews of the Gironde and, a month later, the Jews of Paris. After granting additional requests for exemptions, the government ultimately subsumed only the Jews of the northeast within the decree's economic provisions. 19 Napoleon concluded his program for the regeneration of the Jews with a final decree, published on July 2.0, 1808, that ordered Jews to assume and declare fixed personal and family names in place of the traditional system according to which many Jews were known only as "A son of, or daughter of, B." To stimulate their integration into the French milieu, Jews were forbidden to select names drawn from the Hebrew Bible or the names of towns. The penalty for violating the provisions of the decree was expulsion. In addition to hastening their assimilation, the decree was intended to facilitate both governmental and consistorial supervision of the Jews and their movements.20 The impact of the combination of the public spectacle of the Sanhedrin and the various governmental ordinances that together constituted Napoleon's program for the complete integration of Jews as French citizens was ambiguous and contradictory. On the one hand, the Napoleonic measures made explicit general assumptions about assimilation and economic utility, that surrounded the emancipation of the Jews during the Revolution. In fact, in his proposal that the Sanhedrin endorse his goal of one intermarriage for every two endogamous Jewish marriages Napoleon wanted to mandate what some proponents of emancipation

48

The Napoleonic Synthesis

had hoped would happen, namely, the total assimilation, or biological fusion of Jews with the rest of the French people. Only such a process of what the historian François Delpech called "forced assimilation" would resolve the "Jewish question" in France. 21 The focus of Napoleon's program on eliminating the specific commercial role of the Jews and refashioning them in the image of the majority of their fellow citizens as farmers and craftspeople also reflected the Revolution's definition of equality. On the other hand, the reorganization of the Jewish communities in the consistorial system and the resort to exceptional legislation that singled out "Jewish" economic behavior reinforced the very sense of group cohesiveness and identity that emancipation and the Sanhedrin's renunciation of Jewish nationality were designed to efface. Public debate on the Jews that erupted during the Empire demonstrated just how contingent their emancipation was. Popular antisemitism, fed by traditional Christian prejudice and economic antagonism, remained strong. Those who supported emancipation still harbored notions that Jews must prove their worthiness for citizenship. Those who remained unreconciled to the Revolution saw in the new status of the Jews in France a powerful symbolic affront to their dearest values. Encouraged by Napoleon's responsiveness to their complaints against the Jews, they could dream of a restoration of at least one aspect of the ancien régime through a revocation of emancipation. How had Jewish life in France changed in the quarter century between the outbreak of the Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic empire? How significant to the Jews who lived through this era was the revolutionary act of emancipation? Answers to these questions depend upon which Jews historians consider most important. Contemporary outside observers in the first decade of the nineteenth century found very little evidence of the economic and cultural regeneration of the masses of Jewry, especially in Alsace. Nor were the Jews of the northeast integrated into the public life of the country. As the Central Consistory, referring to the situation in Alsace, declared in 1 8 1 0 of the Revolution: [It] made no difference in the opinion of the Jews in this land; the same hatred is shown to them . . . It is very rare to see a Jew, no matter how well educated or how honest, fulfilling municipal functions or serving on the jury. The most ignorant of villagers is preferred . . . When the decree of March 1 7 , 1 8 0 8 was promulgated, many mayors published this law with an undue display and many times to the sound of a tambour. 22

The Napoleonic Synthesis

49

Indeed, in Alsace there had been few indications of change either in the economic and cultural activity of the Jews or in their public image. The vast majority of Jews continued to eke out a living in petty commerce; they were peddlers, old-clothes dealers, cattle merchants, and small-scale commercial agents. Many combined this trade with small-scale moneylending. The Infamous Decree of 1808 made the conduct of their business more difficult and impoverished many Jews who had legally lent money at interest, but it did not drive them into farming or artisanry. Given their commercial skills and the historic ban on their owning land or belonging to guilds, it is not surprising that they shied away from sectors of the economy that seemed unpromising and were not experiencing expansion. Because of concern that public schools would foster conversion and as a result of experiences of discrimination, only about 1 0 percent of Jewish children in Alsace received a public education. At least one governmental official, the subprefect of the arrondissement (district) of Château-Salins in the northeast department of the Meurthe, sympathized with the reluctance of Jewish parents to send their children to local public schools. As he wrote in 1806, observant Jews, like Anabaptists, Lutherans, and Calvinists, were repulsed by public education because "our schools are Catholic schools rather than public schools. Prayers according to the Roman religion are recited upon entering and leaving, the catechism of the same religion is taught there, and the textbooks used are of that same religion." 23 The freedom of movement that emancipation permitted led, however, to a redistribution of the Jewish population within Alsace and Lorraine and in the country as a whole. Jews migrated to the cities and to communes where there had previously been no Jews. The Jewish population of Strasbourg, for example, that before emancipation had been limited to Cerf Berr and his retainers, numbered more than twelve hundred in 1806. New Jewish communities appeared especially in departments contiguous to the old Jewish population centers. Whereas before the Revolution Jews had lived in twenty-one of the departments (according to the 1809 division of the country into eighty-six departments), in 1809 Jews were present, albeit in small numbers, in forty-three. Lured by the opportunities that the bustling capital offered, French Jews thronged to Paris. By 1809 there were more than twenty-nine hundred Jews there. Even with this dispersion of the Jewish population, however, during the Empire 99 percent of the Jews of France still resided in the twenty-one departments of their original settlement. More than three-quarters lived in the traditional heartland of French Jewry, Alsace and Lorraine, and

5°

The Napoleonic Synthesis

fully 5 5 percent in Alsace alone. The total Jewish population grew to more than forty-six thousand. Despite the perception of Frenchmen of the time that foreign Jews, presumably from Germany, were flooding into Alsace, it appears that no more than i o percent of the Alsatian Jewish population were of foreign birth. A similar percentage of the Jews of Paris were immigrants from Germany, Holland, and Poland. In some new, small Jewish communities near the northern border, such as Dunkerque in 18 io, the majority of the Jewish residents were of foreign origin, most from Holland. Taken as a whole, French Jewry did not experience a significant wave of immigration in the aftermath of emancipation.24 Despite the fact that the Alsatian Jews who attracted the greatest measure of public attention provided their governmental observers with what they considered insufficient evidence of regeneration, though there were local variations, state officials evaluated favorably the civic rectitude of the Jews of France during the Empire, when Napoleon began to solicit information on the Jews in each department. Even in parts of the northeast most subprefects and prefects commented that Jews in their jurisdictions obeyed the laws; the subprefect of Toul in the department of Moselle added, "at least as well as the other citizens." Going even further, the prefect of the Seine considered the jews of Paris to be quite similar in all their practices to other classes in the city. Occasionally when criticizing Jewish usurers, a government official, such as the prefect of the department of the Meurthe, would point out that there were even more Catholic usurers whose business practices "were no less rapacious" than those of the Jews. In the south the Sephardi Jews continued in their path of acculturation and integration. Responding to a question about Jews as public functionaries, the mayor of Saint-Esprit commented in his 1 8 1 2 report to the Minister of the Interior, "Since the Revolution there has always been some Jew called to public function; a justice of the peace, municipal officers, and almost always the second adjoint [or, assistant] to the mayor have been selected from among the Jews." 2 5 There were modest signs of economic diversification as well, again most visible among the Sephardim of the southwest. In Bordeaux thirtyfour Jews worked as artisans and professionals, among them six teachers and a naturalist, who was the founder and proprietor of a museum; sixty-six Jews owned houses in the city and thirty-nine were proprietors of rural land. The percentage of artisans in both Paris and Nancy increased significantly, and in Luneville in 1808 the subprefect reported that twenty young Jews were practicing crafts. Most of the Jews living in the departments of Landes, where Saint-Esprit was located, and in

The Napoleonic Synthesis

51

Basses Pyrénées were described as owning property. In Bordeaux this economic diversification was accompanied by integration of Jewish youth within the public school system. By 1 8 1 0 it was noted that many Jews attended local schools and a few went to lycées. In the less affluent Jewish community of Saint-Esprit, however, Jews neglected their children's education to initiate them early into business pursuits. A few wealthy families did instruct their daughters in skills that would enhance their feminine charm, such as music, dancing, and embroidery. Outside of Alsace Jewish children gradually moved into the public schools, with the more prosperous Jews preferring to hire private tutors. In the department of Moselle, for example, in 1 8 1 1 there were thirty Jewish children in public school in Thionville (with a total Jewish population of 306), thirty-two in Sarrelouis (Jewish population of 2.21) and ninety in Metz (Jewish population of 2,186); in the department of Vaucluse in the same year forty-eight Jewish children (from a total Jewish population of 647) attended public schools. In addition, despite the popular impression that Jews shirked army service more assiduously than did their fellow citizens, young Jewish men appear to have served in Napoleon's army in numbers consistent with their representation in the total population.26 It would be foolish to expect any significant measure of acculturation and social integration to have occurred in less than a generation. The first steps toward acquisition of secular culture and entry into French institutions that were taken between 1789 and 1 8 1 5 merely point toward a phenomenon that would become more pervasive, indeed dominant, throughout the nineteenth century. Napoleon's Jewish program laid the ideological and institutional foundation for the project of assimilation that would occupy French Jewry, one might argue, until World War II. The project of assimilation adopted by the leadership of French Jewry (as well as by other western Jews) accepted the fact that emancipation demanded the Jews' adaptation to the culture of the larger society and their willingness to find a place within its institutions. Although, as the Jews understood it, the project of assimilation did not necessitate the renunciation of Jewish identity, it did require its transformation and limitation, in theory at least, to membership in a religious confession. Religious and national civic loyalties complemented each other in modern Jewish identity. Indeed, the leadership of an emancipated French Jewry denied the possibility of conflict between religious and civic obligations, and hence between the various components of the French Jew's identity. The doctrinal decisions of the Sanhédrin were the first comprehensive statement by Jewish

S2-

The Napoleonic Synthesis

leaders of the project of assimilation. By declaring the primacy of civil law and restricting Jewish law to matters of religious ritual, the Sanhedrin proclaimed a new era in which Jews accepted civil law as a value rather than merely as an unavoidable reality. While the Sanhedrin expressed an emancipationist ideology, the consistorial system that reorganized the Jewish community provided an institutional agency to achieve its leaders' goals. From their inception, the consistories preached the need for regeneration. In practice regeneration came to mean the inculcation of civic rectitude and order, the promotion of French and secular learning in general, the encouragement of "useful professions" among Jewish youth, and the adaptation of Jewish ritual practice to the aesthetic standards of the French bourgeoisie. By involving the state in the selection of the notables and the consistorial leadership, Napoleon devised an administrative structure that favored and enhanced the power of those most sympathetic to the project of regeneration. The location of the Central Consistory, the site of consistorial power, in Paris also helped to disseminate into the provinces the advanced ideas of the cosmopolitan capital, where assimilationist tendencies and alienation from traditional Judaism were prominent among the Jewish elite. The consistorial system thus conferred the mantle of communal leadership upon a secular, progressive, Jewishly uneducated lay elite. Finally, the establishment of the consistories integrated the former members of the diverse Jewish "nations" resident on French soil into a single institutional entity that came to be recognized and define itself as French Jewry. Many Frenchmen who had supported the emancipation of the Jews regarded their Jewish fellow citizens with disappointment during Napoleon's reign because of their failure to regenerate themselves almost instantly. Some public officials in the northeast even commented explicitly that the Jews still kept themselves apart from other French citizens. Yet these critics of Jewish behavior witnessed the beginnings, however hesitant, of the powerful social process of assimilation that would gradually transform the descendants of Yiddish-speaking village peddlers into comfortable members of the urban French bourgeoisie. It is to that complex process of social change, and the different contexts in which it occurred, that we now turn.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Acculturation and Mobility

D

uring the course of the nineteenth century French Jews gradually acculturated to the lifestyle and values of the French bourgeoisie. Although the first steps toward change were hesitant, by the end of the July Monarchy in 1848 many Jews living in France were French-speaking and were eager to prepare their children for integration into French society. Yiddish, however, remained vital in the Alsatian countryside. Taking advantage of the economic opportunities available in an expanding capitalist economy, Jews mobilized their commercial skills and moved in large numbers to Paris and other cities that seemed more likely than their home towns and villages to offer the most favorable economic prospects for the future. Geographic and social mobility, as well as the elimination of Jewish communal autonomy, eroded the bases of traditional Jewish practice. Like most Jews living in modern Western societies, the Jews of France gradually abandoned those aspects of Jewish observance, such as the 53

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Acculturation and Mobility

dietary restrictions of kashrut and the requirement of daily prayer, that demanded time and interfered with social interactions with Gentiles. The articulate bourgeois spokesmen of French Jewry, whether lay leaders of the consistories or intellectuals writing for a Jewish press that became well established in the 1840s, pressed for aesthetic changes in public Jewish ritual that would reflect their own sense of self as members of the French bourgeoisie. They also promoted a communal self-definition that emphasized the harmony of French and Jewish values. The Jews of modern France are traditionally depicted in Jewish historiography as fully assimilated. Their assimilation is presumed to reflect the substitution of a French identity for a Jewish one, or perhaps the exchange of a vibrant Judaism for an attenuated one. Yet, recent scholarship shows that such a simplistic view does not do justice to the complex processes of transformation of Jewish identity occurring in the modern period. Indeed, a number of historians suggest that the blunt term "assimilation" obscures the varieties of behavior and the nuances of identity that characterize modern Jewry. The term "assimilation" does not allow for the many factors that together forge an individual's identity, for different social contexts in which one or another aspect of identity is expressed, or for the coexistence of the desire for full civic integration with the retention of what we might today call ethnic particularism.1 Indeed, Jews in the modern world bear multiple identities as members of a minority group and participants in civic culture. In France Jews struggled to find appropriate ways to maintain and legitimate their group specificity even as they expressed their wholehearted devotion to France and to the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution. Moreover, they were not simply passive absorbers of bourgeois French culture; they also participated in its shaping. As a sociological process, assimilation involves several different stages: acquisition of such basic markers of the larger society as language and dress, as well as the more amorphous category of "values"; integration of minority group members into the institutions of the majority, with the attendant weakening of minority institutions; and, finally, biological merger of the minority with the majority through intermarriage. For assimilation to proceed to its last stage, two mutually reinforcing factors must both be present—the desire of the minority to become like and to join the majority, and the receptivity of the majority to the entry of minority group members in its midst. Without openness on the part of the larger society, it is possible for a minority to be fully acculturated and yet remain poorly integrated.2

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55

Rabbi Zadoc Kahn, Grand Rabbi of Paris and later of France (1839-1905)

Nineteenth-century France offered Jews, along with its other citizens, numerous economic and political opportunities. French commerce and industry expanded, spurred by the development of the railroad in the late 1830s and 1840s. Despite the entrenchment of local notables, the French educational system provided modest possibilities for mobility even to children of the petite bourgeoisie and the better-off artisans and peasants. Although France did not achieve political stability in the century that followed the Revolution, its Jewish citizens enjoyed the protection of the law under all of the French regimes—the Bourbon Restoration, the Orleanist July Monarchy, the Republic established by the Revolution of 1848, the Second Empire, and the Third Republic. Jewish equality was finally achieved in full during the July Monarchy. In 1 8 3 1 the government decided to pay the salaries of Jewish religious functionaries as it did Catholic priests and Protestant pastors. Fifteen years later it abolished the special oath, the more fudaico, that Jews had been

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Acculturation and Mobility

forced to swear in the courtroom. Only the failure to nationalize the debts of the Jewish communities of the ancien régime remained. To be sure, the anti-Jewish riots that erupted in dozens of Jewish communities in Alsace in the early days of the Revolution of 1848 evoked concern among French Jews, but they saw antisemitic activity as an atavism, incongruous with France's commitment to their legal equality. Indeed, in comparison with contemporary European states and societies, French governments and society were remarkably open to Jews, even though Jewishness continued to confer a social stigma. Because the civic equality of Jews seemed to be supported, or at least tolerated, by all political trends, French Jews could be found across the political spectrum, although they were least attracted to the political right because of the privileged position it accorded the Roman Catholic church and because of its lack of enthusiasm for Jewish emancipation. By the 1860s and 1870s, however, Jews were increasingly drawn to republicanism, which they saw as most consonant with their understanding of Jewish values. As a result of their link to the government as an administrative institution, however, the consistories maintained a stance of political neutrality.3 In the three generations following the Revolution and its declaration of emancipation, as a result of high fertility and some immigration from central Europe, France's Jewish population more than doubled, growing to ninety-six thousand in 18 61. Most of the Jews of France adopted French language and dress and mimicked the manners of the French bourgeoisie. A small stratum of Jewish individuals participated actively, and even achieved prominence, in the educational, political, and some economic institutions of French life. Unlike the situation in much of Europe until the last third of the nineteenth century, French Jewish men were able to study in the universities, to pursue careers in law, and to receive appointments as faculty members, although discrimination never entirely disappeared. Jewish scholars of Semitics, some of German origin, enjoyed illustrious careers in the French academy. By the 1840s Jews held public office on the national as well as the local level. Three Jews, among them the lawyer and consistorial activist Adolphe Crémieux, even served as ministers in the first government established after the Revolution of 1848. A handful of Jewish bankers and entrepreneurs, with the Rothschilds and the Péreires merely the best known, played an active role on the Paris bourse and in the building of the French railroad system. At least ten wealthy Paris Jews were admitted to the exclusive Cercle de la Rue de Grammont, a well-connected association of power-

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fui businessmen. Yet, wealthy Jews at mid-century owed their prosperity to their current business interests; they were far less likely than nonJews to be counted among proprietors and rentiers, whose fortunes were of long standing. Further, they were not to be found in the ranks of the industrial bourgeoisie. Although they were not yet thoroughly integrated politically, Jews joined political clubs and civic associations; a number of young Jewish intellectuals were prominent in the Saint-Simonian movement. And, though she participated in a less than respectable social milieu, the Jewish actress Rachel (Elisa Félix, 1 8 2 1 - 1 8 5 8 ) was celebrated for her dramatic achievements as an interpreter of the French classics at the Comédie Française.4 However, French Jews were not fully integrated into French society and sought neither the disappearance of their own institutions nor their biological merger with the French population. With the cooperation of the French state, they maintained a network of communal institutions in the system of consistories that both promoted acculturation and reinforced Jewish feelings of solidarity. Although the consistories were defined as religious institutions and were in theory voluntary, their purview extended beyond the narrowly religious. Since they held a monopoly on public Jewish ritual, adherence was necessary for all who sought the marking of rites of passage in any Jewish way whatsoever. The vast majority of Jews in nineteenth-century France chose to be married and buried as Jews as well as to bring their children into the world as Jews. As part of their mandate to improve the social behavior and conditions of the Jewish masses, the consistories provided charitable assistance through a variety of philanthropic societies under their aegis, developed a network of modern Jewish primary schools, and offered supplementary Jewish education as Jewish children began attending public schools in large numbers. They also assumed responsibility for defending Judaism as well as individual Jews who suffered discrimination. Finally, consistorial institutions provided venues for sociability and possibilities for leadership that encouraged group solidarity. Despite the conflicts that emerged within the consistories around issues of lay vs. rabbinic control and reform of synagogue services, it is clear that French Jews supported the existence of specifically Jewish institutions. Moreover, contemporary evidence indicates that few French Jews in the nineteenth century converted to Christianity. Although there were a number of spectacular conversions to Catholicism, including both the son and son-in-law of Chief Rabbi Simon Deutz and a son of the Ratisbonne banking family of Strasbourg during the Restoration (and his brother more than a decade later),

5»

Acculturation and Mobility

there was no steady attrition through conversion. Indeed, Christian missionaries in France confessed disappointment in their efforts to convert the Jews. The number of intermarriages, although higher than the number of conversions, remained statistically insignificant, especially in the major Jewish population center, the northeastern provinces. Even among the Jewish bourgeoisie in Paris during the Second Empire, the rate remained under 14 percent.5 Most of the socioeconomic changes in the lives of French Jews were related only indirectly to the revolutionary act of emancipation. The freedom of mobility that citizenship offered the Jews—restored to them after Napoleon's restrictive decree of 1808 was allowed to lapse in 1 8 1 8 — permitted them to enhance their economic possibilities by moving from stagnant villages and small towns to the areas of economic expansion, the cities. Although urbanization characterized the French population as a whole in the nineteenth century, its pace was faster and its extent greater among the Jews. Thus, at mid-century more than 45 percent of French Jews lived in the urban capitals of districts, compared to about 18 percent of the total French population. Paris, which had a tiny Jewish population in 1789, became by far the largest Jewish community in France, home to more than one-quarter of French Jewry with a Jewish population of twenty-five thousand in 18 61. 6 In the northeastern provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, where small town and village Jewish communities had been the norm during the ancien régime, new Jewish communities in the cities of Strasbourg and Mulhouse joined the older communities of Metz and Nancy as urban centers of Jewish life. Alsace and Lorraine were also the source of growth of most of France's urban Jewish communities beyond the region. In 1872, for example, 48 percent of Jewish men and 3 6 percent of Jewish women living in Paris had been born in the two northeastern provinces.7 Migrants from AlsaceLorraine similarly spurred development of new communities like Lille and Dijon. By 1868 the descendants of Jews who had lived in Alsace during the ancien régime were dispersed in no fewer than forty-two of France's ninety departments.8 Migrants differed in socioeconomic status from their stationary fellow Jews. 9 Spurred by the general overpopulation of Alsatian villages, migrants and their fathers were more than twice as likely than nonmigrants to be recruited from the highest socioeconomic strata of prosperous merchants and far less likely to be located at the bottom of the Jewish socioeconomic scale, plying their wares in the traditional Jewish street trades. The differences between the mobile and the stationary sug-

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gest that the combination of success in the village or small-town economy and high aspirations stimulated migration. Or, upward social mobility preceded migration for the majority of Jews on the move. While there were poor Jewish migrants, most migrants came from among the elite in the countryside and were attuned to new economic possibilities. Jewish migrants in France differed substantially from their fellow French travelers. Unlike the latter, Jews were not peasants who had been forced from the land. Many left towns of substantial size. Moreover, even those who lived in rural communes had some experience with the workings of a commercial economy. When they reached their final destination, Jewish migrants found work in the commercial sectors of the urban economy, often becoming small shopkeepers and commercial employees, and frequently artisans. Gentile migrants also swelled the ranks of the urban working classes. Like other internal migrants in France, Jews tended to migrate in family groups. Women were equally represented with men, and siblings often migrated together. Family resources and commercial experience enabled Jewish migrants to adjust relatively easily to their new homes, though it often took a generation of hard work to acquire even a petty bourgeois income. 10 Migration speeded the process of acculturation. Jews who moved from village or small town to city experienced some social disruption and were freed from the constraints of social disapproval that prevailed in small communities. The city permitted a measure of social anonymity to its new inhabitants. Apparently more adventuresome than those who stayed put, migrants may also have been predisposed to experiment in matters of social, cultural, and religious behavior as well as geographic mobility. When they returned to their old home to visit relatives and friends left behind, migrants served as examples of successful acculturation. In the second half of the century the French Jewish storytellers Daniel Stauben (pen name of Auguste Widal) and Léon Cahun, both originally from Alsace, pointed to the deleterious impact of migration to the large city upon traditional patterns of behavior. Cahun's hero Anselme, the village schoolteacher, gives up regular attendance at the synagogue when he settles with his family in Paris, though he continues to celebrate Jewish festivals and the anniversary of his parents' deaths. 11 In a similar vein, Stauben expressed his longing to immerse himself once more "in this simple life, the last vestige of a civilization which is disappearing. In Paris . . . for us transplanted Alsatian Jews, the customs of our ancestors, alas, are too quickly reduced to memories." 1 2 While both Stauben and Cahun described a migration to Paris and were writing in

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a nostalgic mood, the effect of moving to such cities as Mulhouse or Lille, though less pronounced, was a similar one. The urban/village distinction in religious practice cannot be entirely explained by the phenomenon of migration, but the newness and relative anonymity of the urban settlements helped undermine traditional custom. Along with their migration and urbanization, French Jews generally experienced a gradual embourgeoisement that accompanied the transformation of their economic patterns. To be sure, this economic transformation bore little resemblance to the vision expounded by supporters of Jewish emancipation during the revolutionary era. They had projected a "normalization" and "productivization" of Jewish economic activity that would change peddlers and old-clothes dealers into peasants and craftsmen. However, Jews felt far more comfortable in the expanding commercial sector, to which they had been confined in Europe for more than a millennium, than in the declining agricultural sector, of which they had no experience. As they relocated in cities and as the village economy declined in Alsace, particularly after mid-century, Jews abandoned peddling, petty brokerage, and dealing in used goods for settled shopkeeping and commercial employment. In Lyon, for example, the percentage of peddlers among the Jews declined from three-quarters in 1 8 1 0 to about one-half in 1 8 3 0 to just 13 percent in i860. In Strasbourg at mid-century, 1 1 percent of Jewish household heads were peddlers or street traders while more than 50 percent practiced settled forms of commerce. Finally, in 1 8 7 2 in Paris 44 percent of economically active Jews supported themselves in independent commerce (exclusive of peddling) or commercial employment while only 6 percent remained peddlers. In the same year in Marseille as well, 4Z percent of Jews were in commerce, and only 6 percent were unskilled workers. 13 Jews achieved upward mobility by staying within the commercial sector rather than by leaving it. Young Jewish men also entered artisan trades in growing numbers, especially in the cities, but artisanry was never as attractive as commercial activity. Most Jewish artisans seem to have used artisanry as a stepping stone to commerce. Thus, the percentage of artisans among the Jewish population of Paris was about 30 percent for the period 1 8 0 9 - 1 8 4 0 but declined to 25 percent by 1872, despite a heavy influx of immigrants from the east. 14 Fewer than half of the Jewish artisans living in Strasbourg in 1866, who were traceable from the census of 1846, remained in artisan trades; almost half moved into stable commercial activity. In the small towns and villages of Alsace artisanry never attracted more

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than a handful of Jews. In the three Alsatian communities whose manuscript censuses I studied—Bischheim, Niederroedern, and Itterswiller— artisanry grew from a mere z percent of the economically active Jewish population in 1846 to an unimpressive 6 percent in 1866. 1 S Artisanry made economic sense to Jews only in urban environments. Although most Jews entered the ranks of the bourgeoisie through commerce on a modest level, the most successful made their fortunes in banking and industrial entrepreneurship. The family of Captain Alfred Dreyfus provides an example of the successful economic trajectory of ambitious and hard-working Jews. A dealer in secondhand goods and a small-scale moneylender, Dreyfus's grandfather Jacob had amassed sufficient capital by the mid-i830s to move from his native Alsatian village of Rixheim to the city of Mulhouse, where he and his only son Raphael were described as merchants. After Jacob's death, Raphael worked as a traveling commission agent for textile manufacturers and lent money at interest, while his wife Jeanette worked as a seamstress. After two decades of saving, Raphael succeeded in establishing his own thriving cotton mill and shared in the prosperity of the Protestant textile industry of the city. As the major center of Alsatian industry, Mulhouse offered three generations of the Dreyfus family a bustling market for the entrepreneurial skills they had honed in the countryside. Jeannette retired from business to the homemaking pursuits of the bourgeoisie, caring for her large family. As the Dreyfus business prospered, the family moved to more comfortable residences in ever more fashionable neighborhoods. Although the two oldest sons worked with their father in the family firm, Alfred and his brother Mathieu received an elite higher education that would prepare them for noncommercial careers. Their sisters were raised for, and entered into, advantageous marriages. 16 The Dreyfus family typifies the different and complementary roles of Jewish women and men who experienced embourgeoisement. Although census takers took no notice of the work of married women, it is likely that Jewish housewives, like their Gentile sisters, worked alongside their husbands in fledgling enterprises or supplemented the family income through sewing or caring for boarders before the family achieved bourgeois status. With embourgeoisement, men measured their success through their dedication to their business or profession while women were expected to retire from outside work in favor of managing a complex household with efficiency and thrift. Sharing the general bourgeois ideal of the mother as source of moral and religious values, French Jewish leaders encouraged women to transmit Judaism and its moral lessons

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to their children. They published prayerbooks in French and textbooks aimed at girls to prepare them for their future tasks as mothers and encouraged women to engage in charitable endeavors that helped needy women and children. 17 A popular French-language prayerbook published in 1848 makes clear the gendered assumptions about men and women's natures. In his prayer the husband acknowledged the need to temper his superiority as head of the household: "May I never forget that if strength and reason are the perquisite of my sex, hers is subject to weakness of body and feeling of soul; do not permit me, Lord, to be unjust toward her and to demand of her qualities that are in no way in her nature. . . . " This concept of female fragility reflects nineteenth-century western European bourgeois ideals of womanhood, adopted by acculturated French Jews. In her prayer the wife accepted her role of preparing a domestic haven for her husband: "Lord, you have given me a husband as the companion of my life, to guide my steps and to share my destiny. It is from him that I receive my subsistence; make me worthy, Lord, to soften his work by the evenness of my disposition . . . [and see to it that] I not fill with bitterness the nourishment that he earns for me and my children. . . ," 1 8 Although nineteenth-century Jewish men and women may have departed from these prescriptions, their religious endorsement legitimated them as social ideals. Paris was home to the vast majority of French Jewry's economic elite. It was in Paris that the great banking families—such as the Rothschilds, the Pereires, the Foulds—as well as prosperous wholesalers set up their businesses.19 And, as the center of French intellectual life, Paris attracted Jewish writers and scholars seeking brilliant careers. Although French Jews as a whole experienced noticeable upward mobility into the bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth century, the improvement in their economic condition was gradual. Despite a prominent Jewish plutocracy in Paris, even there most Jews only secured a stable position in the low and middling ranks of the bourgeoisie at the end of the century. A study of Paris Jewry from 1808 until 1840, based largely on notarial records and census documents, found that at the beginning of the century Jews lagged behind the general population in the number of bourgeois in their ranks, estimated at about 1 2 percent. In 1840 the percentage of Jewish bourgeois—about 1 7 percent—matched the proportion of bourgeois in the total urban population, but the vast majority of Paris Jews resembled their fellow Parisians, who comprised the popular classes. Yet by 1 8 5 1 Jews were somewhat less likely than

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Gentiles—14 percent in contrast with more than 22 percent—to be among the popular classes. And proportionally more liberal professionals filled their bourgeois ranks. 20 Other sources of information suggest that most Jews eked out a living with little economic cushion should misfortune strike. Like other Frenchmen, the vast majority of male Jews did not pay sufficient taxes to qualify for the franchise. In 1845 there were only 965 electors in all of France authorized to take part in consistorial elections. In Paris most Jews could not even afford to purchase a permanent grave, and most chose the simplest, and least expensive, wedding ceremony. Jewish charitable institutions throughout the country did not lack clients. In Alsace, the problem of wandering beggars and vagabondage persisted beyond mid-century, exacerbated by the erosion of the rural economy. In an 18 5 6 investigation of poverty in Alsace, Jews were found to have a greater proportion of indigent than either the Catholics or Protestants, and 20 percent of Paris Jews in 1 8 5 1 were considered indigent.21 Still, the possibility of achieving bourgeois status was within reach for most French Jews by 1870 as their commercial skills, careful saving, and willingness to invest in business and in secondary school education for their sons translated into increased prosperity and the adoption of a bourgeois lifestyle. The Jews of Paris, the vanguard of French Jewry, already in 1 8 7 2 were to be found primarily in occupations characteristic of the bourgeoisie, even if many lacked the financial means to be comfortable members of that social stratum. In that year two-thirds of Jewish men in Paris were merchants (32 percent), employees (17 percent), liberal professionals (8 percent), or proprietors and rentiers (10 percent).22 Acculturation and upward mobility should not be confused, however, with assimilation understood as "becoming like" French men and women. As the historian Shulamit Volkov has pointed out with regard to late nineteenth-century German Jewry, in economic and demographic terms acculturated Jews of Germany differed greatly from their fellow Germans. 23 By the beginning of the Third Republic French Jews, too, displayed characteristics that set them apart from other French citizens. They were heavily urban, overwhelmingly located in the commercial sector of the economy rather than in agriculture or industry, and somewhat more predisposed than their neighbors to small families. They were also beginning to play an active role in the cultural life of Paris and in the liberal professions such as law and medicine. Although the socioeconomic transformation of French Jewry was primarily a product of large social trends common to France and other

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European countries rather than of political emancipation, the specific context of the French social and political scene affected the nature of Jewish identity and the shape that Judaism assumed in France. The early acquisition of emancipation as well as the governmentally supervised, centralized consistorial structure facilitated acculturation and limited expressions of dissent whether in the form of extreme orthodoxy or radical religious reform. Although French Jews spoke in many voices, consistorial Judaism developed a consensus about appropriate manifestations of Judaism that defined the boundaries of the French Jewish community. Because the acculturation of the Jews in France occurred after emancipation had been secured, and because discrimination against Jews was comparatively minor, French Jews, unlike their cousins across the Rhine, did not need to convert to advance their careers. The handful of early apostasies among the Jewish elite seem to have been sincere religious conversions, motivated perhaps by a perception of the strong tie of French culture and history with the Roman Catholic church and a sense of dissonance between their own status and that of the traditional Jewish masses. Indeed, a high proportion of the prominent converts joined religious orders.24 Those young Jews who did find their careers blocked by discrimination, particularly once the Falloux law of 1850 strengthened Catholic influence in public education, were more likely to turn to French courts, the press, or the consistory system to protest the violation of the French ideals which they had themselves embraced than to convert. Thus, Isidore Cahen, who was denied a position as a lycée teacher of philosophy in 1849 because of Catholic opposition, dedicated himself to a career as an activist journalist, succeeding his father as editor of the major Jewish reformist weekly, the Archives israélites, and later becoming one of the founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Although Jewish victims of discrimination rarely found redress for their situation, the sense of belonging to a nation based upon law fueled the self-definition of those French Jews who spoke publicly for the community or have left their mark in archival documents. In 1836, for example, the Strasbourg Jewish journal La Régénération declared in its first issue that French Jews were "more happy" than their fellow Jews in Germany, who were constantly being told that they must become worthy of emancipation, while French Jews had their citizenship by right.25 Similarly, in 1845 ^ e Univers israélite, the organ of traditionalist French Jews, celebrated France's commitment to equal citizenship for all its Jews with the comment, "[The] question of worthiness is good fortune for

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the . . . philosophers of Germany, who refuse the sun and liberty to Jews on the eternal pretext: 'You are not yet worthy.'" 2é French Jews, on the other hand, identified with the central government, which had granted them citizenship and whose representatives on the local level tended to support Jewish claims to equal treatment under law. Emancipation, thus, was central to the emergence of a French Jewish identity; it was also fundamental to the creation of a sense of a unified French Jewish community. Indeed, from the most radical reformers, such as Olry Terquem, originally of Metz and later a resident of Paris, to the most fervent proponents of traditional Judaism, such as Grand Rabbi Salomon Klein of Colmar, there existed a broad consensus as to the benefits of emancipation and the need to participate in French civic life. How Jews could best prepare themselves for full participation in French society and what forms of public expressions of Judaism were most consonant with acculturation to the French bourgeoisie were issues that for decades engaged the urban Jewish elites, whether businessmen, professionals, or intellectuals, who led the consistories and contributed to public debate in periodicals and pamphlets. With the power of the government behind them, the acculturated lay leaders of the consistories set the agenda for the French Jewish community. Yet, the fact that the consistories wielded a monopoly on all expression of Judaism in France necessitated sensitivity to the opinion of the more traditional Jews, who remained the majority in Alsace-Lorraine, if social order were to be maintained. Even with the government's support, consistorial leaders could not be too far in advance of their constituency. In embracing emancipation, consistorial leaders as well as Jewish activists writing in the French Jewish press agreed on the basic outlines of a program of regeneration that was aimed at stereotyped traditional Ashkenazi Jews. 27 Such Jews would, of course, have to abandon "that Hebraic-German jargon which offends the ears of every well-reared person" 28 and acquire the French language and basic elements of secular French culture. Ideally, they would exchange their traditional economic role of peddling and petty brokerage for artisanry or agriculture. Finally, they would abandon, or at least modify, those religious customs that provoked Gentile criticism of Jewish "superstitions" and made acculturated, modern Jews uncomfortable. This last goal, based on subjective measures of discomfort, was, needless to say, the source of much internal communal debate. The emancipationist ideology of the leaders of French Jewry certainly promoted acculturation and integration, but not the final stages of

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assimilation. Although Jewish leaders preferred the new, presumably neutral, term "Israélite" to the older, often pejorative term "Juif," they presumed the consonance of Jewish identity and survival with French citizenship and allegiance. As the editor of La Régénération wrote in 1836, "The Israelite of France wants only to be an Israelite and Frenchman; he is not obliged to renounce his personality to be French to the fullest extent."29 Precisely what the content of modern French Jewish identity was, is open to question. Following in the wake of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin, the official spokesmen of French Jewry and many individual Jews as well generally ascribed a purely confessional basis to their distinctiveness. At other times, however, the same individuals acknowledged a sense of Jewish memory and shared fate and the pride of a still embattled international minority group.30 The consistorial leaders used their power and influence effectively to promote a program of regeneration among French Jewry. Although they did not attain all their goals, they succeeded in transforming the nature of education among French Jewish youth and in instituting significant changes in the public expression of Judaism in France. In establishing modern Jewish primary schools and in implementing moderate reforms in public Jewish ritual, they hastened the acculturation of French Jews but also cushioned the impact of the encounter with non-Jewish culture. Like other followers of the Enlightenment, Jewish proponents of acculturation and civic integration placed great faith in the ability of schools to influence youth. The first modern Jewish boys' school was opened in Paris in 1819. "Everything is flexible, is supple in the child," declared a Strasbourg Jewish physician in a school ceremony in 182.4.31 By acquainting Jewish children with secular culture, modern schooling would inculcate patriotism and morality along with the French language and the skills necessary for a modern society. Yet, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Jewish leaders recognized that most Jews would not follow the advice tendered by Berr Isaac Berr in 1791 to send their children to public schools, for such schools were seen, quite accurately, as suffused with Christianity rather than as religiously neutral. Consistorial leaders, therefore, assumed responsibility for establishing modern Jewish primary schools designed to take the place of the traditional heder. The latter, a private Jewish one-room school, taught boys the rudiments of Hebrew as well as reading and interpretation of the biblical text (in Yiddish) and introduced them to the study of the Talmud, the vast corpus of rabbinic law and lore, and other rabbinic texts that were the basis of advanced Jewish learning in the yeshivas. As the Central Con-

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sistory wrote to the Strasbourg consistory in 1 8 1 9 , it saw the establishment of modern Jewish schools as "the only and unique way to bring about the moral amelioration of those under our administration." 32 Between 1 8 1 7 and 1 8 2 1 about a dozen modern Jewish primary schools were established in Jewish population centers, with the most important located in Paris, Metz, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg.33 Although schools for girls were founded later than those for boys, the education of girls was considered an important component of the general moral improvement of the Jewish population, for mothers were deemed responsible for the moral development of their children. Girls' education also signaled the adaptation of French Judaism to Western standards. In the 1820s the largest of the consistories, the consistory of the Lower Rhine, with its seat in Strasbourg, embarked upon an ambitious project of introducing modern schools in every commune with a Jewish population of at least two hundred persons. The Central Consistory pressed the consistory of the Upper Rhine to follow suit, pointing out the civic and political benefits of modern schools, "one of whose salutary effects would be to prove to the authorities and to your fellow citizens that you are making the greatest efforts to tear away the Jewish youth of your district from idleness and ignorance and to inspire them at an early age with the sentiment of their duty toward God, toward the fatherland, and toward society." 34 Most of the students in the new schools were the children of the poor, who paid no tuition, while wealthier Jews preferred to hire private tutors for their children. The curriculum of the modern Jewish primary schools undermined the assumptions of traditional Jewish education. Although the schools combined general and Jewish studies, they subordinated the latter to the former. Moreover, they taught Judaism in a new way, with consistorially approved textbooks and catechisms. Based on Catholic models of religious education designed to convey moral lessons, the books aimed to imbue their students with an identity that synthesized French and Jewish values. No book could be used without consistorial authorization. Despite considerable resistance to modern schools from the traditional masses of Jews in Alsace, the consistories succeeded in substituting their schools for traditional Jewish educational institutions because the consistories had available powerful sanctions. The proposal to establish modern Jewish schools had originated in 1 8 1 2 with the Minister of Education and Religious Affairs. The government approved their founding and supervision by the consistories. In the Lower Rhine, for example, the rector of the academy of Strasbourg was closely involved

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with the Strasbourg consistory's Cantonal Committee of Schools of the Hebrew Faith in its supervision of the Jewish primary schools. As the sole governmentally recognized Jewish institution regularly in touch with the Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, the consistories were able to issue decrees that authorized only qualified teachers and strengthened the authority of modern schools. To establish his qualifications and receive a teaching license, a traditional melamed had to pass a proficiency examination in French or German. Otherwise, his school would be deemed a Talmud school, inappropriate for primary instruction. Most importantly, families receiving assistance from a consistorial philanthropic association had to enroll their children in an authorized primary school, not a Talmud school. A certificate attesting to completion of the course of study at an authorized primary school was necessary for subsequent admission to more advanced Talmudic schools.35 Although what the consistories called "clandestine schools," that is, traditional hadarim, survived into the 1830s, by mid-century modern Jewish primary schools had virtually replaced traditional Jewish education, which was relegated at best to supplementary classes. In some cities, notably Paris and Mulhouse, large numbers of Jewish children attended confessionally mixed public schools and received instruction in Judaism, if they so chose, from a Jewish chaplain who came to the school. The Guizot law of 1833, which mandated universal, though neither compulsory nor free, public education, spurred the development of Jewish primary schools.36 According to the law's provisions, local governments were expected to provide subsidies for salaries and buildings for schools of each religious denomination. The editor of La Régénération went so far as to hail the law in 1836 as "the dawn of a new life; one sees Jewish schools rising up in many places. " 3 7 Although Jewish schools in major cities did receive subsidies from their municipal councils—indeed, some had even before 1833—in many eligible communities in the two provinces of Alsace, where the concentration of Jews was greatest in France, the local councils simply refused to provide their financial blessing to what they viewed as a pernicious form of Jewish separatism.38 Towns in the Upper Rhine proved particularly recalcitrant in assisting Jewish schools. Occasionally the central government even intervened to pressure appropriate governmental bodies to accede to Jewish requests for assistance in funding or staffing their schools. By 1854, out of 39 communes in the Lower Rhine with sufficient Jewish population to be

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eligible for a public school (école communale), 3 5 had some type of Jewish primary school, of which 28 were publicly subsidized. In 1 8 5 1 in the Upper Rhine, on the other hand, of 34 eligible communes, 29 had a Jewish primary school, but only 4 had the status of école communale,39 The network of modern Jewish primary schools had a major impact on the identity formation of young Jews in the years between 1840 and 1870, especially in Alsace. The local Jewish schoolmaster became a model of acculturation for his pupils. Though his knowledge of Hebrew and Judaism was often inadequate, since the French normal schools that future teachers attended offered no Judaic instruction until the late 1850s, he did succeed in offering instruction in French. Indeed, the schools provided the only French-speaking environment for village and small-town Jews in Alsace. Graduates of Jewish primary school were taught to synthesize their religious, moral, and civic duties. The approved textbooks called upon young Jews to display kindness, honesty, and charity toward their neighbors and "to unite our interests and our destiny to the common destiny and the general interests of the land in which we live." Reaffirming the decisions of the Napoleonic Sanhédrin, they pointed out that during their army service Jewish youth could dispense with those religious practices that conflicted with their military obligations.40 At the same time, the curriculum presented a different message, that of Jewish uniqueness and distinctiveness. The textbooks focused upon the mission of the Jews as a model for humanity and highlighted the exemplary nature of historic Jewish figures.41 The teaching of the responsibilities of "chosenness," combined with lessons about admirable Jews, seems to have stimulated ethnic pride. As Daniel Stauben, who grew up in Alsace, commented of the impact of one popular school reader, Les Matinées du samedi, upon Jewish youth: "From i t . . . there crept into the minds of its young readers a double sentiment—for which the author must be thanked—a proper pride in race and a great love of the fatherland." 42 When Jewish youth received their introduction to general culture in a Jewish social context, the potentially traumatic effect of secular learning upon their Jewish identity seems to have diminished. At least in Alsace, by the 1850s, when increasing numbers of Jews sent their sons to lycées and collèges, secondary education also took place within an environment that did not demand the renunciation of Jewish religious observance. Both in Strasbourg and Colmar the lycées provided their Jewish students with a Jewish chaplain who supervised daily prayer

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and offered religious instruction; kosher food was available under the auspices of a Jewish restaurateur. Both major Jewish newspapers in France, the reformist Archives israélites and the conservative Univers israélite, praised the facilities for making it possible for children of even the most Orthodox families to "participate in a national education which sooner or later must vanquish the prejudices which can still exist against us." 43 The provision of a French secondary education for their sons not only displayed the eagerness of French Jews—including, incidentally, the most vociferous leader of French Orthodoxy, Grand Rabbi Salomon Klein of Colmar 44 —to introduce their sons to high French culture. It also offered the possibility of social integration in class and later as lycée graduates assumed positions in the grandes écoles in Paris, the professions, and the civil service. The final aspect of the consistorial educational policy consisted of vocational schools that offered the sons (and in Paris the daughters) of the Jewish poor an alternative to the traditional petty commerce of their parents. Established at approximately the same time as the modern Jewish primary schools, the vocational schools of Paris, Strasbourg, and Mulhouse trained a small number of Jewish youth in artisanal skills.45 Although their modest resources limited their practical impact, the schools served a useful philanthropic and political purpose. Unlike the French arts and crafts schools, which trained an elite of skilled workers and foremen, vocational schools provided apprenticeships, as well as religious instruction, to the neediest of French Jewish youth who had completed an authorized primary school. Additionally, the leaders of French Jewry recognized the public relations benefits provided by the vocational schools. The Mulhouse school, for example, described itself in an annual public ceremony in 1858 as "an arm against all attacks, a consecration of our rights and liberties in society" and in 1859 as an institution that "had silenced many prejudices." 46 The effectiveness of the consistorial elite's educational program for French Jewry can be assessed in part by the response of traditional Jews to the new situation. Although traditionalists accepted the value of secular education, by the 1840s they were complaining publicly about the inadequacy of religious instruction in the consistorially supported schools. To enhance the Jewish education available in the primary and secondary schools, some traditional Jews, again especially in Alsace, established a bet midrash (institution for traditional Jewish learning) or, more commonly, supplementary evening classes.47 For the most part, however, these efforts were unsuccessful; certainly they did not reverse

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the new educational priorities. Even the bet midrash founded and promoted by Grand Rabbi Salomon Klein foundered under attacks from local lay consistorial notables and from the Central Consistory. The financial and governmental power of the consistories, which were committed to modern education, prevailed. Moreover, parents doubtless came to realize, first in urban centers and then in smaller communities, that modern education offered possibilities for economic advancement and rise in status that could not be matched by traditional schools, which, after all, prepared students specifically only for the modest positions of schoolteacher and rabbi. Supplementary Jewish education, limited in hours and serving students already subject to a full day of classes, could not compete with the state-endorsed authority of an official school. Not surprisingly, French Jews' level of Jewish knowledge declined. In the course of the nineteenth century the traditionally educated elite became limited to the professional rabbinate and a handful of university professors of Semitics. Just as the consistorial leadership succeeded in speeding up the acceptance of modern education and in shaping its content, so, too, did it refashion the public expression of Judaism in France to accommodate to its own modern sensibilities. In this area, however, the centralized consistorial system served to limit the influence of radical reformers.48 Since the consistories exercised a monopoly on Jewish religious services, banning even private gatherings for the purpose of prayer, reformers had to make their ideas acceptable to the consistorial elite. And because that elite wanted French Jewry to attract as little unfavorable governmental attention as possible, it had to take into account the feelings of the Jewish masses of the northeastern provinces in order to maintain a semblance of public order within the nation's Jewish communities. The transformation that the consistorial leadership effected in French Judaism in the course of the nineteenth century was aesthetic rather than ideological in nature. Religious services became more orderly and dignified, but the basic structure of the prayers remained unchanged. As was the case in Germany, the impulse for religious reform originated with those Jews who were at least partly acculturated to elite Western culture and heavily influenced by Enlightenment rationalism but did not consider conversion to Christianity as a viable option. In France the cities of Metz and later Paris were home to the first advocates of religious reform. German reform efforts also influenced the specific proposals of French proponents of change. Unlike their fellow Jews across the Rhine, however, French reformers had no need to formulate their policies as a

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strategy to secure civic equality. The emancipation of French Jewry was not seriously challenged after the downfall of the Napoleonic empire and after the Napoleonic Sanhedrin had publicly highlighted the patriotism of French Jews as well as the flexibility of Jewish law when in conflict with civic obligations. This difference enabled French reformers to sidestep such ideologically charged issues as the authority of halakha or the compatibility of the traditional Jewish messianic belief with modern citizenship. Prayers calling for the restoration of Jews to Palestine, for example, were not excised from the liturgy. Consistorial leaders sought a form of Judaism that would feel comfortable to bourgeois French Jews and that would ensure the survival of France's Jewish community. In fact, they argued that reforms were necessary to attract educated Jewish youth, whose growing indifference to Jewish religious practice and institutions they increasingly lamented from the 1840s on. Concerned with the public presentation of Judaism, they addressed their energy primarily to issues of comportment that departed from accepted bourgeois standards of behavior or that had no direct counterpart in Christian practice. Thus, the consistories called for decorum in public prayer. They banned the custom of holding a public auction for synagogue honors, such as being called to the Torah during its public reading, with the honor going to the highest bidder. Through decrees, issued primarily in the 1840s and 1850s, they imposed order upon funeral processions and regulated the circumcision ceremony to eliminate the practice of mezizah, the sucking of blood, that violated accepted canons of hygiene. They suggested the introduction of weekly sermons to teach morality and social responsibility. Consistorial circles, however, rejected many radical proposals, such as shifting the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday, that were proposed over the course of some twenty years in the first half of the nineteenth century, primarily by the mathematician Olry Terquem. Publishing his views under the pseudonym Tsarfati (Hebrew for Frenchman) in pamphlets and later in the Jewish press, Terquem stimulated debate but did not have a perceptible impact on the evolution of Judaism in France.49 In their modernization of Judaism the consistorial elite was influenced by the practices of the Catholic church in France. Thus, as we have noted, they introduced catechisms into the Jewish primary school as the preferred method to teach the tenets of Judaism. Unlike reformers in Germany, they made no effort to eliminate Hebrew from public prayer; the use of Hebrew in prayer services paralleled the Latin of the Mass. When they innovated in the area of public ritual, they borrowed from the larger

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environment, suggesting the introduction of a ceremony for all newborns to supplement the male infant's ritual circumcision and a religious initiation rite for all adolescents, reminiscent of Catholic confirmation, to supplement the traditional ceremony of the male youth's bar mitzvah. These two innovations suggest a sensitivity on the part of acculturated spokesmen for French Jewry to the position of women in traditional Judaism. Eager to refute charges that the subordinate status of women in the synagogue demonstrated that Jews remained "Orientals," they sought to provide a greater role for women in the public sphere of Judaism. In 1 8 3 1 , for example, a commission of prominent laymen, established by the Strasbourg consistory, included in its demands for religious reform a statement that the temple be set up in such a way that women could enter the main sanctuary (rather than be relegated exclusively to a balcony).50 Moreover, by requiring a program of study as preparation for the ceremony of religious initiation, the consistories expanded the formal Jewish education of girls. The reformist majority within the consistorial leadership desired more far-reaching changes, but they were stymied by mass resistance on the part of the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine and their rabbis and by the organization of Orthodox Jews in Paris. In 1846, for example, as part of the selection process for the new grand rabbi of France, the Central Consistory asked candidates for the position to present their written opinion about the feasibility of nine reforms the consistorial leaders hoped to see implemented. The proposed reforms dealt with the enhancement of the rabbi's pastoral role, the improvement of women's role in the synagogue, and the adoption of the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew in the creation of a uniform French rite. They also included such radical measures as suppression of prayers deemed to conflict with the civic responsibilities of Jews, such as the restoration to Zion, the introduction of the organ into French synagogues in imitation of church services, and the acceptance of patrilineal along with matrilineal descent as sufficient for recognizing individuals as Jews. 51 The last proposal strongly violated Jewish law and custom and suggested the acceptability of intermarriage. The consistory's attempt to promote reform through this circular letter led to vehement denunciations by a large number of rabbis in the northeastern provinces, including the consistorial grand rabbis, and an effective mass petition campaign.52 As a result of the public outcry of rabbis and laypeople, a moderate candidate, Marchand Ennery, received the position. A decade later, when the then Grand Rabbi of France, Salomon Ulmann, convened a conference of all the grand rabbis to discuss

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various proposed reforms, the rabbis of Alsace and Lorraine, under the leadership of Grand Rabbi Salomon Klein, vigorously opposed three of them: the abridgment of religious services through the elimination of certain piyyutim (medieval prayers), the use of the organ on the Sabbath, and the institution of a new ceremony for newborns. Traditionalists rejected the first reform because it could encourage rampant rewriting of traditional liturgy and the second and third because they aped Christian practices. All the proposed reforms were adopted at the rabbinic conference, since the staunch traditionalists were in the minority. However, as a concession to the widespread resistance in the northeast, implementation of the reforms was left to the initiative of the grand rabbi of each departmental consistory. In Paris during and after the Revolution of 1848, Abraham ben Baruch Créhange sought reforms that would strengthen the influence of traditionalists. He lobbied for the introduction of universal male suffrage in consistorial elections, so that the needs and sensibilities of the poor Orthodox Jews of the capital would be met. He also advocated the elimination of regulations, such as the tax on kosher meat and the ban on private prayer assemblies, that weighed heavily upon poor and working-class Jews. 53 Moderate religious reform occurred within France because of two parallel paths of acculturation: by many French Jews in the middle decades of the century and by a segment of the French rabbinate, who were likely to be selected by consistorial lay leaders as grand rabbis for major rabbinical posts. Radical reform, on the other hand, failed because of the strength of the traditionalists, their concentration in Alsace-Lorraine, and the incorporation of their rabbinic leaders within the consistorial system. With the establishment in 1830 of a modern Jewish rabbinical school, which included secular subjects within its curriculum, and its transfer from Metz to Paris in 1859, French rabbis increasingly supported the moderate traditionalism of consistorial Judaism.54 Both in matters of public communal ritual and in matters of individual social practice, the pace of acculturation and integration was uneven. Not surprisingly, the adoption of bourgeois standards of behavior began in the major cities and gradually spread to small towns through the impact of the press, consistorial circulars, rabbinic networking, and personal contacts. For example, despite initial opposition, the abolition of the auction of synagogue honors, the practice of praying quietly in the synagogue, and the introduction of ceremonies of religious initiation for

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boys and girls became widely accepted throughout French Jewish communities. Even in the department with the highest concentration of traditional Jews, the Upper Rhine, by 1866 the auction of synagogue honors had virtually disappeared. Resistance to some innovations, though, remained strongest in Alsace and Lorraine. The organ, which was accepted most readily in Paris and in some new urban communities, was not played for the first time in the Strasbourg synagogue until 1 8 5 7 , on the occasion of the wedding of the daughter of a prominent local family. Playing the organ on the Sabbath or holidays, however, occasioned controversy in Strasbourg even in 1865. Moreover, although the Central Consistory had issued decrees about synagogue honors and funerals in the 1840s, the consistory of the Lower Rhine was still banning the sale of honors through circulars in 1858 and mandating orderly funerals in i860. In Alsace some Jews preferred traditional custom to bourgeois concepts of beauty and order.55 By the 1860s, though, many bourgeois standards of decorum had penetrated deeply from the cosmopolitan cities to even the smaller towns and villages of Alsace and Lorraine, particularly among youth. As the Univers israélite commented in 18 61 in an article on the religious state of French Jewry, "the least hamlet sees one or several of its children betake themselves to a large city where they are initiated to a superior civilization and from which, returning transformed, they bring back to their home what they have seen. They are so many missionaries of civilization; after having experienced [its] irresistible influence, they become the agents to propagate it around them. . . ." 5 6 Accepting without question the desirability and higher status of bourgeois culture, the journal described one vehicle for its diffusion. An example of this diffusion of bourgeois standards emerges in the pinkas (minute book) of the Jewish community of Bouxwiller, a small town northwest of Strasbourg, with a Jewish population of 3 1 2 in 1863. That year the pinkas recorded in Yiddish a new set of regulations for proper behavior in the synagogue. Calling for decorum in public prayer, the regulations also specified appropriate dress. On the Sabbath and holidays, each male worshiper was expected to attend synagogue services wearing a high black hat. The wearing of a smock or round camisole—work clothes—was forbidden. Through its appearance, the synagogue was intended to reflect the status to which its members aspired.57 Yet that status did not preclude the observance of traditional Judaism. By the end of the Second Empire most French Jews had adapted themselves and their public institutions to French bourgeois culture and had

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integrated into the general educational and civic institutions of France. 58 Although antisemitism had by no means disappeared, it seemed to French Jews to constitute little threat, since as French citizens they could call upon the institutions of the state to come to their defense. Having developed an identity that synthesized French patriotism and Jewish pride, they were prepared to take their place on the international stage in support of the rights of less fortunate Jews.

CHAPTER

FIVE

French Jews and World Jewry UT...IH.-.F-.AD.-.CREMIEUX.SENATEUR. Sr.-.C0MK.Sr.- a À Rk« é c o s s.-. ATATIS

LXXXIÜ.

ANNO.

MBCCC1.XXVÎII.

I

n May 1860 six young French Jews—professionals, businessmen, and intellectuals—founded the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an organization devoted to the international defense of Jews. 1 Publishing a stirring manifesto, they appealed to world Jewry in terms that evoked Jewish pride and sense of solidarity as well as confidence in the historical progress set in motion by the Revolution: If, dispersed to all corners of the globe and mixed with the nations, you remain attached with your heart to the ancient religion of your fathers, however weak the link . . . If you detest the prejudices from which we still suffer . . . the lies that are repeated . . . the calumnies that are fomented . . . If you believe that the most ancient and simple of spiritual religions must keep its place, fulfill its mission, proclaim its right, manifest its vitality in the ever more active great movement of ideas . . . If you believe that a large number of your coreligionists, overwhelmed by twenty centuries of misery, can recover their dignity as men, conquer their dignity as citizens . . . If you believe that it would be an honor for your religion, a lesson for the peoples [of the

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world], progress for humanity, a triumph for truth and universal reason to see concentrated all the living forces of Judaism . . . If finally you believe that the influence of the principles of # ' 8 9 is all powerful in the world, that the law which flows from them is a law of justice . . . that the example of peoples who enjoy absolute religious equality is a force . . . [then] israelites of the entire world, come . . . give us your membership, your cooperation. 2

In its statutes promulgated a month later, the new organization promised to "work everywhere for the emancipation and the moral progress of the Jews" and "to lend effective support to those who suffered because of their being Jews." 3 It intended to publicize and ameliorate the situation of Jews who were subject to discrimination and persecution by working on two fronts: in the realm of international politics to secure civic equality for Jews and within Jewish communities to stimulate self-improvement, largely through education. Within two decades the Alliance had local committees and members in sixteen European countries, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as a few in such distant places as North and South America. In 1 8 8 1 only about a quarter of its 24,176 members were French citizens, living in France or Algeria, or former French citizens, resident in AlsaceLorraine. The leadership of the organization, however, was in French hands. The international character of its mass membership attested, perhaps, to a general recognition of the special status of French Jewry as the first major Jewish community to have been emancipated and as the community with the closest ties to a large segment of Jews in need.4 The new organization reflected the contradictory self-perceptions of French Jews as strong and assertive citizens, natural leaders of world Jewry, and as vulnerable members of a still despised group. On the one hand, its founders articulated a sense that emancipated Jews should, and could, act publicly and politically to achieve social justice for their less fortunate fellow Jews. On the other, they clearly felt that the stigma attached to traditional Jewish populations, whether in eastern Europe, North Africa, or the Levant, diminished their own image in French society. Indeed, they projected onto the nonemancipated Jews for whom they assumed responsibility the same disdain that Enlightenment thinkers had expressed toward their ancestors three generations earlier. To become worthy of emancipation, Jews had to acquire a Western-style education that would inspire them to moral and rational behavior. They had to become productive citizens. The impetus for the establishment of the Alliance was the 1858 Mortara Affair, which rocked the Jewish world and elicited wide publicity

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and sympathy among non-Jews as well. Indeed, Isidore Cahen, the editor of the Archives Israélites and later one of the founding members of the Alliance, responded to the situation with an article calling for the establishment in Paris of a Jewish defense committee.5 Edgar Mortara, a six-year-old Italian Jewish child, was taken away from his parents at the instigation of the Catholic church, which then wielded secular power in Italy, when a former family servant revealed that she had baptized the child as a toddler, fearing that he would succumb to an illness. Since he was a baptized Catholic, church authorities declared that he could not be reared by (his own) Jewish parents. Despite the protests of his family, Jewish leaders from a number of European countries, and even the Emperor Napoleon III, Edgar was not returned to his home but was reared in a Catholic institution. The Mortara case demonstrated the limits of Jewish political and diplomatic action carried out by individual spokesmen and the existent communal bodies.6 The founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in fact, dissented from the political caution of the Central Consistory. As a communal institution with formal links to the government, the Central Consistory was naturally constrained in its criticism of governmental action. Although it did register its protest when Jews were denied the protection of the law to which their citizenship entitled them, it was more reluctant than some departmental consistories in taking a public stand. Indeed, it frequently chastised the departmental consistories in Alsace for urging precipitous reaction to expressions of antisemitism.7 Even in matters that did not directly involve the government, such as the publication of antisemitic attacks in the press, it often chose the strategy of behind-thescenes lobbying, rather than public protest. Pragmatism and prudence governed its selection of cases for intervention, for it considered failure more of a setback than silence.8 The leaders of the Alliance implicitly asserted that Jews could be more effective in their self-defense in a unified organization that would speak publicly in a collective voice for the Jews of many lands. They had been impressed by the concerted activity of the Board of Delegates of British Jews and the Central Consistory in response to the Damascus blood libel. In 1840, when a Capuchin monk, Father Thomas, and his servant disappeared, the Jews of Damascus were accused by Christian Arabs of ritual murder and more than a hundred men were imprisoned. The new French consul lent his weight to the charge. Because of the importance of French support for the shaky rule of the Egyptian Mehmet Ali, then in control of Syria, the consul wielded considerable influence. The

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accused men, who included prominent local Jews, were arrested and tortured. The Jews of Damascus turned to the Jews of Istanbul, who appealed to European Jewry, including the French Rothschilds and the Jews of London. The strategy of the Jews of Damascus recalled traditional reliance upon powerful and well-placed individual Jews to intercede with the authorities, generally in secret, on behalf of those in distress. However, in this case the major organizations of British and French Jewry assumed responsibility for a public intervention that made good use of the media. They sent a well-publicized joint delegation, headed by Moses Montefiore, a prominent British Jew, and Adolphe Crémieux, then vicepresident of the Central Consistory, to the Middle East and succeeded in gaining the release of the imprisoned Jews.9 Such action served as a model for the Alliance activists. The historian Michael Graetz has persuasively shown that the founders of the Alliance were drawn from an intellectual elite that was alienated from the consistorial leadership. Most of them were republicans and many had ties to the Saint-Simonian movement, which preached a rationalist, quasi-messianic universalism. The language of Alliance leaders in its early years reflected this utopianism. As one 1862 speech to the general assembly of the organization proclaimed: "The union of all free israélites to emancipate oppressed israélites the world over" would lead "toward the day of radiant light" when "all the world's peoples" would form a single people and "all religions [would] unite in a single religion."10 Initially, officials connected with the Central Consistory expressed reservations about the new organization and kept their distance from it. A few months after the founding of the Alliance, a member of the Central Consistory declared at a consistory meeting, "This society acts with little prudence and could sometime, through ill-considered steps harm the true interests of Judaism." 11 Some departmental consistories, though, particularly those in Alsace that had chafed at the discipline imposed by the Central Consistory, welcomed the Alliance's approach. Within several years even national consistorial circles saw the utility of the Alliance and offered their support and collaboration. By 1863 the Alliance's president was Adolphe Crémieux, perhaps the most renowned Jewish lawyer and politician in France, the former Minister of Justice of the provisional government of 1848. Crémieux had joined the fledgling association in i860. Soon the leadership ranks of the Central Consistory and the Alliance were indistinguishable.12 The establishment of the Alliance Israélite Universelle reflected the complexity of French Jewish identity in the middle of the nineteenth cen-

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tury. Despite the radical redefinition of the Jews in the wake of the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic Sanhedrin as only a religious community, French Jews displayed an identification that conflicted with the strict ideology of.-emancipation. As Phyllis Cohen Albert has demonstrated, the rhetoric of French Jews, expressed in public statements, the press, and the Alliance's manifesto, betrayed an ethnic self-perception and sense of mutual responsibility that could not be defined merely as concern for coreligionists. French Jews repeatedly referred to themselves and fellow Jews with such terms as "nation, people, our brothers, family, and solidarity."13 The Jews of the Alsatian town of Haguenau, for example, expressed their sense of historical connection across borders with the victims of the Damascus blood libel by including them in 1840 in their memorial book, a list of (mostly European) Jewish victims of persecution dating back to the Middle Ages. In i860 the Strasbourg consistory donated 1,600 francs to the Central Consistory on behalf of the distant Jewish refugees of Morocco.14 In these ritual and philanthropic acts nineteenth-century French Jews were following traditional Jewish prescriptions of solidarity for kinfolk in distress. As the Talmudic maxim phrased it, "All Israel is responsible one for the other." The ransoming of captive Jews was considered a major religious obligation.15 In the light of traditional mandates, the Alliance adopted the acronym KYaH (Kol Yisrael Haverim—All Israel are comrades) as its Hebrew title. In practice, then, acculturation and mobility were consonant with feelings of "ethnic solidarity," even though such a linguistic formulation derives from a twentieth-century rather than a nineteenth-century sensibility. Although concern for the situation of their fellow Jews and for their own status as citizens motivated the leadership of the Alliance, France's national interests and position in the world played a role as well in defining the organization's agenda. Cremieux and the Central Consistory dissented from French governmental policy in the Damascus Affair, but the Alliance's focus on educating the "backward" Jews of North Africa and the Levant meshed well with France's imperial interests. By the middle of the nineteenth century, European countries had a major stake in North Africa and the Middle East. France had conquered Algeria in 1830 and was heavily involved with Morocco and Tunisia and allied with the Ottoman Empire. Through its schools the Alliance served as a Jewish arm of France's mission civilisatrice in the Middle East. The French conquest of Algeria provided the first opportunity, and necessity, for French Jews to address the problems of a traditional Levantine Jewish community. Severely restricted and discriminated against

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under Muslim rule, the sixteen thousand Jews of Algeria were concentrated in the coastal cities. To their fellow Jews in metropolitan France they appeared as a subordinated population, in need of protection and guidance. The degradation, residential segregation, a$d legal autonomy of Algerian Jewry cast aspersions on the image of French Jews and reminded them of their own preemancipation status.16 Sharing the attitudes of the French colonizers to the native population, despite initial assertions that the Jewish population was superior to the indigenous Muslims, Alliance leaders sought to confer the advantages of Western culture on their Jewish kin. Given French rule over Algeria, the Central Consistory was concerned to bring Algerian Jews into the consistorial system, regularize their status, and extend to them the project of regeneration. The ultimate goal of French Jewish leaders was to remake the Jews of Algeria in their own image and secure their emancipation. From 1 8 3 3 the Central Consistory was in contact with governmental authorities to achieve these goals. When in 1842. the president of the Marseille consistory, Jacques-Isaac Alteras, presented his report on the Jews of Algeria to the government officials who had supported his proposal of a fact-finding tour of the Jewish communities of Algeria, the groundwork was laid for both state and consistorial restructuring of Algerian Jewish life. 17 Acting upon some of the recommendations of the Alteras report, the French government established an Algerian consistory in 1845. Based in Algiers, with two provincial consistories in Oran and Constantine, all fell under the control of the Ministry of War. Only in i 8 6 z were the Algerian consistories integrated into the French consistorial system and placed under the aegis of the Ministry of Religions. As in metropolitan France, laymen by law predominated in the leadership of the consistories. Unlike the contemporary situation in France, however, both the lay leadership of the Algerian consistory and the rabbis were to be appointed by the government, which sought Europeans to fill the central positions, including all three rabbinical posts. Although ostensibly religious bodies, the consistories were established primarily to maintain social control. By centralizing the expression of Judaism in Algeria, assuring order in the synagogue, and preventing the formation of independent prayer assemblies, the consistories regulated the Jewish sector in Algeria. 18 The 1845 ordinance also charged the consistories with supervising the task of "civilizing" the Jews of Algeria by seeing to it that families sent their children, both male and female, to Jewish day care centers and schools that would teach French along with religious studies and by en-

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couraging useful professions, especially agriculture, among the Jews. Although the schools were to be established by the authorities, the consistories would subsidize them and propose candidates for their teaching and administrative staff. By the time of the Alliance's founding, modern Jewish schools were functioning in all of the centers of Algerian Jewish life. French Jews succeeded in presenting the acculturating Jews of Algeria as a mediating force between the French colonists and authorities and the indigenous Muslims, and as a vehicle for the penetration of French culture into Algeria. In 1870 Adolphe Crémieux, once more a governmental minister (the Minister of Justice) in the new Third Republic, lent his name to the legislation that granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, whose population had doubled, to thirty-three thousand, in the forty years since French colonialization.19 Building upon the experience of French Jews in Algeria, the Alliance Israélite Universelle assumed as one of its primary activities the provision of modern education to the not-yet-emancipated Jews of the world, particularly in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the schools of the Alliance, which trained generations of Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were its most notable historic legacy. In the first decade of its existence the Alliance established fourteen schools, the first in Morocco; by 1900 there were a hundred schools with twentysix thousand students—in Morocco, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Bulgaria, Turkey, Mesopotamia, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Greece, Iran, and Algeria. 20 Although local, Westernized leaders often initiated contact with the Alliance, the Alliance's prestige and resources were crucial in providing stability to the modern schools that were under its aegis. 21 The Alliance's program of refashioning Oriental Jewry through education, its version of Orientalism, found expression in statements like the following, which dates from 1896: what is the aim of the Alliance . . . In the first place, to cast a ray of the civilization of the Occident into the communities degenerated by centuries of oppression and ignorance; next, to help them find jobs more secure and less disparaged than peddling . . . finally, by opening their spirits to western ideas, to destroy certain outdated prejudices and superstitions . . . But in addition, the action of the Alliance principally aimed to give to the Jewish youth . . . a moral education . . . to create . . . good men, attached to their duties as citizens and as Jews . . . knowing how to reconcile the needs of the modern world with the respect of ancient traditions. 22

Despite its reference to men, the Alliance educated both boys and girls in its schools. By 1900 there were forty girls' schools and ten that were

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coeducational.23 Although its education was gendered and imbued with the European bourgeois assumption that the purpose of learning for girls was to prepare them for their central adult role as mothers responsible for teaching their own children, the introduction of female education was, in the words of the historian Aron Rodrigue, "a revolutionary development in the Middle East." 24 Since it envisioned the formation of a Jewish population that was modern and rational in its sensibilities but also loyal to Judaism, as French Jewry saw itself, the Alliance included the teaching of Hebrew language and the Jewish religion in its curriculum. As in traditional as well as modern Jewish communities of the time, boys received much more instruction in these subjects than girls. The Alliance left the teaching of Hebrew and Judaism to local rabbis, with two consequences. The involvement of native rabbis tended to defuse the opposition of local traditionalists. But the Jewish learning the students received compared quite unfavorably in terms of pedagogic method with the schools' secular instruction, which reflected the most current teaching styles and philosophy.25 Although the Alliance leaders were committed to the congruence of Western culture and a modern understanding of Judaism, Jewish learning was not at the center of their educational vision. Following the French primary system, the Alliance schools devoted their curriculum to French language and reading, arithmetic, natural science, geography, and local history. In addition to French, a language appropriate to local conditions was taught.26 Deeming the creation of scholars inappropriate to the needs and status of its students and seeking to shape useful citizens, the Alliance advanced practical aims in its schools. Just as the French Jewish elite had promoted vocational education for Jewish children in Alsatian villages and poor urban neighborhoods throughout France, so Alliance directors included vocational education as an important component of their schools' curriculum. Just as the leaders of French Jewry for decades indulged the dream of establishing agricultural colonies for the children of the Jewish poor, so the Alliance investigated the founding of such a colony in Alsace. In 1870 it actually established an agricultural school and colony, named Mikveh Israel, in Palestine as a primary tool for regenerating the local Jews. In both cases Jewish leaders expressed notions of productivization rooted in Enlightenment thought that also reflected the biases of the bourgeoisie toward the lower classes. Despite its focus on practical instruction, however, the Alliance's principal goal remained the moral education of its students through the inculcation of Western values, a goal that reflected its paternalistic attitude toward its clientele.

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To offer an appropriate education, the Alliance decided in its early years that it would have to prepare its own instructional staff. Its first teachers were French Jews, mostly students and graduates of the École Rabbinique from Alsace and Lorraine, but the cultural gap between teachers and pupils was often too wide to bridge. In 1867 the Alliance established a normal school in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, to which it sent the best male graduates of its own schools in the Middle East and North Africa to be trained as teachers. Most of the recruits came from the Ottoman Empire and had been raised in the JudeoSpanish (Ladino) language, which facilitated their mastery of French. After four years of study of the standard French normal school curriculum as well as Hebrew and Judaic subjects, graduates returned to Alliance schools as teachers. Along with their advanced education they had generally acquired the colonially educated native's disdain for their traditional communitiés of origin. Fully imbued with the educational philosophy of the Alliance, they sought to recapitulate with their students their own path of enlightenment. In their Jewish communities they functioned as an important Westernizing elite. Beginning in 1872 a small number of female teachers recruited from the Middle East and North Africa were trained in private Jewish institutes in Paris until the Alliance established its own École Normale Israélite Orientale de Jeunes Filles in 1922. 27 The curriculum of the schools and the dedication of their teachers to French culture instilled in their students Francophile sympathies. Although the schools increasingly included the country's indigenous language in their curriculum, French was not only the language of instruction, but it also assumed a symbolic role as the bearer of Western culture. Moreover, Alliance schools combined an emphasis on French language and culture with a disparagement of the students' Jewish dialects, primarily Judeo-Spanish. Much as French elites from the time of Abbé Grégoire through the nineteenth century insisted on the need to replace local patois with standard French, so the directors and teachers of the Alliance schools sought to eliminate their students' native language.28 Like the Maskilim of central and eastern Europe, who dismissed Yiddish as a jargon and stressed the importance of speaking and writing a pure language, and the French Jewish leaders who banned the use of Yiddish from their schools in Alsace, the Alliance staff saw in the adoption of French in place of Judeo-Spanish the ultimate signifier of a civilized culture. Because of their promotion of French language and culture and their creation of a Gallicized elite in countries in which France maintained an interest, the directors of Alliance schools had easy access to

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French consular officials who could offer governmental support for their programs and suppress whatever local opposition might arise. In addition to its educational activities, the Alliance Israélite Universelle became a significant player in the field of international diplomacy. Committed to bringing emancipation à la française to persecuted Jewish populations, it used the stature of its leadership as well as its standing with the French government to defend Jewish victims of discrimination abroad and to promote the expansion of Jewish rights, particularly in southern and eastern Europe. In the 1860s it coordinated diplomatic efforts on behalf of Jewish citizens of France who were discriminated against in Switzerland and argued as well for the emancipation of Swiss Jewry. In the Ottoman Empire, the Alliance, which had the ear of the authorities thanks to its educational work and the collaboration of the French and British governments in its contacts with local officials, petitioned the Sultanate to intervene in the increasingly common ritual-murder accusations against the Jewish population instigated by Greeks within the Empire. The Alliance was also active in presenting the case for the continued protection of Moroccan Jewry under the aegis of foreign consulates and businessmen. As a result of the international Madrid conference of 1879-80, in which the Alliance participated, the Jews of Morocco achieved stability, albeit temporary, along with expressions of benevolence on the part of the Moroccan ruler.29 With the Ottoman Empire's loss of control of its European possessions in the Balkans, the Alliance assumed responsibility for ensuring that the Jews who were coming under non-Muslim rule not fall victim to antisemitism in the new Christian states emerging in former Ottoman territory. As early as 1 8 6 1 the Jews of Serbia turned to the Alliance to seek its support against the new regime, which they viewed, not without reason, as hostile. The Alliance undertook a diplomatic campaign with western European powers on behalf of the Jews of Serbia, who were subjected to restrictive governmental policies as well as popular violence. As a result, the Alliance became the target of an antisemitic press campaign within Serbia. Because of Serbia's dependence upon recognition by western European powers, the Alliance succeeded in linking the "Jewish question" to Serbian independence. Its right to speak for the Jews of Serbia was ultimately acknowledged by Serbian rulers when they received delegations from the Alliance. Although it did not lead to the emancipation of Serbian Jewry, the combined pressure of the Alliance and western European governments prevented the mass expulsion of Jews from the territory. In the years when the status of the new states was being deter-

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mined at a series of international conferences, the Alliance provided information and constant reminders about the fate of the Jews. Accepting the stipulations of religious equality mandated by the 1878 Congress of Berlin as a condition for international recognition, the new states of Serbia and Bulgaria abided by their treaty obligations.30 Romania proved a more difficult case. Indeed, the Alliance's most significant foray into international diplomacy concerned Romania's Jews. They numbered almost 125,000 in 1859 and 269,000 in 1899. 3 1 Making up 9 percent of the population of the province of Moldavia, where they were concentrated, and a majority of most Moldavian cities, including its capital, Jassy, they were victims of an explosive combination of governmental discrimination and popular antisemitism. Because of the diplomatic efforts of the Alliance and prominent Jews like the Rothschilds and especially Bismarck's banker Gerson Bleichroder, their situation figured prominently in the deliberations about the status of Romania in the 1870s. 3 2 Its experience with the defense of the Jews of Romania illuminates the methods and the limits of the Alliance's exercise of political power. In 1866 a minor Hohenzollern prince, Prince Carol of HohenzollernSigmiringen, ascended the Romanian throne. The new regime quickly expressed an official antisemitism. Derived from religious hatred and from the nobles' perceptions of Jews as economic rivals, antisemitism became the foundation stone of the sociopolitical structure of the state. Jews were immediately placed in a subordinate legal position; the constitution declared that citizenship would be reserved to Christians. As was the case with Serbia, the Jews of Romania appealed to the Alliance to gain its support for their campaign for civic equality. Shortly before the promulgation of the constitution, in June 1866, Adolphe Cremieux himself visited Bucharest where he addressed members of Parliament and the government. Although Prince Carol warmly received Cremieux and promised him that "the complete emancipation of the Jews will find in me the most active and devoted cooperation," 33 one week later a clause excluding the Jews from citizenship was entered in the draft of the constitution. Prime Minister Bratianu persuaded the members of Parliament to reject equality for the Jews with a stirring speech that reflected popular opinion: "The Jews have become a social plague for Romania, a social plague of which we must rid ourselves. . . ." 3 4 The initial effort of the Alliance had failed. For more than a decade the Alliance, under Cremieux's leadership, mobilized its contacts with political figures, including ambassadors to

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France, the press, and well-situated individual Jews to keep the issue of the persecution of the Jews of Romania before the public and on the agenda of international diplomats. Although Gerson Bleichroder became the central player in the drama of Romania's "Jewish question" because of Germany's growing power in central Europe and its involvement with the financing of Romanian railroads, the Alliance remained the official spokesman of international Jewry. It maintained close ties not only with Bleichroder, with whom it was in regular communication, but also with powerful Jews in England, Austria, and, of course, France. France's defeat in the 1870 war with Prussia diminished the Alliance's standing among the Jews of Germany and its allies, but no other organization could yet compete with it on the international stage. The status of the Jews of Romania came to the fore in 1878 when an international congress was convened in Berlin in June to establish peace and remake the map of southeastern Europe in the wake of the Balkan revolt against the Turks and the Russo-Turkish war. With liberal ideals still on the ascendant among the nations of western Europe, western Jews, with the Alliance as their political organ, felt that the time was right to make a strong case for the emancipation of Romanian Jewry. In addition to the ethical arguments that could be mobilized to end the persecution of the country's Jews and to confer civic equality upon them, practical considerations also argued for the likelihood of success. Romania depended upon the Great Powers for recognition; moreover, a German-Romanian trade agreement was about to be signed. The Romanian refusal to exempt Jewish citizens of Germany from the discrimination to which all Jews were subject in the country injured not only Jews but offended Germany's right to protect its citizens according to its own constitution. After the Reichstag declared its support for pressuring Romania to prevent German Jews in Romania from becoming second-class citizens, Bleichroder wrote to Cremieux, "We are on the eve of emancipation." 35 Working hand in hand with Bleichroder, the Alliance met with diplomats and journalists to keep the issue of Romanian Jewry visible during the Congress of Berlin. At the urging of the French Foreign Minister, and with the support of Bismarck, the Congress included in the treaty Article 44, which tied international recognition of the independence of Romania, as well as Serbia and Bulgaria, to the principle of citizenship and political equality for all the residents of the new states.36 The signing of the Treaty of Berlin signaled an apparent victory for Jewish diplomacy, but the temporary nature of that victory demon-

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strated the utter dependence of the Alliance and its supporters on the active collaboration of powerful governments dedicated to the extension of human rights, a rarity in most times and places. The Romanians, leaders and public alike, felt that Article 44 had been imposed upon them. Almost immediately they began to violate its provisions, continuing to treat all Jews, including Romanian natives, as foreigners and restricting them in both political and economic terms. Far from bringing emancipation to the Jews of Romania, the Congress of Berlin ushered in a period of harsh reprisals against them. Once the western European powers had achieved a solution that contained Russia, established stability, and provided Germany with its economic goals, their commitment to the ideals of equality was insufficient to risk their political gains over the issue of a Jewish minority. The Alliance—even with the combined pressure of Gerson Bleichroder, Adolphe Cremieux, Moses Montefiore, and Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, even with its political and media sophistication—could not counter the indifference of governments that had no stake in foreign Jews. The Alliance also became directly involved with the mass emigration of Jews from the Russian empire. Its concern with the economic distress and governmental discrimination suffered by Russian Jews was longstanding, but it first began to address the issue of emigration in 1869, when a cholera epidemic and famine caused an exodus of some five thousand Polish and Lithuanian Jews to nearby German port cities. Their consultations with Jews in the United States and specifically with American Alliance committees made European Alliance leaders aware of the reluctance of American Jewish communities to accept unregulated mass emigration. The Alliance therefore attempted to control emigration, seeking as candidates for assistance young, able-bodied men and chartering ships to bring them to the United States. In deference to the views of American Jewry, the Alliance restricted the number of immigrants, and many returned to Russia. When refugees from the 1 8 8 1 Russian pogroms congregated in Brody, Austrian Galicia, the Alliance issued an international appeal for funds on their behalf. In October it sent to Brody one of its founders and an important activist, Charles Netter, to assist the refugees, to screen them and choose appropriate candidates for emigration to the United States, and then to arrange for their journey. Overwhelmed by the number of refugees and their worthiness for assistance, after one week in Brody Netter wrote to the Alliance headquarters in Paris, "I fear we shall be inundated. I would like to bring all doubters here for only twenty-four hours—then our cause would be won."

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Although the Alliance temporarily acceded to American requests to stop the shipment of immigrants and repatriated many of the 1 8 8 1 refugees, it continued its efforts through the spring of 1882. The Zionist leader Ahad Ha-Am, later a critic of assimilated French Jewry, witnessed the Alliance's efforts with the refugees when he passed through Brody in the late fall of 1 8 8 1 and described them with admiration: "I could see Netter, that worthy man, standing in the station and distributing money to the refugees. His face expressed the kindness and compassion he felt for them . . . One could read in their eyes how hopefully they looked into the future. As the train started to move, they called out: Long live Netter! Long live the Alliance!" 37 Through its educational, diplomatic, and relief activities, the Alliance Israélite Universelle achieved an international reputation as the most significant of Jewish defense agencies in the period before World War I. Indeed, its success can be measured in part by the stature it acquired among antisemites, who viewed it as paradigmatic of the Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. Because its educational project in particular furthered French interests, it enjoyed a favored status with the French government. Although the organization presented itself as a multinational agency of Jews and most of its members were not citizens of France, its French leadership and home base as well as its promotion of French language and culture confirmed the widespread perception that it was the political arm of French Jewry. With the visibility of the Alliance on the international political stage and the prominence of the Rothschilds in the economic arena, a century after their emancipation, the Jews of France, who then numbered fewer than a hundred thousand, epitomized the achievements of emancipation and acculturation. Although a Zionist intellectual like Ahad Ha-Am pointed to French Jewry as an example of the high price of emancipation and assimilation in terms of loss of authentic Jewish culture,38 most observers depicted French Jewry in favorable terms. The events of the last years of the nineteenth century were to challenge the confidence of French Jewry in its status as well as its image in the world.

CHAPTER

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I

n 1889 the Jews of France joined other French citizens sympathetic to republicanism in celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution. One French rabbi expressed the prevalent sentiment of his community with his proclamation in a patriotic sermon: "We have adopted the customs and traditions of a country which has so generously adopted us, and today, thanks to God, there are no longer any but Frenchmen in France." 1 His statement reflected the combination of pride and gratitude that characterized the attitude of French Jewry looking back at what they had accomplished in the century following their emancipation. On the one hand, they recognized that of all European countries France alone had demonstrated a multigenerational commitment, through a number of changes of regime, to the equality of its Jewish population. Even in Great Britain, the major source of political liberalism, Jews had become eligible for public office only in 1858. On the other hand, French Jews 91

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expected approval of their evident fulfillment of the "bargain" of emancipation. To meet the expectations of those who had accepted them into the French polity, they felt that they had acculturated fully to the norms and values of French life. France and her Jews together, then, were responsible for what Jewish spokesmen saw as the obvious elimination of their status as aliens, not only in legal terms but in social and psychological terms as well. Turning to his congregants another rabbi proclaimed in 1889, "To be Jews (Israélites) and only Jews, that did not suffice for you; to that. . . title of nobility you sought to add that of Frenchmen, of children of France. Children of France, that is what the Revolution made of you." 2 French Jews had much good fortune and signs of acceptance into the French polity to celebrate. Although they had suffered a significant decline in population with France's loss of the northeastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany as a consequence of the FrancoPrussian war of 1870, their response to this communal tragedy underlined their sense of full belonging to the French nation. The Jews of Alsace and Lorraine had opted for French citizenship and had emigrated from the northeastern provinces to the interior of France in higher proportions than their Catholic and Protestant neighbors. They were quick to point to this dramatic evidence of their patriotism. 3 As Rabbi Arnaud Aron declared in an 1889 sermon, referring to the Jews of AlsaceLorraine, "You have abandoned your birthplace, leaving your dearest interests there, to seek of France a corner to shelter you." 4 The nostalgia that French Jews expressed for their Alsatian homeland in particular and for the traditional way of life that they had followed there in the past offered a Jewish parallel to the celebration of rural provincial origins by other Frenchmen now resident in France's urban centers. Thus, Léon Cahun's La vie juive, a collection of vignettes of village Jewish life in Alsace, published in 1886 and illustrated with sentimental lithographs by Alphonse Lévy, demonstrated French Jewry's sense of rootedness in a particular region of French soil. At a safe geographical and chronological distance, the traditional Jewish villages of Alsace seemed to provide an ideal place to be from. 5 One hundred years after their emancipation the sixty-eight thousand Jews of France had become a visible component of the French bourgeoisie. Almost 60 percent of French Jewry were concentrated in Paris; in only four provincial cities—Marseille, Bordeaux, Nancy, and L y o n — were there Jewish communities of more than a thousand persons. Migration from Alsace and Lorraine, especially after the German annexa-

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tion, contributed to the growth of new communities in cities such as Lille and Dijon. 6 Although there were poor Jews who lived in rundown neighborhoods, the 1872. census of France's largest Jewish community, Paris, revealed that only 1 0 percent of the city's Jews were engaged in unskilled labor, with peddlers predominating among that group. Businessmen, professionals, and proprietors and rentiers accounted for fully one-half of the total Jewish population. To be sure, many of the Jewish businessmen of Paris and other French cities were bourgeois primarily in their aspirations rather than in their incomes or lifestyles; the social and economic gradations within the middle class were significant. In contrast to the general urban masses, however, French Jews were not working class, though some were skilled artisans.7 A mark of the social mobility and acculturation of French Jewry was the leisure-time activity of its most successful representatives. Like other members of the French bourgeois and aristocratic elite, only more so, at the end of the nineteenth century the comfortable bourgeois strata of French Jewish society adopted the practice of taking summer vacations at the seashore or visiting health spas. Although most Jews who frequented summer vacation spots or spas chose their destinations with little regard for possibilities of Jewish religious observance, some did seek sites congenial to religious needs.8 Most importantly in terms of public perception, Jews were particularly prominent in certain sectors of the modern urban economy centered in Paris—private banking, and finance more generally, and large-scale retailing. The historian Jean-Yves Monnier found that in 1 8 7 2 there were 95 Jewish bankers in France; and in 1892, of 440 owners of financial institutions, 90 to 100 were Jews. However, the role of Jewish bankers, and especially the Rothschilds, were greatly inflated by antisemitic opinion, which saw the development of finance and industrial capitalism as a Jewish plot.9 Jews also participated actively in the capital's cultural life, as writers for literary reviews and journalists. As one commentator noted ruefully in 1885, "Today the barons of Israel represent luxury . . . charity . . . the arts . . . the smart set. . . fashion's latest style." 10 Jews also became respected faculty members of France's academic institutions. The career of Émile Durkheim suggests the ease with which Jews were integrated into French universities. Born in Lorraine in 1858 into a rabbinic family, Durkheim studied philosophy in Paris and pioneered in the field of sociology. Unlike the German sociologist Georg Simmel, whose career was impeded by his parents' Jewish origins and by German construction of sociology as a "Jewish" field, Durkheim received academic laurels from his earliest years. In 1887, when he was

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not yet thirty, he was appointed to the first chair in social science in Europe, established for him at the University of Bordeaux. Moving to Paris, he became a professor at the Sorbonne in 1902 and chaired the new department of sociology that opened in 1913. In France, Durkheim's Jewishness in no way prevented the recognition of his brilliance. 11 French Jewish scholars also left their mark on European Jewish intellectual life. In 1880 there were sufficient scholarly resources available for Rabbi Zadoc Kahn to establish the Société des Etudes Juives, which sponsored the journal Revue des études juives. The establishment of the Revue asserted the autonomy of French Jewry's intellectual elite, who considered themselves no longer dependent on the more numerous and better educated central European Jews of German cultural formation. As the political sociologist Pierre Birnbaum has demonstrated in a major study, by the end of the nineteenth century a significant number of Jews were making careers in state service at the highest levels—as civil servants, magistrates, army officers, and elected officials. 12 Alfred Dreyfus was merely one of a cadre of Jews who climbed the ladder to success in their chosen field of governmental service. Even in those European countries where Jews were citizens, the military was not generally perceived as a sector open to them. Yet in France, Jews could be found in the highest ranks of the military. As early as the July Monarchy Jews served as officers in the French Army; the Third Republic saw twentyfive Jewish generals. In some Jewish families a military career became virtually a patrimony. The most striking example, the Brisacs, originally from Metz, boasted a general in each generation from the last third of the nineteenth-century to the end of the twentieth. 13 Not only did Jews enjoy access to all levels of the civil service, participate in republican political debate, and take their seats as well in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, they seem to have experienced no significant obstacles to advancement in their careers. Although their Jewishness was noted in their official dossiers, as was that of their wives, it did not figure in their professional evaluation and promotion. Moreover, the "Juifs d'état" displayed few signs of radical assimilation: they did not change their recognizably Jewish names; with few exceptions they did not intermarry; and they did not distance themselves from the organized Jewish community. Such behavior was not seen as necessary. Fully acculturated to French social patterns and values and fully integrated into state institutions, they nonetheless maintained strong ties of Jewish identity and association, despite their generally modest level of religious practice. With their seamless web of French culture and Jewish identity

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they incarnated the goal of French patriotism and Jewish particularity that had been expressed by the leadership of French Jewry from the era of emancipation. Their very existence proved the compatibility of French and Jewish loyalties that the motto of the Central Consistory—Religion et Patrie—proclaimed. The social mobility of French Jewry and their integration into state institutions was more far-reaching than in any other European country. But their success had not eliminated anti-Jewish prejudice. On the contrary, their patterns of social mobility fueled the development of modern antisemitism in France. Before the establishment of the Third Republic, traditional versions of antisemitism had manifested themselves in the generations following the emancipation of the Jews. Catholic publications continued to excoriate Judaism and went so far as to revive accusations of ritual murder, all the while directing missionary efforts at the Jewish population, much to the consternation of the Jewish community. 14 French newspapers regularly identified Jewish defendants in court cases while refraining from mentioning the religious affiliation of others. Even lawyers and judges referred to the origins of Jewish litigants. Occasionally Jews were denied positions in education or the judiciary on the basis of their religio-ethnic background. The denial in 1849 of Isidore Cahen's appointment to teach philosophy because of Catholic opposition was only the most notorious case. In the late 1850s, a Jewish lawyer named Schwarz was refused consideration for a position as magistrate in Alsace out of concern for the prejudices of the local population. In many instances popular prejudice against Jews, particularly in Alsace, was offered as a rationale to deny them the absolute equality to which they were entitled as citizens. 15 Finally, the identification of Jews with usury sustained anti-Jewish hostility. Such charges derived from the historic legacy of Catholic disparagement of moneylending combined with the particular economic role of Jews well into the second half of the nineteenth century as providers of credit in the Alsatian countryside. Aside from the riots that exploded in Alsace during the Revolution of 1848, however, antisemitic attitudes did not lead to violence. And by the 18 60s there was evidence of the muting of popular antipathy to Jews, even in the northeastern provinces. 16 Modern political antisemitism emerged in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, feeding upon the socioeconomic and political dislocations of the Third Republic. As a political ideology antisemitism found supporters among disparate groups—from Catholics and monarchists on the Right who yearned for the restoration of a

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hierarchical, clerical France to socialists on the Left who rejected the economic structures of capitalism and the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, from some followers of the antiestablishment General Georges Boulanger to Paris shopkeepers resentful of the competition posed to the small businessman-artisan by large-scale commerce.17 To all of these social groupings the Jew symbolized the distressing changes that capitalist development and political democracy were bringing to France. Despite the acquisition of citizenship and political participation, the Jew was still widely viewed as the quintessential foreigner who promoted new ideas that clashed with French tradition. Although Jews in France were dispersed across the political spectrum, they tended to support republicanism. Their access to citizenship derived, after all, from the Revolution and its promotion of individual rights and the concept of equality at the expense of the privileges of the estates of the ancien régime. Those who opposed the Revolution frequently claimed that it was the work of the Jews, who had benefited from it. In 1889 the Catholic newspaper La Croix called the centennial celebration of the Revolution "the Semitic centenary" and asserted that Jews had fomented the Revolution in order to gain control of France.18 Not only did the equality of Jews challenge the special role that the Church had historically occupied in France; Jews also dissented from Catholic claims to a special role in education and in the definition of French culture more broadly. Most importantly, Jews seemed to thrive in a modern, urban capitalist economy that was alien to the French aristocracy and peasant alike and injurious to shopkeepers as well as workers. Indeed, the Jews were perceived as capitalists par excellence. Thus, the theme common to antisemites of different social origins was antimodernism.19 By the time of the centennial celebration of the Revolution, public expression of antisemitic attitudes had become socially and culturally acceptable.20 The popular reception accorded Edouard Drumont attested to the resonance of antisemitic ideology among the French reading public. Published in 1886, Drumont's La France juive was wildly successful. His two-volume excoriation of the Jews blamed them for all of France's ills. Within a year more than a hundred thousand copies had been sold, and by 1 9 1 2 the book had been translated into six languages and reprinted two hundred times. As Drumont modestly assessed his contribution, his "only merit had been to put into print what everyone was thinking."21 Drumont was a Paris journalist, of petty bourgeois origins, who had achieved some success before his publication of La France juive.11 His

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ambitions, however, were greater than his early accomplishments, and he blamed the Jews for his own modest career as well as for the decadence that, along with many others, he saw in fin-de-siecle France. 23 A Catholic, Drumont combined traditional, Christian-derived anti-Jewish prejudice, including the notion that Jews exuded a peculiar odor and were fundamentally evil, with an anticapitalist, antimodern, culturally reactionary nationalist sensibility. He railed against what he called "the industrial feudality," the modernizing elite under Jewish control that had destroyed the old France by introducing factory production, the railroad, and the department store. In the words of historian Philip Nord, Drumont "styled himself a knight errant of the humble folk against the lifethreatening forces of large-scale organization: collectivism, corporate capitalism, and 'the Jewish International.'" 24 He blamed the Jews for the exploitation of the simple people, the workers and artisans, who needed protection from their rapaciousness. Although Drumont viewed, and depicted, the Jews as foreigners on French soil and referred to them in racial terms, as polluters of French society, he never developed a systematized racism of the sort that characterized an important segment of German antisemites of the time. The absence of sophisticated racial theory, however, did not prevent him and his followers from indulging in a conspiratorial view of Jewish behavior, according to which the tightly knit Jewish people, following hereditary instincts, plotted to extend its influence over, and ultimately obtain control of, key sectors of French life. 25 Evidence of the danger of the Jews was their perceived dominance in the world of high finance. Drumont was able to exploit the financial crises of the time, and particularly the crash of the Catholic bank, the Union Générale, in i 8 8 z — a crash purportedly engineered by the Rothschilds, the bank's competitors. And he knew how to use the new resources of the popular mass media, and particularly the illustrated newspaper.26 Perhaps of even greater significance than the flamboyant success of Drumont's La France juive was the penetration of antisemitic attitudes into the center of public discourse. In a recent study of statements about Jews published in France in a variety of journalistic, literary, and political texts in the single year 1889, Marc Angenot, a professor of comparative literature and specialist in the analysis of social discourse, has persuasively argued that the pervasiveness of antisemitic references reveals the entry of antisemitic stereotypes into the conventional beliefs of French culture and the consequent legitimation of antisemitic assumptions. Thus, although the republican press was formally committed to democracy and egalitarianism and opposed to racist pronouncements, it

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occasionally indulged in antisemitic statements, and Angenot sees its resolute reticence to take a public stand against antisemitism as a display of embarrassment about the issue rather than a dismissal of its political significance. Similarly the respectable (but not necessarily republican) bourgeois press, which would never descend to antisemitic invective, was comfortable to offer "spiritual reflections" about the Jews or cite the antisemitic opinions of others. Suffering no such compunctions, the Catholic press, and particularly La Croix, clearly laced its campaigns against secularism, the Republic, and Freemasonry with antisemitic invective. 27 Any study of antisemitism, concludes Angenot, must extend beyond the doctrinaire ideologues to include those who would have rejected their monomaniacal intensity while accepting aspects of their message. "[W]hat should count in the study of ideologies is the potential or real acceptability for a society, or for certain groups, of a series of statements susceptible of being integrated as 'lived'; it is not the particular psychology that is attributed to the most systematic promoters of this ideology, but the collective personality that this ideology constructs and reinforces." 28 However pervasive the rhetoric of antisemitism in the late 1880s and however much Frenchmen of different social origins and political persuasions had integrated antisemitic themes into their worldview, efforts to establish an antisemitic political movement in France were largely unsuccessful before the Dreyfus Affair. The National Antisemitic League of France, founded in the fall of 1889, was disbanded just a year later.29 Although antisemitic activists attracted support from some small retailers, like the Paris butchers of the La Villette slaughterhouse, who faced Jewish competition, their antidemocratic and antirepublican political views ultimately limited their appeal among the shopkeepers, who remained adherents of the Republic. 30 Likewise, some socialist and anarchist propagandists and candidates for office had long found in Jewish stereotypes the perfect representation of the despised capitalist; indeed socialist ideologues, including Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and especially Fourier's disciple Alphonse Toussenel, author of the popular 1845 book Les Juifs rois de l'époque, had incorporated antisemitism into their anticapitalist vision. By the end of the nineteenth century antisemitism pervaded the French left and played an important part in socialist reluctance to become involved in the Dreyfus Affair. Socialists, however, could not collaborate fully or over the long term with a movement that included those whose anticapitalism was wed to antirepublicanism and antisocialism, and antisemites were concerned above all with

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maintaining order and hierarchy. Although they lamented the suffering of the good French workers and peasants because of the nature of the modern "Jewish" economy, they sought to mask class antagonisms and restore social harmony rather than equalize the status of worker and bourgeois. As one of the most perceptive critics of fin-de-siecle France, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, commented in 1897 in a book on antisemitism, the movement was "a kind of socialism sui generis, a socialism of the Right "3i Antisemitism had its greatest impact in France in the years of the Dreyfus Affair, which began with the arrest in 1894 of the hapless Alfred Dreyfus for espionage and concluded in 1906 with the annulment of his second court martial and the official clearing of his name. 32 Ironically, the relatively weak antisemitic movement transformed a military case into an "affair" that split French intellectuals and politicians along with Paris society and attracted international attention. The Affair provided new energy to antisemitism in France. So powerful was antisemitic imagery and the violence it spawned during the Affair that some historians have remarked that antisemitism was stronger in France than in any other western or central European nation at the time. The eminent German historian George Mosse has written that "ironically, before the First World War, it was France, rather than Germany or Austria, that seemed likely to become the home of a successful racist and National Socialist movement. Germany had no Dreyfus Affair. . . ," 3 3 Yet, the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair coexisted with a higher degree of integration of Jews within the institutions of French society than was possible in Germany or Austria at the time. Indeed, neither Germany nor Austria could have had a Dreyfus Affair, since no German or Austrian Jew had achieved a parallel position in their respective armies. And, as Birnbaum's work has demonstrated conclusively, Dreyfus was not alone in his early career success nor did his conviction derail the careers of other Jews who had made their careers within the institutions of the French state.34 Although the Dreyfus Affair revealed the baselessness of the belief that antisemitism was destined to disappear as Jews acculturated and as education presumably diffused Enlightenment values among the masses, it did not have a lasting impact on the status of Jews in France. Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for high treason about a month after the army found evidence that someone on the General Staff was selling information to a German military attaché, Colonel Maximilien Von Schwarzkoppen, stationed in Paris.35 The evidence, a memorandum later called the bordereau, was retrieved from the German attaché's

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wastepaper basket by a French cleaning woman of the German embassy who was in the pay of the Statistical Section, the agency concerned with espionage and counterespionage. The handwritten but unsigned document listed military information that the writer, clearly a French officer, was supplying to the military attaché. The Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier, and his staff began to search for the spy in their ranks. Some historians have suggested that antisemitism played little or no role in the fingering of Dreyfus as the culprit. Dreyfus was a newcomer to the General Staff and was, moreover, not well liked. He was perceived by his colleagues as rather arrogant and standoffish. As upper-class Catholics who were antirepublican, army officers resented the entry into the Third Republic's officer corps of déclassé elements like Dreyfus. As an Alsatian with family in the annexed territory, he could be suspected of close ties with Germany, especially since he traveled to Alsace for visits with his brother.36 Yet anyone familiar with antisemitic tropes cannot fail to recognize that Dreyfus's Jewishness predisposed his colleagues to seeing him as the traitor in their midst. After all, popular antisemitic writing challenged the claim of Jews living in France to be truly French; citizenship provided no guarantee of belonging to the nation. 37 Caricatures of Jewish financiers from the period immediately preceding the Dreyfus Affair, for example, depicted them as foreigners by virtue of their inability to speak French properly—they had recognizably German accents.38 Moreover, antisemites, as well as simple Catholics, had no difficulty associating Jews with treason, for Judas, as the betrayer of Jesus, was a quintessential representation of "the Jew." One antisemite in 1892. described the Jews in terms of their connection with Judas: "Judas is their type, their prototype, their archetype, or, if one prefers, the definitive paradigm of the ignoble and eternal conjugations of their avarice. . . ." 39 Aside from the fact that he was a Jew from Alsace, Alfred Dreyfus had no characteristics that would lead to his suspicion as a spy. Born in 1859 in Mulhouse, the youngest of the nine children of Raphael and Jeanette Libman Dreyfus, Alfred grew up in the comfortable economic circumstances that his father had attained as the owner of a cotton mill.40 Raphael Dreyfus, a former broker, and his wife Jeanette, a former seamstress, aspired to provide their children with an education that would prepare them for economic success and full participation in French cultural life. Although they themselves had been raised in a milieu in which Yiddish and German predominated, they insisted that their children master French. For the two youngest children, Alfred and his brother Mathieu, it was their native language. After the annexation of Alsace, the two

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boys studied in Paris collèges as boarding students, and Alfred obtained admission to the prestigious École Polytechnique, where he chose a military career as a mark of the gratitude to France that he shared with other French Jews. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the artillery, Alfred received favorable evaluations, despite his Alsatian accent, slender build, and nearsightedness, and was soon promoted. A fellow Jewish officer of considerable wealth introduced Dreyfus to his sister, Lucie Hadamard, and in April 1890, the two were married by Zadoc Kahn, the Grand Rabbi of France, in the Gothic-style premier Paris synagogue on the Rue de la Victoire. Like other Juifs d'état, Dreyfus acknowledged his Jewishness as a matter of course and maintained a circle of Jewish friends and relatives. The family settled in an apartment in Paris's affluent first arrondissement, and in the first years of their marriage Lucie gave birth to a son and a daughter. Graduating near the top of his class from the École de Guerre in January 1893, Dreyfus began a term as a probationer on the General Staff of the army, despite the fact that he had lodged a protest with the commanding officer of the École de Guerre against one member of the school's examining staff, General Pierre Bonnefond, who was said to have commented that he "did not want a Jew on the General Staff." 41 Dreyfus's arrest in 1894 came as a shock, brutally interrupting what had been a disciplined, and smooth, trajectory into the haute bourgeoisie. Once suspicions had settled on Dreyfus, he was ordered to produce a sample of his handwriting, and not surprisingly, it was deemed sufficiently similar to the handwriting on the bordereau to result in Dreyfus's immediate arrest and incarceration. He was held incommunicado until the initial investigation was completed in the first week of December. His arrest and subsequent court martial might have proceeded with little fanfare had Edouard Drumont not decided to exploit the event to expose the power of French Jewry even within an institution like the army that was the virtual symbol of France and its traditional values. The army wished to keep the matter secret, but Major Hubert Henry, an antisemitic officer connected with the Statistical Section who would play a central role in the Affair, informed the Libre Parole, the popular antisemitic newspaper that Drumont had founded in 1892, of Dreyfus's arrest. On November 1, the Libre Parole named Dreyfus as the traitor, adding, "The affair will be hushed up because this officer is a Jew . . . He was arrested two weeks ago. He has made a full confession. There is absolute proof that he sold our military secrets to Germany." 42 The charge that Dreyfus's Jewish connections would lead to the stifling of

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information about the case stimulated official zealousness and the determination to secure his conviction as expeditiously as possible. Dreyfus's court martial was held in closed session in December; he was convicted and sentenced to military degradation and deportation for life to Devil's Island. Despite efforts to convince him to confess, he persisted in maintaining his innocence.43 Dreyfus's degradation ceremony in January 1895 occasioned an outburst of popular antisemitism likely to shake the self-confidence of French Jewry. Before a crowd of twenty thousand observers kept at a distance, Dreyfus was stripped of the insignia on his uniform and cap and his sword was broken. He was led bareheaded before the assembled troops. To the journalists and officials who were witnessing the ceremony, he called out, "Tell the whole of France that I am an innocent man! " 44 Unmoved by his protestations of innocence, the crowd around the square shouted, "Death to the traitor! Death to the Jews!" 45 Viewing the ceremony as the Paris correspondent of the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl found his long-standing concern with antisemitism reinforced. As he later mused, "If such things could happen in republican, modern civilized France, a century after the Declaration of Human Rights," then only their restoration to their own land offered the Jews a solution to their problem of permanent alienation. Understanding fully the sensibility of a successful Jew, Herzl knew instinctively that Dreyfus could not have committed treason.46 Only a handful of people, however, were so convinced that Dreyfus was the victim of a miscarriage of justice that they devoted themselves to reversing the judgment against him and securing his return from exile. Foremost among them, in addition to his wife Lucie, was his brother Mathieu, who immediately hired a conservative Catholic lawyer, Edgar Demange. Upon being given access to the dossier compiled by the army on the eve of Dreyfus's court martial in December, Demange was sufficiently persuaded of Dreyfus's innocence to stay with the case until the officer's vindication in 1906. Attempting to stem the tide of the ongoing antisemitic campaign of the Libre Parole and the Croix, Mathieu Dreyfus sought out army officers who might testify on his brother's behalf and, both before and after the court martial, assiduously contacted journalists and politicians—all to no avail. After months with no success, he took up a suggestion that he find a writer who might place Dreyfus's case before the court of public opinion. The writer he selected was Bernard Lazare, a young intellectual of anarchist sympathies, who had attracted attention in the Paris literary world. Although Lazare, himself of Jewish

Antisemitism and the Dreyfus Affair

origins, had no sympathy for wealthy Jews and in an 1894 book had attributed the development of French antisemitism at least in part to the faults of the Jews themselves, the explosion of antisemitism that surrounded Dreyfus's arrest, conviction, and degradation made him receptive to Mathieu's request to write a pamphlet in defense of his brother. And with the few documents he had, Mathieu was able to persuade Lazare of Alfred's innocence.47 After a year and a half, during which the antisemites controlled information about the case and used it to attack the government, Lazare's wellresearched pamphlet, Une erreur judiciaire: la vérité sur l'Affaire Dreyfus (A judicial error: The truth about the Dreyfus Affair) was published and distributed in November 1896 (at the expense of the Dreyfus family) to all members of Parliament, important journalists, and other prominent persons. The pamphlet, which included the full text of the bordereau, opened an offensive against the antisemitic interpretation of the case. Independently, within the ranks of the army, the consensus as to Dreyfus's guilt had been shaken. In the spring of 1896 the recently appointed head of the Statistical Section, an Alsatian officer named Georges Picquart, pieced together fragments of a telegram (the petit bleu), retrieved by the dedicated cleaning woman in the pay of the Statistical Section. When reconstituted, the document, addressed to Major Marie-Charles Esterhazy, implicated him as a German spy.48 By August, Picquart had identified Esterhazy not simply as an additional German spy, but as the author of the bordereau. Although Picquart shared many of the antisemitic attitudes of his time and background, he was a man of the utmost integrity, and he could not keep quiet about the implications of his discovery. After reporting to his superiors, Generals Raoul de Boisdeffre and Charles-Arthur Gonse, he was ordered to "keep the two affairs separate" and prevented from setting a trap for Esterhazy.49 Shortly thereafter the two generals ordered Picquart to leave Paris so as to divert him from what they deemed his unseemly pursuit of the matters of Esterhazy and Dreyfus. Recognizing that he had antagonized the General Staff, whose concern for the reputation of the army, not to mention their own careers, far exceeded their interest in the suffering of a potentially innocent man, Picquart prepared a statement to be opened in case of his own death and confided his findings to his lawyer. Unbeknownst to Picquart, his colleague in the Statistical Section, Major Henry, realizing how insubstantial the evidence against Dreyfus was as well as how dangerous were Picquart's findings, had begun to fabricate documents that would prove Dreyfus's guilt and discredit Picquart's material.

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While Dreyfus endured the physical and mental deprivation of his imprisonment on Devil's Island, during 1897 a small but growing band of intellectuals and politicians became his supporters, the first Dreyfusards. In addition to members of his family and Bernard Lazare, they included the politicians Joseph Reinach, Charles Scheurer-Kestner, and most importantly Georges Clemenceau, who was also the political editor of L'Aurore, the young writer Léon Blum, Lucien Herr, the respected librarian of the École Normale, Picquart's lawyer Louis Leblois, and faculty and students of the university and the École Normale. Of this list, only Lazare, Reinach, and Blum were Jews. Lucie Dreyfus's published petitions and Mathieu Dreyfus's unremitting efforts to speak to journalists and politicians had slowly yielded results. At the end of the year there occurred a series of events that strengthened the hands of those who would not let Dreyfus slip into obscurity. Upon leaving his post in France in November 1897, German military attaché Von Schwarzkoppen declared to French President François Félix Faure that he had never had any contacts with Dreyfus. A few days later Matthieu Dreyfus published an open letter to the Minister of War accusing Esterhazy of having written the bordereau. And the popular writer Émile Zola committed himself passionately to Dreyfus's cause, publishing newspaper articles and pamphlets.50 The turning point in the Dreyfus Affair was the publication on January 13, 1898 in Georges Clemenceau's newspaper L'Aurore of Zola's "J'Accuse," a powerful indictment of French justice in the form of an open letter addressed to the president of France.51 Zola penned this cri de coeur immediately after the acquittal of Major Esterhazy in a court martial on the charge of espionage. The acquittal was no surprise. As the Italian military attaché Alessandro Panizzardi had written to his friend Von Schwarzkoppen on the last day of 1897, "Everybody believes that the famous affair will end during the first week of 1898 with an acquittal of Esterhazy . . . The government has interests which are too great for it not to arrange things thus." 52 Zola accused the army officers of conducting a massive cover-up, finally masterminding Esterhazy's acquittal because his "conviction inevitably involved a revision of the Dreyfus trial; and this the staff was determined to avoid at any cost." 53 The honor of the army, as they conceived it, prevailed over the right of the individual to justice. But, Zola contended, the Dreyfus Affair had revealed the rot at the heart of the army: " [W]hat a nest of base intrigues, gossip, and dilapidation has this sacred asylum, entrusted with the fate

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of the country, become! . . . It is a crime to exploit patriotism for works of hatred, and, finally, it is a crime to make the sword the modern god, when all human science is at work on the coming temple of truth and justice." 54 Zola concluded his lengthy exposé with an accusation explicitly designed to lead to his own trial for defamation: "I accuse . . . the first council of war of having violated the law by condemning an accused person on the strength of a secret document, and I accuse the second council of war of having covered this illegality, in obedience to orders, in committing in its turn the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man." 5 5 Zola was, indeed, brought to trial. But the immediate consequence of "J'Accuse" was an outburst of antisemitic riots, that began within days in metropolitan France as well as Algeria. Although historians traditionally deemphasized the scope and significance of the unrest, Steven Wilson's thorough investigation of the riots has made that neglect no longer feasible. He has documented sixty-nine disturbance in three waves of violence that lasted from mid-January through the end of February 1898. 56 The riots occurred in fifty-five locations, including multiple, sporadic riots in Paris toward the end of January and during Zola's trial in February. Concentrated in urban areas in both the east and west of France, where the nationalist Right wielded considerable electoral strength and patriotic sentiment ran strong, the disturbances varied from small, brief incidents of shouting of antisemitic slogans to wild disorder prolonged for several days. In about thirty locales the riots were serious: they involved crowds of demonstrators, troops had to be called in to restore order, and damage to Jewish property occurred. In Paris on February 1 1 , for example, a crowd of one thousand attacked the Dreyfus family home. Most of the extreme violence occurred in Algeria, where, in Algiers, 158 Jewish-owned shops were looted and burned and two Jews were killed while the army stood by in what can only be called a pogrom. But even in metropolitan France, the serious riots resulted in the occasional breaking of windows or looting of Jewish stores, attacks on synagogues and rabbis' homes as well as, in nine places, physical injury to Jews. Although Zola's verbal assault on the army triggered the riots, local Catholic organizations, antisemitic meetings and speeches, and the rightwing and antisemitic press, particularly the Libre Parole and the Croix, played an important role in fomenting the violence. In Paris the French Antisemitic League, founded in 1897, waged an active campaign that

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targeted Jewish shops. At a time of economic recession and political confusion these political associations were able to play upon pervasive antisemitic stereotypes with a potent combination of patriotic nationalist and antimodern rhetoric. They were especially successful among the students and young clerks and workers who predominated among the demonstrators. The riots took place in cities and towns with a Jewish population; the physical presence of Jews provided an actual target for resentment. As Wilson has noted, "Jews did not 'cause' antisemitism, but they were its inevitable victims." 57 The conviction of Zola for libel in February 1898 did not lay the Affair to rest. Instead, the drama played itself out in the courts, the press, and among the French intellectual and political elite. The historian Michael Burns has demonstrated that the passions surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, and particularly its political implications, did not penetrate into the French countryside, where peasants were often ignorant of issues that filled the front pages of the Parisian press. But the Affair split the French political and cultural world centered in the capital and threatened to bring down the Republic. 58 There were numerous episodes which mobilized the opposing forces: the discovery of Major Henry's forgery and his subsequent suicide in 1898, followed by a massive campaign conducted by the Libre Parole to finance his widow's lawsuit against Joseph Reinach and a public subscription for a memorial fund to honor this "martyr" of the Affair; Dreyfus's second court martial, held in Rennes in 1899, that resulted in a second conviction "with extenuating circumstances" and Dreyfus's acceptance of a pardon; and the successful Dreyfusard campaign to eliminate Catholic influence in education that began in 1900 with the dissolution of the Assumptionist order and culminated in 1905 with the separation of church and state. The Affair was not formally terminated until 1906, when the Court of Appeals annulled the Rennes verdict and Alfred Dreyfus was reinstated in the army (though promoted from captain only to the rank of major while Picquart became a brigadier general), and named a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. In the decade preceding Dreyfus's exoneration, the division of the politically conscious citizens of the country and their conflicting definitions of the nation and patriotism found expression in the establishment of extraparliamentary voluntary associations. The Dreyfusards established the League of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, while the anti-Dreyfusards revived the dormant League of Patriots. For the former, the Dreyfus Affair strengthened their commitment to the individual rights proclaimed by the Revolution and an acceptance within the body politic

Antisemitism and the Dreyfus Affair

of all those who assumed the obligations of citizenship; for the latter, the Affair reaffirmed their sense that their France, the France of peasant, nobility, and Church, rooted in the legacy of Joan of Arc, was being eroded by the very values of the Revolution. These values were incarnated in the Jews, who sapped France's traditional strength while remaining of necessity alien to the fatherland. The popular intellectual Maurice Barrés voiced this position clearly in his 1902 Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme: The Jews do not have a country in the sense that we understand it. For us, the fatherland is our soil and our ancestors, the land of our dead. For them, it is the place where their self-interest is best pursued. Their intellectuals thus arrive at their famous definition: " T h e fatherland, it is an idea!" But which ideaP That which is most useful for them—for example, the idea that all men are brothers, that nationality is a prejudice to be destroyed. . . . 5 9

Both sides used imagery of Truth in presenting their case, but the meaning of Truth was contested. The status of French Jewry was inevitably damaged by the placement of Jews at the center of a political battle for the soul of France. Using the mass media to great advantage, antisemitic activists during the Dreyfus Affair unremittingly disseminated representations of Jews that subverted the Jews' self-perception as loyal citizens and respectable members of the bourgeoisie. Although both Dreyfusards and their opponents took advantage of the development of artistic journal illustration, published in a highly politicized press, to present their positions, the antisemitic visual propaganda had a visceral impact that was difficult to neutralize, certainly not by representations of Truth as a naked woman or of Dreyfus as straight-backed hero.60 Antisemitic caricatures that proliferated during the Affair depicted the Jews as hook-nosed, fat capitalists, whose physiognomy, like their accent, was foreign. Rich male Jews sometimes sported a crown to indicate that through their wealth they had assumed the prerogatives of royalty. Dreyfus the traitor was portrayed as Judas. In a print published in an antisemitic journal, one aristocratic antisemite, the Countess Sibylle Martel de Janville, who wrote and drew cartoons under the names " G y p " and "Bob," depicted Jews as rats, happily consuming the cheese of France while the Republic slept.61 Particularly disgusting was a series of more than fifty anti-Dreyfusard political posters, entitled Musée des Horreurs, that presented the heads of prominent Dreyfusards attached to animal bodies. Although Jews figured as only a few subjects of these posters, their faces were caricatured with hooked

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noses and negroid features while the features of the non-Jewish politicians and journalists were not distorted.62 In addition to posters and newspaper illustrations, both sides in the Affair produced propaganda presenting their positions in popular form—playing cards, postcards, comic strips, and board games—as well as Jewish New Year greeting cards designed to be sent to Captain Dreyfus. 63 The antisemitic popular material produced by the anti-Dreyfusards widely disseminated gross caricatures of Jews, including the Grand Rabbi of France as well as the Rothschilds and Jewish politicians along with the stereotypical Jewish bourgeois. It is likely that such visual material confirmed for many in France that the Jews were fundamentally "other," in speech, appearance, and sensibility. French Jews were not prepared for the virulence of the antisemitism that emerged in the 1880s and became a powerful force during the Dreyfus Affair. During the centennial of the Revolution, Grand Rabbi Zadoc Kahn had articulated, in response to evidence of antisemitism in French society, the confidence that French Jews felt in the legacy of the Revolution: "France will not repudiate her past, her traditions, her principles which constitute the best of her moral patrimony. . . ." 64 Like most western European Jews in the postemancipation period, French Jewry had developed an ideology that posited no conflict between French citizenship and Jewish identity. Indeed, the cultivation of Jewish values enhanced one's loyalty to France. Moreover; the status of the consistories under the control of the state apparatus mandated that the organized Jewish community refrain from political stances. Only when the rights of Jews as Jews were curtailed did the consistorial leadership feel empowered to intervene to protect its constituents. Despite the rampant antisemitism of the Affair, there was no consensus that Dreyfus had been victimized as a Jew. In fact, many critics and historians have attacked the passivity of French Jewish leaders during the Affair. They share the interpretation of Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, who wrote in a contemporary newspaper article that the failure of French Jewish leaders to act vigorously on behalf of Dreyfus was evidence not only of fear but also of the deleterious impact of assimilation. At the time of Dreyfus's degradation in 189 5, for example, the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Meliz, published in Russia, presented a sharp critique of the self-delusion of emancipated French Jewry: "Our brethren in France, asleep with storm round about them, will still not stop being in their Eden of pleasant dreams. If they would only wake from their deep sleep now, they would see the heavy cloud coming up on the sky of their lives, but they lie there . . . dreaming." 65

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There were French critics of the Jewish community as well. Reflecting upon the Affair, a contemporary, the poet and ardent Dreyfusard Charles Péguy, wrote in 1910, "It is among Jews that the Dreyfus family, the emerging Dreyfus Affair, and emergent Dreyfusism encountered at first the greatest resistance." 66 A generation later, in a comparison of the Jews of his own day with those at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, Léon Blum blasted the apolitical Jewish bourgeoisie, whose assimilation manifested itself in the fear of loss of class privilege: "The rich Jews, the Jews of the middle class, the Jewish functionaries feared the struggle undertaken for Dreyfus exactly as they fear today the struggle undertaken against fascism . . . They imagined that the antisemitic passion would be turned aside by their cowardly neutrality. . . ." 6 7 In a less critical mood, Blum understood Jewish reluctance to become involved in the Affair as motivated by concern that signs of "Jewish solidarity" would merely fan antisemitism. Antisemitism thereby paralyzed the political will of Jews. These critiques are founded on observable behavior. The Jewish elite of the Central Consistory, for example, seem to have been unaware of the implications of the Affair; consistorial minutes indicate that they did not formally discuss any aspect of the cause célebre during their meetings of the time.68 Nor did the Alliance Israélite Universelle, so vigilant about manifestations of antisemitism abroad, intervene in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, presumably since his case, if he were innocent, was one of injustice committed against an individual, and not necessarily because that individual was a Jew. According to contemporary police reports cited by one historian, "studied indifference" seems to have characterized most Jews, at least insofar as they interacted with public authorities. By referring to the impact upon them of the riots of 189 8 some memoirists suggest, though, that the perceived indifference of Jews merely masked their fear and angry confusion. 69 Moreover, their historical experience as a minority had taught Jews that behind-the-scenes maneuvering was generally more effective than public display of assertiveness or resistance. Historical evidence indicates, however, that French Jewish reaction to the Affair was far more varied and complex than earlier assessments have conveyed. In the first place, the roster of early Dreyfusards, pace family members, includes many Jews: Lazare, Reinach, Blum, as well as numerous intellectuals, such as Marcel Proust, Daniel Halévy, Julien Benda, Edmond Fleg, and the Natanson brothers, editors of the influential Revue blanche. The Jewish press was not constrained by the factors that influenced consistorial spokesmen. Both the Archives israélites

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and the Univers israélite followed the Affair closely. They felt no compunction against attacking the Central Consistory for its reluctance to criticize the failure of French institutions to redress Dreyfus's situation and to suppress antisemitism. As a police dossier reported of a conversation at the end of 1897 with Isaiah Levaillant, editor of the Univers israélite and a former prefect and Minister of the Interior, "He does not conceal that there is now among the Jews a feeling that they must fight. . . ." 7 0 In 1903, when the socialist Jean Jaurès, a passionate though late convert to support for Dreyfus, sought to press for a judicial reconsideration of his case, Levaillant argued in the Univers israélite that the lesson of the Affair was the need for the political mobilization of Jews not only in support of Dreyfus but also in defense of liberty and equality more generally. Moreover, the Jewish newspapers assertively blamed the Catholic church for its dissemination of antisemitic attitudes and for its involvement in promoting a vision of France that excluded Jews as equal citizens. By the end of the Affair, the Jewish press had come to the conclusion that it was necessary for church and state to be separated, both to strengthen the Republic and to stimulate the development of Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish self-defense, constrained by the consistorial system. Most significantly, even some of those associated with consistorial circles tried to find an appropriate vehicle for expressing their support for Dreyfus and overturning his conviction. Even before Dreyfusard efforts had begun, in December 1894 Grand Rabbi Zadoc Kahn and several prominent Jews associated with the Central Consistory and the Alliance Israélite Universelle established a Committee of Defense against Antisemitism. Although Kahn and Narcisse Leven, the head of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, were unable to muster support for a political committee that would act publicly, the defense committee subsidized the efforts of others in the press and in electoral campaigns, functioning in secrecy until 190Z. When the antisemitism of the Affair was on the wane, it published a document that presented its activities in combating antisemitism as the efforts of "grateful sons of the Revolution." 71 The self-presentation of the defense committee reflected the prevalent view of the French Jewish elite that their citizenship and religio-ethnic identity were in harmony, even in the trying conditions of the Dreyfus Affair. They could best defend Jewish interests when they acted as French citizens, participating in the political process to help realize France's highest ideals as embodied in the legacy of the Revolution. Thus, many Jews were active in, and financially supported, the League of the Rights

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HI

of Man, which combined specific support for Dreyfus with a general commitment, as its statutes stated, "to combat all forms of intolerance and arbitrary rule." 72 Despite the growing acceptability of antisemitism in the 1880s and 1890s and the vulnerability that French Jews must have felt, however briefly, as a result of the riots of 1898, it was thus plausible for the Jewish community to locate its particular experience within the broad context of French politics. They could see their victimization as merely an unfortunate part of the general assault on the Republic and on capitalism. Although Zionists and eastern European Jews seem, in retrospect, to have understood the potential threat and popular appeal of antisemitism far better than did the Jews of fin-de-siecle France, it is important not to read the history of the period through the lens of the Holocaust. French Jews of the time saw the state as their protector. The antisemitism that they encountered did not derive from official sources but from political sectors opposed to republican institutions. As the case against Dreyfus unraveled in the late 1890s, significant factions within the political as well as within the intellectual elite, along with many Protestants, rallied to the Dreyfusard cause. Moreover, the government itself increasingly viewed antisemitism as a threat to public order and mobilized its forces to suppress its violent expression and to diminish the effectiveness of the organized antisemitic leagues. Although antisemitism continued to appear in the judiciary and the army, and most obviously among municipal authorities in Algeria, the central institutions of the state continued to protect the Jews. By 1899 the government was eager to be done with the divisiveness and the negative international publicity generated by the Affair, especially as France prepared for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Radical republicans, who were hostile to the Catholic church, supplanted the moderates who had predominated in the first three decades of the Third Republic. The interests of republican France and her Jews thus increasingly converged, culminating in Dreyfus's pardon in 1900 and ultimate exoneration in 1906. From the vantage point of French Jewry, the system had worked: the rights of Jews as citizens had been protected through the normal, nonsectarian operation of French politics. It is difficult to assess with any certitude the impact of the Affair upon French Jewry. Indeed, Jews likely experienced the Affair differently, depending upon their age, class, and political ideology. For some intellectuals the Affair prompted a reexamination of their commitment to full assimilation and a recovery of the Jewish cultural heritage that had earlier seemed irrelevant to their lives as French citizens. They struggled to

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define for themselves as well as for their readers the meaning of their differentness in French society. That most significant of Dreyfusards, Bernard Lazare, the former anarchist, was active in the formative years of the Zionist movement. As a result of the antisemitism experienced during the Affair, the writer Edmond Fleg began a lifelong exploration of Jewish sources and dedicated himself to presenting them in translation to a French audience. He also spoke out frequently in support of Zionism. In addition to addressing himself to Jewish themes, the poet and essayist André Spire became a supporter of Jewish nationalism. As Spire later wrote of the long-term impact of the Dreyfus Affair, "French Jews who had lost all contact with Jewish life, who were ignorant of virtually all of Jewish history began to study them with fervor. Instead of seeking, as before, to hide their Jewish souls . . . [they published] Jewish poems, Jewish novels, Jewish dramas and comedies." Fleg confirmed Spire's assessment. "It was the Dreyfus Affair which revived my Judaism," he commented. "I already had a literary career; one of my plays had been performed at the Comédie Française, another at the Opéra. I abandoned all that, devoured as I was by the Jewish question. I read all I could on that subject and I published my works." 7 3 Most Jews, of course, were neither intellectuals nor literary figures. Jews of the haute bourgeoisie, who had been integrated into the social milieu of their non-Jewish peers, experienced the years of the Dreyfus Affair as a period of social exclusion, as Marcel Proust depicted in his masterpiece A la Recherche du temps perdu. Needless to say, members of the Dreyfus family were shunned. All Jews confronted the possibility of public insult and ostracism. As Wilson documents, for example, " A t B e l f o r t . . . in December, 1897, Jews were openly insulted by army officers at one of the fashionable cafés in the town, a type of incident apparently fairly common in France during the Affair." 7 4 Jewish children were also bullied in school, and Jewish shopkeepers and salesmen felt the effect not only of social discrimination but also of economic boycott, encouraged by antisemitic organizations. The threat of encountering antisemitism led Jews to socialize more exclusively with each other, and Jews and non-Jews alike commented on the fact that the antisemitism of fin-de-siècle France promoted Jewish solidarity. Yet most French Jews seem not to have been affected in the long term by their encounter with the open and virulent antisemitic prejudice that flourished briefly during the Affair. In 1972 the elderly banker Georges Wormser, who had been an adolescent during the Affair and as an adult served as the president of the regional Paris consistory, informed me that

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antisemitism in his youth was neither visceral nor violent except in Algeria and among the followers of Drumont. He recalled fist fights in his lycée at the time of the Affair "but more in fun than in passion. My 'antisemitic' comrades of those days later became friends of mine." Wormser's unproblematized retrospective reading of the Affair could be found in contemporary communal responses as well. In 1906 the Archives israélites editorialized, "The Dreyfus Affair has concluded for the Jews [Israélites] and its conclusion would make us love even more, were that possible, our dear country." Even the Univers israélite, whose editor Levaillant had counseled an attack on antisemitism rather than reticence, published an article that asserted that the Affair "had particularly fortunate results for our coreligionists, for in giving birth to the Dreyfus Affair, antisemitism had died." 75 After leaving his post at the Univers israélite, in 1907 Levaillant, then a member of the Central Consistory, expanded the paper's assertion that French antisemitism had suffered a mortal blow. In a lecture he explained that the decline of antisemitism could be traced to the recognition by republicans that antisemitism was a weapon aimed at the Republic itself, and not simply at the Jews. Implicitly he was acknowledging that while the French polity was tolerant of anti-Jewish prejudice in and of itself it could not accept antisemitism once it was reconceptualized as an assault against the values of the Revolution and the foundation of the Republic. In the years between Levaillant's lecture and the outbreak of World War I, however, antisemitism as an organized, independent movement may have waned, but antisemitism as a cultural prejudice and as a component of anti-Republic nationalism did not. Antisemitic stereotypes abounded in French literature, and right-wing nationalist organizations like the Action Française, founded at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, kept alive the animus of political antisemitism.76 French Jews were resilient, and they recovered quickly from the shock of the Dreyfus Affair. Even Captain Dreyfus himself, though his career had been derailed by his conviction and his health impaired by his imprisonment, remained convinced until his death that his love of France had not been misplaced. In his last letter from Devil's Island in 1899 he had written to Lucie, " M y confidence in the Justice of my country is the same. It will be the honor of this noble France, the honor of our dear army, to finally arrive at a solution to this horrific judicial error. . . ." 7 7 His faith in France never wavered, and French Jews shared his patriotism. For all the tensions it aroused, the Dreyfus Affair did not long pose a direct conflict between loyalty to France and commitment to Jewry, nor

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did it challenge the definition of French Jewish identity. In the twentieth century a number of critical ideologies and events—in particular, the emergence of Zionism and the Vichy government's state-sponsored persecution during World War II—undermined the certitude of French Jewry that they could easily combine the Jewish and French components of their identity. By the time of the Dreyfus Affair the bearers of a significant challenge to the self-perception of French Jews had already arrived in the person of Jewish immigrants from the countries of eastern Europe.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Immigration and the Remaking of French Jewry, 1881-1918

A t the very time when French Jews were enjoying their status as L \ members of the bourgeoisie and reveling in their manifest accep-A- S t a n c e in state institutions and their participation in French economic and cultural life, they faced a twofold challenge. The rise to prominence of antisemitism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century threatened most blatantly their self-perception as acculturated French citizens who no longer had to defend the legitimacy of their claim to equality. And the arrival of immigrants from eastern Europe destabilized their carefully cultivated self-presentation within French society. Both posed questions as to the nature of their identity and obligations as Jews.

"5

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Immigration and Remaking of French Jewry

Despite France's reputation as a haven for political refugees, traditionally the French have not seen themselves as a nation of immigrants. In contrast to the United States, the historical literature on migration and the immigrant experience in France remains meager. This is the case as well with regard to the history of French Jewry. Although successive waves of migrants—from Alsace-Lorraine to Paris and the provincial cities of France, from eastern Europe, and from North Africa and the Levant—have swelled France's Jewish population and reshaped the country's Jewish culture as well as the image of the Jew in French society, the immigrant Jewish experience in all its variety has attracted the attention of few scholars. 1 Yet no understanding of the development of French Jewry is possible without consideration of the different cultures that have interacted, often contentiously, to define the contours of Jewish culture and community in France in the twentieth century and to negotiate the forms of expression of Jewishness within French society. Throughout the nineteenth century Jewish migrants from the east, mostly from central Europe and occasionally from Poland, then part of the Russian empire, trickled into France, settling in the northeastern provinces and making their way to Paris. According to the census of 1872, at least 23.5 percent of the Jews living in Paris were of foreign origin, with 1 1 percent from central Europe and 6.5 percent from Poland and Romania. 2 Only in the years 1 8 8 1 and 1882, when the Russian pogroms led to the massing of desperate refugees in the town of Brody and the involvement of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in their resettlement, did the question of east European Jewry assume center stage for the Jews of France. Just a small number of Yiddish-speaking Jews, of foreign speech, dress, and demeanor, however, settled in France, virtually all in Paris, in the 1880s and 1890s. To be sure, immigrant Jewish workers established mutual aid societies in those years, and a group of radical Jewish workers published an open letter in 1898 expressing their distress at the failure of the Socialist Party to support the Dreyfusard cause.3 Yet France was the destination of a relatively small contingent of Jewish immigrants, in large part because, unlike England, for example, it was not a link in the overseas chain of migration. In comparative terms, the migration of east European Jews to France occurred late. Although almost two million east European Jews arrived in the United States between 1 8 8 1 and 1 9 1 4 , and some 120,000 in England in the same period, the corresponding figures for France are an estimated 44,000 nationwide, of whom 80 percent lived in Paris.4 And the surge in migration to France occurred primarily after 1905, with the failure of

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revolution in Russia and the imposition by Great Britain of restrictions upon immigration. Because of its involvement with the countries of North Africa and the Levant and because of the impact of the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in promoting French language and culture, France attracted immigrants from North Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, and Palestine along with the more numerous east European Ashkenazim. Before World War I these Sephardi immigrants, however, made up only 15 percent of the total Jewish immigration to France.5 Proud of their culture and their facility with French, they tended not to associate with their fellow Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. The latter represented immigrant Jews in French public opinion. They challenged the financial resources as well as the ideological presuppositions of native French Jewry. Although refugees from the pogroms became the visible symbol of Jewish migration westward, the emigration of Jews from eastern Europe was not fueled primarily by violent outbreaks of antisemitism but by lack of economic opportunity. Even in Romania and Austrian Galicia, where no pogroms occurred though Jews did suffer from discrimination, streams of young migrants headed to the New World and to destinations less distant. Moreover, Jews from the east had appeared in western countries well before the pogroms, during the reign of the liberal czar Alexander II, when expectations of improvement in the political and economic status of the Jews were widespread. Economic factors were the major stimulus of emigration from all the countries of eastern Europe. In Russia, where the largest concentration of Jews in Europe lived in towns and cities in the Pale of Settlement, the westernmost provinces of the empire, to which most Jews were confined, the economic and political developments of the second half of the nineteenth century eroded the particular role that Jews had played in the Russian economy as intermediaries between the countryside and the town or city.6 Russia provided the majority of Jewish immigrants to France as to other western countries. As a nonpeasant population with a long commercial tradition, Jews had specialized in marketing the serfs' produce and in the petty commerce of storekeeping and innkeeping. With the development of the railroad, markets were no longer defined by the distance that a wagon could cover. Regional markets soon replaced the local markets in which Jews had played a major role. The emancipation of the serfs in 18 61 also gave them unprecedented mobility that reduced their dependence on Jewish middlemen. Finally, the government encouraged the Russian nobility to engage in commercial pursuits, providing them with monopolies

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that excluded Jews from sectors of the economy in which they had been active. The government also curtailed Jewish rights to engage in such activities as innkeeping. Although Jews increasingly turned to artisanry and to a lesser extent industrial labor, they found few possibilities in these areas, in part because both Russian and Jewish factory owners preferred Russian to Jewish employees. The latter were perceived as less docile workers.7 The shrinkage of the traditional Jewish economy, fueled by nationalist considerations as well as by technological and political developments, occurred as the Jewish population was expanding and concentrating in the cities. During the nineteenth century the Jewish population of the Russian empire experienced a demographic explosion. At the beginning of the century there were some 800,000 Jews in Russia; at the end of the century, that number had reached more than five million. Through natural increase the Jewish population tripled in size in the fifty years between 1847 and 1897. 8 Consequently, more and more Jews entering the urban labor market had to compete for fewer jobs. Young Jews seeking greater opportunities than were available in the restrictive economic and social circumstances of their homelands gathered their meager resources and headed west. There prosperity was deemed a good possibility, if not a certainty. Although the United States was the chosen destination of the lion's share of the emigrants, France, too, was perceived as a land of liberty and opportunity. The phrase "Lebett vi got in Frankraykh " (to live like God in France) summed up the immigrants' fond hopes for life in their new country.9 The reality they confronted, however, was hardly paradise. Arriving in Paris via train, they had to find a job and a place to live in a city in which their speech and dress marked them as foreigners. Following the pattern of other immigrants, they settled together in neighborhoods whose poor housing stock made rents affordable. In Paris immigrant Jews lived primarily in a quarter they called in Yiddish the "Pletzl" (little square), which was located on the right bank in the third and fourth arrondissements in the Marais Saint-Paul district. As early as the census of 1809, it had become the site of Paris's first modern Jewish community and later was home to migrants from Alsace-Lorraine.10 Immigrant communities also emerged in Montmartre and in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine of the eleventh arrondissement, while Jewish students, like their French peers, congregated on the left bank in the Latin Quarter. With time the immigrants diffused outward from the Pletzl. In the period between World Wars I and II Belleville, a neighborhood in the contigu-

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ous eleventh arrondissement, became the largest immigrant Jewish community in Paris. The Pletzl and other immigrant areas of settlement were poor and crowded quarters, where Yiddish signs, kosher butchers, and Jewish restaurants gave visible expression to the foreignness of their residents. One observer of the Pletzl in 1 9 1 2 reported to New York's popular Yiddish newspaper, Der Forverts: "The alleys are frightfully dirty, the houses mostly old ruins . . . Without exaggeration one can find from twelve to fifteen persons living in two small rooms . . . The largest and best room serves as the atelier [workroom]; one eats where one can and sleeps in a dark hole without windows." 1 1 A study of immigrant Jewish capmakers of the same year commented that their lodgings in the Pletzl "had neither air nor light, [but] narrow and dirty staircases, running water only on the ground floor, rare and hideous water closets—all the poor living conditions [which made] this quarter . . . one of the eventual homes of every epidemic that reaches the capital." 12 Those Jews who emigrated from Russia and Romania to settle in the slums of Paris came largely from the artisanal working class that had emerged in the towns and cities of eastern Europe. In contrast to Jewish immigrants to the United States, however, they were somewhat more likely to be skilled workers and professionals and much less likely to be unskilled laborers and servants. 13 Proportionally more Jewish men than women immigrated to France than to the United States, perhaps because immigrant men assumed they might return home. In France two-thirds of the Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe from 1 8 7 2 to 1907 were male, as opposed to 56 percent in America. 14 Finally, there were two distinct immigrant communities that were characterized by their cultural attributes. France attracted to its universities a relatively large number of young Jewish men and women whose opportunities for higher education were restricted in their countries of origin and who were recruited by the University of Paris. More attuned to the norms of the Russian intelligentsia, they were less religiously observant than other immigrants, less likely to speak Yiddish, and more au courant of the latest in radical Russian politics. Similarly, Jewish painters and sculptors such as Amedeo Modigliani, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall, and Chaim Soutine—to name only the best known—were drawn to Paris as the capital of the international art world. 15 To support themselves and their families, immigrant Jewish men found jobs in those expanding sectors of the economy in which they had some skill, in particular various facets of the apparel industry. A variety

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Immigration and Remaking of French Jewry

of sources indicate that from one-third to more than one-half of the immigrants worked in women's and men's wear, in capmaking, in shoemaking, and in the production of furs. A significant minority were located in other artisan trades, such as furniture making, the metal industry, leather work, and rubber raincoats. Finally, about one-quarter of male immigrant heads of households supported themselves in commerce, especially once they had settled into their new community. Two different sources indicate that before World War I, however, fewer than 10 percent of immigrant Jews engaged in peddling and other forms of street trade. It is difficult to assess whether peddling was a starting point for upward mobility into the world of established retail and wholesale commerce or the desperate strategy of an unskilled and unemployed immigrant. 16 It is clear, however, that virtually all Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, with the exception of university students, found employment as skilled and semiskilled workers or as small merchants, adapting their skills to the needs of the local labor market. Women worked as well, but their work is not well documented because census takers and investigators tended to ignore it. Some commentators noted that wives worked by their husbands' side in small businesses and did piecework at home because their income was necessary for the family's survival. In 1911 the Asile Israélite opened a day-care center for children of working mothers as well as a workshop to provide employment to mothers. Statistics from the interwar period indicate that between a quarter and a third of job-seeking applicants to a Jewish social welfare agency were female. 17 Whatever their trade, immigrant Jews were enmeshed in a dense network of social, cultural, and economic relationships with their fellow Jewish immigrants. The immigrants did not constitute a homogeneous group; they differed by class and political ideology as well as in their levels of religious practice. Yet by virtue of their shared language and immigrant status as well as their common place of residence they formed a community perceived as distinct by both the immigrants themselves and by outside observers. French society expressed ambivalence to foreigners and especially to Jews, whose concentration in Paris made them particularly visible to the media and who initially seemed slow to assimilate. Although France pursued an open-door policy toward refugees and migrants more generally and public spokesmen often depicted the Jewish victims of persecution with sympathy, organs of public opinion sometimes indulged in antisemitic rhetoric. A journal published by the Society of Historical and Ar-

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12,1

chaeological Studies of the Fourth Arrondissement, for example, in 1909 described the neighborhood in which immigrant Jews predominated as an "exotic quarter in the very heart of Paris [that] has a veritable cutthroat look. [Its residents] scarcely work but plunder each other . . . In infected slums entire families swarm in . . . promiscuity."18 The press, and especially antisemitic papers, regularly expressed concern about Russian immigrants as bearers of two types of disease—physical and political. As poor refugees from the east, they were viewed as dirty and infested with germs. More long-lasting was the perception that they were infected with the contagious virus of revolution. A police report on Russian refugees in Paris carried out shortly after the revolution of 1905 concluded that "all of them must be considered sympathetic to the Russian revolution."19 Even liberal groups generally sympathetic to the oppressed opposed the ethnic separatism of Jewish immigrants. In 1907 both the socialist paper L'Humanité and the League of the Rights of Man criticized the fact that four Paris public schools, located in the immigrant quarter, had a student body comprised almost exclusively of immigrants, in part because the schools made some accommodations to the parents' religious and cultural sensibilities. Classes did not meet on Saturday, as they traditionally did in French public schools, and a committee of Jewish women provided free kosher lunches to the children. L'Humanité found the voluntary segregation of these students reprehensible: "Separated from their neighborhood pals, these children retain their customs and their language; they form a closed caste and later . . . in the large Parisian city they will form a very distinct society scarcely penetrable by the customs of modern life . . . How can we be surprised at racial hatred when . . . the administration itself favors the particularist development of these races instead of seeking to facilitate their fusion, even from childhood."20 The paper called for the compulsory distribution of immigrant children among other public schools and for an end to the special aid provided by the Jewish community. The League of the Rights of Man also weighed in, protesting to the Minister of Public Instruction that the public toleration of the schools violated the religious neutrality of the state.21 The protest mounted by these two liberal elements in French society against schools that the Minister of Public Instruction himself praised for facilitating the acquisition of French language and customs by their students signaled a profound antipathy to immigrant distinctiveness on the Left as well as on the Right.

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Native Jews shared many of the prejudices of French society toward the immigrants. To be sure, they felt an obligation to provide assistance to the immigrants out of a sense of solidarity and because of their recognition that their own status was inextricably linked to real and perceived immigrant behavior. They viewed with concern the signs of immigrant Jewish differentness. At the 1 9 1 3 General Assembly of the Paris consistory the Baron Edmond de Rothschild criticized the new arrivals who "do not understand French customs . . . [who] remain among themselves, retain their primitive language, speak and write in jargon." 22 The immigrants, for their part, saw themselves as superior to native Jews in the richness of their Jewish knowledge and the vitality of their Jewish culture. To them the native Jewish community appeared moribund. 23 Drawn together by their common background and shared living conditions, immigrant Jews established a variety of institutions that reflect how they defined their needs. Just as Italian and Polish immigrants felt uncomfortable in French Catholic churches and established their own, so immigrant Jews rejected the sedate and stately consistorial synagogues in favor of their own shtiblakh (small and informal prayer groups), called oratoires by the French Jews. The style of the consistorial synagogue, with its organ, French sermon, and bourgeois formality, repelled traditional immigrants who associated Judaism with its eastern Europe variant. The immigrants also established their own charitable and welfare associations to provide for their needy in an atmosphere free from the patronizing tone that they perceived in native French Jewish charitable institutions. Thus, the immigrants supported a shelter for indigent newcomers, a dispensary, and a popular soup kitchen. In addition to demonstrating its concern for the poor, the immigrant Jewish community in Paris also provided for its own cultural needs. It could boast of a popular university, under Zionist auspices, a Yiddish theater, and a few local Yiddish newspapers to supplement the Polish Yiddish press that was readily available. Paris became a regular stop on the circuit for Yiddish literary and cultural figures like Sholom Aleichem and Abraham Cahan. Like many other immigrant groups, Jews from eastern Europe also formed associations of mutual assistance, most often based upon a shared home town and occasionally upon a shared trade. These landsmanshaftn, or societies, provided a place for socialization as well as various forms of practical assistance, such as sick benefits, small loans, and widows' pensions. Most importantly, they guaranteed their members burial in a Jewish cemetery, among friends as it were. 24

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Through the mutual aid societies the immigrant Jewish community first asserted its sense of self vis-à-vis the native establishment. In 1 9 1 3 twenty-two immigrant societies in Paris organized themselves into the Federation of Jewish Societies. Their goal was to liberate themselves from the degrading perception that as recipients of the charitable assistance of native Jewish institutions they were simply shnorrers (beggars) and to claim their right to greater participation in the administration of communal welfare. The Federation of Jewish Societies declared immigrant Jews in France to be an asset to French Jewry and equal to the task of formulating their own needs. As its founding commission proclaimed, One can hope that the French Jews . . . will not be long in recognizing that the Jewish immigrant is a source of activity and precious good will, that he possesses by the force of circumstances—having suffered and struggled himself since his arrival in France—a more exact sense of the interests and needs of his co-religionists; that it would be u n j u s t . . . to keep him constantly separated from all participation in the management of communal works; and that from the close collaboration of the French Jewish element and the immigrant Jewish element will result a renewal of life within French Judaism and a more just and effective distribution of Jewish charity and assistance. 25

As this proclamation indicates, within less than a generation of their arrival in France in any number, east European immigrant Jews defined themselves as a specific community ready to enter into a partnership with native French Jews on equal terms and convinced that it was their right to transform French Jewry and not simply be assimilated into it. In addition to their social needs as immigrants and their religious and cultural needs as Jews, immigrant Jews also reacted to their condition as workers. Indeed, their identities were complex, made up of multiple elements of ethnic culture and class that led them to participate in a variety of subcommunities on the immigrant Jewish street. The labor community, with its twin goals of improving the lot of the worker and bringing about a social revolution that would eradicate capitalism, provided a social as well as political framework for many immigrant Jews, particularly those who had been politicized in Russia. Difficult working conditions prevailed, particularly in the various branches of the garment industry. Production took place in small workshops with inadequate ventilation, leading to a high incidence of tuberculosis. A number of features of the system of production limited the economic prospects of the immigrants. In the first place, production was seasonal, with workers subject to long periods of unemployment.

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Because a rigid division of labor prevailed in the industry, employers were able to establish a hierarchy of skills and wages and to reserve the bestpaying positions for male French workers. Employers mixed French and immigrant workers together, exploiting a "divide and conquer" strategy among their workers of different languages and cultural backgrounds. The custom of piecework fostered competition and long hours and produced a stressful atmosphere in which workers pushed themselves to complete as many pieces as quickly as possible to guarantee their family's subsistence. Finally, the system of piecework and division of labor led to the practice of fagonnerie, or subcontracting, in which immigrant petty entrepreneurs farmed out tasks that required little or no skill to home workers, often women and children, paying them pitiful rates. Dreaming of economic mobility and seeing himself as self-employed, the immigrant fagonnier, who worked at home and subcontracted work to others, contributed to keeping industry wages low.26 Although the structure of the clothing industry in Paris, as in New York and London, erected obstacles to the organizing of immigrant Jewish workers and contributed to the instability of many Jewish unions after their formation, the legacy of the Russian Jewish labor movement and the vibrancy of the contemporary French labor movement combined to promote labor activism among immigrant Jews. In the 1880s and 1890s, influenced by the currents of Russian radicalism and led by an educated Russified elite, Jewish workers in the Pale of Settlement began to organize and to conduct strikes as well as to study Marxist doctrine. By the turn of the century an active Jewish labor movement existed not only in Russia but in every site of immigrant settlement. Although Marxism denied the very legitimacy of Jewish nationalism and particularism and called on Jewish workers to recognize that their interests lay in uniting with all working classes, the Jewish labor movement justified its separatism on both pragmatic and ideological grounds. Jewish workers, it asserted, had to organize their own local unions because they spoke their own language and had their own class enemies. Among workers who did not have a proper understanding of class relations under capitalism, antisemitism also prevented the integration of Jewish workers with their Gentile fellows. The leaders of the Bund—the Jewish political party established in 1897 that was a component of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party until Lenin expelled it in 1903 for nationalist deviation—even articulated an ideological defense of their own existence. According to Bundist tenets, Yiddish-speaking Jewish workers in the Russian empire constituted a national group, despite the glaring lack of

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what was generally considered an essential element of a nation, their own territory. As a mass political party the Bund was quite successful; it had five thousand members by 1900 and thirty thousand in 1903, accounting for a substantial segment of the Russian party. Jewish labor activists and socialists combined a recognition of their ethnic distinctiveness with a sense of belonging to a universal movement for the achievement of equality for workers in the short term and the radical restructuring of society through the overthrow of capitalism in the long term. 27 Eking out a living in the trades in which they were concentrated and suffering in particular from the structural features of the garment industry, immigrant Jewish workers in Paris responded to the ideologically sophisticated leaders from Russia—anarchists, Bundists, Jewish Mensheviks and Bolsheviks—who tried to organize them. The workers' mutual aid societies gave way to labor unions dedicated to improving the wages and working conditions of the immigrant workers and to achieving recognition of their dignity. Jewish workers organized Yiddish-speaking syndical sections that were affiliated with existing unions within the French federation of syndicats, the Confédération Générale du Travail. Only the capmakers, who were almost all immigrant Jews, established an independent union in a trade that had not been previously organized. By the beginning of the twentieth century there existed sufficiently stable unions among the capmakers, tailors, bakers, furniture makers, and furriers to sustain significant strike actions. In 1 9 1 0 - 1 1 the activists of the Jewish labor movement, whose ranks had swelled with the migration of disappointed revolutionaries after the failure of the Russian revolution of 190 5, established an Intersectional Bureau (which became the Intersyndical Commission in 19x3) and began publishing a Yiddish newspaper, Der Yidisher arbeter, to unite the Yiddish-language unions and to coordinate syndical and socialist propaganda among Jewish workers. 28 Like other elements of French society, the labor movement, too, was ambivalent about the newcomers. Despite their discourse of class solidarity, French workers tended to protectionism. They resented meetings in the garment industry conducted primarily in Yiddish and perceived a conflict of interest between themselves and the immigrants, who seemed not only to be competitors for scarce jobs but also depressors of the wage scale through their tendency toward façonnerie. Indeed, the establishment of the Intersyndical Commission represented a Jewish political reaction to expressions of protectionism and of hostility directed against immigrant Jews within the French labor movement. Laying the foundation for institutional cooperation between French and Jewish workers,

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it asserted the willingness of Jewish workers to affiliate en masse with the French movement and to lend their support to strike actions. The activity of the Jewish syndical sections from 1 9 1 1 to the conclusion of World War I in 1 9 1 8 established the legitimacy of the Jewish labor movement within the general French movement. Yet, though the labor movement preached universalism and brought immigrant Jewish workers in contact with the general French labor movement, in the pre-war period as well as during the war politicized immigrant Jewish workers remained within what was essentially an ethnic enclave.29 Immigrant identity is by its very nature unstable. As immigrants become increasingly familiar with the host society and recognize that the formative experiences and culture of their youth are foreign to their own children, they adapt their behavior to the conditions of life in their new land. Immigrant Jews have two possible reference groups as models for the reshaping of their identity: the native Jewish community of their place of settlement and the larger non-Jewish society. As in other countries where east European Jews settled, such as the United States and England, relations between the native Jewish community and the immigrants were complex. On the one hand, the native Jewish community provided extensive philanthropic, religious, and legal assistance to the immigrants, who considered the community's institutions the natural place to turn for representation vis-à-vis the authorities. The Central Consistory, for example, helped Jewish immigrants from Russia regularize their marital status. On the other hand, the condescension of the native Jewish elite toward the immigrants was overt and palpable. Native Jews saw the immigrants as unfortunates who had to be raised from their inferior state and liberated from their primitive culture in order to be worthy of equality as members of the French Jewish community and as French citizens. As was the case in the 1880s, the discourse of native Jewish spokesmen about the immigrants continued to recall the patronizing stance of Enlightenment liberals toward traditional Jews and their culture at the time of the French Revolution. So concerned were native French Jews about the impact of the presence of Yiddish-speaking foreign Jews upon their own status and image that their major institution of immigrant aid, the Paris Comité de Bienfaisance (Charity Committee), beginning in 1906, sought to deter further Jewish immigration. It sent letters to provincial and foreign communities and to other Jewish organizations pointing out the limitations on its resources and declaring its unwillingness even to help migrants in transit to another site of permanent settlement. OntheeveofWorldWarlin i 9 i 4 t h e Comité

Immigration and Remaking of French Jewry

de Bienfaisance discussed seriously a proposal to "bring the matter [of immigration] to the competent authorities to ask for a measure to prevent the free entry of foreigners into France." Although the Comité de Bienfaisance ultimately decided not to intervene with the government to curtail immigration, its very consideration of the issue stands in marked contrast to the active political involvement of native U.S. and British Jews on behalf of open immigration when their governments formulated restrictive policies. The stance of the leadership of native French Jewry suggests that, despite the extent of integration of French Jews and their public posture of self-confidence as French citizens, they experienced a higher level of anxiety regarding the immigrants, and a greater measure of distance from them, than was the case in other western Jewish communities.30 Native Jews saw their institutions as central agents for the transmission to the immigrants of French values and standards of behavior. In particular, they wanted immigrants to suppress the ethnic elements of their identity, beginning with their mother tongue, Yiddish. Presuming that their own model of identity based on religious affiliation was the sole legitimate form of Jewish particularity possible in France, the established leaders of French Jewry saw themselves as the appropriate teachers of the immigrant population whose status as foreigners made them incapable of accurately assessing their own situation. Autonomy for immigrants was out of the question. Consistorial circles therefore rebuffed the natural desire of immigrants to select their own religious leaders, banning immigrant rabbis from serving in consistorial temples, even in immigrant neighborhoods, though they occasionally accepted foreign cantors. When in 1913, however, immigrants asked the Paris consistory to appoint a cantor "of their own mentality" to fill the vacancy at the Saint-Isaure temple whose congregants were of east European origin, the consistory board refused. The deliberations of consistorial leaders reveal their perceptions both of the immigrants and of their own responsibilities toward them: functionaries of that mentality are really functionaries who care little about discipline . . . The question which arises is the following: Must they be given a functionary who will satisfy them as regards the chants and melodies of their country but who will really not be, we won't say French, but au courant of our customs or even of the French language, and therefore not of our mentality. [The matter is especially important since] in Montmartre it's a question of molding, of educating . . . this population. 31

Although the Paris consistory permitted foreigners to serve on its council until 1919, not a single immigrant was selected for the honor: The Central Consistory went further excluding noncitizens from eligibility for election.32

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Native Jewish leaders saw schooling as essential to their task of refashioning immigrant Jews in their own image. The Paris consistory, for example, considered its educational facilities—three parochial schools and a network of supplementary religious courses—as purveyors of the value of assimilation and as vehicles for the making of good citizens. If they were effective, they would solve the "immigrant problem" as it was defined by the consistorial elite. As the Paris consistory concluded about its day schools, "They succeed in transforming into useful citizens children who, without them, could become a charge to society and a matter of shame for their brethren by origin." Or as the consistory's Comité des Ecoles put it, in comparing the advantages of its schools as opposed to local public schools, they were "more favorable for the assimilation of the foreign Jewish population." 33 Similarly, the consistory's supplementary religious courses, offered after school in synagogues and in several public lycées, included in their goals the adjustment of the children of the immigrants to French conditions. A 1908 report on religious education offered at the consistorial temple located in the heart of the immigrant quarter noted, "It is . . . only through religious instruction that a healthy influence can be exercised on these young minds . . . It is thus that these uprooted [children], so brusquely transported to a society totally different from their own, will be able, thanks to the effect of moral and religious instruction, to adapt more easily to their new life." 34 The informal lessons in French manners and modes of thought presented by courses conducted in French by native teachers and rabbis were considered a vital subtext to the Jewish religious texts that were the ostensible subject of study. To reach adults, the Paris consistory subsidized the French courses and lectures of the Université Populaire Juive, which the Univers Israelite praised for "turn[ing] these foreigners into excellent patriots." 35 The immigrants, for their part, did not seek wholesale assimilation either into the native French Jewish community or within the larger society. Conscious of the social, economic, and ideological gap that divided them from native Jewry, they rejected the premise that their own culture was inferior to that of French Jews. Indeed, they were aware that they possessed a greater measure of yiddishkayt, the multihued fabric of Ashkenazi Jewish culture and sensibility, than did the Jews native to France whose Jewishness was but a fragment of their entire cultural formation. The immigrants' initial response to their situation as clients of French Jewry was to avoid the institutions of the native community as much as possible. As mentioned above, they did not pray in the formal

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12.9

consistorial synagogues but established shtiblakh that met in unassuming locations. Until 1905 such unauthorized minyanim, or quorums for prayer, were illegal, but with the separation of church and state in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair they no longer needed consistorial approval. Although their resources were limited, immigrants also founded their own welfare institutions. Most important was the Asile Israelite de Nuit, established in 1900, which provided food and temporary lodging to new immigrants. Preferring to offer their children a Jewish education according to their own standards, rather than rely on the consistorial-sponsored schools and courses, immigrants established schools that would instruct their children in Hebrew, classical Jewish texts, and Jewish history. In 1 9 1 1 a group of immigrant merchants and liberal professionals established a school for "Talmud Torah" and stipulated that its teachers had to be "Russian or Polish Jews who have pursued their Hebrew studies in their own country."36 Sephardi immigrants, too, founded their own religious, philanthropic, and educational institutions, though in smaller number. Unlike the east European immigrants, however, they tended to affiliate their organizations with the consistory and to participate in consistorial institutions. The immigrants' contact with the larger society and with French culture was generally not mediated through native Jewry. Most immigrant children attended public schools, and they brought the French language and elements of urban street culture into their homes. Through the Yiddish-language labor movement and its press, immigrant workers became familiar with the broad political concerns of the organized working class. Der Yidisher arbeter, for example, kept its readers abreast of doings within the Confédération Générale du Travail and of issues that affected all workers in France. Within the immigrant community the labor movement was not alone in introducing its followers to French politics and culture. One pre-war Yiddish newspaper, Di moderne tsayt, regularly published a Yiddish-French dictionary for its readers. Local intellectuals lectured frequently about matters of general as well as specifically Jewish interest and brought issues of international and local politics to their immigrant audiences. Finally, the lectures sponsored by the Zionist-oriented Université Populaire Juive offered practical advice on matters of immediate concern to immigrants seeking to integrate within their new environment, such as learning French, the legal status of aliens, and procedures of naturalization. Although adult immigrant Jews lived in a Yiddish-speaking environment, with few if any significant contacts with

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non-Jewish French citizens, they were well aware of the larger society in which their immigrant community was located.37 The conditions of French life made adoption of new patterns of behavior inevitable, as the immigrants, and their children in particular, unconsciously internalized the standards of their environment. In the years immediately preceding World War I even traditionally observant immigrant Jews demonstrated that they had acquired new tastes where style of worship was concerned. In 1 9 1 1 a group of immigrant Jews from Russia, who had been resident in France for some years and had achieved a measure of prosperity, established a group called the Agoudas Hakehilos (Association of Communities) to, as they reported in 1 9 1 3 , "remedy the proliferation of small groups . . . which meet for the practice of our religion in locations which are too small, [and] where a lack of hygiene keeps many of our Paris coreligionists, and principally our children, from attending the services and religious courses which take place there. . . ." 38 At the same time another group of immigrants from the fourth, eleventh, and twelfth arrondissements petitioned the Paris consistory in strikingly similar language for the use of a temple for their own services to be conducted in traditional style by a French-trained rabbi of eastern Europe origins: "Our young people, who have already gone through French schools, refuse to frequent our oratories, which are scarcely appropriate to the dignity of a place of worship." 39 The perception that traditional styles and places of worship that were fully acceptable in Russia were undignified and inappropriate to the Parisian scene reflected an ongoing process of acculturation. Like acculturating nineteenth-century Jews raised in traditional Ashkenazi Jewish homes and institutions, as they adjusted to France, twentieth-century immigrant Jews applied to their religious institutions aesthetic standards derived from the surrounding culture. The two groups of immigrants took different stances vis-à-vis the consistory. Agoudas Hakehilos opted for a separatist strategy while the other immigrants requested integration within the consistorial system on their own terms. Both, however, articulated a recognition that the public expression of Judaism would have to be accommodated to the sensibility of children raised in French, a sensibility that their parents clearly shared insofar as they now focused on the squalor of their shtiblakh rather than their intimacy. No longer newcomers, the partially acculturated immigrants preferred the synagogue to the shtibl. Indeed, the new synagogue that the Agoudas Hakehilos erected on the Rue Pavée in Paris reflected the latest in modern architectural fashion while including all that was ritually necessary for Orthodox prayer.40

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In their interactions with France and French Jewry, the immigrants gradually acculturated to French patterns of behavior but also transformed the French Jewish community. Although the modern French Jewish community was always heterogeneous, by the beginning of the Third Republic consistorial Judaism had achieved widespread acceptance. Bourgeois aspirations and values prevailed among French Jews, despite the fact that many did not have the financial resources to claim bourgeois status. There appeared to be no challenge to the emancipationist ideology disseminated by the consistories that asserted the utter compatibility of French and Jewish ideals and proclaimed the realization of the vision of an acculturated and integrated French Jewry. The establishment of immigrant Jewish neighborhoods in Paris called into question fundamental assumptions of native French Jewry. With their Yiddish language visible in newspapers and signs on shop windows, the immigrants publicly expressed an ethnic self-conception that challenged the public suppression of ethnicity by native Jewish spokesmen. The predominance of the working class within the immigrant Jewish community also undermined the bourgeois self-presentation of native Jews. Of greater concern, the radical politics espoused by the leaders of the Jewish labor movement and the participation of immigrant Jewish workers in strike activity raised the specter that Jews would be increasingly identified with forces destructive of public order. Not only were the immigrants violating the political neutrality that characterized the organized French Jewish community, but the politics that so many immigrants espoused so publicly were repugnant to the bourgeois republicans who predominated among native Jewry. The political differences were not only theoretical but also practical: immigrant Jewish workers did not hesitate to protest against their exploitation by Jewish employers, who owned an estimated one-third of the firms in the clothing industry. In doing so they revealed the class divisions among Jews residing in France. As the immigrants settled in and succeeded in sustaining their own communal institutions, they began to challenge the hegemony of consistorial circles, and particularly the exclusive right of native Jewish leaders to speak in the name of all of French Jewry. Although their challenge did not carry significant weight until the interwar years, both before and during World War I the immigrants articulated their right to participate in communal decisions that affected their lives. Observant immigrants succeeded in 1 9 1 1 in achieving modest representation on the Butchers and Mikveh Commission of the Paris consistory, though without recognition of their claim to partnership on communal boards. As we have

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seen in the 1 9 1 3 proclamation of the Federation of Jewish Societies, the immigrants asserted not only that they understood their own needs better than could others who shared neither their culture nor their experience, but that they had much to contribute to France's native Jewish community.41 Although the immigrants aroused antipathy and anxiety among many native Jews, and particularly within consistorial circles, the small group of traditionalists in the native community shared the immigrants' assessment of their potential benefit to French Jewish life. According to the Univers israélite, by 1908 the immigrants made up 60 percent of religiously observant Jews in France, and their presence promised to revitalize the practice of Judaism. As an article in the paper the previous year had suggested, "Provided that we know how to win them over and lead them, that we do not oppose them with disdain and ostracism, who knows whether our foreign coreligionists are not destined to enrich French Judaism, at least morally, and give it more force?" 42 As an organ sympathetic to the needs of the religiously conservative, the Univers israélite frequently expressed concern for the plight of the immigrants, responding to a 1 9 1 3 communal report on restructuring immigrant aid that "it is important to bear constantly in mind that the g o a l . . . is to come to the aid of the . . . immigrants and not to get rid of them."43 In addition to changing the demographic composition of French Jewry, introducing ethnicity as an acknowledged component of French Jewish identity, and offering models of political assertiveness, immigrant Jews from eastern Europe provided communal support for Zionism within France.44 Through the efforts of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the generous philanthropy of the Baron Edmond de Rothschild, French Jewry had long been interested in Jews living in the Holy Land and had participated in the early colonization efforts of Palestine in the last third of the nineteenth century.45 But French Jews rejected the ideology of the organized Zionist movement as it emerged in the 1890s and early 1900s, seeing quite correctly that it denied the validity of the French Jewish model of emancipation and assimilation as the solution to the "Jewish question." As a 1907 article in the Univers israélite summed up French Jewish opinion on Zionism, "The history of Judaism is the history of a progressive denationalization . . . Where [the Jews] live, there is their fatherland . . . Let us be Jews above all, and faithful to the spirit of Judaism. But the spirit of Judaism, as it is reflected in its history, is the condemnation of Zionism."46 Although a number of French Jewish intellectuals became Zionist activists—among them Bernard Lazare,

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Edmond Fleg, and André Spire—most French Jews not only recoiled from a Zionist ideology that undermined their own identity as French citizens and Jews, they associated Zionism with the immigrants, who constituted the majority of its supporters and leaders. Immigrant Jews had formed Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) societies in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, and they continued to define the movement both before World War I and into the interwar years, despite the fact that the French Zionist Federation, established in 1901, did not direct its propaganda specifically at the immigrants. Although the leadership of the movement in France was in the hands of eminent intellectuals like Max Nordau and Alexander Marmorek, they were expatriates with no direct contact with native Jewish figures. Moreover, publicity material in French was sorely lacking. French Zionists had to rely upon their own resources since the international Zionist movement did not produce French-language propaganda. Because of the predominance of immigrants in the movement and the prominence of Germans and Russians among the international leadership, Zionism in France bore a distinctly foreign stamp. Efforts to reach native French Jews through the Zionist paper L'Echo sioniste were not helped by the paper's doctrinaire stance and its sharp attacks upon established Jewish institutions, particularly the Alliance. Not surprisingly, given the preoccupation of the immigrants with their economic survival and the inability of the movement to recruit effectively among native Jews, there appear to have been fewer than a thousand adherents of Zionism in Paris before World War I. Yet the emergence of Zionism on the local as well as the international stage provided possibilities for enhanced Jewish cultural and political activity that would explode in France later in the twentieth century.47 World War I contributed to the integration of the immigrants into French Jewish life while also setting the stage for the arrival of thousands of new Jewish migrants into France. The war enabled both native and immigrant Jews to demonstrate their patriotism and to benefit from a broad union sacrée (sacred unity born of shared patriotism) that characterized French society during these years and that found its reflection in an unprecedented cooperation of natives and immigrants within the Jewish community.48 Native Jews participated actively in the French war effort, primarily in the armed services but also through engaging in quasidiplomatic activity to realize French aims. Jewish institutions cooperated closely with the government in providing religious services to French soldiers and in ministering to Jewish prisoners of war. The Jewish leadership made sure to publicize issues that powerfully documented the

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identity of Jewish and general French interests—for example, the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine—as well as the complete civic integration of Jews. Thus, French Jewry widely disseminated the story of the chaplain Abraham Bloch, who was killed in action bearing a crucifix to a wounded Catholic soldier.49 In the midst of war, the story was the perfect symbol of the fraternity of Jews and Christians envisioned by the promoters of Jewish emancipation during the Revolution. In addition to displaying Jewish courage and patriotism, it illustrated the way in which religion reinforced love of country, providing an incarnation of the consistory's motto of "Religion et Patrie. " Both lay and rabbinic Jewish leaders invoked the concept of union sacrée and pointed to the wholehearted acceptance by French Jews of their obligations to their fatherland. They argued that, in stark contrast to French Jews, antisemites, by attacking an entire category of fellow citizens in wartime, were antipatriotic. The immigrants, too, rallied to the French cause, volunteering for military service under French auspices. Although Bundists in France opposed the war, they did not engage in public antiwar activity. As noncitizens, they would have risked their right to residence in France as well as incurred the hostility of French socialists, who had rallied to the war effort. Two days after the declaration of war, the Federation of Jewish Societies issued a stirring proclamation that was circulated in immigrant Jewish neighborhoods. Hailing France as the country that first conferred the rights of man and citizen upon Jews, the proclamation concluded: "If we are not yet Frenchmen in law, we are so in heart and soul, and our most sacred duty is to put ourselves at once at the disposal of that great and noble nation in order to participate in her defense." 50 Such immigrant expressions of loyalty to France, accompanied as they were by the immigrants' volunteering for military service, evoked from native Jews an outpouring of political and financial support for the immigrants. Although the Paris consistory asked immigrant Jews to refrain from the public use of Yiddish because of the possibility of its provoking hostility by being confused with German, the Univers israélite protested the war censor's ban on its use in private correspondence. A number of prominent French Jews organized a fund-raising concert, the proceeds of which were to aid disabled soldiers and widows of Jewish volunteers. In their publicity they expressed solidarity with immigrant Jews, who had "no natural protector"; they continued, "It seemed to us that French Jews had contracted a debt toward their coreligionists, who had spontaneously devoted themselves to their Fatherland. It is to pay a part of that debt that this concert is designed." 51 Other native institutions assumed

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35

responsibility for meeting the extraordinary needs generated by either the temporary or permanent loss of a family's male breadwinner. Thus, Baron Edmond de Rothschild headed a new organization to care for war widows and orphans in the immigrant community. The consistorial schools, too, made their facilities available to students and their families seven days a week, serving the pupils two meals a day and evacuating some children to the countryside. Finally, prominent native Jews organized legal assistance for Russian and Ottoman Jews living in Paris and one communal organization, the Union Scolaire, provided employment to immigrant women. Most importantly, prominent native Jews, such as the sociologist Émile Durkheim and Rabbi Israël Lévi, publicly expressed the hope that French and immigrant Jews draw closer together.52 In fact, the wartime situation permitted immigrant Jews to collaborate with representatives of native Jewry in communal charitable activity. Immigrant and native women together established an aid society for soldiers, which significantly divided its administrative positions between the wife of France's Grand Rabbi and an immigrant woman. Immigrants also served on the planning committee of the benefit concert for war widows and disabled soldiers that was initiated by the native Jewish community. These few instances of cooperation did not bridge the social and cultural divide between immigrant and French Jews, but they did signify a recognition of shared interests and of the potential for eventual integration of the two communities. Although World War I had fostered understanding between immigrants Jews and the established French Jewish community, the political and social divisions between, and within, the two populations came to the fore again in reaction to the challenges posed during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Massive immigration, growing antisemitism and xenophobic nationalism, economic depression, the rise of Nazism, and the renewed international prominence of Zionism elicited contradictory responses among native and immigrant Jews and ensured that the relative communal harmony enshrined in the term union sacrée would be short-lived.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

Between Two World Wars The Inescapable Impact of Economics and Politics

W

ith the conclusion of World War I the Jews of France were plunged into a period of political and economic turmoil that was exacerbated with the passage of time. The arrival of thousands of new immigrants from eastern Europe raised anew, and on a far larger scale, the cultural and political conflict that had abated during what then was called the Great War. According to the most recent estimates, there were approximately 150,000 Jews in France in 1 9 1 9 , but 300,000 in 1939. 1 The increase in France's Jewish population derived almost entirely from immigration, and immigrant Jews therefore comprised the majority of the French Jewish community on the eve of World War II. Polish and Russian migrants were joined beginning in 1933 by refugees from Nazism, primarily from Germany but also from other central and east European countries. Although France recognized its need i37

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for immigrants to restore its economic productivity and revive its stagnant population, both severely damaged by the massive loss of young men during the war, the economic crisis of the international Depression spurred opposition to immigration—on the part of French Jews as well as the French polity. In this period of national and international political turbulence the French Jewish community faced a number of particularly powerful issues. The growing importance of Zionism on the international stage compelled Jews to reexamine their identity and their political stance. Antisemitism, both in its local varieties and as disseminated by the Nazis, achieved a prominence that mandated the development of political strategies of self-defense. As a consequence of Nazi policies, French Jewry also confronted the thorny issue of how to deal with the thousands of Jewish refugees in France. Finally, the accession to power of France's first Jewish, and coincidentally, first socialist premier ironically signified both the high degree of integration of Jews within France and their vulnerability as a tiny minority, less than i percent, of the French population. During the interwar period Zionism came to preoccupy the leadership of French Jewry. Much to the surprise of the French Jewish establishment, Zionism acquired an unanticipated significance during the war. It had to be taken into account on two grounds: the role it might play in the disposition of former Ottoman territory after the war, and its potential usefulness (much exaggerated by the allied powers) in mobilizing American Jewry to pressure the U.S. government to intervene in the hostilities. When the French government accepted the provisions of the Balfour Declaration, the national minority clauses that were incorporated into the Versailles treaty, and the conferral of the mandate over Palestine to the British, the spokesmen for native Jewry found that their overt opposition to Zionism placed them in the awkward position of seeming to oppose governmental policy. 2 Spearheading the formal opposition of native Jewry to Zionist politics was the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Its major spokesman and from 1920 its president was Sylvain Lévi, a prominent Sanskrit scholar who enjoyed close ties with the Baron Edmond de Rothschild and with the Quai d'Orsay, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Long involved with support for the Jews of Palestine, the Alliance saw the Zionist movement not only as a competitor but also as a subverter of the model of emancipation and acculturation that undergirded its activity and that represented the worldview of native French Jewry. Although Lévi expressed cautious

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optimism about Zionist efforts in Palestine after his first trip in 1918, his subsequent public pronouncements and private interventions with the French Foreign Ministry sought to distance both France and French Jewry from the project of Zionism. In a 1919 letter to the Foreign Ministry, Lévi dismissed French Zionism as out of step with French Jewry: "That which is called French Zionism is essentially a group of foreign Jews residing in France, surrounded by Jewish and non-Jewish dilettantes that it would be compromising to take seriously . . . French Judaism, which is fully conscious of its duties toward the fatherland, would be offended in its most intimate feelings should it be frivolously engaged by an insignificant minority which is in large part foreign to it." Not surprisingly, Lévi discouraged the government from allowing representatives of French Zionism to speak at the peace conference. In a speech in February 1 9 1 9 he cautioned the Council of Ten, the body of delegates of the allied governments, from accepting Zionist assessments as to the potential of its activity in Palestine and from endorsing the concept of a Jewish national home. A Jewish national home, he argued, would injure the status of Jews throughout the world by raising the dangerous notion of dual loyalty: "It would create . . . a redoubtable precedent to call men who, in their own countries, exercise fully the rights of citizen to exercise these same political rights in another country."3 In 1920 and 1 9 2 1 , while Lévi continued to lecture about the dangers of Zionism, the Alliance published articles highly critical of Zionism in its journal, Paix et droit.4 The circles around the Central Consistory largely shared the Alliance's perspectives on Zionism. In response to the discussion of Zionism at the peace conference, the leadership of the Central Consistory determined in March 1 9 1 9 to discuss, and ultimately adopt, a statement that "would be a declaration of war against Zionism." While praising the potential economic, cultural, and religious consequences of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, the statement declared that the establishment of a Jewish state would "misread the very course of history" and endanger the millions of east European Jews who would remain in their countries of origin. The statement was never published, however, because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with which Grand Rabbi Israël Lévi had been in contact to avoid injuring French interests, opposed its dissemination. Despite its public position of neutrality vis-à-vis Zionism, the Central Consistory permitted its rabbis to use their positions to attack Zionism, and prominent rabbis took full advantage of this license.5 The leaders of the consistories and of the Alliance, however, did not represent the range of responses to Zionism expressed among native

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French Jewry in the wake of the 1 9 1 7 Balfour Declaration and the Zionist accomplishments at the peace conference. Some readers of the French Jewish press, for example, indicated their dismay at the silence of the Central Consistory upon the issuance of the Balfour Declaration. Dissenting in practice from the stance of the Alliance and the Central Consistory, both the Archives israélites and the Univers israélite regularly revealed their interest and pride in Zionist accomplishments. After ratification of the British mandate over Palestine, consistorial circles took a more conciliatory line about the Yishuv, the Zionist settlement, in Palestine. Although they remained hostile to Zionist politics, they encouraged support of Jewish settlement of the land. In 1923 the Association of French Rabbis went so far as to issue a statement that recognized "the moral and ideal value" of Zionism for "millions of our brothers." But this concession was included in a sentence that declared that Zionism "cannot be reconciled with the principles of French Judaism and with the conception which the latter has always had of its duties vis-à-vis world Judaism." 6 The stance of the native Jewish establishment in the 1920s can be summarized as support for Palestinian Jewry combined with opposition to Zionism, that is, the political movement that sought a Jewish national home, and then a state, in Palestine. Claiming that French Jewry were responsible for the establishment of Jewish colonies in modern Palestine, native Jewish leaders sought to channel concern for the Jews of Palestine into non-Zionist institutions. Thus, in 1925 French rabbis founded a charitable institution, Oeuvre Palestinienne, as an appropriate venue for those anxious to support the rebirth of Eretz-Israel in a religious context. They declared immediately that they could not recommend to French Jews either the Keren Kayemet or the Keren Hayesod, two Zionist funds that invested in the acquisition of land and the expansion of the Yishuv. Historian Michel Abitbol interprets the Association of French Rabbis' declaration and the establishment of Oeuvre Palestinienne as motivated by the favorable impression that the Zionist settlement of Palestine made upon the rabbinic leadership. In 1925, for example, Grand Rabbi Lévi, according to Abitbol, was deeply moved by his participation in the dedication of the Hebrew University and determined to find a way to aid Palestinian Jewry.7 My own reading of the documents, however, suggests that the ostensible non-Zionist pro-Palestinism of the French Jewish leadership, both lay and rabbinic, represented a strategy to weaken the institutions of the Zionist movement by establishing parallel, nonnationalist funds that posed no ideological

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challenge to French Jewry. In fact, unlike non-Zionist members of the Jewish establishment elsewhere, who joined the Jewish Agency upon its founding in 1929 to work toward the strengthening of the Yishuv, no representatives of the Alliance or the consistory agreed to serve on the new body, despite the government's enthusiastic endorsement of such participation. Although individual native Jews, including Léon Blum, the head of the Socialist Party, did join the council of the Agency, the central institutions of the community maintained their distance. The hostility of the native Jewish elite to Zionism gradually waned, however, as the growing refugee problem of the 1930s transformed Zionism from a Utopian vision into a practical necessity. By the 1930s Zionist activity no longer disqualified laymen from leadership positions in communal organizations nor led to censure of rabbis. Particularly in Alsace-Lorraine, where religious tradition and ties of ethnic solidarity remained stronger than in Paris or the other provinces, involvement in Zionist affairs was a common attribute of communal leaders. There Zionists maintained their own institutional structure, the Regional Union of Zionists of Eastern France.8 Although the organized Zionist movement in France never achieved stability or official recognition within local Jewish life, in the interwar years Zionism influenced a considerable number of French Jews, particularly among the younger generation, and stimulated their exploration of Jewish culture. Some explicitly Zionist institutions were successful. The Keren Kayemet, with its familiar blue charity box and its publication La Terre retrouvée, drew a significant measure of support, while by 1936 more than five thousand young Jews in France and North Africa were affiliated with Zionist and pro-Palestinian youth groups. Zionist influence, however, extended beyond its own institutions. Many contemporary commentators, including opponents of Zionism, attributed the revival of Jewish culture that they perceived in France as early as the late 1920s to the impact of Zionism, particularly as it was mediated through such intellectuals as Edmond Fleg, André Spire, and the novelist Albert Cohen. In a 1931 internal report the Paris consistory acknowledged the impact of Zionism, which it hoped to use for its own purposes: "Zionism and, with it, a kind of 'ethnic, ethical, aesthetic' Judaism, in any case a Judaism independent of religion, have made, and continue to make, under our very eyes, progress which we ought not dispute but from which we can, we must profit." 9 A consequence of the Zionist ferment was the founding of Jewish literary and intellectual reviews to supplement the familiar communal newspapers. Not only did

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Zionist organizations sponsor a variety of publications, but many French- and Yiddish-language Jewish periodicals with no formal affiliation with organized Zionism dealt extensively with Zionist affairs and with questions of Jewish history and identity that Zionism raised. In the major centers of French Jewish life, in the provinces as well as Paris, Zionist-sponsored courses in Jewish history and Hebrew, films on Palestine, and lectures on contemporary affairs expanded the parameters of Jewish cultural expression in France. Working through established nonZionist institutions, Zionist activists thus followed a strategy of infiltration to influence the Jewish consciousness of French Jews. 1 0 The most fertile ground for the exercise of Zionist influence proved to be the Jewish youth movements that proliferated in the interwar years. 11 Rejecting the conventional emancipationist ideology of French Jewry that they felt had reduced Jewishness to religious ritual and a bit of sentiment, young men and women were receptive to Zionism in their quest for a reinvigoration of Jewish life on French soil. In 192.3 two important Jewish youth movements appeared on the French scene: the first, the ostensibly international Union Universelle de la Jeunesse Juive (UUJJ), transferred to Paris from Salonika when its Sephardi founders immigrated to the French capital; the second and most significant was the Éclaireurs Israélites de France (EIF), the Jewish scout movement, whose first chapter was established in Paris by Robert Gamzon, the teenaged grandson of the former Grand Rabbi of France, Alfred Lévy. Bringing native and immigrant Jewish youth together, both groups renegotiated the boundaries of Jewish identity in France and deepened the Jewish component of their cultural formation. The UUJJ was the first non-Zionist Jewish organization in France to endorse a definition of French Jewish identity that broke with the exclusively religious framework promoted by the native Jewish establishment from the time of emancipation. Embracing both religious and ethnic components of Jewish identity, the UUJJ rejected only "the tendency toward assimilation, conceived as destructive of the ethnic particularity of Israel." 12 Although it remained officially unaffiliated with the Zionist movement, the UUJJ was openly pro-Zionist in its orientation, and a number of Zionist activists served on its central committee. Aimé Pallière, the semi-convert to Judaism who was one of the leaders of the UUJJ, confided in a 1927 letter to the Zionist Organization Executive that "the secret aim of [the UUJJ's] organizers was to win over to Zionism the elements of Jewish youth who remained outside the movement." 13 Indeed, its espousal of Zionist tenets as well as its rejection of religion as the sole

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basis of Jewish identity led to significant conflict with consistorial circles as well as with the French rabbinate. However, despite the attempts of the native establishment to quarantine it, the UUJJ was influential among Jewish youth for more than a decade. Its Paris section alone numbered almost a thousand members in 192.9. To counter assimilatory trends within the Jewish community, the UUJJ promoted Jewish education among its members. To empower its members politically, it engaged in defense activities, protesting wherever it deemed the rights of Jewish youth to be in danger. All of its activities were designed to stimulate pride among French Jewish youth. As Raymond-Raoul Lambert, 14 a prominent young native French Jew wrote in the pages of the UUJJ's paper in 1926, "It is the sign of a new era that Jewish youth has become aware of the forces it represents . . . [T]he word ' J e w ' n o longer bears the pejorative connotation that made the pale adjective 'Israelite' preferable." 15 Prior to its decline in the mid-i93os, the UUJJ's impact was notable. It integrated members of the native, the east European immigrant, and the Sephardi immigrant communities. It questioned the ideological assumptions of the native Jewish establishment, suggesting that assimilation was a mixed blessing. It provided a tentative alternative model for French Jewish identity, one based on the recovery by the younger generation of the full range of Jewish culture and history. If French Jewry was to survive as a vigorous entity, particularly in a secular age, then according to the UUJJ, French Judaism had to release itself from the restrictive confessional definition imposed upon it during the process of emancipation. Even more successful than the UUJJ was the Jewish scout movement, which had twelve hundred members in 1930 and more than two thousand on the eve of World War II. 16 Although it, too, challenged the ideology of emancipation, it aroused less opposition in consistorial circles than did the UUJJ. Its origins within the elite of the native Jewish community, who provided the patrons of its Central Committee, and the advisory role played by Edmond Fleg muted tensions between the EIF and consistorial circles. These conflicts erupted as the scouts became increasingly pluralist in their definition of Jewish identity. Formed initially to shape "French scouts of the Israelite religion," the EIF openly expressed support for cultural Zionism by 192,7. It opened its doors to all Jews, including Zionists and free-thinkers, and cooperated with Zionist scout groups. As the Jewish activism of the movement intensified, the Central Committee informed the young leaders in 1930 of criticism in prominent circles that the EIF's National Council of Troop Leaders had

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exhibited a "too-Jewish tendency." In a meeting with the Central Committee both Fleg and Gamzon pointed to the evolution of the movement, in Gamzon's words, "in a much more Jewish direction." 17 When the National Council of the movement resolved two years later that "the EIF tends henceforth to a conception of Judaism including at the same time both the religious ideal and the Zionist ideal," 18 a generational conflict erupted between the troop leaders and their older patrons. The latter saw the stance of the young activists as a form of ethnic particularism unacceptable to French society. Gamzon articulated the right of the scout leaders to define the movement, whose heterogeneous membership would not be satisfied with the doctrines of native Parisian Jewry. "If a great number of young people are attracted by Zionism," he declared, "it is because they see in it a living Judaism in contrast to the dead Judaism which western Judaism has become." 19 Although a compromise was found, in which Zionism was not mentioned specifically in the goals of the movement, the young leaders of the EIF successfully asserted their autonomy and their recognition of diversity within the ranks of Jewry. Throughout the decade of the 1930s they expanded their Jewish cultural, educational, and religious programming. In their encampments scouts learned Hebrew, experienced the joyous celebration of Jewish ritual, and practiced the Zionist ideals of combining manual labor and intellectual activity. The response of the French scouting movement to the growth of the EIF demonstrates the ongoing difficulty of accommodating Jewish particularism within French society in the interwar period. The national ficlaireurs de France refused to accept the EIF as an affiliate, though it accepted Catholic troops, because the Jewish troops were considered too sectarian. Jewish scouts were expected to affiliate with free-thinking troops. That rejection suggested a painful truth to Jewish youth—that French society in practice as well as in theory did not consider the assertion of Jewish religious identity completely parallel to the expression of Catholic interests and would neither favor nor facilitate the development of an ethnic Jewish identity. Jewish scouts then made use of the argument that their peculiar situation resembled that of French provincials. "There is no contradiction between the fact of loving France and loving Judaism, any more than there is when a Corsican loves both France and Corsica," declared their scout manual. The analogy was ingenious but strained, for Judaism (which the scouts defined not as a creed alone but as a religio-ethnic culture) was neither a geographic nor a cultural component of the French nation. When similar analogies were

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made in parliamentary debates about antisemitism in 1938, they were dismissed derisively by right-wing deputies.20 However, the provincial parallel seemed to young French Jews the only acceptable way of describing their position as Jews within the French sociopolitical tradition. Since that tradition was rigid in structure, like the UUJJ, the EIF simply added an ethnocultural component, essentially secular in definition, to the basic religious component of Jewish identity.21 The communal debate about the validity of Zionist perspectives on Jewish identity and politics occurred in a period of growing cultural and political antisemitism. In fact, the issue of designing an appropriate and effective response to antisemitism both divided the Jews living in France and also stimulated efforts at bridging their differences in search of a unified policy. Distinctions of cultural origins, class, and political ideology proved powerful and ultimately decisive impediments to the achievement of unity. But the efforts of the last years of the 1930s laid the groundwork for the integration within the leadership structure of French Jewry of a broader representation of Jews than had previously been possible. Most French historians have dismissed the significance of antisemitism in French political life, arguing, when they took note of it at all, that it remained largely in the realm of ideas, except for the unfortunate incident of Vichy. Relegating antisemitism in France to a marginal phenomenon, they see the antisemitic riots of the Dreyfus Affair and the antisemitic legislation of Vichy as mere aberrations in the long history of modern France. 22 Yet, a few scholars have demonstrated persuasively that antisemitism has played an important role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French politics, although its sources of support and social manifestation have changed over time. Most suggestive has been the approach of political sociologist Pierre Birnbaum, who has demonstrated the linkage between antisemitism and opposition to the strong republican state, into which Jews had been well integrated by the end of the nineteenth century.23 Although antisemitism had played virtually no political role in the France of the 1920s, the events of the 1930s brought it to the fore. 24 Economic depression, mass migration, the emergence of the Popular Front, and the threat of war combined to fuel antisemitic sentiment that was then widely disseminated by the press and popular literature. As poor immigrants and rich capitalists, as radical leftists and opponents of Nazism, Jews were deemed to be sapping France's economic strength and leading the country into war with Germany. Both proponents and opponents of antisemitism agreed that by the middle of the decade

Between Two World Wars antisemitism had become noticeable and its magnitude frightening. As Rabbi Jacob Kaplan commented sadly and in a moderate tone in the pages of the Univers israélite in 1935, "In our dear country of France, for the first time since the war, antisemitism has raised its head." 25 It is difficult to measure the social and political impact of antisemitic ideas in periods when political groups proclaiming such ideas do not attain power. Jews who were young adults in the years between the two world wars experienced social antisemitism; their Jewishness was a stigma. Some commented that they had to outperform their colleagues in order to dispel antisemitic stereotypes. As Raymond Aron later reflected, "For a Jew to be considered honest, he must be twice as honest as another."26 Zeev Sternhell, the historian of French fascism, has persuasively argued that the antisemitism disseminated by the radical right of the 1930s not only prepared the way for the behavior of the Vichy regime but also crystallized a tradition that posed a vision of French society and politics in opposition to the liberal heritage of the 1789 Revolution. For Sternhell, the antisemitic and antiliberal intellectuals of the interwar period were pivotal in undermining democracy in a period of crisis. In the 1930s as in the 1890s—both periods in which there was concern with the moral decline of the nation—" [t]he Jew mirrored the nation's decadence, which he both hastened and aggravated . . . Anti-semitism was one aspect of the great revolt against. . . liberalism and Marxism, against the core of the intellectual heritage on which Europe had been living since the eighteenth century."27 In an age of mass politics, antisemitism served as a powerful tool to achieve the unity of divergent social groups. Intellectuals and political activists of the radical right, who became the bearers of antisemitism after World War I, succeeded in presenting the Jew as the antithesis of the Frenchman, thereby providing a focus for their definition of the nation. Most influential in this process was Charles Maurras, whose political organization, the Action Française, founded at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, was the veteran antisemitic league during the 1930s. In Sternhell's words, Maurras made antisemitism "one of the pillars of nationalisme intégral," the organic nationalism that grounded citizenship and identity in historic and biological connection with the people.28 The attraction of antisemitism to some French intellectuals and to a segment of the French populace was heightened in the 1930s by Nazi success in revitalizing Germany. Although anti-German sentiment, reinforced by two wars and particularly the enormous loss of men in World War I, remained strong, the élan of Nazi Germany was impressive. Fur-

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ther, Germany exported its racist antisemitism westward; on the far right, French antisemitism of the 1930s carried a new racist message. However one assesses the significance of publicly expressed antisemitism, there is a consensus as to its explosion during the 1930s. A recent study of the subject demonstrates how antisemitic publications, ranging from political newspapers to pamphlets and books, proliferated during the decade, reaching their peak in the last three years before the outbreak of World War II. Although their circulations varied with time, their combined total was in the millions.29 To be sure, the moderate press did not indulge in antisemitic diatribe, but the vast quantity of antisemitic papers and the prominence of antisemitic discourse in the writing of such serious literary figures such as Louis Céline, Robert Brasillach, and Jean Giraudoux endowed antisemitism with a visibility and respectability unseen since the end of the nineteenth century. Antisemitism was not confined to literary or journalistic debate. Antisemitic propaganda led to sporadic attacks on Jews in immigrant Jewish neighborhoods and on Jewish businesses in Alsace-Lorraine. The Action Française regularly sent its organized hooligans, the Camelots du Roi, into immigrant neighborhoods for demonstrations and petty harassment. Along with the Action Française, a number of right-wing political leagues rode the antisemitic hobbyhorse. They took particular interest in the revelations that emerged in 1 9 3 3 - 3 4 about the shady dealings of Serge Alexandre Stavisky, a Russian of Jewish origins who manipulated his connections with governmental figures for his personal gain. The Stavisky Affair, as it was called, brought thousands of Frenchmen into the streets of Paris on February 6, 1934 to riot against democracy and the corruption it had allegedly brought to the French polity. Stavisky became a powerful representation of the Jew as foreigner, swindler, and shady wheeler-dealer. As is the case with all varieties of racism, the crimes of individual Jews were routinely attributed to the entire group. 30 Although in the interwar period political antisemitism became identified with the Right, at the popular level antisemitism occasionally manifested itself among workers presumably under the influence of the Left. In 1934, for example, a Jewish communist unemployment committee in the Belleville neighborhood determined to print a tract in French to alert French workers to the proliferation of antisemitic incidents in their ranks. 31 When Léon Blum became France's first Jewish premier in 1936, at the head of a Popular Front government of socialists and communists, antisemitic rhetoric increasingly passed from the streets to the Chamber of

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Deputies and the General Council of the Seine. In the former, Xavier Vallat, a deputy of the Right who later achieved notoriety as the head of Vichy's Commissariat-Général aux questions juives, rose to deplore the day when "for the first time this old Gallo-Roman country would be governed . . . by a Jew." After remonstrances from Edouard Herriot, the president of the Chamber, that "such words [were] inadmissible in a French tribune," Vallat continued, "To govern this peasant nation that France is, it would be better to have someone whose origins, however modest, are deep in our soil than a subtle Talmudist."32 In the Council of the Seine, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, publisher of the antisemitic paper La France enchaînée, took the opportunity to express similar sentiments.33 To antisemites Blum's rise to the premiership symbolized the insidious Jewish invasion and subjugation of France. In their view he had manipulated his way to power and served as the tool of Jewish interests, which were, by definition, alien. As one writer for the periodical Action Française summed up the antisemitic assessment of Blum's premiership: "Here it is one year since France has fallen under the yoke of a foreign nation."34 The fact that Blum was both a socialist and a Jew reinforced the stereotype of the Jew as radical subverter of the social order. Jews were deemed responsible for all of the ills of modernity, ranging from capitalist speculation to Marxist revolutionary ferment, to Freudian psychology and modernist culture. In the popular antisemitic discourse of the day Blum was depicted as having betrayed his lack of true French sensibility and his intrinsically Jewish soul in his youthful advocacy of the value of premarital sexuality and his life-long dedication to socialism.35 Moreover, Blum was unabashedly and publicly proud of his Jewishness, which he felt to be a source of his socialist commitments and in no way in conflict with his French culture. In the Chamber of Deputies in 1923 he responded to an antisemitic attack by declaring, "I am a Jew . . . That is a fact. You are not insulting me when you remind me that I belong to a Jewish race, that race I have never denied, and I have only feelings of gratitude and pride towards it." In another public statement he added, I was born in France, I was brought up as a Frenchman in French schools. M y friends are French . . . I have a perfect command of the French language without the slightest trace of a foreign a c c e n t . . . I have the right to consider myself perfectly assimilated . . . And yet, none the less I feel that I am a Jew. And I have never felt the slightest contradiction, the slightest conflict between these two areas of my consciousness. 36

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So dominant and disturbing was the figure of Blum as a "representative radical J e w " that some native Jews concerned with their image in French society and anxious about the rise of antisemitism made every effort to distance themselves from him. Although most Jewish papers praised France for its openness to political leaders irrespective of their religious affiliation, some worried that Blum's prominence might blur the boundary between religion and politics so central to French Jewry's ideology or, even more importantly, fuel antisemitic passion. Consistorial archives of the 1930s contain anguished letters from native Jews who saw Blum's election as dangerous for French Jewry. The consistory dedicated itself to proving the patriotism of French Jewry, often in ways that indicated a strong anti-Blum animus. Thus, from 1934 through 1 9 3 7 the Central and Paris consistories allowed the participation of the Croix de Feu, a rightist league under the leadership of Colonel François de la Rocque, in memorial services to the Jewish war dead held in Paris's synagogue on the Rue de la Victoire. In June 1936, when Blum had been named premier, the service, organized by Rabbi Kaplan and attended by consistorial lay leaders and rabbis, was even dedicated to the Croix de Feu, much to the consternation of Jewish activists on the Left. In their eagerness to demonstrate the patriotism of French Jewry, native Jewish leaders once more became hypersensitive to each and every manifestation of the foreignness of immigrant Jews, and particularly their association with radical politics, that is, Bolshevism. Many were convinced that there was a direct link between overt signs of foreign culture among Jewish immigrants and the rise of antisemitism. In 193 5 the Paris Comité de Bienfaisance decided that army service and political quietism should be criteria of eligibility for receiving assistance; by 1939 its administrators resolved to deny aid to "those indigents [who] go to cafés where they . . . ostentatiously read Hebrew [i.e., Yiddish] newspapers, [an act] which is likely to develop antisemitism."37 The most notorious expression of the xenophobia of the native Jewish elite, fueled by fear of heightened antisemitism, occurred in May 1935 when Robert de Rothschild, president of the Paris consistory, addressed that institution's general assembly. Offering advice to immigrants, including the recent refugees, who were "still insufficiently familiar with the French mentality and customs," he echoed the government's position by calling upon them to "abstain . . . from all political demonstrations" until they completed their military service. And he abandoned his prepared remarks to conclude his speech with the intemperate comment: "If [the immigrants]

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are not happy here, let them leave. They are guests whom we have warmly received, but they should not go about rocking the boat." 38 Among highly assimilated and wealthy native Jews, the consistory's public chastisement of immigrant Jews did not establish sufficient distance between French and foreign Jews. The consistory, after all, continued to follow a policy that it had adopted in the late 1920s of coopting responsible immigrants, largely drawn from the middle-class Federation of Jewish Societies, into its leadership ranks. In reaction to the Stavisky Affair and growing French xenophobia and antisemitism, there emerged in 1934 an explicitly nationalist, conservative group, the Union Patriotique des Français Israélites, which limited its membership to French citizens. Asserting that "the sacred interest of our fatherland . . . remains our only ideal," the Union exerted pressure from the Right on consistorial circles.39 The consistorial elite was open to such pressure, as it shared the Union's reluctance to combat antisemitism politically. Since the struggle against antisemitism in the 1930s was conducted under the aegis of the political left, those native Jews firmly rooted in the middle and upper classes and committed to the bourgeois order felt most comfortable in continuing the emancipationist policy that relied upon the state to defend all of its citizens. There was no room for a Jewish politics of selfdefense, especially not for one that seemed to be partisan. Not surprisingly, then, the Paris and Central consistories organized no protest meetings against Nazism, and in fact they opposed the boycott of German products; consistorial rabbis issued appeals to Jews not to participate in anti-Nazi street demonstrations. At a June 1933 conference of French Jewish organizations the Paris consistory even cast the lone abstaining vote on the issue of disseminating anti-Nazi propaganda. Although consistorial circles acknowledged by 1935 that an effective response to antisemitism and Nazism could not consist solely of virtual silence, the native elite sought to control all self-defense efforts. The Center of Defense and Vigilance that was established in January 1936, comprised of delegates from the Central Consistory and the Alliance, called upon French Jews to leave political decisions to the new group (on which there was no immigrant representation) and to refrain from "individual, irresponsible steps." 40 Some young native Jews and the vast majority of immigrant Jews and their offspring rejected the very premises of the native Jewish elite in its attitude toward antisemitism. Unlike the consistorial circles, they accepted the legitimacy of Jews' organizing and engaging in politics to de-

Between Two World Wars fend themselves. Moreover, while the native Jewish leadership was most comfortable with the politics of discretion and patriotic rhetoric, the immigrants and a segment of native Jewish youth advocated the strategy of mass politics. Needless to say, immigrant Jewish socialists and communists were most comfortable with an overtly political struggle against antisemitism; they were well schooled in mass political action and recognized the identity of their interests as people of the Left and as Jews. Although they differed with the socialists and communists as to strategy and were adamant in not ceding leadership to them, liberal and Zionist immigrants joined the Left in acknowledging the need for action. And as one, immigrant Jews rejected the notion popular in native circles that French antisemitism was a response to the immigrants' own behavior and visibility.41 Because even those Jews who favored a militant response to antisemitism were divided by class, ethnicity, political ideology, and relation to Jewish tradition, there was no unity among them. Most successful in integrating native and immigrant Jewish youth of leftist orientation was the International League against Antisemitism (known by its French initials, LICA). Founded in 1928 by Bernard Lecache, the son of east European immigrants and a former communist, the organization appealed to youth with its forthright newspaper, Droit de vivre, its activist approach, and mass demonstrations against antisemitism, both local and foreign. LICA, for example, along with immigrant Jewish veterans, in April 1933 initiated a French boycott of German goods and in August 1934 organized the only major Jewish public protest against the pogrom in Constantine, Algeria. The key to LICA's success was its identification of the struggle against antisemitism with the universalist goal of combating fascism. Lecache was thus able to tie his nonsectarian organization to one of the major themes of French politics of the Left in the 1930s and to appeal to young Jews who might otherwise have considered defense against antisemitism as too particularistic.42 The middle-class, pro-Zionist Federation of Jewish Societies, which had been reorganized in the years 1924-1926, sought to forge links with consistorial circles in order to achieve cooperation on issues of common concern, including antisemitism. Such an approach demanded at least a tacit acceptance of political quietism where antisemitism was concerned. The Federation's predominance in the early 1930s—it represented immigrant Jews not only vis-à-vis the consistory but also in international organizations—was undermined by the public expressions of xenophobia on the part of their supposed partners in the consistorial elite and

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most significantly by the emergence in the fall of 1935 of the communist-led Jewish Popular Front in the immigrant Jewish community. Presenting itself as parallel to the Popular Front movement in general French politics, the Jewish Popular Front movement asserted that it was the most effective way for Jews to organize and combat antisemitism. Indeed, the cooperation of Bundists and Jewish communists with the larger French parties to which they were tied, the Socialist and Communist parties respectively, integrated immigrant Jews into the French political structure. By exalting the victims of capitalism and fascism, communist ideology, in particular, provided enormous psychological support to immigrant Jewish workers. It enabled them to find meaning in their status as objects of persecution within the pantheon of the oppressed. Despite the fact that the Federation, under the leadership of Israel Jefroykin, voted not to join the Front and the Bund rejected its crossclass composition, the Jewish Popular Front succeeded in bringing together most of the Jewish workers' parties, LICA, the Jewish veterans, organizations of merchants and artisans, and a few of the Federation's member societies. It thereby became, for a year and a half, the strongest voice within the immigrant community and provided a considerable measure of stature for the communists. Unity among the immigrant Jews, however, dissolved completely in 1 9 3 7 , parallel to the downfall of the French Popular Front. The sharp attacks on Zionism by Jewish communists during the Arab riots of 1936 in Palestine as well the insinuation that Zionists were cooperating with the Nazis alienated their socialist-Zionist allies. The abolition of the Jewish subsection of the Communist Party destroyed the Jewish communists' claim to autonomy. On the eve of World War II the immigrant Jewish community remained fragmented, as three different organizations, the communist Union of Jewish Societies, the Federation of Jewish Societies, and the Union of Jewish Societies under LICA, all sought to unite immigrant Jewry under their own auspices.43 Divided in their strategies for fighting antisemitism, French Jews were torn as well by their radically different approaches to the refugee problem of the 1930s. Only in the last years of the decade did both native and immigrant Jews reach a consensus that aid to the refugees entailed a challenge to increasingly restrictive governmental policies.44 Because of its proximity to Germany and its tradition of offering asylum to victims of political persecution, France took in more refugees than any other European nation. In 1 9 3 3 , for example, France accepted

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twenty-five thousand refugees from Nazi Germany, 8 5 percent of whom were Jews, out of an estimated total of sixty to sixty-five thousand persons who fled from the Reich in that year.4S The welcome extended to the refugees soon cooled, however, as various groups argued that these new immigrants were competing for scarce jobs in a period of unprecedented economic crisis. By October 1933 the liberal visa policy that had enabled refugees to enter the country in large numbers was ended, and in 1934 right-wing governments introduced measures that limited residence permits to foreigners with working papers and ordered the expulsion of foreigners who lacked appropriate residence permits.46 Although the Popular Front years witnessed a more humane policy toward the greatly reduced number of refugees still in France—regularizing their status, issuing a general amnesty for illegal immigrants, and offering safeguards against arbitrary expulsion—it continued to define France as a country of transit and was reluctant to accept additional refugees. With the demise of the Popular Front in 1938, tolerance of refugees disappeared from French political life. At the end of the year there were approximately sixty thousand Jewish refugees from central and eastern Europe in France, living a hand-to-mouth existence in a hostile society. From the spring of 1938 the centrist Radical government promulgated new laws that gave the police wide latitude in deporting illegal aliens without a hearing, ordered stiff jail sentences followed by expulsion for aliens without identity papers, and retroactively stripped all refugees who had entered the country without a visa of the right to remain. The Decree Law of November 12, 1938, foreshadowing the situation in Vichy and occupied France, established internment camps for those refugees of illegal status who had no place to which they could be deported.47 There has been much controversy about the reactions of French Jewry to the situation of Jewish refugees in France in the 1930s. Several recent studies, and particularly one left-wing polemic, have accused the French Jewish establishment of allowing fear for their own status to erode all sense of responsibility for the refugees.48 Others have argued that the generally lukewarm response of native French Jewry must be understood in the context of the difficult economic and political climate of the period rather than interpreted merely as evidence of ethnic and class antagonisms.49 Vicki Caron's comprehensive study of French refugee policy and Jewish involvement in the refugee question provides a more complete and nuanced picture than previously available of the development of French

I

54

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Jewish responses to the philanthropic and political dilemmas posed by the refugee crisis. Basing her appraisal on a wide range of archival sources, she convincingly demonstrates three important points: that the divisions among French Jewry as to appropriate communal and governmental policies toward the refugees were not limited to the native/immigrant axis but were located as well within the native Jewish elite; that French Jews gradually achieved a measure of consensus on the refugee issue; and that by the end of the decade the French Jewish establishment had come to the uncomfortable conclusion that it had to engage in politics to challenge the government's draconian decree laws of May and November 1938. Recognizing their special relationship with the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and equally aware that other French citizens would presume a special measure of responsibility on their part, by March 1933 the French Jewish establishment founded a committee to proffer assistance to the refugees. Soon it incorporated smaller immigrant-sponsored relief associations to become the National Committee of Relief. Under the control of native Jews prominent in consistorial circles and substantially funded by the Rothschilds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the National Committee nonetheless functioned as a nonsectarian agency. It included non-Jewish politicians in its ranks and enjoyed governmental recognition as the central refugee relief committee. As the enthusiastic welcome accorded the refugees in the spring of 1933 quickly faded, however, and the numbers of refugees swelled, the National Committee fell under the control of hardliners who sought to diminish the refugee problem by ridding France of its refugees. Preeminent among the hardliners was Jacques Helbronner, a powerful lawyer who was a member of the Conseil d'État, a French delegate to the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees in 1 9 3 4 - 3 5 , and vice-president of the Central Consistory. Consistently placing a narrow view of French national interests above humanitarian concern for the refugees, Helbronner advanced a distinctly antirefugee position. The only refugees he thought worthy of permanent asylum in France, he noted at the June 1933 founding meeting of the National Committee, were the possible " 1 0 0 to 1 5 0 great intellectuals . . . since they are scientists or chemists who have secrets our own chemists don't know. . . . " The rest, he described at a 1936 refugee aid meeting, included "nonentities of no use in any human group." 50 He fully endorsed the shift in French policy toward restrictionism, arguing that France had done all that it could. At high-level official meetings, where he represented the

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National Committee, he urged the government to limit strictly the inflow of refugees, and he rejected every plan, such as dispersal in the provinces or the establishment of agricultural colonies, that would have permitted the refugees to stay in France. As far as he was concerned, emigration alone would resolve France's refugee problem—a solution that he articulated not only to French governmental ministers but also to the League of Nation's High Commission for Refugees. Indeed, early in 1934 the National Committee, following Helbronner's lead, began to repatriate refugees even to Germany. Although there were others among its leadership, especially its General Secretary Raymond-Raoul Lambert, who dedicated themselves to a far more generous view of the goals of refugee assistance, Helbronner's approach prevailed. 51 Helbronner's disdain for the refugees and his harsh view of the possibilities of resettling them in France were reflected in the day-to-day operations of the National Committee. Although it expended the vast sum of from 600,000 to 900,000 francs a month,52 it alienated its refugee clients and the community of foreign Jews centered in Paris. Criticism of the agency filled the pages of the Yiddish- and German-language Jewish press. Some disgruntled refugees, supported by communist activists, demonstrated against the National Committee and its leadership. In March 1934 André Spire resigned from the organization's board because it "worked without heart and without soul." 53 At that time, as a consequence of its view that philanthropic assistance stimulated further emigration, the National Committee began to curtail its activities and by mid-1935 it ceased functioning altogether. With the moderation of French policy toward the refugees as a result of the election of the Popular Front government in the spring of 1936, French Jewish refugee relief revived. At the initiative of the Joint Distribution Committee, a new committee, the Committee of Assistance to Refugees (CAR), was established with Lambert as its general secretary. The hardliners had fallen from grace; Helbronner lost not only his pivotal position in the Jewish community's relief efforts but his post as French delegate to the High Commission for Refugees as well. Under Lambert's leadership, CAR focused on providing assistance, including vocational retraining, that would enable the refugees to find a niche in France.54 As the situation of the refugees worsened once more in the period of appeasement before the outbreak of World War II, Lambert and other moderates openly challenged the antirefugee statements of the hardliners. Their views ultimately prevailed within the Jewish community, although they lacked the power to effect a change in governmental policy.

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In November 1938 the German government sponsored a pogrom against German Jewry. Called Kristallnacht because of the shattered windows that littered the streets, the pogrom erupted ostensibly as retribution for the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a member of the German embassy in Paris. When Julien Weill, Grand Rabbi of Paris, gave an interview to the conservative daily Le Matin in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, he abdicated all French and French Jewish responsibility for the situation of the refugees. France, he declared, had done more than its share, and a spiritual leader such as himself was not equipped to resolve the refugee problem. Moreover, he sought to refute the popular impression that French Jews were beating the drums for war with Germany and that the Jewish refugee issue was a major obstacle to securing peace in Europe. Asserting his support for the French policy of appeasement, he subordinated all concern for the refugees to the achievement of an accord with the Nazi regime.55 Although some consistorial leaders were pleased with the patriotic impression made by Weill's interview, his remarks elicited a strongly critical response as well. Politicized Jewish youth of both native and immigrant origin protested Weill's position in open letters and newspaper editorials in the newspapers that they controlled, Samedi and Affirmation. One's dignity as a Frenchman, they declared, could not be bought at the expense of one's dignity as a Jew. Within the Jewish establishment itself spokesmen dissented from Weill's uncritical praise of France and his eagerness to remove the refugee question from the agenda of both France and French Jewry. At the end of November 1938 the Paris consistory, for example, adopted a resolution in a spirit quite unlike Weill's. It declared that it was a "human duty . . . to assure every possibility of life to the unfortunate Jews . . . The Paris consistory will do everything possible . . . to ensure that this relief effort be completely effective." Also in contradistinction to Weill, the Grand Rabbi of France, Isai'e Schwartz, along with Jewish lay leaders from Alsace-Lorraine, issued a stirring appeal to French Jews living along the northeastern frontier: "Our refugee brothers must not be forced into wandering, suicide, madness, or any other act of desperation through any fault of our own. No sacrifice will be too great."56 From the fall of 193 8 until the outbreak of the war in September 1939 the staff of CAR worked unceasingly to ameliorate the situation of the refugees within the shifting constraints of French policy. Most of their funds and energy were expended on regularizing the legal status of refugees caught in the web of French regulations. As they recognized the

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I

57

necessary limitations of their efforts, they began publicly to express dissent from the premises of a governmental policy that transformed victims of vicious persecution into criminals simply because they were unable to find legal refuge. In April 1939 the far from radical Lambert articulated in the pages of the Urtivers israelite a widely shared perspective among those native Jewish leaders who devoted themselves to refugee aid: "It is inadmissible that the prisons have been populated by unfortunates who have committed no crime other than fleeing too quickly from those countries where far worse persecutions lay in store for them." The following month prominent members of the native Jewish community participated in a meeting with the Minister of Justice to request that the decree laws be rescinded and amnesty be extended to those refugees who had been arrested. When Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria were interned as enemy aliens upon the declaration of war, the native Jewish community challenged this designation of the refugees by creating a new committee to extend aid to the internees.57 Disappointed with France's failure to live up to its humanistic ideals and acknowledging that they could do no more than alleviate the impact of a harsh policy, native Jewish leaders looked to a time when the cessation of economic and political turmoil would enable the forces of toleration to prevail in France. The events of the 1930s and particularly the refugee problem had placed French Jews, native as well as immigrant, in a situation that challenged the premise of the prevailing ideology of the Jewish community, that French and Jewish interests always converged rather than conflicted. French policy toward the refugees, governed by the severe economic impact of the Depression on the French economy and the xenophobia of the politics of the Right and Center, saw the victims of Nazi persecution as foreign competitors for scarce jobs. Although French Jews acknowledged the constraints imposed by the difficult economic circumstances of the time, most saw the refugees as fellow Jews in distress and not merely as the cast-off refuse of Nazi-dominated central Europe. They looked for practical solutions that would rescue the refugees rather than expel them. In 1938 and 1939 French foreign policy created additional tension for Jews, despite the fact that the government refrained from endorsing antisemitism and in April 1939 passed the Marchandeau law that banned antisemitic libel.58 The center-right governments that predominated in the last years of the Third Republic sought to dance with the Nazi devil in order to maintain peace; the majority of the French

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population appears to have supported its government's efforts at appeasement. Although eager to avoid the label of warmongers, French Jews were well known for their opposition to the Nazi regime. Even in welcoming the temporary cessation of tension achieved by the Munich pact, their joy could not be wholehearted, as they witnessed the extension of Nazi power and the potential creation of new Jewish refugees. As was common by the late 1930s, native and immigrant youth used the pages of Samedi to criticize both France's brutal refugee policy and the perceived failure of nerve of the native Jewish establishment. Its young critics attacked the native elite's feeble response to the refugees and its reluctance to recognize that appeasement ran counter to Jewish interests. Among a significant group of primarily immigrant Jewish noncommunist intellectuals and a few native Jewish youth the recognition of the vulnerability of European Jews—that they could count on no particular country to come automatically to their defense—led to a reflective mood that the historian David Weinberg has labeled the "return to the ghetto" philosophy.59 Jewish writers called not for physical segregation or for rejection of secular Western culture but for a spiritual turning inward, a renewed appreciation of traditional east European Jewish values, and an intensified study of the sources of Jewish strength and survival throughout history. The theme of "return to the ghetto" bespoke a pessimism about the contemporary situation of the Jews in France as elsewhere in Europe and a recognition of the weakness of the liberal ideals and social forces upon which Jews had relied since the time of the French Revolution. The French Jewish community remained fragmented, and disoriented, on the eve of World War II. Within both native and immigrant ranks, there was more political and ideological ferment than two decades earlier. To be sure, the ideological divisions within the community no longer followed the native/immigrant split: native and immigrant elites cooperated in consistorial circles, and native and immigrant youth participated together in youth groups and in publishing ventures. The declaration of war in September 1939 also brought immigrant and native Jews together, for it found both prepared tofightto defend France and to bring about the downfall of Nazi Germany. French and Jewish interests once more converged: through army service and the support of the war effort Jews could demonstrate their patriotism and gratitude to France and simultaneously cast a blow against the greatest enemy of the Jewish people. Even the Jewish communists, dissenting from the Nazi-Soviet nonag-

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gression pact of August 23 and hence from official Communist Party policy, declared their support for the war and called upon immigrant Jews to volunteer for military service.60 While most native French Jewish men, like the historian Marc Bloch, 61 viewed their army service as their duty as sons of France toward their beloved fatherland, immigrant Jews seem to have been motivated as much by the desire to take vengeance upon Hitler specifically as Jews as by the need to defend their new homeland. The surrender of France to Nazi forces and the establishment of the Vichy regime in the unoccupied southern part of France compelled the Jews of France, for the first time in their modern history, to contend with hostile authorities, both foreign and indigenous, bent on their destruction. For both immigrant and native Jews, their previous experience in France left them ill-prepared to recognize, and respond to, the full extent of the danger that they confronted in the years 1940-1944. Perhaps, though, their battle against the decree laws in the 1930s left them somewhat better prepared than we have previously thought.

CHAPTER

NINE

The Holocaust in France

T

he fall of France to the Germans in June 1940 initiated a period of unprecedented persecution for Jews living in France. Not only were they vulnerable to Nazi brutality in the occupied northern three-fifths of the country, but they suffered the hostility of the Vichy regime in the south, which proved itself an all-too-willing partner in antisemitic activity. According to the painstaking research conducted by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, more than 75,000 of the estimated 300,000 to 3 50,000 Jews within the borders of France in 1940 were deported to death camps. More than 14 percent of the deported were under the age of eighteen. Of the individuals deported, at most twenty-five hundred-some 3 percent—survived. Thousands of Jews were arrested and interned in camps on French soil; the Klarsfelds estimate that about three thousand of them died there, victims of deprivation and cruelty. And all of France's Jews were subject to legislation which severely restricted their economic and political freedom, stripping both native-born and naturalized Jews of their rights of citizenship.1 The war years demonstrated that the long-standing faith of French Jews in the protection offered by the state was misplaced. Although every French regime from the time of the Revolution had, with some minor exceptions,2 defended the Jews' claims to equality as citizens, the French 161

The Holocaust in France

state that emerged from the defeat of the Third Republic, the fascist regime of Vichy, was a source of antisemitic discrimination, not a bulwark against it. However, the Vichy state did not reflect the range of popular attitudes toward the Jewish victims of persecution. The survival of around three-quarters of Jews living on French soil during the Holocaust was, in part, a product of the willingness of some individuals and groups within French society to dissent from the antisemitism promoted by their own state as well as by the Nazis and to engage in behavior that prevented the deportation of the Jews in their midst. They stand out among the majority of the French population who remained indifferent bystanders and the minority who actively collaborated in the persecution of the Jews. 3 Although information about the experience of Jews in France during the Holocaust, much of it from the writings of survivors, has been available since the late 1940s, only in the past twenty-five years have the French begun to acknowledge their part in the incarceration and deportation toward death of Jews living in France. The claims of Vichy leaders that they acted reluctantly, under German pressure, and that they followed a strategy of sacrificing foreign Jews to save French Jewish citizens were widely accepted. With the publication in 1 9 8 1 of Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton's Vichy et les juifs and the publicity produced by the subsequent trials and convictions of S.S. officer Klaus Barbie and Vichy militia leader Paul Touvier, the involvement of representatives of the French authorities, from civil servants such as Maurice Papon, deputy head of the Vichy civil administration accused of deporting 1,600 Jews from Bordeaux, to members of the police, as well as of French individuals in the persecution of Jews has been publicly recognized. Papon was brought to trial in the fall of 1997. 4 The tragedy of the Jews of France was not a product simply of the Nazi occupation of France; it was shaped by a lethal combination of indigenous French forces and Nazi designs. The Jews of France may have realized that the defeat of France left them particularly vulnerable, but they could not foresee the extent of their vulnerability. It is always easy in hindsight to specify correct responses and always morally and methodologically untenable for a historian to do so. Like others caught in wartime upheaval, Jews tried to cope. As the writer Emmanuel Berl later noted, "We didn't ask ourselves too many questions. One lived from day to day." 5 The reactions of Jews to the Nazi occupation were as varied as the diverse origins and identities of the Jewish population. Expressing the patriotism that was integral to their identity as French citizens, native-born

The Holocaust in France

French Jews ached at the military defeat. They were reluctant to distinguish themselves as Jews from their countrymen, despite recognition by some that the Nazis would do so, and expressed confidence that the egalitarian traditions of French republicanism would prevail. As RaymondRaoul Lambert, the general secretary of CAR, the Jewish community's central refugee organization during the 1930s, and also editor of the Univers Israelite, wrote in his diary on July 1 5 , 1940: "French Judaism lives in particular anguish. It agrees to suffer like all but fears discrimination possibly imposed by the enemy . . . But I still have confidence. France cannot accept everything and it is not for nothing that for more than a century my ancestors have mingled on its soil—that I have fought two wars. I cannot imagine life for my wife, for my children, and for myself under another climate, an uprooting which would be worse than an amputation." 6 So integrated were many French Jews "of old stock" into French life that they asserted that their behavior during the occupation was dictated solely by their French identity. In the testament that he wrote in 1943 and gave to his family when he became involved in clandestine activities with the Resistance, the prominent historian of medieval France, Marc Bloch, testified to this sentiment: "I am prepared . . . if necessary, to affirm here, in the face of death, that I was born a Jew: that I have never denied it, nor ever been tempted to do so . . . [Yet], a stranger to all credal dogmas, as to all pretended community of life and spirit based on race, I have, through life, felt that I was above all, and quite simply, a Frenchman. " 7 Another example of the full assimilation of some Jews into French culture occurred in the internment camp of Drancy, located a few kilometers from Paris. There Jewish inmates with little specific Jewish identity made every effort to organize a Christmas celebration as well as to observe Bastille Day while ignoring the festivals of the Jewish calendar.8 Immigrant Jews, whether noncitizens or naturalized, also responded with patriotism to the German invasion, but their Jewish identity was generally more salient than was the case with their native-born fellow Jews. They had welcomed the opportunity to fight the Nazi enemy who were oppressing their relatives in the east. Indeed, 30 percent of the foreigners who volunteered for or were drafted into the French army in the months before the defeat were Jews, despite the fact that Jews constituted a far smaller proportion of foreigners in France.9 Profoundly disturbed by the Nazi-Soviet pact, immigrant Jewish communists, as we have noted, dissented from the Party line. In their newspaper in August 1939 they had declared their willingness to defend France and had called

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upon their activists to volunteer for army service, and by August 1940 they had begun illegally publishing a small anti-Nazi newspaper.10 The German invasion of the northern part of the country sparked an exodus of millions of French, whatever their origins or political ideology, toward the south and the relocation of the government in Bordeaux and, after the armistice, in Vichy. Among the throngs heading south were thousands of Jews, most from the Paris region. They were joined by three thousand Jews expelled from Alsace-Lorraine by the German forces. In the fall of 1940 German and Vichy censuses revealed that 60 percent of the Jews within the borders of France at the time were located in the southern zone. 11 Many foreign and first-generation French Jews, lacking resources for the journey, remained in the capital. Some native French Jews stubbornly refused to allow the Nazis to push them from the beautiful city in which they were so much at home. And, like other French people, most of whom reversed their steps, some of the Jewish refugees from the German invasion trekked back to the occupied zone. Documents indicate that some 30,000 Jews returned to Paris, bringing the Jewish population of the area to almost 1 5 0,000. 12 The determination of the Nazis to behave "correctly" and refrain from overt demonstrations of force contributed to the decision of Jews and Gentiles alike to confront the postarmistice conditions in the familiar surroundings of their homes. Some Jews would pay with their lives for this decision. Jews living in both the occupied zone and under Vichy rule first became aware of the particular consequences of the German victory for their status in the fall of 1940. As Marrus and Paxton have demonstrated, Vichy France acted independently in introducing discriminatory measures against the Jews within its borders; it did so "without direct German order." 13 Although early legislation passed during the summer restricted all those whose fathers were not French from membership in the civil service and the medical and legal professions, it was enforced with particular venom against Jews. Another law established a commission to review all naturalizations that had occurred under the liberalized rules established in 192.7. Vichy's measures stemmed from the nationalist and antisemitic ideology of the regime, from its own goals, such as blocking the further immigration of refugees and reducing the influence of foreigners, and particularly from its desire to assert its sovereignty over the population under its control. Vichy leaders also needed a scapegoat upon whom to blame France's military defeat. Moreover, Marshal Philippe Petain, premier of Vichy France, and the politician Pierre Laval, who were happy to restrict Jews within public and economic life but in-

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different to the details of policy in this area, gave free rein to the antisemitic ideologues within the government to devise the means to handle the "Jewish question." On October 3, 1940 the Vichy government introduced its Statute on the Jews, which discriminated against Jews on the basis of their race. The law defined Jews as those individuals, including Jewish converts to Christianity, who were descended from at least two grandparents "of Jewish race" if married to a Jew or from at least three, if not. 14 Jews were to be excluded from a list of enumerated positions in the civil service, from the officer corps of the armed services, and from posts in education, the press, and radio and cinema. Although Jewish veterans and individuals of special merit could apply for exemptions, only a minuscule few received them. Large numbers of Jews now found themselves deprived of their means of support. Further legislation passed the next day had an immediate impact on foreign Jews. It authorized prefects to intern foreign Jews in camps, to assign them to supervised residence in remote villages, or to draft them for forced labor. Several days later the government repealed the Cremieux law, which had conferred French citizenship upon the Jews of Algeria. When at the end of October the Minister of War set out to enforce the Statute on the Jews, he extended its provisions to remove not only Jewish officers, as had been stipulated, but enlisted men as well. In the occupied zone the Nazis had issued their first anti-Jewish ordinance on September 27, 1940. After defining Jews as followers of the Jewish religion or descendants of two Jewish grandparents who practiced Judaism, the ordinance imposed a number of restrictions upon them. Because the Nazis sought to rid themselves of Jews, it banned their reentry from the unoccupied zone. Most importantly, it required that all Jews under German control be counted and registered. They were to carry an identity card with the word " J e w " stamped on it (in French). Finally, all Jewish businesses were to be identified as such with signs in French and German displayed in their windows. Most Jews living in the occupied zone appeared at the appropriate police offices to register their names, addresses, places of birth, and professions in the census that took place between October 3 and 19. 1 5 Many felt they had no choice: they could not hide their Jewishness, they spoke with an accent, proper documentation was essential in wartime, the penalties for disobedience were severe. Although Jews of immigrant background retained a healthy suspicion of governmental authority from their own or their families' experiences in their countries of origin, even

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they participated overwhelmingly in the census. It has been estimated that only 10 percent of all the Jews living in Paris evaded the German ordinance. Drawing on their own experience and tradition, native Jews, as good French bourgeois, simply followed the law. In October 1940 they could not know that the information collected in the census would serve as the basis for the future roundup of Jews for deportation. The Nazi anti-Jewish ordinances were not unexpected. However, the French state's legislative aggression against its Jewish populace, whether citizens or immigrants, shocked those Jews who had constructed an identity that comfortably combined their French culture and Jewish particularity. It was inconceivable to them that France, the first country in Europe to emancipate its Jews—France, whose fidelity to its revolutionary slogan of liberté, fraternité, and égalité they had assumed to be unshakable—had abandoned the values that underlay their own Frenchness. Jewish institutions and individual Jews who had achieved prominence in the France of the Third Republic responded to the unprecedented situation with private and dignified expressions of distress. In November 1940 General Pierre Boris, a decorated veteran of World War I, sent a letter of protest to Marshal Pétain in which he declared, I am obliged, like my coreligionists, to acknowledge the material import of the Statute, but I will never acknowledge its moral validity . . . I believe that I have the right and the duty to raise this protest. The right: because I belong to a family that has been French for centuries and which has given France many honorable and honored functionaries and officers . . . The duty: because I am responding to the call of my relatives and friends dead on the field of honor. Because I would be dishonored in the eyes of future generations of Jewish Frenchmen who will survive the persecutions that are beginning and will serve France, if not as officers then at least as soldiers, were I not at the very least to try to save their honor by refusing to accept the insult without reacting, however feebly it may be possible for me to do so. . . . 1 6

Boris's letter represents the proud sensibility of those "Juifs d'état" who were profoundly conscious of their indelible French identity, of their integration at the highest levels of state service, and of their previously recognized contributions to France. The Jewish military officers, distinguished civil servants, professors, and political leaders directly affected by Vichy's racism were recipients of military decorations and members of the Legion of Honor. Relatively few—among them Marc Bloch—asked for individual exemptions from the provisions of the statute; many protested the values it embraced and the shame that it brought to France.

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In mid-1941 the Central Consistory sent to Marshal Pétain a long letter of protest against the statute, signed by a host of prominent Jews including Jacques Helbronner, president of the Central Consistory and former member of the Conseil d'État, the highest branch of the civil service; William Oualid, professor of law and secretary of the Central Consistory; Georges Wormser, the former head of the cabinet of former prime minister Georges Clemenceau; General Boris; all the consistorial Grand Rabbis; and numerous industrialists and lawyers.17 The letter displays the refusal of native-born Jews to believe that French authorities were actually the source of the discriminatory measures against them. After pointing to the illustrious record of French Jews in army service and their contributions to French arts and sciences, the professions, and the civil service, the letter expressed, poignantly and perhaps with some suspicion of the truth, the confidence of the signers that French leaders wanted to protect them but could not. As they wrote, Jewish Frenchmen wish still to believe that the persecutions of which they are the object are entirely imposed on the French state by the occupying authorities and that the representatives of France have tried their best to attenuate their rigors . . . Jewish Frenchmen, if they cannot safeguard the futures and perhaps even the life of their children and grandchildren, but seeking above all to leave them honorable names, demand of the head of state who, as a great soldier and a fervent Christian, incarnates in their eyes the fatherland in all of its purity, that he give them a record of this solemn protest, which is their only weapon in their weakness. Jewish Frenchmen, more attached than ever to their faith, keep intact their hope and their confidence in France and its destiny. 18

What is absent in these personal and collective remonstrances to Vichy leaders is any protest of the distinctive victimization of non-French Jews, who could not be subsumed in the term "Français israélites." Yet foreign Jews were thefirsttargets of draconian measures in both zones of France. Enemy aliens had been interned in French camps since the outbreak of war in the fall of 1939. Most were released at the time of the armistice, but they were reinterned in the fall of 1940 under Vichy. War refugees, especially from Belgium and the Netherlands, swelled their numbers, and by the end of 1940 some forty to fifty thousand foreigners, about 70 percent of them Jews, were interned in French camps.19 As the Germans became more and more insistent in their policy of making France Judenrein, from the summer of 1942. on, French Jews joined their foreign coreligionists in the internment camps, although the majority of native Jews were never interned. It could not have escaped the notice of the

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Jews incarcerated in the camps that in both zones they were being guarded by French police. Gurs, Rivesaltes, Les Milles, and Le Vernet in the unoccupied zone, and Drancy, Compiégne, Pithiviers, and Beaunela-Rolande in the occupied zone (among many others less well known) became "home" to thousands of Jews, including children. Conditions in the camps were deplorable. The physical and sanitation facilities were inadequate as was the supply of food and medicine; inmates were crowded together and disease was common. Rabbi René Kapel, a demobilized army chaplain and an activist on behalf of the victims of antiJewish persecution, regularly visited Gurs to offer assistance. Recalling the camp as it was in the winter of 1 9 4 0 - 4 1 , he described the suffering of inmates in the ice and snow: "old people scarcely dared to leave their barracks to go to the latrines, so slippery was the ground . . . At that time thirty deaths were registered daily, and sometimes more, because of the terrible epidemic of dysentery that raged then in Gurs. I still see the cart drawn by two men, on which lay some thirty cadavers." 20 In the camp cemetery at Gurs, a total of 1 , 1 6 7 Jews are buried.21 The American president of an international humanitarian relief organization, the Nimes Committee, referred pointedly at the time to the detrimental impact that the barbarous conditions in the camps would have on France's reputation abroad. 22 The Jewish inmates of the camps were sustained by assistance from both Jewish and nonsectarian organizations. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, familiarly referred to as the Joint, assumed the task of funding relief to Jews in the camps as well as to other Jews in need through established nonpolitical Jewish organizations in France, such as Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), Organisation pour la Reconstruction et le Travail (ORT), and consistorial institutions as well as through such groups as the Quakers. With the support of Grand Rabbi René Hirschler, the Joint succeeded in pushing the different Jewish relief agencies, both native and immigrant, to unify in October 1940 under the name Commission Centrale des Organisations Juives d'Assistance (CCOJA; also referred to as the "Central Commission") and with the recognition of the occupying authorities. Only the relief network operated by the Jewish communists, Solidarity, refused to join the new Central Commission, a stance that reflected communist opposition to cooperating in any form with the Nazis. Although CAR, the refugee assistance committee, had initially resisted associating with immigrants in the Central Commission on an equal basis, the fiscal power of the Joint was persuasive. Ironically, wartime conditions thus accomplished what the in-

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terwar years of peace could not. A number of non-Jewish relief organizations, including international bodies, also offered assistance, ranging from the French Protestant youth group, 'Comité Inter-Mouvements auprès des Évacués (CIMADE), and the Amitiés Chrétiennes, a joint Catholic-Protestant effort, to the American Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and various branches of the Red Cross, which banded together with some Jewish organizations to coordinate aid to camp inmates under the name the Nîmes Committee. These Jewish, Christian, and secular relief organizations alleviated the suffering of those in the camps. Most importantly, they supplemented the meager, in many cases starvation, rations afforded the internees. ORT opened facilities for occupational retraining within the camps. In the southern zone the Nîmes Committee negotiated with the Vichy authorities to bring in doctors and social workers to tend to the problems of the camp inmates as well as teachers to provide education for the children. It also received authorization to open supervised residences outside the camps, initially for children but extended also to some adults, so that individuals incarcerated for no crime other than Jewish birth might live in nonprison-like conditions. From the time of liberation there has been some debate about the impact of these efforts at ameliorating the situation of camp inmates. On the one hand, they clearly alleviated discomfort and improved the experience of living in the camps. On the other hand, by making life in the camps bearable, the helping organizations may have contributed to a complacency that deterred efforts at escape. As Rabbi Kapel reflected in his memoirs, the knowledge that the internment camps were holding pens for individuals who would be deported—a knowledge not available in the first two years of occupation and often not believed even when the first evidence was presented—would have dictated a different strategy than that followed by the relief organizations in their early period of operation: We were too inclined to respect a certain legality, in the hope of better serving the interests of the internees. Without doubt we should have silenced our scruples and bribed the Vichy officials, the internment camp directors, the chiefs . . . of the Milice [the Vichy militia], agents of the Gestapo and the German security service. We should have furnished false identity cards to a larger number of internees, and done everything to facilitate their escape. We should have acted [earlier] as we did beginning in 1 9 4 3 . . . . 2 3

The habit of obedience to the law and reliance on familiar patterns of behavior died hard, particularly for French Jews but also for immigrants who had developed a trust in France's promise.

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The vulnerability of being a Jew in France became apparent only gradually. Jews struggled with the challenges of supporting their families amidst the problems of relocation to new communities in the south and the Vichy Statute on the Jews, whose restrictions were tightened and expanded by further legislation in 1 9 4 1 . In the occupied zone, they confronted even grimmer economic prospects, having to cope with the "aryanization" of businesses and special taxes levied by the Germans. During the Occupation 42,22.7 Jewish enterprises were placed under provisional administration and 17,020 were sold or liquidated by April 3, 1944. 24 Jews encountered public indifference to their plight as well as overt expressions of antisemitism. When all Jews in the occupied zone were required to wear a yellow star of David with the word "Juif" upon their clothing, beginning on June 7, 1942, they experienced a new form of stigmatization and symbolic segregation. As one then nine-year-old recalled in an interview conducted in the 1970s, "You see, I wore the yellow star all the time in Paris. It was terrible. Every recess, every day after school, the other children would taunt me; I couldn't bear i t . . . I had to suffer the brutal jokes of my teachers . . . The swine, they took advantage, they would enjoy themselves at my expense." 25 But the greatest fear—first of foreign Jews, later of all Jews—was of arrest and incarceration. Beginning in the spring of 1 9 4 1 both the Nazi and Vichy leadership expressed their determination to move forward on the "Jewish question." At the end of March Vichy established the Commissariat-Général aux questions juives (CGQJ), a governmental office for Jewish affairs, and appointed Xavier Vallat, a resolute antisemite but also an anti-German French nationalist, as its head. Seeking ultimately to expel the vast majority of Jews from France (after the conclusion of the war), Vallat sought in the meantime to reduce Jewish participation in the economy, through a series of statutes that severely limited the Jewish presence in various occupations and extended the "aryanization" of Jewish property and businesses to the unoccupied zone. By imposing strict and rigorously enforced anti-Jewish legislation and demonstrating that Vichy was as opposed to "Jewish influence" as were the Nazis, Vallat hoped to persuade the Germans to accept Vichy regulations as valid for all of France. Most ominously for Jews, he imposed a detailed census on all Jews in the unoccupied zone, which included information on property and income. Jews were forbidden to move, even within a commune, without notifying local authorities. Mayors and communal employees were required to monitor the enforcement of the anti-Jewish legislation

The Holocaust in France as well as to administer the machinery of identity and ration cards and labor service. A special anti-Jewish police force was also established at the initiative of the minister of the interior. All of these measures reflected what Marrus and Paxton have labeled "Vichy's grand strategy for dealing with the Germans: by internalizing parts of the German project, stamping them 'made in Vichy' and extending them to the Unoccupied Zone, they seem to have hoped that they could both extend French authority and diminish the German grip over the Occupied Zone." 26 Although foreign Jews had been the target of Vichy's initial acts of internment in camps, a law of June 2, 1941 allowed prefects to order administrative internment for any Jews, including the native-born, deemed in violation of Vichy's many anti-Jewish measures or considered dangerous to public security. Judicial rules of evidence did not apply. In March 1941 the German Consul-General had written to Berlin, "The French government has also taken in hand the placing of alien Jews in concentration camps in the Unoccupied Zone; the French Jews are to follow later."27 The prediction was accurate, but Vichy leaders were, in fact, reluctant to arrest native French Jews in any numbers. The Nazis were not constrained by the same scruples. To be sure, they directed their first raids in Paris at foreign Jews, arresting a small number of Zionists in November 1940 and 3,710 men in May 1941. Flexing their muscles and seeking to achieve acquiescence to German regulations through intimidation, on August 2 0 , 1 9 4 1 Captain Theodor Dannecker, head of the Gestapo's Jewish section in France, ordered the French police to check the identity papers of passengers at the Métro stations of Paris's eleventh arrondissement, a center of Jewish population. No Jew, whether French citizen or immigrant, was permitted to pass. The morning Metro action and a house-to-house search conducted that day by French police together resulted in the arrest of 4,232 Jewish men, most of them foreign, who were sent to Drancy. A raid in Paris in December was aimed at male Jewish citizens, 743 of whom were picked up and incarcerated.28 Although mass arrests of native Jews would not become common until 1943, when the appetite of the Nazis for Jews could no longer be sated by foreigners alone, the early roundups of Jews signaled that the niceties of legal status offered feeble protection against Nazi intentions to develop a comprehensive and deadly policy for all Jews. In 1942 the situation of Jews in both the occupied and unoccupied zones worsened. Those under Nazi occupation found their lives circumscribed by a spate of new measures. Their radios and bicycles were confiscated, their telephones disconnected. They were subject to strict

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curfews and permitted to shop for only one hour in the afternoon. Banned from all public establishments, they were restricted to the last car of the Metro. Finally, as we have noted, the display of the yellow star of David was mandated for every Jew aged six and above. 29 The lot of the Jews under Vichy declined in 1942 as well. In May the direction of the Commissariat-Général aux questions juives was transferred from Xavier Vallat to Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a right-wing antisemitic activist who displayed no sign of the conservative French nationalism that had motivated Vallat. In fact, Darquier had long admired the Nazis and was the favored candidate of the Germans, who had pressed for Vallat's replacement at the CGQJ. Under Darquier's aegis antisemitic propaganda and persecution flourished, although Darquier wielded little influence and enjoyed little respect among either Vichy's leadership or the German occupiers, whose company in Paris he favored. 30 On November 1 1 , the Germans occupied all of France (with the exception of a zone in the southeast occupied by the Italians). Jews who had fled Nazi control by fleeing to the south now found themselves confronting danger directly. What made 1942. a turning point for Jews in France, however, was less the German occupation of the entire country than a significant shift in German policy. Nazi leadership in France determined to implement the "Final Solution" by going beyond the restriction and impoverishment of Jews to their deportation to the death camps in the east. The first convoy to Auschwitz left from the camp of Compiègne on March 27, 1 9 4 2 , the last—the seventy-ninth—departed from Drancy for Buchenwald on August 1 7 , 1944, on the eve of the liberation of Paris. 31 Traveling tightly packed in train cars, with no food rations or sanitary facilities, the deportees had scant chance to survive in Auschwitz, the destination of almost all of the convoys, should they survive the train trip. The mass arrests and deportations resulted in the death of about one-quarter of the Jews of France, but they also transformed public opinion about the Jewish question in France. As the Germans set in motion the machinery of deportation, the brutal hunt for Jews became a public spectacle. French police, along with some Nazi personnel, knocked on apartment doors and gave their Jewish inhabitants only scant minutes to pack a few belongings. Marched through the streets on their way to an internment camp, the Jewish victims increasingly evoked pity from those who could not avoid seeing them along with their French overseers.

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The Paris raid of July 16, 1942.—generally called "the great roundup of the Vel d'Hiv" after the sports stadium in which the victims were deposited, or Black Thursday—had a particularly great impact. 32 Armed with index cards with names of immigrant Jews, forty-five hundred French policemen fanned out in the early morning darkness to arrest men aged sixteen to sixty and women aged sixteen to fifty-five. They were to be dropped off for registration at various public buildings throughout the city and suburbs from which they would be bused directly to Drancy if unaccompanied by children under sixteen and to the Vel d'Hiv, located near the Eiffel Tower, if their children were with them. The roundup continued the following day. Among the 12,884 detainees were 5,802 women and 4,051 children. More than 8,000 people, about half of them children, were confined for five days in the Vel d'Hiv, which lacked the sanitary facilities for such numbers.33 The stench was overpowering. There were no working water lines, and jugs of waters had to be brought in by hand to quench the thirst of the inmates. The scene in the stadium was chaotic. André Baur, the head of the northern branch of the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF North), the central organization of Jews whose establishment was imposed by the German and Vichy authorities, was allowed into the stadium on the night of July 16. He jotted down his impressions: The Vel d'Hiv . . . We arrived at the central stage by the tunnel. . . On the stage, stretchers are lying on which women and children moan. In a small enclosure on the left, the Red Cross has installed an ambulance. T w o doctors and nurses are busy at work. One gets the impression that there are only children and sick people . . . There are actually only two Jewish doctors and one from the Red Cross for the 7 , 5 0 0 people . . . The nurses have tears in their eyes, the policemen are heartsick. . . . 3 4

From the Vel d'Hiv the children and their parents were transported primarily to the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, where they were again exposed to dirt, hunger, and disease. Since permission had not yet arrived from Germany to deport young children to the east, those younger than fourteen were forcibly separated from their parents and older siblings and left alone in the camps, under the care of a few Red Cross volunteers. In full view of local residents, the adults and older children were deported on four convoys to Auschwitz. Of more than four thousand deportees, thirty-five survived.35 In early August permission arrived for the deportation of the children, under the ruse that they would be reunited with their families. The

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thirty-five hundred disoriented, frightened children were packed into freight cars and shipped to Drancy. In 1943 an adult woman inmate of Drancy who was placed in charge of the children from Pithiviers described their arrival a few months before: They ranged in age from fifteen months to thirteen years, the filth was indescribable, three-quarters of them have pus-filled bruises all over, and impetigo . . . They almost all suffered from dysentery . . . Very quickly we came to realize that everything we tried would be hopeless . . . They all belonged in the infirmary, but this was impossible since they are to leave for an unknown destination. I will never forget the faces of those children . . . [I] n these little faces, the horror of the days which they are living is branded. They show us their most precious belongings: the pictures of their mothers and fathers which their mothers gave them when they parted. . . . 36

Within a few days of their arrival the children were deported to the east, to the "unknown destination" that in Drancy they had called "Pitchipoi," a name derived from east European Jewish folklore. Pitchipoi, it turned out, was Auschwitz. Not a single child incarcerated in the Vel d'Hiv survived. The roundup of Jews—men, women, and children hunted down and arrested publicly by French police—motivated some individuals to aid Jews in escaping their enemies. They also appalled sufficient numbers within the French population to undermine the authority of the Vichy regime. Protests against the brutal treatment began to be voiced. A few leading figures of the Church expressed their horror in no uncertain terms. The initial protests consisted of private letters to Petain, but in August 1942 Archbishop Jules Saliege of Toulouse issued a pastoral letter to be read in all the churches of his diocese on Sunday, August 23. Reacting to the expulsion of foreign Jews from camps in the unoccupied zone to the Nazis in the north, the pastoral letter condemned the harsh measures to which Jews were being subjected and called upon Christians to recognize their common humanity with Jews: "Why does the right of sanctuary no longer exist in our churches? Why are we defeated? . . . The Jews are real men and women. Foreigners are real men and women. They cannot be abused without limit. . . They are part of the human species. They are our brothers like so many others." 37 Although governmental officials, who had gotten wind of the pastoral letter, tried to prevent its promulgation, most priests defied the secular authorities. The massive public roundups in the unoccupied zone that occurred at the very end of the month stimulated other Church figures in the south, including Car-

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dinal Pierre Paul Marie Gerlier of Lyon, to speak out. Among Christian religious leaders in France the Protestants had been most active and earliest in protesting Vichy's discriminatory policy. As the regime escalated its anti-Jewish measures one of their prominent spokesmen, Pastor Marc Boegner, head of the Protestant Federation, issued a strong statement that was read in most Protestant churches on September 2.2.. In the occupied zone, however, where the cost of protest was high, not a single clerical voice objected to the persecution of the Jews. The protests of religious leaders reflected increasing popular dismay at the public arrest, incarceration, and deportation of Jews, even among those who were quite ready to tolerate some restrictions on Jews in the French economy and society. More French Gentiles were willing to refrain from cooperating with French police and German Gestapo agents in tracking down Jews and, in addition, were willing to alert Jews in danger of arrest. Some were prepared to take the risk of supplying Jews with the false papers necessary for their survival in hiding or even of hiding Jews themselves. The most impressive act of collective determination to hide Jews occurred in the small Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, situated in the distant and undeveloped reaches of the Haute-Loire. 38 Dissidents in Catholic France, some Protestants seem to have been particularly sympathetic to other minorities and predisposed to challenge authority. Under the leadership of Pastor André Trocmé the village residents and the surrounding peasants assumed responsibility for sheltering Jews, who first found their way to the area as individual refugees in the winter of 1 9 4 0 - 4 1 and later were sent by rescue groups. It has been estimated that during the war about five thousand Jews were hidden by the three thousand natives of the village and its hinterland.39 In addition to Protestant clergy and laypeople, some Catholic priests and nuns also participated in rescue activities, particularly where children were involved. With many institutions at their disposal, they agreed to find places for Jewish children whose parents relinquished them so that they might survive. Bereft of their families, Jewish children entered convent and boarding schools where they had to assume a new identity and learn sufficient ritual and liturgy to "pass" as Catholics. Although most Church personnel refrained from strongly pressuring their Jewish charges to convert, the homelessness of the children, their association of Jewishness with danger, and their desire to escape the burden of differentness led some into the Church. And some priests and nuns did promote the baptism of children in their care, assured that their

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conversionary activity was legitimated by some parents' consent to the baptism, secured under duress, and convinced that they were thereby providing salvation to the children.40 Religious activists, both Catholic and Protestant, were frequently found as organizers and staff members of rescue networks that were established to provide Jews with the resources that would minimize the possibilities of their arrest and deportation. Both the Protestant CIMADE and the Amitiés Chrétiennes cooperated with Jewish organizations and, with financial support from the Joint, assisted camp inmates, secured the release of Jews from camps, set up humane centers to house and care for them (they still remained technically under arrest), and acquired custody of the children of incarcerated adult Jews. As the situation of Jews deteriorated, the Christian welfare organizations gradually moved from providing food and social assistance to the acceptance of illegal activity, such as the creation and distribution of forged identity and ration cards and the smuggling of Jews into Switzerland. The networks of clergy who personally hid Jews and secured temporary refuge for them in their institutions and among their faithful were crucial in enabling the escape from France of thousands of Jews. Rescue was the dominant form of resistance developed by the diverse elements of French Jewry themselves as a means of responding to their situation during the Holocaust.41 The majority of French Jews who survived "rescued" themselves and their families independently by placing their children with Gentiles whom they knew or by going into hiding themselves with only minimal organized assistance in the form of false documents and useful contacts. Various Jewish organizations, however, played a major role in the survival of many French Jews. Welfare organizations like OSE, ORT, and the Committee of the Rue Amélot, all dominated by Jews of immigrant origin, as well as the EIF (the Jewish scouts) came to recognize that legal relief work, or self-help, offered only a limited form of protection from Nazi and Vichy persecution and that children were the most vulnerable victims of anti-Jewish measures. Growing numbers of Jewish leaders, in the words of historian Jacques Adler, by the spring of 1942 turned "from self-help to resistance."42 Although some historians of the Holocaust would limit acts of resistance to sabotage or armed violence against the German occupiers, in the past generation most scholars of the Holocaust, like Adler, Susan Zuccotti, and Deborah Dwork, have expanded their definitions of resistance. Yehuda Bauer, one of the foremost authors in the field, writes in his general history of the Holocaust, "[Jewish] resistance was any group action con-

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sciously taken in opposition to known or surmised laws, actions or intentions directed against the Jews by the Nazis or their supporters." 43 The rescue of children and adults undertaken by Jewish and non-Jewish organizations falls comfortably in this rubric, along with armed combat and sabotage. Resistance necessitated self-liberation from the notion that obedience to the law was valid in all circumstances. As it became clear that the law, in both the occupied and unoccupied zones, was determined by enemies bent on degrading Jews, curtailing their possibilities for dignified selfsupport, and ultimately deporting them to unknown destinations, Jewish leaders began to engage in illegal activity. Even when they recognized the limits of legality, however, they continued to operate legal institutions, in part because of their perception that Vichy was willing to be of assistance. Only as the German presence in the south effectively eroded Vichy's claim to autonomy did OSE, ORT, and EIF disband their legal operations. 44 Although immigrant Jews, more attuned to the strength of antisemitism than were native Jewish citizens of France, were the first to dispense with the niceties of legality, a variety of Jewish organizations and individuals ultimately chose to break the law in order to save Jewish lives and to subvert the German occupation. The child rescue network that OSE established late in 1942 to save the children of immigrant Jews, headed by a newly recruited Jewish engineer named Georges Garel, required the creation of false Christian identities for the children, the identification of families and institutions willing to accept the risk of hiding them, and the smuggling of the children to their havens. Of the more than fifteen hundred children who passed through "the Garel circuit" only four were caught. 45 The evolution of the Jewish scout movement, which had brought the children of immigrants and native Jews together even before the war, is indicative of the changing sensibilities of Jewish youth and of the development of multiple definitions of resistance.46 Concerned with the revitalization of Jewish youth, particularly through agricultural training, and the deepening of their Jewish consciousness, the EIF had established centers in rural areas even before the war and had assumed the task of evacuating the children of immigrant Jews from Paris once war began. After Moissac, in the department of Tarn-et-Garonne, was acquired on December 1939, it became the EIF's most important children's home, and the unoccupied zone its center of operations. Much of its financial support came from the Joint, via clandestine channels. Because agriculture occupied a privileged place in Vichy's national revolution, in 1941 the

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EIF even managed to secure a subsidy from Vichy's ministry of agriculture for the training of each Jewish youth under the age of twenty, provided he was of French citizenship. Despite the subsidy, however, adult scout leaders protested to the CGQJ the invidious distinctions drawn on the basis of religion and "so-called race" in Vichy's policy, though not apparently the distinction between French and foreign Jews. 47 Cooperating with other relief agencies, such as OSE, the Jewish scouts cared for children in need in two children's homes. When the Germans and Vichy established the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), an organization designed to coordinate all Jewish activity, on November 29, 1 9 4 1 , the EIF agreed to be absorbed by the new body. Robert Gamzon, founder of the scouts and one of its most important adult leaders, served on the UGIF's administrative council. The scouts pursued their activity in the fourth division, devoted to the needs of youth, and extended their efforts to reach the children of immigrants incarcerated in the camps. In response to the roundups of foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone during August 1942 the EIF leaders opted for illegal activity. In the months preceding that summer, the EIF had established the sixth section, a unit of the fourth division that specialized in social service, specifically professional training, rural placement, and maintaining contact with and providing aid in the camps. Working under the cover of the legal UGIF, the sixth section became the center of illegal activity, even after the scout division of the fourth section was dissolved by official order of Darquier de Pellepoix in January 1943 and all scouting activity banned. Working closely together, particularly after the invasion of the southern zone, the sixth section leaders located in Paris and the south pursued several lines of clandestine activity: the provision of false identity cards (of high quality, incidentally); the identification of contacts who would provide money, papers, and hiding places to those who escaped the roundups; and the rescue and placement of Jewish children in safe homes in the countryside. To prevent their discovery and capture, the scout leaders opted for decentralization of authority, with regional leaders meeting together monthly. In recognition of the persistence of the Germans in their search for Jews to deport, in October 1943 they began to disband their legal children's homes and farms and find hiding places in rural areas for their charges. The residents of Moissac were dispersed during December. In a short period of time the scouts succeeded in placing between

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200 and 250 children in private homes and assumed responsibility for supporting them. To facilitate their rescue efforts, the activists of the sixth section had to develop informants who would provide them with intelligence about Nazi and Vichy operations and contacts in town halls who had access to birth records and to blank ration cards. The sixth section became skilled in fabricating false identity cards, which it made available to members of the Resistance and to Vichy police sympathetic to the Resistance. Its members maintained contact with Jewish children hidden in private homes and in Christian institutions to supervise their education and medical care, affirm their ties with Judaism, and generally facilitate their adjustment. Finally, it worked with OSE and with the Mouvement des Jeunesses Sionistes (MJS, the Zionist youth movement) to organize the clandestine passage of Jews across the border into Switzerland and Spain. The clandestine activity of the sixth section was dangerous; of its eighty-six (or, according to one source, eighty-eight) workers, thirty met their deaths in France or through deportation to Nazi death camps. In addition to providing thousands of false identity and ration cards and financial assistance to the dispossessed, the activists of the sixth section had taken care of some 850 to 1,200 children and had transported another 500 to Switzerland. Of the more than 500 residents in the EIF children's home, only one was seized and deported. After its children's residences and its farms disbanded in the last months of 1943, some of the scout activists, with Robert Gamzon at their head, chose to engage in armed resistance and established three EIF underground units.48 Their company was subsequently named in memory of one of their colleagues in the sixth section, Marc Haguenau, murdered by the Gestapo in March 1944. In the late spring they became affiliated both with the Jewish Army and with a branch of the official Resistance, the Secret Army of the Tarn. They undertook dangerous assignments, including collecting supplies parachuted to the local Resistance and capturing a German train transporting weapons, food, and soldiers. With pride they participated in the liberation of the region's capital, Castres, on August 21 and continued thereafter to fight to expel the last of the Germans in the eastern departments. Their French patriotism, strong Jewish identity, and scouting self-discipline had led the Jewish scouts from obedience to the law to clandestine rescue efforts and finally to armed resistance.

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As one of the Jewish organizations engaged in illegal operations, at the same time that it embarked upon armed resistance the EIF participated in the founding of a comprehensive umbrella underground organization, the Conseil Représentatif des Juifs de France (CRIF), an expanded version of the Central Commission (the CCOJA). After the arrest of its president, Jacques Helbronner, the Central Consistory took part in the establishment of CRIF, thereby for the first time ceding its claim to be the sole organization capable of speaking in the name of French Jewry. And immigrant Jews in CRIF wielded more influence than had been the case in CCOJA. As was the case with the French population as a whole, only a minority of Jews engaged in armed resistance to the Germans. Jews seem to have been disproportionately represented, however, in the various Resistance groups from their beginning. Prominent intellectuals like Raymond Aron, René Cassin, and Marc Bloch were joined by grandchildren of Albert Dreyfus, rabbis, and large numbers of ordinary Jews of both native and immigrant origins. Like Marc Bloch, most native Jews, who were profoundly French in their culture and consciousness, asserted that their love of France led them to resist the Nazis. Immigrant Jews were particularly prominent in the communist Resistance, where they often served together in Yiddish-language units that grew out of the preexisting Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée (MOI), the foreign workers' section of the Communist Party. The combination of their political ideology and status as special targets of Nazi persecution seems to have spurred immigrant communist Jews to unusual militancy. There has been considerable recent debate as to whether immigrant Jews who participated in the communist Resistance expressed a specifically Jewish consciousness in their opposition to the Germans or whether they were simply communist activists engaged in the universalist struggle against fascism.49 Annette Wieviorka, in particular, has argued that during the war years Jewish communists did not perceive their activities within the Resistance in terms of their Jewishness. Instead, they were motivated by their concern for meeting the foreign policy needs of the soviet state and of the French Resistance as defined by its communist leadership. For example, they invested virtually no effort in saving Jews, even children, since rescue was not considered one of the goals of the Resistance. Those who have remained communists, she notes, continue to assert that their wartime resistance derived from their political identity and not from their Jewishness. Moreover, she demonstrates that the Jewish section of the MOI was not semi-independent but shifted its line to ac-

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commodate to Party policy. After the war, the communist movement in France reinforced the communist, but not the Jewish, identity of its adherents. Adam Rayski, on the other hand, speaking for communist Resistance fighters who have broken with the Party, has written that during the war Jewish and communist interests coincided and therefore to be a communist was a positive expression of (secular) Jewishness (judéité). In his view, the Jewish section of the MOI retained some autonomy and was concerned above all with the fate of the Jews. Wieviorka concurs with Rayski where the recruits of the post-July roundup are concerned. She attributes to the sons and daughters of immigrants who had lost their parents in the roundup a specific Jewish consciousness. A member of the communist Resistance herself, the historian Annie Kriegel noted that the movement enabled her to fight Nazism both as a French citizen and a Jew. She joined the communists as a sixteen-year-old at least in part because the Gaullists were not interested in adolescent females who did not fit their view of the Resistance fighter as a military man. 50 It is difficult to sort out human motivations, particularly when the possibility of reflection and documentation is limited by the exigencies of wartime. Although it is unlikely that most Jews who participated in the communist Resistance defined their ethnic or cultural identity as primary in their choices, it is likely that they felt that their communist anti-Nazi activities were at least in part an act of Jewish defiance. Some Jews, like the members of the EIF, felt the need to organize a specifically Jewish branch of the Resistance that, by demonstrating Jewish heroism, would assert Jewish ethnic pride in the face of racism and would also avenge the Jewish victims of the Nazis. The initiative for the establishment of a "Jewish army" occurred soon after the fall of France, in the autumn of 1940, when a group of young Zionists under the leadership of the poet and journalist David Knout and his wife Ariane (alias Régine) and Abraham Polonski began to plan for armed resistance in addition to the relief and rescue activity they conducted under the organizational aegis of a group called Main Forte (strong hand). They expected their fighters not only to participate in the anti-Nazi Resistance but also to contribute later to the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state. According to Anny Latour, the Jewish Army (referred to by members as the AJ, or Armand-Jules) crystallized at the end of 1 9 4 1 . Recruiting young Jews, both women and men, in the south of France for commando units, the leaders of the A J trained them in military strategy and in the use of weapons. 51 A special initiation ceremony conducted in darkness, with only a light shining in the recruit's face, signified the na-

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tional hopes and Jewish consciousness of the fighters. Under a blue and white flag, they swore allegiance on the Bible to the Jewish Army and its leaders and recited the words "Let my people live again! Let Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) be born again! Liberty or Death." 52 The different Jewish units of the EIF and the Zionist youth movement negotiated with the A J to form the Organisation Juive de Combat (OJC) on June i , 1944, and the latter forged ties with both communist and noncommunist units in the region of the Tarn. Some four hundred fighters are estimated to have participated in the activities of the OJC. 5 3 While a substantial number of Jews participated in morally unambiguous resistance activities, whether armed combat, sabotage, or rescue work, the official organization of the Jews of France, the UGIF, was trapped in a more ethically troubling situation.54 It was formed by the Vichy government in response to the German demand to centralize all Jewish institutions and to provide easy access to France's Jewish population. Was it collaborationist because it cooperated with the Germans and with Vichy's CGQJ in its efforts to respond to the needs of victims of anti-Jewish policy? Or do the benign, indeed philanthropic intentions of its leaders, excuse it from charges of collaboration, even when its activities facilitated the control and arrest of Jews? The UGIF was established with separate branches in the occupied and unoccupied zones. All Jews in France, both citizens and foreigners, were required to join, and all existing Jewish organizations were expected to be dissolved into the new entity. The leadership of French Jewry tried to negotiate both with Vallat and Captain Dannecker, head of the Jewish section of the Gestapo in France, to retain the autonomy of Jewish institutions, but they had limited leverage. Consistorial leaders, many of whom had access to key players in the Vichy government, vehemently opposed the establishment of a single organization for all of French Jewry and succeeded in negotiating a special role for the consistory as the representative of French Judaism, the religious voice for France's Jews. In the southern zone individual organizations were allowed to retain their autonomy. The consistory's refusal to join the UGIF seems to have stemmed more from the new organization's amalgamation of natives and immigrants as well as religious and secular associations than from any principled objections to dealing with the Nazi authorities. Individuals associated with consistorial circles, André Baur and RaymondRaoul Lambert, became directors of UGIF North and South respectively. Some of the prominent persons whom Vallat selected to serve as leaders of the UGIF rejected the invitation, but as Lambert's diary reveals, his

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decision to accept a position in the UGIF was motivated by a desire to help the victims of Nazism, not to benefit at their expense. Both Baur and Lambert and their families were deported to Auschwitz and were murdered there. The tragedy of the UGIF stemmed from the irreconcilable differences between the goals of its Jewish staff and those of the German and Vichy officials who ultimately controlled it. UGIF leaders saw their role as providing relief to the beleaguered Jews of France. At the beginning they felt they could negotiate with the authorities; certainly it served Vallat's interests in asserting Vichy's autonomy vis-a-vis the Germans for French Jewish leaders to object to German policy. The native Jews who administered the UGIF also fell victim to their own trust in rationalism and legality. They presumed, as did so many Jews (and others) confronting the unprecedented horror of Nazism, that obedience to the law would minimize German brutality. They were trapped in a situation that made overt opposition costly: refusal to comply with German orders would lead to reprisals against the entire Jewish population. There is evidence that native Jewish leaders were willing, however reluctantly, to accept the arrest of foreign Jews in the expectation that French Jewish citizens would be spared. Moreover, they felt that the relief work they performed filled a real need. Consequently, in the wake of the Vel d'Hiv roundup they did not resign in protest; instead, they provided social workers and medical supplies to the Jews caught by the Nazis and newly incarcerated in Drancy. The commitment of the UGIF leaders to legalism went even further, almost to the point of self-delusion. The Paris leaders of UGIF North were given clear signals about the proposed July 1 6 , 1 9 4 2 , roundup two weeks in advance when the CGQJ, at German behest, demanded that they prepare supplies for at least seven thousand people. Although immigrant leaders who had caught wind of the German intentions made efforts to warn the Jewish population so that they might go into hiding, the UGIF directors sat on the information, alerting their immigrant colleagues of the Rue Amelot committee only on what they thought was the eve of the raids. It took an unforeseen delay on the part of the Nazis and their French collaborators to transform the last-minute warning into a three-day lead. Tragically, the UGIF's policy of remaining within the law also cost hundreds of Jewish children their lives. Having gained custody of children whose parents had been deported, the UGIF maintained them in group homes and made no efforts to disperse them despite the fact that

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their names had been recorded in police registers. They carefully kept files on these and other children with their names and addresses clearly noted. Even in 1944, when the Nazis' genocidal intentions were obvious, the new head of UGIF North, Georges Edinger, refused to destroy its files and hide the children still under its supervision. The most notorious incident of this sort occurred under the aegis of UGIF South, at a children's home in the village of Izieu, not far from Lyon, that was financed by OSE. On April 6, 1944, as the home's administrators were searching for hiding places for their residents, forty-four Jewish children and seven adults were arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz. With the exception of one adult woman, all were murdered.55 Finally, both branches of the UGIF were compromised by their painful accessions to Nazi demands. At the end of January 1943 the German authorities had demanded of UGIF North the surrender of all but 9 of its z8z foreign workers. (Employment by the UGIF had until then provided exemption from arrest and deportation.) The UGIF leaders initially had determined to resist this order and to declare to the CGQJ their intention to resign rather than comply. After weeks of negotiation, however, the UGIF board agreed to the German concession that they might retain up to 1 5 percent of their foreign workers, whom they were to select themselves. On March 4, Baur wrote to his counterpart Lambert of UGIF South, "You know our board's attitude. Unfortunately, the threat of measures against the rest of our personnel and against the French Jews has compelled us to reconsider our attitude." 56 The UGIF proved powerless to protect its own employees. The reputation of the UGIF South was similarly damaged by its submission to German power in October 1943. When the Gestapo invaded the Marseille office of the UGIF with orders to prepare children in a local group home for deportation, UGIF leaders chose to acquiesce to the command rather than disperse the children with the assistance of the Resistance. The threat of reprisals against the Jewish community of Marseille was the decisive factor. 57 The UGIF was not responsible for the fate of Jews in France during the Holocaust. The conditions in which it operated were established by others who wielded overwhelming power and were not reluctant to employ it. Yet, in retrospect, decisions taken by UGIF leaders appear clearly to have facilitated the Nazis' task. Indeed, most immigrant organizations came to that conclusion during the war itself. Rue Amelot, the major immigrant institution, always refused to join the UGIF board, and continued to operate illegally, a decision accepted by the UGIF leaders in order to neutralize immigrant opposition. In 1943 the OSE representative

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resigned from the board. Some immigrant groups in Paris urged the UGIF leaders themselves to resign. At the initiative of the Zionist movement in the south and of the EIF leadership, an illegal, shadow structure was set up within the UGIF South, with the (at least) tacit toleration of its leaders. Although it was impossible to transform the UGIF itself into a hotbed of resistance, some of those involved with it were thus able to use the organization to support their own illegal activities. The cover that the UGIF South offered for resistance in the form of rescue work did not prevent the organization from being brought to an unofficial communal trial by members of the Jewish Resistance in July and August of 1944. 58 Yet, as Serge Klarsfeld has demonstrated in a rather macabre quantified comparison, the UGIF's activity contributed to the survival of many more Jews than its failure to act contributed to the death of Jews. 59 The experiences of the war years left French Jewry in disarray. About a quarter of the pre-war Jewish population of France was murdered in the Holocaust, and virtually all Jews who survived had to recover from the physical and psychological dislocations they had suffered. Families that had dispersed to facilitate survival had to find their various members. Jewish orphans hidden in Christian institutions had to be reclaimed and resettled. The communal institutions abandoned or transformed by wartime needs had to be rebuilt. Although CRIF offered a model for the cooperation of Jews of different origins and perspectives, it was not clear whether the unity forged under pressure of war and persecution would survive in conditions of peacetime. With the liberation of France and the restoration of democracy the task of reconstruction faced the Jews of France both as individuals and as a community. For five years Jewish men and women as well as their institutions had devoted their energy to survival—through hiding and resourcefulness in the case of the former and relief and rescue in the case of the latter as well as through participation in armed resistance. Returning from their hiding places in the south or from the traumas of deportation, the Jews who had escaped the murder that the Nazis had planned for them now grimly struggled to restore a semblance of normality to their lives. As a community French Jewry had to replace the leaders lost in the Holocaust—nineteen rabbis and many important lay figures were killed—and build an institutional framework appropriate for a population no longer secure in its pre-war assumptions.60 Although its numbers had been reduced to somewhere about 250,000, the Jewish population of France remained the largest in noncommunist continental Europe.

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Despite the deaths and dislocation of the war years, French Jewry reorganized, restored its battered institutions, and provided relief to those in need. Even before the liberation, the three major pre-war Jewish organizations, the Central Consistory, the Federation of Jewish Societies, and the communist-dominated Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l'Entr'aide reemerged. Their resources were not sufficient to solve the immediate problem that confronted the community, the resettlement of the refugees and the alleviation of their misery. In 1947-48 alone, two thousand immigrants or transients arrived in France each month. 61 The Paris consistory's Comité de Bienfaisance noted in its 1948 general meeting that it had run a deficit the previous year and was now providing assistance to a new clientele—deportees and their families. In 1947 it aided two thousand families, about six thousand individuals, of whom 60 percent were of French nationality and 40 percent foreign. 62 The magnitude of the refugee problem led to the unification, as early as March 1945, of several former social welfare agencies concerned with refugees into one omnibus agency, the Comité Juif d'Action Social et de Réconstruction (COJASOR). Most of the funding came from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. In the first three years after the liberation that organization facilitated the integration of thirty-five thousand refugees, both immigrants and returning deportees.63 Ongoing social welfare needs, combined with further pressure on the part of the Joint and recognition of the benefits of coordination, led to the establishment in 1949 of the Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU). Building on the experience of CRIF, that had from 1943 brought together native and immigrant Jews, Bundists, Zionists, and communists, the new organization unified for the first time the disparate social and ideological components of French Jewry, with the exception of the communists, around the issue of philanthropy. Cooperation was essential, for French Jewry was largely dependent on its own institutions to restore its depleted material and human resources. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the French polity rehabilitated its wounded dignity by celebrating the heroes of the Resistance. Deportees and those who suffered the seizure of their property through decrees of the Nazi occupiers or laws passed by the Vichy government were not perceived as worthy of special attention or honor. When General Charles de Gaulle picked fifteen heroes of the war, for example, to be interred in a public ceremony on November 1 1 , 1 9 4 5 , not one was a deportee. Moreover, Jews were not seen as different from other victims of Nazism; their specific fate went unmentioned.64 Grand Rabbi Jacob Kaplan's powerful

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High Holiday sermon in the fall of 1945 that pointed to the disproportionate suffering of France's Jews during the war went unreported in the press.65 Sometimes, the very claims of Jews for redress of their grievances were resented. Efforts by French Jewish survivors to regain their expropriated property in Paris, for example, were met as early as 1945 and sporadically through the early 1950s with antisemitic demonstrations.66 Furthermore, during the 1940s and 1950s French intellectuals, with the exception of Jean-Paul Sartre, did not take antisemitism seriously as a social phenomenon. Like most French, they preferred to read Vichy as an aberration in the political history of France and antisemitism as merely an adjunct of fascism.67 The marginal status of Jews within French public opinion was reflected in a 1947 survey, which queried whether Jews were Frenchmen, like all the rest. Only 37 percent of the respondents answered yes.68 Not surprisingly, French Jews trumpeted their own participation in the Resistance as a way to reintegrate themselves in the larger society.69 The most painful issue that plagued the Jewish community was the recovery of Jewish orphans who had survived the war hidden with Christian families or Christian institutions in France. It has been estimated that their number was between fifteen and twenty thousand.70 Often the families that had accepted these children and raised them in the absence of their parents had become emotionally attached to their charges and were reluctant to surrender them, even to surviving relatives who eagerly sought them. Many of the children themselves, raised as Christians, felt at home in their new families and had few memories of their lives before the war. Their identity as Jews had been obliterated by time or was the painful source of memories of their "abandonment." Christian or secular institutions also saw no need to transfer Jewish children, and youth, among them survivors of concentration camps temporarily housed in France, to Jewish individuals or institutions. For the Jewish community as well as the next of kin the loss of these children was experienced with particular anguish because of the impact of the Holocaust. French Jewish spokesmen found themselves arrayed against French public opinion, even as expressed by former Resistance activists. In 1945, for example, conflict erupted between Jewish organizations and the Christian Comité National des Oeuvres Sociales de la Résistance (COSOR), which had about fifteen thousand Jewish orphans in its care. It had also taken charge of Jewish children who had returned from Buchenwald. Speaking on behalf of Jewish organizations that sought to raise these youth as Jews, Marc Jarblum, the president of the Federation of Jewish Societies, on July 1 , 1945 published an open letter

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to Father Pierre Chaillet in a French Zionist newspaper specifically about these children, who wanted, for the most part, to settle in Palestine: T w o conceptions collide [here]: one, which is that of certain non-Jewish French people . . . desires that the Jewish children, saved by the generous efforts of French Catholics, Protestants, or secularists . . . be integrated in the French nation, assimilated, melted, compensating in some way for the demographic losses of the country. And that conception is to be applied even when it is a question of children who have never lived in France, who were deported with their parents and to whom France has now generously opened its doors for a temporary stay. In opposition to this conception is that of the Jewish collectivity conscious of its Jewishness. Having horribly suffered in numeric and moral terms, it seeks to preserve its children in its own bosom, with the hope to offer them, in addition to a Jewish historic and spiritual ambiance and tradition, also . . . a country, a definitive homeland: Palestine. . . . 7 1

Although there were some native Jews affiliated with the consistory who shared the general French view that the Jewishness of these orphans was now irrelevant to their upbringing, Jarblum's perspective, with the exception of its strongly Zionist conclusion, was widely accepted. Léon Meiss, president of the Central Consistory as well as of CRIF, expressed a similar point of view in an interview published in 1947 in the Jewish press: When we decided to hide our children with non-Jewish families, we did not ask for guarantees; we had only one thought: to save them. Since the liberation, we have begun the obligation of recovering our children, which has not been an easy task . . . We are grateful to those who welcomed our children when they were in danger; but they would be abusing our trust in refusing, now, to return them to our hands. 72

One case that remained in public view until it was resolved in 1953 represented the conflicting perspectives and became a cause célèbre. The Finaly brothers, Robert and Gerald, born in France in 1 9 4 1 and 1942 to Jewish refugees from Austria, were entrusted to a municipal orphanage in Grenoble for the purpose of hiding them once the deportation of Jews had begun. Their parents died in deportation, but their surviving aunts sought them out as early as February 1945. Refusing to hand them over to their aunts, the Catholic director of the orphanage, Antoinette Brun, argued that their parents had abandoned them. She acquired legal custody of the brothers and had them baptized in 1948. As the case wended its way through the French courts, with an aunt receiving custody in 1950 and Brun succeeding in her appeal of the judgment, the

The Holocaust in France Catholic press and Le Figaro defended the Church as the rescuers of the boys. When Brun was ordered to produce the Finaly children, they were essentially kidnapped by the Church, hidden first by sisters of NotreDame-de-Sion, then sent to Basque monks in Spain. The Catholic writer François Mauriac defended Brun as a saint, and other Catholic spokesmen campaigned in her favor, referring to the spiritual maternity of the Church, the good intentions of the Catholic kidnappers, and the ingratitude of the Jews. Antisemites took advantage of the case to vent their Jew-hatred. Although most Jewish leaders wanted quiet and secret action on behalf of the aunts' claims, the judge Rabi, an antiestablishment Jewish activist since the 1930s, provided a public Jewish voice. Moreover, reflecting the rage and frustration of the French Jewish community, Grand Rabbi Jacob Kaplan, who had been negotiating with Church representatives and had secured an agreement to return the brothers, on June 6, 1953 issued a strongly worded statement attacking the Church for failing to live up to its word and for supporting "ritual kidnapping" (enlèvement). With the formation of a Comité National Finaly by those opposed to Church influence, the mobilization of intellectuals in support of the Jewish community, and Mauriac's reversal of his position, public opinion turned against Brun and her collaborators. On June 23, 1953 France's highest court ruled against Brun, and the Finaly boys were given to their youngest aunt, who brought them to Israel to be reared in her family. One recent commentator attributes the "rejudaization" of French Jewry to the Finaly Affair. 73 In fact, signs of a new militancy appeared among spokesmen of French Jewry even before the Finaly Affair attracted public attention, as the openly articulated Jewish position on child survivors from 1945 on suggests. Although French Jewish leaders had for the most part dissented from Zionism before World War II, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs held hearings on the subject in the spring of 1945, the Grand Rabbi of France, Isaïe Schwartz, declared frankly in his testimony: "During this war French Jews did not benefit from the protection to which they had right and they felt abandoned by the public authorities. They no longer hold the same attitude of reserve regarding Zionism as previously; henceforth they bring to this movement a real and active sympathy."74 Testimony to this change occurred in February 1946 when representatives of different French Jewish organizations appeared before the Commission of Inquiry on Palestine meeting in Paris to register their support of Zionism.75 Moreover, after the liberation French Jews participated in a number of pro-Zionist mass demonstrations. At a May 1945 rally Léon Meiss

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articulated the new spirit of French Jewry: "We no longer have the false shame that formerly prevented us from addressing the problem of Zionism." 76 And at the establishment of the State of Israel more than thirty thousand people, the largest mass Jewish demonstration in France up to that time, filled the Vel d'Hiv in celebration.77 The new militancy in regard to the status of child survivors and Zionism foreshadowed the growing willingness of elements within the French Jewish community to assert issues particular to Jews more openly than had been the case in the period between the emancipation of French Jewry and Vichy's denial to Jews of the rights of citizenship. The forthrightness of public Jewish activity, however, coexisted with contradictory trends. Although French Jewish leaders were outspoken in defense of Jewish rights and with reference to Jewish mistreatment during the war, there occurred no significant rethinking of the emancipationist ideology that presumed the coincidence of French and Jewish interests. Moreover, thousands of Jews responded to their experience of persecution and vulnerability during the Holocaust by abandoning or masking their Jewishness, behavior vigorously criticized in the Jewish press by communal spokesmen. After the war some French Jews were reluctant to mark their sons through circumcision, and conversions and name-changing became a noticeable phenomenon. Of the name changes that occurred between 1803 and 1957, for example, a startling 85 percent took place between 1945 and 1957. 7 8 Communism also challenged the particularism of French Jewish identity, even though it supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Its political strength and popularity, at its peak in the aftermath of the war in part because of its prominence in the Resistance, proved enormously attractive to Jewish youth, especially those of east European immigrant families, who were seeking a solution both to their own marginality and to general social problems. In terms of Jewish identity, however, communism had nothing to offer other than complete assimilation. Jewish leaders who looked to the survival of their religious and cultural institutions developed a number of strategies to strengthen them. Aware of trends within American Jewry, Léon Meiss suggested the adaptation to the French synagogue of the "Jewish center" model, in which the synagogue expanded its programming to serve cultural as well as religious needs. His proposal, though, seems to have had little impact. The consistory attempted to reach out to those alienated from its circles, in particular Sephardim, east European immigrants, and youth.79 Most im-

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portantly and most successfully, a number of Jewish leaders focused on education as the key to the future of the French Jewish community. In the years following the war rabbis and intellectuals with ties to the community realized that the losses of the Holocaust had widened the rupture with inherited Jewish culture initiated by Enlightenment and emancipation. In September 1946, a conference on spiritual reconstruction, held by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, concluded that it was essential to establish a systematic program of Jewish education.80 Plans developed at the same time to found a teachers' seminary for religious teachers were well received.81 Similarly, the Chaplaincy for Jewish Youth, established by the Central Consistory in January 1945 and headed by Rabbi Samuel Kapel, recommended a more intense system of Jewish education that would depend upon the creation of Jewish primary schools and lycées. Indeed, the Lycée Yavneh was established in 1948. 82 Still, in 1950 there were only four hundred students in Jewish day schools and five hundred children enrolled in Talmud Torahs (supplementary schools).83 Rabbi Meyer Jaïs's remarks to a communal meeting in 1948 summed up the convictions of French Jewish leaders concerned with the spiritual survival of Judaism as well as with the physical survival of Jews. Responding to Sartre's allegation in Réflexions sur la question juive that antisemitism alone sustained Jewish identity, Rabbi Jai's reflected on the loss of authentic Jewish culture in the modern period as a consequence of assimilation. In order to reverse this process Jai's proposed the establishment of a network of private Jewish schools at all levels "so that Jews would reacquire a consciousness of their Judaism," necessary for their own cultural creativity and for their ability to contribute to general culture. As Jai's put it, "It is in the interest of Judaism as of the entire world that we be totally, ferociously ourselves because it is thus, and only thus, that we can best serve others." Jewish culture, Jewish civilization, would become the basis of a unity that Jewish nationalism and Judaism as a religion had been unable to achieve.84 The expansion of Jewish education in France was, in fact, accomplished in the decades that followed World War II, but its success depended as much upon the transformation of France's Jewish population as upon the dreams of its leadership.

CHAPTER

TEN

A Renewed Community

I

n the aftermath of the Holocaust, it is unlikely that any French Jews would have been able to foresee the emergence within a generation of France's Jewish community as the largest and most vibrant in western and central Europe. With the mass migration of Jews from the countries of North Africa, however, the community more than doubled in size. Along with the impact of the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and developments within French society, this wave of immigration transformed the culture of French Jewry and engendered new models of French Jewish identity. Beginning in the mid-1950s and extending to the mid-1960s, France became the destination of choice for the Jews of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, who felt increasingly subject in their home countries to nationalist xenophobia. 1 Although North African Jews had migrated in small numbers to France during the nineteenth century and regularly since 1 9 1 4 , the achievement of independence in the three North African states, since it was accompanied by antisemitic agitation, spurred a mass migration. Sporadic attacks against Jews in Morocco in the first part of the 193

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1950s stimulated their emigration abroad throughout the decade. The more educated and prosperous Jews settled in France. Jews began leaving Tunisia in large numbers in 1 9 6 1 , with twenty-five thousand emigrating in the course of two years. As non-Muslim French citizens, Algerian Jews recognized that they had no future in an independent Algeria and emigrated en masse after i960 as independence became ever more likely and was finally achieved in 1962. Although many North African Jewish emigrants, particularly the poorer and more traditional, chose Israel, those who felt culturally French and had French citizenship, as did all Jews in Algeria, opted to settle in their "cultural motherland." Of the North African immigrant Jews surveyed by the sociologist Doris Bensimon in 1966-67, as many as 55 percent of the adult Tunisians and 48 percent of the adult Moroccans enjoyed French citizenship.2 Because of the French colonization of the Maghreb and the educational activities of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Jewish elite in particular felt close to France. Like other immigrants holding French citizenship, immigrant Jewish citizens benefited from a law of December 2 6 , 1 9 6 1 , that assisted them with loans, professional integration, and preference in public housing. In additional, the FSJU (Fonds Social Juif Unifié) offered assistance to the immigrants, in the form of advice, the location of housing, and temporary financial aid. Thanks in large part to the immigration of North African Jews, between 1950 and 1970 France received the largest number of Jewish immigrants in the world, next to Israel. In those years, and particularly in the 1960s, 220,000 Jews from North Africa relocated to France. The North African immigrants settled overwhelmingly in Paris and its environs and secondarily in the Midi. In the postwar years, Jews have followed the prevailing demographic trends and settled in the growing suburban communities. Between 1944 and i960 the total Jewish population grew to 360,000 and reached approximately 535,000 in the 1970s. As has been the case since the second half of the nineteenth century, the Paris region accounts for about half of that population. A quarter of French Jews live in the Midi, with the rest scattered throughout France. In the provinces there are only five Jewish communities that number more than 10,000: in Marseille, Lyon, Nice, and Toulouse in the south and in Strasbourg in the northeast. North African immigrants account for a large portion of the population of these Jewish communities, ranging from 23 percent in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg to 64 percent in Toulouse. The immigrants have also expanded the number of Jewish communities in France, from 1 2 8 in

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1956 to 293 in 1966. 3 In the Paris region the number of suburban communities grew between 1955 and 1978 from 1 5 to 56. Neighborhoods of Paris like Belleville, that had been the centers of east European Jewish life in the interwar years, have been transformed into sites of Sephardi Jewish culture, as Jews of North African origins circulate in the streets, fill the cafés, establish businesses, and dominate local Jewish institutions.4 Comfortable with a Jewish identity rooted in religious tradition and a culture that expressed itself in French as well as Arabic and occasionally Spanish, North African Jewish immigrants have stimulated the multiplication of temples, community centers, and Talmud Torahs. In 1 9 7 7 there were ninety-seven consistorially supervised kosher butchers in the Paris region as opposed to fewer than ten in the 1950s, and kosher restaurants made their appearance as well. 5 On the other hand, ten years earlier Bensimon found little North African immigrant participation in the life of the organized French Jewish community. Only 4 percent of immigrant adults belonged to a Jewish cultural or recreational group and 13 percent to a religious group. Of the teenagers a quarter were members of a youth group or movement.6 The immigrants and their children associated religious tradition with family life rather than with institutions. In Bensimon's 1966-67 survey sample, more than half of whom were of Algerian origin and hence relatively secularized, 68 percent of adults and 7 1 percent of youth still celebrated with their families on all major Jewish holidays. The majority sought to retain a combination of tradition, family get-togethers, and what they saw as an Oriental way of life. 7 Among employed youth, 14 percent defined themselves as Orthodox and 49 percent as traditional, with a minority of 37 percent as self-declared freethinkers. University students, as well as those who had lived in France for at least a decade, tended to be less religiously observant than the rest of the sample, but 56 percent of them still identified themselves as Orthodox or traditional. Of the three groups of North African immigrants studied, the Algerians were the least observant, the Tunisians the most, and the Moroccans in between. Although there was a decline in traditional practice in comparison with the older generation, a majority of the surveyed Jewish youth of North African origin anticipated retaining much of their parents' Jewish culture and almost all desired a Jewish spouse. Most declared that they would not marry someone of whom their parents disapproved.8 Still, the survey informants manifested the intergenerational conflict common in immigrant families, where parental authority is often subverted by the values and conditions of the new society. When there

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were quarrels with parents, they centered around religious, ideological, or political differences, patterns of socializing and dress, family problems, and proposed marriages.9 Writing a decade after this initial study, Claude Tapia concluded that the Jewish immigrants from North Africa seemed to be following a different path than their immigrant predecessors. Prophecies, and fears, of French Jewish leaders that North African Jews would within a decade experience the same loss of identity and abandonment of religious practice as had earlier immigrants had not yet been borne out. Indeed, if endogamy is a marker of the continuity of Jewish identification and of resistance to assimilation, then Jewish immigrants from Tunisia and Morocco, with an intermarriage rate in the years 1 9 6 6 - 1 9 7 5 of less than 5 percent, reinforce Tapia's conclusion. Among Jews of Algerian origin, however, 48 percent chose a non-Jewish spouse, manifesting a higher rate of intermarriage than French-born Jews, whose intermarriage rate at the time was 40 percent.10 The North African Jewish immigrants initially changed the socioeconomic contours of the community. Of the adults, the vast majority were educated in North Africa following the French model: just 3 percent were uneducated, and a mere 1 percent had received only a traditional Jewish education (though the number rose to 1 0 percent among Moroccans). More typical were the 28 percent who had completed only primary school, the 52 percent who were graduates of secondary or technical schools, and the 1 6 percent with higher education, most of them youth. Among the 1966-67 survey sample, there was no difference in educational attainments among the three groups, but other studies show Moroccans to be less well educated. Although women were as likely as men to have had primary and secondary education, it was far less common for them to have acquired higher education, and only 24 percent of the adult women in the sample, and 1 1 percent of women with children, worked for wages, primarily in traditional female occupations. This is not surprising given the traditional North African Jewish and European bourgeois opposition to the employment of married women. Bensimon found in her survey that only 26 percent of adult male immigrants and 24 percent of young salaried men would approve with no reservations of their wives' working. The immigrants, and particularly the men, were involved in a wide range of fields, from traditional artisanry, industrial work, petty commerce, and commercial employment to the liberal professions. 11 Tapia concluded in a study published in 1977 that as a result of the immigration of North Africans the socioeconomic structure of

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French Jewry, which had been largely middle class, was diversified. The immigrant Jews from North Africa included a working class that constituted 28 percent of the population while employees and middle-rank professionals accounted for 2.9 percent, and small merchants and artisans an additional 1 5 percent.12 The upward social mobility of the immigrants and their children was quite striking. The rapid reduction of the fertility of North African Jewish immigrants—a 50 percent decline between the years 1 9 5 7 - 1 9 6 1 and 1967-1971—enabled their children to pursue education rather than having to support their families. In the mid-1970s the demographic investigations of Bensimon and Sergio Delia Pergola revealed that Jewish youth of North African origin, both male and female, were heavily represented in both secondary and higher education. Indeed, as has been the case with many Jewish populations in the modern period, Jews in France, whatever their origins, seem to have chosen education as a vehicle of upward social mobility for their children. French Jews are better educated than the rest of France's population. 13 As Bensimon had found a decade earlier, immigrant Jewish parents, like native-born Jews, had high aspirations for both their sons and daughters and expressed a distinct preference for salaried positions, the civil service, and the liberal professions, rather than commerce.14 The decline in the numbers of artisans and businessmen was far more rapid among immigrants than among native-born Jews. Although the percentage of North African-born Jews, and particularly those from Tunisia and Morocco, located in the working class remained significantly higher than among Jews born in France, in the mid-1970s the ranks of immigrants from Tunisia and Morocco included a considerable intellectual bourgeoisie as well. Despite their successful socioeconomic integration in France, however, the immigrants occupy a lower status in both the French Jewish community and in French society because of their origins. 15 Jewish immigrants from North Africa changed the cultural style of French Jewish life as well as the nature of French Jewish identity. The more assertive style of Jewishness that they introduced into the public culture of French Jewry was reinforced by the Six Day War of 1967, by developments in French politics and society, and by a number of antisemitic incidents that aroused concern among a broad spectrum of French Jewry. In 1980 the sociologist Dominique Schnapper published a study of French Jewry in which she developed three ideal types of Jewish identity

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in France: practicing Jews, for whom their relation to Judaism and its religious traditions was paramount; militant Jews, who introduced their Jewishness into the political realm; and assimilated Jews—or Israélites— who followed the emancipationist tradition of keeping their Jewishness discreet.16 Based on extensive interviews conducted between 1975 and 1978 with 1 5 6 individuals, among whom were 66 couples, the book derives its data from a diverse group of Jews living in France: native-born and of east European and North African origin; Parisians and provincials; members of the working and middle classes, students, and professionals. 17 Although Sephardim and Ashkenazim could be found in all camps and Schnapper finds the different ideal types more useful than ethnic origin for understanding French Jewish identities, she also points out that "These new arrivals [from North Africa] displayed a political activism which at times took prominent leaders of the Parisian community by surprise." 18 Such public assertion of Jewishness had characterized east European Jewish immigrants to France in the years before World War II, but the Holocaust had decimated their ranks and the leadership of the postwar Jewish community was largely in the hands of the native Jewish elite along with some acculturated survivors of the pre-war east European migration. Although these officials of Jewish communal institutions strongly defended Jewish interests, as in the retrieval of Jewish property stolen during the war and in their support of Israel, their style of protest was not populist. Most noteworthy in Schnapper's study was the emergence of new forms of Jewish identification in the France of the 1970s. Her findings are borne out by Bensimon and Delia Pergola's survey that found that for only 4 percent of their respondents was their Jewishness of no significance. The largest group (34 percent) attributed a religious significance to thèir Jewishness; among those of North African origin, about half were located in this group that found the meaning of Jewishness in religious tradition. At the other end of the spectrum of those who identified as Jews was a group almost as large (31 percent) that claimed a connection to "Jewish reality" with no religious component. The remaining third of the total population of French Jewry located their Jewishness in terms of familial, communal, or historic traditions. 19 Because of the influx of the North African immigrants, religious observance was more widespread in France in the 1970s than ever before in the twentieth century. The Sephardic community became the source of the majority of French rabbis trained in the postwar years, and the

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last two Grand Rabbis of France, René Sirat and Jacques Sitruk, have been of North African origin. There were also traditionally observant Jews whose origins lay in Alsace-Lorraine. Moreover, another group of postwar immigrants (not mentioned by Schnapper), were Orthodox survivors of the Holocaust, who brought energy and visibility to traditional Jewish practice. Among them the Lubavitcher Hasidim were particularly active in outreach to nonobservant French Jews. In their struggle to find a meaningful identity, small numbers of previously secular Jews, who had been raised with little or no Jewish education, had also adopted religious practice. Prominent among them were disillusioned intellectuals who had participated in the events of May 1968. Former Maoists and radical leftists of other stripes as well, they found in the texts and practices of traditional Judaism the discipline, meaning, and intellectual challenge no longer supplied by the politics of the far left. 20 New to the French Jewish scene were those Jews whose Jewishness found expression not in the private rituals of home or the communal rituals of the synagogue but in the public arena of politics. Labeled "the militants" by Schnapper, their Jewishness focused on Israel and Zionism. Jewish militancy revolving around Israel, however, took two distinct forms. While the larger group lobbied vigorously and demonstrated publicly in favor of the State of Israel, the other group, of leftist political sensibilities, articulated its Jewishness by publicly opposing Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Defining their Jewishness in terms of the Jewish value of concern for the oppressed, they saw in the Palestinians the true "Jews" of their time.21 Amongst these new Jewish identities there remained still a sector of assimilated Jews who followed in the footsteps of the "Israélites" of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As we have seen, some of this group in the wake of World War II attempted to distance themselves from their Jewish origins. Most, however, did not deny their Jewishness, and they are more conscious of the persistence of antisemitism than were their pre-war forebears. The Jewishness of the assimilated, though, becomes salient in their lives only at times of crisis, whether life cycle events or perceived threats to the Jewish collectivity, whether in France or in Israel. Moreover, they no longer serve in the major leadership roles of the organized Jewish community. Dividing this group in two, Schnapper distinguishes between those of long-standing French origins who were raised with little knowledge or experience of Jewish practices, and the social subgroup of merchants, who are more likely to retain symbolic

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Jewish ritual practice. Both are characterized by their full acculturation within French bourgeois society as a whole. Indeed, their social and cultural values reflect the bourgeois milieu rather than specific aspects of Jewish tradition. Their Jewishness consists of their sense of shared fate with other Jews and perhaps, Schnapper suggests, a shared set of moral attitudes. The merchants differ from other assimilated Jews in the fact of their social cohesiveness and the connection of their Jewish expression to their business activities. Regrettably, there have been no sociological studies focusing on gender distinctions in patterns of French Jewish identity.22 The diversity of identities manifested by French Jews in the 1970s and thereafter reflects more than the demographic transformation of the community. The Six Day War and the pro-Arab tilt of France's Middle Eastern policy renewed the Jewish consciousness of many French Jews of different origins and ideologies. Like other Jews throughout the world, the Jews of France experienced the Arab threat to Israel in May 1967 as a potential second Holocaust that would bring an end to the Jewish people. As Anne Sinclair, a well-known assimilated Jewish television journalist, later declared, " I was nineteen years old and I affirmed myself as a Jew at that precise moment because the aloneness (solitude) of Israel was unbearable to me." 2 3 French Jews organized massive demonstrations in support of Israel during the crisis days of May 1 9 6 7 and raised more money for the Jewish state than ever before. Despite the general antipathy toward Israel on the part of the Left (with the exception of the socialists) because of the Arabs' stronger claim to membership in the Third World, the majority of leftist Jewish intellectuals supported Israel in 1967. Surveys of public opinion indicated that the French population as a whole was generally sympathetic to Israel, but in expressing their solidarity with the Jewish state, French Jews had to confront their government's hostility to Israel both in its time of danger and its moment of triumph. In the early 1960s, when President Charles de Gaulle had articulated a pro-Israel policy, French Jews felt no tension between the two aspects of their identity. In the spring of 1 9 6 7 , however, de Gaulle and his government were seeking to adopt a policy that would enhance French interests in the Arab world. Indeed, de Gaulle warned Israel's minister of foreign affairs, Abba Eban, at the end of May that France would condemn an Israeli attack. In response to Israel's preemptive strike, which he saw as unjustified, de Gaulle announced an arms embargo during the war. He had no understanding of the emotional impact of the war on

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French Jewry, for many of whom the war represented a return of the nightmare of the Holocaust. Moreover, de Gaulle attributed French public sympathy for Israel in its conflict with the Arab states to Jewish domination of key media outlets.24 De Gaulle's resentment of Israel and of French Jewish support of the Jewish state erupted at a press conference that he held on November 27, 1967. In response to a question about his attitude to the outcome of the Six Day War, he included a characterization of the Jewish people throughout history. The Jews, he declared, were "an elite people, sure of themselves, and domineering." 25 As his remarks indicate, he conflated Israel with the Jewish people. Angered by visible French Jewish identification with Israel during the Six Day War, de Gaulle implied in his criticism of the Jewish people that the Jews of France were themselves guilty of dual loyalty. Through his statement he intended to remind the Arab states of France's sympathy for their position and perhaps to remind French Jews that expressions of their particularity that deviated from official state policy were unacceptable. De Gaulle's remarks incited a debate about the position of Jews in French society and the political uses of antisemitism. To some critics, among them many Jews, de Gaulle's comments lent legitimacy to antisemitic stereotypes and framed Jewish manifestation of political power in negative terms. A group of prominent intellectuals declared in Le Monde on December 2 , 1 9 6 7 that "these historical considerations about Jews are close to slander and can revive antisemitic hatred . . . [T]hey justify retroactively centuries of pogroms and millions of slaughtered." The Jewish journal Les Nouveaux cahiers, published by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in its editorial response to the press conference, proclaimed the "absolute imperative" of Israel's existence and asserted the legitimacy of Jewish solidarity. It declared no conflict between that solidarity and belonging to the French nation and French people, for, it boldly stated, "French pluralism is a reality. . . Denying pluralism would make of France a totalitarian country." 26 Claiming that his remarks were intended as a compliment to the ability of the Jewish people to survive for nineteen centuries under difficult circumstances, de Gaulle persuaded the Grand Rabbi of France, Jacob Kaplan, that Jewish concerns were unwarranted. Despite de Gaulle's disclaimers, however, the charges of antisemitism did not disappear. Indeed, anonymous letters to the newspapers after the press conference, responding favorably to the president's comments, indicate that they were taken as highly critical of the Jews. In 1968 one of France's preeminent

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assimilated Jewish intellectuals, the political scientist Raymond Aron, published a book entitled De Gaulle, Israël et les Juifs in which he wrote that the press conference "solemnly authorized a new antisemitism" and that de Gaulle "had demeaned himself... by resorting to the use of national stereotypes and racial prejudices . . . in explaining Israeli imperialism through the eternal nature, the domineering instinct of the Jewish people."27 Aron asserted that by questioning the patriotism of French Jews de Gaulle's antisemitic rhetoric exposed them yet again to injustice. According to the political journalist Maurice Szafran, de Gaulle publicly raised the "Jewish question" anew both for French Jews and for the French polity as a whole.28 De Gaulle's press conference ushered in a period in which many French Jews felt compelled to break with their government on the question of Israel. French Middle Eastern policy became pro-Arab in the aftermath of the Six Day War. De Gaulle followed his press conference with the imposition in 1968 of a total embargo on the sale of military equipment to Israel. Sharply worded governmental criticism of Israel continued under the presidencies of Georges Pompidou, elected in 1969, and Valéry Giscard-d'Estaing, elected in 1974. At the same time that large numbers of French Jews were alienated from their government's stance on Israel, the eruption of the student-led uprising, the "events" of May 1968, which lasted for about six weeks, politicized many French Jewish youth and offered a model of political militancy to a broad stratum of French Jewry. Jewish students participated enthusiastically in the mini-revolution; among its leaders were several Jews, and especially the fiery Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Despite the political failure of the revolt and the Gaullist landslide in the June elections, the student and worker strikes that almost brought France to a halt and that led to changes in France's educational system raised questions of pluralism and minority nationalism in the struggle for decentralization of the French state and society. Moreover, the "events" forcefully indicated the potential power of mass demonstrations. This combination of the large-scale immigration of Jews who had not internalized the emancipationist bargain, the impact of the Six Day War and the growing centrality of Zionism and Israel in French Jewish consciousness, and the lasting cultural and intellectual effects of the 1968 revolt changed the face of public Jewish expression in France. In 1973 the Comité Juif d'Action (the Jewish action committee) was founded to mobilize support for Israel. Under the leadership of Henri Hajdenberg,

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in 1976 and 1977 it organized two massive demonstrations called "Twelve Hours for Israel." In 1980 under its new name, Renouveau Juif (Jewish renewal), it convened a third demonstration that took on the character of a public fair celebrating Jewish culture. It has been estimated that Hajdenberg's organization succeeded in the last two rallies in bringing out 150,000 Jews.29 The Zionization of French Jewry had increased markedly with the establishment of the State of Israel and the recognition of the devastating consequences of the Nazi genocide for European Jewry and its culture. Although the major communal institutions of French Jewry had repudiated Zionism from its emergence at the turn of the century, their stance changed after World War II. Within a year of its establishment in 1949, the FSJU, the overall fund-raising organization of French Jewry, placed Israel high on its agenda despite the pressing nature of local needs. The consistories became advocates of the importance of Israel after the Six Day War. The Six Day War had a major impact on French Jewish consciousness and behavior. Most strikingly, some 6,852 French Jews emigrated to Israel between the years 1965 and 1 9 7 1 , and since then at least one thousand a year have emigrated.30 Among those who left shortly after the war were prominent intellectuals and communal activists such as Léon Askenazi (Manitou), André and Renée Neher, Eliane Amado Levi-Valensi, and Lucien Lazare. Although the emigration of members of the Jewishly knowledgeable elite arguably weakens French Jewish cultural life, the ties that Israelis of French origin maintain with their former community reinforce the centrality of Israel in French Jewish consciousness. Aliyah (immigration to Israel) was a step taken by only a small proportion of French Jews, but it remains a viable option for many more. Sociological surveys indicate that while the number who would consider aliyah has declined since the period of enthusiasm immediately after the 1967 war, when almost 50 percent of those surveyed claimed to be weighing the option, in 1987 more than 36 percent (and 40 percent of those under the age of forty-five) still included aliyah as a possibility in their lives. Repeated visits to Israel provide French Jews with an experiential, rather than simply an emotional, connection to the country. By 1987, 80 percent of French Jews, as contrasted with 40 percent before the Six Day War, had visited Israel at least once, and 58 percent twice or more.31 It is no exaggeration to conclude, then, that the vast majority of French Jews have become proud supporters of Israel, though many seem

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not to have accepted every aspect of Zionist ideology. About the same number (just over 90 percent) declared their concern for the future of Israel in 1987 as in 1967. Although more than half of French Jews in a survey conducted before 1967 felt that the destruction of the State of Israel would have no consequence for the situation of the Jews of the world, twenty years later such an attitude was limited to a mere 5 percent. Reflecting these changed attitudes, French Jews donated more to Israel in 1987 than they had in 1967. As the conductor of the 1987 survey concluded, not to be attached to Israel is to be marginalized in the French Jewish community.32 Although the Six Day War was the central factor in the Zionization of French Jewry, there were other forces that contributed to Israel's growing centrality. Albert Memmi's framing of Zionism in I 1 Í S 1 9 6 6 book The Liberation of the Jew as the national liberation movement of the Jew provided those on the Left with an anticolonial context for understanding Jewish nationalism. Disillusionment with communism after Hungary and Czechoslovakia, moreover, brought former Party members of the older generation back to Jewish concerns. Some, like the intellectual and scholar Annie Kriegel, found in Zionism and Jewish cultural activity a meaningful identity to replace the all-embracing discredited ideologies of the past. Born in 192,6 to a Parisian middle-class Jewish family with roots in Alsace-Lorraine, Kriegel added Zionism to a secular Jewish identity acquired during her childhood. That identity instilled in her youth was based on familial sentiment, social networks, and on values, such as respect for learning and pursuit of social justice, that Kriegel characterized as Jewish.33 Similarly, part of the Generation of '68 also broke with the leftist pieties of their youth and came to support Israel as an aspect of their reappropriation of a Jewish identity. The massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972. Olympic games in Munich and the United Nations 1975 declaration equating Zionism with racism played a part in their repudiation of a political universalism that embraced antisemitism.34 In 1977 CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Juifs de France), the umbrella organization of French Jewry, published a communal charter articulating the importance of Israel for France's Jews. It stated that "for almost 4 0 0 0 years the Jewish soul has been attached to Israel and to Jerusalem. This historical, spiritual, and essential link explains why the French Jewish community considers Israel the privileged expression of Jewish existence." 35 The rallies on behalf of Israel sponsored by Renouveau Juif vividly demonstrated that pro-Israel sentiment was a powerful force among the French Jewish population and that public assertion of Jew-

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ish particularity—politics and culture in the street—was seen as socially acceptable. As Hajdenberg stated in a 1 9 8 2 interview, "French Jews must get over Ashkenazi fears that they won't be French if they proclaim their Jewishness." 36 The reappropriation of Jewishness in France was not confined to Zionism, however. In the wake of the challenges to French cultural and political centralism articulated during May 1968 some French Jewish intellectuals began to explore new ways to combine Jewish distinctiveness with French citizenship and identity. Although the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the most prominent public intellectual of his time, had raised the question of Jewish status and identity right after World War II in his influential book Réflexions sur la question juive, he had presumed that Jewish identity was by and large imposed upon Jews. Jews became authentic in Sartre's eyes by affirming their Jewishness, but their Jewishness had no particular cultural component. He expected that in the absence of antisemitism Jews would completely assimilate. Sartre had enabled many Jews growing up in postwar France to feel free of the stigma long attached to Jewishness, but a small but significant contingent of French Jewish intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s sought to go beyond Sartre's defense of the right of Jews to be like everyone else to explore how Jews might understand, and legitimate, their difference. Support for Zionism was the most popular way to identify as a French Jew whose Jewish identity was not based primarily upon religious belief and practice. However, there were some intellectuals who promoted Diasporism as a counterforce to Zionism. The ideologues of Diasporism recognized the importance of Zionism and vigorously defended the State of Israel, but they argued that Jews in the Diaspora should be recognized as a national minority with a legitimate culture all their own. Since many of the proponents of Diasporism were of east European, and especially Lithuanian, parentage and since the issue of national minority rights had been a major tenet of Jewish socialism with roots in Lithuania, the anthropologist Judith Friedlander has argued in her provocative book Vilna on the Seine for the impact of a Lithuanian (or perhaps PolishLithuanian) legacy on the French debates about Jewish identity. Although the French context appears paramount, the east European connection is striking. The central figure among the proponents of Diasporism was Richard Marienstras, a professor of English literature who was born in Warsaw in 1928. Although he had been disseminating the doctrine of Diasporism since the early 1950s, only in the late 1960s and 1970s did he find an

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audience receptive to his message. In 1967 he founded Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux, which brought together about one hundred and fifty followers to construct and promote a secular Jewish culture in France. The Cercle placed its emphasis on the model of east European Yiddish culture, which it brought to the attention of French society by sponsoring public events as well as through Marienstras's contributions to important journals. Although the Cercle urged the study of Yiddish and of Jewish history, it was no repository of nostalgia that anticipated a significant revival of Yiddish on French soil. Instead it suggested that the east. European model might stimulate French Jews to develop an authentic Jewish culture appropriate to their own society. Marienstras's ideas received wide publicity with the publication in 1975 of his book Etre juif en diaspora (Being Jewish in the Diaspora). Rejecting the options available to Jews of their time as the basis of Jewish identity—to wit, assimilation, religion, or a Jewish nation-state—Marienstras and his group sought to revive the concept of minority culture as a viable basis for Jewish identity in the Diaspora, and therefore in France. The doctrine of minority culture also necessitated the disavowal of the doctrine of the French Revolution—that there could be only one nation within the state. The Cercle was particularly successful in disseminating the new slogan of "le droit à la différence" (the right to be different). As had the Éclaireurs Israélites in the 1930s, Marienstras saw the status of French Jews as parallel to that of French provincials. In contrast to the pre-war situation where such a statement remained theoretical, he was able to forge alliances with regional language groups and other minorities in France through meetings with representatives of such movements as the Bretons and the Armenians. He urged French Jews to lobby for French recognition of minority rights in general and for measures facilitating the cultural survival of all minorities. In 1974 the Cercle in fact joined other minorities in a public meeting in Versailles, and with the socialist François Mitterrand's accession to the office of president in 1 9 8 1 , Marienstras was appointed to a presidential committee charged with reporting on minority cultures. The report issued by that committee advised the French government to recognize the cultural autonomy of its minorities and to foster their cultural survival. In response to the report, Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture, in 1986 created a National Council of Regional Languages and Cultures. 37 The Cercle was thus a major participant in a French debate on the nature of late twentieth-century French society and culture. The French state did not, in fact, implement its purported new commitment to

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strengthening minority cultures. However, the discourse about the possibility of particularism within French identity was transformed by the early 1980s. In 1977 the Gaullist former president Giscard-d'Estaing declared that "there is no contradiction between being fully French and continuing to live according to local or regional traditions, customs, and cultures" and the socialist Mitterrand included an endorsement of "the right to be different" in his campaign literature in 1981. 3 8 It was in this cultural climate that Jewish intellectuals who rejected the Cercle Gaston Crémieux's concept of the Jews as a cultural minority mused on the need for new forms of Diaspora Jewish identity. In 1980, at the age of thirty, Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Polish Jews who had immigrated to France in the 1930s and who had raised him in the aftermath of the Holocaust with no formal Jewish culture, published a powerful personal memoir, Le juif imaginaire.39 A young member of the Generation of '68, Finkielkraut lamented the void of Jewish culture in his life and in the life of his peers. "What makes me a Jew," he declared, "is the acute consciousness of a lack, a sustained absence, the exile where I live in relation to a civilization of which, 'for my own good' and because of Auschwitz my parents did not want me to be the heir." Raised with great pride in his Jewishness, Finkielkraut felt that pride was based merely on sentiment and on the recognition that the Holocaust conferred on all Jews the elevated status of victim. As he put it, "I inherited a suffering that I had not undergone." He delighted in the triumph of "the Jew" over "the Israélite," of self-assertion over invisibility, of the reconciliation of French Jews and immigrant Jews: "We are living today the last episode of that grand disappointed idyll; the majority of Jews have abandoned the strategy of effacement, for it seems to them at one and the same time illusory and condemnable." Nonetheless he rejected the various forms that French Jews had adopted to express their Jewishness, from militant support for Israel to Sephardi triumphalism to Yiddishism. Although he considered religion the only basis for Jewish identity and experience in the Diaspora, he did not see the majority of French Jews embracing a meaningful Judaism. In Finkielkraut's eyes, French Jews were reverse Marranos, "Jews in the world outside . . . for the public . . . and in the intimacy of [their] daily existence, people like all others . . . without any cultural specificity."40 In the climate of post-Zionism and postassimilation that he experienced as a young French Jew of the Left, he reflected the serious quest of young Jewish intellectuals to develop a Jewish cultural specificity that was personal and not completely dependent on memory.

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Finkielkraut and Marienstras were part of an intellectual ferment among French Jewry unprecedented in its extent. Already in 1 9 5 7 the first annual Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française (Colloquium of French-speaking Jewish Intellectuals) was convened in Paris. The explosion of intellectual concern with the meaning of Jewishness and the status of the Jews after the critical years of 1967 and 1968 has drawn ever larger numbers to the annual event. Among the regular participants and most popular teachers was Emmanuel Levinas, the French philosopher who emigrated from Lithuania to France in 1923 at the age of seventeen. In the course of his long career he drew upon classical Jewish texts to inform his discussions of ethics, and his philosophical readings of the Bible, Talmud, and rabbinic commentaries have been important to the Jewish consciousness of contemporary Jewish intellectuals. Finkielkraut, for one, has been influenced by Levinas's philosophical analysis of "the other." Although Levinas's work is not written for a popular audience, his impact has been considerable, particularly as his recognition as a major philosopher of the late twentieth century has grown. Through his role as writer and teacher and his participation in the colloquia of French intellectuals, he has influenced a generation of disciples who have built upon his teachings.41 Levinas was the most significant thinker and contributor to French culture of the postwar French Jewish community. But a cadre of young intellectuals and activists have also left their mark on French Jewish culture. Two young Jews of North African origin, Benny Lévy and Shmuel Trigano, have challenged the emancipationist model of Jewish identity in France. A Maoist leader during the 1968 events and secretary of JeanPaul Sartre until his death in 1980, Lévy began to read Jewish texts seriously under the influence of Levinas. In the early 1980s he adopted Orthodox Judaism and brought his disciples into the world of the yeshiva, in Strasbourg, while continuing to teach philosophy part-time at the University of Paris. His personal journey testifies to the ongoing power of traditional Judaism for Jews whose grounding in secular learning and experience of radical politics proved inadequate to the need for meaning in their lives.42 Rather than return to an Ashkenazi style of Orthodoxy, Shmuel Trigano has blazed the trail of Sephardi militancy in an intellectual form to suggest the need for a new relation of Jews to the French state. A student of philosophy and political science who was deeply immersed in Zionism, Trigano has published a number of controversial books that stress the need for Jews to base their ethics and politics on classical Jewish val-

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ues rather than on Western thought and political development. Emancipation under the aegis of the Western nation-state, he has argued, was destructive of Jewish cultural survival. Paradoxically, it is the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition that he presents as a resource for the creation of a postmodern society. In addition to his writing and teaching, Trigano has been an intellectual activist, co-founding with his teacher Annie Kriegel the scholarly Jewish journal Pardès in 1985 and serving as director of the Alliance Israélite Universelle's Beit Hamidrach, a program in Jewish texts for those unfamiliar with classical Jewish sources.43 The most widely recognized of Jewish intellectuals among the general French public, however, is neither Benny Lévy nor Shmuel Trigano but Bernard-Henri Lévy. One of the "new philosophers" of the 1970s, his La barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a human face) became an international best-seller upon its publication in 1977. In it he maintains that brutality was an inevitable consequence of socialist revolution and derides the claims of philosophy, and especially of Marxism, to explain historical development. He has been critical of the Enlightenment and of the legacy of French nationalism. Like other figures mentioned above, Lévy considers himself a student of Lévinas and has turned to a classical Jewish text, in his case the Bible, to provide meaning for people in modern times.44 The changed cultural and political style of French Jewry became evident in the responses of Jews to new manifestations of antisemitism in France. The reemergence of antisemitism, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, fed Jewish self-assertion; it contributed to the loss of faith in the Revolution's bargain of emancipation and state protection in exchange for the erasure of cultural particularism. Antisemitism was never absent from French political life, but physical violence against Jews did not occur in postwar France until the 1970s and 1980s. To be sure, during the 1950s the stresses that accompanied decolonization and the election in June 1954 of a Jew, Pierre MendèsFrance, as premier facilitated the reemergence of antisemitism as a vehicle for opposition to the Republic. "Frenchmen," wrote one rightist ideologue active from the 1930s on, "watch out for the Jewish dictatorship" of Mendès-France and his entourage.45 Pierre Poujade, the leader of a right-wing populist movement of the mid-1950s, rallied his followers with antisemitic innuendo and overt attacks on Jewish influence. In the elections of January 1956 his party received 1 1 percent of the vote and elected more than fifty deputies to Parliament. His movement did not last long on France's political scene, but it provided political training for

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Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose National Front has become the most significant player on the Right since the 1930s, frequently attracting a substantial proportion of the vote in local elections. Although Le Pen disavows antisemitism in favor of anti-immigrant xenophobia, any careful reading of his remarks reveals his anti-Jewish animus. As the political sociologist Pierre Birnbaum has persuasively demonstrated, there has been a remarkable continuity in ideology and in personnel in French political antisemitism for the past century. The antisemitic venom of the radical right has specifically targeted Juifs d'état, from Léon Blum to Pierre Mendès-France to Simone Veil, appointed Minister of Health in 1974 and president of the European parliament since 1979, who are depicted as the true rulers of France. The conspiracy theories of modern antisemitism thus lend emotional force to antirepublican, nationalist politics.46 Although antisemitic discourse is most significant in its political form, antisemitism has taken other forms as well in postwar France. Antisemitic stereotypes, which appeared often in mainstream French newspapers during the Mendès-France years, have declined. However, France has been home to a vigorous branch of the Holocaust denial movement, which asserts that the Nazi genocide of European Jewry never occurred and that the Jews manufactured the story—a new conspiracy—to increase their own power. Denial of the Holocaust was given its most notorious hearing in 1978 when the glossy newsmagazine L'Express published an interview with the Vichy director of the Commissariat-Général aux questions juives, Darquier de Pellepoix, still in exile in Spain. During the interview Darquier proclaimed, "True, there were gassings in Auschwitz. But it is lice that were gassed." It was Robert Faurisson, however, a professor of literature, who, along with his rightist followers, created the Holocaust denial movement that used academic pretensions to buttress its claims. Beginning in 1978, Faurisson has received considerable media attention, including in France's preeminent newspaper Le Monde. Jean-Marie Le Pen, too, has flirted with Holocaust denial. Indeed, Holocaust denial has brought together antisemites of the Right, who seek an ethnically homogenous and antidemocratic state, and antisemites of the Left, who see Israel and hence the Jews as the source of all evil in the world.47 Most frightening to French Jews of all postwar expressions of antisemitism was a series of bombings of Jewish institutions that demonstrated both the vulnerability of Jews to terrorism on French soil and also the inadequacy of governmental responses to it. The first attack,

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which occurred in March 1979, was directed against a kosher student restaurant in the Latin Quarter and injured twenty-six people. A commando attack in 1982 targeted Goldenberg's restaurant and its clientele in the old east European immigrant quarter in Paris, killing six and wounding an additional twenty-two persons. In terms of public response, the most significant incident took place in October 1980 when a bomb exploded outside the liberal synagogue of the Rue Copernic, in Paris's fashionable sixteenth arrondissement, killing six people. The horror of the incident was deepened for Jews when France's Prime Minister Raymond Barre, in reaction to the killings, differentiated among the victims. On French television Barre condemned "this odious act which intended to strike Jews [Israélites] going to synagogue and which struck innocent Frenchmen crossing the Rue Copernic."48 The message Barre sent, in all likelihood inadvertently, was that the intended Jewish victims were neither innocent nor French. Barre's gaffe was reinforced by President Giscard d'Estaing's waiting four days before issuing a statement. However, the incident elicited public demonstrations of solidarity with Jews and strengthened the activism of French Jewish youth. In 1989 the Jews of France joined their fellow French citizens in celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The celebration was less wholehearted than had been the case a century earlier. Then, Jewish expressions of gratitude to France and appreciation of the Revolution and its accomplishments were unadulterated, despite the visibility of antisemitism. At the end of the twentieth century, French Jews had more than the legacy of the Revolution with which to contend. Their community had been transformed by the immigration of Jews, first from eastern Europe and more recently from North Africa. Zionism continued to challenge the emancipationist paradigm of Jewish modernity that had been set in motion by the Revolution. And, most importantly, French Jews had begun the process of coming to terms with Vichy, with the collaboration of French officialdom in the murder of their loved ones. To be sure, there was still much to celebrate. French Jews have continued to benefit from social and political integration. As graduates of France's most prestigious institutions of higher education, they have succeeded in achieving careers of distinction in the universities, in cultural life, and in politics. In 1968 René Cassin, a specialist in international law and president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, received the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1987 his remains were reinterred in the Panthéon, a site reserved for France's greats. Scholars like Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have continued the tradition of Jewish participation at

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the highest levels of French scholarship set by Émile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, Marc Bloch, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Moreover, President François Mitterrand had an unprecedented number of Jews among his circle of advisers and was considered a friend of the Jewish community and of Israel.49 Perhaps the most telling information on the status of French Jews emerges from survey data. In a survey conducted in 1984, 94 percent of respondents replied affirmatively to the question whether Jews were French people like all the rest, as compared to 37 percent in 1947 and 60 percent in 1966. In fact, a Jewish woman, the television journalist Anne Sinclair, was selected in 1989 to represent Marianne, the incarnation of republican France.50 This growing acceptance of Jews on the popular level was accompanied by an improvement in official Jewish-Christian relations. As early as 1947 the Seelisberg conference in Switzerland, in which Rabbi Jacob Kaplan participated, rejected the Christian teaching of contempt and led to the formation the following year of the organization Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne.51 Vatican II, in particular, initiated a period of mutual respect in Catholic-Jewish relations; its document, Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965, suggested in its modifications of Church dogma about the Jews that antisemitism was incompatible with true Christian faith. France's Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, born into an immigrant Jewish family from Poland, has also worked to improve Jewish-Catholic relations. Beginning in the 1970s, as France began tentatively to confront its experience under the Vichy regime, French Jews, too, had to face their memories of Vichy. In particular, they bore the burden of assessing the impact on their identity as French Jews of Vichy's betrayal of their human and civic rights. There were many events that brought home to French Jews the complicity of the wartime French government in their own persecution. The appearance of Marcel Ophuls's powerful documentary film "The Sorrow and the Pity" in 1 9 7 1 , followed the following year by Robert Paxton's Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 and especially the 1981 publication of Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton's seminal study, Vichy and the Jews, initiated a public debate about the nature of the Vichy regime and its role in the Holocaust, questioning the myth of widespread resistance. Contributing to that debate were the documentation of the extent of the Holocaust in France by the Klarsfelds, first published in 1978, as well as the trial of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi "butcher of Lyon." The memories of Vichy, ironically coinciding with the emergence of the Holocaust denial movement, con-

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tributed to a growing sense among French Jews that what it meant to be a Jew in France was once again open for discussion. The emergence of Vichy and the Holocaust into the consciousness of French Jews highlighted the fact that the self-effacement that had accompanied the assimilation of French language, culture, and values had not brought the security promised by emancipation. 52 The intellectual debate ignited by Marienstras, Finkielkraut, Trigano, and others in the two decades before the bicentennial became a subject for communal reflection in Les Nouveaux cabiers. In its summer 1989 issue, the journal published two articles that took note of the split of French Jews in their attitudes toward the Revolution and emancipation. For some, the Revolution had deceived the Jews: the demands regarding assimilation that it had imposed on them as a condition of their emancipation had to be rejected. For others, those demands remained valid, a necessity of French citizenship.53 Two hundred years after emancipation most French Jews, whatever their attitude to the Revolution, realized that they had to define for themselves and their community just what the nature of Jewish specificity was to be in contemporary France. The "right to be different" mandated an exploration of the meaning of difference. In an increasingly diversified France, Jewish reflections about identity also became part of a national debate on the extent of particularity that the French polity was prepared to tolerate. Just as the emancipation of the Jews revealed the tensions in revolutionary ideology and practice, and the Dreyfus Affair exhibited the divisions between modernizing Republicans and antimodern traditionalists, so members of the small Jewish community in contemporary France have continued to be active participants in the public discourse about the nature of the French state and society at the end of the twentieth century. The French Jewish community in the modern period has been shaped by the encounter of French Jews of diverse provenance with French society and culture. The emancipation of the Jews as it was understood from the time of the French Revolution, both by French society and by the Jews themselves, necessitated the adoption of French culture and values and the limitation of Jewish distinctiveness to the private domain of religion. To be sure, even in the period when the ideology of assimilation went unchallenged, many Jews in France maintained Jewish familial and ethnic sentiment and a modicum of religious tradition even as they acculturated and integrated into French society and politics. In recent years the ideology of assimilation has been eroded by factors specific

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to the Jewish experience as well as by changes in French society and culture. The right to be different now coexists with the revolutionary tradition of the right to be the same. How France and her Jews together negotiate the balance between equality and particularism will determine the contours of Jewish life in France in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

A 11 of Jewish history, but especially modern Jewish history, involves L \ the interaction of two groups, the Jews and the societies in which JL JLthey have lived. Neither group is monolithic or static; each is comprised of individuals of different classes who vary in their cultural traditions, regional legacies, and political dispositions and participate in a continually changing society. In presenting the history of the Jews of modern France I have tried to highlight this interaction. Moreover, because Jews have lived in so many different societies, the study of their experience in one country, such as France, provides a prism for a multinational comparison of political attitudes and policies toward minorities. 1 This book has explored the encounter of France and its Jews from the mid-eighteenth century until 1989, when France celebrated the bicentennial of the Revolution as the country with the largest Jewish population in Europe, with the exception of the successor states of the former Soviet Union (whose Jews had been subject to forced assimilation). The story of the Jews in modern France, while specific to the sociopolitical developments of the country, presents a microcosm of the modern Jewish experience in the West. As the corporate basis of Jewish communal autonomy was eroded and modern states emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews were liberated from the constraints of discriminatory legislation but also deprived of the institutional powers that had enforced group cohesion. Despite the survival of social discrimination, individual Jews could participate in the larger culture, 215

Conclusion economy, and polity and reap the benefits of their successes. But Jews as a group were compelled to construct new forms of identity and new communal institutions that would be consonant with the larger societies in which they lived. The central questions that arose almost immediately— what limits of religious or ethnic particularity would be imposed by state and society, what limits would Jews themselves place on their own integration to maintain a distinctive identity—have never been definitively resolved. As social and political values have changed, Jews have continued to struggle with their place in the larger society. The issue of religious difference in the secular French state of the 1990s, in which Islam is the second largest religion and in which religious markers like the Islamic scarf are permitted in public schools, is quite different, for example, from the earlier years of the twentieth century. The "right to be different" now claimed by minorities and regional groups in France contends with an earlier concept of civic equality as the right (and the duty) to adapt to a vision of a homogeneous albeit universalist France. The history of the Jews in modern France has starkly displayed the contrasts Jews have experienced in the past two centuries in Europe. On the one hand, Jewish emancipation occurred early and was reaffirmed by French governments for a century and a half. In comparative perspective, France proved most generous to its Jewish population. The Jews of France were the first in Europe to have full access to the possibilities offered by emancipation, for revolutionary France was the first country to apply the doctrines of Enlightenment humanism to the "Jewish question." In France Jews were offered equal citizenship without paying the price of conversion, and they embraced the opportunities of acculturation and integration. Despite the persistence of some popular antipathy to Jews and Judaism, France's Jews found French culture seductive and French society comparatively open to those willing to adopt French manners. Eager to take part in the larger society, they reinvented themselves, restructured their communities, adapted their Judaism to the pragmatic and ideological demands of the times, and participated fully in French culture and politics. And they did well, in economic and social terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of Jews living in France, with the exception of new immigrants, were middle class and a small minority were upper class. French Jews were no strangers, however, to the paradox of acculturation and renewed discrimination that characterized the experience of Jews in western and central Europe, and to a lesser extent even in the United States. In the modern period, Jews in France also fell victim to a secular

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Jew-hatred which mocked the gains of emancipation. After a century of acculturation and social mobility, they faced the single most virulent incidence of political antisemitism to erupt anywhere in the West—the Dreyfus Affair. And during the Holocaust they witnessed the collaboration of French leaders and institutions in the destruction of the oldest emancipated Jewish community in Europe. The antisemitism that found a home in the Vichy regime enabled French citizens to participate in the deportation of one-fourth of France's Jewish population to their deaths. If French Jewry's record of emancipation spiced with rejection is the modern European Jewish experience writ large, its prolonged survival reflects another central aspect of modern Jewish history—the importance of mass migration in repopulating Jewish communities. Although the new Jewish communities of North and South America, South Africa, and Israel recognize the impact of immigration on their structure and values, European Jewish communities tend to deemphasize the role of immigrants in their stories. While acknowledging the arrival of newcomers, they marginalize their importance. Yet immigration from abroad contributed not only numbers to the French Jewish population but also different cultural styles, political ideologies, and self-definitions that interacted with the changing cultural and political patterns of modern France. The history of modern French Jewry, then, is not simply a tale of acculturation and integration of a population in place from the eighteenth century. It is a story of successive waves of migration, from eastern and central Europe, from the Levant, and most recently from North Africa, which have replenished and reshaped the Jewish community—immigrants who have accommodated in their own fashion to the regnant values of French society and culture. Although the French Jewish experience is paradigmatic of Jewish modernity, it also bears the particular imprint of French history and culture. In exploring the interaction of Jews with French society and politics, a history of the Jews of France illuminates the majority host society as well as one of its minority groups. The story of the emancipation of the Jews during the French Revolution, for example, reflects the tensions within the revolutionary camp and highlights the complex mixture of liberation and enforced conformity that comprised the revolutionary project. It lays bare the deleterious consequences as well as the benefits of Enlightenment universalism. The paradox of legal equality and continued social discrimination that Jews experienced in the nineteenth century points to the strength of the French state and its limits in transforming society. The transformation of French antisemitism at the end

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Conclusion

of the nineteenth century and its political role from the time of the Dreyfus Affair through Vichy contributes to our understanding of the Right in France and the sources of its appeal. Finally, exploring the ways in which different segments of French society have conceptualized, and reacted to, the "otherness" of the Jews permits a broader understanding of the treatment of all sorts of "deviants" in modern France. As France becomes increasingly multicultural and multiethnic at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the history of French Jewry moves from the margins to the center.

Notes

C H A P T E R ONE: B E F O R E T H E R E V O L U T I O N 1. For a general survey of the traditional premodern Jewish community, see Salo Baron, The Jewish Community, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1937). 2. For background information on the Marrano Jews of France, see Elie Szapiro, "Le Sud-Ouest," in Histoire des Juifs en France, ed. Bernhard Blumenkranz (Toulouse: Privât, 1972), pp. 2 2 1 - 6 1 ; Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1978); Jean Cavaignac, Les israélites bordelais de 1780 à 1850: Autour de l'émancipation (Paris: Editions Publisud, 1991); and the documents in Gérard Nahon, Les 'Nations' juives portugaises du sud-ouest de la France (1684-179 iJ(Paris: Fondation C. Gulbenkian, 1981). On the development of the various new Jewish communities in France, see Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 12-28, and Simon Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 19-37. 3. For a compelling evaluation of the Marrano phenomenon, see Yosef Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 1-50. On the Marrano economic diaspora and its impact, see Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 4. For the text of the letters patent, see Nahon, Les 'Nations' juives portugaises, pp. 21-26. 5. For the cemetery evidence of the affirmation of Jewish identity, see Gérard Nahon, "Pour une approche des attitudes devant la mort au xviiiè siècle: Sermonnaires et testateurs Juifs portugais à Bayonne," Revue des études juives 136, nos. 1 - 2 (January-June 1977): 7. On the abandonment of Catholic rites and on the 1723 letters patent see Malino, Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, pp. 7, 9; for the 219

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text, see Nahon, Les 'Nations' juives portugaises, pp. 35-39. See also Szapiro, "Le Sud-Ouest," pp. 2.33-3 5. 6. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 24-28; Malino, Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, pp. 6-9. 7. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 189-98, 204-6, 2 1 4 - 1 7 , 2 2 3 - 2 5 , 228-32; Cavaignac, Les Israélites bordelais de 1780 à 1850. 8. Szapiro, "Le Sud-Ouest," pp. 248-49. 9. Jean Cavaignac, "Juifs et Chrétiens à Bordeaux au xviiiè siècle," in Les Juifs dans le regard de l'autre (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail—Vent Terrai, 1988), pp. 4 1 - 4 3 . The citation is found on p. 42 and is drawn from Le régistre des délibérations de la nation juive portuguaise de Bordeaux (1711-1787), ed. Simon Schwarzfuchs (Paris: Fondation C. Gulbenkian, 1 9 8 1 ) , P- 59510. Malino, Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, pp. 23-26; Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 140-63. 1 1 . Mémoire remis par les Députés des Juifs de Bordeaux à Monsieur de Malesherbes, Ministre d'État (1788), as presented in Documents inédits sur l'entrée des Juifs dans la société française (1750-1850), ed. Renée Neher-Bernheim (Tel-Aviv: Diaspora Research Institute, 1977), vol. 1 , p. 233. 1 2 . Ibid., p. 234. 1 3 . Ibid., pp. 2 1 3 - 2 4 . The citation is from a letter by the intendant of the province of Guienne of July 7, 1 7 8 1 , reprinted on p. 220. See also Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, p. 7 1 . 14. For general histories of these communities, see René Moulinas, Les Juifs du pape en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1 9 8 1 ) , and Hugues Jean de Dianoux, "Le Sud-Est," in Blumenkranz, Histoire des Juifs en France, pp. 1 9 3 - 2 2 0 . On the Jews of Carpentras, see Marianne Calmann, The Carrière of Carpentras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 15. René Moulinas, Les Juifs du Pape: Avignon et le Comtat Venaissin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), pp. 1 0 8 - 1 9 , and his "Les Juifs d'Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin au xviiè et au xviiiè siècle," in Les Juifs dans le regard de l'autre, pp. 30-32. See also Esther Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs de France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997). 16. Moulinas, Les Juifs du Pape, pp. 1 3 0 - 3 3; de Dianoux, "Le Sud-Est," pp. 197, 2 0 1 , 209. 1 7 . Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 1 3 3 - 3 7 . 18. On the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, see Gilbert Cahen, "La région lorraine," and Georges Weill, "L'Alsace," both in Blumenkranz, Histoire des Juifs en France, pp. 7 7 - 1 3 6 and 1 3 7 - 9 1 respectively; and Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, pp. 24-27. 19. Weill, "L'Alsace," p. 166. 20. For a survey of the culture of the Jews of Alsace, see Freddy Raphael and Robert Weyl, Juifs en Alsace: Société, histoire, culture (Toulouse: Privat, 1976). On Alsatian Jewish folk art, see Raphael and Weyl, L'Imagerie juive en Alsace (Strasbourg, 1979) and the guide for the 1989 Jewish Museum (New York) exhibition entitled "Memories of Alsace: Folk Art and Jewish Tradition." On the demography of Alsatian Jewry, see Georges Weill, "Les Juifs d'Alsace: Cent ans d'historiographie," Revue des études juives 1 3 9 , nos. 1 - 3 (1980): 8 1 - 1 0 8 , and

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also his "Recherches sur la démographie des juifs d'Alsace du xviè au xviiiè siècle," Revue des études juives 130 (1971): 51-89. On the ghettoization of Jews in Metz, see Cahen, "La région lorraine," pp. 81, 119-20. For the latest study of the Jews of Metz, see Pierre-André Meyer, La Communauté juive de Metz au xviiiè siècle (Nancy-Metz: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993). 21. On Jews as moneylenders, see Cahen, "La région lorraine," pp. 108-10; Roland Marx, "Les Juifs et l'usure en Alsace: Réflexions sur un mythe," Saisons d'Alsace, nos. 55-56 (Les Juifs d'Alsace)(i^j5): 62-67; and Zosa Szajkowski, The Economic Status of the Jews in Alsace, Metz and Lorraine (1648-1789) (New York, 1954), reprinted in part in Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 (New York: Ktav, 1970), pp. 1 5 1 - 2 1 9 . 22. Cahen, "La région lorraine," p. 81; Weill, "L'Alsace," p. 149. 23. Cahen, "La région lorraine," pp. 92-95, 1 1 5 ; Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 164-75. 24. See Frances Malino, "Competition and Confrontation: The Jews and the parlement of Metz," in Les Juifs au regard de l'histoire: Mélanges en l'honneur de Bernhard Blumenkranz, ed. Gilbert Dahan (Paris, 1985), pp. 327-41, and also her "Resistance and rebellion in eighteenth-century France," Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 30 (1987-88): 55-70. The discussion in this paragraph is based upon Malino's evidence. See also Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 240-43. 25. Hayyim Joseph David Azulai, Maagal Tov Hashalem, ed. Aaron Freimann (Jerusalem, 1934), pp. 1 1 5 - 1 6 , as cited in Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 160-61. 26. See Simon Schwarzfuchs, "L'Émancipation: Un problème des États 'Centraux' de l'Europe—La Haskalah et le cercle de Metz à la veille de la révolution," in Politique et Religion dans le Judaïsme Moderne: Des Communautés à l'Émancipation, ed. Daniel Tollet (Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris Sorbonne, 1987), pp. 51-62, and Jonathan Helfand, "The Symbiotic Relationship between French and German Jewry in the Age of Emancipation," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 29 (1984): 331-50. For an exploration of the social context of the Berlin Haskalah, see Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis, 1770-1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 27. Schwarzfuchs, "L'Émancipation: Un problème des États 'Centraux' de l'Europe," pp. 53-54. 28. Michael Graetz, ed., The French Revolution and the Jews: The Debates in the National Assembly, 1789-91 (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1989), pp. xxx-xxxiv. 29. Cahen, "La région lorraine," pp. 91-92. 30. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 136, 250-51, 271. C H A P T E R TWO: T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N A N D T H E E M A N C I P A T I O N OF T H E JEWS i. On the issue of universalism and particularism as reflected in the emancipation of the Jews in France, see Pierre Birnbaum, "Sur l'étatisation révolutionnaire: L'abbé Grégoire et le destin de l'identité juive," Le Débat, no. 53

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Notes to Pages 1 8 - 2 1

(January-February 1989): 157-73. For a contemporary discussion of the tension between universalism and particularism in the French setting, see Dominique Schnapper and Chantal Benayoun, "Citoyenneté républicaine et spécificité juive," Les Nouveaux cahiers, no. 97 (summer 1989): 5-10. For a Zionist critique of late nineteenth-century French Jewry, see Ahad Ha-Am, "Slavery in Freedom," in Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, trans, and ed. Leon Simon (Cleveland and Philadelphia: Meridian Books and Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), pp. 171-94, and Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Raphael Patai (New York and London: The Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, i960), vol. 2, pp. 621, 672-73. 2. On Moses Mendelssohn, see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), and David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). On Enlightenment attitudes toward the Jews, see Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 268-313, and Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 37-41, 57-71. 3. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 280-8 6, 299-3 1 3 (the citation may be found on p. 300); François Delpech, "De 1789 à nos jours," in Blumenkranz, Histoire des Juifs en France, p. 271; and Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). 4. On Dohm, see Katz, Out of the Ghetto, pp. 5 8-64; Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, pp. 59-63; and Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modem World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 27-34. 5. On the Edict of Toleration, see Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern World, pp. 34-36. On the 1784 edicts, see Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 318-22; Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, pp. 66-72; Robert Badinter, Libres et égaux . . . L'émancipation des Juifs sous la Révolution française (1789-1791) (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 37-39; and Graetz, French Revolution and the Jews, pp. x-xi. 6. On the essay contest and the prize-winning essays, see Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 328-38, and Jay Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), pp. 30-32. On Zalkind Hourwitz, see Frances Malino's comprehensive biography, A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Malino argues against the interpretation of Hourwitz as a self-hating Jew and sees him as an early proponent of the need for Jews to balance acculturation and their Jewish identity. 7. [Henri] Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des juifs (Metz and Paris, 1789), p.190, reprinted in La Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1968), vol. 3. 8. [Adolphe] Thiéry, Dissertation sur cette question: Est-il des moyens de rendre les Juifs plus heureux et plus utiles en France? (Paris, 1788), p. 3, reprinted in La Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs, vol. 2, p. 34. 9. Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération, p. 43. 10. Thiéry, Dissertation, p. 66.

Notes to Pages 21-2.7

223

1 1 . Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération, pp. 1 3 1 - 3 2 . 12. On the strategies of the various Jewish communities, see Jean-Marc Chouraqui, "Que voulaient donc les Juifs de France? Les stratégies de l'émancipation," Les Nouveaux cahiers, no. 97 (summer 1989): 1 0 - 1 7 . On the Malesherbes "commission," see Malino, Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, pp. 27-39, and Badinter, Libres et égaux, pp. 87-97; Gérard Nahon, "Prospective des 'Portugais' du sud-ouest de la France à la veille de la Révolution," in Tollet, Politique et Religion, pp. 85-99. 1 3 . Malino, Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, p. 30. For the memoir of the deputies of the Jews of Bordeaux to Malesherbes, see Neher-Bernheim, Documents inédits, vol. 1 , pp. 233-35. 14. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 2 1 , 2 6 - 3 1 , 4 9 - 5 1 . 15. On the trope of regeneration in the discourse of the Revolution, see Mona Ozouf, "Regeneration," in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 781-90. 16. Badinter, Libres et égaux, pp. 9 9 - 1 1 5 ; Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, pp. 9 7 - 1 1 6 . 1 7 . David Feuerwerker, L'émancipation des Juifs en France, de l'ancien Regime à la fin du second Empire (Paris: A. Michel, 1976), pp. 2 5 2 - 6 1 ; Robert Weyl and Jean Daltroff, "Le Cahier de Doléances des Juifs d'Alsace," Revue d'Alsace 109 (1983): 65-80. 18. Badinter, Libres et égaux, p. 1 1 0 . 19. Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern World, p. 103. 20. Badinter, Libres et égaux, pp. 1 1 9 - 2 0 , 1 6 1 - 6 3 ; Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, pp. 1 2 7 - 3 0 . 2 1 . "Adresse présentée à l'Assemblée Nationale, le 3 1 août 1789, par les députés réunis des Juifs, Établis à Metz, dans les Trois Évêchés, en Alsace et en Lorraine," pp. 1 3 - 1 4 , reprinted in La Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs, vol. 5. 22. "Adresse présentée à l'Assemblée Nationale, le 26 août 1789, par les Juifs residans à Paris," pp. 6-7, reprinted in ibid. 23. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 14. 24. First citation is from Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, p. 56; "Adresse présentée à l'Assemblée Nationale, le 26 août 1789," p. 5. 25. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, p. 49. 26. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 30. 27. Ozouf, "Liberty," in Furet and Ozouf, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, p. 720. 28. "Opinion de M. le Comte Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, député de Paris, le 23 décembre, 1789," reprinted in La Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs, vol. 7, p. 1 3 . 29. This opinion was stated most strongly by the right-wing deputy, the abbé Maury. He was seconded by the Alsatian deputy, Prince Claude de Broglie. See Badinter, Libres et égaux, pp. 1 5 0 - 5 1 , 1 5 9 - 6 0 . On the slogan "nation within a

Notes to Pages 28-3 z nation," see Jacob Katz, "A State within a State—The History of an anti-Semitic Slogan," The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities Proceedings 4 (1971), pp. 32-58, reprinted in Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation (Westmead, England: Gregg Interntional Publishers, 1972). 30. "Opinion de M . L'Évêque de Nancy, Député de Lorraine, sur l'admissibilité des Juifs à la plénitude de l'état-civil, et des droits de citoyens actifs," reprinted in La Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs, vol. 7, pp. 3-4. 3 1 . Ibid., pp. 4, 7. 3 2. On the different strategies of the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, see Pierre Birnbaum, "Between Social and Political Assimilation: Remarks on the History of the Jews in France," in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 995)i PP- 94~9933. Badinter, Libres et égaux, pp. 1 6 7 - 7 7 . The citation is from p. 177; Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, pp. 1 3 0 - 3 7 . 34. "Lettres Patentes du Rois, Sur un Décret de l'Assemblée Nationale, portant que les Juifs, connus en France sous le nom de Juifs Portugais, Espagnols & Avignonnois, y jouiront des droits de citoyens actifs. Janvier 1 7 9 0 , " reprinted in La Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs, vol. 7; Moulinas, Les Juifs du pape, p. 438. 35. "Adresse de l'Assemblée des Representans de la commune de Paris, à l'Assemblée Nationale, sur l'admission des Juifs à l'État Civil," reprinted in La Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs, vol. 6, p. 7; Badinter, Libres et égaux, pp. 1 8 5 - 2 1 2 ; Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, pp. 1 3 8 - 4 1 . 36. Badinter, Libres et égaux, pp. 2 1 4 - 1 5 ; Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, p. 145. 37. Badinter, Libres et égaux, pp. 2 1 6 - 1 8 . 38. Ronald Schechter, "Translating the 'Marseillaise': Biblical Republicanism and the Emancipation of Jews in Revolutionary France," Past and Present, no. 143 (May 1994): 108-35; the quote is from p. 108. 39. Berr Isaac Berr, "Lettre d ' u n citoyen, membre de la ci-devant Communauté des Juifs de Lorraine, à ses confrères, à l'occasion du droit du Citoyen actif, rendu a u x Juifs par le décret du 28 Septembre 1 7 9 1 , " (Nancy, 1 7 9 1 ) , reprinted in La Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs, vol. 8, pp. 1 6 - 1 7 . For a survey of Berr Isaac Berr's activity during the Revolution, see Martine Lemalet, "L'Émancipation des juifs de Lorraine à travers l'oeuvre de Berr Isaac Berr ( 1 7 8 8 - 1 7 9 1 ) , " in Toilet, Politique et Religion, pp. 6 3 - 8 3 . 40. Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, pp. 7 2 - 7 7 . 41. See, for example, Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération, pp. 131-32, 137, 191; Jacques Godechot, "La Révolution française et les Juifs," in Les Juifs et la Révolution française, Problèmes et aspirations, ed. Bernhard Blumenkranz and Albert Soboul (Toulouse: Privât, 1976), p. 55. 42. Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914, trans. N o a h Jonathan Jacobs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 1 7 - 1 8 . 43. Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l'israélite, p. 16.

Notes to Pages 3 2-41

2.25

44. Szajkowski, /ews and the French Revolutions, pp. 785-94, 809-23; Françoise Job, Les Juifs de Lunéville (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1989), PP- 71-7345. Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions, pp. 791-93. 46. On the development of a trend toward uniformity as the goal of equality, see Ozouf, "Equality," in Furet and Ozouf, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, p. 680. On Grégoire's campaign against patois, see Birnbaum, "Sur l'étatisation révolutionnaire," p. 162. 47. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, pp. 44-45, 52-53, 75-81. The quote is from pp. 53 and 81. 48. Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions, pp. 555-56, 560-63; H. Tribout de Morembert, "Les Juifs de Metz et de Lorraine, 1791-95," in Blumenkranz and Soboul, Les Juifs et la Révolution française, p. 93. 49. Szajkowski, "Anti-Jewish Riots in Alsace during the Revolutions of 1789,1830, and 1848" (in Hebrew), Zion 20 (1955): 83-84; Roland Marx, "La Régénération économique des Juifs d'Alsace à l'époque révolutionnaire et Napoléonienne," in Blumenkranz and Soboul, Les Juifs et la Révolution française, pp. 1 1 1 - 1 7 ; Godechot, "La Révolution française et les juifs," in Blumenkranz and Soboul, Les Juifs et la Révolution française, pp. 60-63. 50. Godechot, "La Révolution française et les juifs," in Blumenkranz and Soboul, Les Juifs et la Révolution française, p. 62. 51. Szajkowski, "Autonomy and Jewish Communal Debts during the French Revolution of 1789," in his Jews and the French Revolutions, pp. 635-46. CHAPTER THREE: THE NAPOLEONIC SYNTHESIS 1. The classic study of Napoleon and the Jews remains Robert Anchel, Napoléon et les Juifs (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1928). 2. Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhédrin (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 37-43; Malino, Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, pp. 65-66; Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, pp. 87-88. 3. Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhédrin, pp. 27-28, 45. 4. Louis Poujol, Quelques observations concernant les juifs en général et plus particulièrement ceux d'Alsace (Paris, 1806). The citation is from p. 132; Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhédrin, pp. 33-37. 5. Berr Isaac Berr, as cited in S. Posener, "The Immediate Economic and Social Effects of the Emancipation of the Jews in France," Jewish Social Studies 1 (1939): 293. 6. The quote from Napoleon is cited by François Delpech, "De 1789 à nos jours," in Blumenkranz, Histoire des Juifs en France, p. 291. See also Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhédrin, pp. 46-52. 7. For the questions and brief responses, see Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, Jew in the Modern World, pp. 1 1 6 - 2 1 . For an extensive account of the deliberations of the assembly as well as the questions, see Diogène Tama, Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrim, trans. F.D. Kirwan (London: Charles Taylor, 1807). The book was reprinted by Brown University, in its Classics in Judaic Studies series (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985). See also Bernhard

226

Notes to Pages 41-46

Blumenkranz and Albert Soboul, eds., Le Grand Sanhédrin de Napoléon (Toulouse: Privât, 1979). For a recent evaluation of the significance of the questions and answers in the project of regenerating French Jewry, see Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, pp. 77-84. 8. François Delpech, "Les Juifs en France et dans l'Empire et la génèse du Grand Sanhédrin," in Blumenkranz and Soboul, Le Grand Sanhédrin de Napoléon, pp. 4-5. 9. On the Sanhédrin and Jewish law, see Charles Touati, "Le Grand Sanhédrin de 1807 et le Droit Rabbinique," in Blumenkranz and Soboul, Le Grand Sanhédrin de Napoléon, pp. 27-48, and Gil Graff, Separation of Church and State: Dina de-Malkhuta Dina in Jewish Law, 1750-1848 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), esp. pp. 7 1 - 1 0 9 . For an analysis of the debate about the acceptability of the responses by the assembly and the Sanhédrin according to halakha, see Jean-Marc Chouraqui, "La loi de l'état est la loi: Compréhension et implications d'un principe talmudique après l'émancipation," in Toilet, Politique et Religion, pp. 1 1 5 - 3 8 . The citation is from Tama, Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrim, p. 195. 10. Tama, Transactions of the Paris Sanhedrim, pp. 197-207. The citation is from p. 207. 1 1 . Ibid., pp. 154-56. 12. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 28, 134-3513. Malino, Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, pp. 95-102; Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhédrin, pp. 1 1 1 - 1 1 4 , 120-22. 14. Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1977), pp. 45-50, 56-60. For an English translation of the 1808 Organic Ordinance, see Simeon J. Maslin, An Analysis and Translation of Selected Documents of Napoleonic Jewry (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, 1957), pp. 26-35. On the role of notables in nineteenth-century French politics, see Daniel Halévy, The End of the Notables (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1974). The book was first published in French in 1930. 15. Maslin, Selected Documents, p. 30. For an 1 8 1 2 circular distributed by the Consistory of the Lower Rhine to all commissaires-surveillants and rabbis and calling for preaching on two sacred obligations, vaccination and army service, see Neher-Bernheim, Documents inédits, vol. 1, pp. 470-73. See also the "Lettre Pastorale addressée par le Consistoire Central des Israélites de France aux consistoires dans la circonscription desquels il se trouve un ou plusieurs des départements qui viennent d'être affranchis des dispositions du décret du 17. III. 1808," Archives Nationales (AN), F19 11.007. 16. For one example of a request to provide detailed information, see the January 30, 1 8 1 0 copy of a letter from the prefect of the department of Meurthe to the Consistory of Nancy in Maslin, Selected Documents, pp. 74-78. For a February 19, 1 8 1 0 letter from the Consistory of the Lower Rhine directing all

Notes to Pages 46-54 commissaires-surveillants to take action against foreign beggars and migrants, see ibid., pp. 108-9. 1 7 . Achille-Edmond Halphen, Recueil des lois, décrets, ordonnances, avis du Conseil d'Etat, arrêtés et règlements concernant les Israélites depuis la Révolution de 1789 (Paris, 1 8 5 1 ) , p. 47. 18. Maslin, Selected Documents, pp. 35-38. 19. Ibid., pp. 38-39 for restrictions on settlement and on army service, and pp. 39, 46-49 for the exemption of Jews of various departments from the provisions of the decree. 2.0. Ibid., pp. 56-58; Anchel, Napoléon et les Juifs, pp. 4 4 1 - 4 4 . 2 1 . Delpech, "Les Juifs en France," p. 2 1 . 22. Central Consistory, "Rapport à son Excellence . . . , 1 8 1 0 , " A N F 1 9 il.031. 23. Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhédrin, p. 128; Posener, "The Immediate Economic and Social Effects," pp. 289, 3 1 0 . The subprefect's remarks may be found in Neher-Bernheim, Documents inédits, vol. 1 , p. 3 3 1 ; they are also briefly cited in Job, Les Juifs de Lunéville, p. 228. 24. Posener, "The Immediate Economic and Social Effects," pp. 2 8 1 - 3 1 2 , and his "Les Juifs sous le premier empire: les statistiques générales," Revue des études juives 93 (1932): 196-97, 201; Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, PP- 3 - 5 , 9 - 1 0 , 1 5 , 1 7 . For the Jewish population of Paris, see the consistorial census of 1809, Archives of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). For the Jewish population of Strasbourg, see Neher-Bernheim, Documents inédits, vol. 1 , p. 349, and also for the Jewish population of Dunkerque, ibid., p. 400. 25. For characterizations of the law-abiding character of the Jews, see Neher-Bernheim, Documents inédits, vol. 1 , pp. 333 (Lunéville), 336 (Toul), 343 (dept. of Meurthe), 345 (dept. of Vosges), 347 (dept. of Cote-d'Or), 4 1 9 (dept. of Landes). For the remarks on Catholic usurers, see ibid., p. 3 4 1 . On SaintEsprit, see ibid., p. 4 2 1 . 26. Neher-Bernheim, Documents inédits, vol. 1 , pp. 336, 387-88, 3 9 0 - 9 1 , 405, 4 1 1 - 1 3 , 4 2 0 - 2 2 ; Job, Les Juifs de Lunéville, p. 170. The figures on school attendance are drawn from reports in A N F 1 9 11.009 and F 1 9 1 1 . 0 1 0 . For general social changes, see Posener, "The Immediate Economic and Social Effects," pp. 297, 299, 308, 3 1 8 - 2 0 . CHAPTER FOUR: ACCULTURATION AND MOBILITY i . On the mutual compatibility of assimilation and retention of Jewish identity, see Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany. On the potential for multiple identities, see Gary Cohen, "Jews in German Society: Prague, 1 8 6 0 - 1 9 1 4 , " in Jews and Germans from i860 to 1933. The Problematic Symbiosis, ed. David Bronsen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitàtsverlag, 1979), pp. 306-37. On the development of a Jewish subculture in Germany, see David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). On the ethnic component of nineteenth-century French Jewish identity, see Phyllis Cohen Albert, "Ethnicity and Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century

2.28

Notes to Pages 54-57

France," in Mystics, Philosophers, and Politicians. Essays in Jewish Intellectual History in Honor of Alexander Altmann, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Daniel Swetschinski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), pp. 2.49-74, a n d her "L'Intégration et la persistence de l'ethnicité chez les juifs dans la France moderne," in Histoire politique des Juifs en France, ed. Pierre Birnbaum (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1990), pp. 221-43. 2. For an elaboration of a sociological interpretation of assimilation, see Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). For the distinction of acculturation and integration, see Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979). 3. On the economic and social development of nineteenth-century France, see Roger Price, An Economic History of Modern France (London: Macmillan, 1981); David Pinkney, The Decisive Years in France, 1840-47 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-194j (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), especially vol. 2, chap. 4. On the achievements of 1 8 3 1 and 1846, see Patrick Girard, Les Juifs de France de 1789 à i860. De l'émancipation à l'égalité (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1976), pp. 88-92, and François Delpech, "De 1 8 1 5 à 1894," in Blumenkranz, Histoire des Juifs en France, pp. 3 1 6 - 1 8 . On the political alignments of French Jewry, see Girard, Les Juifs de France de 1789 à i860, pp. 160-65; Michael Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: The French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 8 6 - 1 2 1 ; and Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 64-89. 4. On Jewish population growth, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, p. 3. On the Jewish economic elite and on Jewish Saint-Simonians, see Michael Graetz, From Periphery to Center (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1982), pp. 128-53, and the abbreviated English version of his book, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 143-62. On the nature of Jewish wealth, see Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs, p. 165. On Adolphe Crémieux, see S. Posener, Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880), 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1933-1934, which appeared in English as Adolphe Crémieux: A Biography, trans. Eugene Golob (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1940); and, most recently, Daniel Amson, Adolphe Crémieux: L'oublié de la gloire (Paris: Seuil, 1988). On the growing social and political integration of Jews, see Girard, Les Juifs de France de 1789 à i860, pp. 1 2 5 - 3 1 , and Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, pp. 122-62. On the early integration of elite Jews in Paris, see Christine Piette, Les Juifs de Paris (1808-1840): La marche vers l'assimilation (Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 1983), p. 72. On the absence of Jews in the industrial bourgeoisie and their limited political integration, see Birnbaum, "Between Social and Political Assimilation: Remarks on the History of Jews in France," in Birnbaum and Katznelson, Paths of Emancipation, pp. 105, 107, 1 1 0 . On the actress Rachel, see Rachel Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie Française (New York: Knopf, 1993).

Notes to Pages 5 8-62

229

5. On the consistories and their functions, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry. On the famous conversions, see Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, pp. 1 1 4 - 1 7 , 232-34, and Jonathan Helfand, "Passports and Piety: Apostasy in Nineteenth-Century France," Jewish History 3, no. 2 (fall 1988): 59-83. I differ with both Berkovitz and Helfand in their analysis of the significance of conversion among French Jews, which I find to be of little statistical importance. On the intermarriage rate of bourgeois Jews in Paris, see Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs, p. 194. 6. Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 22-23. 7. Population statistics on Strasbourg and Mulhouse are available in A N F19 1 1 . 0 2 3 and F19 1 1 . 0 2 4 and from List of Communities, Consistory of the Lower Rhine, 1854 and 1863, Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) AR-C 1088, 34-39; on the Jewish population of Paris, see Doris Bensimon-Donath, Socio-démographie des juifs de France et d'Algérie, 1867-1907 (Paris: POF-Etudes, 1976), p. 108. 8. List of departments containing Jews from the Lower Rhine and who were obligated to contribute to the extinction of the debt of the former Jewish community of Alsace, 1868, Hebrew Union College Library, Cincinnati (HUC), Alsace-Lorraine Collection, Box 1 , Folder 8. 9. See Paula E. Hyman, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 86-97. 10. On general migration within France, see Leslie Page Moch, Paths to the City (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983). 1 1 . Léon Cahun, La vie juive (Paris, 1886), p. 108. 1 2 . Daniel Stauben, Scènes de la vie juive en Alsace (Paris, i860), p. 96. The book has appeared in an English translation as Scenes of Jewish Life in Alsace, ed. and trans. Rose Choron (Malibu, Calif.: Joseph Simon/Pangloss Press, 1991). 1 3 . On Lyon, see François Delpech, Sur les Juifs: Etudes d'histoire contemporaine (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1983), p. 1 5 5 ; on Paris, see Bensimon-Donath, Socio-démographie des juifs, pp. 143-46. The figures on Strasbourg were calculated from the manuscript census of 1846, Archives départementale du Bas-Rhin (ADBR), V I I M 7 1 9 , 726, 733, 740. On Marseille, see Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs, p. 1 7 1 . 14. Piette, Les Juifs de Paris, p. 90; Bensimon-Donath, Socio-démographie des juifs, p. 146. 1 5 . My calculations from manuscript censuses, ADBR V I I M 266, 267,459, and 562. 16. See the following works, all by Michael Burns: "The Dreyfus Family," in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice, ed. Norman Kleeblatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 142-46; "Emancipation and Reaction: The Rural Exodus of Alsatian Jews, 1 7 9 1 - 1 8 4 8 " in Living with Antisemitism: Modern Jewish Responses, ed. Jehuda Reinharz (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1987), pp. 1 9 - 4 1 ; and Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). 1 7 . Hyman, Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace, pp. 60-61, and also my Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 18-49.

230

Notes to Pages 62-67

18. Arnaud Aron, Prières d'un coeur Israélite (Strasbourg: Société consistoriale des bons livres, 1848), pp. 263-65. 19. On the Rothschilds, see Anka Muhlstein, Baron James: The Rise of the French Rothschilds (New York: Vendôme Press, 1983 ), and Herbert R. Lottman, The French Rothschilds: The Great Banking Dynasty through Two Turbulent Centuries (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995); on the Péreires, see Jean Autin, Les frères Féreire: le bonheur d'entreprendre (Paris: Perrin, 1984). 20. Piette, Les Juifs de Paris, pp. 57-59; Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs, pp. 166, 168. 21. Delpech, "De 1 8 1 5 à 1894," p. 312; Zosa Szajkowski, Poverty and Social Welfare among French Jews, 1800-1880 (New York: Éditions historiques franco-juives, 1954), reprinted in part in his Jews and the French Revolutions, pp. 1 1 3 3-61 ; and L. P. Reboul-Deneyrol, Pauperisme et bienfaisance dans le BasRhin (Paris and Strasbourg, 1858). 22. Bensimon-Donath, Socio-démographie des juifs, p. 146; Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs, p. 168. 23. Shulamit Volkov, "Distinctiveness and Assimilation: The Paradox of Jewish Identity in the Second Reich" (in Hebrew), in Crises of German National Consciousness in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), pp. 169-85. 24. Jacob Katz, "Religion as a Uniting and Dividing Force in Modern Jewish History," in The Role of Religion in Modern Jewish History, ed. Jacob Katz (Cambridge, Mass: Association for Jewish Studies, 1975), pp. 6-8. 25. On Cahen, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 156-57. The citation is from La Régénération 1 (1836): 3. 26. Univers israélite 1, no. 10 (January 1845): 36. 27. For the elaboration of the programs of regeneration developed by the leaders of French Jewry, see Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity. There seem to have been no Jewish leaders in France who opposed regeneration, even if there were differences as to its ultimate goals. 28. Précis de l'Examen qui a eu lieu, le 18 janvier 1824, à l'Ecole primaire israélite de Strasbourg (Strasbourg, 1824), pp. 25-26. 29. Simon Bloch, La Régénération 1 (1836): 37. 30. Albert, "Ethnicity and Solidarity" and "L'Intégration et la persistence." See also Marrus's use of the term "community of suffering" to describe the basis of Jewish solidarity and his recognition that Jews used the term "race" to refer to themselves (Politics of Assimilation, pp. 10-50). 3 1 . Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs, p. 177. The quotation is from Précis de l'Examen, p. 17. 32. Letter of the Central Consistory to the Strasbourg Consistory, no. 1926, July 2, 1819, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), HM 1055. 33. Szajkowski, Jewish Education in France, 1789-1939 (New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, 1980), pp. 4-5. For extensive consideration of the status and impact of Jewish schools, see Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, pp. 150-91, and my Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace, pp. 9 8 - 1 2 1 .

Notes to Pages 67-70 34. Letter of Central Consistory to Wintzenheim Consistory, no. 2554, December 12, 1 8 2 1 , CAHJP HM 1055. 35. Letters of Cantonal Committee to Strasbourg Consistory, July 1 8 , 1 8 2 6 and May 25, 1 8 3 1 , letter to Rector of the Academy of Strasbourg, August 18, 1826, Copie de lettres du Comité Cantonal, CAHJP HM 5529; deliberations of Cantonal Committee, January 2,1826, CAHJP HM 5516; Maurice Bloch, L'Alsace juive depuis la Révolution de 1789 (Colmar, 1907), p. 12. 3 6. On the Guizot law and on the history of French education more generally, see Antoine Prost, Histoire de l'enseignement en France, 1800-1967 (Paris: A. Colin, 1968), esp. pp. 92 and 166, and R. D. Anderson, Education in France 1848-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), esp. p. 30. 37. La Régénération 1 (1836): 20. 38. For complaints about the reluctance of municipal councils to provide funds for Jewish primary schools, see the 1846 consistorial census with survey of educational facilities, Strasbourg Consistory, Archives of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), no. 8599; Univers israélite 2 (1845-46): 338, 469; and l'Ami des Israélites (1847): 278. 39. Statistics, Consistory of the Lower Rhine, 1854, LBIAR-C 1088, 34-39; Statistics, Consistory of the Upper Rhine, 1 8 5 1 , JTS, French Documents, Box 26. 40. See, for example, Isaac Lévy, Les veillées du vendredi, morale en exemples (Verdun, 1863). The citation is from Salomon Ulmann, Recueil d'instructions morales et religieuses à l'usage des jeunes israélites français (Strasbourg, 1843), P- i o 5> a s ¡s the reference to religious practice and military service. 41. See, for example, L. Sauphar, Gan Raveh. Manuel d'instruction religieuse et morale, trans. L. Wogue (Paris, 1850), p. 43; S. Hallel, L'Encens du coeur ou Prières de premier ordre avec traduction interlinéaire et accompagnées de courtes notes explicatives et de notes etendues sur la source, l'âge, l'auteur, et l'objet de chaque prière (Metz, 1867), pp. 68, 75; G. Ben-Lévi, Les Matinées du samedi (Paris, 1843); ar| d Louis Cottard, Souvenirs de Motse Mendelssohn ou Le second livre de lecture des écoles israélites (Paris: F. G. Levrault, 1832). 42. Stauben, Scènes de la vie juive en Alsace, p. 281. 43. The citation is from Univers israélite 12 (1856-57): 288. See also Archives israélites 19 (1858): 535, and 21 (i860): 607-8, and Halevanon 2 (1865): 23-24. 44. One of Klein's sons, at least, attended the lycée of Colmar and is mentioned in the Jewish press as a prize-winner; see Univers israélite 17 (1861-62): 44. 45. See Szajkowski, "Jewish Vocational Schools in France in the Nineteenth Century" (in Yiddish), YIVO Bleter 42 (1962): 8 1 - 1 2 0 ; Lee Shai Weissbach, "The Jewish Elite and the Children of the Poor: Jewish Apprenticeship Programs in Nineteenth-Century France," AJS Review 12, no. 1 (spring 1987): 123-42; and my Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace, pp. 1 1 2 - 1 5 . 46. Univers israélite 14 (1858-59): 557, and 15 (1859-60): 363. For the favorable attitude of one member of the Central Consistory to the vocational schools, see the letter of Adolphe Franck, May 5 , 1 8 4 1 , JTS, French Documents, Box 25.

232

Notes to Pages 70-76

47. For complaints, see Univers israélite 1 1 (1855-56): 275. On the bet midrash established in Ingwiller, see Univers israélite 2 (1845): 2 7 1 - 7 2 ; "Discours prononcé par M. le Rabbin Bloch à l'occasion de la distribution des prix du Talmud-Torah au temple de Wissembourg," Univers israélite 20 (1864-65): 282-85. 48. For reform in France, see Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, pp. 203-28; Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, passim, and her "Non-Orthodox Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century French Judaism," in Essays in Modern Jewish History, ed. Phyllis Albert and Frances Malino (East Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), pp. 1 2 1 - 4 1 ; and Meyer, Response to Modernity, pp. 1 6 4 - 7 1 . 49. On changes in various aspects of ritual, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 2 3 1 - 3 5 . On Terquem, see Berkovitz, Shaping of Jewish Identity, pp. 1 1 8 - 2 5 , I37-3950. Commission report, September 6, 1 8 3 1 , Strasbourg Consistory, JTS, French Documents, Box 18. 51. The French text of the Central Consistory's circular has been published in Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 385-86. Responses of several candidates may be found in JTS, French Documents, Box 18, and LBI, Alsace-Lorraine Collection. 52. For petitions, see JTS, French Documents, Box 18, and Houghton Library, Harvard University. 53. On the 1856 conference, see Minutes of the Rabbinical Conference, May 1 5 - 2 2 , 1856, JTS, French Documents, Box 19. A summary of the decisions appears in Archives israélites 1 7 (1856): 306-13. On Créhange and his constituency, see Zosa Szajkowski, "Internal Conflicts in French Jewry at the Time of the Revolution of 1848," in his Jews and the French Revolutions, pp. 1063-73. 54. On the nineteenth-century French rabbinate, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 240-82, and Jean-Marc Chouraqui, "De l'émancipation des juifs à l'émancipation du judaïsme: le regard des rabbins français du xixè siècle," in Birnbaum, Histoire politique, pp. 39-57. 55. On the spread of reforms, see Archives israélites 4 (1843): 1 9 0 - 9 1 ; 5 (1844): 866; 6 (1845): 1 7 1 ; 8 (1847): 373; 18 (1857): 668-69; 24 (1863): 448; 26 (1865): 1 0 1 8 ; 27 (1866): 92-93; and 29 (1868): 624. For the ban on the sale of honors throughout the Lower Rhine, see Consistoire Israélite de Strasbourg, "A Mm. les Commissaires administrateurs des synagogues," March 20, 1858, and on the regulation of funerals, Consistoire Israélite de Strasbourg, "A Mm. les Rabbins communaux et commissaires administrateurs des synagogues," November 1 , i860, p. 1 , both in Houghton Library, Harvard University. 56. Univers israélite 16 (1860-61): 310. 57. Pinkas of the Jewish community of Bouxwiller, 1828-1948, CAHJP HM 1067, pp. 32-33. 58. On French Jewry during the Second Empire, see David Cohen, La Promotion des Juifs en France à l'époque du Second Empire, 2 vols. (Aix-enProvence: Université de Provence, 1980).

Notes to Pages 77-80

2-33

C H A P T E R FIVE: F R E N C H JEWS A N D W O R L D J E W R Y 1 . The six were Elie-Aristide Astruc, Isidore Cahen, Jules Carvallo, Narcisse Leven, Eugène Manuel, and Charles Netter. They were supported by eleven other individuals. Within several months there were 1 4 z "founding members." For a comprehensive history of the Alliance, see André Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire: L'Alliance israélite universelle at la renaissance juive contemporaine (1860-1960) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). 2. As cited in A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 37-38. 3. As cited in ibid., pp. 38-39, and their evolution from i860 to 1 9 2 0 reprinted in his appendix, pp. 4 1 2 - 1 6 . For a discussion of the founding of the Alliance and its goals, see ibid., pp. 1 9 - 4 1 ; Graetz, From Periphery to Center, pp. 2 8 1 - 3 2 2 , and his Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 249-288; Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 2 1 - 2 3 ; and Michael Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco, 1862-1962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), pp. 32-34. 4. A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 45-46, 429-32. 5. On Cahen's article, see ibid., p. 27, and reprinted in his appendix, pp. 405-6. 6. On the Mortara case, see ibid., pp. 2 5 - 2 7 , and Natalie Isser, Antisemitism During the French Second Empire (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 2 7 - 5 2 , and, most recently, David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Knopf, 1997). Edgar Mortara was allowed to return to his family in 1870, when the Church was deprived of secular power in Italy. By then he had become a fervent Catholic. He entered the priesthood and devoted himself to conversionary activities. 7. For example, it urged caution in a letter to the Strasbourg Consistory on March 19, i860 and was sharply critical of the Colmar Consistory, in a letter of October 1 4 , 1 8 6 1 for lodging a complaint directly with the Minister of Religions about an antisemitic article. Correspondence of the Central Consistory, 1 8 5 9 - 1 8 6 6 , CAHJP H M 1 0 6 1 . 8. On the political behavior of the Central Consistory, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 1 6 1 - 6 9 . 9. On the Damascus Affair and its impact, see Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: "Ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Posener, Adolphe Crémieux, vol. 1 , pp. 1 9 8 - 2 4 7 (French edition); Amson, Adolphe Crémieux, pp. 1 2 3 - 3 7 ; Tudor Parfitt, '"The Year of the Pride of Israel': Montefiore and the Blood Libel of 1 8 4 0 , " in The Century of Moses Montefiore, ed. Sonia and V. D. Lipman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 1 3 1 - 4 8 ; Barukh Mevorakh, "The Influence of the Damascus Blood Libel on the Development of the Jewish Press in the Years 1 8 4 0 - 1 8 6 0 " (in Hebrew), Zion 2 3 - 2 4 (1958-59): 46-65; and Jonathan Frankel, "Crisis as a Factor in Modern Jewish Politics, 1840 and 1 8 8 1 - 8 2 , " in Reinharz, Living with Antisemitism, pp. 5 1 - 5 8 .

234

Notes to Pages 80-83

10. The words are L. J. Koenigswater's, as cited in Michel Abitbol, "The Encounter between French Jewry and the Jews of North Africa: Analysis of a Discourse (1830-1914)," in The Jews in Modern France, ed. Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Brandéis University Press, 198 5 ), p. 3 7. On the political ideology of Alliance founders, see Graetz, Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 264-67, and Nord, Republican Moment, pp. 69-72, 78-79. 1 1 . As cited in A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, p. 42. 12. Graetz, From Periphery to Center, pp. 287-88, 309-22, and his Jews in Nineteenth-Century France, pp. 280-88; on Crémieux's involvement with the Alliance, see Posener, Adolphe Crémieux, pp. 140-63; Amson, Adolphe Crémieux, pp. 304-23; and A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 1 5 - 1 8 , 42-43. 13. Albert, "Ethnicity and Solidarity," pp. 257-60. The citation is from p. 257. 14. Memorial Book (Memorbukh) of the Jewish Community of Haguenau, CAHJP HM 2/5010. The subsequent entry is dated 1881 and refers to the victims of the Russian pogroms; letter of Central Consistory to the Strasbourg Consistory, March 9, i860, Correspondence of Central Consistory, 1859-1866, CAHJP HM 1061. 15. On the importance of ransoming captives, see Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra, 8a-8b. 16. On the contact of Algerian and French Jews, see Simon Schwarzfuchs, Les juifs d'Algérie et la France (1830-1855) (Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1981), and Abitbol, "The Encounter between French Jewry and the Jews of North Africa," pp. 3 1 - 5 3 . 17. For the Alteras report, entitled "Rapport sur l'état moral et politique des israélites de l'Algérie et des moyens de l'améliorer," see Schwarzfuchs, Les juifs d'Algérie, pp. 67-201. 18. Although the Alteras report had recommended the equality of Algerian Jewry under common law, the service of Jewish men in the African militia, the linkage of the Algerian consistory to the Central Consistory, and the election of consistorial officials, the government did not accept those recommendations. On the Algerian consistory and its duties, see ibid., pp. 49-52 and, for the text of the ordinance, pp. 373-78. On the decree of 1862 which reorganized the consistorial system, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 92-93, 380-82. 19. On the Crémieux law, see Posener, Adolphe Crémieux, pp. 230-36, and Amson, Adolphe Crémieux, pp. 359-66. 20. A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 1 5 2 , 1 6 1 - 6 3 . For a list of Alliance schools with their date of establishment, see Aron Rodrigue, De l'instruction à l'émancipation: Les enseignants de l'Alliance israélite universelle et les Juifs d'Orient 1860-1939 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1989), pp. 24-30. Rodrigue's list includes ninety-nine schools established by 1900. 21. See, for example, Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, p. 46; A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, p. 162. 22. As cited in Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, pp. 7 1 - 7 2 . The statement, which was disseminated in a circular, was first published in Jacques Bi-

Notes to Pages 84-92 gart, L'Alliance israélite: son action éducatrice (Paris, 1900), p. 14. For a discussion of the nature of Alliance education, see Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, pp. 71-80. 23. My calculations from a table in Rodrigue, De l'instruction, pp. 24-30. 24. Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, p. 79; A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 191-92. 25. Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, pp. 80-85; A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 156-57. 26. For a detailed discussion of the curriculum, see Rodrigue, De l'instruction, pp. 31-39. 27. On the École Normale Israélite Orientale, see A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 1 7 7 - 8 1 , 504-5, and Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, pp. 58, 73-74. On the school for girls, see A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, p. 1 8 1 . 28. Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, pp. 85-86. 29. A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 69-70, 104-5, 1 1 0 - 2 1 . 30. Ibid., pp. 81-87. 31. On the struggle for equal rights for Jews in Romania, see Carol Iancu, Les Juifs de Roumanie (1866-1919): De l'exclusion à l'émancipation (Aix-enProvence: Éditions de l'Université de Provence, 1978). The information on the Jews of Romania in the following paragraphs is drawn from this study. The demographic data are found on pp. 142-43. 32. On Bleichröder and his role in the struggle for the emancipation of Romanian Jewry, see Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 3 51-93. 33. The citation is from Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie, p. 65;seealsoPosener, Adolphe Crémieux, vol. 2, p. 150 (French edition). 34. Cited in Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie, p. 68. 35. Stern, Gold and Iron, pp. 372-77. The citation may be found on p. 376. 3 6. On the Congress of Berlin, see Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie, pp. 153-62; Stern, Gold and Iron, pp. 377-79; and Posener, Adolphe Crémieux, vol. 2, pp. 160-63 (French edition). The text of the articles in the treaty that concern Jews is reprinted in A. Chouraqui's appendix to his Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 436-37. 37. A. Chouraqui, Cent ans d'histoire, pp. 76-78, and Ronald Sanders, Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), pp. 37-39, 41, 49-59. The citation from Netter's letter is on p. 51. The citation from Ahad Ha-Am is found on p. 59. 38. Ahad Ha-Am, "Slavery in Freedom," in Selected Essays of Ahad Ha-Am, pp. 171-94C H A P T E R SIX: A N T I S E M I T I S M A N D T H E D R E Y F U S AFFAIR 1. Felix Meyer, rabbi at Valenciennes, as cited in La Révolution française et le rabbinat français, ed. Benjamin Mossé (Avignon, 1890), p. 175. 2. Rabbi Aron, in a sermon delivered in the temple of Lunéville, ibid., p. 28. 3. On the response of the Jews of the region, see Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1918 (Stanford: Stanford

2.36

Notes to Pages 92.-95

University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 45-74. The comparison with Christian rates of option and emigration may be found on p. 50. 4. Mossé, La Révolution française et le rabbinat français, p. 34. 5. On the function of nostalgia for acculturated urban Jews, see Paula E. Hyman, "Traditionalism and Village Jews in Nineteenth-Century Western and Central Europe: Local Persistence and Urban Nostalgia," in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), pp. 1 9 1 - 2 0 1 ; Richard I. Cohen, "Nostalgia and 'Return to the Ghetto' as a Cultural Phenomenon in Western and Central Europe," in Assimilation and Community, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992-), PP- 130-556. The demographic data, derived from consistorial censuses conducted in 1 8 8 9 - 9 1 and 1896-97, are drawn from Bensimon-Donath, Socio-démographie des juifs, pp. 72-74. 7. Ibid., pp. 1 4 3 - 4 7 . With the arrival of immigrants from eastern Europe, the socioeconomic distribution of French Jewry was transformed. See chapter 7. 8. Antoine Halff, "Lieux d'assimilation, lieux d'identité: les communautés juives et l'essor des stations thermales et balnéaires à la Belle Epoque," Pardès 8 (1988): 4 1 - 5 7 . 9. Birnbaum, "Between Social and Political Assimilation," pp. 1 0 8 - 1 0 . 10. On the social and economic differentiation of Jews in fin-de-siècle France, see Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, pp. 3 5-47. The statistics on Jews in finance are from Jean-Yves Monnier, "La vérité sur les juifs de France au xixè siècle," L'Histoire 148 (October 1991): 33, as cited in Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs, p. 164. The comment is by Alexandre Hepp, as cited in Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 1 3 1 . 1 1 . For a biography of Durkheim, see Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). i 2. Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République: Histoire politique des Juifs d'État de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992); the book has been translated into English as The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews from Gambetta to Vichy, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Birnbaum has identified 1 7 1 "Juifs d'état" in the Third Republic (1870-1940) and has examined their official dossiers deposited in the Archives Nationales in Paris. The information in this and the following paragraph is drawn from Birnbaum's book. 1 3 . Birnbaum, Jews of the Republic, pp. 4 5-5 3. 14. On the strident anti-Jewish writing of Louis Veuillot in the Catholic paper L'Univers and his 1858 article on Jewish ritual murder, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 162-64, and Isser, Antisemitism During the French Second Empire, pp. 32-42. Missionary efforts were not notably successful, although a few cases of elite converts, including the Ratisbonne brothers and Rabbi Simon Deutz, attracted a great deal of attention. 1 5 . On the Cahen incident, see Albert, Modernization of French Jewry, pp. 156-57.Cahen went on to succeed his father as editor of the Archives israélites and became one of the founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. On the

Notes to Pages 95-97

237

Schwartz case, see the January 26, 1857 letter of the Central Consistory to the Strasbourg Consistory, no. 7769, CAHJP H M 1060. 16. On the evolution of popular attitudes toward the Jews of Alsace, see my Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace, pp. 1 1 - 2 9 , 1 2 9 - 3 1 . 17. On the Boulangist movement as the source of the recognition of the political potential of antisemitism, see Zeev Sternhell, "The Roots of Popular AntiSemitism in the Third Republic," in Malino and Wasserstein, Jews in Modern France, pp. 1 0 3 - 3 4 , and William D. Irvine, The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On the appeal of antisemitism to shopkeepers and its role in attracting these members of the petite bourgeoisie to radical right politics, see Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 372-92. 18. Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), p. 350. 19. The most comprehensive presentation and analysis of antisemitism in late nineteenth-century France is Wilson's massive Ideology and Experience. For an earlier study, see Robert F. Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1950). On the antimodernism of German antisemitism, see Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany: The Urban Master Artisans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 3 1 3 - 1 9 , and her "Antisemitism as a Cultural Code—Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 25-46. See also the classic George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964) and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961). 20. For a study of the diffusion of antisemitism within French culture, see Marc Angenot, Ce que l'on dit des Juifs en 1889: Antisémitisme et discours social (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1989). z i . Edouard Drumont, La France juive: Essai d'histoire contemporaine (Paris: C. Marpon & E. Flammarion, 1886). On its popularity, see Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 1 7 1 . The quotation is from Drumont, Le Testament d'un antisémite (Paris: E. Dentu, 1891), p. 4 1 , as cited by Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 1 7 1 . 22. The most recent study of Drumont and the rise of modern French antisemitism is Michel Winock, Edouard Drumont et de: antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982). Winock, however, overestimates Drumont's social marginality. 23. On the widespread sense of the deterioration of French life at the time, see Weber, France: Fin de Siècle, esp. pp. 9-26. 24. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment, p. 378. 25. On the racist element in fin-de-siècle French antisemitism, see Wilson, Ideology and Experience, pp. 456-508. 26. On the relation between the development of mass politics and antisemitism, see Michael R. Marrus, "Popular Anti-Semitism," in Kleeblatt, The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, pp. 50-61.

2.38

Notes to Pages 98-101

27. Angenot, Ce que l'on dit des Juifs en 1889, pp. 63-64, 66-67, 86-95. On La Croix, see Pierre Sorlin, "La Croix" et les Juifs (1880-1889): Contribution à l'histoire de l'antisémitisme contemporain (Paris: B. Grasset, 1967). 28. Ibid., pp. 147-48. The citation may be found on p. 148. 29. Wilson, Ideology and Experience, pp. 1 7 1 - 7 2 . 30. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment, pp. 382-83. 31. On the complex relationship of socialism and antisemitism in France, see Wilson, Ideology and Experience, pp. 319-78, and Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire, 1885-1914 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978). The quotation is from Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, L'Antisémitisme (Paris: C. Lévy, 1897), p. 61, as cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 319. For earlier work on socialist attitudes toward Jews, see Edmund Silberner, Western Socialism and the Jewish Question (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1955) and George Lichtheim, "Socialism and the Jews," Dissent (July-August 1968): 314-42. 3 2. A complete bibliography of the Dreyfus Affair would be of book length. For the best recent treatment, see Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: George Braziller, 1986). See also Eric Cahm, The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics (New York: Longman, 1996). 33. George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978), p. 168. Hannah Arendt first presented this thesis, in an even stronger version in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1958). See also Peter Pulzer, "Why Was There a Jewish Question in Imperial Germany?" Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 25 (1980): 133. 34. I share these views with my colleague Todd Endelman. See my "The Dreyfus Affair: Turning Point in Jewish History?" The Max and Irene Engel Levy Memorial Lecture (Harvard University Library, 1985), pp. 4-5, and Todd Endelman, "Comparative Perspectives on Modern Anti-Semitism in the West," in Reinharz, Living with Antisemitism, pp. 106-8. 35. For a brief chronology of the events of the Affair, see Kleeblatt, Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, pp. vii-xii. 36. See, for example, Guy Chapman, The Dreyfus Case (London: Rupert Hart-David, 1955). On the role of his Alsatian origin in the suspicion of Dreyfus, see Caron, Between France and Germany, pp. 128-29. 37. On the antisemitic exclusion of Jews from the French nation, see Wilson, Ideology and Experience, pp. 379-455. 38. For examples of these caricatures, many produced by socialist or anarchist artists, see Kleeblatt, Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, pp. vii-xii. 39. Léon Bloy, Le Salut par les Juifs, p. 38, as cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 391. 40. For a multigenerational history of the Dreyfus family, see Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair. 41. As cited in ibid. p. 91. 42. Libre Parole, November 1 , 1894, as cited in The Dreyfus Case: A Documentary History, ed. Louis Snyder (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973), pp. 19-20.

Notes to Pages 1 0 2 - 1 0 7

239

43. On the judicial history of the Affair see Benjamin F. Martin, "The Dreyfus Affair and the Corruption of the French Legal System," in Kleeblatt, Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, pp. 37-49. 44. Jacques St. Cere, correspondent of the New York Herald, as cited in Snyder, The Dreyfus Case, pp. 38-39. 45. Ibid. 46. Cited in The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. and trans. Marvin Lowenthal (New York: Dial Press, 1956), p. xix. 47. On Lazare, see Nelly Wilson, Bernard-Lazare: Antisemitism and the Problem of Jewish Identity in Late Nineteenth-century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), and Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, pp. 164-95. 48. The document acquired the name petit bleu because the telegram was written on blue paper. See Bredin, The Affair, pp. 140-47. 49. Ibid., pp. 1 6 2 - 1 6 8 . The citation is from p. 163. 50. For a sample of Zola's writings on the Dreyfus Affair as well as documents relating to his trial, see Snyder, Dreyfus Case, pp. 1 6 1 - 2 1 4 . On Zola's activity, see Bredin, The Affair, pp. 275-99. 5 1 . For the text of "J'Accuse," see Snyder, Dreyfus Case, pp. 177-86. 52. As cited in Bredin, The Affair, pp. 233-34. 53. Zola, "J'Accuse," as cited in Snyder, Dreyfus Case, p. 1 8 1 . 54. Ibid., p. 184. 55. Ibid., p. 186. 56. Wilson, Ideology and Experience, pp. 106-24. The data on the riots and their circumstances are drawn from Stephen Wilson's work, which makes good use of official reports. 57. Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 1 1 5 . 58. There were also some Republican anti-Dreyfusards, who saw the Dreyfusard campaign as disruptive of social and political order. Michael Burns, Rural Society and French Politics: Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). See also Nancy Fitch, "Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern Antisemitism," American Historical Review 97 (February 1992): 55-95. On the division among artists, some of whom contributed, for example, in 1899 to an album entitled Hommage des artists à Picquart while others pointedly refrained, see Philip Dennis Cate, "The Paris Cry: Graphic Artists and the Dreyfus Affair," in Kleeblatt, Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, pp. 63-64. 59. Maurice Barrés, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (Paris: F. Juven, 1902), p. 73. 60. On the visual dimensions of the Affair, see Cate, "The Paris Cry," pp. 62-95, and niy review essay, "The Dreyfus Affair: The Visual and the Historical," Journal of Modern History 4 1 , no. 1 (March 1989): 88-109. For additional visual material, see Snyder, Dreyfus Case, sixteen pages tipped in between pp. 226 and 227. 61. On Gyp, see Willa Silverman, The Notorious Life Of Gyp: Right-wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

240

Notes to Pages 1 0 8 - 1 1 3

62. On the Musée des Horreurs, see Kleeblatt, Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, pp. 244-5 2 63. Ibid., pp. 1 9 1 - 9 5 , 198-204, 222, 224. The Jewish New Year cards appear to have been published abroad. 64. As cited in Mossé, La Révolution française et le rabbinat français, p. 1 2 . 65. As cited in Richard I. Cohen, "The Dreyfus Affair and the Jews," in Antisemitism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (New York: Pergamon Press for the Vidal Sasson International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988), p. 308. The book was first published in Hebrew in 1980. 66. Charles Péguy, Notre Jeunesse (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 8e cahier de la xvè série, 1910), p. 73. 67. Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l'Affaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), p. 97. Blum's perspective was adopted, for example, by Hannah Arendt, "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today," Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 3 (July 1942): 23 2, and also her Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 1 1 7 - 1 9 , and by Michael Marrus in Politics of Assimilation. 68. On French Jewish reactions during the Affair, see Cohen, "The Dreyfus Affair and the Jews," pp. 2 9 1 - 3 1 0 . The evidence from silence in the case of the consistory is on p. 294. See also Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, pp. 2 5 0 - 5 3 . 69. Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 7 1 1 , for the reference to indifference; p. 698 for reference to testimony of fear. 70. As cited in ibid., p. 4 1 2 . 7 1 . On the work of this committee, see Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, pp. 240-42, and his "Le Comité de Défense contre l'Antisémitisme," Michael 4 (1976): 1 6 3 - 7 5 ; the citation is from p. 170. 72. As cited in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 59. 73. On André Spire, see Paul Jamati, André Spire (Paris: P. Seghers, 1962) and Spire's autobiography, Souvenirs à bâtons rompus (Paris: A. Michel, 1962). The quotation is cited in Jamati, André Spire, p. 7 1 . Spire's best-known work today is his Quelques Juifs et demi-juifs, 2 vols. (Paris: B. Grasset, 1928). On Edmond Fleg, see his Pourquoi je suis Juif (Paris: Les Editions de France, 1928); it appeared in English as Why I Am a Jew, trans. Louise Waterman Wise (New York: Bloch, 1945). The book is addressed to his unborn grandson. Tragically, he had no grandchildren, for both his sons died fighting for France in World War II. His most important book on a Jewish theme was his Anthologie juive, published in France in two volumes (Paris: G. Crès et Cie, 1923) and in English as The Jewish Anthology, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925). The quotation is from an interview printed in Jean Toulat, Juifs mes frères (Paris: G. Victor, 1962), p. 64. 74. Wilson, Ideology and Experience, p. 700. On the impact of antisemitism on the Jews of the time, see pp. 692-730. 75. Personal interview with Georges Wormser, Paris, October 27, 1972; Archives Israélites, July 26, 1906; B. M., "La Nouvelle revision," Univers israélite, June 22, 1906, p. 360. 76. Levaillant's lecture was published as "La génèse de l'antisémitisme sous la troisième république" in Revue des études juives 53 (1907): lxxvi-c. For a

Notes to Pages 1 1 3 - 1 1 6 brief analysis of his perspective, see Cohen, "The Dreyfus Affair and the Jews," pp. 3 0 0 - 3 0 1 . On the linkage of antisemitism and nationalism of the Right, see Sternhell, "The Roots of Popular Anti-Semitism in the Third Republic," pp. 1 0 3 - 3 4 . On the Action Française, see Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962) and Edward Tannenbaum, The Action Française: Die-Hard Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Wiley, 1962). Weber minimizes the movement's antisemitism. 77. As cited in Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, p. 2 1 6 . CHAPTER SEVEN: IMMIGRATION AND THE R E M A K I N G OF F R E N C H J E W R Y , 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 1 8 1 . It is striking how much of the literature on the immigrant Jewish experience in France has been written by North American scholars. The major works on east European immigrants in France include Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986); Paula E. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 3 9 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); and David Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Judith Friedlander's Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) and Jonathan Boyarin's Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 9 9 1 ) focus on the post-World War II years. Zosa Szajkowski, a self-taught scholar who lived in Paris and later in New York, pioneered in this area with his publications in Yiddish. A French scholar, Charlotte Roland, published a sociological study of the Paris immigrant Jewish neighborhood of Belleville; see her Du ghetto à l'occident: Deux générations yiddiches en France (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1962). Sociologists have recently devoted significant attention to the post-World War II migration from North Africa, which will be considered in chapter 10. 2. Bensimon-Donath, Socio-démographie des juifs, p. 94. In addition to those of foreign birth, 1 6 percent of the population listed no place of birth. 3. On the workers' societies, see Nancy Green, "The Contradictions of Acculturation: Immigrant Oratories and Yiddish Union Sections in Paris before World War I," in Malino and Wasserstein, Jews in Modern France, p. 67. On the immigrant Jewish workers' protest, see Marrus, Politics of Assimilation, pp. 245-48. 4. The estimate for France is drawn from Green, Pletzl of Paris, appendix A, pp. 201-6. Green evaluates a variety of statistical and anecdotal sources to arrive at this figure, which is quite persuasive. The statistics on the United States and England are drawn from Arkadius Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, ed. Roger Weiss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 32, 1 1 4 , and Lloyd Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England 1870-1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, i960), p. 30. Because Paris was the undisputed center of immigrant Jewish life in France, as well as home to France's major Jewish institutions, I will focus on Paris in my discussion of immigrant Jewry in France.

Notes to Pages 1 1 7 - 1 2 6 5. Extrapolation from statistics in Michel Roblin, Les Juifs de Paris (Paris: Éditions A. & J. Picard, 1952), p. 73. 6. Arkadius Kahan, "The Impact of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia on the Socioeconomic Conditions of the Jewish Population," in his Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, pp. 1-69. 7. Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers' Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 8. Arthur Ruppin, The Jews in the Modern World (London: Macmillan, I 934)> P- 2.3; Henry Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1 9 0 J (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), pp. 7-8. 9. Green cites the phrase as part of Yiddish oral tradition, referred to in a three-volume French Jewish novel, L'Épopée de Ménaché Foïgel, written by André Billy and Moïse Twersky (Paris: Plön, 1927-28), vol. 1 , p. 243. See Green, Pletzl of Paris, p. 68. 10. Ibid., pp. 69-72; Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, p. 69. 1 1 . A. Frumkin, Der Forverts, August 3 1 , 1 9 1 2 . 1 2 . Brandeis University Library, Special Collections, IV 10b. 1 3 . Green, Pletzl of Paris, p. 1 1 1 . 14. Ibid., p. 104; Simon Kuznets, "Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure," Perspectives in American History 10 (1976): 35-124. 1 5 . Ibid., pp. 76-77. 16. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 7 3-7 5 and appendix A; Green, Pletzl of Paris, pp. 1 0 7 - 1 8 , appendixes C and D, pp. 2 0 8 - 1 4 . 1 7 . Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 75-76. 18. La Cité 8, no. 29 (January 1909): 456. 19. Green, Pletzl of Paris, pp. 48-50. The citation is on p. 49. 20. L'Humanité, February 3, 1907. 2 1 . Letter of Minister of Public Instruction to the Director of Primary Education of the Seine, November 29, 1907, Association Consistoriale Israélite de Paris (ACIP), B 80 (1907); letter of the Minister of Public Instruction to the president of the League of the Rights of Man, February 1 7 , 1 9 0 8 , ACIP B 82 (1908). 22. Minutes of General Assembly, May 25, 1 9 1 3 , ACIP B 94 (1913). 23. Di Moderne tsayt, December 1 3 , 1 9 0 8 . 24. On immigrant Jewish institutions, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, PP- 77-8325. Report of commission of the Federation of Jewish Societies, 1 9 1 3 , Brandeis University Library, Special Collections, France, non-consistoire. 26. Green, Pletzl of Paris, pp. 1 2 5 - 2 8 , 1 3 0 - 3 3 ; Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 98-99. 27. Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle; Tobias, Jewish Bund, pp. 140, 239; Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 28. Green, "Contradictions of Acculturation," p. 67. 29. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 9 2 - 1 0 1 ; Green, Pletzl of Paris, pp. 1 4 9 - 7 1 -

Notes to Pages 1 2 7 - 1 3 3

243

30. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 120-24. The deliberations of the Comité de Bienfaisance may be found in its unpublished minute book, January 21, 1914. 3 1 . Minutes of Religious Section, ACIP B 95 (1913). 32. The eligibility of foreigners for service on the Paris council was repealed in 1 9 1 9 so that all council members could serve on the Central Consistory, for which foreigners were not eligible. See Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, p. 140. 33. Fundraising letter of the Paris Consistory, September 1 , 1907, ACIP B 83 (1908); minutes of Comité des Écoles, June 18, 1 9 1 3 , p. 235, CAHJP INV 1077. 34. Report of Paris Consistory, ACIP B 83 (1908). 35. Paris Consistory, Minutes, June 5, 1907, AA 19; Minutes of the Financial Section, November 10, 1908, B 83 (1908); letter to Université Populaire Juive, May 2 1 , 1 9 1 2 , BB 88 ( 1 9 1 2 - 1 3 ) , all ACIP. The articles in the Univers israélite appeared on December 20, 1907, pp. 4 2 1 - 2 6 , and March 1 3 , 1908, pp. 805-10. 36. Article 10, Statutes of the Association de l'École "Talmud Torah" des Israélites russes et polonais, HUC, France, Box 47. 37. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 8 1 - 8 3 . 3 8. Moral report of Association cultuelle israélite dite "Accoudas [sic] Hakehilos," annual general assembly, December 1 5 , 1 9 1 3 , HUC, France, Box 47. 39. As cited in Green, "Contradictions of Acculturation," p. 62, and her Pletzl of Paris, p. 85. 40. Carol Herselle Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 250-53. 4 1 . Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 139-42. 42. As cited by Green, "Contradictions of Acculturation," p. 57; see the footnote for the estimate of the proportion of immigrants among the traditionalists and the text page for the 1907 citation. 43. Univers israélite, September 2 6 , 1 9 i 3 , p . 679. The paper also called upon its readers to show more than tolerance to the immigrants, September 2 1 , 1906, p. 10. 44. On the assessment of Zionist influence within France until 1939 and the immigrant role in the movement, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 1 5 3 - 7 8 . For a general history of French Zionism until 1948 see Catherine Nicault, La France et le sionisme 1897-1948: Une rencontre manquée? (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1992) and Michel Abitbol, Les Deux Terres Promises: les juifs de France et le sionisme (n.p.: Olivier Orban, 1989). 45. On the role of the Rothschilds, see Simon Schama, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (New York: Knopf, 1978). 46. Univers israélite, August 2 3 , 1 9 0 7 , p. 714. 47. Catherine Nicault, "Sionisme et Judaïsme français avant 1 9 1 4 : Les causes de l'échec," Pardès 8 (1988): 62-63. In his Les Deux Terres Promises Abitbol focuses on native Jewish responses to Zionism but asserts that Zionism in France was almost exclusively an immigrant phenomenon until a late date (pp. 19, 146). On the role of immigrant intellectuals, see p. 20.

244

Notes to Pages 1 3 3 - 1 4 3

48. On French Jewry during World War I, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 49-59. 49. The story may be found in Univers Israélite, January 1 , i 9 i 5 , p p . 1 5 9 - 7 0 , and in Sylvain Halff, "The Participation of the Jews of France in the Great War," American Jewish Yearbook 2 1 (1919-20): 3 1 - 9 7 . The nationalist Maurice Barrés also publicized the story in his Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France (Paris: Emile-Paul frères, 1 9 1 7 ) , pp. 92-93. 50. Reprinted in Univers israélite, February 18, 1 9 1 6 , pp. 600-1; Sylvain Halff, "The Participation of the Jews of France," pp. 78-79. 5 1 . Circular, May 1 5 , 1 9 1 6 , Brandeis University Library, Special Collections, France, non-consistoire. 52. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 1 2 7 - 2 9 . CHAPTER EIGHT: BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS 1 . Ralph Schor, L'opinion française et les étrangers 1 9 1 9 - 1 9 3 9 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), p. 182. Other estimates place the number of Jews in France on the eve of World War II as high as 3 50,000. This higher figure includes Jews from Holland and Belgium who fled to France after the German invasion. 2. On the response of French Jewry to the growing prominence of Zionism in international diplomacy, see Abitbol, Les Deux Terres Promises, pp. 45-89, and Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 160-69 • On French policy toward Zionism, see Nicault, La France et le sionisme, pp. 5 1 - 1 3 4 . 3. Abitbol, Les Deux Terres Promises, pp. 76-79. The first citation of Lévi is from p. 78 and the second from p. 79. 4. Hyman, Front Dreyfus to Vichy, p. 166. 5. Ibid., pp. 1 6 3 - 6 5 , and notes, pp. 283-84. 6. Abitbol, Les Deux Terres Promises, pp. 84-88; Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 167-69. The citation from the statement of the Association of French Rabbis appears in Hyman on p. 168 and in Abitbol on p. 88. Abitbol omits the negative aspects of the association's declaration. 7. Abitbol, Les Deux Terres Promises, pp. 88, 1 3 3 - 3 8 . 8. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 169-72; Nicault, La France et le sionisme, pp. 1 7 3 - 7 8 . 9. Notes du Secrétariat, Paris Consistory, Brandeis University Library, Special Collections, IV 3c, pp. 1 - 2 . 10. Nicault, La France et le sionisme, pp. 1 7 2 - 7 8 ; Abitbol, Les Deux Terres Promises, pp. 1 1 2 - 8 . 1 1 . On the Jewish youth movements and their impact, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 179-98, and Abitbol, Les Deux Terres Promises, pp. 118-23. 1 2 . Chalom (July 1927): 1 2 - 1 3 . 1 3 . Letter of Aimé Pallière to Zionist Organization Executive, July 2 4 , 1 9 2 7 , Central Zionist Archives Z4/3232 II. 14. On Lambert, see his World War II diary, Carnet d'un témoin: 1 9 4 0 - 1 9 4 3 (Paris: Fayard, 1985), edited and introduced by Richard Cohen; for biographical information on Lambert's pre-war experience, see pp. 1 4 - 2 0 .

Notes to Pages 1 4 3 - 1 4 6

2-45

15. Chalom (July 1926): 1 5 - 1 6 . 16. On the Éclaireurs Israélites de France, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 191-98, and Alain Michel, Les Éclaireurs israélites de France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Editions des E.I.F., 1984). 17. EIF, Minutes of the Conseil Directeur des Chefs et Commissaires (CD), October 2.0, 1930, found in headquarters of EIF, Paris. 18. Ibid., February 2.5, 1933; La Terre retrouvée (December 25, 1932): 18. 19. EIF, Minutes of the CD, June 19, 1933. 20. One incident occurred on April 5, 1938 (Centre de Défense et de Vigilance, Bi. #63, 4/14/38 in Alliance Israélite Universelle Ms. 650 Bt. 2). Interestingly, Charles Maurras of the Action Française suggested in May 1939 that "the sector of Jews of French origin and assimilated to France [be treated] as a sort of ideal province, without material territory"; cited in La Terre retrouvée (June i , 1939): 4. My thanks to Vicki Caron for both these references. z i . La Terre retrouvée, February 12, 1930, and EIF, typescript manual, p. 16. zz. See, for example, Eugen Weber, "Reflections on the Jews in France," in Malino and Wasserstein, Jews in Modern France, p. 8 ; Gérard Noiriel, Le Creuset français: Histoire de l'immigration xixè-xxè siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1988); and Richard Millman, La Question juive entre les deux guerres (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), p. 145 and passim. 23. See three works by Pierre Birnbaum: Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Léon Blum to the Present, trans. Miriam Kochan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), Le Peuple et les gros: Histoire d'un mythe (Paris: Grasset, 1979), and Jews of the Republic; and also Zeev Sternhell, "The Roots of Popular Anti-Semitism in the Third Republic," in Malino and Wasserstein, Jews in Modern France, pp. 103-34; and Ralph Schor, L'Antisémitisme en France pendant les années trente (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1992). 24. Schor, L'Opinion française et les étrangers, p. 18z, and L'Antisémitisme en France pendant les années trente, pp. 21-49. 25. As cited in Schor, L'Antisémitisme en France pendant les années trente, p. 24. 26. Raymond Aron, as cited in Renée Poznanski, Être juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Hachette, 1994), p. 29. 27. Sternhell, "The Roots of Popular Anti-Semitism in the Third Republic," p.132. 28. For Sternhell's analysis of French fascism, which stresses its affinity with the revolutionary left, see in particular his Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). On the role of antisemitism in French fascism, see his "The Roots of Popular Anti-Semitism in the Third Republic," and the pamphlet Antisemitism and the Right in France (Jerusalem: Shazar Library, The Institute of Contemporary Jewry, et al., 1988). The quote is from "The Roots of Popular Anti-Semitism in the Third Republic, " p. 1 1 5 . For a view of French fascism which stresses its origins in the conservative right, see Robert Soucy's two studies, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924-1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) and French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933-1939 (New Haven: Yale

Notes to Pages 1 4 7 - 1 5 0 University Press, 1995). On the Action Française, its ideology and political activity, see Weber, Action Française. 29. Schor, L'Antisémitisme en France pendant les années trente, pp. 28-36. For an early assessment of the new virulence of French antisemitism in the 1930s, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 199-202. Even Eugen Weber concedes the prevalence of antisemitism in France in the late 1930s. See his The Hollow Years (New York: Norton, 1994). Both Weber and Stephen A. Schuker, in his "Origins of the 'Jewish Problem' in the Later Third Republic," in Malino and Wasserstein, Jews in Modern France, pp. 135-80, blame the behavior of immigrant and refugee Jews for the spread of antisemitism in France. Schuker asserts, in particular, that French antisemitism was a response to Jews' participation in leftist politics. 30. On the Stavisky Affair, see Serge Berstein, Le 6 février 1934 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Schor, L'Antisémitisme en France pendant les années trente, pp. 95-96, and Weber, Action Française, pp. 320-24. Antisemitism surfaced in the Chamber of Deputies during the Stavisky Affair. On attacks on Jews, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 134, 201. 31. Minute Book of the Unemployment Committee of the 20th Arrondissement (Belleville Club) (in Yiddish), January 3 1 , 1934, YIVO, Documents on France. 32. Journal Officiel, Débats, Chambre, June 7 , 1 9 3 6 , p. 1327. See also Birnbaum, Anti-Semitism in France, pp. 242-44. Vallat's remarks evoked lively protests from the Left and the extreme Left and the following comment of Edouard Herriot: "M. Vallat, as president of this Assembly, I have never known in this country, as for myself, either Jews, as you say, or Protestants or Catholics. I know only Frenchmen." The remark was met with applause on the Left, extreme Left, and from some in the Center. 3 3. For a biography of Darquier de Pellepoix, see Jean Laloum, La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix (Paris: Syros, 1979). 34. As cited in Schor, L'Antisémitisme en France pendant les années trente, p. 169. On antisemitic attacks on Blum, see Birnbaum, Anti-Semitism in France, passim. 35. On Blum, see Joel Colton, Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics (New York: Knopf, 1966) and more recently Jean Lacouture, Léon Blum, trans. George Holoch (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982). 3 6. The quote beginning "I am a Jew" is from Chamber of Deputies, Débats parlementaires, January 1 1 , 1 9 2 3 ; the excerpt beginning "I was born in France" is from a 1937 book on Blum, Marc Vichniac's Léon Blum. Both are cited in Birnbaum, Anti-Semitism in France, p. 43. 37. Comité de Beinfaisance, Minutes, February 17, 1935 (Minute Book 1934-1937) and June 15, 1939 (Minute Book 1938-1947). 38. On Rothschild's speech, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 203-4, and Weinberg, A Community on Trial, p. 76. 39. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, p. 204. 40. Birnbaum, Anti-Semitism in France, pp. 63-74, and Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 2 1 7 - 1 9 , 226-29. The quotation is cited on p. 219. By 1938 it had become more activist.

Notes to Pages 1 5 1 - 1 5 5

247

4 1 . On immigrant responses to antisemitism, see Weinberg, A Community on Trial, pp. 1 0 3 - 3 7 , and Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 206-16. 42. On Lecache and the LICA, see Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 1 8 1 , 205-6; Weinberg, A Community on Trial, pp. 26-27, 50—51,164-65; and Birnbaum, Anti-Semitism in France, pp. 75-77. 43. Weinberg, A Community on Trial, pp. 148-67, and Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 204-6. 44. For a general study of the refugee problem of the 1930s, see Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). On French policy, see Timothy P. Maga, "Closing the Door: The French Government and Refugee Policy, 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 9 , " French Historical Studies 12, no. 3 (spring 1982): 424-42, and his book, America, France, and the European Refugee Problem, 1933-1947 (New York: Garland Press, 1985); Barbara Vormeier, "Quelques aspects de la politique française à l'égard des émigrés allemands," in Hanna Schramm and Barbara Vormeier, eds., Vivre à Gurs, trans. Irene Petit (Paris: François Maspero, 1979), pp. 179-284. On the refugee problem and French public opinion, see Rita Thalmann, "L'émigration du mè Reich dans la France de 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 3 9 , " Le Monde]uif 35, no. 96 (October-December 1979): 127-3 9, and her " L'Immigration allemande et l'opinion publique en France de 19 3 3 à 1936," in La France et l'Allemagne, 193 2 - 1 9 3 6 (Paris: Editions du CNRS, I 98o), pp. 149-72. The most recent and most comprehensive study of French Jewish responses to the refugee crisis has been conducted by Vicki Caron; see her "Loyalties in Conflict: French Jewry and the Refugee Crisis, 1 9 3 3 - 3 5 , " Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 36 (1991): 305-38, and "The Politics of Frustration: French Jewry and the Refugee Crisis in the 1930s," Journal of Modern History 65 (June 1993): 3 1 1 - 5 6 . Caron's book on the subject, entitled Uneasy Asylum: France and the Refugee Crisis of the 1930s, will be published by Stanford University Press. 45. Caron, "The Politics of Frustration," p. 314; Marrus, Unwanted, p. 129. 46. Caron, "Loyalties in Conflict," pp. 3 1 8 - 1 9 . 47. Caron, "The Politics of Frustration," pp. 327-30. The figures are on p. 328. For a comprehensive discussion of French refugee policy and its context in the last years of the 1930s, see Caron, "Prelude to Vichy: France and the Jewish Refugees in the Era of Appeasement," Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 157-76. 48. The book which attracted the most attention was Maurice Rajsfus's Sois Juif et tais-toi! 193 0-1940: les français "israélites " face au nazisme (Paris: Études et documentation internationales, 1981). 49. Both Hyman and Weinberg, while critical of the French response, have taken this position. 50. The first quote is cited by Caron, "Loyalties in Conflict," p. 320; the second by Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, p. 224. 51. Caron, "Loyalties in Conflict," pp. 3 2 1 - 2 4 , 326, and "The Politics of Frustration," pp. 3 1 9 - 2 3 . 52. The first figure is from an October 1933 police report, as cited in Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, p. 2 2 1 ; the second from a telegram of the Grand Rabbi of France and the president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle to Cyrus Adler seeking aid, as cited in Caron, "Loyalties in Conflict," p. 3 1 0 .

Notes to Pages 1 5 5 - 1 6 3 53. As cited in Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, p. 221. 54. Caron, "The Politics of Frustration," pp. 324-27. 55. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 230-31; Caron, "The Politics of Frustration," pp. 330-31; Weinberg, A Community on Trial, p. 88. 5 6. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, p. 231. The first citation is from p. 333, the second from p. 332 of Caron, "The Politics of Frustration.". 57. Caron, "The Politics of Frustration," pp. 343-51. The citation is from p. 346. 58. On the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War II, see Weinberg, A Community on Trial, pp. 1 7 1 - 2 0 5 , and Caron, "Prelude to Vichy," pp. 163-68. 59. Weinberg, A Community on Trial, pp. 188-94. 60. Ibid., pp. 200-5, and Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, pp. 2 3 1 - 3 2 . 61. For Bloch's biography, see Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). C H A P T E R N I N E : T H E H O L O C A U S T IN F R A N C E 1. On the Jewish population of France in 1940, see Lucien Lazare, Rescue as Resistance: How Jewish Organizations Fought the Holocaust in France, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 36-37. The figure includes refugees from Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg as well as Jews deported from Baden and the Palatinate. For statistics and names of the victims of the Holocaust in France, see Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported from France 1942-1944: Documentation of the Deportation of the Victims of the Final Solution in France (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1983). 2. For Napoleon's discriminatory legislation, see chapter 3. 3. For a discussion of this issue, see Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993), esp. pp. 227-46. Zuccotti's book is the best synthesis available for the English-language reader interested in this period. On public opinion under Vichy, see also Asher Cohen, Persécutions et sauvetages: Juifs et Français sous l'Occupation et sous Vichy (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993). The single most comprehensive study of the experience of French Jews during World War II is Poznanski, Être juif en France. 4. Marrus and Paxton's volume is available in English as Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981; reprinted by Stanford University Press, 1995). For expanded documentation of Vichy's role, see Serge Klarsfeld, VichyAuschwitz: Le Rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1983 and 1985). On July 16, 1995 President Jacques Chirac became the first French head of state to acknowledge French responsibility for the death of Jews during the Holocaust (New York Times, July 17, 1995, p. 1). For an assessment of Vichy's responsibility in the death of French Jews, see Michael Marrus, "Coming to Terms with Vichy," in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (spring 1995): 23-41. 5. As cited in Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, p. 50. 6. Lambert, Carnet d'un témoin, p. 72. A longer version of this passage, with some minor differences in translation, is cited in Richard I. Cohen, The Burden

Notes to Pages 1 6 3 - 1 7 2

249

of Conscience: French Jewry's Response to the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 19. 7. Printed as conclusion to Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 177-78. 8. Annette Wieviorka, "Indicible ou inaudible? La déportation: premiers récits (1944-47)," Pardès 9 - 1 0 (1989) (Penser Auschwitz, sous la direction de Shmuel Trigano): 37, 46-47, and "Jewish Identity in the First Accounts by Extermination Camp Survivors from France," Yale French Studies, 85 (1994) (Discourses of Jewish Identity in Twentieth-Century France): 140, 147-48. 9. Zuccotti, The Holocaust, pp. 3 1 - 3 2 . 10. Weinberg, A Community on Trial, p. 204; Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940-1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 36. 1 1 . Adler, jews of Paris, p. 8. 12. Cohen, Burden of Conscience, p. 18. On the Jews who opted to stay, see Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, pp. 44-47. 1 3 . Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p. 7. 14. For the provisions of the statute, see Birnbaum, Jews of the Republic, p. 3391 5 . Poznanski, Être juif en France, pp. 67-72. 16. As cited, at greater length, in ibid., pp. 450-51. 1 7 . Ibid., pp. 4 5 1 - 5 2 . For other reactions of Juifs d'état to Vichy discrimination, see pp. 442-85. 18. Ibid., pp. 452-53. 19. Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, p. 37. 20. As cited in André Kaspi, Les Juifs pendant l'Occupation (Paris: Seuil, 1991), P- 1392 1 . Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p. 176. 22. Lazare, Rescue as Resistance, p. 9 1 . 23. As cited in Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, p. 79. 24. Claire Andrieu, "Les mythes de la banque juive et les réalités de l'aryanisation," Pardès 16 (1992): 72. 25. Testimony of "Lazare" in Claudine Vegh, éd., I Didn't Say Goodbye, trans. Ros Schwartz (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), p. 35. 26. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p. 13 6. For Vallat's strategy, see pp. 7 5 - 1 1 9 . 27. Ibid., p. 168. 28. Adler, Jews of Paris, pp. 37-39; Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, pp. 86-7. 29. Adler, Jews of Paris, pp. 4 1 - 4 2 . 30. Laloum, La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix. 3 1 . For the description of each convoy, its destination, and the names of the deported, see Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews. Although he labels the August 1 7 convoy as number 79, he has added a few numbers for convoys of wives of POW's, a small convoy that deported from Clermont-Ferrand on August 22, 1944, Jews in resistance convoys, etc.

250

Notes to Pages 1 7 3 - 1 8 1

3 2. On this roundup, see Claude Lévy and Paul Tillard, Betrayal at the Vel d'Hiv, trans. Inéa Bushnaq (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) and Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, pp. 106-17. 33. Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, pp. 107-10. 34. Cited in Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews, pp. 59-60. 35. Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, p. 1 1 3 . 36. Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews, pp. 166-67. 37. As cited in Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p. 271. 38. On the rescue activities of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, see Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1979) as well as Pierre Sauvage's film, Weapons of the Spirit. 39. Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, p. 228. 40. Two memoirs that depict the experience of Jewish children of immigrant origin in Catholic institutions are Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979) and Frida Scheps Weinstein, A Hidden Childhood: A Jewish Girl's Sanctuary in a French Convent, 1942-45, trans. Barbara Loeb Kennedy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). See also Louis Malle's film Au Revoir les enfants. 41. On the recognition of the growing necessity to embrace illegal rescue activity, see Hillel Kieval, "Legality and Resistance in Vichy France: The Rescue of Jewish Children," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 339-66. On the rescue activities of diverse Jewish organizations in France, see Lazare, Rescue as Resistance. 42. Adler, Jews of Paris, pp. 165-95. Adler, himself a communist during the war years, asserts that the Jewish communists, because of their political understanding of Nazi antisemitism, took the lead in promoting a policy of resistance. 43. Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), p. 245, emphasis in original. On rescue as resistance, see Deborah Dwork, Children With a Star (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 44. Kieval, "Legality and Resistance," pp. 358-66. 45. Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, pp. 2 1 3 - 1 6 . 46. On the Jewish scouts and their wartime activity, see Michel, Les Éclaireurs israélites de France. Information on the activity of the group is drawn primarily from this book. 47. See the July 3 1 , 1941 letter from Marc Haguenau to Xavier Vallat, reproduced in ibid., p. 89. 48. Anny Latour, The Jewish Resistance in France (1940-1944), trans. Irene R. Ilton (New York: The Holocaust Library, 1981; published in France in 1970), pp. 218-22. 49. See Annette Wieviorka, Ils étaient juifs, résistants, communistes (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1986); Adam Rayski, Nos illusions perdues (Paris: Balland, 1985); and the debate among Rayski, Wieviorka, and Stéphane Courtois entitled "La résistance communiste juive," Pardès 6 (1987): 159-96. 50. Annie Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991 ), p. 195.

Notes to Pages 1 8 1 - 1 8 7

251

51. For Knout's description of the Jewish Army, see his Contribution à histoire de la résistance juive en France 1940-1944 (Paris: Éditions du Centre, 1947). On the founding of the Jewish Army, see Latour, The Jewish Resistance, pp. 94-9752. Latour, The Jewish Resistance, p. 93. Latour was a member of the Jewish Army and described her own initiation rite. 53. Zuccotti, Holocaust, the French, p. 275. 54. For measured evaluations of the UGIF, see Cohen's Burden of Conscience and the more critical Adler, Jews of Paris, pp. 81-161, as well as Kaspi, Les Juifs pendant l'Occupation, pp. 324-39. For a virulent attack on the UGIF and its leadership, see Maurice Rajsfus, Des Juifs dans la collaboration: L'UGIF, 1941-44 (Paris: Études et documentation internationales, 1980). 55. For material on the children and adults of Izieu, prepared for the trial of Klaus Barbie, see Serge Klarsfeld, The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy, trans. Kenneth Jacobson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985). For a collection of photographs and documents of Jewish children, victims of the Holocaust, see his French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, trans. Glorianne Depondt and Howard M. Epstein (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 56. Cited in Adler, Jews of Paris, p. 1 3 7 . 57. Cohen, Burden of Conscience, pp. 1 3 1 - 3 2 . 58. Zosa Szajkowski, Analytical Franco-Jewish Gazetter, 1939-45 (New York: S. Frydman, 1966), pp. 1 3 4 - 3 5 , and Cohen, Burden of Conscience, pp. 135-3759. Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz, vol. 2, pp. 1 7 1 - 7 3 . And, of course, in no case was the UGIF directly responsible for the deaths. 60. David Weinberg, "The French Jewish Community after World War II: The Struggle for Survival and Self-Definition," Forum 45 (summer 1982): 45. 61. Erik Cohen, L'étude et l'éducation juive en France ou L'avenir d'une communauté (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1991), p. 1 7 3 . 62. Comité de Bienfaisance de Paris, Assemblée générale ordinaire, May 9, 1948, p. 18. 63. Renée Poznanski, "L'héritage de la guerre: le sionisme en France, dans les années 1 9 4 4 - 4 7 , " in Les Juifs de France, le sionisme, et l'état d'Israël: Actes du colloque international, ed. Doris Bensimon and Benjamin Pinkus (Paris: Publications Langues'O, 1989), vol. 1, p. 244. 64. Annette Wieviorka, "Indicible ou inaudible?" p. 50, and Maurice Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française: De 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), pp. 31-32, 34-36. 65. Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française, pp. 48-49. 66. Weinberg, "The French Jewish Community," p. 48; Poznanski, "L'héritage de la guerre," p. 242; Poznanski, Être juif en France, pp. 672-75. 67. On French intellectuals of this period, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), esp. pp. 181-82. 68. Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française, p. 1 7 . 69. Poznanski, "L'héritage de la guerre," p. 245.

Notes to Pages 187-196 70. Samuel René Kapel, Au lendemain de la Shoa: Témoignage sur la renaissance du Judaïsme de France et d'Afrique du Nord (1945-1954) (Jerusalem, 1991), p. 23. Poznanski cites a lower figure in her discussion of the problem, Être juif en France, pp. 677-79. 71. Kapel, Au lendemain de la Shoa, pp. 18-22. The quotation is cited on p. 21. 72. Ibid., pp. 27-28. 73. Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française, p. 65. For his analysis of the Finaly Affair, see pp. 65-74. Kaplan's statement is cited on p. 72. 74. Poznanski, "L'héritage de la guerre," p. 247. 75. Weinberg, "The French Jewish Community," p. 51. 76. Poznanski, "L'héritage de la guerre," p. 265. 77. Weinberg, "The French Jewish Community," pp. 51-52. 78. Poznanski, "L'héritage de la guerre," p. 243; Weinberg, "The French Jewish Community," pp. 47-48. 79. Weinberg, "The French Jewish Community," p. 51. 80. Cohen, L'étude et l'éducation juive, p. 173. 81. Kapel, Au Lendemain de la Shoa, pp. 32-34. 82. Ibid., pp. 81-82, 84. 83. Cohen, L'étude et l'éducation juive, p. 174. 84. Meyer Jais, "Rapport sur la culture juive," Fardes 14 (1991): 98-100. The quotations are from pp. 98-99. CHAPTER TEN: A RENEWED COMMUNITY 1. For an early sociological study of the North African immigrants, see Doris Bensimon-Donath, L'intégration des juifs nord-africains en France (Paris: Mouton, 1971). This book remains an important source of information on the first decade of North African immigration. 2. Ibid., p. 17. 3. Doris Bensimon and Sergio Delia Pergola, La population juive de France: socio-démographie et identité (Jerusalem: Institute of Contemporary Jewry of Hebrew University and Centre National de la Recherche scientifique, Paris, 1984), pp. 35-38, 40-41, 47, 56, 66-67. Some have estimated the French Jewish population as high as 700,000, but Bensimon and Delia Pergola are the only trained sociologists and demographers to have conducted a scientific study. 4. My discussion of North African immigrant Jewish culture is based on Claude Tapia's collection of essays, some of which appeared in the 1970s: Les Juifs sépharades en France (1965-1985): Études psychosociologiques et historiques (Paris: Éditions de l'Harmattan, 1986). 5. Ibid., p. 222. 6. Bensimon-Donath, L'intégration des juifs nord-africains, p. 209. 7. Ibid., pp. 1 1 8 , 202. 8. Ibid., pp. 103-5, 197-200. 9. Ibid., p. 1 1 0 . 1 o. Bensimon and Delia Pergola, La population juive de France, pp. 13 0 - 3 1 . The intermarriage rate here cited is of individuals.

Notes to Pages 196-2.04

2.53

11. Bensimon-Donath, L'intégration des juifs nord-africains, pp. 59-60, 79-82. 12. Tapia, Les Juifs sépharades en France, p. 2 2 1 . 1 3 . Bensimon and Della Pergola, La population juive de France, pp. 1 4 3 , 173-77, 37714. Bensimon-Donath, L'intégration des juifs nord-africains, pp. 124, 158. 15. Bensimon and Della Pergola, La population juive de France, pp. 190-91,3 77. 16. Dominique Schnapper; Juifs et israélites (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1980). I will refer in my discussion to the English-language version of her book, Jewish Identities in France: An Analysis of Contemporary French Jewry, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Schnapper writes as a professional sociologist whose own background was shaped by her mixed heritage as the daughter of a prominent assimilated French Jew, Raymond Aron, and a non-Jewish mother. 1 7 . Schnapper; Jewish Identities, appendix 1, pp. 1 5 7 - 6 1 . 18. Ibid., pp. xlvi-xlvii. 19. Bensimon and Delia Pergola, La population juive de France, pp. 241-4 3. 20. Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, pp. 1 2 4 - 6 1 . 2 1 . Schnapper, Jewish Identities, pp. 6 4 - 1 0 1 . 22. Ibid., pp. 1 0 2 - 3 1 . 23. As cited in Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française, p. 154. 24. Ibid., pp. 1 5 1 - 6 2 . For a general history of the attitude of France and French Jewry toward Israel, see Doris Bensimon, Les juifs de France et leur relations avec Israël (1945-1988) (Paris: Éditions de l'Harmattan, 1989); on de Gaulle and the Six Day War, see pp. 1 6 0 - 6 1 , 165-68. 25. As cited in Raymond Aron, Essais sur la condition juive contemporaine, compiled and annotated by Perrine Simon-Nahum (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1989)» P- 3726. Henry H. Weinberg, The Myth of the Jew in France 1967-1982 (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1987), pp. 34, 40-41; Les Nouveaux cahiers, no. 1 2 (winter 1967-68): 2-3. The citations are from p. 3. 27. Raymond Aron, De Gaulle, Israël et les Juifs (Paris: Pion, 1968). The first citation is from p. 12, the second from p. 1 5 . Reprinted in Aron, Essais sur la question juive, pp. 46, 49. The emphasis is in the original. 28. Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française, pp. 164-72. 29. Phyllis Cohen Albert, "French Jewry and the Centrality of Israel: The Public Debate, 1968-1988," in From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism, ed. Ernest Frerichs and Jacob Neusner, Brown Judaic Studies 175 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), vol. 4, pp. 2 1 4 - 1 5 . 30. Bensimon, Les juifs de France et leurs relations avec Israël, p. 1 7 1 . 31. Yves Chevalier, "L'évolution de la perception d'Israël par les juifs de France: 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 8 7 , " in Bensimon and Pinkus, Les Juifs de France, le sionisme, et l'état d'Israël, vol. 2, pp. 4 1 7 - 1 9 . 32. Ibid., pp. 4 2 1 - 2 6 . 33. Kriegel, Ce que j'ai cru comprendre, pp. 50-52, 67-70, 744-86. 34. For an example, see the interview with Alain Geismar in La jeune France juive: Conversations avec des Juifs d'aujourd'hui, ed. Luc Rosenzweig (Paris: Editions Libres-Hallier, 1980), pp. 36-61.

z

54

Notes to Pages 204-210

35. Albert, "French Jewry and the Centrality of Israel," pp. 208-10, 225. The citation from the CRIF document is on p. 210. 36. As cited in H. Weinberg, Myth of the Jew in France, p. 150. 37. See Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, pp. 1 4 - 1 6 , 39-40, 50-52, and Albert, "French Jewry and the Centrality of Israel," pp. 2 1 7 - 1 8 . 38. For Giscard, see Schnapper, Jewish Identities, p. xlix; and for Mitterrand, see Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, p. 50. 39. Alain Finkielkraut, Le juif imaginaire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980). The book has appeared in English as The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O'Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 40. Ibid. The citations are respectively from pp. 139, 13, 76-77, and 1 2 1 of the French version. See also Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, pp. 92-96. 41. The bibliography by and about Lévinas is extensive. For a biography, see Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). For his impact on Jewish intellectual life in France, see Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, pp. 88-91, 96-97, 138-39. 42. On Lévy, see Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, pp. 124-39. 43. On Trigano, see ibid., pp. 139-42. Trigano's major works include Le Récit de la disparue (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), La nouvelle question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), La demeure oubliée (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1984), and La république et les juifs (Paris: Presses d'Aujourd'hui, 1981). Most recently he has edited a four-volume collection entitled La société juive à travers l'histoire (Paris: Fayard, 1992). 44. Bernard-Henri Lévy, La barbarie à visage humain (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1977). It appeared in English under the title Barbarism with a Human Face, trans. George Holoch (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). His book on the Bible is entitled Le Testament de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1979). 45. As cited in Birnbaum, Antisemitism in France, p. 247. 46. Ibid., passim. This book is particularly useful for those who are interested in the ubiquity of antisemitic discourse in the French right. On Poujade, see also Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française, p. 77. 47. Bensimon, Les juifs de France et leurs relations avec Israël, p. 256, for the Darquier citation; and H. Weinberg, Myth of the Jew in France, pp. 59-64. On the "Faurisson Affair," from the perspective of a supporter, see Serge Thion, ed., Vérité historique ou vérité politique: Le dossier de l'affaire Faurisson: la question des chambres à gaz (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980). On Holocaust denial in general and the ongoing role of Faurisson, see Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (New York: The Free Press, 1993). For the most significant response of a French Jew to Faurisson and his claims, see Pierre Vidal-Naquet's article in Esprit (September 1980): 8-56, reprinted in his Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent (Paris: Maspero, 1981), pp. 197-272, and his Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, translated and with a forward by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). On Faurisson and the alliance of the political extremes, see Judith Friedlander, "Anti-Semitism in France, 1978-1992: Questions and Debates," in Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 63-80.

Notes to Pages 2 1 1 - 2 1 5

155

48. As cited in Bensimon, Les juifs de France et leurs relations avec Israël, p. 253. 49. Mitterrand had visited Israel in 1979 and had attended the memorial service held at the synagogue of the Rue Copernic the day after the bombing while no one from the Gaullist government chose to do so. As president of France, he also attended a memorial service after the killings in Goldenberg's restaurant. However, his reception of Yasir Arafat at the Elysée Palace in 1989 caused some consternation in the Jewish community as did the revelations shortly before his death about his Vichy past and his close friendship with the Vichy administrator René Bousquet. 50. Szafran, Les Juifs dans la politique française, pp. 1 7 - 1 9 . 51. Annie Perchenet, Histoire des juifs de France (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1988), pp. 197-9852. See Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972). For a discussion of the impact of the memory of Vichy on French consciousness, see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 53. Schnapper and Benayoun, "Citoyenneté républicaine et spécificité juive," pp. 5-9, and David Kessler, "Le Juif émancipé: perdu ou responsable?" Les Nouveaux cahiers, no. 97 (summer 1989): 76-79. CONCLUSION 1. For a persuasive analysis of the utility of a comparative approach to Jewish emancipation, see Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, "Emancipation and the Liberal Offer," in their Paths of Emancipation, pp. 3-36.

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Illustrations

Chapter One: The synagogue in Cavaillon, whose building began in 1772. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Chapter Two: A revolutionary exhorting Jews, ca. 1791. Archives Municipales de Strasbourg. Chapter Three: Napoleon Reestablishes the Cult of the Israelites, May 3 0, 1806. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Chapter Four: Synagogue of the Rue de la Victoire, Paris. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Rabbi Zadoc Kahn (1839-1905), Grand Rabbi of Paris (1868-1889), Grand Rabbi of France (1889-1905). Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Chapter Five: Adolphe Crémieux. Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Chapter Six: V. Lenepveu, The Traitor, 1900» The traitor, of course, is Dreyfus. The Jewish Museum/Art Resource, New York. Chapter Seven: Immigrant Jews in Paris, 1922. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Chapter Eight: Léon Blum. French Embassy Press and Information Service. Chapter Nine: Children of the Jewish home of Saint-Mandé, July 1944. Most were arrested and deported. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Chapter Ten: Jews demonstrating on behalf of Israel, Paris, June 1967. From L'Arche, September 26-October 25,1972.

273

Index

Abitbol, Michel, 140 academy, Jews in, 56, 93-94, 2 1 1 - 2 1 2 acculturation, 4 - 5 , 8, 13, 5 0 - 5 1 , 53-76, 93, 1 3 0 - 1 3 1 , 2 1 6 - 2 1 7 . See also assimilation, of Jews Action Française, 1 1 3 , 146, 147 Action Française, 148 Adler, Jacques, 1 7 6 Agoudas Hakehillos, 130 Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsburg), 90 Albert, Phyllis Cohen, 81 Alexander II (czar), 1 1 7 Algeria, 78, 81, 83; antisemitism in, 105, h i ; consistory of, 82; Jews of, 81-82, 194 Algiers, 82 aliyah, 203

Amitiés Chrétiennes, 169, 176 ancien régime, 15 Angenot, Marc, 97-98 Antisemitic League, 1 0 5 - 1 0 6 antisemitism, 30, 32-33, 56, 64, 93, 95-99, " S , " 7 , 135, 138, 1 4 5 - 1 4 9 , 150, 1 5 1 - 1 5 2 , 187, 189, 209-212, 2 1 7 - 2 1 8 ; and Dreyfus Affair, 99-103, 1 0 5 - 1 0 9 , i n , 1 1 2 , 1 1 3 ; in Romania, 86; during World War II, 1 1 7 . See also Holocaust Arab states, 200, 201 Archives israélites, 64, 70, 79, 1 0 9 - 1 1 0 ,

Alliance Israélite Universelle, 64, 77-90, 109, n o , 1 1 6 , 132, 150, 1 9 1 , 194, 201, 2 1 1 ; attitude of to North African and Ottoman Jews, 82-83, 85; attitude of to Zionism, 1 3 8 - 1 3 9 , 140, 141; diplomatic activity of, 86-90; educational activity of, 82-85, 1 1 7 , 209 Alsace, 8, 25, 27, 30, 40, 58, 68, 92, 95, 100, 134, 147; Jews of, 8 - 1 1 , 14, 18, 19, z i , 22, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 38, 4 1 , 47, 48-49, 50, 53, 58-59, 60, 63, 65, 69, 73, 74, 75, 78, 85, 92, 100, 1 1 5 , 1 1 8 , 1 4 1 , 156, 164, 199 Altéras, Jacques-Isaac, 82 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 154, 155, 168, 176, 186. Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne, 2 1 2

65, 198 Asile Israélite, 120 Asile Israélite de Nuit, 129 Askenazi, Léon (Manitou), 203 Assembly of Jewish Notables, 4 1 - 4 3 , 44. See also Sanhédrin assimilation, of Jews, 31, 33-34, 43, 47-48, 5 1 - 5 2 , 65-66, 94-95, 142, 163, 190, 1 9 1 , 199-200, 205, 213; attitude of Napoleon toward, 42, 47, 48; definition of, 54, 63 Association of French Rabbis, 140 Auschwitz, 172, 173, 183, 207 Austerlitz, Battle of, 39 Austria, 88, 99, 1 1 7 Avignon, 6, 29 Azulai, Haim David, 13

1 1 3 , 140 Aron, Rabbi Arnaud, 92 Aron, Raymond, 146, 180, 202 Ashkenazim, 5, 8, 12, 13, 15, 2 1 , 22, 29,

175

Index Balfour Declaration, 138, 140 Balkans, 1 1 7 Barbie, Klaus, 162, 212 Barre, Raymond, 2 1 1 Barrés, Maurice, 107 Basses Pyrénées, Jews of, 51 Bauer, Yehuda, 176-177 Baur^ André, 173, 182-183, 184 Bayonne, 2, 3, 13, 22, 24 Beaune-la-Rolande, 168, 173 Belfort, 1 1 2 Belgium, 167 Belleville, 1 1 8 - 1 x 9 , z95 Benda, Julien, 109 Bensimon, Doris, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198 Bergson, Henri, 2 1 2 Beri, Emmanuel, 162 Berlin, 13, 14, 18, 19, 1 7 1 ; Congress of, 87, 88-89 Berti ® e r r Isaac, 1 1 , 1 3 , 22, 31, 40, 41, 66 Berr, Cerf, 1 1 , 13, 19, 21, 22, 24, 41, 49 Berr, Marx, 24 Bing, Isaie Berr, 14 Birnbaum, Pierre, 94, 99, 145, 210 Bischheim, 61 Bismarck, Otto von, 88 Bleichroder, Gerson, 88, 89 Bloch, Abraham, 134 Bloch, Marc, 159, 163, 166,180, 2x2 Blum, Léon, 104, 109, 1 4 1 , 147-149, 210 Board of Delegates of British Jews, 79 "Bob," 107 Boisdeffre, General Raoul de, 103 Bonald, Louis de, 39 Bonnefond, General Pierre, 1 0 1 Bordeaux, 164; Jewish communal structure of, 4; Jews of, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 21, 2-4,41, 51, 67, 92 Boris, General Pierre, 166, 167 Bouches du Rhône, consistory of, 45 Boulanger, Georges, 96 Bouxwiller, 75 Brasillach, Robert, 147 Brisacs, 94 Brody (town), 89-90, 1 1 6 Brun, Antoinette, 188-189 Bucharest, 87 Buchenwald, 172, 187 Bulgaria, 83, 87, 88 Bund(ists), 124-125, 134, 152, 186. See also Jewish labor movement Burns, Michael, 106 Cahan, Abraham, 122 Cahen, Isidore, 64, 79, 95

cahiers de doléances, 24, 25; of Jews, 24, 26 Cahun, Léon, 59, 92 Camelots du Roi, 147 Cantonal Committee of Schools of the Hebrew Faith (Strasbourg), 68 Caron, Vicki, 153 Carpentras, 6 carrières, 7 Cassin, René, 180, 2 1 1 Catholic church, 32, 34, 38-39, 56, 64, 79, i ° 7 , 174, 175-176, 189; attitude of to Jews, 7, 40, 95; and Dreyfus Affair, 102, 105, 1 1 0 , h i ; influence of on French education, 49,106; influence of on reform Judaism, 72-73 Catholics, 45, 55, 63, 92, 95, 100, 102, 105, 134, 144, 175, 176, 188, 189 Cavaillon, 6 Céline, Louis, 147 Center of Defense and Vigilance, 150 Central Consistory, 44-45, 48, 52, 66-67, 7 i , 75. 79, 80, 81, 82, 95, 109, n o , 1 1 3 , 126, 127, 139, 140, 149, 150, 154, 167, 180, 186, 188, 191 Cercle de la Rue de Grammont, 56-57 Cercle Gaston Crémieux, 206-207 Chagall, Marc, 1 1 9 Chaillet, Father Pierre, 188 Chamber of Deputies, 147-148 Château-Salins, 49 citizenship, criteria for, 21-22 Clemenceau, Georges, 104, 167 Clermont-Tonnerre, Count Stanislas de, 27 Cohen, Albert, 141 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 202 Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française, 208 Colmar, 65, 69, 70 Comité de Bienfaisance, 126-127, 149, 186 Comité des Écoles, 128 Comité Inter-Mouvements auprès des Évacués (CIMADE), 169, 176 Comité Juif d'Action, 202-203 Comité Juif d'Action Social et de Réconstruction (COJASOR), 186 Comité National des Oeuvres Sociales de la Résistance (COSOR), 187 Commissariat-Général aux questions juives (CGQJ), 148, 170, 172, 178, 182, 184, 210 Commission Centrale des Organisations Juives d'Assistance (CCOJA), 168, 180 Committee of Assistance to Refugees (CAR), 155, 156-157, 163, 168

Index

Committee of Defense against Antisemitism, n o Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, 189 Committee of the Rue Amélot, 176, 1 8 3 , 184 Committee on Public Safety, 3 2 communism, 190, 2.04 Communist Party, 152., 1 5 9 , 1 6 3 , 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 , 204 communists, 1 4 7 , 1 5 1 , 1 5 2 , 1 5 8 - 1 5 9 , 1 6 3 - 1 6 4 , 168, 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 , 186 Compiègne, 168, 1 7 2 Confédération Générale du Travail, 1 2 5 , 129 Congress of Berlin, 87, 88-89 Conseil d'État, 5, 6, 40, 44, 1 5 4 , 1 6 7 Conseil Représentatif des Juifs de France (CRIF), 180, 1 8 5 , 186, 188, 204 consistories (consistorial system), 44-46, 48, 52., 54, 57, 64, 65, 66, 67, 7 1 , 72, 74, 79, 80, 82, n o , 1 2 7 , 1 3 0 , 1 3 9 , 140, 1 4 1 , 1 4 3 , 149, 1 5 0 , 1 5 1 , 1 5 4 , 156, 1 5 8 , 168, 1 8 2 , 190 Constantine (Algeria), 82, 1 5 1 Constituent Assembly, 25, 27, 29, 30 conversion, of Jews, 57-58, 64, 190 Council of the Seine, 148 Créhange, Abraham ben Baruch, 74 Crémieux, Adolphe, 56, 80, 83, 87, 89 Crémieux law, 165 Croix, 96, 98, 102, 1 0 5 Croix de Feu, 149 Czechoslovakia, 204 Damascus Affair, 81 Damascus blood libel, 79-80, 81 Danneker, Theodor, 1 7 1 , 1 8 2 Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis, 148, 1 7 2 , 178, 2 1 0 David, Jacques-Louis, 3 2 decrees of March 1808, 44-47, 48, 49 de Gaulle, General Charles, 186, 200-202 de la Fare, Bishop Anne-Lois Henry, 27-28 Delia Pergola, Sergio, 197, 198 Delpech, François, 48 Demange, Edgar, 1 0 2 Derrida, Jacques, 2 1 1 Deutz, Simon, 57 Diasporism, 205-207 Dijon, 58, 93 Divrei Shalom ve-Emet, 13 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm, 19, 20 Drancy, 1 6 3 , 168, 1 7 2 , 1 7 3 , 174 Dreyfus, Alfred, 6 1 , 94, 99-104, 106, 108, 1 1 3 , 180 Dreyfus, Jacob, 61

Z77

Dreyfus, Jeanette Libman, 6 1 , 1 0 0 Dreyfus, Lucie Hadamard, 1 0 1 , 1 0 2 , 104, 1 1 3 Dreyfus, Mathieu, 6 1 , 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 , 1 0 2 - 1 0 3 , 104 Dreyfus, Raphael, 6 1 , 1 0 0 Dreyfus Affair, 98, 9 9 - 1 1 4 , 129, 1 4 5 , 146, 2 1 3 ; impact of on French Jewry, 1 1 1 - 1 1 4 ; Jewish reactions to, 1 0 8 - 1 1 3 Dreyfusards, 1 0 3 , 106, 107, 109, 1 1 1 , 112, 116 droit à la différence, 206, 207, 2 1 3 , 214, 216 Drumont, Edouard, 96-97, 1 0 1 , 1 1 3 Dunkerque, Jewish community of, 50 Du Port, André, 30 Durkheim, Émile, 93-94, 1 3 5 , 2 1 2 Dwork, Deborah, 1 7 6 Eban, Abba, 200 Éclaireurs Israélites de France (EIF), 1 4 2 - 1 4 5 , 176, 1 7 7 - 1 8 0 , 1 8 5 , 206 École de Guerre, 1 0 1 École Normale, 104 École Normale Israélite Orientale, 8 5 École Normale Israélite Orientale de Jeunes Filles, 85 École Polytechnique, 1 0 1 École Rabbinique, 74, 85 economic mobility, of Jews, 6 0 - 6 1 , 62-63, 93, 1 9 7 , 2 1 6 Edict of Nantes, 4 Edict of Toleration (Austria), 19 Edinger, Georges, 184 education: of Algerian Jews, 83; and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 82-85; Catholic, 67; of Jewish girls, 67, 70, 83-84; of Jews in France, 5 1 , 57, 60, 6 6 - 7 1 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 8 , 1 9 1 , 197; traditional, 66, 7 0 - 7 1 , 129; vocational, 70 Egypt, 83 emancipation, of Jews, 1 7 - 1 8 , 23, 25, 28, 3 0 - 3 1 , 40, 47, 48, 5 1 , 52, 78, 2 1 3 , 216; impact of, 3 2 - 3 5 , 37, 43, 48, 49, 58, 65, 9 1 - 9 2 , 209 England, 88, 1 1 6 , 1 2 6 Enlightenment, 6, 22, 99, 1 9 1 , 209, 2 1 6 , 2 1 7 ; attitude of toward Jews, 1 8 , 2 0 - 2 1 , 23, 28, 3 1 , 35, 78, 1 2 6 Ennery, Marchand, 73 Estates General, 24, 29 Esterhazy, Marie-Charles, 1 0 3 , 104 ethnicity, 8 1 , 1 2 3 , 1 2 6 , 1 2 7 , 1 3 1 , 1 3 2 , 144, 198, 2 1 3 Falloux law, 64 fascism, 146, 1 5 1

Index

278 Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 1 1 8 Faure, Félix, 104 Faurisson, Robert, 210 Federation of Jewish Societies, 123, 132, 134, i5°> 151. 186, 187 Finaly Affair, 188-189 Finkielkraut, Alain, 207, 208, 213 Fleg, Edmond, 109, 1 1 2 , 133, 141, 143. H 4 Fonds Social Juif Unifié (FSJU), 186, 194, 203 Forverts, 1 1 9 Fould family, 62 Fourier, Charles, 98 Franco-Prussian war, 92 French Jewish community, 138, 213; decline of, 1 2 - 1 3 ; diversity of, 1, 131, 158, 213; impact of Holocaust on, 185, 1 8 7 - 1 9 1 ; impact of Revolution on, 32, 34, 37; and Israel, 203-204; modern self-definition of, 32, 52,-65; premodern traditional, 2, 4, 7, 9-12; relations of eastern European immigrants with, 127-29, 131 - 1 3 2 ; relations of North African immigrants with, 195; restructuring of, 38, 48, 18 6, 216 French Resistance, 163, 179, 180-182, 184, 186, 187, 190 French Zionist Federation, 133 Friedlander, Judith, 205 Furet, François, 26 Furtado, Abraham, 22, 41, 44 Galicia, 1 1 7 Gamzon, Robert, 142, 144, 178, 179 Garel, Georges, 177 gender roles, 61-62, 181, 200 Generation of '68, 204, 207. See also May 1968 Gerlier, Cardinal Pierre, 1 7 4 - 1 7 5 Germans, 167, 170, 179, 182, 183 Germany, 50, 65, 145, 154, 156, 157, 158; Jews of, 63, 64, 72, 88, 89, 99, 146, 147 Gestapo, 169, 1 7 1 , 179, 182, 184 ghetto, 7, 9 Giraudoux, Jean, 147 Gironde, 47; consistory of, 4 5 Giscard-d'Estaing, Valéry, 202, 207, 2 1 1 Gonse, Charles-Arthur, 103 Graetz, Michael, 80 Great Britain, 91, 138; Jews of, 127. See also England Greece, 83 Grégoire, Abbé Henri, 20-21, 25, 32, 85 Guienne, 5

Guizot law, 68 Gurs, 168 "Gyp," 107 Haguenau, 32, 81 Haguenau, Marc, 179 Hajdenberg, Henri, 202-203, 2 ° 5 halakha, 2, 72 Halévy, Daniel, 109 Hameassef, 13 Haskalah, 13-14, 44 hebera, 4 Hebrew, 11, 19, 66, 69, 72, 84, 85, 142,144 Hebrew University, 140 heder, 66, 68 Helbronner, Jacques, 1 5 4 - 1 5 5 , 167, 180 Henry, Hubert, 101, 103, 106 Herr, Lucien, 104 Herriot, Edouard, 148 Hertzberg, Arthur, 18 Herzl, Theodor, 102, 108 Hirschler, Rabbi René, 168 Hitler, Adolf, 159 Holland, 50. See also Netherlands Holocaust, 1 6 1 - 1 8 5 , 1 9 3 , 1 9 9 , 201, 217; denial of, 210, 212, 213; French rescue activities during, 162, 169, 175-180, 185; impact of on French Jewry, 185, 1 8 7 - 1 9 1 , 198; popular attitudes during, 162, 170, 172, 174; protests against, 1 7 4 - 1 7 5 ; resistance during, 176-180, 185 Hourwitz, Zalkind, 20 Hovevei Zion, 133 Humanité, 1 2 1 Hungary, 204 Hunt, Lynn, 23, 32 identity, of French Jews, 14-15, 35, 43, 51, 64-65, 66, 67, 69, 76, 79-80, 94-95> " 4 > n 5 i 12-6, 131. 14*. 1 4 3 - 1 4 5 , 163, 166, 1 8 1 , 190, 197-200, 203-204, 205-208, 213, 215 immigrants, Algerian Jewish, 194, 195, 196; and intermarriage, 196 immigrants, central European Jewish. See refugees, Jewish immigrants, eastern European Jewish, h i , 1 1 5 , 116, 1 1 7 , 1 1 8 - 1 2 0 , 1 2 2 - 1 2 6 , 129, 134, 137, 143, 186, 198, 2 1 1 , 217; culture of, 128-129; French attitudes to, 1 2 0 - 1 2 1 ; during Holocaust, 163, 165, 166, 167-169, 17I-> I 7 3 - I 7 4 > I 7 7 . 180-181, 182, 183, 184, 185; native Jews' attitudes

Index

279

tO, 1 2 2 , 1 2 6 - 1 2 8 , I 3 2 , I 3 5 , I 4 9 , I 5 0 , 167, 182, I90

immigrants, Moroccan Jewish, 1 9 4 , 1 9 5 , 196, 197

immigrants, North African Jewish, 1 9 3 - 1 9 7 , 2 1 1 , 217; religious identity of, 195, 198 immigrants, Sephardi, 1 1 7 , 129, 135, 143, 190 immigrants, Tunisian Jewish, 194, 195, 196, 197

immigration: French attitudes to, 1 1 6 , 120, 138; role of in French Jewish history, 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 , 2 1 1 , 217 Infamous Decree, 46-47, 49 integration, of Jews, 32, 47, 53, 54, 57, 65, 74, 9 4 - 9 5 , 99, 1 6 3 , 2 1 7

intermarriage, 42, 58, 196 International League against Antisemitsm (LICA), 1 5 1 , 1 5 2 Intersyndical Commission, 1 2 5 - 1 2 6 Iran, 83 Islam, 216 Isle-sur-Sorgue, 1', 6 Israel, 200, 201, 202, 203, 210, 217; and French Jewish identity, 199-200, 204-205, 212; French Jewish support of, 1 9 8 , 200, 2 0 3 - 2 0 4 , 207

Istanbul, Jews of, 80 Itterswilier, 61 Izieu, 184

"Jewish question," 1 8 - 1 9 , 2 2 - 2 3 , a 4> 5> 3 i , 3 7 , 88, 1 7 2 , 2 0 2 , 2 1 6

Jewish scout movement, 143, 176, 177-180

Jews: contemporary image of, 212; legal status of, 1-2; political activism of, 209, 2 i i , political attitudes of, 96, 1 5 0 - 1 5 3 , 1 5 6 , 199; socioeconomic condition of, 2, 3, 4 - 7 , 8 - 1 0 , 5 6 - 5 7 , 60-63, 93,

IZO

>

I 1

kahal, 2. See also French Jewish community Kahn, Rabbi Zadoc, 55, 9 4 , 1 0 1 , xo8, n o Kapel, Rabbi René, 168, 169, 1 9 1 Kaplan, Rabbi Jacob, 146, 186-187, 189, 201, 2 1 2

Keren Hayesod, 140 Keren Kayemet, 140, 1 4 1 Klarsfeld, Beate, 161, 2 1 2 Klarsfeld, Serge, 1 6 1 , 185, 2 1 2 Klein, Rabbi Salomon, 65, 70, 71 Knout, Ariane (Régine), 1 8 1 Knout, David, 181 Kriegel, Annie, 181, 204, 209 Kristallnacht, 156 Lambert, Raymond-Raoul, 143, 155, 157, 163, 182-183,

j

84

Landes, 50 landsmanshaftti, 1 2 2 - 1 2 3 Lang, Jacques, 206 Latin Quarter, 2 1 1 Latour, Annie, 181 Laval, Pierre, 164 law of 1 7 8 4 , 1 9 Lazare, Bernard, 102-103,

io

4>

io

9>

112, 132

Jaïs, Rabbi Meyer, 191 Jarblum, Marc, 187-188 Jaurès, Jean, 110 Jefroykin, Israel, 152 Jewish Agency, 141 Jewish Army (AJ), 179, 1 8 1 - 1 8 2 Jewish labor movement, 124-126, 129, 131. See also Bund Jewish Popular Front, 152 2

July Monarchy, 53, 55, 94

3-IZ4,

196-197

Joint, 168, 176 Joseph II (Holy Roman Emperor), 19 Judaism, Orthodox, 70, 199, 208; practice of, 13, 53-54, 60, 65, 132, 1 9 8 - 1 9 9 ; reform of, 7 1 - 7 5 ; tradi-

tional, 65, 73, 74, 208

Lazare, Lucien, 203 League of Nations High Commission for Refugees, 155 League of Patriots, 106-107 League of the Rights of Man, 106-107, IIO-III, 121

Lebanon, 83 Leblois, Louis, 104 Lecache, Bernard, 151 Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, 175 Lehman, Jessel, 3 2 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 210 Les Milles, 168 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 18 letters patent, 3, 10, 21 Levaillant, Isaiah, n o , 1 1 3 Levant, 78, 81, 1 1 6 , 1 1 7 , 2 1 7 Le Vernet, 168 Lévi, Rabbi Israël, 135, 139, 140 Levi, Sylvain, 138-139 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 208, 209, 2 1 1 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2 1 2 Lévi-Valensi, Eliane Amado, 203 Lévy, Rabbi Alfred, 142 Lévy, Alphonse, 92 Lévy, Benny, 208 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 209

z8o

Libre Parole, 1 0 1 , 102, 105, 106 Libya, 83 Lille, 58, 60, 93 Lipchitz, Jacques, 1 1 9 Lithuania, 89 Lithuanian Jewish culture, impact of on French Jewry, 205, 208 London, Jews of, 80 Lorraine, 8, 20, 25, 27, 92, 1 3 4 , 147; Jews of, 8 - 1 1 , 1 3 , 2 1 , 22, 24, 26, 29, 3 ° , î 2 -, 38. 4 i . 47. 49, 58, 65, 73, 74, 75. 78, 85, 92, 1 1 6 , u 8 , 1 4 1 , 156, 164, 199 Louis XV, 3 Louis XVI, 14, 19 Lower Rhine, 68; consistory of, 45, 67, 75. 79 Lubavitcher Hasidim, 199 Lunéville, 50 Lustiger, Cardinal Jean-Marie, 2 1 2 Lyon, 6, 60, 92, 184, 194 Madrid conference, 86 Main d'Oeuvre Immigrée, 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 Malesherbes, Chrétien Guillaume de, 21-23 Malesherbes Commission, 2 1 - 2 3 Malino, Frances, 22 Marais Saint-Paul, 1 1 8 Marchandeau law, 1 5 7 Marienstras, Richard, 205-206, 208, 213 Marmorek, Alexander, 133 Marranos, 2 - 3 , 1 3 , 2 1 , 33, 207 Marrus, Michael, 162, 164, 1 7 1 , 2 1 2 Marseille, 184, 194; consistory of, 82; Jews of, 60, 92 Marx, Roland, 34 Maskilim, 14, 30, 44, 85 Mauriac, François, 189 Maurras, Charles, 146 May 1968, 202. See also Generation of'68 Mehmet Ali, 79 Meiss, Léon, 188, 1 8 9 - 1 9 0 Memmi, Albert, 204 Mendelssohn, Moses, 14, 18, 19 Mendès-France, Pierre, 209, 2 1 0 Mercier, Auguste, 100 Mesopotamia, 83 Metz, 20, 33, 94; Jews of, 8, 10, 1 1 - 1 3 , 14. M . 3 ° . 38, 4 1 , 5 1 . 58, 65. 67, 7 i , 74 Meurthe, 49, 50; consistory of, 45 Middle East, 80, 81, 84, 85 Midi, 194 migration, 49-50. 53. 58-59 mikveh, 4, 1 0

Index

Mikveh Israel, 84 Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, 67, 68 Minister of Justice, 1 5 7 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 139, 189 Ministry of Public Instruction, 1 2 1 Ministry of Religions, 38, 44, 82 Ministry of War, 82 Mirabeau, Count Honoré de, 19, 35 Mitterrand, François, 206, 2 1 2 Modigliani, Amadeo, 1 1 9 Moissac, 177, 1 7 8 - 1 7 9 moneylending, 9 - 1 0 , 33-34, 37-38, 42, 44, 46, 49, 95. See also usury Monnier, Jean-Yves, 93 Montefiore, Moses, 80, 89 Montesquieu, 35 Montmartre, 1 1 8 Montpellier, 6 Morocco, 81, 83, 86, 193 Mortara Affair, 78-79 Moselle, 50; consistory of, 45; Jews of, 51 Mosse, George, 99 Mouvement des Jeunesses Sionistes (MJS), 179 Mulhouse, 58, 60, 61, 68, 70, 100 Munich Olympics, 204 Nancy, 20, 27, 33, 34; Jews of, 8, 1 1 , 1 3 , 5°. 58, 92. "nation within a nation," 22, 27, 40 Napoleon, impact of on Jews, 35, 3 7 - 5 2 Napoleon III, 79 Natanson brothers, 109 National Committee of Relief, 1 5 4 - 1 5 6 National Council of Regional Languages and Cultures, 206 Nazi Germany, 154, 1 5 7 , 158 Nazi Occupation, 162 Nazis, 1 3 8 , 1 5 2 , 163, 164, 165, 170, 1 7 1 , 1 7 2 , 177, 179, 180; persecution of Jews by in France, I 6 J - I 6 6 , 168-169, 1 7 1 - 1 7 3 , 182, 184, 185 Nazism, 1 3 5 , 145, 146, 150, 1 8 1 , 183, 186 Nazi-Soviet pact, 163 Necker, Jacques, 29 Neher, André, 203 Neher, Renée, 203 Netherlands, 167. See also Holland Netter, Charles, 89-90 New Christians, 2-3. See also Marranos Nice, 194 Nîmes, 6 Nîmes Committee, 168, 169 Nord, Philip, 97

Index Nordau, Max, 133 North Africa, 78, 81, 83, 85, 116, 117, 141, 193, 217 North America, 217 Nouveaux cahiers, 201, 213 oath more judaico, 55-56 occupied zone, 164, 165, 170, 171 Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), 168, 176, 177, 178, 179, 184-185 Oeuvre Palestinienne, 140 Ophuls, Marcel, 212 Oran, 82 Organisation Juive de Combat (OJC), 182 Organisation pour la Reconstruction et le Travail (ORT), 168, 169, 176, 177 Orientalism, 83 Orthodox Jews, 73, 74 Ottoman Empire, 78, 81, 83, 85, 86 Oualid, William, 167 Ozouf, Mona, 27 Palestine, 83, 84, 117, 138-139, 140, 152, 181, 188 Pallière, Aimé, 142 Panizzardi, Alessandro, 104 papal Jews, 6-7 Papon, Maurice, 162 Paris, 24, 39, 40, 41, 43, 52, 62, 79, 96, 101, 105, 121, 142, 143, 149, 171, 172, 178, 208; cultural impact of Jews in, 93, 119; Jews of, 1, 6, 7-8, 13, 14, 21, 26-27, 58, 3*, 47, 49-5°, 62-63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 92, 116, 118, 121, 133, 144, 164, 166, 185, 194-195 Paris Commune, 29, 30 Paris consistory, 112, 122, 127, 128, 131, 149, 150, 156. See also consistory of under Seine Paris Exposition, i n parlement, 12-13 Paxton, Robert, 162, 164, 171, 212 Péguy, Charles, 109 Péreire family, 56, 62 Pétain, Marshal Philippe, 164, 166, 174 Picquart, Georges, 103, 106 Picquigny, barony of, 14 Pithiviers, 168, 173, 174 Pletzl, 118-119 pluralism, 35, 201 pogroms, Russian, 89, 116, 117 Poland, 8, 50, 89, 116 Polonski, Abraham, 181 Pompidou, Georges, 202 Popular Front, 145, 152, 153

2.81 population, of Jews: in Algeria, 83; in France, 1, 4, 6, 7, 56, 58, 92, 116, 137, 161, 185, 194 Portuguese merchants, 3—4 Poujade, Pierre, 209 Poujol, Louis, 39-40 poverty, of Jews, 63 Prince Carol (Hohenzollern), 87 Protestants, 20, 21, 22, 25, 38-39, 44, 45, 49, 55, 61, 63, 92, in, 175, 176 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 98 Proust, Marcel, 109, 112 Quakers, 168 rabbis, 11, 42, 43, 45, 46, 55, 73, 74, 84, 91, 92, 127, 139, 167, 180, 185, 198-199 Rabi (judge), 189 Rachel (Elisa Félix), 57 Ratisbonne family, 57 Rayski, Adam, 181 Red Cross, 169, 173 Reform synod (Brunswick), 44 refugees, Jewish, 137-138, 152-153, 155, 157; attitudes of French Jews to, 152-158 Régénération, 64, 66, 68 regeneration, of Jews, 21, 23, 24, 28, 33, 3 5, 37, 4°, 45-46, 47, 48-49, 50, 52, 65, 66, 82 Regional Union of Zionists of Eastern France, 141 Reinach, Joseph, 104, 109 Rennes, 106 Renouveau Juif, 203 Resistance, 163, 179, 180-182, 184, 186, 187, 190 Revolution, French, 3, 6, 7, 15, 17-35, 37, 91, 96, 108, 126, 146, 206, 211, 2-13, 2.15, z i 7 Revolution of 1848, 55, 56, 95 Revue des études juives, 94 Rewbell, Jean-François, 30 right to be different, 206, 207, 213, 214, 216 Rivesaltes, 168 Rocque, François de la, 149 Rodrigue, Aron, 84 Romania, 87-89, 117 Rothschild, Alphonse de, 89 Rothschild, Edmond de, 122, 132, 135, 138 Rothschild, Robert de, 149 Rothschild family, 56, 62, 80, 90, 93, 97, 108

Index

2.82.

Rue Copernic, synagogue of, 2.11 Russia, 89; Jews of, 1 1 7 - 1 1 8 Saint-Esprit, Jews of, 2, 4, 6, 21, 32, 50, 51 Saint-Simonian movement, 57, 80 Saliège, Archbishop Jules, 174 Salonika, 1 4 2 Sanhédrin, 43-44- 45. 47, 5 i ~ 5 2 i 66, 69, 72,81 Sarrelouis, Jews of, 51 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 187, 1 9 1 , 205, 208 Schechter, Ronald, 30 Scheurer-Kestner, Charles, 104 Schnapper, Dominique, 1 9 7 - 1 9 8 , 199-200 Schwartz, Rabbi Isaïe, 156, 189 Schwarzfuchs, Simon, 32 Schwarzkoppen, Maximilien Von, 99, 104 Second Empire, 45, 58, 75 sedaca, 4 Seelisberg conference, 2 1 2 Seine, 50; consistory of, 45; Council of, 148 Sephardim, 3, 4-5, 6, 8, 13, 15, 21, 22, 29, 50, 198, 207 Serbia, 86-87, 88 Sholom Aleichem, 1 2 2 shtiblakh, 129, 1 3 0 Simmel, Georg, 93 Sinclair, Anne, 2 1 2 Sinzheim, Rabbi David, 41, 42 Sirat, RabBi René, 199 Sitruk, Rabbi Jacques, 199 Six Day War, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204 Socialist Party, 1 1 6 , 1 4 1 , 1 5 2 socialists, 98, 134, 147, 1 5 1 social mobility, 53, 93-95 Society of Historical and Archaeological Studies of the Fourth Arrondissement, 120-121 Solidarity, 168 South America, 2 1 7 Soutine, Chaim, 1 1 9 Soviet Union, 2 1 5 Spain, 2, 179 Spire, André, 1 1 2 , 1 3 3 , 1 4 1 , 1 5 5 Stauben, Daniel (Auguste Widal), 59, 69 Stavisky Affair, 147, 150 Sternhell, Zeev, 146 Strasbourg, 14, 21, 39, 4 1 , 49, 58, 60, 66, 67, 69, 74; academy of, 67; consistory of, 67, 70, 73, 81 Sulamit, 44 Switzerland, 86, 176, 179

synagogue, 4, 7, 10, 32, 45, 82 Syria, 79, 83 Szafran, Maurice, 202 Tal, Uriel, 31 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice, duc de, 29 Tapia, Claude, 196 taxation, of Jews, 1, 8, 1 1 - 1 2 , 19, 21, 2-4. 2-6, 34, 45, 63 Terquem, Olry, 65, 72 Terror impact of on Jews, 32-33 Thiéry, Adolphe, 20-21 Thionville, 30; Jews of, 51 Third Republic, 55, 63, 94, 95, 106, 110, 1 1 3 , 166 Toul, 50 Toulouse, 194 Toussenel, Alphonse, 98 Touvier, Paul, 162 Treaty of Berlin, 88-89 Treaty of Versailles, 138 Treaty of Westphalia, 8 Trigano, Shmuel, 2 0 8 - 2 0 9 , 3 Trocmé, Pastor André, 175 Trois-Évêchés, 12, 24, 25 Tunisia, 81, 83, 194 Turkey, 83, 1 1 7 Ullman, Rabbi Salomon, 73 Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l'Entr'aide, 186 Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF), 1 7 3 , 178, 1 8 2 - 1 8 5 Union of Jewish Societies, 1 5 2 Union of Jewish Societies Under LICA, 1 5 2 Union Patriotique des Français Israélites, 150 Union Scolaire, 135 Union Universelle de la Jeunesse Juive, 142-143 United States, 1 1 8 , 126, 138; Jews of, 127, 138 Univers Israélite, 64, 70, 75, 110, 1 1 3 , 131» I 3 4 , I 4°> ! 4 6 , i57> 163 Université Populaire Juive, 128, 129 University of Paris, 1 1 9 unoccupied zone, 165, 170, 1 7 1 Upper Rhine, 68, 69, 75; consistory of, 45» 67, 79 usury, 19, 39-40, 4 1 - 4 2 , 46-47, 50, 95 Vallat, Xavier, 148, 170, 182, 183 Vaucluse, Jews of, 51 Veil, Simone, 210 Vel d'Hiv, 1 7 3 - 1 7 4 , 183 Versailles, 206; Treaty of, 138

Index

Vichy, 145, 146, 159, 1 6 1 , 162, 164, 166, 169, 1 7 1 , 174, 177, 179, 182, 1 8 3 , 2 1 1 , 2 1 2 , 2 1 3 , 2 1 7 ; anti-Jewish policies of, 1 6 4 - 1 6 5 , 167, 1 7 1 , 1 7 2 , 1 7 3 , 186, 2 1 0 , 2 1 2 village Jews, 8, 58, 60, 75, 92 Voltaire, 18 vom Rath, Ernst, 156 Weill, Rabbi Julien, 156 Weinberg, David, 158 Westphalia, Treaty of, 8 Wieviorka, Annette, 180 Wintzenheim, 33 Women, 51, 59, 61-62, 73, 1 1 9 , 120, 135 World War I, 126, 1 3 1 , 1 3 3 - 1 3 5 , 1 3 7 , 146 World War II, 1 1 7 , 1 3 7 , 147, 1 5 5 , 205 Wormser, Georges, 1 1 2 - 1 1 3 , 167

2.83

yeshiva, 1 1 , 6 6 Yiddish, 8, 1 3 , 19, 32, 34, 52, 53, 65, 66, 75, 85, 100, 1 1 6 , 1 1 8 , 1 1 9 , 122, 126, 1 2 7 , 129, 1 3 1 , 134, 142, 149, 1 5 5 , 180, 206, 207 Y M C A , 169 youth movements, Jewish, 1 4 2 - 1 4 5 Zionism, 1 1 2 , 1 1 4 , 129, 1 3 2 - 1 3 3 , 1 3 5 , 1 3 8 - 1 4 5 , 208; impact of on French Jewry, 1 4 1 - 1 4 5 , 1 5 2 , 188, 189-190, 202, 203, 204, 205, 2 1 1 Zionist Organization Executive, 142 Zionists, HI, 1 5 1 , 179, 1 8 1 , 182, 185, 186 Zola, Émile, 1 0 4 - 1 0 6 Zuccotti, Susan, 1 7 6

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