Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation

JEWISH YOUTH

and IDENTITY

in Postwar France

THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE

Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenblit, editors

Paula Hyman, founding coeditor

JEWISH YOUTH

and IDENTITY

in Postwar France

Rebuilding Family and Nation

DANIELLA DORON

This book is a publication of

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2015 by Daniella Doron

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doron, Daniella, author.

Jewish youth and identity in postwar France : rebuilding family and nation / Daniella Doron.

pages cm — (The Modern Jewish experience)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-01741-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-253-01746-8 (ebook) 1. Jewish youth—France—History—20th century. 2. Jewish children—France—History—20th century. 3. Jewish youth—France—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Jewish children—France—Social conditions—20th century. 5. France—Civilization—1945– 6. France—Social conditions—1945–1995. I. Title.

DS135.F83D64 2015

305.235089'92404409045—dc23

2015017064

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TO MY PARENTS

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1Their Children? Our Children!

Holocaust Memory in Postwar France

2A Drama of Faith and Family:

Custody Disputes in Postwar France

3Notre Vie en Commune:

The Family versus the Children’s Home

4The Homes of Hope?

Trauma, Universal Victimhood, and Universalism

5From Competition to Cooperation:

Redefining Jewish Identities

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IT IS MY PLEASURE to have the opportunity to thank the many people who have left their imprint, in multiple ways, on this work and my life.

Words fall short in expressing my deep gratitude to Marion Kaplan, first my doctoral adviser and now my dear friend, for her care, her time, and her rigorous scholarly example. The thousands of e-mails exchanged over the years, coffee dates on the Upper West Side, and our independent study meetings conducted over coffee and a shared black-and-white cookie mark some of my fondest memories of graduate school. Her comments on my work have forced me to refine my writing and thinking; her own scholarship has kindled my initial interest in the field and continues to serve as a source of inspiration. As my career has taken me further away from New York than either of us would have ever imagined, Skype dates have replaced coffee dates, and she has remained my first port of call for advice and good cheer. For all of this, Marion will forever have my gratitude, admiration, and lasting friendship.

I consider myself tremendously fortunate to have found such a nurturing environment at New York University. Herrick Chapman and Mary Nolan generously read more drafts than they would probably care to remember, and their comments have sharpened the analytical focus of this study. The more I progress in my career, the more fully I appreciate their commitment to mentoring graduate students and the scholarly erudition they display in their own work. I first met Laura Lee Downs in a setting quite far away from Greenwich Village—in the cafes and archives of Paris. Her seminar at the EHESS on children and war, our many conversations (both scholarly and otherwise) over wine in Paris and New York, as well her incisive comments have made the research and the writing of this study far more pleasant and intellectually gratifying. She has shaped my thinking on the history of childhood and the family, and I hope that she will see her influence in the following pages. I also extend my thanks to Paula Hyman for her kindness in reading the first version of this work and her advocacy of this book during its early stages. Her own path-breaking work in French Jewish history and Jewish history have informed my own perspective on these fields.

Fellowships from the Council of European Studies, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, and the Center for Jewish History provided critical funding for the research and writing of this book. The statements made and views expressed, however, are solely the responsibility of the author. In particular, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Center for Jewish History offered spaces that fostered productive research and animated conversations with colleagues, including Eran Neuman, Paul Jaskot, Jonathan Judaken, Noah Shenker, and Avi Patt. I am grateful to the post-doctoral fellowships offered by the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and the Jewish Studies Program at Colgate University and am especially indebted to Doris Bergen, Hindy Najman, Lesleigh Cushing, and Alice Nakhimovsky for their guidance and generosity of time and spirit.

In addition to the collegial atmosphere offered by these institutions, I have benefited from multiple writing groups as this book has transformed and taken shape. My cohort at NYU read several chapters, and our regular meetings greatly improved this study. I thank Nathan Marcus, Elisabetta Bini, Michelle Standley, Sasha Disco, Maggie Clinton, Quinn Slobodian, Lauren Kaminsky, Sherene Seikaly, Andrew Lee, and of course Molly Nolan. Another writing group was formed not by NYU students, but by a motley group of modern European historians all writing in New York. Every month I eagerly anticipated escaping Butler Library for our enjoyable and constructive Ortsgruppe Upper West Side evenings with Noah Strote, Emily Levine, Eli Stern, and Joshua Derman. While at Colgate, I greatly enjoyed my interdisciplinary writing group made up of Dan Bouk, Noah Dauber, and Liz Marlow, and at Monash University, my research group composed of David Garrioch, Leah Garrett, Michael Hau, Paula Michaels, Karen Auerbach, Randall Geller, Julie Kalman, Jane Drackard, and Seamus O’Hanlon offered a warm and rigorous scholarly community.

I would like to thank the editorial team at Indiana University Press—Sarah Jacobi, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, and Debra Hirsch Corman—for their support of this book as well as their editorial input. A special thanks goes to Dee Mortensen for being such a talented editor and a pleasure to work with. Amy Hackett and Evelyn Bence have offered their honest editorial feedback and have helped tighten and transform the prose. I am grateful to the anonymous readers who provided valuable suggestions for revisions. They have left an indelible imprint on this book, and I consider myself exceedingly fortunate that the manuscript was placed with such insightful and generous readers. This work would have not seen the light of day without the support of the series editors Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha Rozenblit. It is especially fitting that this book is being published under the editorial leadership of Marsha Rozenblit, since I first fell in love with modern Jewish history in her undergraduate classroom. Without her infectious enthusiasm for Jewish history and dedication to her students, I surely would not be writing these pages.

The friendships I have made over the last several years, in New York and points across the globe, have brought many needed moments of levity to my life. In New York, my dearest and most steadfast friends Lauren Kaminsky, Shane Minkin, and Michelle Standley have been my touchstones. I am not sure I would have made it through graduate school and beyond without our regular stammtischer, many late-night phone calls, and our memorable trips to Berlin (a halfway point between Paris and Moscow). A special thanks also goes to my friend Tara Zahra. She has always provided friendship and a formidable scholarly example; our days shared in the archives made research infinitely more enjoyable. At the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU, Lara Rabinovich, David Kofman, Rachel Kranson, Flora Cassen, and Shira Kohn formed a cohort of Jewish historians and friends. In Paris, I shared many welcome glasses of wine and archival breaks with Kelly Ricciardi, Emily Machen, and Ethan Katz. A once committed New Yorker, I found myself surprisingly happy living in Hamilton, a small town in upstate New York. The friendships I forged while at Colgate University are too numerous to mention, but I would like to particularly thank Lesleigh Cushing, Heather Roller, Noah Dauber, Robert Nemes, David McCabe, Dan Bouk, Alice Nakhimovsky, Liz Marlow, and Ben Stahlberg. My subsequent move to Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, could have been jarring given the distance. But instead my friends and colleagues at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation—Mark Baker, Leah Garrett, Andrew Marcus, Andrew Benjamin, Nathan Wolski, and Helen Midler—as well as those in the History Department have ensured that it was a remarkably easy transition. I thank them for creating a warm academic community, integrating me into their lives and communities, and exposing me to the richness of life in Australia.

Noah Shenker and I immediately struck a friendship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Perhaps the early version of this work would have progressed more quickly had we not spent so many hours locked in endless conversation in the fellows’ office, but surely my happiness would have suffered. In the years that followed, he has continued to bring love, joy, laughter, and his keen editorial skills to my life and to this book. We now find ourselves once again with adjacent offices, and I am so grateful that he is by my side at work and at home.

In this study, I have carefully considered the historical institution of family, but in my life little analytical thought has been directed toward my own family. Rather, I have tended to take it for granted that I have been blessed with the kind of loving and warm family that the historical actors in this book would have surely praised. Judy and David Shenker have welcomed me into their own tight-knit family unit, and I am deeply grateful to be part of it. Many happy evenings and familial occasions have been spent with Andrea Norrito and Bruce Shapiro as well as the Gats—Maya, Michael, Carol, and Josh—on the Upper West Side and Long Island. I have always turned to my brother, Yonatan Doron, for lively political debates and emotional support and to my sister, Shelly Doron, for laughter and welcome distraction. My parents, Eldad and Marsha Doron, have unfailingly offered their love and support. Their home has been a refuge when I sought to escape my work, and their words a source of needed encouragement. And, above all, they have provided an enduring model for creating a warm and loving family life. I dedicate this book to them.

ABBREVIATIONS

ARCHIVES

ORGANIZATIONS

JEWISH YOUTH

and IDENTITY

in Postwar France

Introduction

THE GLASS FAMILY, CONSISTING of the French Jewish M. and Mme Glass and their daughters Jeannine and Simone, had been a cohesive family unit. That all changed in the heartbreaking year of 1942. The Glasses had already fled their home to take refuge in the Nièvre, but the change in location failed to alleviate the danger still looming over the family. Concerned about the tenuous nature of their wartime existence, M. and Mme Glass turned to the Lagouttes, non-Jews also living in the Nièvre, to care for both daughters.¹ Afterward, and despite their own deteriorating circumstances, the Glass parents continued to monitor their daughters’ well-being. Before her deportation, Mme Glass informed the Jewish communal body, L’Union générale des Israélites de France (the General Union of Israelites in France, UGIF), of her children’s whereabouts, while for his part, M. Glass maintained a correspondence with the girls throughout his internment in Camp de Clefs.² Facing imminent deportation, M. Glass reached out one last time to his daughters’ guardians, expressing his gratitude for sheltering his poor, orphaned daughters, entreating them to care for their girls as their own, and voicing his hope that he would one day see them again.³ M. Glass would not come to realize that wish.

The end of the war brought grim news to the surviving relatives. By 1946 M. Goldberg, the cousin of M. and Mme Glass, assumed that his kin had perished in the concentration camps. In light of this somber reality, he decided to approach the Bundist Jewish child welfare agency, La Colonie scolaire (the School Colony), for assistance in gaining custody of his now orphaned teenage cousins. But the Lagouttes were not eager to part from their charges. Having raised the Glass daughters for four years, they resisted relinquishing custody of the girls, whom they had grown to love. Upon learning of the situation, La Colonie scolaire, in the words of one social worker, agreed that the fight must be continued, pledging their help to organize a family court proceeding (conseille de famille), which did, in fact, eventually name M. Goldberg guardian of the girls. Goldberg chose the Luxembourgs, friends of the parents, as a foster family for the adolescents. Fourteen-year-old Simone soon thereafter left the family that had sheltered her for the home of her parents’ friends, the Luxembourgs. But the issue of Jeannine proved increasingly contentious. Mme Lagoutte’s adamant refusal to relinquish Jeannine prompted M. Goldberg, in the words of a Jewish social worker monitoring the case, to virtually kidnap her, with the assistance of some friends.⁴ Placed with her sister in the home of the Luxembourgs, Jeannine appeared content in such a different milieu. Yet, a few days before she was scheduled to leave for a Jewish sleep-away camp, Jeannine secretly phoned the Lagouttes, pleading to return home. The Lagouttes promptly traveled to Paris, where they picked up Jeannine, without the knowledge or consent of the extended Glass and Luxembourg families.⁵

M. Goldberg informed La Colonie scolaire of this recent twist in July 1947. By both M. Goldberg and La Colonie scolaire’s accounts, the child welfare agency demanded that the girl be returned by any means and redirected the case back to the family courts, where it lingered for an additional two years.⁶ In the interim, bad blood between the Christian and Jewish families only intensified. Jeannine penned hurtful letters to her Jewish relatives, including her sister, proclaiming that she refused to live with them under any circumstances whatsoever. Finally, the Court of Appeals ruled for the Lagouttes in part on the basis that not only was M. Glass not officially dead, but her stay with the Lagouttes accorded with his last known wishes.⁷

Jeannine Glass’s case remained closeted in the archives and presumably in the memories of those who participated in this family drama. And yet her experience speaks to a larger story about Jewish children and national and familial reconstruction efforts after the Second World War in France. In a bid to reconstitute national and ethnic communities, French Jewish communal and national agencies mobilized in the name of Jewish so-called lost children. The rationale behind these efforts was both intensely emotional and highly pragmatic. The youth represented the future of the nation (a term used loosely and defined as country, the polity, the ethnic community, and/or religion, depending on who used the term and when). For distressed families, these children were the last remains of deceased relatives. For all parties involved, the youth could not remain lost. It is presumably for this reason that La Colonie scolaire insisted that the struggle for Jeannine Glass must be continued, and it is presumably these reasons that prompted M. Goldberg to kidnap the girl.

The custody dispute encircling Jeannine Glass also reveals how the goals of rebuilding families in the wake of war remained intensely complicated and elusive. We do not know why postwar Jewish agencies housed the Glass girls with family friends and not their cousin, though perhaps we can presume that just like so many other French Jews, M. Goldberg’s own familial or emotional circumstances precluded caring for two adolescents. The Jewish agencies and the individuals involved in the case nonetheless worked to provide Jeannine and Simone with a Jewish family life. Yet that postwar family life quickly faltered. The years of familial separation and hiding as a Christian took a toll on Jeannine too great for her to overcome. By the late 1940s she found herself deeply embedded in the Lagoutte family and professed her devout Catholicism and distaste for Judaism. The shaky nature of French Jewish familial life, as exemplified by the Glass family strife, prompted Jewish agencies and families to adopt a collectivist approach for the care of their youth. At the height of the Glass family drama, when Jeannine declared that she would not live with them under any circumstances whatsoever, her Jewish guardians flirted with the idea of sending her to a Jewish children’s home or to Israel.⁸

This book examines efforts to rehabilitate Jewish children and reconstruct Jewish families, like those of Jeannine Glass, that had been fractured by the war. Even though her case was especially dramatic, replete with double kidnappings and clandestine escapes, her story typified the kind of emotional, financial, and communal energy invested in postwar French Jewish children and families. It considers how children like Jeannine Glass became objects of struggle as French Jews and non-Jews reassessed their vision of France in the wake of Vichy. Because of its pragmatic and emotional significance, the fraught matter of the rehabilitation of Jewish children created a forum for postwar French citizens of all faiths to voice their competing perspectives on Jewish communal and French national reconstruction. Such weighty and contentious issues as a nascent memory of the Holocaust, the contours of republicanism, the reconstruction of Jewish ethnicity, and the utility of the institution of family in the postwar world all figured in Jewish child welfare work and debates as France’s citizens labored to reconstruct the world of the child and reconstitute their visions of France.

This book documents how Jewish social workers, child welfare experts, and communal leaders working and writing in postwar France pinned their hopes and fears on the French Jewish community’s surviving thirty thousand Jewish youth. The story of efforts to rehabilitate young Jews helps recover the voices of children as they tried to make sense of their shifting identities, reveals Jews attempting to explain their specific experience of genocide to a French society itself attempting to forge shared narratives of wartime suffering and resistance, and explains how sectors of French society clashed over their notions of the institution of family and national identity.⁹ Writing familialism and the history of childhood into postwar French Jewish history also unravels some common historiographical assumptions. The history of efforts to reintegrate postwar Jewish children reveals that a popular embrace of Jewish ethnicity, communal comity, and an early articulation of Holocaust memory emerged on the French stage immediately at war’s end. This evidence in turn questions a historiography that has emphasized the allures of assimilation and silence for postwar French Jews, but it does not entirely support those historians that stress the themes of reconstruction and renewal.¹⁰ I argue that even though French Jews jumped into the task of reconstruction with vigor and energy, their underlying mood spoke to their sense of crisis and anxiety. This study additionally contributes to the historiography on the Jewish family by considering how ideas about national identity and citizenship have informed the familialist strategies of Jews in the modern era. The national political and cultural terrain navigated by Jews—in this case republican France—shaped how Jewish families formed and re-formed.

As French Jews sought to redress the demographic losses caused by the Nazis, matters relating to Jewish ethnicity and childhood acquired a poignant urgency. French Jewish organizations combed the countryside and the cities of France for the Jewish children hidden with non-Jewish families and institutions during the war. They constructed nearly seventy children’s homes for youth rendered parentless and homeless by the persecutions, engaged in debates about the best conditions in which to raise orphans, and finally established youth programs to affiliate every young Jew. The fact that French Jews continued to pursue programs and initiatives, from custody disputes in 1945 to Jewish Community Centers in 1955, reflects the tenacity of ethnic identities among French Jews in the postwar era.

Conceptions of family, however, proved highly fungible and adaptable to the demands of the circumstances. Though Jewish child welfare and family policy activists theoretically wished to reconstruct Jewish family life after the war, reality proved to be far more complicated. In particular, the emotional and economic fragility of countless Jewish families propelled Jewish activists to doubt the ability of French Jews to care properly for their children. This book shows how these communal leaders experimented with collective solutions, such as establishing children’s homes or organizing colonies de vacances (sleep-away camps), to house and educate French Jewry’s precious remaining youth. But Jewish organizations were not the only ones reassessing their ideas about the institution of family after the war. Many Jewish individuals also reconsidered their notions of family, a fact revealed by the staggering percentage of children placed in orphanages by surviving parents.

Just at the moment when French Jews were taking a collectivist approach, many European politicians and pedagogues were citing the nuclear family as key to forging social stability and building democracy. Collectivist education, as historian Tara Zahra has noted, was discredited in the West by the Nazi regime. Fearful of replicating the excessive intervention into family life of the Nazis, postwar politicians and child welfare workers now saw educating children within families as heralding a new age of democracy. For them, after years of total war and occupation, a return to stability and normality translated into rebuilding family ties that had been torn asunder by the war.¹¹ In France, republican politics often informed French non-Jewish perspectives on what they considered the best interest of the child. Rejecting the particularistic politics of Jewish agencies and the racism of the Nazis, French non-Jews generally sought to preserve the families that had been cobbled together in hiding during the war. Their belief that any loving family served the child’s best interests was rooted in their own competing attempts to restore republicanism or buoy Catholicism after Vichy. For this group, the importance of loving families—not sectarian interests—was undeniable and unassailable. French policies and practices toward orphaned children speak to a post-fascist attempt to reassert republicanism and Jewish life after Vichy racism.¹² The charged topic of children and nationhood emerged as a matter of considerable dispute.

SETTING THE STAGE: PREWAR FRENCH JEWISH HISTORY

The relationship between postwar French Jews and republicanism emerged out of a longer history that traces back to the French Revolution, a watershed moment in reconfiguring the terms between Jews and the state. No longer an autonomous community governed by its own laws and leadership, French Jews became the first Jewish community in Europe to navigate the privileges and perils of citizenship in a modern nation-state. The principles of republican universalism mandated that the forty thousand Jews of France launch into the task of self-regeneration: transforming from a group distinct in dress, religion, and communal affiliation, to equal citizens deeply integrated into French society and culture. French republicanism, committed to principles of individualism and individual rights, dictated that all of France’s citizens should embrace cultural assimilation and subsume particularistic ethnic, religious, or regional identities. In exchange for the political and social advantages conferred by emancipation, French Jews were to relegate Judaism to the private sphere where they practiced a set of religious beliefs, much like other French citizens. French Jews largely saw in the emancipatory contract an unprecedented opportunity for social and economic mobility and, over the course of the nineteenth century, generally shed many of the traits that had visibly distinguished them from the rest of France’s citizens. Embracing republican France, they sent their children to the public school system and their men to the army and to some of the highest positions in French administration. French Jews could be aptly described as crazy for the Republic.¹³

Earlier historiography had accepted the demands of republican universalism at face value, arguing that French Jews embraced a politics of assimilation that sought to negate Jewish particularity.¹⁴ And, yet, as a larger school of historiography has since demonstrated, French Jews never intended to radically assimilate into French society.¹⁵ Acculturation was a gradual and geographically inconsistent process. Whether they headed the Consistoire central (the Central Consistory, the state-sanctioned religious body of French Jews) or worked as cattle dealers in eastern France, French Jews picked and chose which aspects of the majority culture to adopt and which aspects of their minority culture to retain. Even among those seemingly assimilationist Parisian Jews who had reached the highest echelons of the French administration, they too balanced their loyalty to republican universalism with continued Jewish particularity. Pierre Birnbaum’s research on state-Jews who worked for the French administration reveals that they wed and befriended other Jews, served on the boards of Jewish communal organizations, and remained active in French Jewish religious life. Jews, even at the highest levels of the French state, continued to move in Jewish circles.¹⁶ The creation of the Alliance israélite universelle (Universal Israelite Alliance, AIU or the Alliance), established by the intellectual French Jewish elite in 1860, exemplifies the continued ties of Jewish ethnic bonds even as French Jews evangelized republican universalism. This organization, first established to combat antisemitism abroad, eventually sought to improve the situation of Levantine Jews by importing French language, culture, and values through an extensive network of French language schools and programs. In its work with international Jewry, the Alliance mimicked the overall civilizing mission of nineteenth-century imperial France, but its organizational agenda also testified to the sense of mutual responsibility that French Jews felt toward co-religionists abroad.¹⁷ The Jews of Alsace, the largest Jewish community of France, were slower and more hesitant in embracing French republican norms. Into the middle and last third of the nineteenth century, even as the process of their acculturation continued apace, many Alsatian Jews still adhered to Jewish folk and religious customs, traditional economic patterns, and linguistic difference in the form of Judeo-Alsatian. Alsatian Jews only slowly and partially accepted the assimilatory project of self-regeneration.¹⁸ Ultimately, while in theory nineteenth-century French Jews publicly championed French republican universalism, in practice their quotidian reality spoke to the continued ties of ethnic belonging.¹⁹

From the earliest days of the Revolution, French Jews never constituted a cohesive and homogenous entity. But the waves of Jewish immigrants that landed in France at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century further diversified the nature of French Jewry and exacerbated the tensions between Jewish particularism and French universalism. Between 1881 and 1914, approximately 44,000 eastern European Jews made their way to Paris, where they built a vibrant and varied Yiddishist, Leftist, and working class subculture.²⁰ At the close of the First World War, 150,000 Jews resided in France.²¹ Focusing on the extremes of these two groups—the French Jewish establishment such as the Consistoire central and the Alliance, or the activist immigrant organizations—has led some historians to stress the gulf and the friction that divided immigrant and native French Jews.²² Judaism dictated the dress and the daily rhythms of many of these observant eastern European Jews, thereby challenging republican ideology that consigned religious observance to the private sphere. Concerned that this wave of visibly distinct immigrants would spark a resurgence of antisemitism, the native French Jewish establishment attempted to acculturate and integrate the new arrivals through a series of education and social-welfare programs. But these efforts were met with resistance and resentment. Historians have argued that immigrants felt the establishment had adopted a condescending and patronizing attitude in their refusal to accept the validity of multiple forms of Jewish expression in France. Rather than finding a middle ground, the establishment demanded immigrants shed their previous ideological and religious commitments and accept the mores of French culture and society.²³

The interwar period further reconfigured the French Jewish community through immigration and also has served as a site of recent historiographical reappraisal. Between 1919 and 1939, France provided refuge to large numbers of Jews fleeing poverty in eastern Europe and later fascism in central Europe. On the eve of the Second World War, somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000 Jews made their home in France.²⁴ This influx of immigrants and refugees, coupled with the general economic and political climate of interwar Europe, caused French Jewry to reckon with a series of thorny political and social challenges. Most notably, the 1930s witnessed a surge of antisemitism. The rise of the Nazis in particular prompted a large wave of refugees to make their way to France, just at the very moment when the French economy spiraled downward and French xenophobia and antisemitism spiraled upward; historians generally refer to this situation as the refugee crisis of the 1930s. Moreover, the dire predicament of central and eastern European Jews forced French Jews to grapple with the now pressing question of Zionism and Palestine as a site of Jewish refuge. The trifecta of Zionism, the refugee crisis, and antisemitism prompted some French Jews to reexamine previously held assumptions about the wisdom of the Israélite-Française model, a Jewish identity founded upon a solely religious framework.

These interwar developments have encouraged historians to reexamine the nature of the political and cultural antagonisms between native and immigrant Jews in France. A linguistic, economic, and cultural divide undeniably existed between native and immigrant French Jews, but as we have seen, immigrants did not import Jewish ethnicity into France. French Jews had long refused to buckle to the assimilatory force of the French state. In contrast to earlier scholarship that had focused on the extreme edges of the native and immigrant divide, more recent work has documented the zones of commonality and cooperation between the two groups. For one, though the first generation of Jewish immigrants generally felt most comfortable with Yiddish, their children opted for French. Focusing largely on the 1920s, Nadia Malinovich has argued that an increasing number of Jews in France reached a comfortable symbiosis between being French and Jewish. Responding to the spike in eastern European antisemitism and the momentum of the Zionist project in Palestine, writers, youth groups, and intellectuals felt compelled to articulate an increasingly communitarian conception of Jewish affiliation.²⁵

This reappraisal of the viability of the Israélite-Française model can be seen in a number of domains. Large numbers of French Jews (including establishment organizations such as the Consistoire central or the AIU) refused to embrace Zionism, remaining convinced that Jewish nationalism was irreconcilable with French universalism. Nonetheless, Malinovich and others have convincingly argued that the role of Zionism among interwar Jews has been underappreciated.²⁶ Convinced that Palestine should serve as a haven for persecuted eastern European or Levantine Jews, some French Jews upheld their tradition of supporting philanthropic initiatives—including those directed at supporting Zionism—that worked to aid their more unfortunate brethren. While older French Jews tended to view Palestine as a viable solution to the plight of persecuted co-religionists, younger French Jews of immigrant parents joined the small but still significant number of Zionist youth groups. Though, as the historian Daniel Lee has noted, these Zionist youth groups failed to attract the participation of large numbers of younger Jews of native French parentage, this fact should not imply Zionism’s failure to take hold of French Jewish youth in other ways.²⁷ Lee points to the Éclaireurs israélites de France (Jewish Scouts of France, ÉIF), supported by the Consistoire central, as representing a crucial vehicle in introducing mainstream younger French Jews to Zionism.

The refugee crisis reveals how the French Jewish establishment came to work tirelessly on behalf of non-native French Jews. The immigration of thirty thousand German and Austrian Jews to France after 1933 collided with the explosion of French antisemitism.²⁸ This rise in antisemitism resulted from a confluence of factors: the large waves of refugees, the Great Depression, the looming possibility of yet a second world war, and, some would argue, a deeply entrenched right-wing antisemitic tradition.²⁹ This surge in antisemitism meant that many Jews in France encountered social antisemitism in their day-to-day life, and the Jewish establishment had to strategize how to most effectively handle both this uptick in antisemitic hostility and the refugee crisis. Some historians have argued that the French Jewish leadership doggedly adhered to the politics of discretion and patriotic rhetoric in the face of this crisis, whereas immigrant and youth groups opted to wage a public political battle against antisemitism and champion the cause of Jewish refugees.³⁰ The historian Vicki Caron has agreed with these scholars that the reaction of the French Jewish establishment was woefully inadequate during the first years of the refugee crisis, but she has also shown how divisions existed within the French Jewish establishment regarding how to formulate appropriate and effective communal policy vis-à-vis the crisis. Furthermore, by the second half of the 1930s, the native French Jewish leadership embraced a pro-refugee stance and went to great pains to help overturn anti-immigration legislation.³¹ All in all, a greater number of immigrant and native French Jews came to realize that the source of antisemitism resided not with the behavior and presence of immigrant Jews, but with the French.

On the eve of the Second World War approximately 330,000 Jews resided in France, only a third of whom enjoyed French citizenship. The recent scholarship documenting the interwar era has convincingly called into question previous historiography that had damned the native French Jewish establishment for pursuing a politics of assimilation nearly till the bitter end. Instead, a complex picture of a French Jewry in transition emerges—demographically reconfigured by decades of immigration, gradually accepting of forms of Jewish expression based on communitarian and ethnic allegiances, and increasingly, though not entirely, willing to work with, rather than against, Jewish immigrants and their agencies. The 1920s and the 1930s set the stage for the developments that this book will trace in the war’s wake. Larger segments of French Jewish society came to appreciate the value of Jewish communal cooperation and reassessed the legitimacy of plural forms of Jewish identification that ran counter to the ideal of republican universalism. In the wake of the Holocaust, the seeds sown in the interwar era came into bloom.

THE WAR, CHILDREN, AND FAMILIES

The fall of France in 1940 served as the greatest challenge to French Jews’ faith in French equality and liberalism. When the Third Republic collapsed, the German authorities occupied the Northern Zone, while a collaborationist regime, referred to as Vichy,