French Jewish History

Until the 1960s, landsmanshaftn societies included more than 10,000 families in Paris alone, or three-quarters of Yiddish-speaking Jews. Composed mainly of Holocaust survivors, these societies gradually shifted from providing social services to serving as social spaces in which survivors could gather and share their memories of their traumatic experiences. They encouraged the publication of various memorial writings – from Memorial books (yizker bikher) to historical essays and, sometimes, literary testimonies. This article analyses all known publications from these landsmanshaftn societies between 1946 and the 1960s. Their distinctive features – such as the importance of war experiences in France, single-author-publications or the emergence in Paris of the Memorial Book’s literary model – reflect the particularities of the Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors’ community living in France, compared to their brethren – and interlocutors – in America or in Israel.

Français [English abstract follows].

« Sur l’horloge de l’histoire », note Adam Rayski, « les aiguilles avançaient plus vite pour les Juifs que pour les autres populations de l’Europe occupée. Le temps des autres n’était pas exactement le nôtre… » [Adam Rayski Nos illusions perdues, Paris, Balland, 1985, p. 91]. Cependant, les Juifs ne peuvent pas faire individuellement l’expérience du temps à un rythme constant. L’expérience du temps n’est en effet jamais uniforme. Concernant celle des Juifs de France pendant l’Occupation, elle n’a guère été vraiment interrogée, tout comme la manière dont leur temporalité est structurée durant ces années. À travers l’exemple rémois, notre propos entend démontrer l’importance de ces questions dans la compréhension de la condition des Juifs de France au cours de cette période. Il mobilise dans ce but de nombreux témoignages, ainsi que des concepts et notions de psychologie en plus des outils de l’historien. Au terme de notre démonstration d’inspiration phénoménologique, une temporalité en majeure partie différente dès 1942 de celle des non-Juifs se dessine, composite, saccadée. Elle traduit une persécution qui s’étend au final jusqu’à l’architecture soutenant la vie des Juifs de France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

* Romain Dupré, « The Lived Time of the Jews of France during the Second World War : the example of Reims ».

« On the clock of history », says Adam Rayski, « the hands advanced faster for Jews than for the other people of Europe that was under occupation. The time of the others was not exactly like ours… » [Adam Rayski Nos illusions perdues, Paris, Balland, 1985, p. 91]. Meanwhile, the Jews cannot individually experience time at a constant rate. Their experience of time is indeed never uniform. For the Jews of France during the Occupation, Time was hardly really questioned, like how their temporality was structured over the years. Using the example of Reims, our purpose intends to show the importance of these issues in the understanding of the status of the Jews of France during this period. For this purpose, he mobilises many testimonies and psychology concepts, in addition to the tools of the historian. At the term of our phenomenologically-inspired demonstration, Temporality contours between Jews and non-Jews show the emergence of major differences from 1942 onwards; Jews’ time being more interrupted, less constant. It reflects a persecution which in  the end extends to the architecture supporting the life of the Jews of France during the Second World War.

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

Résumé : Cet article se propose d’examiner, dans la perspective de la typologie générale, certaines dynamiques morphocréatrices à l’œuvre dans le lexique d’une variété minoritaire. Le français parlé par les israélites de Gascogne, cas typique d’une « langue spéciale » propre à un groupe restreint, puise une partie substantielle de sa matière lexicale propre dans le contact avec l’hébreu, employé comme langue liturgique, ou ‘hiérolecte’, par ce groupe parlant. Cependant, ces ‘hébraïsmes’, indépendants sémantiquement de la langue-source, ne doivent être considérés comme des emprunts, en ce qu’ils dérivent d’énoncés liturgiques par voie de délocutivité. Leur sens repose sur l’évocation de l’acte de profération ou sur un geste qui lui est associé. Après une étude typologique des cas les plus caractéristiques de ce matériau linguistique inédit, son analyse, concluant sur une reformulation du paradigme délocutif, apportera des éléments à la compréhension des faits généraux lexicologiques et linguistiques dont il relève. ////
Abstract : This article focuses on some morphological features of a minority variety of French, within general linguistic typology. The French vernacular spoken by the Jews of Gascony is an emblematic example of a narrowly used communal variety whose differential vocabulary is mainly borrowed. In this case, contact with Hebrew, used solely as a ‘hierolect’ (a language serving only sacred and ritual purposes), provides much of the lexical material. However, these ‘Hebraisms’, semantically unrelated to the source language, cannot be regarded as loanwords, for they are built through delocutivity from liturgical acts of speech. Their meaning derives from the utterance itself or from a gesture associated with it. Following a typological study and classification of the most characteristic samples of this original material, its analysis, concluding with a renewed definition of the delocutive paradigm, will propose new elements towards the understanding of relevant general lexicological and linguistic facts.

Published in Zeramim II: 2, pp. 81-120 as found at www.zeramim.org

Entering territory beyond the United States, in “In Fashions & Out Fashions: When Appearing Jewish Becomes Illegal,” Jonah Rank reviews Québec’s recent legislation that banned Muslim women’s facial coverings when receiving or offering public services.
Speculating what an appropriate Jewish response ought to be to the suppression of visible marks of Jewish identity, Rank explores five episodes from Jewish religious history and mythology when Jews—real and imagined—have faced such crises.

ERRATA:
On p. 93, " sacred soil in Ottoman and eventually Palestine" should read "sacred soil in the Ottoman Empire (and eventually Palestine)." My gratitude to my mother-in-law, Myra Weiss, for finding this one! (She's a great proofreader!)
More to come?

De l’affaire Dreyfus à 1940, les Juifs de France ont réagi face à l’antisémitisme. Mal interprétée pendant longtemps par une historiographie marquée par la mémoire de la Shoah, l’histoire de leurs rapports à la haine qu’ils suscitent reste pourtant encore largement à écrire. Cet article à caractère exploratoire entend montrer où et comment se nouent ces rapports. Dans cette optique, nous examinons l’espace des sources, la scène publique, la coulisse et l’intime à travers le prisme du fait minoritaire et plus précisément de la condition juive. Cette grille de lecture et la pluralité de l’identité juive impliquent de multiplier les regards mais aussi de mobiliser une importante documentation souvent inédite. Notre analyse s’appuie dès lors sur l’histoire locale et individuelle, sans négliger cependant celle à l’échelon national. Il en ressort une histoire non linéaire et loin d’être marginale.

This study offers a linguistic description of the idiom of the Jews of the Comtat Venaissin ("Judeo-Provençal") at the end of the 18th century, based on a critical edition of the only relevant document illustrating this language, a theatrical play in verse entitled Harcanot et Barcanot. The introduction provides a philological inventory of all known sources of "Judeo-Provençal." The critical and variorum edition of the text, accompanied by linear glosses in English, is followed by a commentary comprising a glossary and analysis of all relevant linguistic features. It reveals, inter alia, that this language possessed words pertaining to the linguistic repertoire of French Jews since the Middle Ages; as for the phonetic features of the Jewish dialect of Provençal, their etiology is to be found in the history of the communities. The study concludes with a reassessment of the nature of linguistic variation in the dialect of the Jews of Provence.

This article challenges the assumption that participants in the Judeo-French literary renaissance of the 1930s were exclusively French-born Ashkenazi Jews by focusing on the contributions of new Sephardic immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. Although many immigrants were intent on assimilating into French society, authors such as Abraham Navon and Joseph Benrubi used their literature to encourage the community to find ways to negotiate between ancestral tradition and the new host culture. Close readings of Navon’s and Benrubi’s work reveal a hybrid
French–Sephardic identity formed by juxtaposing Judeo-Spanish language and ritual with French secular life. By following these literary models, new immigrants could integrate into French society without denying their heritage.

Cet article a pour objet de présenter et décrire un manuscrit bayonnais inédit d'une traduction rituelle en castillan des Haftarot des Trois semaines, unique exemple d'une tentative d'adaptation des accents massorétiques à un texte autre que celui de la Bible hébraïque.
Ce document exceptionnel s'inscrit par ailleurs dans la suite du corpus de manuscrits liturgiques des Israélites du Sud-ouest, publiés récemment en français chez Peeters.
Le manuscrit présente de surcroît des particularités philologiques dignes d'intérêt, surtout au regard de l'analyse des traditions linguistiques de la dite communauté, dans laquelle se place cette étude.

Jewish rights in the Balkans constituted a significant concern for Western European Jewish elites in the nineteenth century, in particular for the Alliance Israélite Universelle. For the organisation, defending these rights was a duty not only for France but for Europe as a whole. International advocacy shaped the self-understanding of French Jewish political leaders as Europeans. However, their legacy was ambiguous: if Jewish activists in the Balkans adopted many of their political strategies, they increasingly questioned French Jewish activists’ idealised vision of Europe.

This article sheds new light on the linguistic identity of the so-called 'Portuguese Jews' of Gascony. According to the currently accepted historical reconstruction, after being Spanish-speaking during the first centuries of their settlement in France, these communities all adopted standard French towards the end of the 18th century. However, their linguistic legacy has been misinterpreted: Spanish was a mere written tongue, used by learned members of the communities until the 18th century, whereas Gascon, the local vernacular, was spoken. This situation of diglossia, paralleling that of the local Christian inhabitants, who wrote in French yet spoke Gascon, resulted in differentiation of the common language of both communities, with the emergence of a distinctive Jewish variety. Now mostly obsolescent, this 'Jewish' language is being recovered through intensive study of textual evidence – samples of which are provided here along with some of our theories.

This article gives a new approach to the case of the abbé Grégoire and to the debates concerning his pantheonization in 1989 through an analysis of his idea of regeneration. The author studies the idea of regeneration in Gregoire’s work, from its pre-revolutionary origins to the French Revolution and analyses his ideas of regenerating oppressed people in France (such as Jews, Blacks, dialect speaking inhabitants), the French Nation and the world as well. The author emphasizes the paradoxes linked with the idea of regeneration as it is both liberating and constraining. She concludes by stressing the fact that today in France these contradictions are still parts of the way cultural differences are viewed.

Among the Jewish reviews born in France in the wake of the “ Jewish Revival ” in the twenties, Menorah was one of the first as well as one of those which lasted fot the longest time. Originally financed by the World Zionist Organization, it was created by Jacques and M. O. Camhy, and had been managed since 1924 by Gustave Kahn. The analysis of its editorial politics and its choice of themes reveal the tendencies of the French Zionism in those years, and more specifically of the coming together between Jewish nationalism and the progressist ideals of Justice and Peace dear to the “ Geneva generation ” and of the Jewish culture and identity.

Ce texte est extrait d’un livre à paraître sur l’Histoire des Juifs de France, de l’Emancipation (1791) à nos jours. Les extraits choisis concernent principalement trois mythes, répandus  notamment aujourd’hui  à gauche et à l’extrême gauche:
– le mythe selon lequel la Résistance aurait été particulièrement sensible à l’antisémitisme, à la déportation des juifs et à leur génocide pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale ;
– le mythe selon lequel la gauche et le CRIF (qui en 1944 regroupait toutes les tendances politiques ET religieuses juives) auraient rapidement tiré les leçons  historiques et politiques du judéocide ;
– le mythe selon lequel l’Etat français et l’intelligentsia de gauche auraient eu une attitude « philosémite » après la Libération, mythe diffusé par la mouvance décoloniale dont font partie Houria Bouteldja et le PIR.
Ces extraits n’abordent ni les rapports entre les Juifs autochtones et les autres habitants de l’empire colonial français en Afrique du Nord, pendant la même période, ni les activités des résistants juifs, y compris des Juifs sionistes, contre l’occupant nazi, questions traitées dans d’autres chapitres.
Yves Coleman, Ni patrie ni frontières, 24 octobre 2021

This article revisits the history of the Metz contest of 1785-8, commonly seen as a seminal event in the story of Jewish emancipation in France. Using newly discovered documents, it highlights a contest on Jews held even earlier: that of the Société des Philantropes of Strasbourg in 1778. Furthermore, this essay offers a new perspective on the abbé Grégoire’s participation in the Metz contest by analyzing his comments on the Strasbourg competition (which he also entered) as well as the manuscript of Grégoire’s original Metz entry, long thought lost by scholars. While Grégoire is widely reputed to have co-written his Metz entry with Jewish friends, in the interest of helping them, the manuscript suggests that Grégoire wrote his first entry on his own, motivated more by a desire to protect his Emberménil parishioners from Jewish usury than to aid the Jews themselves. Indeed, Grégoire seems to have befriended individual Jews only during his revisions for the second phase of the contest, as he sought to make his entry more appealing to the Academy’s prize committee. This new information helps us to better understand Grégoire’s motivations in becoming involved with Jews and his later frustrations with them. It also gives us a more complicated picture of the relationship between Grégoire and his Jewish associates than that of assistants who embraced his ideas uncritically.

The lecture I propose intends to analyse the simultaneous developments between Wissenchaft des Judentums and the so-called Franco-Judaïsme in the context of the mid-Nineteenth century: how did the two movements speak to the Jews? How did they deal with Jewish identity? What importance did religion have for them? What is the difference between French “Mosaism” and German reform?