Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945-1955

Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955

Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series

General Editor: Steven T. Katz

The Shtetl: New Evaluations

Edited by Steven T. Katz

The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Edited by Richard Landes and Steven T. Katz

Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955

Edited by Seán Hand and Steven T. Katz

Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955

Edited by Seán Hand and Steven T. Katz

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

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© 2015 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955 : edited by Seán Hand and Steven T. Katz.

pages cm

ncludes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4798-3504-1 (cl : alk. paper)

1. Jews—France—History—1945–1958. 2. Jews—France—Social conditions—History—1945–1958. 3. France—Ethnic relations—History—1945–1958. 4. France—Politics and government—1945–1958. I. Hand, Seán, editor. II. Katz, Steven T., 1944– editor.

DS135.F83P67 2015

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Seán Hand

1. The Revival of French Jewry in Post-Holocaust France: Challenges and Opportunities

David Weinberg

2. The Encounter between Native and Immigrant Jews in Post-Holocaust France: Negotiating Difference

Maud Mandel

3. Centralizing the Political Jewish Voice in Post-Holocaust France: Discretion and Development

Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac

4. Post-Holocaust Book Restitutions: How One State Agency Helped Revive Republican Franco-Judaism

Lisa Moses Leff

5. Lost Children and Lost Childhoods: Memory in Post-Holocaust France

Daniella Doron

6. Orphans of the Shoah and Jewish Identity in Post-Holocaust France: From the Individual to the Collective

Susan Rubin Suleiman

7. Jewish Children’s Homes in Post-Holocaust France: Personal Témoignages

Lucille Cairns

8. Post-Holocaust French Writing: Reflecting on Evil in 1947

Bruno Chaouat

9. Léon Poliakov, the Origins of Holocaust Studies, and Theories of Anti-Semitism: Rereading Bréviaire de la haine

Jonathan Judaken

10. André Neher: A Post-Shoah Prophetic Vocation

Edward K. Kaplan

11. René Cassin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle: A Republican in Post-Holocaust France

Jay Winter

About the Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Marilyn and Mike Grossman Conference Fund, housed at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University, for making possible the international conference held at Boston University in 2011 that inspired the production of this book. The editors also gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance and additional resources given to the production of this book by the Humanities Research Centre and the Department of French Studies, both at the University of Warwick. We wish to thank Dr. Claire Trévien for her translation of one chapter, and Dr. Amanda Hopkins and Holly Langstaff for their editorial assistance with all the chapters. We also thank David Lees for help with indexing. Sincere thanks, in addition, are due to Pagiel Czoka, the former Administrative Assistant at the Elie Wiesel Center, who worked tirelessly to see that everything needed for a successful conference was in place. Thanks also go to Rabbi Joseph Polak, who made the Hillel House available to us for use during the conference and provided our meals. We wish also to acknowledge the expertise, support, and friendship of Jennifer Hammer at NYU Press, and to thank the JDC Archives for permission to reproduce the cover image.

Introduction

Seán Hand

This book is concerned with a pivotal moment of history in France, the first ten years of political and social reconstruction after the end of World War II. It is a period that was crucial to the restoration of a Jewish population and cultural presence in France after years of persecution and destruction, and it involved such immediate tasks as the reunification of families and communities, restitution of property and resources, and reestablishment of rescinded rights. But it is equally a decade that involved major developments that came to challenge the very notion of a restoration of order, to the extent that it changed the enshrined and understood relationship between France and Jews. For in betraying Jews in France through the implementation of anti-Semitic policies and the facilitation of murder, the Vichy state also broke the powerful pact of republican assimilation. This pact had distinguished the particular French model of Jewish emancipation sometimes called Franco-Judaism. It conferred on Jews a theoretical equality arising out of secularist and universalist principles that effectively insisted on public invisibility as a distinct grouping.¹ Significantly, however, protection of Jews during the Vichy and occupation period had come overwhelmingly from nonstatist sources, and in the immediate postwar period the particular mistreatment of Jews was subsumed within an official narrative of an indivisible France that remained united in a collective experience and in reconstructive efforts. One observable consequence of this approach was a conscious and isolatable form of public self-organization among Jews in postwar France that was new to the country’s modern history. The decade in question therefore saw a rapid proliferation of societies, agencies, and schools of thought devoted to the open articulation of particular visions and community identities for Jews in France, where previously any distinctiveness had been subsumed, more often than not willingly, under the powerful assimilationist ethos of the French republican model. This fundamental shift was thereafter to become further propelled by subsequent postwar events of international significance, and especially those relating to decolonization and to post–Cold War geopolitics, which not only altered France’s demographic makeup, including that of its identifiable Jewish population, but also tested again the historical notions of allegiance, loyalty, and cultural affiliation for Jews in France.

Yet, for all the fundamental significance of these changes in the relationship between France and Jews, this is a decade that has often been somewhat overlooked until now. The reasons for this are perhaps obvious: momentous international events take place before and after the period in question, combined with the desire in both political circles and survivors’ mentalities to leave behind shameful and traumatic events and focus instead on national reconstruction and hopeful emotions. Unsurprisingly, historical accounts can repeat this effect when they return to the drama and uncertainty of the wartime period. They therefore tend to focus on the treatment of Jews that for so long remained insufficiently acknowledged by official accounts, and then move forward rapidly to review such dramatic moments of change as the significant immigration of North African Jews to France caused by the Algerian war of 1954–62 and more generally by the region’s decolonization, or to observe the tense conflict in loyalties and identifications produced by the events of the Six-Day War in 1967, including in reaction to comments made by significant figures such as Charles de Gaulle.²

To accept these large historical moments as defining, however, is also to internalize a certain timetable set in motion initially by the very synthesizing Gaullist narrrative of wartime efforts and postwar will, and therefore to overlook those fundamentally significant efforts made in many different quarters to restore the life, culture, and institutions of French Jewry in the immediate postwar period. Indeed, we could say that these movements were themselves to affect subsequent international shifts. It is therefore the aim of this volume to focus on the key relevant activities and ideas relating to the years 1945–55 in order to provide a fuller and truer picture of the relationship between France and the Jews on its soil at a moment of complex renovation.

At the beginning of the occupation, Jews in France numbered over 300,000. Almost two-thirds of them lived in Paris, and 190,000 were French citizens. Of the 76,000 deported from France during the war, fewer than 5 percent were to return. This does leave some 200,000 who did survive the destruction, and their numbers were to be augmented further by refugees immediately after the war, as well as at key moments thereafter. (Polls conducted in 2012 estimated the number of Jews resident in France to be between 483,000 and 600,000, making them the third-largest national grouping after citizens of Israel and the United States.) This is the size of the postwar population, then, that was to be affected by the tasks of wholesale institutional and psychological reconstruction. These tasks were undertaken by a rapidly proliferating number of committees, special operations, and purposeful individuals, whose actions and efforts took place within a period of continuing hardship and competing claims to immediate assistance. By focusing on this time, and especially by highlighting the efforts of significant Jewish organizations, large-scale related planning, and associated intellectual reconstruction, we achieve a much more continuous and informed understanding of the life, contribution, and significance of Jews in France in the postwar era. We can also note immediately that such reconstructive efforts served a difficult dual function in relation to Jewish identity. On the one hand, such identity could be naturally of a wholly practical and concrete nature, concerning, for example, the key issue of saved orphans whose psychological as well as physical welfare was forever affected by their experience. On the other hand, the question of identity effectively also had to assume the equally fundamental task of attempting to conceptualize the events that had taken place, and to propose a range of intellectual and identificatory solutions for Jewish life and culture in France and Europe. This is a task that we see enacted by such influential postwar figures as Emmanuel Levinas, Léon Poliakov, and André Neher. At both levels of activity, this kind of work came to assume a fundamental significance for any continuing sense of French republicanism, since these efforts effectively created a subtle shifting of weight between the coexisting dual identities of Jewish French citizen, on the one hand, and French Jew, on the other hand. This is not at all to suggest that French Jews necessarily abandoned the republican model of assimilationist identity. It is notable that postwar Jews did not relocate in significant numbers from France to Israel; and in seeking to isolate some of the reasons why this was so, we can do no better than to review the position of René Cassin, who provides an unambiguous reassertion of commitment to the traditional French concept of citizenship. But it remains equally true that the assimilationist model was thrown into crisis by the events of the Shoah in France, just as it has been further tested on subsequent occasions when official adherence to republican indivisibility and neutrality momentarily slipped in relation to attitudes toward Jews. In this aspect also, then, the immediate postwar period, in terms of accommodation and reaction, was effectively a foundational one for the contemporary complexities of Jewish identification and affiliation in France.³

Organizing Complexity

The focused study of this period, which involved an internationally coordinated approach to recovery and planning, immediately highlights the complexity and interactivity of all sociopolitical renewal in France, including for Jews. The tasks and events reviewed here were also occurring at a time when the end of World War II was widely felt to have inaugurated a potentially more deadly struggle for European domination that eventually was to settle into Cold War vigilance. Our focus therefore has the additional benefit of locating itself at a key moment of urgent and uncertain interactivity affecting not just France’s national self-identity but also Europe’s new transnational humanitarian and strategic concerns. David Weinberg’s chapter makes an essential point when it emphasizes, among other details, how, from the devastation of France’s religious and lay leadership, there arose an organizational will. By virtue of having survived the Holocaust in France, and being also at the heart of postwar allied operations with a heightened moral status, this organizational will made France the natural locus for forms of concerted Jewish activism that were also European, North American, and Zionist in their scope, address, and resources. This meant that new forms of French Jewish autonomy and internationalist self-identification arose powerfully in a period of geopolitical flux, wherein traditional structures and allegiances in France nevertheless wished to reassert themselves. The resulting complexity interestingly highlights how the transnational organizations that became important agents during this time were an early instance of the fundamental shifts in power that would begin to develop rapidly in postwar globalizing politics. As a result, we can appreciate how the French-based activities of the Conseil représentatif des israélites de France (CRIF), or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or the Joint), or the American Jewish Committee (AJC) ultimately held ramifications that extended well beyond their precise initial concerns. Such organizational activity therefore certainly affected the self-perceptions of French Jewry, and it arguably affected the broader image of France’s exceptionalism. Several of the chapters in this book therefore refer naturally to the existence and activities of such organizations, some of which were financed significantly via the JDC. To isolate just a few examples: the Comité juif d’action sociale et de reconstruction (COJASOR) assisted surviving or returning Jews; the Fonds juif social unifié (FSJU) evolved from initial refugee support to more wholesale orchestration of a French social, educational, and cultural Jewish presence in response to decolonization’s effects; the Conseil représentatif du judaïsme traditionaliste de France (CRJTF) looked to create Jewish youth centers, kindergartens, or holiday camps; the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) took an internationalist perspective on restitutions; and the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC) during the war itself began to compile documentary evidence of war crimes against Jews that would be cited in the Nuremberg trials, before becoming part of the archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah located in Paris. Such new forms of affiliation and planning were in addition, of course, to the transformed aims of other long-established organizations. One of the most important of these was undoubtedly the Paris-based Alliance israélite universelle (AIU), founded in 1860 to preserve the rights of Jews throughout the world via education. In the postwar period its politics shifted toward Zionism, even if de Gaulle typically viewed the Middle East presence of the AIU as also serving French colonial interests. A further example is the Oeuvre des secours aux enfants (OSE). Originally founded in 1912 by doctors in St. Petersburg as an organization designed to protect the health of needy Jews, during the war it had housed and assisted Jewish refugee children; but today it works in a much broader arena involving health, sociomedical, and educational support for Jewish populations, and as such works in partnership in several eastern European countries as well as in Israel.

The chapter by Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac detailing the founding fortunes of the CRIF during this period provides one valuable focus on the multiplicity of issues and choices which we can see would have affected the organizational will that emerged at this historical point. From the moment of its wartime inception, which itself was already contextualized by the history of interwar competition for Jewish political affiliation, the CRIF’s mission of speaking for all French Jewry instituted a fundamental change in the historical nature of French Jewish identification, in terms of both organization and political univocity. While the Central Consistory, the body governing Jewish congregations, looked at that time to retain internal control (it left the present-day CRIF in 2004), the alliance of often divergent political visions united such different figures as Léon Meiss (then head of the Consistory), Isaac Schneersohn (cofounder of the CDJC), and Robert Gamson (founder of the French Jewish scouting movement) around instances of anti-Semitism. Indeed, one of these instances involved early judgment of the possible moral culpability of the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF), a wartime French Jewish council or Judenrat recognized by a Vichy law of November 29, 1941. Out of this internal politics, however, and quickly moving beyond judgment of the war years, it found itself adopting international positions on Palestine and Israel, postwar rearmament, and Cold War politics, though without necessarily cohering around one common vision or creating common cause with organizations such as the AIU. The general effect during this decade was therefore to begin a process of shifting the collective voice away from a neutrality in keeping with a French assimilationist instinct, and toward the status of being an official French affiliate to the World Jewish Congress and an influential organ in French political life, a position the CRIF occupies today.

In a similar vein, the chapter by Lisa Leff traces a parallel shift in relations between Jewish organizations and the state during this time, concerning how the postwar insistence on republican race-blind policies could also generate major restitutional injustices, including where purloined items such as artworks were treated as national rather than private property. The case of book looting and restoration here provides a particularly fascinating study of the precise mechanisms and decisions that came into play when works were treated simultaneously as French patrimony (irrespective of a work’s origins) and as the heart of a particular Jewish community or society. As Leff shows, the interactive and diplomatic nature of much of the expeditionary and attributive work therefore involved the maintenance of a delicate partnership between bodies such as the AIU and the French state, in a way that seemed to maintain the historical assimilated position of Franco-Judaism and yet to acknowledge a cultural particularism whose untypical nature was justified as needs-driven but perhaps signaled a new relationship. In counterpoint to this, Maud Mandel’s study of the contemporary tensions and transformations created by immigrant arrivals for the predominant character of Franco-Judaism usefully stresses how the disruptions of the Shoah and World War II did not necessarily overturn all traditional internal notions of difference, but rather perhaps laid the conditions for an accommodation of the equally dramatic development of French Jewry following the further immigrant influx arising in particular from France’s decolonizations. Mandel traces all the organizational attempts to articulate and govern these changes in a way that brings out how the Consistory and the CRIF themselves needed to acknowledge entrenched exclusivist attitudes among the historical Jewish population. These attitudes could be seen to reaffirm the national neutralism of Franco-Judaism and simultaneously to betray a snobbery and fear regarding how association with unassimilated groups might undo certain historically acquired benefits. In a fascinating reflection of changes occurring at the national level, this complex reaction produced both a continuing rhetorical adherence to assimilation and the beginnings of a more pluralist sensibility that would, for example, allow consideration of greater institutional decentralization as the price for retaining unity within a broader Consistory. Mandel ultimately isolates two key factors in this transformation which also acted as a profound influence on the entire French nation in the postwar period: the general Americanization that was accelerated in this case by JDC funding, and which challenged and overtook older sectarian divisions; and the dramatic revitalization of French Jewish spirituality by North African immigration.

Uses and Abuses of Children

The chapters by Daniella Doron, Susan Suleiman, and Lucille Cairns collectively highlight one exemplary instance of the complex consequences of immediate reconstruction, namely, the operations and aims associated with the plight of Jewish orphans after the war. Approximately 10,000 Jewish children were deprived of one or both of their parents, with as many as 7,000 placed in Jewish children’s homes at the Liberation. As 40 percent of these children had one surviving parent, the situation was further complicated by the economic circumstances of surviving relatives.⁴ As with other problems, this issue was overdetermined by the specifics of the political context: France had to deal not just with a national version of postwar restoration, but also with the intricacies of simultaneous adherence to anti-Semitic hatred by Vichy and resistance to those operations by ordinary citizens. Given the destruction of families through war, the inclusion of children in roundups and deportation by Vichy officials, and the concealment by French people of Jewish children under threat, the plight of children was to provide an obvious focal point for multiple and sometimes conflicting thoughts of restorative justice. Inevitably, as Doron discusses, the issue quickly became politicized, with the condition of innocent and vulnerable children being co-opted not just by contesting narratives of martyrdom, but also by broader forms of exculpation and universalization. This was a period marked dramatically by the so-called Finaly affair (1948–53), a legal dispute involving the Consistory that played out against the background of a Vatican instruction, wherein two Jewish boys from Grenoble whose parents had been deported were cared for by a Catholic who initially refused to return the children to their aunts on the grounds that they were now Catholics. In the midst of this instrumentalization, as Suleiman brings out in detail, the French context also entailed the further psychological complications associated with a whole generation of Jewish children who had survived the war by dint of being hidden in France by non-Jewish families, and for whom subsequent conflicts of emotional identification and narrative understanding remained unresolved, sometimes to the present day. Inner conflict and religious identity became intertwined, creating a French Jewish memory that was effectively denied forms of working through during the period. Suleiman endorses the view of Annette Wieviorka and other historians that, because of the general public attitude, this situation did not change until after the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. This meant that for these young survivors psychological conflict was to remain as a foundational complex for the postwar era, resulting in later eruptions around such moments as the Six-Day War, where one’s French and Jewish identity again became potentially opposed.⁵ These unresolved complications, which play out a tension between memory and history that occupied French historiography from the 1970s on, are intimately charted by Lucille Cairns in her reading of personal testimonies by hidden Jewish girls. Both their accounts and the related research highlight the sheer diversity of the problem. Orphanages could have distinct regimes, aims, and therapeutic practices, whether because of a director’s personality or because of the different secular, religious, and ideological identities of the organization involved. Beyond this, though, there were also broader implications relating to the source of financial support, such as the JDC, and even to the fact that the French Jewish community, perhaps regarding the orphaned child as an unwelcome link to the past or simply as an impossible additional burden, itself sometimes displayed a dereliction of duty. An associated fact is that approximately 5 percent of the total Jewish population in France between 1947 and 1950 undertook a change of patronymic, a figure that doubles if one includes Jews who adopted a gallicized patronymic on acquiring French citizenship. Such recorded name changing was six times higher in the period 1945–57 than in the whole of the period from 1808 (when Napoleon I decreed that all Jews had to adopt a fixed patronymic) and 1939.⁶ Cairns also advances the interesting thesis that the analyzed memoirs seem progressively more generous as the events recede into the past, suggesting a longer-term resolution of trauma that among other things confirms the idea that the immediate postwar period provided no accessible psychological framework for recovery and rehabilitation. By focusing, then, on the hugely compelling cases of the Jewish orphans produced by the persecutions, extermination policy, and war, and by including in their study the continuing conflict generated by subsequent propaganda campaigns, traumatic identity formation, and unresolved tension between personal memory and public history, these chapters underscore powerfully again the key point that this period not only saw the attempted management of immediate concerns, but also anticipated a postwar age of multipolar belonging. The effects of this conflicted sense of allegiance were to be registered belatedly in France by later generations, whether via political adherence or by way of complex narrative constructions that attempted to express the intricacies of postmemory identity.⁷

One Nation, One Narrative

The resolutions of Jewish agencies and authorities during this period were fundamentally contextualized by the political and economic problems besetting the French Fourth Republic, which ran constitutionally from 1946 to 1958. From September 1944, when the government assumed the task of rebuilding a nation still at war, and so favored the armaments and associated infrastructural industries over domestic shortages, France used national resurgence to dismiss self-examination. This era was above all to be one of rapid economic and institutional regrowth in both France and Europe. There were some key achievements in the period, notably relating to the establishment of comprehensive social security and health care systems. But the government was also dogged from the beginning by its immediate history, tense relations with General de Gaulle, and an unstable ministerial balancing act that sought to maintain a three-way party alliance. It was also being driven along at the same time by the multiple ideals of European unity and the epochal collapse of colonial empire. In this new landscape, the capacity and will of the government to assume full responsibility for the Shoah, and to confront its profoundly altered relationship with the Jewish population, were arguably already limited by these immediate politicoeconomic priorities, as well as by unwillingness or inability to acknowledge the national nature of betrayal.

One key effect was that the particular treatment of Jews during the Vichy and occupation years became categorized as a precise wartime event that could therefore be addressed and settled by the épuration or purging process that largely took place between 1944 and 1945. Order, efficiency, and justice were de Gaulle’s stated priorities in a liberation speech made at the Palais de Chaillot on September 12, 1944, and at one level this list was clearly being stated in terms of relative importance.⁸ Indeed, the prevailing conditions arguably militated against any sympathy for Jewish survivors of France’s war record, who in some quarters were still tenaciously identified as entirely foreign, and whose return from the camps or exile could therefore be represented as an added burden rather than as a consequence of the state’s culpability. Indirect factors further fueled this sentiment: the resolute Gaullist presentation of France as a unified resistant wartime force that had never betrayed itself even in its darkest moments, and the ambivalence about the assistance and continuing presence of the United States on French soil (which flared up, for example, over military decisions taken at the moment of the recapture of the city of Strasbourg at the beginning of 1945), encouraged and mobilized a general chauvinism that vaguely legitimated dismissal of the treatment of Jews.⁹

These tendencies were already primed, moreover, by the experience of ordinary French citizens during the initial period when prisoners and deportees liberated by Allied forces gradually returned home. The word experience is here salient, for plainly the national narrative of united resistance and self-won triumph in the face of external threats was flatly contradicted by the complex and compromised reality that refugees embodied. Of the 5 million people of different categories who had to find their way home and attempt to rebuild lives, 700,000 were actually Service du travail obligatoire (STO) workers, that is, compulsory work service laborers who were returning from mostly forced employment in German factories. Their status as a Vichy-requisitioned nonresistant workforce complicated the notion of refugee for state propaganda and ordinary citizen alike. Moreover, the logistics associated with returning prisoners, deportees, workers, and survivors at one level were regarded as hampering the continuing war effort’s need to ration resources such as transportation,