Alexandre ADLER is a historian and editorial director of Courrier International.
The problem with the Ashkenazim is that if you take them at the beginning of this century, they are extremely differentiated. If, by contrast, you take them a century earlier, they are very close over a fairly broad surface. And if you take them now, they are closer still. So there is a kind of Gaussian bell-curve where the starting point is shared; differentiation is at its maximum during the Emancipation: this is borne out in France with the successive waves of Ashkenazi populations that made up French Jewry, in the majority until just after the war. And today, after the effect of belonging to France, there is once again a drawing together. There is nonetheless a very strong differentiation that reaches its peak during the 1930s, between what our parents jokingly called the “Jews” and the “Israelites.” The Israelites being a very profoundly different group — at least so they thought. In reality, what is going on? From the eighteenth century on, a very substantial movement of emigration takes place toward France. For the Alsatian Jews, who imagine themselves perhaps to be French of longer standing, generally are not, inasmuch as the great movement that constituted Alsatian Jewry came after the annexation to France; it is at that moment that a great number of Jewish families from the Rhine Valley moved toward France, quite simply because the Intendants of Louis XIV and Louis XV were indisputably more tolerant and practiced good administration where the petty German princes were tyrannical.
So it is a constant movement that operates at this time and that will swell Alsatian and Lorraine Jewry; you can see it, moreover, in the names: all the SCHWOBs come from the left bank of the Rhine; the RASTIBONNEs and the SPIREs. Parisian Jewry begins in this period: the PEREIRE brothers founded the first Jewish cemetery (that of the Aide aux Aveugles) upon coming from Bordeaux, because they had privileges. They were French subjects in their own right, since they were regarded as Christians. The Bordeaux Jews were descendants of Marranos with a particular status. So it is they who open the first cemetery and the first tolerated Jewish community; but in fact there had been Jews for 60 to 80 years before them, and there they come somewhat from all over the world: many from Amsterdam, a few already from Poland. Finally, King Stanislas Leszczyński of Poland brings with him, like every Polish nobleman, a whole retinue of stewards and Jewish servants who are at the origin of Lorraine Jewry. It is thus a somewhat particular characteristic, and the city of Metz, French since the sixteenth century, has always had a Jewish community that is at once more Frenchified than the others and more closely connected — as one sees in the Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln — with the rest of German Jewry. Because Metz is a great trading center and, at bottom, the counterpart of Frankfurt; this, until the end of the Ancien Régime. All these people speak a Western Yiddish, until the end of the eighteenth century and even a little at the start of the nineteenth century. Léon BLUM’s father, even at the end of the Second Empire, understands a few scraps of it. This is called Judeo-Alsatian.
Grand Rabbi Simon DEBRÉ wrote a little book in the 1890s entitled L’humour judéo-alsacien (Judeo-Alsatian Humor), which contains, by the way, many stories particularly intelligible to Poles but which obviously vanish completely amid the republican solemnity of the following generation. What brings about a real break is the war of 1870 and the rallying to France of the majority of these Jews of Alsace and Lorraine and their Parisian cousins, who had already begun to flock in under the Second Empire. All at once, indeed, the Germanic reference that had always been very important in this Alsatian Jewry disappears violently because one is for France and against Prussia. Small towns of the Vosges, of the Territoire de Belfort, and even villages fill with synagogues because the Jews of the Haut-Rhin or the Bas-Rhin settle just a few kilometers away. This is the case notably of the DREYFUS family, which keeps business interests in Mulhouse but relocates to the Vosges. That is why Senator SCHEURER-KESTNER will be the first defender of the Captain, since Mathieu DREYFUS knew him through business in his department. Marcel MAUSS’s family settles in Saint-Dié (perhaps that is what would have fostered an ethnological concern in their offspring). Families of all kinds in Belfort, in localities as illustrious as Giromagny, Fusmein; and then a portion of the Alsatian textile industry transfers itself to Besançon, to Dijon, and even to the Lower Seine: this is the origin of the Jewish communities of Rouen, of Le Havre — where they mingle, moreover, with the Alsatian Protestants — and, of course, of Paris. This is the beginning of a great Alsatian and Lorraine Jewry that becomes Parisian and, above all, that Frenchifies itself aggressively.
A typical case: Léon BLUM spoke no foreign language; I believe it was an absolute affectation still preserved among the older generation: to be nothing but French and, incidentally, or rather particularly, an Israelite. Grand Rabbi Kaplan, for example, pronounced the name of the English playwright “SHA-KES-PE-ARE”; let everyone make of that what they will, but in this fierce will to assimilation (of which Pierre BIRNBAUM spoke in that fine book Les fous de la République — The Zealots of the Republic) — which is also, moreover, an adherence to the French civil service even though that is not the origin of personal fortunes — there is this extraordinary will that PROUST saw perfectly well in BLOCH, the ridiculous Racinian who, moreover, comes to resemble more and more his Sephardic father-in-law, M. Nissim BERNARD. In any case, what is certain is that from this moment on the Israelites constitute themselves as a perfectly delimited and recognizable group. On the one hand, they want to be essentially French. They have cut themselves off from their roots in eastern France. On the other hand, they are going to — and this is a difference from the French Jewry of the first half of the nineteenth century — break with the rest of the Jewish world. Indeed, during the first part of the nineteenth century, French Jewry, which is on the path of assimilation, is also a Jewry that retains deep contacts, notably with Germany. There was then a convergence between French Jews and German Jews, a fairly similar vision of things. Thus the Alliance Israélite Universelle benefits from the banker support of BISMARCK, B. SERVAN-SCHREIBER, but on the whole there is a break with the Germanic world. This break is translated even into a difference with Alsatian Jewry itself, the Jewry that remained in Alsace and that between the two wars will undergo a noticeably different evolution. Why? Well, first of all because the Alsatian Jews are not familiar with laïcité (secularism), which becomes the religion of the Israelites. They are in a German system where they pay a secular tax for their religious communities. They are identified as Jews much more than as citizens, unlike their close cousins who had become French. Moreover, like the whole Alsatian population, they adapt to the German system. To such a degree that the mayor of Colmar, for example, in 1910 and throughout almost the entire “Belle Époque,” will be a Jewish lawyer, Maître Daniel BLUMENTHAL; likewise, many Jews recognize themselves in German social democracy. After 1918, Alsatian Jewry is somewhat out of step. It is very Germanized: it is there, moreover, that a whole pool of Germanists develops, like André NEHER, who is of German culture but also far more religious. It is thus the role that the University of Strasbourg and Strasbourg Jewry will play in a certain religious return among the
Ashkenazim. Indeed, it has trouble — one sees it with André NEHER — finding common ground with its natural interlocutors, the French Israelites. And, if the Ashkenazim assimilate to France like the Alsatians, their situation is no less ambiguous on this point, as one sees for example even among the Communists of Alsatian origin: A. Billon will be an architect in Berlin for ten years of his life before returning to France, or again with Jean GOL, a Surrealist, who is a bilingual poet. This is that somewhat overlooked aspect of Alsatian Jewry.
It goes without saying that all this is part of the skeletons in the closet, for with the advent of Nazism, obviously, this German reference that was still so important (for example with William WEILER, a man from Mulhouse who passes directly from Berlin to Hollywood) disappears purely and simply: it is no longer a matter of being between German and French culture.
The debate plays out between France and Nazism. So this bilingual Alsatian Jewry, half oriented all the same toward the German reality, disappears. And today we are witnessing a fairly steady exodus of the Alsatian Jews toward the interior, toward Paris, which takes place practically from generation to generation, even if there still exists an important core in Strasbourg — but it is no longer the same. So much for the Jews who were, at bottom, foundational to France.
Then come the waves of emigration. As I said, the first are the Germans. We nearly kept Karl MARX, who stayed a little while. Paris was the capital of German Jewry throughout the entire first half of the nineteenth century. HEINE became a French citizen; his family, moreover, remained French: they are the FURTADO-HEINEs, since they married into FURTADO, the first President of the Sanhedrin. Ludwig BÖRNE, who was the first prophet of the German Left from Frankfurt, is buried at Père-Lachaise. It is the first grave that the young Sigmund FREUD must visit when coming to Paris, for it was a symbol. So there is still a great German emigration that settles in France under the Second Empire. It comes to an almost complete halt
from 1870 on.
The German Jews represent only a small wave of later emigration. One can say there were a very small number of them after 1933. Why did they not stay in France? It is rather difficult to understand, for in Germany the Jews were by far the most Francophile population. The love of France was the love of the French Revolution. France was always cited as an example of what ought to be done for Germany. It was regretted that the German Jews were always worse treated than the French Jews. There was the fact that there were Jewish officers in the French army, whereas the German Jews could hardly rise above the rank of non-commissioned officer. That there should be senior civil servants, judges, was a thoroughly important thing, even though the German Jews dominated the legal and medical professions but had no access to the State. So they had a very great admiration for France. All at once, their arrival in the thirties opened their eyes. On the whole, the contact was bad.
EINSTEIN did not stay. Hannah ARENDT stayed in France for a time and retained a very bad impression of it (and indeed all her prose, which I do not really appreciate, bursts with barely contained Francophobia).
The Communists passed through on their way to Spain but did not stay there. A good number came back, notably to East Germany. Curiously, many German Jews only passed through on their way to England and, if they could, to the United States. It is quite striking to see how weak this immigration was. I myself, who come from it, can say that I was utterly isolated in my childhood, for our family — what remained of it — was utterly elsewhere, and it took the demonstrations of 1968 for me to discover Daniel COHN-BENDIT and to discover too, with surprise, that the majority of my own age cohort wanted to become German Jews… Which I congratulated myself on, while taking good care not to warn them of the drawbacks this might present in every respect, and even beyond the qualification of Jew.
In any case, a weak immigration, whereas it was dominant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This because German Emancipation fixed the population in place, and afterward the great movement of departure was made toward America or, secondarily, toward England. One does not really know why.
My idea is that there are meridians in the Ashkenazi world that always separate two temperaments. If you take the center of the explosion, that is to say Poland, you have the South, which is Hasidic, and the North (Lithuanian), which is Mitnagged. Extend the line and everything is like that. Berlin is in the lineage of Vilna, Petersburg, and Moscow up to a certain point. By contrast, Kiev is entirely Hasidic, Odessa completely so, and Vienna too. Paris is entirely in the Hasidic lineage and little in the Lithuanian one. It is London that inherited the serious Mitnagdim. Of course there are those who are Mitnagdim in Paris and those who will not recognize themselves in this idea, but there is something deeply Galician about France and there is something deeply Lithuanian about London. The German Jews, the Berlin Jews who are of Lithuanian culture, of course, even if they have forgotten it, did not find common ground with French Jewry. Up to here, I have been speaking of the Jews of the West.
Now come the Jews of the East, for before the arrival of the Sephardim, it was a real distinction — a distinction, moreover, perfectly arbitrary and artificial. Indeed, there is not a single German Jew who clung much to his difference from the Jews of the East who did not come, in the majority at any rate, from Poland. This was the case in Berlin, just as west of Berlin. The Polish Jews and the Russian Jews (they will differentiate) come in several stages. They in fact mark out the great traumas of the history of Eastern Europe: 1880/1882, pogroms; 1905, failure of the Revolution; then 1920, the aftermath of the collapse of the Russian Empire and of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These are three distinct emigrations. 1880/1900 is a relatively more comfortable emigration than the preceding ones. Not that it lacks its train of workers, of small artisans, of people of modest means, but we are still in the time when overland transport is a great adventure and not everyone risked it. What is more, the aftermath of the great pogroms of 1880 is also the beginning of mass emigration toward the United States. So France is not a privileged land of welcome.
One begins to see at this moment a more specifically Russian immigration, that is to say of Russified, emancipated Jews who, after a certain time, try to escape the life of the Russian Empire.
After the Revolution of 1905 and around it, the movement broadens, and this time it widens. We have at once the beginning of this popular immigration and also many Russian or Polish intellectuals who, because of the numerus clausus, come to the Western universities. The most important wave is that of the immediate aftermath of the war of 1914. And at bottom, the Russian and Polish Jewish emigration of this period will represent a dominant demographic element in French Ashkenazi Jewry. These are important elements of rupture: first with the reintroduction of Yiddish, which had disappeared; with the existence of a communal life that does not fit within the consistorial framework; also a different balance between the practice of religion and Jewish belonging. This emigration, especially in its popular strata, which is already influenced by the activity of Bundist socialism in Poland and Russia, and by communism shortly after, is secular when it is not frankly anticlerical. It is at the same time far more identitarian than the French Jews, the Israelites, are. Hence an obviously very great antagonism between Jews who practice the Jewish religion but who are afraid to display themselves as such, and others who are perfectly at ease and much more assertive in this identity but who do not practice it. Of course, one may find this portrait altogether exaggerated, for one finds every possible and imaginable nuance. But consistorial Jewry begins, from this period on, to have very serious problems with this population, which is obviously also, in the sense that nineteenth-century historians gave to the term, a dangerous population. That is to say, at once workers, artisans, many people on the move across this vast land, and many people who come with revolutionary ideologies in which traditional, embourgeoised French Jewry recognizes itself poorly. Hence movements of defense, of denial, that one finds in the Rabbinate, among the war veterans, Israelites who had even been anti-Dreyfusards like Daniel HALÉVY but who take a stand for February 6, 1934, writers who lament the transformation of the Jewish community into a population of métèques — and communizing métèques at that — who risk drawing upon themselves an antisemitism that the integration displayed by the Israelite population was supposed to avert. Even though the experience of the DREYFUS affair runs directly counter to this idea, and even though already in that period a conflict — but rather a generational one — had divided the Jewish community on this question. The fact remains that a part of these reactions will lead, under the Occupation, to the UGIF, one of the most wretched episodes in the history of this period, and that others will refuse such a logic. But, in short, one cannot say that the two population groups — always making exception for some on either side — really merged or rubbed shoulders. And one finds in this Polish Jewry of the interwar period many institutions, which one finds also in the United States: associations of towns, of countries, of villages, that remain important and that ensure a solidarity — which will give rise to the Fédération des Sociétés Juives and, of course, the influence of the communist phenomenon.
Why does communism rally these Polish Jews much more than it does in Poland itself? The explanation is quite simple: it is that the Communist Party has, in France, Bundist practices. Not, moreover, by theory, since it is rather hostile to that, but in practice. Indeed, the need to organize the immigration — notably to find it a union structure, which is the first objective the Communist Party sets itself, along with the union it inspires, the CGTU — leads it to create Jewish commissions, to have a Yiddish press, to play, as it does for the other immigrations, on a certain identitarian sentiment, which will moreover be a means of integration.
At the same time, compared with the Bund, which still lives in the religion of Yiddish, the Communist Party presents this second advantage: it is assimilationist. At bottom, in cultural behaviors, it pushes the parents to invest massively in the French primary school and the lycée. This will, moreover, be a general phenomenon of this population, to invest enormously in the school system: as much as it does not quite accept the dominant norms imposed by the Israelite society of the time, so much does it adhere deeply to the secular school. This combination produces, in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union appears as the principal adversary of HITLER, a strong adherence — which will of course wither. One can trace the high point in 1941–1942, at the moment of the Great Roundup, of the collapse of the institutions of traditional French Jewry, and of the organization of self-defense, the FTP-MOI, by these bodies that ultimately recruit far more broadly than the initial level of adherence to communism. And of course one can trace, from 1965 to 1967, the wasting-away of this prestige of the Communist Party; with high points, here again: the first trials of 1948, the doctors’ affair of 1952, in 1956 the return of certain militants who had gone back to Poland to build Socialism. And then, of course, in 1967, the Soviet Union’s stand against Israel, which in that generation liquidates the phenomena of sympathy that had been very strong for the Soviet Union — very strong, moreover, for the same reasons, in Algeria after the abolition of the Crémieux Decree. To this Polish immigration, which is of modest origin and rather tied to the center of Paris, but which one also finds everywhere in the regions where there is a strong Polish population (Lille, Valenciennes, Roubaix, and a great deal in the East as well), is added a Russian immigration of a different nature.
The Russian Jews who come after 1905 and especially after 1920 belong to the middle classes, since at bottom, there, popular Jewry could not move, or did not want to move, or else adhered to the Soviet regime. The Russian Jews one finds in France belong rather to the comfortable middle classes. Some even — I knew a few in my youth — had sympathies for the White armies (which had none for them); many, on the contrary, have sympathy neither for the Whites nor for the Reds. These are what my grandfather calls the Pink Russians, who are almost entirely Jewish. For example, the Mejaronek, the International Bookshop that imported Russian books until Perestroika dealt it the fatal blow, is obviously a Jewish invention; a restaurant like DOMINIQUE is a Jewish restaurant, but a Russian one. In fact, the Russian Jews, assimilated into Russian culture and who benefited from the Russian lycée just before the war of 1914 (that period of openness in pre-Revolutionary Russian society), are the great defenders of Russian culture. One thus finds a complex Russian culture that includes a degree of distance from the Soviet Union and a degree of residual sympathy all the same for the Bolsheviks who emancipated the Jews, etc. It is therefore a thoroughly important human group in the Parisian world.
Without the Russian Jews, Montparnasse would not have been what it was. Without the Russian Jews, a large part of the cinema, of the French literature of that period, would not have been what it was. In the following generation, moreover, complete assimilation into French culture takes place. But this biculturality is very important during the interwar period.
And, finally, a third very important human group: the Jews of Central Europe; I mean, in fact, the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and its surroundings. Essentially, the bulk of these Ashkenazi Jews who arrive notably in the 1930s, and who will be much talked about, are the Romanian Jews. Why are they talked about? Well, because Romania is a French semi-colony. And the assimilationist — or at any rate associative — designs of France were such that the Romanian educational system of the interwar period is modeled on the French system. One of the paradoxical results of this is that the Romanian State introduces a baccalauréat and then even an agrégation and a university system that are the French system. At one point, the Romanian State will go so far as to accept the French bac topics. In exchange for such devotion, the French government will imprudently — to its eyes, later — open access to the French universities to Romanian citizens. It happens that the baccalauréat is not yet closed to Jews in Romania (many indeed hold it), but the universities, by contrast, are marked by the numerus clausus. The consequence: a very great number of young Romanian Jews, upon completing their baccalauréat, go to France to pursue studies sometimes in law but above all in medicine. It is thus on the subject of these Romanian Jews, increasingly numerous in the medical faculties, that the Action Française will set off the first xenophobic movements to close the French universities to the métèques. Moreover, the Romanian Jews, though strongly Yiddish-speaking, Frenchify very quickly once the interwar generation gains access to French culture. There is, indeed, a first Romanian Jewish writer of the French language, Benjamin FONDANE, who will die in deportation. Subsequently, after the war again, the Romanian Jews who were relatively spared, all things being equal, by the genocide, will see a certain number settle in France and complete this emigration. The other countries are less represented. There are of course, among these Romanian Jews, Hungarian Jews, since there are the Jews of Transylvania, an annexed region, who are Hungarian-speaking, of Hungarian culture, and sometimes German-speaking, but weakly drawn to Romania. They nonetheless benefit from the status of Romanian citizen. There are a certain number of Czech and Slovak Jews, but they too are not very numerous, given the attraction that the Germany-England-United States line exerted on them, once again. There are even Jews from Yugoslavia, but these are small, weak groups. The bulk is composed of the Polish emigration, which is a result of the economic and political upheavals of independent Poland between the two wars, for the last wave, and of Polish and Russian Yiddish-speaking Jews who came before the war of 1914. All these groups have one essential characteristic: they do not define themselves as Ashkenazi. I first heard the term Ashkenazi at the age of 20.
The Ashkenazi/Sephardic definition is a much later identity. Of course, they do not define themselves among themselves as belonging to a single group. There are two strong identities: the Jewish identity and the French identity. The characteristic, indeed, of all Central European Jewry, from Germany to Russia, is a very strong adherence to France. France is, in all the countries of Eastern Europe, much more than one of the countries of emigration. It is the country that emancipated the Jews, the one where the Jews have an utterly different status. It is also the country of culture; a culture which, with the French Revolution, is regarded as a major event that separates the Jewish world into two periods. Of course, there are those who are refractory to this kind of idea, but precisely those people do not come to France. So, from this point of view, and by an extraordinary paradox — I had begun by saying that these groups were indifferent to one another because they had experienced their condition as Jews very differently in the countries of departure — upon arrival, they all find themselves French, with very diverse degrees of adherence to Zionism, all of which will be reinforced after 1967.
But they are all French, and essentially through education. Indeed, the importance given in the French secular system, in my view, to the values of education, to the values of learning and knowledge, entirely overlaps with the values proper to the family milieu, which itself insisted a great deal on this. And indeed, I believe it is quite true as well — it is not specific to the Ashkenazim, on this point — that there is a coalescence that operates through the school, through scholastic success, through adherence to the values conveyed much more by the French and secular school system.
There is the portrait of this Ashkenazi Jewry. It is also, of course, very strongly — for the same reasons: weak religious participation, strong identity but one that cannot be maintained — engaged in mixed marriages and assimilation. I do not have the figures, but they are certainly very impressive. On this plane, there is plainly a break that operates and that is marked by the 1960s.
The Sixties no doubt represent the moment of fusion, already, of all these different elements. It is the moment when, already, generations raised in the French primary school dominate from the demographic point of view, when the French experience begins to stabilize. It is a relatively young community where, on the other hand, the gulf between the old Israelites and the newcomers begins to be leveled by precisely assimilation; where the number of Ashkenazi Jews who are not French citizens is reduced to a very small number. I still had a schoolmate at the lycée whose parents, who were communist militants, had been refused naturalization by the D.S.T. because one of their brothers was still a colonel in the Police in Poland — but after 1968 the matter was settled; they were truly the last. But the idea of the foreign Jew was prevalent in my parents’ generation, and had disappeared in mine. COHN-BENDIT too had been refused French nationality, because he had stirred up a great deal — and then there is also the discovery of Israel.
I think I am not exaggerating when I say that Zionism was the affair of a very small minority in the 1950s. It was regarded as something at once sympathetic, courageous, which was not the object — even for those of communist culture — of the a priori condemnation that it would later face because of the alliance of the Arab countries with the Soviet Union, but which was at the same time considered marginal. The American Jews on one side, the fact that there were Jews in the Soviet Union, seemed more important to many than the State of Israel, which was a kind of experiment. And then, with the revelation of what communism was, and with the rootedness, I believe, in an identity that was no longer in dispute, paradoxically it is there that adherence to Israel began to be something much stronger and much more important.
I have the feeling — I was 16 at the time — that the Six-Day War was, for all the generations of Ashkenazi Jews in France to this day, an emotional shock without precedent, one that ran through every stratum of this society. The Communist Party loses at a stroke the last mark of respect. The small shopkeepers, who are increasingly skeptical, still gave for the festivals on the Rue de Paradis, for the Fête de l’Humanité, like the DARTY brothers. And then one even finds old Israelites, like Emmanuel BERL, who had written dreadful things in his youth, who set about insulting an Astier de la Vigerie over writings about NASSER, and then Bernard FRANK. In short, this whole stratum of Israelite writers who were not in the habit of touching such matters, as the Jews of the East were, and who all at once recover an identity because of the defense of Israel.
So I believe that 1967 was the moment of completion of the fusion. Today, then, I think that the Jewish feeling is at once much greater among the Ashkenazim than it was in the aftermath of the war, paradoxically; as is the awareness of what the genocide was, of which one speaks very little. At the same time, as astonishing as it may be, the Ashkenazi feeling, by contrast, has completely disappeared. Indeed, it never existed, so it had no reason to be. As much as I hear a great deal of talk about Sephardic identity every day, so much do I think that Ashkenazi identity, apart from the cuisine, or a certain number of things of that kind, does not have very great force; an important Jewish identity, yes, but an Ashkenazi identity — I am not so sure. It is not a question of numbers, it is also a question of definition. I recognize myself very well in a certain form of Ashkenazi identity, but at bottom it is already something distant. For the reference — I am thinking of the Ashkenazi world of Poland and Russia — is itself a myth that has been handed down. But it is not something lived.
What is lived by the Ashkenazi Jews in France is belonging to a country, the difficulties of assimilation, it is Vichy. The great identity, probably, of the Ashkenazim, is Vichy. That is to say that, at bottom, for me, the first Jewish education I had from my parents — I do not know whether this is a particular case — was to know all the names of the collaborators, the actors who had been mixed up in the collaboration. I was taught “Remember Amalek”; afterward, I even had lessons on the DREYFUS affair. But not so much on the old Ashkenazi identity, in my opinion. In the end, these are, as always, only notations of every kind, and they contain a large measure of personal experience that would need to be analyzed. But it seems to me that the great experience that made the Ashkenazim is Vichy, where, moreover, we all found ourselves together.
LECTURE delivered at the AJHL on January 26, 1993 —