On the eve of the Second World War, the Jews of France had only a rather hazy notion of their situation as a whole within the national collectivity. Nothing coherent or homogeneous, but many cleavages: between a minority that expressed its Jewish belonging and a majority sliding toward the loss of identity, between native-born Israélites and immigrant Jews, between Communist militants or sympathizers and adherents of other political options. A dozen micro youth organizations vied for the very rare adherents of Zionism. The immigrants from Eastern Europe were dispersed according to their locality of origin — more than 170 mutual-aid associations, the landsmanschaften, which guaranteed their members benefits in cases of burial, illness, and unemployment. A historian, Paula Hyman, has counted 133 titles of Yiddish periodicals then published in France.
There are no reliable numerical data. So much so that a respected intellectual of the time, Drieu La Rochelle, could write without exposing himself to ridicule that an invasion of 4 million foreigners, including a million Jews, had surged over France.
The truth was that in 1939 there were two and a half million foreign immigrants, that is, 6% of the overall population. Among them the Jews numbered 120,000. This last figure is an estimate calculated from the censuses of Jews carried out in France under the Vichy regime and the Occupation. The same data have allowed demographers to estimate that in 1934 there resided in France:
110,000 native-born Jews 70,000 immigrant Jews naturalized French 120,000 foreign immigrant Jews.
To this total of 300,000 would be added, with the great exodus of May and June 1940, about 40,000 Jewish refugees from Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Relative to the French population as a whole, fewer than 1% (more precisely, 0.85%) were Jewish.
A growing portion of the French were contaminated by a xenophobic fever whose irresistible surge, it seems, no one had the power to contain. In May and November 1938, discriminatory decrees against immigrants gave the prefects the power to expel or to intern in “special centers” foreigners lacking residence permits or work cards. All this took place under the Third Republic, the Assemblée Nationale being the one that emerged from the 1936 elections won by the Front populaire, the Président du Conseil being Édouard Daladier. The functionaries of the Republic, before becoming those of the Vichy regime, had applied this decree in such a way that of the 40,000 civilians interned in the south of France in the summer of 1940, 70% were Jews — ten times more than their proportion among the foreigners.
Antisemitic, the functionaries? Neither more nor less than other Frenchmen. For, reinforced by a certain press, very many French people had made the racist equation their own: “foreign immigrants = Jews.” The xenophobic passion expressed itself above all as antisemitic passion.
Resistance: parenthesis or historical continuity?
To describe the involvement of Jews in the Resistance demands strict methodological rigor. Is it a matter of the epic of a handful of men and women who joined a sphere of action different from their milieu for the duration of the war? Or does the resistant commitment inscribe itself within the continuity of a history — that of the Jews in France since the Emancipation? Or, again, are we dealing with the participation of Jews in the lived experience of the national community as a whole? This last option, however, vanished as soon as the laws of Vichy and of the occupier had excluded the Jews from that community. Which did not prevent a certain number of Jews from maintaining themselves virtually within the galaxy of republican legality and from committing themselves to the Resistance. In their case, the commitment is identical to that of other French people. This is not the Jewish Resistance but: Jews in the Resistance.
Jews in the Resistance
Two well-known examples belong to this category. The most familiar is that of the MOI — that is, the immigrant Jewish Communists in the Resistance. Considered from a methodological point of view, this resistance is not Jewish. Nothing distinguishes it from the resistance of the other Communists. In each case of incompatibility between the interest of the Communist Party as defined by its hierarchy and the Jewish interest, it was ultimately submission to the orders of the Party that prevailed. The other example is that of the Jo Aboulker group in Algiers, in November 1942. It is known that this group of about 300 resisters made possible the Anglo-American landing at Algiers, without gunfire and without shedding a drop of blood. The group was nearly 90% Jewish. Here, nothing distinguishes the Jews from the others as regards their commitment to the Resistance. As one of the most eminent resisters of this group, the Oran-born Karsenty, has stressed, the identity of their resistance was not Jewish but French.
There is, however, nothing illegitimate — quite the contrary — in considering the whole of the Jewish resisters of Algiers as a group. Targeted by the statut des Juifs (the anti-Jewish statutes), they were fundamentally contested in their aspiration to see themselves recognized and confirmed in their belonging to French nationality. There was a specificity to the Jewish condition in Algeria from 1940 to 1944. A similar reflection applies to the Jews of the MOI. Their resistance, too, is a group phenomenon. The francs-tireurs of the Yiddish MOI carried with them an element — the vernacular language and culture — that determines Jewish identity. And so the Yiddish MOI was not classifiable as clearly as the other Jewish Communist resisters are within the category of Jews in the Resistance.
The Resistance of the Jews
Is it then fitting to classify this MOI group in the category of the resistance of the Jews, or that of the Jewish Resistance? The question is complex, and I am not among those who believe they hold the unilateral answer. By “resistance of the Jews” I mean the totality of the individual cases — very numerous, moreover — of Jews committed to the Resistance because they were Jews. It may be a matter of a defensive reaction against persecution, or of a decision taken in the name of values and ideals conveyed by Jewish tradition.
The historian who would wish to study this category obviously runs up against insurmountable difficulties. How to distinguish these resisters from the Jews who fought in the name of their patriotic sentiment and republican values, exactly like the non-Jewish French resisters? Another insoluble question is that of the criteria of identification. How to determine, among all the resisters, who was Jewish? A third question, finally, also without an answer: in the name of what value is one to legitimize a study bearing on the Jews in the Resistance, thus selected, or discriminated against, or isolated in relation to the other resisters?
The Jewish Resistance
Unlike the two preceding categories — with their blurred contours, almost rebellious to historical investigation — the Jewish Resistance obeys precise criteria. It is the resistance of groups and networks endowed with a Jewish identity — religious, cultural, or political — fighting to attain a Jewish objective, distinct from the objectives of the Resistance.
The identity of such groups can only inscribe itself in the wake of a preexisting associative or communal entity defining itself essentially as Jewish. In other words, any grouping that issued from a prewar Jewish organization, working during the Occupation in insubordination to the laws of Vichy, belongs to the category of the Jewish Resistance.
The only conceivable Jewish objective in any of the occupied countries, France included, is obviously the survival of the Jews. There lies the inescapable criterion of the category “Jewish Resistance.”
At the risk of schematization, I propose, in the context of the present reflections, the following definition: any organization whose program includes both the promotion of Jewish identity and action for the rescue of Jews belongs to the Jewish Resistance.
This option obeys a Jewish communal vocation. It therefore inscribes itself in the perspective of the history of the Jews in France since the Emancipation. Issued from the prewar community — infinitely fragmented, profoundly divided, and in permanent decline — the organizations of the Jewish Resistance halted the process of de-Judaization. They crystallized the surge of vital energy of a few dynamic elements of this nearly moribund community, and prepared the leadership and the program of a Jewish renaissance destined to flourish after the war.
A non-exhaustive inventory of the most eminent network leaders who clandestinely animated a specific rescue action evokes the names of Eugène Minkowski, Joseph Weill, Georges Garel, and Moussa Abadi at the head of the OSE; David Rapoport, head of the Comité Rue Amelot; Juliette Stern, director of the WIZO; Marc Jarblum, head of the Fédération des Sociétés Juives; Robert Gamzon at the head of the EIF movement and its “Sixième” network; Simon Lévitte, director of the Mouvement de Jeunesse Sioniste and its “Éducation Physique” network; Joseph Bass, head of the service André; and finally Dyka Jefroykin, delegate of the American Joint Distribution Committee. They were all involved in the operations to rescue children and adolescents, a field that illustrates the particularity of the Jewish Resistance.
Its modalities were very complex, sometimes ambiguous. Thus, at first, before the summer of 1942, most of the organizations cited above operated in the light of day, within legality. Then they gradually “drifted” toward a pseudo-legality, before plunging into a clandestinity as opaque as possible. At this stage, the child or adolescent initially wrested — not without difficulty, but in full view of all — from an internment camp and placed in a Jewish home, had changed identity and found themselves either in Switzerland or in Spain after an illegal border crossing, or hidden in a monastery or a non-Jewish family. Fabrication of false papers, prospecting for host homes for “Aryanized” Jews, border crossings, escorting of the young — all this was accomplished by Jewish resisters.
Without the aid of non-Jews, whether or not involved in the Resistance — functionaries, ecclesiastics, ordinary private individuals from every milieu — none of this would have been feasible. Very many Jewish adults, too, survived thanks to the false papers, the hiding places, the subsistence allowances lavished by the Jewish Resistance.
The whole of its networks took complete charge of and rescued 10,000 Jewish children, thereby removed from the hands of the murderers. According to the data established by Serge Klarsfeld, 27% of Jewish adults in France were exterminated and nearly 14% of children and adolescents. This gap between the two figures is represented by the 10,000 children rescued by the Jewish Resistance — a resounding victory won against the Germans and their collaborators.
Far more than that, organizations of the Jewish Resistance took part as such in the armed insurrection under FFI or FTP command, within combat units constituted by this Jewish Resistance. This was the case, for example, of the bataillon bleu-blanc (blue-and-white battalion) of the Corps Franc de la Montagne Noire, formed by the Armée Juive (Zionist), and of the Marc Haguenau company of sector 10 of the Tarn, emanating from the EIF.
From the autumn of 1943, French Israélites and immigrant Jews finally entered into an egalitarian dialogue, in the most complete clandestinity. The result was the creation of the Conseil Représentatif des Juifs de France (Representative Council of the Jews of France). It was the first attempt to promote a new community — no longer of a strictly religious option, but encompassing also the identity choices of the cultural and the political.
It is essential to stress that the persons and organizations concerned by the category of the resistance of the Jews, and by that of Jews in the Resistance, are neither more nor less heroic and worthy of respect than those that fall under the Jewish Resistance. The classification and the definitions proposed by these reflections establish no hierarchy in merit or in glory. They have no other pretension than to contribute to one of the debates of the history of the Jews in France in the twentieth century.