Léon Blum was born in 1872 in Paris into an old Alsatian Jewish family. His father, a merchant, wished his son to pursue higher education, which Léon did, completing studies in law at the Sorbonne. Later he was admitted to the Conseil d’État, where he attained the rank of Maître des requêtes.

Léon Blum discovered politics with the Dreyfus affair. He committed himself fully among the Dreyfusards, after the example of Jean Jaurès, for whom he felt an admiration and with whom he formed a friendship. He followed him into the Socialist party and was elected deputy in 1919. Then, at the Congress of Tours, he led the socialist current and became the head of the Socialist Party, which he led to victory at the moment of the Popular Front, becoming the first Jewish Head of Government in France, under the permanent and violent attacks of the far right in the Chamber, notably from Xavier Vallat, future Commissioner for Jewish Affairs under Vichy. The Vichy regime, moreover, brought him before the Court of Riom, accusing him of being “responsible for the defeat of France.” In the course of that trial, he so ridiculed the prosecution that Pétain had the trial stopped while sentencing him to life imprisonment; he then handed him over to the Nazis, who had him deported to the concentration camp of Buchenwald, from which he emerged alive, by a miracle, at the Liberation.

Léon Blum was one of the major figures of the French workers’ and social-democratic movement. He died in 1950.

Léon Blum, while being fully French for generations, always claimed his identity as a Jew. A sympathizer with the Zionist cause, he was, in 1928, one of the founders—together with Edouard Bernstein, Arthur Henderson, and Emile Vandervelde—of the “Socialist Committee for Palestine.” He immediately accepted, at the request of Chaïm Weizmann, to be part of the enlarged Council of the Jewish Agency, which he addressed at its first meeting in Zurich in 1929. He remained regularly in contact with Weizmann. The latter, so as not to put Blum—who was at the time President of the Council of the Popular Front—in a difficult position, had chosen pseudonyms to designate him: Flower, or rather Lebel Tsvet (Leibel, the diminutive of Léon in Yiddish, and Tsvet, flower in Russian).

Blum often intervened to support the Jews of Palestine, against the maneuvers or pressures of the Arabs of Palestine, Syria, or Egypt: with the local French authorities, whether to prevent infiltrations, or else against the policy of the English, which he found too favorable to the Arabs. Blum often met Weizmann in Paris; the latter kept him informed of political developments.

In 1938 the American sympathizers of the Zionist cause had the idea of creating a kibbutz in Palestine, to which the name Blum would be given, in recognition of his aid to the Zionist movement. It was thus that there was born in Upper Galilee the kibbutz Kfar Blum, on the lands whose acquisition Blum had favored in the 1930s.

From his return from the camp—a man whom the Shoah had brought still closer to Zionism—Blum resumes his contacts with Weizmann. He strongly supports the Jews of Palestine and the right to immigration into Palestine.

It is known that, beginning with the British White Paper of 17 May 1939, Jewish immigration is limited to 75,000 arrivals over five years.

“He then finds himself placed before a grave dilemma: the Zionists are indeed engaged in a fierce and deadly struggle against his dearest political friends, the English Labourites. What to do? Jarblum presses him, in June 1946, to intervene much more energetically with Attlee and Bevin. The situation is grave, on account of Bevin’s very harsh attitude and the escape of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In an article of 6 July 1946, ‘The Palestine Affair,’ Léon Blum still tries to believe in the good intentions of the Labourites and condemns the acts of the Jewish terrorists. This article will give rise to very contradictory comments and will be cited by the English in a truncated way, which will entail an indignant protest from the author. It is true that in June 1946 the hour is still, for him, one of preserving the solidarity between French socialists and British Labourites. But he is then much criticized by Zionist circles. His faithful friend Marc Jarblum writes in his newspaper, Notre Parole, that Léon Blum is gravely mistaken.

But Blum is going to evolve toward an increased Zionist activism, and the SFIO to detach itself more and more from the English Labourites on the Palestinian question. In November 1946, the Renseignements généraux report a meeting between Léon Blum and David Ben-Gurion, which would have had as its objective the facilitation of the activities of the Haganah in France. Such information is again given in January 1947. During the period of a month in which he is head of the government and minister of Foreign Affairs, Léon Blum clashes on this question with the officials of the Quai d’Orsay. Édouard Depreux evokes Blum’s annulment of a decision by the ministry to refuse transit visas to Jewish emigrants.”

— Ilan Greilsammer, Léon Blum

Blum is going to evolve toward a more active Zionism. He is said to have met Ben-Gurion in 1946, with the objective of facilitating the activities of the Haganah in France.

But it is the affair of the Exodus that will be the occasion for Léon Blum to confront his English friends. He had in the meantime had a decision by the ministry to refuse transit visas to Jewish emigrants annulled.

“On 1 August 1947, Léon Blum publishes a very vehement article, which takes up the cause of the passengers of the Exodus: the English attitude ‘wounds and revolts the universal conscience,’ it is ‘pitiless.’ This spectacle is ‘heartrending, unbearable, intolerable.’ And he writes to the Zionist newspaper La Terre retrouvée to authorize it ‘to reproduce this article, in which its readers will find the echo of the sentiments I share with them.’ In fact, it is thanks to his intervention that the French government, despite the pressure from London, refuses to make the survivors of the Exodus disembark from the ship.

The Zionists’ ship left the port of Sète even though the certificate of seaworthiness had been refused, and after having received a supply of fuel oil. The French ministry of the Interior manifestly did nothing to prevent the ship from leaving. Where is the word given? And Massigli concludes: ‘A very grave blow has been dealt to Franco-British relations.’ Why, he asks, did Léon Blum make no allusion in his article to France’s non-observance of the word given to the English?”

However, his biographer Ilan Greilsammer underscores, it seems that Léon Blum perceived the excesses of a certain Zionist nationalism and saw the dangers of extremist groups, such as the Irgun, of Menahem Begin, or the Stern group. There is a clear correlation between his attitude and that of the philosopher Martin Buber: while never finding themselves in contradiction with the Zionist movement or, later, with the State of Israel, the two intellectuals always wished that an eminently spiritual message should not be reduced to something too politico-military—to an army, to a flag.

Thus he refuses to join, in 1947, the French League for a Free Palestine inspired by Irgun circles, and he writes: “In the internal conflict that opposes certain terrorist organizations to the regular representatives of Palestine and of the Zionist movement, I am fully on the side of the latter.”

In 1947 Blum will intervene to influence the vote of the French delegation at the UN, in favor of the plan to partition Palestine. On his intervention with President Vincent Auriol, the French delegation, which had at first received the instruction to abstain, finally votes for the partition plan.

Blum sums up his attitude toward Zionism rather well in a tribute he paid to Chaim Weizmann:

“A French Jew, born in France of a long line of French forebears, speaking only the language of my country, nourished principally on its culture, having refused to leave it at the very hour when I ran the greatest dangers there, I nonetheless take part in the admirable effort—miraculously transported from the plane of dream to the plane of historical reality—that henceforth ensures a worthy homeland, equally free, to all the Jews who have not had, as I did, the good fortune to find it in their native country. I have followed this effort ever since President Weizmann made me understand it. I have always felt proud of it, and I am more than ever in solidarity with it.”

Sources

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