While the history of the Jewish community of Shanghai is well known—bound up with the development of international commerce in that city from the nineteenth century onward, and then, between 1939 and 1945, with the arrival of German Jews fleeing Nazism—that of the Jewish community of Kaifeng is far less so. The origins of this community remain mysterious, and the modes of its survival over several centuries raise a questioning about identity and transmission identical to that surrounding the history of the Marranos.1 Kaifeng is located in the west of China, in Henan, not far from the Yellow River. As early as the end of the ninth century, travelers or missionaries reported a Jewish presence in China, without arousing the slightest interest. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuits charged with the evangelization of China made contact with the Jewish community of Kaifeng. This encounter is full of misunderstandings, particularly for the Jews, who knew nothing of Catholicism. The old rabbi of Kaifeng, anxious about his succession, would even propose that a Jesuit take his place at the head of the synagogue. The Jesuits’ attempts to convert this community would nonetheless fail. The ties between the Jewish community and the Jesuits would, however, continue, the latter hoping to convert the Jews more easily than the Chinese, and by this means to gain easier access to the Chinese. Moreover, the example of syncretism and adaptation to local customs, without loss of faith, on the part of the Jews of China, was used by the Jesuits in the quarrel that set them against Rome. The Jesuits believed that a certain adaptation to local customs was necessary in order to convert the population; Rome refused it. The expulsion of the Christians from China and the closing of the interior of the Chinese empire to foreigners between 1725 and 1860 would isolate the Jewish community. When the Chinese Empire was once again opened to foreigners, the Jewish community was in a great state of dilapidation (synagogue in ruins, famine among the members of the community) despite attempts to maintain the rite. In a letter sent in 1850, which would reach James Finn—a Hebraist diplomat and active member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews—twenty years later, a member of the Jewish community of Kaifeng writes: “No one understands a word of the canonical texts in our possession… Everywhere we have sought someone who understands the alphabet of the great country (Hebrew). The synagogue is dilapidated, without ministers of worship.” In parallel, a Chinese sergeant describes the Jewish community thus: “They know neither where they come from nor at what period they arrived in China. In appearance, they are entirely Chinese.” Between 1866 and 1906, there were several attempts to rescue the Jewish community of Kaifeng, but these never reached their conclusion. Yet, despite the fact that Judaism had been reduced for them to a few vague reminiscences, the Jews of Kaifeng wished to reconnect with their tradition with outside help. In 1900, ties were established with the Jews of Shanghai, who had settled in China since the middle of the nineteenth century. A few Jews of Kaifeng set out for Shanghai to ask for help. Fifty Jewish families were still living in Kaifeng. They no longer followed any rite, did not differ from the Chinese in their daily life, but they refused to eat pork and to venerate idols. The Jewish community of Shanghai was ultimately unable to help them. For lack of a rescue they had awaited in vain for about a century, the Jews of Kaifeng would assimilate, and the community would disappear.
Traqués, cachés, vivants. Des enfants juifs en France (1940-1945) (Hunted, Hidden, Alive. Jewish Children in France, 1940–1945)
Danielle Bailly (collective work coordinated by), preface by Pierre Vidal-Naquet. L’Harmattan, collection Judaïsmes. Paris, 2004, 350 pp., 27 euros. Reviewed by Nicole Eizner
It is not to the readers of Plurielles that one need recall that during the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime, in the time of the extermination, many children were hidden by people who in no way differed from others, except that they saved children. They were believers or not, members of the Resistance or not. They belonged to every social class, they lived in every region of the country. Most often country folk. Sometimes it was an entire village that mobilized for these children—for example, the Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Haute-Loire. The eighteen testimonies gathered by Danielle Bailly are gripping and deeply moving. Some of the children were at the time almost babies, others were around ten or twelve years old. What is particularly enriching is to grasp, through their testimonies, what they made of this life begun, it must be said, somewhat harshly. Orphans for the most part, they nonetheless built a full and rich life at the cost, for many, of enormous material and psychological difficulties. A kind of revenge. In all these cases, life proved stronger than Nazi barbarism. One regret, however: none of those who hid and saved these children was interviewed. That is a pity.
Juliusz Hibner, Pole, Jew, and Communist
Irena “Bozena” Puchalska Hibner, Un homme insoumis (An Unsubmissive Man). Paris, éd. Honoré Champion, 2004, 177 pp. Reviewed by Jean-Charles Szurek
Juliusz Hibner passed away in 1994, in his 82nd year. The book in question here is made up of his memoirs, recorded and collected by his wife, Irena “Bozena” Puchalska Hibner, published first in Paris, in 1998, in the Polish review Kultura, then in Poland, and finally now in France. What motivated Jerzy Giedroyc, the director of Kultura, who had fought all his life against the communist system’s grip on Poland, to publish this text was first of all the unique character of this testimony. Hibner in fact recounts in detail, among other things, a little-known episode of the events of 1956 in Poland: how he, deputy Minister of the Interior and commander of the Internal Forces, gave the order to military units to stand up to the Soviet tanks that were heading for Warsaw during the Eighth Plenum of the PZPR (Communist Party) in October 1956. It is not really known to what kinds of pressure the Soviets meant to subject the Polish communists, then in full ferment. The fact remains that the Soviet leadership (Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and Marshal Konev in particular) came in force to Warsaw for this plenum. There is no doubt that they wanted, at the very least, to keep the conservatives in place there to the detriment of the partisans of change within the Polish Party, who had rallied to the symbolic figure of Gomułka. Their choice to “let the Poles sort it out themselves” was not due to chance, Gomułka giving Moscow pledges of a socialist order. Now it is symptomatic that this military resistance was erased from official historical writing after the events of 1956, and that, since the opening of the archives, few historians evoke it. What interested Giedroyc was probably also the posture of these communists who, confronted with the growing distortions of their initial morality by the criminal cynicism of the Stalinist raison d’État, came to opt for dissident, even “oppositional,” paths, or even for “internal emigration,” or for emigration plain and simple. I do not know to which category Juliusz Hibner belonged, but, having reached maturity, he abandoned “active” politics to devote himself to physics. He belonged to that generation of Polish Jews—of whom there do not exist so many memoirs or writings—who opted for “red assimilation,” in the expression of the writer Julian Stryjkowski, who had himself made that choice. Red assimilation, that is to say the choice of universal socialism, embodied in the 1920s and 1930s by the USSR, which allowed them, they believed, to lift the double obstacle: that of capitalism and that of belonging to a minority rejected by entire fringes of Polish society at the hour of independence. Nothing, in this book, makes it possible to pin down any identity quest on the author’s part. Born into a poor Jewish family of Galicia, it was thanks to private mathematics lessons that he was able to finance a first university year in Lvov, carried out thanks to exceptional gifts. But, quickly engaged in the communist cause, we find him in the International Brigades in Spain and then in the camp of Djelfa, in Algeria. He joined the Soviet Union in 1943, taking part in the anti-Nazi fighting. Wounded, given up for dead, he is perhaps the only Pole distinguished with the most important Soviet military decoration. One will therefore not find, in this account, any direct reflection on the crossed destinies of Jewish being and communist being in twentieth-century Poland, and it is perhaps abusive, if not certain, to draw Hibner into an unclaimed posture. But his choices, his affinities, his friendships ceaselessly recall the rubbing of shoulders with these Jewish communists who, as actually existing socialism took shape, would examine with bitterness a creation far removed from the ideal of their youth. For Juliusz Hibner, as for Frantisek Kriegel2 or Gabriel Sichon-Ersler, the Spanish and anti-Nazi commitment remained an ideal-type, lived and contradicted by socialist construction. Some today display their hostility toward the antifascist struggle of the International Brigades’ volunteers, declaring, decades after the facts, that it is fortunate that Spain did not become a People’s Democracy. That same Julian Stryjkowski, passing from communist allegiance to a radical opposition to communism, asked Hibner in the 1970s “whether he did not regret it,” “whether he was not ashamed” to have taken part in the Spanish war, a war that might perhaps have turned Spain into a People’s Democracy. Hibner replied that in Spain values as essential to him as democracy were at stake—the same democracy he would defend, not without courage, in 1956. To join the International Brigades expressed a commitment that was not necessarily ordered by the Communist Party. It was spontaneously that Hibner decided to leave Poland for Spain (it would take him three months to get there); it was against the local section of the Party that another figure of the Polish Jewish communists, Wieslawa Welykanowicz, would likewise opt for departure toward the Spanish commitment. Despite triumphant Stalinism, these commitments were often driven by the subjectivity of their authors. Does this mean that one can trace a straight, luminous line between the “pure” commitment of 1936 and the no less “pure” one of 1956, as if there existed no zone of shadow, no adherence to Stalinism? Hibner does not speak of it enough, and that is a pity. This is perhaps due to the obligatory form of the interview, which does not always allow the author really to confront the question head-on. In any case, what dominates in Hibner is the spirit of rebellion, a quality not often found among the communists of state consolidation… Such is the principal virtue of this book and of this exceptional testimony.