Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955 ed. by Séan Hand, and Steven T. Katz (review)

The eleven chapters of this collection provide detailed and intelligent explorations of institutions, individuals, and issues arising from and affecting the Jewish community in France in the immediate post-war period. The years between Sartre’s still controversial analysis of the Jew as a being constructed by the gaze of the Other in 1945 and the French version of Elie Wiesel’s Night in 1957 are conventionally seen as a period of ‘silence’, which is sometimes used as evidence of France’s implicit disavowal of its complicity in the genocide. In fact, as this volume shows in great and welcome detail, the Jewish community rebuilt itself from the bottom up and successfully reasserted its place within French society and the institutions of the state. The initial problems were daunting, as David Weinberg shows in the opening chapter: a much-diminished Jewish population lacking resources of every kind, with huge needs for the support and defence of the dispossessed. Even more burdensome, as Maud Mandel shows in a lively and well-documented chapter, were the waves of immigrant Jews — initially from Eastern Europe, then from Egypt and Morocco — which challenged the cultural and linguistic unity of the French Jewish community. Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac explains the reorganization of Jewish institutions, of which the most important by far was the creation of the Conseil représentatif des institution juives de France (CRIF, whose pioneers would be amazed and delighted to know that French Presidents now never miss its annual dinner). Lisa Moses Leff tackles an obscure but precious episode in the restitution of stolen goods: the largely successful work of a French state body, the Sous-commission des livres, which restocked the library of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) and made scholarly Jewish studies possible once again in France. Daniella Doron, Susan Suleiman, and Lucille Cairns provide three complementary views of the situation of the children of the Shoah in France — through memories of orphanages, through the controversy over the Week of the Jewish Martyred Child, and through the emergence of ‘Jewish memory’ with a particularly valuable consideration of the career of Pierre Vidal-Nacquet. Bruno Chaouat’s essay on Jean Giono and Emmanuel Levinas is perhaps the least persuasive of the chapters, but the three concluding essays, on three remarkable individuals whose work really structures the ‘Jewish presence’ in France since the war, are the high points of this volume. Jonathan Judaken shows the foundational importance of Léon Poliakov’s Bréviaire de la haine (Paris: Calmann & Lévy, 1951) for the whole of the Holocaust studies industry that followed from it; Edward Kaplan writes a fine and sensitive essay about André Neher as the founding father of Jewish studies in post-war France; and Jay Winter’s admirable sketch of René Cassin — lawyer, diplomat, Français libre, and indefatigable president of the AIU for several decades — is a masterpiece of its kind. In Cassin’s case at least, and it is surely not unique, the specifically French model of integration that allowed so many Jews to prosper in Third Republic France was not rendered obsolete by the Holocaust, but strengthened by being generalized into a global defence of human dignity. This book should be essential reading for scholars of the Jewish dimension of French culture in the twentieth century, and I recommend it highly to anybody who wants to see how France coped (rather well) with a difficult and emotionally complicated minority issue in a period often disparaged for its hypocritical amnesia of the recent past. But the major lesson that these chapters teach is that individual action matters a great deal, even and perhaps especially when the tides of history are beyond human comprehension.