The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary

3. Facing the Crisis at Home and Abroad

83 3 Facing the Crisis at Home and Abroad In the period between World War I and World War II, French Jewry was divided into two main groups: native French Jews and the east European immigrants. Each of these groups, neither of which was monolithic within itself, maintained its own organizational frameworks and political culture. Their spokespeople reported and interpreted the daily developments in different newspapers and periodicals and even in different languages (French and Yiddish). These distinctions were also articulated in the historical narratives and symbols that spokespeople of the two groups drew from the past. This was the dynamic that unfolded in response to the difficult challenges that Jewish emancipation faced in Germany, all over Europe, and even in France itself during the 1930s. In 1919 there were approximately 150,000 Jews living in France. By 1939 the number climbed to around 300,000.1 This rapid growth, which was primarily the result of increased immigration, not only reflects the demographic transformation of French Jewry during this period but also had a great impact on the community’s political and public agenda. Since the French Revolution and, even more so, from the mid-nineteenth century, the native Jewish population had been undergoing an integration process within the state, society, the economy, and culture. Led by the Central Consistory of the Jews of France, which had been founded during the Napoleonic era, local French Jews had developed a clear sense of patriotism that enabled them to cope with the challenge of the Dreyfus Affair and was strengthened during World War I.2 The French Jewish ideology of assimilation, which 84 C H A P T E R 3 became fully crystallized in the late nineteenth century, presented the Jews as an indispensable part of the French nation and based itself on the legacy of the great Revolution and the Napoleonic regime.3 While the local Jews were becoming more and more integrated, the immigrant Jews—mostly concentrated in Paris—tended to preserve their linguistic and ethnic characteristics and to develop their own political subculture .4 The immigrants’ political tendencies could be compared to those of the Jewish east European immigrants in England and in the United States. For east European Jews who tended toward political activism and especially for those who identified with left-wing movements (Bundists, Communists, and others), France and primarily Paris symbolized the universal values of the Revolution. This symbolic value was one of the reasons that they preferred France as their immigration destination. England seemed to be more conservative , and the United States was viewed as too materialistic.5 As we shall see in this chapter, those who wrote for the immigrant press and shaped public opinion had their own interpretation (or even interpretations) of French history, values, and heritage. In their journals there could also be found articles by Yiddish publicists and intellectuals from other countries (mostly Poland and the United States), and therefore they reflected the trends in the thoughts and moods of the wider Yiddish literary readership. These trends did not always match the conceptualizations or interests of the local French Jews. The Jewish community of France, and especially of Paris in the 1930s, was therefore unique in comparison to other European Jewish communities insofar as it consisted of two communities with approximately equal standing . Although almost equal in size, they were very different in their language, origin, and political culture and therefore in their approach to questions of Jewish identity and in their reaction to the Nazi threat.6 For these reasons, French Jewry of the 1930s offers an interesting case study. Through it we can examine the reception, interpretation, and political mobilization of national, Jewish, and universal historical narratives and symbols in response to the Fascist and Nazi onslaught on the achievements and values of the emancipation era. The various ways in which Jews in France—both locals and immigrants —came to terms with the developments of the 1930s and attempted to mobilize historical memory can be fully interpreted only in consideration with the French political and social setting during this period and the use of historical symbols in the general French political arena. The world economic crisis that began to be felt in France in the early 1930s, the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany in 1933, the internal French political split that became 85 Facing the...