Les Juifs pendant l'Occupation (review)

Book Reviews 101 to ask what it stood for and to know that such a thing really happened.2 As novels allegedly dealing with the Holocaust continue to proliferate, it is the responsibility of the audience to interrogate both text and author. Many questions can, of course, be asked of both. But first and foremost among these queries should be, does this work have any relationship to the destruction of European Jewry and its manifold consequent implications for humanity? Alan L. Berger Jewish Studies Program Syracuse University Les Juifs pendant l'Occupation, by Andre Kaspi. Paris: Seuil, 1991. 428 pp. 149 F. When Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton published their pathbreaking Vichy France and theJews ten years ago, the scholarly literature on the subject available in French was almost nonexistent. Andre Kaspi's survey of the subject demonstrates that the fate of the French Jews during the war has now become a major topic of serious academic research. Kaspi, best known as France's leading historian ofthe United States, is fully acquainted with the English-language scholarship in this field, but he draws heavily on recent French work, and shows that the taboos which long hindered inquiry in this field have been lifted. At the time of the German invasion, the 300,000 French Jews were anything but a true community. Alongside a highly assimilated native Jewish population, loyal to the country that had given Jews citizenship in 1791 and vindicated Captain Dreyfus, France housed a population of poor East European immigrants attracted by liberal immigration laws after World War I and a quite different German-Jewish population of refugees fleeing Hitler in the 1930s. Another 300,000 Jews lived in France's three North African colonies. Despite the existence of a vocal French antisemitic tradition, most native-born Jews had a hard time imagining that the French state could treat them differently from other citizens. Recent immigrants 2Herbert Mitgang in his review of Ida Fink's The Journey reports Levi's response. See Mitgang's "Words as a Shield Against the Nazis." New York Times, August 19, 1992, Secti0!l C. p. 18. . 102 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 had a more jaundiced view, but also fewer resources for escaping wartime persecution. Kaspi nuances somewhat Marrus and Paxton's harsh verdict on the Vichy government's Jewish policies. He agrees that the Vichy "Statut des Juifs" of October 1940 was not prepared in response to German pressure, and that its definition ofJewishness was in some ways more sweeping than the German laws, but points out that Petain's officials were not acting in a vacuum. The Germans occupying the northern three-fifths of French territory had already begun issuing anti-Jewish decrees; French preoccupation with maintaining some semblance of national sovereignty virtually dictated a reaction. But Kaspi's descriptions of Vichy's internment camps and of its policies in North Africa, never occupied by the Germans, show that the Petain government was capable of brutally mistreating Jews, especially those defined as "foreign," without any German inspiration. Initially, most Jews assumed that they were better off having their papers in order than plunging into clandestinity; their conformity and the efficiency of the French administration greatly facilitated subsequent round-ups, but the victims gradually learned to do what they could to escape. Kaspi stresses the role of the French police in the rafles or roundups that led to the deportation ofover 75,000 Jews from France, only 2500 of whom survived the Nazi death camps. At the same time, however, the rafies antagonized the non-Jewish population, increasing support for the Resistance, and French civilians saved many Jewish lives. Kaspi gives a nuanced assessment of the UGIF, the centralized organization created by the Germans to oversee Jewish affairs: it initially provided necessary welfare services, but unwittingly created structures that later helped the Germans identify and deport their victims. He treads a similarly cautious line in dealing with the issue of Jewish resistance, noting that Jewish militants often identified themselves as patriots or Communists more than as Jews. With respect both to the UGIF and Jewish resistance, Kaspi gives little hint of the bitter controversies that have raged since the...