"A Drama of Faith and Family": Familialism, Nationalism, and Ethnicity among Jews in Postwar France

The Second World War presented postwar French Jews with an excruciating death toll as well as a devastating demographic landscape: large numbers of single parent households, nuclear families in economic and emotional distress, and approximately three thousand orphaned children. In the decade following the Liberation, debates over to whom these Jewish children "belonged" captivated French Jewish child welfare workers, Jewish and non-Jewish policymakers and the public, and above all else families occupied with the Herculean task of deciding the future lives of parentless youth. ² Should children remain with those non-Jewish individuals who had hidden, saved, and often loved them even at risk to their own lives? Or should these young children be turned over to distant relatives or Jewish communal institutions in an effort to keep them as Jews? In short, who and what constituted these children's best interests?

The heated issue of custody rights of orphaned Jewish children confronted social workers, families, and surely the children themselves with heart-wrenching dilemmas, but it also presented them with an opportunity to ruminate over the contours of ethnicity, nationalism, and familialism in postwar France. For Jewish activists anxious to reassert Jewish ethnicity in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the best interests of the child could only be served in a Jewish setting, be it familial or institutional. In contrast, dominant French policy and public opinion regarding the settlement of thousands of displaced Jewish youth generally favored universal and republican values. French non-Jewish families facing the prospect of an emotionally wrenching family separation generally maintained that any loving family—be it Christian or Jewish—ought to represent "the best interests of the child." Many French judges and bureaucrats concurred, viewing the custody disputes as a propitious opportunity to reassert secular republicanism after the unsettling experience of occupation and collaboration. Regardless of these youths' prior nationalities and ethnicities, they could become the citizens France desperately needed. In these struggles over youth, malleable ideas about the family were utilized to articulate both contested ideas about Jewish identity after the Holocaust and republicanism after Vichy.

By exploring a series of politically and emotionally charged custody disputes, this article complements recent scholarly efforts to revise older narratives that suggested that postwar Jews preferred to slip back into a "normal" life by denying particularism. ³ Instead, ensuring a Jewish identity and education for orphaned youth acquired particular urgency and poignancy for French Jewish organizations and individuals after the genocide. More generally, these case studies reveal how ideas about national identity and citizenship have informed the familialist strategies of Jews in the modern era. The debates about the Jewish family that erupted in the wake of the Liberation demonstrate the extent to which notions of family and nationhood were often intertwined and how quickly they could be destabilized in moments of crisis.

"A Difference of Psychology": Familialism, Ethnicity, and Universalism

The case of Jeannine G. shines a light on ideas about familialism, nationalism, and ethnicity that emerged as France's citizens—Jewish and non-Jewish—worked to rebuild children's lives and the French nation. ⁴ In 1946, assuming their parents dead, Mr. Goldstein of Paris approached the Bundist Jewish child welfare agency the School Colony (La colonie scolaire) to seek help in gaining custody of his young cousins. Jeannine and Simone G. had been hidden from the Nazis by the Lacostes of the Nièvre since 1942. Now that safety had arrived, however, the Lacostes hesitated to give up the two girls they had loved for years. Upon hearing of the case, the School Colony—in the words of one social worker—agreed that the "fight must be continued" and helped Mr. Goldstein organize a family court proceeding (conseille de famille), which named him guardian of the girls. Soon thereafter, the older daughter Simone, then fourteen years old, left the family that had sheltered and saved her for the home of the Feldmans, her parents' friends in Paris. Later that year, when Mrs. Lacoste now adamantly refused to return Jeannine, Mr. Goldstein, in the words of a social worker, "virtually...