The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance (review)

"Let us abstain from making judgments, condemnations, exclusions . . . . The rift that we currently observe within the Jewish community of France is, to speak frankly, scandalous" (p. 276). In his newly translated book Adam Rayski cites this response by an important man of letters to the circulation in the early 1980s of the accusation that the Jewish communists of the Main d'œuvre immigrée (MOI—Immigrant Labor Organization) had not focused specifically on Jewish suffering during World War II. In France, Jewish choices under the Vichy regime (and in the German-occupied North) have long been a painful subject. In 1980, Maurice Rajsfus published a work scandalously if straightforwardly entitled Des juifs dans la collaboration (Jews among the Collaborators) about the controversial Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF). The UGIF was an organization set up to function as what some have called France's Judenrat, in which Jews participated in the process of Nazi registration and control but also sought to shield their people as best they could through accommodation and cooperation. Did the communists of the Resistance, even when they included substantial numbers of Jews from Eastern European immigrant backgrounds, care too little, owing to their universalistic antifascism, about the worst crimes of the time? Did "native" French bourgeois Jews collude meekly in the destruction of their own people, an act made worse by the fact that they sometimes survived while their less acculturated co-religionists bore the brunt of persecution?

Adam Rayski's book is one more contribution to the study of such loaded questions, and shows how hard it is to abstain from "judgments, condemnations, exclusions." What Rayski has done in the book is to provide a remarkably absorbing, if occasionally slanted, history of Jewish reactions to their evolving persecution. In his chapters, each subdivided into brief readable sections, he covers official (consistorial and rabbinic) responses, the formation of the UGIF and its activities, and the creation of alternative resistance groups in the North and South. As Rayski presents the period, "native" Jews were one group and recent immigrants another, but by the end of his book, in spite of their strongly differing behaviors during the war, these groups came together in the creation of the Conseil représentatif des Juifs de France (CRIF), whose animating principles reflected an intent to overcome the division of the Jews during the war.

That Rayski is not a neutral historian is what makes the book both compelling and problematic. Born in Białystok in 1914, Rayski became a communist as a teenager, immigrated to Paris to work as a communist organizer, and spent the war as political head of the MOI's Jewish Section. (He narrates his life story in a marvelous memoir, Nos illusions perdues, published in 1985.) Though he left communism behind in the 1950s, he insists on the centrality of communists as the backbone of Jewish resistance in France. Indeed, in a prior work, co-authored with Stéphane Courtois and Denis Peschanski, Rayski chronicled the MOI itself (Le sang de l'étranger, 1989). In the work under review, originally published in French in 1992, he entered what François Bédarida calls in the foreword "the rare and invaluable category of witness-turned-historian" (p. x). And the book reflects an impressive multi-continental search for archival documents and relies on often-neglected Yiddish newspapers of the era (including some of Rayski's own articles), which are all-important for canvassing the choices of the Jews in their sociological and political diversity. All historians of the era will benefit from Rayski's finds and his vivid explanation of their significance. The Choice of the Jews Under Vichy joins earlier works in English such as Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton's Vichy France and the Jews (1981), Susan Zuccotti's The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews...