Archives juives n°50/2

Les vives polémiques suscitées ces dernières années par les recherches en génétique des populations relativement à l’existence de spécificités juives – concernant leurs résultats ou tout simplement leur pertinence dans la conception d’une identité juive – invitent le chercheur à se replonger dans le xix^e siècle, une époque où le judaïsme, en pleine redéfinition, se trouvait confronté à une notion de « race », alors triomphante. Si l’historiographie consacrée aux rapports des Juifs à l’idée de « race » est particulièrement fournie, elle concerne pour l’essentiel deux aspects : d’une part les Juifs comme victimes de l’antisémitisme et des politiques raciales, et, d’autre part, les Juifs comme acteurs des mouvements antiracistes, dénonçant par exemple les politiques de ségrégation aux États-Unis dans les années 1950 ou l’Apartheid en Afrique du sud. Jusqu’aux années 1990, rares étaient en revanche les travaux qui étudiaient les usages par les Juifs eux-mêmes de l’idée d’une « race juive »]. Or, au xix^e siècle et au début du xx^e siècle, la « race », conçue comme une évidence, est aussi définie et interprétée de façon très diverse. Elle est de toutes les manières incontournable à tel point que publicistes, médecins, scientifiques ou érudits juifs font un usage fréquent du terme, voire reprennent les méthodes de la raciologie, notamment l’anthropométrie.

Si de nombreuses études ont désormais vu le jour sur ce sujet, plus rares sont les publications concernant le judaïsme français. La France souffre en effet du diagnostic posé par John M. Efron, l’un des pionniers des études des conceptions raciales au sein du judaïsme, selon lequel les Juifs de France, relativement épargnés par l’antisémitisme racial, auraient eu moins de raison de prendre position sur cette notion de race que leurs coreligionnaires allemands. Outre que la première affirmation est en soi contestable, la corrélation l’est tout autant. Beaucoup de chercheurs ont notamment signalé que les Juifs britanniques, bien qu’épargnés par un antisémitisme virulent, ont été parmi les plus productifs en matière de raciologie. L’objectif de ce dossier est donc multiple, combler les lacunes historiographiques dans le domaine français, discuter l’affirmation de J. M. Efron selon laquelle la « race » aurait exercé un moindre attrait en France, remettre en question les frontières bien trop rigides entre les judaïcités d’Europe et questionner les dynamiques à l’œuvre en matière de transferts et d’hybridation de la pensée raciale….

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/ Attitudes toward racial thinking in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and the Archives Israélites

A certain number of comparative studies, which are the fruit of a schema opposing a more universalist-minded France with a more ethnically-minded and anti-Semitic Germany, contend that racial thinking was more prominent among German Jews than among their French coreligionists. An analysis of the reception of racial theories by the editors of the Archives israélites and the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums nuances this thesis. As this article demonstrates, both editors participated in discussions around racial thinking that marked public debates in the nineteenth century, and their positions—at least until the emergence of modern anti-Semitism at the end of the 1870s—were similar.

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/ Marcel Mauss and the idea of race faced with the rise of fascismin the nineteenth century

In a 1920 public lecture on nationality, Marcel Mauss noted that “in sum, it is because the nation creates the race that it is thought that the race creates the nation.” Despite this early sociological insight that race was always a social construction, Mauss did not challenge fellow ethnologist George Montandon directly when the latter began popularizing vicious new scientific forms of biological racism and anti-Semitism in interwar France. Mauss did, however, undermine the revival of scientific racism in other ways, particularly in his teaching and research. In works such as The Gift and in his many seminars, Mauss developed a generous and pluralist valuing of human difference that deeply influenced his students. Armed with Mauss’s insights, these students analyzed the devastating effects of escalating racism at home and in the empire more powerfully than their mentor did; several would go on to join the first global anti-racist campaign launched by UNESCO in the wake of the Holocaust. In short, Mauss’s response to the racist abuse of science unleashed by fascism was both layered and indirect. »

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/ Race, the body, and degeneration in the Jewish scouting movement in the interwar years

The Éclaireurs israélites de France (EIF), founded in 1923, has been the subject of a number of scholarly studies focusing on the movement’s religious, moral, and/or political nature, its role as a node of Jewish resistance against persecution during the Holocaust, and its character as an incubator for Zionism before the establishment of the state of Israel. While these are all significant dimensions of the movement’s history, they obscure the degree to which Jewish young people also participated in broader French (and European) interwar projects of national racial reconstruction. This article reexamines the educational programing among EIF scout leaders, movement organizers, and young scouts to make them vitally concerned with defining and redesigning Jewishness by using the terms and categories of race. Natural and social sciences formed the unequivocal bases of scouting programs aimed at “building new Jews,” while religious and theological issues remained under heated debate until the outbreak of the Second World War. This study contributes to a larger argument that during the 1920s and 30s, physical health and wellness emerged as key imperatives of France’s transforming Jewish community, mirroring, building on, and sometimes resisting broader French interests in public hygiene, national demographic reconstruction, and various styles of eugenic racial thinking.

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/ “And if races really existed. . .” Notions of race and “the Jewish race” among militant antiracists in the 1930s

Founded at the end of the 1920s, the Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme (LICA) invented militant anti-racism in France. Denouncing anti-Jewish attacks in its first years of existence, activists from this organization rapidly affirmed their desire to combat all forms of racism. The 1930s, which are the chronological focus of this article, were also a decade in which racial thinking dominated: its influence weighed on ideas, discourses, and slogans forged by these activists as well as the representations of sympathizers who stood with them. Notions of race and more specifically a Jewish race thus occupied a central place in the activism of this organization. The usage of such notions—albeit intended to fight racism—nonetheless give rise to certain ambiguities and even contradictions.

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/ The Avignonese Jews of Paris and the École royale gratuite de dessin (1768-1795)

Founded in 1766 by the painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier, the l’École royale gratuite de dessin of Paris, better known as the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, appealed to private patrons at the time of its establishment. It so happens that in 1768, among the very first patrons (who became known as founders) were twenty-seven Jews who traced their origins to Avignon and worked as haberdashers. Several months earlier, six of them had benefited from a royal edict of March 1767, which gave them the right to buy their patents. The collective participation of Avignonese Jewish families in Bachelier’s project thus appears to be part of a strategy of consolidating newly acquired and cherished rights, while at the same time getting in the good graces of the lieutenant general of the Paris Police. This phenomenon reveals the Avignonese Jews’ desire to integrate into French society, while also indicating their still very marked belonging to a group that not only shared the same geographical and confessional origins, but also had a common professional identity and practiced inmarriage.

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/ From sacrifice to obscurity: Jewish soldiers from German Alsace and Moselle (1914-1918)

After the allied victory, the attitudes of the Reichsland Jews from Alsace-Lorraine during World War I were an unsettling chapter for French Jews as much as for their coreligionists in Alsace and Moselle, who had, yet again, become French. After the conflict, French Jews claimed Reichsland Jews had remained loyal to France. The reality is more complex, since forty years of Germanization could not be erased without a trace, especially among the youth. Furthermore, pro-German sentiments were stoked by the French alliance with pogrom-ridden Russia and the liberating role of the Reich for the Eastern European Jewish masses. At the same time, the memory of French emancipation and anti-Semitism dominant in the Reich’s army pulled opinions in the other direction. This article will attempt to analyze the attitudes and behavior of Jews from Alsace and Moselle who were mobilized from 1914-1918.

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/ The emigration of Tunisian Jews to Palestine in the 1940s. The impact of the Zionist ideal

From 1943 to 1948-49, at least 4,000 Tunisian Jews left North Africa for Palestine and then the State of Israel, just like tens of thousands of European Jewish survivors after the war. Situated in the particular conditions of colonial North Africa, these departures, usually illegal and clandestine, were the fruit of Zionist propaganda that had been disseminated for decades among the Jewish youth of Tunisia, the effects of which were amplified under Vichy and the German occupation. Utilizing sources from the Tunisian protectorate, this article will focus on the ideological factors behind departures, but will also shed new light on how departures were organized (often by Algerian Zionists, of which there were not many) and the ambivalent attitude of the French authorities.