Archives juives n°51/1

L’importance de la Révolution française dans l’avènement du monde moderne a conféré à la France une place singulière dans l’imaginaire de nombre de pays et de peuples, du moins jusque dans la première moitié du xix^e siècle. C’est d’autant plus vrai pour beaucoup de communautés juives de par le monde. Premier pays à octroyer aux Juifs la pleine citoyenneté, la France devint une seconde terre promise, non seulement pour les Juifs français, mais également pour les communautés juives d’autres pays. Comme le rappelle à juste titre Dominique Schnapper, les Juifs français de cette époque « ont cultivé l’idée, également adoptée par d’autres Juifs européens, que la France était, en ce qui concerne les juifs, unique. C’était elle qui avait inventé l’Émancipation et l’avait imposée au reste de l’Europe ».

En effet, dans les territoires conquis par Napoléon I^er, le sort des Juifs s’adoucit considérablement. En Belgique, en Hollande, dans une grande partie de l’Italie et dans la Confédération du Rhin, « une relative atmosphère de tolérance religieuse [devenait] alors de règle […], et les principes d’égalité civile y étaient généralement reconnus ». De plus, une organisation consistoriale fut mise en place avec une double visée de surveillance et de « régénération » des populations juives locales. Après la chute de l’Empire, l’influence française sur les communautés juives d’autres régions ne cessa pas pour autant, comme l’illustre le cas de l’Algérie coloniale]. Et même dans des contrées qui ne faisaient pas directement partie de la zone d’influence française comme la Prusse, l’Empire russe ou encore l’Empire ottoman, les Juifs ne se désintéressaient pas de ce qui se passait en France. Là aussi, la France représentait pour beaucoup l’espoir d’un avenir meilleur – pour les Juifs et pour toute l’humanité –, bâti sur les principes d’égalité des droits et des libertés religieuses et politiques…

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/ Belgian Judaism’s relationship to the French model in the nineteenth century

The Consistory, the central organization of Belgian Judaism, was established in 1832. Established in continuity with the imperial Consistory, it was most importantly designed to incarnate a particular form of adaptation of Jews to modernity. The Belgian Consistory was inspired throughout the nineteenth century by the French model, developing a religious, social, and education policy—like its French counterpart—that aimed to actively promote Jewish citizenship. At the same time, the Belgian Consistory was different from the French model, due to its cultural proximity to German Judaism. As a result, Belgians fostered a very liberal form of Judaism, favored religious reforms, and adopted, in an almost exclusively Ashkenazi community, a Sephardic-inspired ritual.

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/ The spread of the consistorial model to North Africa and the Middle East in the nineteenth century

This article focuses on how the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East perceived French Judaism through a study of the spread of the consistorial model in the nineteenth century. The French only exported Consistories to colonial Algeria, not to Tunisia and Morocco, during the protectorate period. It is also possible to detect traces of the French institutional model in the organization of the millet in different non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire during the Tanzimat period.

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/ Model or competitor? The perception of French Jews by their German co-religionists during the Franco-Prussia War

It was not always easy for German Jews to justify their patriotic participation in the Franco-Prussian war. Fighting against France meant battling the first European nation that had emancipated the Jews and the example of which served to underline most of the claims German Jews were calling for in Germany. They could not deny that the civic and social status of their French co-religionists was much better than their own. Thus, French Jews, as well as those from other countries, often blamed their German co-religionists for hindering their own goal of full emancipation. Some German Jewish authors stressed that emancipation had advanced a lot in Germany too. In some instances, they entered into a real competition with France, trying to show that the German way was the high road to emancipation. Others, however, referring to France, openly blamed Germany for its backwardness in matters of equality. Discussions of France and French Jews were always a tightrope walk for German Jews. If they paid too much tribute to France, they risked being described as friends with the enemy, which could cause just what they feared: doubts about their national loyalty.

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/ France and the World’s Fair of 1937 through the prism of the Yiddish press

During the 1930s, Paris was home to approximately two million immigrants. Around 150,000 of these were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe. This paper traces the development of the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair and places it within both its Parisian and Eastern European historical contexts. Through an analysis that focuses on coverage of the pavilion in the Eastern European Jewish press, I argue that the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion stood as an international marker of the development of Yiddish culture and a stand against the rising tide of fascism and authoritarianism in Europe. Buttressed by this particular 1930s context, Yiddish culture-makers in Paris created a cultural display that presented a global Yiddish culture that spoke to Jews and non-Jews around the world in their attempt to define Yiddish culture as a contribution to their specific Jewish and wider European communities.

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/ France in the imagination of Sephardic Jews in the United States from 1945 to the present

In contrast with the general American Ashkenazi Jewish population, France occupied a central place in the cultural imagination of francophone Eastern Sephardic immigrants to the post-war United States, many of whom had been students in the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle or other francophone institutions in their countries of origin. In the 1950s and 1960s, francophonie opened up an attractive path towards integration for many of these individuals, who came from Arab and Muslim majority countries that had a generally negative set of associations in the United States as “primitive” and “uncivilized.” Whereas being culturally French was a plus for Eastern Sephardim in the 1950s and 1960s, this was less the case in the 1970s and after, when a generally positive reputation of France in the American imagination largely ceded to an image of France as an antisemitic country.

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/ The French Jewish community and Zionism in the 1930s, through the prism of the Univers israélite

Through a detailed analysis of the columns of the Univers israélite, the unofficial paper of the Central Consistory, this article demonstrates the newly expressed support for Zionism among French Jewish leaders in the 1930s. The latter see the creation of a Jewish homeland, first and foremost, as a means of finding a refuge for Central European Jews who fled to France in 1933. Secondly, they consider it a legitimate aspiration for certain Jews to want to live an authentically Jewish life and finally, as a means of renewing Jewish culture in the diaspora, threatened by assimilation. This article questions the reasons that encouraged these Jewish leaders—without renouncing their French integration—to embrace a progressively more assertive and profound attachment to certain Zionist ideals over this decade.