Arrests, Internments, and Deportations of Swiss Jews in France, and the Reactions of Swiss Authorities, 1941–1944

Hundreds of Swiss Jews were living in France when Germany attacked and conquered it in mid-1940. Antisemitic laws came into force soon thereafter. One question was whether these measures would apply to citizens of a neutral state. German and French authorities applied such laws, for instance, interning approximately sixty Swiss Jews in the Northern Zone. The present study focuses on the arrests, internments, and occasional deportations of Swiss Jews living in France, and the often feeble efforts of Swiss diplomats and other authorities to extricate them. The haunting question remains how much more could have been done.

Rassenwahn

German science in early twentieth century was sophisticated, and Nazi theorists had to pay it lip service as they constructed their racial empire. Definitions of key terms like blood or race were never arrived at. Who or what was a Jew? Hans F. K. Günther and other Nazi race theorists were poorly trained and vague. The same was true of Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most influential race ideologues of the Nazi Party. Their works were taken seriously by Nazi bureaucracy. Throughout the Reich, race theorists helped the bureaucracy. George-Alexis Montandon, the Swiss-born, naturalized French physician and polygenist anthropologist, selected Jews in France for deportation using utterly dubious criteria. Exhibitions on race and centers of study were set up to promote Nazi race policies. Relatively little new physical anthropological research was conducted on Jews because it would have undermined the basis of racial laws. Attempts were made to see if Jewish blood was different. Non-somatic research into Jewish difference was carried out by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss. Nazi Jewish studies had to engage with the black Jews who had troubled polygenists.

Assessing the Threat of Antisemitic Harassment and Attack in France—Paris in Focus

Reports of antisemitic harassment and attacks against Jews in France have become frequent in the French and international media. However, such reports are mostly anecdotal and provide only limited information on how widespread these attacks are or if they are increasing over time. Has antisemitism become a frequent experience for French Jews? Are certain community members especially targeted? How likely is it that a Jewish visitor to France is attacked? How threatened do Jews feel and what is the impact of the perceived threat? This paper reviews official statistics on antisemitic incidents (1), attitude surveys of the general population in France (2), and surveys among Jews (3). All three indicators have their weaknesses but taken together they can help to assess the threat that Jews in France face today of becoming victim of antisemitic harassment or attacks. Keywords: France, antisemitism, physical attacks, Orthodox Jews, Paris

Maurice Samuels, The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 241 pp.

“This is not a work of intellectual history in the conventional sense,” writes Maurice Samuels in the introduction to this sophisticated, intricately argued book on French intellectuals’ ruminations about the place of Jews in France since the 18th century. A specialist in French literature at Yale, Samuels presents “a series of close readings of texts” about this issue (p. 15). What are these texts about? Part of a continuing discourse on French citizenship, they are ruminations on whether French society should define rights and obligations for individuals irrespective of their religious, ethnic, or cultural origins, or whether those particularities should govern how individuals identify and order themselves within French society. Suggesting that this Manichean view is too simple, Samuels identifies a countertradition within French universalism that embodies a more malleable approach to universal commitments....

Jewish Citizens of an Imperial Nation-State

This article draws on the work of recent years on Jews and Algeria to map a French-Algerian frame as a new approach to French Jewish history. The article thinks through the implications of two key ideas from the “new colonial history” for the history of Jews in France and Algeria and posits that Jews in French Algeria can profitably be understood as colonial citizens. After focusing briefly on the French-Algerian War and decolonization, a period for which recent scholarship has developed robustly in suggestive ways, the article turns to a case study from a different era: World War II and the Holocaust. It addresses the history of the majority-Jewish resistance movement in Algiers that paved the way for the success of Operation Torch. Finally, the article considers how this French-Algerian framework might reshape our thinking about certain basic issues in the field of French Jewish history. Cet article s'appuie sur les travaux des dernières années sur les juifs et l'Algérie pour tracer un modèle franco-algérien comme nouvelle approche de l'histoire des juifs en France. L'article examine les implications de deux idées clés de la « nouvelle histoire coloniale » pour l'histoire des juifs en France et en Algérie, et pose comme principe que les juifs de l'Algérie française peuvent à juste titre être compris comme des « citoyens coloniaux ». Cet article commence par aborder brièvement une période que l'historiographie récente a développé de manière suggestive—la guerre franco-algérienne et la décolonisation—avant de passer à l'étude d'une autre époque, la Deuxième Guerre mondiale et l'Holocauste. L'article analyse l'histoire du mouvement de résistance à majorité juive qui a ouvert la voie au succès de l'opération Torch. Enfin, l'article discute de la manière dont ce cadre franco-algérien pourrait modifier notre réflexion sur certaines questions fondamentales pour l'histoire des juifs en France.