What counted in the end was the official position adopted by the church. During the summer of 1940 the Catholic hierarchy had been informed of the forthcoming statute. When the assembly of cardinals and archbishops met in Lyon, on August 31, 1940, the “Jewish question” was on the agenda. Émile Guerry, adjunct bishop of Cambrai, summed up the assembly’s official stand: “In political terms, the problem is caused by a community [the Jews] that has resisted all assimilation, dispersion and the national integration of its members taken individually. The State has the right and the duty to remain actively vigilant in order to make sure that the persistence of this unity [of the Jews] does not cause any harm to the common good of the nation, as one would do in regard to an ethnic minority or an international cartel. Here, we are not mentioning the foreign Jews, but if the State considers it necessary to take measures of vigilance, it is nonetheless its duty to respect the principles of justice in regard to those Jews who are citizens like others: they have the same rights as other citizens as long as they haven’t proven that they are unworthy of them. The statute that the State prepares has, in this case, to be inspired by the rules of justice and charity.”195 In other words the assembled leaders of the French Catholic Church gave their agreement to the statute that, a month later, would be announced by the government. Of course when the official announcement came, no Catholic prelate protested. Some bishops even openly supported the anti-Jewish measures.196
The most immediate reason for the French Church’s attitude stemmed from the unmitigated support granted by Pétain and the new État français to the reinsertion of Catholicism into French public life, particularly in education. Whereas the republic had established the separation of church and state and thus banned the use of state funds for the support of religious schools, Vichy canceled the separation and all its practical sequels: In many ways Catholicism had become the official religion of the new regime.197 There was more, however.
Since the French Revolution a segment of French Catholicism had remained obdurately hostile to the “ideas of 1789,” which they considered to be a Judeo-Masonic plot intent upon the destruction of Christianity. Such militant Catholicism found its modern political voice during the Dreyfus affair in the ultranationalist and anti-Semitic party then created by Charles Maurras: the Action Française. The Action Française had been excommunicated in the 1920s, but many Catholics remained strongly attached to it, and the ban was lifted by Pius XII on the eve of the war. It was the Action Française that inspired Vichy’s Statut des Juifs, and it was the same anti-Semitism that belonged to the ideological profile of an influential part of the French church in 1940.
Finally, some of the most fundamental tenets of Christian religious anti-Semitism resurfaced among French Catholics, in a less vituperative form than in Poland of course, but resurfaced nonetheless. Thus the newspaper La Croix, which during the 1920s and 1930s had abandoned its violent anti-Jewish diatribes of the turn of the century (mainly during the Dreyfus affair), could not resist the temptation offered by the new circumstances. “Are the Jews Cursed by God?” was the title of an article published on November 30, 1940. Having justified the new statute, the author, who wrote under the pseudonym C. Martel, reminded his readers that since the Jews themselves had called Jesus’ blood “upon their heads and those of their children,” a curse indeed existed. There was only one way of escaping it: conversion.198
The small French Reformed (Calvinist) Church was influenced by the general cultural-ideological stance shared by most of the country, although Pastor Marc Boegner, its leader, was to become an outspoken critic of Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws. Yet, in the summer of 1941, Boegner himself would emphasize on several occasions that his support was granted to French Jews only and that, in his opinion, the influx of Jewish immigrants had created a major problem.199
In the occupied zone, the Germans didn’t remain idle either. The first anti-Jewish initiatives did not stem from the “delegate of the Security Police and the SD,” Helmut Knochen, or from the military command, but from the embassy in Paris. On August 17, after a meeting with Hitler, Ambassador Otto Abetz demanded that Werner Best, the head of the civil administration branch at military headquarters, prepare an initial set of anti-Jewish measures. Best was surprised by Abetz’s initiative, but the following instructions were drafted nonetheless: “(a) with immediate enforcement, Jews who had fled southward should no longer be allowed back into the occupied zone; (b) preparations should begin for the removal of all Jews from the occupied zone; (c) the possibility of confiscating Jewish property should be examined.”200 On August 26 Abetz was informed by Ribbentrop that Hitler had agreed to these “immediate measures.”201 Everybody fell into line.
By mid-September 1940, the commander of the army, General Brauchitsch, gave the formal go-ahead, and on the twenty-seventh, the “First Jewish Decree,” defining as Jewish anybody with more than two grandparents of the Jewish religion or with two such grandparents and belonging to the Jewish faith or married to a Jewish spouse, was issued. The decree forbade Jews who had fled to the Vichy zone to return into the occupied zone; it instructed the French prefects to start a full registration of all Jews in the occupied zone (in order to prepare their removal), as well as to identify Jewish businesses and register Jewish assets (for later confiscation).202 On October 16 a “Second Jewish Decree” ordered the Jews to register their enterprises before October 31.203 From that day on, Jewish stores carried a yellow sign reading Jüdisches Geschäft/Entreprise Juive [Jewish business].204
The registration of all Jews in the occupied zone started on October 3, Rosh Hashanah. It proceeded in alphabetical order and was to be completed on October 19. In Paris the Jews registered at the police stations of their districts; outside Paris, at the sous-préfectures. The vast majority (over 90 percent) of Jews, whether French or foreign, obeyed the orders without much hesitation. Some even turned the registration into a statement. The terminally ill philosopher Henri Bergson, although exempted from the registration and for years far closer to Catholicism than to Judaism, dragged himself in slippers and dressing gown to the Passy police station in Paris to be inscribed as Jew; a Col. Pierre Brissac went in full military uniform.205
At the end of October 1940, 149,734 Jews had been listed. Late registration of an additional few thousand Jews continued sporadically during the following weeks and months: 86,664 were French, 65,707 were foreigners.206 Pierre Masse, a former minister and senator of the Hérault department wrote to Pétain on October 20: “I obey the laws of my country even if they are imposed by the invader.” In his letter he asked the maréchal whether he should take away the officer stripes that several generations of his ancestors had earned in serving their country since the Napoleonic Wars.207
The identification of “ordinary Jews” as such depended on their readiness to register. No such hurdle existed regarding Jewish writers, alive or dead. It had always been a specialty of anti-Semites to uncover the identity of writers, artists, intellectuals who at first glance were not identifiable as Jews; this was common practice in France as everywhere else. Thus a list of names was readily available when, in September 1940, the association of French publishers promised the German embassy in Paris that no Jewish authors, among other excluded groups, would be published or reprinted any longer: The publishers would, from then on, exercise strict self-censorship. Within days, a first list of banned books, the “liste Bernhard,” was made public, soon followed by a “liste Otto.” It was preceded by a short declaration from the association: “These are the books which by their lying and tendentious spirit have systematically poisoned French public opinion; particularly the publications of political refugees or of Jewish writers who, having betrayed the hospitality that France had granted to them, unscrupulously agitated in favor of a war from which they hoped to take advantage for their own egoistic aims.”208
Some French publishers came up with new initiatives. Whereas at Mercure de France, a French translation of the autobiographical part of Mein Kampf w
as being planned, Bernard Grasset, afraid that he would not be allowed to reopen his publishing house in Paris, informed the Germans, by way of intermediaries, that “as far back you go in both branches of my family, you will find neither a Jew or a Jewess.”209
Possibly more than any other Western European capital, Paris soon became a hotbed of intellectual and artistic collaboration. In the earliest period of German occupation, some initiatives appear as a mixture of abjection and comedy. Thus, the star of the French dance scene, Serge Lifar, much impressed by Goebbels during the latter’s visit to Paris in July 1940, started pressing the German embassy for another meeting with the Nazi propaganda chief. In historian Philippe Burrin’s words, “Lifar fancied his chances as the führer of European dance.” In the meantime, the Germans were worrying about Lifar’s Aryan ancestry. After the dancer was cleared of any Jewish stigma, he was invited to perform at the Embassy—not for Goebbels, alas—but at least in honor of Brauchitsch.210
As a result of the Vichy laws of the summer and fall of 1940, 140 faculty members of Jewish origin, around 10 percent of the teaching body nationwide, were banned from the universities. Fourteen particularly eminent Jewish scholars were exempted from the ban on condition that they continue teaching in the Vichy zone only. The French academic community acquiesced.211 At the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic institution in the country, its four Jewish professors were dismissed, according to the new regulations.
The director of the Collège, Edmond Faral, had not waited for the new laws. In a January 1941 report to Vichy’s delegation in occupied France, Faral eagerly mentioned his own initiative: “The Jewish question: no Jew has taught at the Collège de France since the beginning of the academic year. That decision was taken even before the law of October 3, 1940.” In the draft of the report, the last sentence, later deleted, read as follows: “The administration had taken that decision.”212 When the Jews were no longer allowed to teach at the Collège, none of their “Aryan” colleagues protested.213 The same happened in all French institutions of higher learning. At the prestigious Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, the assistant director, Roger Seydoux, expelled all Jewish professors when asked to do so by Karl Epting, the head of the cultural section of the German embassy in Paris. No attempts were made to obtain exemptions.214
The two main figures of the community, the head of the Consistoire Central, French Jewry’s traditional representative body, and the head of the Consistoire de Paris, Édouard and Robert de Rothschild, fled the country in June 1940.215 They left a Jewry in complete disarray in the feeble hands of the newly elected chief rabbi of France, Isaie Schwartz, and the remaining members of the Consistoire, most of whom had sought refuge in the nonoccupied part of the country.
Even before the armistice became effective, the chief rabbi received a first intimation of things to come: On June 20 the archbishop of Bordeaux broadcast an address to the Catholics of France: on the twenty-third Pastor Boegner spoke to the Protestant community. Schwartz should have been next, but no invitation came; in response to his query he was told that from then on the Jewish religious program would be taken off the air.216
Vague forebodings spread among native French Jews and, even more so, among the foreign Jews, whether they lived in the occupied or the nonoccupied zone. In fact nobody knew, in the summer of 1940, what to expect and what to fear. Two very different chroniclers recorded the events from “opposite” perspectives. The first, Raymond-Raoul Lambert, was a native French Jew belonging to an old Alsatian Jewish family; the other, Jacques Biélinky, was born in Vitebsk and, after having experienced the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and then being jailed in Russia for clandestine socialist activities, he arrived in France in 1909 as a political refugee. For the Germans and for Vichy—both were first and foremost Jews. Lambert was French to the core: French schools, decorated frontline officer during World War I, briefly appointed to the Foreign Ministry, yet also consciously Jewish, even actively so: He organized the assistance to German Jews after 1933 and simultaneously was appointed editor in chief of L’Univers Israélite, the main periodical of the Consistoire. When the war broke out, Lambert donned the uniform once again, this time as a reserve officer.
Biélinky had been naturalized in 1927, and thus, belonged to his adoptive France as much as Lambert. During the coming events, however, Biélinky’s voice would be that of a foreign Jew, of an Ostjude, to a point. He had worked as a journalist for various Jewish newspapers, and although his formal education had stopped with the cheder [the traditional Jewish religious elementary school], he acquired a solid knowledge of painting, and it was as a reporter dealing with the Parisian artistic scene that he signed many of his articles. Between 1940 and 1943 Lambert’s path would not be the same as Biélinky’s; their fates would, however, be identical in the end.217
“French Jewry lives in a particular state of anxiety,” Lambert, still in the army, recorded on July 14, 1940. “It accepts the suffering shared by all, but fears the possibility that the enemy will demand further discrimination. This anxiety makes my future and that of my sons appear especially threatened, but I am still confident. France cannot accept everything, and it is not for nothing that for more than a century my ancestors have been buried in its soil, that I fought two wars. I cannot imagine for myself, my wife and my sons, the possibility of life under another sky, an uprooting that would be worse than an amputation.”218
In fact during the summer and fall of 1940, Jewish life seemed at first to return to a measure of normalcy, even in Paris under direct German occupation. As early as October 1940, all communal welfare offices had resumed their activities and, at this stage, they were able to face the needs of a substantial part of the immigrant community. The French Jews turned to the Consistoire, and, in August, Paris’s chief rabbi, Julien Weill, returned to the French capital. Among French Jews anxiety about the future seemed to be on the wane. The respite was short-lived.
On October 2, 1940, Lambert got an inkling of the forthcoming Statut from early indications in the newspapers. “It is one of the saddest memories of my life,” he noted in his diary. “Thus it can be that in a few days I shall be a second-class citizen, that my sons, French by birth, culture, and faith will be brutally rejected from the French community…. Is it possible? I can’t believe it. France is not France anymore.”219 A few weeks later, the pain was no less intense but saving formulas were emerging: “A friend writes to me: One does not judge one’s mother when she is unjust. One suffers and one waits. Thus we Jews of France have to bend our heads and suffer,” Lambert noted on November 6 and added: “I agree!”220
Biélinky, who continued to live in Paris, noted the announcement of the Statut almost laconically. Two days later, on October 4, after attending the Rosh Hashanah prayers, he mentioned the large number of worshippers and the presence of police forces around the synagogue; as for troublemakers, there weren’t any. After the service he entered a coffee shop. The owner, “a Catholic one hundred percent, loudly expressed his indignation against the persecution of the Jews. He [the owner] declared that the local population, very French and very Parisian, is indifferent to the fate of the Rothschilds, but otherwise it would openly support the Jewish population of modest condition.”221
Among the official leaders of French Jewry, the first to respond to the statute was Chief Rabbi Schwartz. In a letter to Pétain on October 22, 1940, he reminded the chief of state that the French Jews, now excluded from all public office, had always been “the faithful servants of the fatherland [la Patrie]…. We always called in our prayers for the glory and greatness of France…Frenchmen, who do not separate the religion of our fathers from the love of our homeland [sol natal], we will continue to obey the laws of the State…. To a law of exclusion [loi d’exception], we will answer with unfailing devotion to our fatherland.” Pétain’s curt answer praised “obedience to the law.”222
In the meantime Eichmann’s envoy in Paris, the SD officer in charge of Jewish affairs, Theodor Dannec
ker, was taking the first steps to establish a nationwide Jewish Council. Rather than impose the council by a simple Diktat, the sly German used a roundabout way: He persuaded both the Consistoire and the organizations of foreign Jews to coordinate their welfare agencies in a single framework that (so he promised) would not be interfered with by the Germans. They agreed.
On January 30, 1941, the Comité de Coordination was established. Most Jews did not yet understand Dannecker’s tactics. However, even those credulous enough to believe Dannecker’s promises of nonintervention felt an imminent threat when Eichmann’s delegate brought in two former members of the Vienna Judenrat, Israel Israelowitz and Wilhelm Bieberstein, and imposed them as “advisers” to the committee. In April 1941 the first issue of Informations Juives, written almost entirely by the two Austrian Jews—“in poor French” according to Biélinky—was published.223 It was becoming increasingly clear that Dannecker’s Jewish agents were in Paris to take charge of the new organization.224
VIII
As the Wehrmacht broke through the Dutch lines, a wave of panic engulfed the country’s 140,000 Jews: On May 13 and 14, thousands rushed to the North Sea coast in the hope of finding some way to reach England:225 their fear found its hateful echo in the letters of German soldiers. Cpl. HZ described, in a letter of June 2, 1940, an incident that must have taken place in Belgium or in northern France: “You should have seen the Jews, as the Germans were advancing. I saw a Jew with luggage standing by a taxi and offering the driver 6,000 Frs (600 RM) if he could take him to the coast, so that he still could catch a boat to England. Just then, a second Jew arrived and offered 7,000 Frs for the same ride; then came a third one, completely distraught, with trembling knees: please, please, take me along, I shall give you 10,000 Frs.”226 In Amsterdam the number of suicides increased threefold from 1939 to 1940: Most of those who killed themselves were probably Jews. According to various estimates, some two hundred Jews committed suicide during the week starting May 15.227
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