Dorothea Bohnekamp. De Weimar à Vichy: Les Juifs d’Allemagne en république, 1918–1940/44.

Abstract

De Weimar à Vichy: Les Juifs d’Allemagne en république, 1918–1940/44 addresses a deceptively simple topic: the exile, in the 1930s, of tens of thousands of German Jews to France, and the very different experiences of French and German Jewry in these interwar republics. In both countries, Jewish citizens hoped the power of patriotic sacrifice in the First World War would lead to acceptance, and indeed these Jews fought (and died) in rather larger numbers than the general population. But, as Dorothea Bohnekamp deftly demonstrates, their postwar experience could not have been more different. In France, the story Bohnekamp tells is, briefly, an inspiring one. The victory in 1918, however compromised, was seen as the product of the Republic’s strength, and the patriotism of France’s Jews was a measure of that strength. To summarize this moment, she invokes the famous story of Rabbi Abraham Bloch, a Jewish chaplain who was killed in action, allegedly while praying for—indeed, holding a crucifix over—a wounded Catholic soldier. So powerful was this image that it touched even violent reactionaries such as Maurice Barrès. For France’s Jews, still stinging from the betrayal that was the Dreyfus Affair, the sense of redemption was profound. Even the narrowest corridors of the extreme Right had Jewish adherents and maintained respect for Jewish sacrifice during World War I, and this continued until their full Nazification after 1940.