From assimilation to Jewish identity: The dilemmas of French Jewry under the Occupation

Abstract

Following the Napoleonic edict granting citizenship to the Jews, and the implementation of laws consolidating the secularism of the Third Republic, France seemed to have confirmed its status as a land of freedom for European Jews. This changed with the collaboration of Vichy France with the Nazi Occupation. This article studies personal writings, principally diaries, in order to discover the forms of experience of the crisis of identity that beset the Jews of France in the ‘Dark Years’ following this. It shows that under the secularist model of assimilation, this resolved into a series of dilemmas: israélite ou juif, French or Jewish, secular or religiously observant, nationalist, communist or Zionist. The article ends with the key figure of Wladimir Rabinovitch, bringing the account into the second half of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding some key international changes, the terms of these dilemmas has not changed.1