Jacques Sémelin and the French Recovery of Righteousness

Abstract

Jacques Sémelin and the French Recovery of Righteousness Robert Gildea (bio) This is an ambitious, courageous, and controversial book. Ambitious, because it takes up the challenge thrown down by Simone Veil, on the occasion of a celebration in honour of the Righteous of France in 2007, to account for why 75 percent of Jews living in France during World War II were not deported to their deaths, unlike in the Netherlands, where 75 percent of Jews died. Courageous, because it squarely takes on two of the giants in the field, Robert O. Paxton and Michael R. Marrus, whose Vichy France and the Jews (1981) argued that the antisemitism of the Vichy regime was tacitly approved by most of the French population. Controversial, finally, because Sémelin's aim is to redeem the reputation of the French people during les années noires by demonstrating how, less in an organised way than by the cumulation of "little gestures" of help, they saved such a high proportion of Jews in France. There are, nevertheless, a number of questions about this book that merit discussion. I propose to look at three of them. First, the question of numbers and how the survival of different categorisation of Jews is calculated. Second, the question of the scope and depth of antisemitism in Vichy France. Third, the respective roles of Jews and non-Jews in rescue and resistance, and why this matters so much in contemporary French society. NUMBERS AND CATEGORIES A great deal of the force of Sémelin's argument stems from the headline figure of 75 percent of Jews in France who survived the Holocaust. This figure derives from the painstaking work of Serge Klarsfeld, first published in his Mémorial of 1978.1 The figure, Sémelin clarifies, combines two different categories. On the one hand were Jews who were French citizens, fully assimilated, and often given the complimentary name of Israélites. [End Page 246] On the other were Jews of foreign origin, recent immigrants from Poland, Russia, Greece, or North Africa, who were less assimilated and—as is the lot of immigrants—often regarded with scorn. Sémelin points out that they had very different fates. Between 87 and 88 percent of 190,000–200,000 French Jews survived, whereas for 130,000–140,000 non-French Jews the figure was between 56 and 60 percent. "French Jews were rarely arrested," says Sémelin, and there was "a tendency among governments to hand over foreign Jews in order to protect 'their' Jews."2 Foreign Jews, by contrast, were liable to be interned in camps from the beginning of the occupation, making them a sitting target when the roundups began in 1941. There are a number of problems here. To begin with, the nationality of Jews in question is not always clear. Klarsfeld extrapolates nationality from place of birth, which is not reliable. The 2020 online version of the 2012 edition implicitly acknowledges that unreliability by stating that "The 1978 version of the Memorial specifies the nationality of a large number of the deportees until June 1943 and indicates who were the known survivors in 1945. These data being excluded from the 2012 version, they are currently only partial and we will complete them in the future."3 Then there is the question of naturalisation and denaturalisation. Many foreign Jews became naturalised French under legislation of 1927 but were deprived of French citizenship under a Vichy law of July 22, 1940, with a boom in "denaturalisations" in late 1942. The number has been calculated at 6,000 by Bernard Laguerre.4 Unpublished work by Kyra Schulman, a PhD candidate in history at the University of Chicago, suggests that if those 6,000 denaturalised Jews were added to the numbers of French Jews, then the French Jewish death rate would rise from 12.25 to 15.25 percent, a 3 percent increase. This calculation may be marginal, but it does throw some doubt on the sanctity of the accepted totals. A further question is whether having French nationality indeed protected Jews. In September 1942 the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) wrote to the Prefecture of Police...