Jewish Children's Literature in France

Abstract

Due to the tombstone desecration inci­dents in the cemetery in Carpentras, head­ line stories in early 1990 furnished quantities of information on the long his­ tory of the Jews in France. Starting from the Roman period, we are told all the usual ups and downs-mostly the downs, with the forced baptisms, expulsions, slaugh­ ters, accusations, and disasters that Jewish history everywhere features. The ups are the moments when Jewish learn­ ing and literary efforts flourished, as in the 11th century in Troyes, where Rashi was France's—and perhaps Judaism's­ greatest commentator on the Bible and Talmud. The newspapers mentioned the emancipation of 1791; the Dreyfus trial in 1894; Leon Blum, the first Jewish prime minister of France; the battleground of the Second World War; and the perpetual bat­tle and tenacity of being Jewish.