L'immigration des Juifs d'Algérie en France métropolitaine

Abstract

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of the relations between American and French Jewry as Algerian Jews fled to France in the summer of 1962, a key moment in the “sephardization” of French Jewish life. It studies the relationship between the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the major American philanthropic organization, and the Fonds Social Juif Unifie, a French institution that had been established by the JDC in 1949 to collect and distribute funds to French Jewish organizations. Contrary to previous analyses, this article shows that the reception of Algerian Jewry in France was not a strictly French affair, between the State and its Jewish population, but instead a transnational collaboration, involving both American and French actors. Indeed, the JDC’s deep-seated influence in French Jewish life in the years following the Shoah was still being felt in France in the early 1960s, both from a financial and political point of view. In the spring of 1962, the FSJU publicly criticized the JDC, leading to a conflict of seemingly minor significance. Nonetheless, the “rebellion” of the FSJU occurred during the Algerian crisis, providing the young French organization with an opportunity to prove itself capable of managing an emergency situation. The Algerian crisis thus not only renewed French Jewish life after the Shoah from a spiritual and demographic point of view : it provided a “coming-of-age” experience for the FSJU, and greater independence for French Jewish life.