Rene Cassin and the Alliance Israelite Universelle

Abstract

This article considers the claim that French Jews emerged from the Second World War with a sense of disenchantment with the Republican tradition. I want to present to you the opposite case, that of a man whose Republican commitment was unshakable and indeed deepened by the war and the Shoah. ReneCassin, jurist, inter- national statesman, and one of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, never lost his faith in the Republican project at home and abroad. From 1940 on, he worked to revitalize that tradition, not to discard or refashion it. 1 I will bypass the story of his wartime role as the jurist of Free France between 1940 and 1944, and his mediation of the return to the Republican legal order after Liberation. Instead, I will focus on his work on behalf of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, of which he was president from 1943 until his death 33 years later. How did he get there? It was not through a lifelong commitment to Jewish beliefs and practices. Born in Bayonne in 1887, he had a Jewish education to satisfy his mother, and then, like his father, left religious practice behind. He was severely wounded in 1914, and mar- ried a Catholic woman, Simone Yzombard, in 1917. From 1940, he had a liaison with a second Catholic woman, Ghislaine Bru, a film actress with whom he fell in love in London during the Blitz. They married in 1975, when he was eighty-eight years old, just three months before his death. Until the 1930s, ReneCassin was an assimilated Jewish Republican, whose Jewishness was of secondary importance to him. From the 1930s on, and even more so after the defeat of 1940, he became a Republican Jew, with a commitment to the Jewish cause as a central element in his commitment to universal rights. In 1948, ReneCassin put the point this way. It was a year of great achievements for him, including the pilotage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through the General Assembly of the United Nations. It was passed without dissent (though with seven abstentions) on 10 December 1948. In that same year, he was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and thereby became a