How did French Jews face Nazism from 1933 ? They mobilized and entered the war by paying lucid, but sometimes resigned, on Hitlerian Germany.
The history of sensitivities is a now well -established historical genre, exploring in an often multidisciplinary approach the articulation between emotions or feelings, body and behaviors of actors. By exploring the history of the emotional culture of French Jews in the face of Nazism, Jérémy Guedj plunges us into their perceptions, their representations and their awareness of the danger between 1933 and 1939, in a book of extreme methodological rigor and a very sensitive writing.
At the heart of the tumult
After having studied in 2011 the contrasting reactions of French Jews against fascist Italy (between neutrality, hope, benevolence and concern), Jérémy Guedj devotes a book to their relations to Nazism, marked early by concern and clairvoyance. These two books, separated by ten years apart, constitute a historiographical diptych.
Indeed, they are linked by an object and a question of research: how French Jewish public opinion representing, without completely covering it, a heterogeneous community sociologically, cultural, political and religious, does it apprehend an external political danger (Germany from 1933, Italy from 1938) underpined by a biological anti-Semitism ? With what intellectual tools and what cultural references ? What readings do French Jews make these unpublished forms of political radicalism and what do they do, once the threat has been identified ? How these French Jews, themselves victims in their own country of a rise in hatred and violence in the 1930s, faced this unthought and unthinkable path of European modernity, namely that of reversed history which gives the subtitle of the book ?
Beyond the historical object studied in a tightened chronological framework (1933-1939), the author proposes stimulating historiographical reflection and which echo different challenges of the present time. How to make a sensitive history of political vigilance, without falling into the trap of a retroductive reading ? How to enter the emotional experience and the representations of actors “ who do not live in history, in the news “, But who inscribe their existential trajectories in a continuum without a very great historical consciousness ? How to articulate a history of affects, a sensitive event history, to crises and ruptures with an experience of temporalities necessarily plural ?
To answer these questions, Guedj chooses an event history, not in the sense of a tragic chronicle day on the perception of Nazism by French Jews. Prudent and meticulous in his analysis, he refuses to sacrifice the complexity of the past in favor of a typology which would schematically enclose Jews in binary categories: commitment or distance, lucidity or blindness, revolt or resignation. Like other intellectuals before him, he distances himself from the introduction with what he describes as “ Arendt syndrome This position defended by the German philosopher that the Jews, paralyzed by Nazism, allowed themselves to be exterminated in passivity.
French Jews in the face of events
To take up the challenge of complexity, Guedj chooses a choral story articulated to a writing strategy based on the “ intrigue Dear to Paul Veyne. His goal is to “ Reinvesting a narrative order which gives an idea of the succession of contexts and therefore of atmospheres, of the universes in which those who attended the evolutions of Nazism were swimming. »»
It is therefore a question of grasping the way in which the French Jews built representations of events in the process of being done, without these denarii developing a acute historical conscience of the facts in the process of happening. This writing choice is clearly part of a “ History of possibilities “, Which aims to make readers grasp the contradictions of a world where the threat coexists with normality, without the genocidal logic having been thought. But what normality are we talking about ? What does she correspond ?
Anxious to articulate positions with the events in the process of being made (from January 30, 1933 to the night of the pogromes of 1938 via the laws of Nuremberg in 1935), Guedj forgets to re -register the actors in the routine of their daily life inscribed in socio -political configurations in perpetual transformation. In a context of peril rise, how do they effectively adapt to a world darken ? How did they succeed in adjusting their affects as well as possible with everyday dynamics ?
This story of perceptions, reactions and sensitive experiences of Nazism, Jérémy Guedj writes it using press sources (The Jewish Tribune from Strasbourg, The Israelite Universe,, The right to live), but also institutional and public sources. The choice of polyphonic writing, however dominated by the voice of scholars (journalists, intellectuals), implies renouncing a prosopographical approach to these Jews. This book is above all aims to resonate these thousand and one Jewish voice, essentially public and male (except those of Rachel Cheigam and Ida Fink), who crossed this period preceding the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Challenged for reversed history
Organized in seven chapters, the book is more than a dive in the years 1933-1939. Thus, Guedj is not content to study the way in which the French Jews lived (in the sense of a sensitive experience of politics) the arrival of Hitler in power and the way in which the Nazi dictatorship settled and consolidated. He inscribed his analysis in the short time of the interwar period (with a passage on the Republic of Weimar and the moment of public emergence of Nazism in 1923 which raised almost immediate an excitement, which quickly rushed into the second half of the 1920s) and the average time of the cultural representations of French Jews on Germany. It also opens the reader to a conception of Jewish time marked by long duration and historical analogy.
Any culture first refers to a certain representation of time, and Guedj pays great attention to the tension generated by attitudes inherited from the past and anchored in the Jewish collective memory (through the festive ritual of Purim) and behaviors located in a present subject to unpublished issues. This is one of the great qualities of this book capable of uncovering structuring cultural dimensions.
As Johann Chapoutot reminds us in his preface, “ It is thus a millennial story which is questioned in shock, brutal, of Nazi violence ». Thus, Guedj connects the reflection of French Jews on Nazism with biblical references of a past or messianic time marked by the seal of vulnerability and threat. In the case of French Jews, facing Nazism, it was basically replaying the dramatic history of the Meguilain which the heroine Esther saved the Jewish people living within the Persian Empire of an extermination plan conceived by the Vizir Haman. And it is certainly there that we access the specificity of the subject.
The fight against anti -Semitism
The narrative choice leads the author to show us that, on many points, the French Jews shared the same anxieties and the same errors of appreciation as their contemporaries. The main thing was to believe that Hitler, once in power, was going to be forced to give up political and ideological radicality.
Now Hitler was a challenge to common sense. We had to wait at the latest at the latest 1935 and the laws of Nuremberg that the general awareness led to a terrible observation: nothing was ever going to be as before. In chapter 4 in the metaphorical title “ The lock and keys “, Guedj shows how French Jewish intellectuals often petris of messianism (Raymond Aron, Jean-Richard Bloch, Emmanuel Levinas) were able to produce in the 1930s an analysis of Nazism in terms of religion capable of overthrowing the course of history and going backwards of modern European civilization. The author therefore shows that beyond the dread and the excitement, the French Jews took very seriously the threat of Nazism and began to study and discuss Mein Kampf and its ideological foundations.
Aware of the danger, they led the fight in France against Nazi infiltration, relayed by “ agents Like Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Jean Boissel. We will profit with the pages devoted to the Nazi influence both in North Africa and to Alsace and to the reactions that this aroused in terms of commitment. In 1936, the international league against anti -Semitism (Lica) organized a large campaign to aware of public opinion throughout the Grand Est, with a series of important meetings in Strasbourg, Metz, Nancy, Colmar and Mulhouse. The fight against Nazism also took even more concrete militant forms, like the boycott of German products, but also of petition and internationalization of combat with the World Jewish Congress, “ Diplomatic arm of the Jewish people »Founded in Geneva the same year.
All these local, national and transnational commitments inscribed in a context of radicalization of Nazism paradoxically produced a “ kind of addiction that dulls both emotional reflexes and intellectual reflexes “, As a member of Lica In April 1938 the day after the Anschluss. After the night of the pogromes of November 1938 also arose the challenge of German Jewish refugees, which led to the failure of the Évian conference (it “ Welcome the meeting of national selfishness ) And therefore a coordinated reception policy. The French Jews then sank into resignation, before undergoing the events from 1939 despite the merchant decrees-laws of April 21, 1939 against racism, surprisingly forgotten at the end of the book.
In conclusion, this book is an invitation to think of the sensitive history of politics as a history of abundant and subjective temporalities, where the “ Nazism was thought of for himself, here and now ». The latter, apprehended early as a religion and as a civilizational threat, was fought until the end. Thus, the Jews did not enter the war without awareness of the danger, or without having mobilized. Their great merit was to have a lucid, and even inaudible look at Nazi Germany.