Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [263]
Jewish History in Paris
France is home to the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world and the largest in Europe; after Catholicism, however, Islam is the second-largest religion in France. Though Jewish communities in France date back hundreds of years, France’s reputation as a terre d’asile (land of refuge) for political or economic exiles emerged during the Napoleonic Wars, when the “liberating” army attracted immigrants from Germany and Italy. France was also the first of all Western European countries to emancipate the Jews, in 1791, and many Russians who enriched Paris in the late 1800s and early 1900s were Jewish, as Nancy Green recounts in The Pletzl of Paris (Holmes & Meir, 1986); pletzl is Yiddish for “little place.” Green writes that “the mystique of France’s appeal was embedded in both the embodiment of ‘civilization’ and the enduring aura of the French Revolution.… For the Russified Jewish intelligentsia, ‘Russification’ also included a certain amount of French language and literature. French civilization, from its poets and philosophers to its culture and cuisine, had even penetrated the Pale [of Settlement].” (The Pale was an area of western provinces in Russia where Jews were confined to live, as decreed first by Catherine the Great and then definitively established under Nicholas I in 1835. The population within the Pale rose from 1 million at the beginning of the nineteenth century to approximately 5.5 million by the end.) Not even the Dreyfus Affair was seen as an obstacle: l’affaire was in fact outside the realm of understanding of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews since, in Russia, no Jew (except a few doctors) could attain such a rank as army captain. There was also a proverb that Yiddish oral tradition adopted as its own: lebn vi got in Frankraykh—to live like God in France—which dates to 1693, when King Maximilian reportedly said, “If it were possible that I were God and I had two sons, the first would succeed me as God and the second would be king of France.”
The pletzl in Green’s book refers to the Marais quarter, which has a Jewish history dating back to the thirteenth century, though not continuously. At that time, present-day rue Ferdinand-Duval was rue des Juifs (Street of the Jews); nearby rue des Écouffes (pawnbrokers) and rue des Rosiers (perhaps, Green notes, from ros, the teeth on a loom) were already known as centers of Ashkenazic Jewry in Paris. Wealthier Jews, mostly of Sephardic origin, lived in the fifth arrondissement. Today the Marais is home to the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme (71 rue du Temple, 3ème / mahj.org), a really great museum housed in the beautiful Hôtel de Saint-Aignon, dating from the 1600s.
According to Lucien Lazare in Rescue as Resistance (Columbia University Press, 1996), three out of four Jews present in France in 1940 survived World War II. However, not a single deported child survived. It is particularly sad to note, as Pierre Birnbaum explains in his chapter “Grégoire, Dreyfus, Drancy, and the Rue Copernic: Jews at the Heart of French History” in Realms of Memory (volume I), that in the 1980s “various administrative and political authorities refused one after another to provide sites for statues of Captain Dreyfus, Léon Blum, and Pierre Mendès France.” At the site where once stood Paris’s Vélodrome d’Hiver, built as a bicycle racetrack but now mostly known as the site where Parisian Jews were taken before they were deported, there is now only a small plaque that is somewhat hard to find (which I can attest to, though I did manage to find it and take a photo). “This place of remembrance par excellence,” notes Birnbaum, “has simply vanished. Even worse, there is apparently no surviving photograph of the July 1942 roundup to preserve a visual record of the event.”
It’s true that, as Birnbaum maintains, “physical sites of Jewish memory in France are quite rare”; still, Paris, and many other cities and towns in France, has a number of noteworthy sites of Jewish interest. In Paris there is also the Memorial to the Deported behind Notre-Dame on