Film

July 29, 2009

Thorny Past, Present of Jews in France

By Tom Tugend

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Ah, la belle France and the American-French love/hate relationship. There’s Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve (in better days) and rude waiters, lovely Paris in the spring and stifling and deserted Paris in August, brave fighting comrades in 1917 and waving the white flag in World War II.

I had my first encounter in 1944, when my infantry regiment was attached to the First French Army and I met a local girl in a small town.

To warm up the relationship (I had joined up at 18 and wasn’t very experienced in these things), I complimented her on the heroic resistance of the French people against the Nazi occupiers, as documented in numerous Hollywood films.

“What are you talking about?” the girl asked. “There were a few crazy Jews and Communists who resisted, the rest of us just tried to get along.”

A lot more complex and current is the relationship between the French and their Jewish countrymen. Francophiles point to Napoleon, the first European monarch to confer full citizenship on Jews in France and the countries he conquered.

French Jews of the time reciprocated by declaring patriotically, “From now on, the Seine is our Jordan River, Paris is our Jerusalem.”

Francophobes start with the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, when a Jewish officer in the French army was falsely convicted of treason, amid wild anti-Semitic mob scenes.

France’s cyclical anti- and philo-Semitism is the theme of “Being Jewish in France” (“Comme un Juif en France”), Yves Jeuland’s densely detailed documentary film, a three-hour long overview of what one Jewish jurist describes as “a love affair gone sour.” (The film screens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Aug. 7-9.)

Using some rare archival footage, clips from French movies and newsreels, and commentaries by prominent French Jews, Jeuland guides us along the peaks and valleys of the Jewish experience, from the Dreyfus trial to 2007, when the film was released in Europe.

The mass of political minutiae occasionally overwhelms the narrative, but here are some of the high and low lights, with French Jews, like their cousins in other countries, generally asserting themselves in good times and keeping their heads low in stormy weather:

In the first two decades of the 20th century, “respectable” resident Jews worried about an influx of strange and “noisy” Jews from Eastern Europe, but the newcomers boosted Yiddish culture and theater, sports clubs, and membership in Zionist and Communist clubs.

The Depression escalated anti-Semitism, in France as in the United States. The elevation of Leon Blum to prime minister in 1936 raised the pride of some Jews, who carried Yiddish banners in Popular Front parades, among them members of the Jewish Hairdressers Union. More cautious Jews asked Blum not to accept the high-profile post lest any of his failures reflect on the entire Jewish community.

France’s defeat and the Nazi occupation marked the low point of Jewish life in France and the most shameful period in French history.

The Vichy government beat even the Germans to the punch in enacting anti-Semitic laws. We see French police arresting Jews and turning them over to the Nazis, photos of a radiant bride with a large yellow star pinned on her white wedding gown, and a popular exhibit demonstrating how to distinguish Frenchmen from Jews.

After the war, a blanket of silence stifled any discussion of French collaboration, while one Jewish leader wondered how you can live in a land whose police arrested your parents.

However, 1948 marked the beginning of an extended honeymoon period, when France became the best friend of newly established Israel, while an influx of Jews from the former French colonies in Africa added to the number and vitality of the Jewish community in France.

Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War of 1967 annoyed President Charles de Gaulle and ended the honeymoon, but gave French Jews a new pride and self-assurance.

The 1980s started inauspiciously with the firebombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris, in which four people were killed and 20 injured, but the event was countered by a huge anti-racist demonstration. It even became fashionable to be Jewish, and gentiles developed a fascination with Jewish history. In 1995, Jacques Chirac became the first French president to forthrightly acknowledge his country’s guilt in the deportation and murder of French Jews.

With the continuing influx of young Muslims from France’s former colonies and the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the repressed anti-Semitism surfaced once again, now wearing an anti-Zionist face. Antagonism sharpened when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urged French Jews to move to Israel for their future safety.

We asked director Jeuland via e-mail to comment on developments in the two years since he completed the film.

His response, translated from French, was that the latest era of Jewish anxiety, beginning with the intifada in 2000, is not yet over. However, the anti-Israel reaction following the Gaza incursion at the beginning of this year was milder in France than in other European countries, Jeuland wrote, so things could be worse.

“Being Jewish in France” is being released by the National Center for Jewish Films at Brandeis University and will screen on three consecutive days at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Aug. 7 at 7:30 p.m., Aug. Aug. 8 at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Aug. 9 at 1 p.m.

A version of this article appeared in print.

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