Men of thought, men of action: the Great War, masculinity, and the modernization of the French rabbinate

Abstract

This paper explores the evolution of the training and function of the French rabbinate in the interwar period. The First World War thrust Jewish clerics out from obscure institutional positions to the very forefront of national activity as ‘soldiers’ for their community and for the nation. The war experience furnished the French rabbinate with a set of new vehicles for representing a novel model of Jewish integration. Martial and paternal masculinities were both patriotically French and ‘modern’ in their embrace of secular social service and community.

Keywords:

• First World War
• rabbinate
• France
• chaplain
• régénération
• social service
• twentieth century
• masculinity

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Mark Roseman, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Rebecca Spang, Brett Bowles, Matthias Lehmann, Eric Sandweiss, Lisa Moses Leff, and Jonathan Judaken for reading and listening to various versions of this paper as I prepared it, as well as offering helpful support and comments along the way. I am very grateful for the contributions of Alain Hirschler, Philippe E. Landau at the archives of the Consistoire central israélite de France, and the accommodating and kind staff of the library at the Séminaire israélite de France in Paris, especially Joël Touati and Grand Rabbi Pierre-Yves Bauer, without whom the writing of this article would surely not have been possible. Finally, I thank the Borns Jewish Studies Program and the Department of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financially supporting the research for this piece, and for my doctoral dissertation.

Notes

1. Archives du Séminaire Israélite de France (henceforth SIF) 19, rapport du commission de l’administration de l’École rabbinique, March 31, 1916.

2. In his study of the École rabbinique, Jules Bauer notes the institution was ‘terribly tested’ during the war, in the capacity of its students and former students. However, he noted with pride, 18 of its students and graduates had won the Croix de Guerre, the Croix de la Légion d’honneur, or the Médaille militaire for their service on the battlefield. See Jules Bauer, L’École rabbinique de France, 1830–1930 (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1931), 175–6.

3. Bernard Wasserstein, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 132.

4. Ibid.

5. Weill’s interview, given to Le Matin, November 19, 1938, has been evoked in multiple studies documenting the reactions of the French Jewish community to the refugee crisis. Weill stepped back from the question by stating that as a religious authority, these political issues ‘largely surpass my competence’, that the solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ depended increasingly on America and Great Britain, that ‘France has done more than any other country in the world’ to deal with it, and that France ‘cannot greet any new immigrants’, not even in her colonial empire. Although Weill stated that in spite of his compassion ‘for the misery of 600,000 German Jews’, nothing seemed as ‘precious, and necessary’ to him as the ‘maintenance of peace on Earth’. Seemingly supporting appeasement with Hitler and Nazi policy abroad rather than an increased role for France in the developing crises, Weill’s statements to Le Matin were deemed ‘enormously stupid’ by Maurice Rajsfus: ‘on the one hand, he cries crocodile tears for the poor German Jewish immigrants, and on the other he wishes for France’s rapprochement with Hitler’s regime’, in the name of world peace. Vicki Caron has noted that over the course of the 1930s, appeasement took centre stage as a foreign policy goal, ‘ma[king] it clear that the interests of Jews were no longer identical with those of the French nation’. See Maurice Rajsfus, Sois Juif et Tais-Toi! 1930–1940: Les français “israélites” face au nazisme (Paris: Études et Documentation Internationales, 1981); Vicki Caron, “Prelude to Vichy: France and the Jewish Refugees in an Era of Appeasement,” Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 157–76.

6. Nadia Malinovich’s work on French Jewish identity is an important contribution to the scholarship of interwar French Jewry and French Jewish identities, and Paula Hyman’s earlier pioneering work laid the groundwork for most inquiries into these issues. See Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth Century France (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008); Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

7. Archives du Séminaire Israélite de France (henceforth SIF) 19, rapport du commission de l’administration de l’École rabbinique, March 31, 1918.

8. Ibid.

9. See Jay Berkovitz’s discussion on régénération in The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). Berkovitz argues régéneration was a broad and multilayered project extending from the Revolution in which the French state and Jews took interest. Jeffrey Haus’ work on rabbinical education further supports the argument that the inclusion of secular subjects in the rabbinic curriculum over the course of the nineteenth century is evidence of a practical negotiation with these State interests, and with State funding, ‘The extension of public funds … transformed French rabbinical training from a purely religious affair into a matter of state interest [and] gradually intensified the State’s level of involvement with the institution’, which encouraged the transformation of rabbis into ‘role models for their less acculturated coreligionists in order to facilitate Jewish integration’. See Jeffrey Haus, “How Much Latin Should a Rabbi Know? State Finance and Rabbinical Education in Nineteenth-Century France,” Jewish History 15 no. 1 (2001): 59–86. For a full account of modernization projects from within the consistory system from Napoléon to the Dreyfus affair, see Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernisation of French Jewry:Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1977).

10. The Jewish community was divided between the largely assimilated Sephardim of the south-west and the more numerous Ashkenazim of Paris and the eastern French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Usually left out of the picture of France’s divided Jewish community of the ancien régime is the minority of Jews in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, who, living the papal territories of the Mediterranean south, were nicknamed ‘the Pope’s Jews’, and were the only ‘non-Catholics authorized to stay in the Comtat Venaissin and Avignon to practice their faith’. From the early modern period until the eighteenth century, this Jewish community had varying ambivalent relations with the Church, experiencing both protection and persecution. As a result of what Esther Benbassa notes as the uniqueness of their religious and linguistic practices, as well as the local Provençal (and Roman) character of Jewish legal conventions, their ‘openness’ meant that the Pope’s Jews did not experience ‘great difficulty integrating themselves when the Revolution enabled them to become full-fledged citizens’. See Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 41–7. See also Zosa Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 (New York: KTAV, 1970), 462–74.

11. Abbé Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs; ouvrage couronné par la Société royale des Sciences et des Arts de Metz, le 23 Août 1788 (Paris: Libraire Belin, 1789). While beyond the purview of this paper, Ronald Schechter’s more developed discussion of the Abbé’s programme for the modernization of the Jews, and others, places these positions within the larger Enlightenment debate concerning the Jewish question, which sought to ascertain if Jews could become part of a nation, or if, in their religious, economic, social and political particularity, they were incapable of forming a single nation with non-Jews. See Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1725–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), especially 66–110. Also see Jay Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

12. Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century France, 199.

13. Ibid., 193–4. Derasha refers to a homily based on a reading of a rabbinic text, in synagogue services. These were often given in Yiddish. The Derasha stood in stark contrast to the Protestant sermons popularized in Germany during the same period.

14. Muriel Pichon, Les Français Juifs, 1914–1950: Récit d’un désenchantement (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires de Mirail, 2009).

15. Philippe-E. Landau, Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre: Un patriotisme républicain (Paris: CNRS 2008), 26; and Philippe-E. Landau, “Les Juifs russes à Paris pendant la Grande Guerre, cibles de l’antisémitisme,” Archives Juives 34 (2001–2): 43−56.

16. Captain Sylvain Halff, “The Participation of the Jews of France in the Great War,” American Jewish Yearbook 21 (1919–20): 37–97.

17. Halff estimates there were 21 corps chaplains, eight division chaplains and five chaplains at fortified places during the war, totalling 37 rabbis or acting rabbis on the battlefront during the war (1919).

18. Grand Rabbi Israël Lévi, Preface to Jules Bauer, L’École rabbinique de France (1830–1930) (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires, 1930), viii.

19. A letter sent in Paris on behalf of a number of lonely, wounded soldiers in convalescence at a hospital in Paris, Archives du Consistoire Central des Israélites, Dossier 14–18, 6K, Paris, February 23, 1916. Annette Becker notes that in addition to the expansion of the Jewish clergy’s power, Catholic and Protestant clergy in the French armed forces during the war also gained authority and influence. Still, traditional religious forms remained minimal. Gearóid Barry points out that according to Catholic politician Marc Sangnier’s reports in 1920, about 30 out of 1000 French men in the armed forces during the war ‘were dutiful Mass-goers’, and that French chaplains’ reports on Easter communion corroborated this. Catholicism in particular experienced a revival during the war, both on the battlefront and on the home front, a trend that found its expression in ‘new mysticism’ and an ‘unorthodox spirituality of the trenches’ rather than in more traditional forms of Catholic practice. Barry refers to practices of communal prayer and makeshift altars as a ‘practical ecumenism’ which bound men under the trauma of fire in ‘cramped spaces’ with French clergy who, ‘unlike in other countries, benefited from no national service exemption’. While more research into the Catholic and Protestant clergy in the French armed forces remains to be done, there is much scholarship on the war’s profound and diverse effects on Catholicism and Catholic culture which suggests that the experience of total war and destruction also had an impact on Christian life. For instance, see Jay Winter’s important work on the various revivals and reprises of Christianity and Christian forms of representation in the war and interwar period, as well as Stephen Schloesser’s challenging contribution to the history of interwar religion in France that highlights the Catholic establishment’s ‘modernist renaissance’. Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1940, trans. Helen McPhail (London: Berg, 1998); Gearóid Barry, The Disarmament of Hatred: Marc Sangnier, French Catholicism and the Legacy of the First World War, 1914–45 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012); Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

20. SIF 19, Commission administrative de l’école rabbinique; Procès-verbal de la séance du 11 janvier 1916, Paris.

21. I discuss this topic in depth in my forthcoming dissertation, “L’esprit du corps: Bodies, Communities, and the Reconstruction of Jewish Life in France, 1914–1940” (History Department, Indiana University, Bloomington).

22. Grand Rabbi Israël Lévi, Preface to Bauer, L’École rabbinique de France (1830–1930), x.

23. Recruiting new students and instructors at the École rabbinique was near impossible during the war. Israël Lévi, grand rabbi of France in 1930, wrote years later in Jules Bauer’s 1935 chronicle of the school that ‘during the war, [the École rabbinique] was reduced to a skeletal state’. See Bauer, L’École rabbinique de France (1830–1930), viii.

24. Grand Rabbi Julien Weill and Grand Rabbi Maurice Liber, Maïmonide (1135–1204): L’homme de pensée, L’homme d’action (Paris: Fondation Sefer, 1935).

25. There is no complete biography of Maurice Liber. For background, see David Shapira, Jacob Kaplan, 1895–1994: un rabbin témoin du XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007), 338, note 28. Robert Sommer published on the totality of Liber’s writings in “Bibliographie des travaux du Grand-Rabbin Maurice Liber,” Revue des études Juives (1959–60): 95–119; Sommer also wrote a piece in Revue des études juives (1966) entitled “La Doctrine politique et l’action religieuse du Grand Rabbin Maurice Liber.” Most data referenced in this paper has been assembled from numerous collections of documents stored at the Séminaire Israélite de France from his time as a student through his tenure as instructor and grand rabbi after the war.

26. SIF Commission administrative de l’École rabbinique, March 20, 1918. Philippe Landau discusses the story in some detail in “Mythe et réalité: la mort du grand rabbin Abraham Bloch,” in his larger work on Jews in France during the First World War. See Philippe-E. Landau, Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre: Un patriotisme républicain (Paris: CNRS, 2008). Also see note 37 for more references on this topic and notes on the story’s significance during the interwar period.

27. Weill and Liber, Maïmonide (1135–1204): L’homme de pensée, L’homme d’action, 4.

28. Maurice Liber, Rashi, trans. Adele Szold (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1906). Liber completed the original piece in Châlons-sur-Marne in 1906.

29. Ibid.

30. SIF 43 LIBER, Dossier: Le Service Social dans la Communauté israélite de Paris, Note 29, March 1937, “À l’école rabbinique de France.”

31. SIF 45 LIBER, Liber’s conference notes for address, n.d.

32. SIF 43 LIBER, “Note pour les conférenciers,” n.d.

33. SIF 45 LIBER, Conference notes for address, n.d. These are also handwritten in SIF 43.

34. The ÉI provides a fascinating case study of an important regenerative current in bourgeois French Jewish culture in the interwar period. I discuss the foundation and the development of the Éclaireurs israélites de France between its foundation in 1923 and the Second World War in my forthcoming dissertation, see note 21.

35. SIF 45 LIBER, Félix Meyer, “Le Service Social dans l’apprentissage,” n.d.

36. Meyer was only one of several presenters whose comments addressed the economic and social hardships of poor Jews living in Paris. Although Meyer’s solution was to find ways to re-educate the Jewish poor to refashion them into productive members of the French economy, not all participants imagined the same solution to the interwar economic crises facing Jews in France. Unemployment is so bad, one unnamed presenter suggested, that it is better to help send immigrants back than to provide social services. ‘We are doing our best to contribute to the cleansing of the national work market [and] to place those who we estimate to be most desirable for and able to contribute favourably to the French economy.’ SIF 45, “Le Bilan des activités sociaux de la communauté israélite parisienne,” n.d.

37. SIF 45, “Le Bilan des activités sociaux de la communauté israélite parisienne,” n.d.

38. Ibid.

39. “Cérémonie Patriotique à Mulhouse,” Univers Israélite, October 10, 1930.

40. Ibid.

41. I evoke the work of Mary Louise Roberts’ original and challenging argument about the transformations of ideas about gender and female identity in the interwar period. Debates about gender identity and concerns over women’s fashion and behaviour became ‘a primary way to embrace, resist, or reconcile oneself to changes associated with the war’ (6). The ‘modern woman’, for instance, or garçonne, her counterparts, the mother, and the ‘unstable mediator’ between the two, the single woman, all represented versions of an engagement with the war’s results and aftermath – because, as Roberts points out succinctly, they were literally ‘close to home’. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

42. Jean Daltroff estimates that the Jews of Strasbourg, the biggest city and largest Jewish community in Alsace, numbered 7738 in 1931, 21% of whom were of Eastern European provenance. In 1936, the total Jewish population of Strasbourg reached 9118 people, representing 4.75% of the total population of the city: a very visible minority. For more on Strasbourg in the 1930s, see Jean Daltroff, “Un Acte révolutionnaire à Strasbourg: L’inauguration du centre de la jeunesse juive de Strasbourg (18 mai 1938),” in Almanach du KKL (Strasbourg, 2011).

43. Ibid. Approximately half of the membership of the Ets Hayim Orthodox community in Strasbourg, according to Daltroff’s research, was comprised of refugees from Cologne, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg. For a more complete discussion of the refugee crisis in France and Alsace, see Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

44. Erwin Schnurmann, La population juive en Alsace (Paris: 1936). See Caron’s analysis of the embourgeoisement and urbanization of Alsace’s Jewish population over the course of the nineteenth century, through to the German occupation between 1871 and 1918, in Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, 1871–1918 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

45. René Hirschler, Les Juifs à Mulhouse (Mulhouse: La communauté Israélite de Mulhouse, 1938).

46. “Dans les Departements: Lyon,” Menorah, March 15, 1930.

47. The Séminaire Israélite de France holds a number of dossiers on the Bloch affair, many of which contain press and correspondence pertaining to its continued importance in the 1930s. For more on Abraham Bloch, see Muriel Pichon, Les Français juifs, 1914–1950: récit d’un désenchantement (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2009). Maurice Rajsfus’ work emphasizes the degree to which the Bloch story played into the mythology of French Jewish nationalism in the 1930s, under the auspices of the Union patriotique des Français israélites, led by Edmond Bloch. The UPFI, which denied membership to foreign Jewish servicemen, is a curious example of the conservative right-wing leanings in some sections of French Jewish veteran politics. Also see Maurice Rajsfus, Sois Juif et Tais-toi! 1930–1940 (Paris: Études et Documentation Internationales, 1981).

48. Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Masculinity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 35. Daniel Boyarin’s argument about an alternate ‘Jewish’ masculinity is discussed in significant detail in his important study on the topic, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

49. Ibid. Also see George Mosse’s seminal work on this subject, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

50. See Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, for her full discussion of the debates and cultural concerns regarding the ‘new woman’ in interwar France. This assertion contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Jewish masculinities. See Sharon Gillerman, Benjamin Maria Baader, and Paul Lerner, eds., Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). In this recently published collection, scholars explore the multiple ways in which Jewish men appropriated or resisted prevailing ideas about German masculinity, and how they created their own versions of manliness. In order for Jews in Germany to prove their adequacy for citizenship, Jews had to combat antisemitic representations of Jewish effeminacy, or, on the flipside, embrace or manipulate what Daniel Boyarin has described as a ‘unique’ or ‘gentle’ Jewish mode of masculinity, descended from the Talmudic era, a sensitive, non-phallic mode of manliness in fundamental opposition with ‘prevailing gentile ideals of manliness’, 3.

51. René Hirschler, “Ceux qu’on oublie: Les soldats juifs français,” L’Univers Israélite, June 22, 1927.

52. Kristen Stromberg Childers, Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), esp. 42–82.

53. Alain Michel, Juifs, Français et scouts: l’histoire des EI de 1923 aux années 1990 (Paris: Éditions Elkana, 2003); Julien Fuchs, Toujours prêts: scoutismes et movements de jeunesse en Alsace, 1918–1970 (Strasbourg: Éditions La Nuée Bleue, 2007).

54. René Hirschler, Discours: “Le role actuel de la jeunesse, 1935,” personal collection of Mr Alain Hirschler.

55. A recent volume compiled by Alain Hirschler, one of Simone and René’s sons, features a series of Simone’s publications from the period. See Simone Hirschler, Le mariage merveilleux et autres contes d’israël (Paris: Editions Lichma, 2009).

56. “Le Coin des Enfants / Légendes Juives de France: Les exilés,” L’Univers Israélite 29–32, April 1, 1936–May 1, 1936.

57. “Le Coin des Enfants / Légendes Juives de France: Le faux message,” L’Univers Israélite, n.d., but most likely from the same period. Article clipping part of personal collection of Mr Alain Hirschler.

58. Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Washington, DC: University of Washington Press, 1995).

59. Stromberg Childers points out in her monograph (Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914–1945) that broad French pronatalist discussion in the interwar period did place a high degree of responsibility on women, due ‘to the pervasive belief that while fatherhood was only one component’ of a man’s identity, ‘a woman fulfilled her one true destiny in motherhood’ (43). However, paternity and fatherhood were both key elements of family life. ‘Just as God surveyed from afar, fathers were removed from the business of everyday life at home’, Stromberg Childers explains, and even though some family theorists made note of the ‘certain detachment’ of fathers from the ‘everyday activities of home and family’, fatherhood was no less important than motherhood. She quotes from one family theorist that ‘A father … doesn’t follow their adventures or little triumphs … but he carries an immense feeling of responsibility toward those he has put on this earth, for whom he must provide sustenance and orientation in life’. This work unfolds in great detail this palette of fatherly roles and responsibilities, mostly outside the private sphere of the family and home (58–59).

60. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Also see Barbara Pope, “Angels in the Devil’s Workshop: Leisured and Charitable Women in Nineteenth-Century England and France,” in Bridenthal and Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Bonne G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Kaplan describes similar processes in the German case in The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

61. Hyman quotes Lerner’s famous lines in Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, 4.