The Great Migration of Jews to France in the Late 1800s

French Jewish Businessman

The Parisian train stations of the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est, the Gare de Lyon, and all the surrounding streets have seen it all. Over a hundred years ago, Jewish refugees fleeing Eastern Europe's pogroms and charges of blood libel, stepped into France here and, believe me, flat broke as they were, a plethora of no-goodniks were ready and waiting to exploit them: baggage thieves, unscrupulous landlords, pimps, sellers of bogus tickets to nowhere. Here, were those who would turn immigrants into slaves, for a third entered France illegally. No official papers? No rights. You can’t tell the desperate something like that, though; all believed Paris would be paradise, a Latin Shangri-La, the capital of a benevolent country where equal rights guaranteed dignity and freedom from anti-Semitism.

Those who settled became France’s first Yiddish-speaking community and, with their Old Country traditions, they managed to turn the Gallic streets of the Marais, Belleville, and Clignancourt into ersatz Eastern European shtetlekh. Crowding several families into each apartment, most worked as tailors, hatters, junk dealers, ragmen, shoemakers, or peddlers. Others starved or went from house to house begging; their unruly children ran wild and turned to petty theft. Not a few, their dreams shattered, climbed the Bastille with its gilded statue brandishing the torch of civilisation and leapt into the afterlife.

Avoiding the established French Jewish community (considering them heretical and hardly Jewish at all) the immigrants formed landsmanschaften, benevolent societies named after former hometowns, and depended upon them for aid and social life. Of course, not all the new arrivals were conservative. Some were of quite another ilk: intellectuals, students, and radical socialists, those who had cut all ties with Jewish tradition.

Yet, religious or not, these Eastern European Jews were a shock to France’s established community. French Jews, like their German and Austrian counterparts, were modern, urban, urbane, and assimilated. Possessing the same rights as non-Jews, some had become powerful businessmen, bankers, lawyers, university professors, officers in the army, and engineers. In their synagogues, prayers and sermons were held in French; the bimah was now right up in front like any church altar; there were choirs and organs. Sure, the incomers were also Jews, but what did they have in common with Frenchmen? Those kaftan-wearing eastern cousins hailed from orthodox communities where life had stood still for centuries, and where religious injunction dictated thought and behaviour.

Tension mounted. French Jews feared their backward-looking relatives would kindle anti-Semitism, and that unpleasant racial stereotypes would be applied to them as well. Yes, they were sympathetic to the suffering of their brethren—the recently created AIU (Alliance Israélite Universelle) even organised an aid centre in the Galician border town of Brody—but wasn’t it better to send the newcomers elsewhere? Where?

Jewish communities in Marseille, Avignon, Macôn, Troyes, Toul, and Saverne refused them, pleading lack of funds and local antipathy; Toulouse, Nîmes, Versailles, Haguenau, Lixheim, and Lille accepted a few, but with little enthusiasm. Only emigration to North America seemed a good solution, and most soon set sail. By 1901, Paris counted a mere three thousand Romanian Jewish immigrants, one thousand Polish, four thousand Russian, and a handful of Hungarians. But, as feared, economic jealousy, coupled with the Church’s religious intolerance, did foster hatred.

Medieval tales of Jews as carriers of disease were revived. Catholic right-wing newspapers such as L’Authorité claimed Jews, ‘the dirtiest people imaginable’, were carrying cholera bacteria in their baggage. Edouard Drumont, the founder of the French Anti-Semitic League, proposed that the Jewish population—entirely comprised of rich bankers, Polish swindlers, and criminals—be excluded from society. Those of left-wing persuasion claimed an all-powerful Jewish bourgeoisie would sap France’s strength through modernisation, and then betray the country to foreign enemies.

Soon, all Jews, even elite bankers, were on the receiving end of jibes, caricatures, and virulence. Any pretext—the Yiddish language, the Jewish physique, success, education, and way of life—was fuel for the anti-Semitic fire, and it culminated in the false charge of treason against the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus. France’s Great Rabbi Zadoc Kahn openly defended Dreyfus. So did the journalist Bernard Lazare, and prominent non-Jews such as Anatole France, Émile Zola, Henri Poincaré, and Georges Clemenceau. But not the established Jewish community. The future Jewish Prime Minister, Léon Blum, later wrote: ‘The prevailing attitude was that Jews shouldn’t get involved in the affair.’

Excerpt from A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard

https://books2read.com/A-Contrary-Journey