About Jewishness

The history of the Jews of France dates back over 2000 years. In the early Middle Ages, France was a center of Jewish learning, but persecution increased as the Middle Ages wore on. France was the first country in Europe to emancipate its Jewish population during the French Revolution, but, despite legal equality anti-Semitism remained an issue, as illustrated in the of the late 19th century. France currently has the largest Jewish population in Europe.
The Jewish community in France presently numbers around 600,000, according to the World Jewish Congress and 500,000 according to the Appel Unifié Juif de France, and is found mainly in the metropolitan areas of Paris, Marseille, Strasbourg, Lyon, and Toulouse.
Today, French Jews are mostly Sephardi and Mizrahi who came from North Africa and span a range of religious affiliations, from the ultra-Orthodox Haredi communities to the large segment of Jews who are
entirely secular.

Jews were found in Marseille in the sixth century, at Arles, at Uzès, at Narbonne, at Clermont-Ferrand, at Orleans, at Paris, and at Bordeaux. These places were generally centers of Roman administration, located on the great commercial routes, and there the Jews possessed synagogues.
In harmony with the Theodosian code, and according to an edict addressed in 331 to the decurions of Cologne by the emperor Constantine, the internal organization of the Jews seems to have been the same as in the Roman empire. They appear to have had priests (rabbis or Hazzanim), archisynagogues, patersynagogues, and other synagogue officials. The Jews were principally merchants and slave-dealers; they were also tax-collectors, sailors, and physicians.
They probably remained under the Roman law until the triumph of Christianity, with the status established by Caracalla, on a footing of equality with their fellow citizens. The emperor Constantius (321) compelled them to share in the curia, a heavy burden imposed on citizens of townships. There is nothing to show that their association with their fellow citizens was not of an amicable nature, even after the establishment of Christianity in Gaul. It is known that the Christian clergy participated in their feasts; intermarriage between Jews and Christians sometimes occurred; the Jews made proselytes, and their religious customs were so freely adopted that at the third Council of Orléans (539) it was found necessary to warn the faithful against Jewish "superstitions", and to order them to abstain from traveling on Sunday and from adorning their persons or dwellings on that day. In the 6th century, a Jewish community thrived in Paris. A synagogue was built on the Ile de la Cite, but was later torn down and a church was erected instead.
In 1010 Alduin, Bishop of Limoges, offered the Jews of his diocese the choice between baptism and exile. For a month theologians held disputations with them, but without much success, for only three or four of the Jews abjured their faith; of the rest some fled into other cities, while others killed themselves.
Another violent commotion arose about 1065. At this date Pope Alexander II wrote to the Viscount of Narbonne, Béranger, and to Guifred, bishop of the city, praising them for having prevented the massacre of the Jews in their district, and reminding them that God does not approve of the shedding of blood. A crusade had been formed against the Moors of Spain, and the Crusaders had killed without mercy all the Jews whom they met on their route.
During this period, which continues till the First Crusade, Jewish culture was awakening, and still showed a certain unity in the south of France and the north. The 11th century was a period of fruitful activity in literature. Thenceforth French Judaism became one of the poles of universal Judaism.

The First Crusade led to nearly a century of accusations of blood libel against the Jews, many of whom were burned or attacked in France. Immediately after the coronation of Philip Augustus on March 14, 1181, the King ordered the Jews arrested on a Saturday, in all their synagogues, and despoiled of their money and their vestments. In the following April, 1182, he published an edict of expulsion, but according the Jews a delay of three months for the sale of their personal property. Immovable property, however, such as houses, fields, vines, barns, and wine-presses, he confiscated. The Jews attempted to win over the nobles to their side, but in vain. In July they were compelled to leave the royal domains of France (and not the whole kingdom); their synagogues were converted into churches. These successive measures were simply expedients to fill the royal coffers. The goods confiscated by the king were at once converted into cash.

Thirteenth century
This century, which opened with the return of the Jews to France proper (then reduced almost to the Isle of France), closed with their complete exile from the country in a larger sense. In July 1198, Philip Augustus, "contrary to the general expectation and despite his own edict, recalled the Jews to Paris and made the churches of God suffer great persecutions" (Rigord).
Louis IX of France (1226-1270) decided on September 13, 1268 to arrest Jews and seize their property. At the request of Paul Christian (Pablo Christiani), he compelled the Jews, under penalty of a fine, to wear at all times the rouelle or badge decreed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. This consisted of a piece of red felt or cloth cut in the form of a wheel, four fingers in circumference, which had to be attached to the outer garment at the chest and back.
The Inquisition, which had been instituted in order to suppress the heresy of the Albigenses, finally occupied itself with the Jews of southern France who converted to Christianity. The popes complained that not only were baptized Jews returning to their former faith, but that Christians also were being converted to Judaism. In March 1273, Gregory X formulated the following rules: relapsed Jews, as well as Christians who abjured their faith in favor of "the Jewish superstition", were to be treated by the Inquisitors as heretics. The instigators of such apostasies, as those who received or defended the guilty ones, were to be punished in the same way as the delinquents.
In accordance with these rules, the Jews of Toulouse, who had buried a Christian convert in their cemetery, were brought before the Inquisition in 1278 for trial, with their rabbi, Isaac Males, being condemned to the stake. Philip the Fair, as mentioned above, at first ordered his seneschals not to imprison any Jews at the instance of the Inquisitors, but in 1299 he rescinded this order.

The Great Exile of 1306
Toward the middle of 1306 the treasury was nearly empty, and the king, as he was about to do the following year in the case of the Templars, decided to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. He condemned the Jews to banishment, and took forcible possession of their property, real and personal. Their houses, lands, and movable goods were sold at auction; and for the king were reserved any treasures found buried in the dwellings that had belonged to the Jews.
The exiles could not take refuge anywhere except in Lorraine, the county of Burgundy, Savoy, Dauphiné, Roussillon, and a part of Provence - all regions located in Empire.
Nine years had hardly passed since the expulsion of 1306 when Louis X of France (1314–16) recalled the Jews. In an edict dated July 28, 1315, he permitted them to return for a period of twelve years, authorizing them to establish themselves in the cities in which they had lived before their banishment. He issued this edict in answer to the demands of the people. Geoffroy of Paris, the popular poet of the time, says in fact that the Jews were gentle in comparison with the Christians who had taken their place, and who had flayed their debtors alive.

Expulsion of 1394
On September 17, 1394, Charles VI suddenly published an ordinance in which he declared, in substance, that for a long time he had been taking note of the many complaints provoked by the excesses and misdemeanors which the Jews committed against Christians; and that the prosecutors, having made several investigations, had discovered many violations by the Jews of the agreement they had made with him. Therefore he decreed as an irrevocable law and statute that thenceforth no Jew should dwell in his domains. The king signed this decree at the instance of the queen. The decree was not immediately enforced, a respite being granted to the Jews in order that they might sell their property and pay their debts. Those indebted to them were enjoined to redeem their obligations within a set time; otherwise their pledges held in pawn were to be sold by the Jews. The provost was to escort the Jews to the frontier of the kingdom. Subsequently the king released the Christians from their debts.

17th century
In the beginning of the 17th century Jews began again to reenter France. This resulted in a new edict of April 23, 1615 which forbade Christians, under the penalty of death and confiscation, to shelter Jews or to converse with them. Violent anti-Semitic riots broke out in Provence, resulting in Jews migrating to northern France.
Alsace and Lorraine were the home of a significant number of Jews. In annexing the provinces in 1648, Louis XIV was at first inclined toward the banishment of the Jews living in those provinces, but thought better of it in view of the benefit he could derive from them. On September 25, 1675, he granted these Jews letters patent, taking them under his special protection. This, however, did not prevent them from being subjected to every kind of extortion, and their position remained the same as it had been under the Austrian government.
The Regency was no less severe. In 1683 Louis XIV expelled Jews from the newly acquired colony of Martinique.

Beginnings of emancipation
In the course of the 18th century the attitude of the authorities toward the Jews changed. A spirit of tolerance began to prevail, which corrected the iniquities of the legislation. The authorities often overlooked infractions of the edict of banishment; a colony of Portuguese and German Jews was tolerated in Paris.
Judaism in France finally became, as the Alsatian deputy Schwendt wrote to his constituents, "nothing more than the name of a distinct religion". However, the reactionaries did not cease their agitations, and the Jews were subjected to much suffering during the Reign of Terror. At Bordeaux Jewish bankers had to pay considerable sums to save their lives; in Alsace there was scarcely a Jew of any means who was not mulcted in heavy fines. Forty-nine Jews were imprisoned at Paris as suspects; nine of them were executed. The decree of the convention by which the Catholic faith was annulled and replaced by the worship of Reason was applied by the provincial clubs, especially by those of the German districts, to the Jewish religion. Synagogues were pillaged, the celebration of Sabbath and festivals interdicted, and rabbis imprisoned. Meanwhile the French Jews gave proofs of their patriotism and of their gratitude to the land which had emancipated them. Many of them fell on the field of honour in combating in the ranks of the Army of the Republic the forces of Europe in coalition. To contribute to the war fund candelabra of synagogues were sold, and many Jews deprived themselves of their jewels to make similar contributions.

Attitude of Napoleon
Though the Revolution had begun the process of Jewish emancipation, Napoleon spread the concept across Europe, liberating Jews from their ghettos and establishing relative equality for them in the lands he conquered.
The net effect of his policies, however, significantly changed the position of the Jews in Europe. Starting in 1806, Napoleon passed a number of measures supporting the position of the Jews in the French Empire, including assembling a representative group elected by the Jewish community, the Sanhedrin. In conquered countries, he abolished laws restricting Jews to ghettos. In 1807, he made Judaism, along with Roman Catholicism and Lutheran and Protestantism, official religions of France. Napoleon rolled back some reforms on 17 March 1808 by the so-called décret infâme, declaring all debts with Jews annulled, reduced or postponed, which caused the Jewish community to nearly collapse. Jews, especially in the East of the French Empire with all its annexations in the Rhineland and beyond (as of 1810), were also restricted in where they could live, in hopes of assimilating them into society. Many of these restrictions were eased again in 1811 and finally abolished in 1818.

In 1870 all the Jews of Algeria (except those from the M'zab), at that time a French department, were automatically granted French citizenship by the Crémieux decrees.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century the reactionaries, having failed in every attempt to overthrow the republic, had recourse to anti-Semitism, by means of which they maintained a persistent agitation for over ten years. The Jews were charged with the ruin of the country and with all the crimes which the fertile imagination of a Drumont (founder of the Antisemitic League of France) or a Viau could invent; and as the accused often disdained to answer such slanderous attacks, the charges were believed by a great number of people to be true. A campaign was started against Jewish army officers, which culminated in the Dreyfus Affair, during which a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of treason in favour of the German Empire, before being exonerated at the turn of the century.
At the turn of the century, the 1905 law on the Separation of the Church and the State put an end to state religion in France, all religions and philosophies being considered by the state a matter of privacy, tolerance and of freedom of thought.

20th century
Before World War II

By the early 1900s, the conditions of the Jews had improved tremendously and a wave of Jewish immigration arrived in France, mostly fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Immigration temporarily halted during World War I, and Jews fought in French forces, but resumed afterwards. Jews were prominent in art and culture during this period—such as at the turn of the century, with such artists as Modigliani, Soutine, and Chagall. France was also the first country to elect a Jewish Prime Minister, Léon Blum (Benjamin Disraeli, Britain's 19th century Prime Minister, had Jewish parents but had been baptised in the Church of England), during the Popular Front in 1936. Blum, however, was attacked by segments of the French far-right, for his Jewishness, while the monarchist movement, far-right leagues and the terrorist group engaged in anti-Semitic propaganda.

French Jews and the Holocaust
In 1940, early in World War II, France and its allies in the Low Countries were defeated by Nazi Germany, and the Jews there fell victim to the Nazi Holocaust. In the early months of the war there were probably some 350,000 Jews living in France, some of whom were refugees from Germany.[4] As early as October 1940, without any request from the Germans, the Vichy government began passing anti-Jewish measures (the Statute on Jews), prohibiting them from moving, and limiting their access to public places and most professional activities. In 1941, the Vichy government established a Commissariat General aux Questions Juives which worked with the Gestapo to begin rounding up Jews for the concentration camps. Between 1942 and July 1944, nearly 76,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps from France, of which only 2,500 survive. Drancy, outside of Paris, was the primary camp for Jews being deported to the Nazi German death camps in Poland and Eastern Europe. It was designed to hold 700 people, but at its peak in 1940 it held more than 7,000. It is interesting to note, however, that the majority of Jews deported from France and killed during the Holocaust were non-French Jews. Until severe pressure was brought to bear by Nazi Germany, Vichy sought in many instances to protect its native French-born Jews, especially those who had assimilated into the culture or converted to Catholicism.

The Jews of Bordeaux
For centuries the city of Bordeaux, France, has been a special haven to Sephardic Jews.
According to a legend, the Jews settled at Bordeaux shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple, and it is also said that a considerable number of them settled there in the sixth and seventh centuries, because of the commercial advantages of the city. Under Louis le Débonnaire they were allowed to trade freely (828). They had their own administrative and judicial systems and officials. The slave traffic, however, in which many Jews were concerned, was interdicted by royal decree in 829; and from this period the baptismal records contain no entries of conversions to Christianity made among the slaves of the Jews. In 848 the Jews were accused of having delivered Bordeaux to the Normans to be pillaged and destroyed. The Normans were said to have entered the city by means of the "Rue Juifve," a street which was not in the Jewish quarter. Again the bigoted populace opposed the Jews, and accused them of appealing to the Saracens for the purpose of laying waste the cities and lands of the south. There is no proof to sustain either of these charges.
The first definite evidence of Jews in Bordeaux is found in a deed of 1077, where mention is made of the "Montemque Judaïcum," residence of the Jews in the suburb of Saint-Seurin, with the church of Saint Martin as center. There was also a "Porta Judaïca," a "Rue du Petit Judas," or "Puits des Juifs," and a "Rue Judaïque," the last still existing. The dwellings of the Jews were extra muros at this period. A chronicle of the year 1273 mentions them as continuing their residence in Saint-Seurin. "Rue Caphernam" was then the main street in the Jewish quarter.

In this early period the Jews enjoyed comparative freedom, though the practise of usury was on several occasions (1214, 1219) forbidden. The city of Bordeaux was under English (Angevin) dominion; hence the decree of expulsion promulgated by the king of France in 1082, and the permission accorded Christians to repudiate debts due to the Jewish merchants (1182), did not affect the Jews of Bordeaux. Certain taxes were imposed. Thus, about 1150 the Jews paid the archbishop of Bordeaux a poll-tax of eight livres, being considered an estate in mortmain. The English kings sought to confirm the Jews in their ancient privileges; but the persecutions instituted by royal agents were indeed cruel.
When the edict of Charles VI. was promulgated (Sept. 17, 1394), expelling all Jews from France, the Bordelais were not yet under French dominion; and when these came within the purview of Charles VII.'s enactments (1454), their position remained unchanged, although the Jews completely lost their identity as such. They were legally accepted as residents of Bordeaux, but not as Jews. Louis XI. (1462), recognizing the value of Jewish enterprise, but disregarding what was an open violation of the decree of expulsion, ameliorated the condition of the Jewish merchants.

When the Jews were banished from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1496), the Jewish population at Bordeaux increased, for the refugees fled to the cities of southern France. No taxes had been paid by Jews as foreigners for some years, by virtue of their position as "Christian" residents. They continued to reside at Saint-Seurin, and the cemetery was known from early times as "Plantey deus Judius." The Maranos, or New Christians, who came at various times from the Iberian peninsula (1496 to 1525), did not, as at Amsterdam, discard the forms of Christianity at once and return to Judaism. Ancient statutes and more recent decrees forced the Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux into an anomalous position. As strangers, they had the right to settle and reside in the city. They lived as Christians, were baptized, married, and buried in accordance with the rites of the Catholic Church, and were Jewish only within the four walls of their homes.
From the beginning of the sixteenth century the Jews of Bordeaux were in reality a Marano community, the leaders of which were the members of the Govea family, so often mentioned in the annals of the city.
After 1730, the Jews were not considered as "New Christians," but were permitted to live openly as Jews, to own their cemetery,and to proselytize. In 1734 there were about 350 Jewish (Portuguese and Avignonese) families at Bordeaux, numbering nearly two thousand individuals. In 1731 David Gradis had been made a citizen. Louis XV. granted the Jews new letters patent (June, 1723), and shortly thereafter seven synagogues existed (the public, the Avignonese, and five private; e.g., those of the Gradis and the Peixotto).

At the time of the French Revolution five hundred Portuguese Jews resided at Bordeaux. These sought to be free and equal politically and socially. They asked for the recognition by the state of the Jewish religion, rites, and usages; and their deputies to the National Assembly, Lopès-Dubec, Furtado, Rodrigues, and David Gradis, labored actively in behalf of these petitions. They pointed to the protracted duration of their residence in France, to the privileges of 1550, etc. Talley-rand, before whom they appeared, reported their cause favorably to the Assembly, which decided that the rights of the Jews as New Christians and as Frenchmen should not be curtailed (Jan. 28, 1790). The Jews of Bordeaux were thus the first to be admitted by law to the rights of French citizenship. From the privileges granted by the decree, the German and other French Jews were particularly excluded.
In 1806 the number of Jews at Bordeaux was 2,131, and the Bordelais took an active part in the several councils and the Grand Sanhedrin of Napoleon. There were nine synagogues at this time, the chief families of the community being those of Gradis, Furtado, Raba, Fonseca, Peynado, and Cardozo. Abraham Furtado and Isaac Rodrigues represented the Jews of Bordeaux at the Sanhedrin.

Napoleon promulgated several restrictive measures (March 17, 1808), but the Jews of Bordeaux were especially exempted, as there had been no complaints concerning them. In 1809, by the new laws relating to the Jews, Abraham Furtado was made chief rabbi of Bordeaux, and in 1814 Abraham Andrade succeeded him. The new synagogue, consecrated in 1812, was destroyed in 1872, and the present synagogue was erected, being inaugurated Sept. 5, 1882. The community numbered such men of letters as Jacob Rodrigues Monsanto and Furtado among its citizens. Many of its members have been active in public life, in commerce, and in industry. The brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire were well-known financiers during the second empire. David Marx was chief rabbi from 1837 to 1864; he was followed by Simon Lévy and Isaac Lévy, the present incumbent.
Bordeaux served as a final station for countless Jewish refugees who fled southward from northern France in May-June 1940. The town, administered within the Occupied Zone after the Franco-German armistice (June 21, 1940), was one of the most important centers of Nazi police and military activities. Two-thirds of the Jewish population, local Jews and refugees alike, were arrested and deported, including the residents of the old-age home. A census of the Jewish population of the city conducted in June 1941 showed only 1,198 persons originating from Bordeaux or from southeastern France out of a total of 5,177; most were refugees from other parts of France and even from abroad. Between July 1942 and February 1944, 1,279 Jews were deported from Bordeaux by the Germans. A monument has been erected in their memory. In January 1944, French Fascists ransacked the great synagogue, which the Nazis had turned into a detention camp where the victims of their roundups awaited deportation. After the war, the survivors of the Bordeaux Jewish community reconstructed the synagogue with the aid of photographs and eyewitness accounts. When the task was completed 12 years later, the Bordeaux synagogue (which was originally built in 1882) was restored to its former renown as the largest (1,500 seats) and most beautiful Sephardi synagogue in France. Meanwhile the Jewish population increased with the arrival of new members, including a new Ashkenazi congregation. In 1960 there were 3,000 Jews in the community, and with the arrival of Jewish immigrants from N. Africa, the population doubled, with 5,500 persons in 1969. Bordeaux, the seat of a Chief Rabbinate, maintains a community center and a network of Jewish institutions.

Andrey Konstantinow - One of the people in the French Resistance who helped the Jews.
(He lived in the house nextdoor to me.)

The Jews of Nice
Jews have lived in Nice for centuries. Traces were found as from 1501, when they were expelled from neighboring Provence. In the seventeenth century, they represented a significant economic force in this city. The Jewish community existed legally as such and received this status from the Dukes of Savoy. They wanted to develop the economy of the city, and use the Jews to facilitate their external contacts. The Jews established building projects, sugar refineries, soap factories, etc. in Nice. In the 18th century, Jews became French citizens by the decree of September 27, 1791. They had to take the civic oath. Previously, they had no legal rights and officially they didn't exist. On July 20, 1808, an imperial decree required Jews to choose a Frenchified family name.
This early presence of Jews is attested by the graves of the Jewish cemetery located on the Chateau Hill in Nice, the birthplace of local history. Among others, you will find names like Lattès, Viterbo, Morera, and Ventura; some of these families are still present in the city.
In 1938 the Jewish community in the Alpes-Maritimes had about 5,000 members, but this group would rapidly and fundamentally change in importance by the influx of refugees from all geographical and social areas, which completely changed its composition.

The Second World War
For 1940 was the year France fell; when the Nazis occupied its north; when Jewish refugees fled to the Riviera to escape their persecutors.
From 1940 to 1945, Nice's hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, parks, theatres, and casinos became a stage set for tragedy. During the First World War, Nice had been six hundred miles from the front. During the Second, Nice was the front. Not for the whole war, and not for pitched battles like Normandy or Stalingrad. But in Nice, the Gestapo tracked down men, women, and children and sent them to their deaths. In Nice, Allied bombing raids took civilian lives. Resistance fighters fell. And just a few miles down the coast, in mid-August 1944, the Allies invaded southern France. In five years, control of Nice passed from France's Third Republic, to the Vichy regime, to the Italians, to the Germans, and finally to the Americans, before being restored to France in 1945. During these years, hotel rooms where once people made love or silently contemplated the sea became military command posts, torture chambers, or temporary asylums that reeked with fear.

In September 1939, after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, France and England declared war. The impact on the Riviera was swift. Railway companies that fed travellers to Nice from Lyon, Avignon, and Marseille, their rolling stock requisitioned by the military, drastically cut service. The first Cannes Film Festival, set to begin the same day as the invasion, was cancelled. Overnight, Nice hotels lost half their business. The same went for the big department stores, where sales of jewelry, perfumes, and other luxury items dropped 70 percent.
In May 1940, German armies swept into Belgium and France.
Within weeks, Paris fell. By the cease-fire terms, Germany occupied the northern half of France. The other half, l'Etat français, a French with its capital in Vichy, remained unoccupied, though at Germany's sufferance; "Vichy" became forevermore a synonym for spineless collaboration with a cruel enemy. Nice and the rest of the Cote d'Azur lay in unoccupied France, to which hundreds of thousands now fled. As historian Julian Jackson has astutely written, "This 'exodus' of the summer of 1940 seems like some hideously distorted mirror image of that no less famous exodus of summer of 1936, when hundreds of thousands of workers departed their first ever paid holidays."

Nice's guests from Britain and Belgium, of course, were gone. They were in part supplanted by soldiers on leave; refugees from north, their possessions reduced to diamonds sewn into the linings their coats; and nouveaux riches bent on profiting from the black market. For a while, if perversely, cabarets, theatres, and movie houses thrived. During the winter of 1941, betting at Nice's racetrack beside the Var, broke every record. The hotels - many larger ones now run on behalf of German or Italian interests - at first didn't do as well; one in six Niçois, unemployed at the end of the summer of 1940 was a hotel worker. By the following spring, however, with the reopening of the casinos, business was better. In June 1941, a regional committee for tourism was formed in Nice, replacing an earlier "festivals committee" that the Vichy regime deemed unduly frivolous.

Among those arriving in Nice, Cannes, and other Riviera towns during these first two years of the war were Jews from all over Europe. Jews had lived in Nice for centuries, had their own cemetery on the Chateau Hill, numbered perhaps a thousand. Now, though, many more came from Paris and elsewhere in France; from Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe. By one account, they and other Northern refugees were "the ones dressed in black, the men and women whose clothes looked too big for them, cramming the sidewalk cafés, crowding the parks, spilling over onto the beach.” Nice sheltered five thousand Jews on the eve of the war. Some carried Baedekers and Michelins as if they were on vacation. But they weren't on vacation. They were running for their lives.
Some of the well-off and well-known among them, including actors, writers, and musicians, took rooms in hotels on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, or the Croisette in Cannes, its Promenade; one anti-Semitic screed took to calling it "Kahn.” But, as one account recalls, most of the Jews "faced hardship and holed up in miserable hotels.” The International Red Cross helped. So did Jewish self-help societies in Nice. The Hotel Roosevelt became a centre of Orthodox Jewry. "Here,” it was said, "one could see rabbis in their traditional apparel walking through the streets, listen to Talmudic discussions and hear the old tunes of Hebrew prayer and Talmudic study."
We have at least one other slant on Nice's Jews from this period, thanks to a memo written by SS Hauptsturmführer Dannecker, chief of the Gestapo's Jewish office in France. Charged with ridding France of its Jews, Theodor Dannecker visited Nice in mid-July 1942. He reported that on the Promenade des Anglais there were "an enormous number of Jews," that the Niçois avoided the Promenade because of them; that the Jews at one casino represented 60 percent of its visitors.
From the start, the anti-Semitic Vichy regime painted Jews as living extravagantly while real Frenchmen suffered; as criminals, speculators, and black-marketeers who sucked the lifeblood out of France. In Nice, the names of rue Rothschild and another street honouring a Jew had been changed. Jewish businesses had been shut down. Affiches went up saying "Down with the Jews.”
Foreign Jews were the special target of these attacks. To most native French, even including some French Jews, the refugees from the North seemed alien. They looked different, spoke strangely. And they weren't French. So, after Dannecker's visit, as Vichy stepped up its anti-Semitic measures, it aimed them at the foreigners. On August 26, 1942, police rounded up six hundred of them in Nice and, five days later, shipped them to Drancy, the infamous camp outside Paris that served as waystation for Auschwitz. The police, wrote one Jewish survivor, "surrounded hotels, villas, whole blocks of houses and dragged out of their beds terrified Jews who had come to France after 1936. The shouts, the wailing and the groaning broke the stillness of the morning: “These performances did not enjoy wide acclaim among the Niçois. "The methods employed,” a subsequent report admitted, "are dearly unpopular.”

In November 1942, Hitler ordered his armies into southern France - except, that is, for eight départements east of the Rhone; this pocket of France, which included Nice, was ltaly's. But Fascist rule didn't make things worse for Nice's Jews, it made them better; ignoring protests from their German allies, the Italians scarcely laid a hand on them. German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop complained personally to Mussolini when he met with him in February 1943; oh, yes, certainly, the Italian dictator assured him, but he did nothing. An SS officer's report three months later lamented that the Italians had resolved the Jewish question "in a special manner - to use their expression, 'in the Latin way: the antithesis of 'the German way'" prevalent elsewhere in France. In other words, they left the Jews alone, as they mostly did during the war. Even those holding plainly false papers, lamented this officer, enjoyed Italian protection.
By train and boat, Jews from the rest of France converged on this sun-blessed haven; thirty thousand of them crowded twenty miles of coast. The Italian carabinieri protected Nice's Jewish sites; when French anti-Semites marched on a Nice synagogue, the local commander ordered the arrest of anyone who threatened it. For almost a year, in the middle of the war, at the height of the Holocaust's fright –l fury, the hotels, villas, boarding houses, and apartments of the Riviera represented life and hope to European Jews .
But in September 1943, following the Allied invasion of Sicily and southern Italy, the Italians capitulated. German armies rushed south to fill the Axis void, occupying Nice, which Italian forces were evacuating. Raoul Mille depicted the moment in a novel, Les Amants du paradis:

From the west, where the sky glowed with a faint, milky light, rose the distant murmur of a panting beast. Its moan grew into a throbbing. The soil, the foundations, the walls, the beach itself shook in slow, heavy spasms. The day dawned, grey and pink, like the belly of a fish pulled from the sea. A mist blurred the horizon. It was against this surreal and quavering backdrop that the first tank appeared, then cars and trucks.
The Germans were on the Promenade des Anglais.

Could any contrast be more grotesque? On the one hand, the grey uniformed German troops, with all they conjured up of merciless severity. On the other, the wide, palm-crowned Promenade, with all it conjured up of abandon, of easy living, of a leisure that workers and worriers everywhere - all the world's hurried, nervous, and sick - craved.
And now it shook to the roar of German tanks.
The Germans tried to come across as benign. They sent out photographers to snap soldiers at tourist spots - gesturing meaningfully beside the Emperor Augustus's monument at La Turbie; or mingling with street urchins; or camera in hand, strolling along the Promenade, flanked by beach umbrellas and sidewalk merchants. If the Germans were just tourists, the photographs as much as said, why fear them?
For a while, cabarets filled with Wehrmacht officers and Gestapo men, and cash registers rang with purchases of perfume, furs, and wines for frauleins back home: But as the war wore on, such extravagance dried up. Receipts from the taxe de sé‚jour fell from 190,000 francs in December 1943, soon after the Italians left, to fourteen thousand the following May.
With its principal source of revenue gone and Germany siphoning its resources to the Fatherland, Nice had trouble even feeding itself. As malnutrition took its toll, teeth grew brittle, finger- and toenails tore loose. All anyone talked about, besides the war, was food.
As the Allied noose tightened, and after Field Marshal Erwin Rommel expressed displeasure with anti-invasion defences he'd inspected along the south coast, the Germans began to disfigure the pretty tourist face of Nice. In October 1943, they banned bicycles from the Promenade. In December, cement barricades twelve feet high went up, blocking access to the Promenade save for a small pedestrian opening. In January, the Germans dosed all of Nice's restaurants and cinemas and declared the Promenade off limits. Blockhouses were erected, machinegun and anti-aircraft emplacements set up. Young, bare-chested soldiers, rifles stacked neatly beside them as they worked in the sun, dug trenches, laid barbed wire, mined the beach.

In April 1944, Elizabeth Foster, an elderly American unaccountably stuck in Nice for the duration of the war, recorded in her secret journal that the authorities had ordered every civilian to "produce a specified amount of copper;' else draw a heavy fine; her quota was thirty pounds, which sent her rummaging among candlesticks and fireplace ornaments. The Germans demanded copper, among other metals; the previous month, they'd turned to that tourist shrine the Jetée-Promenade for a thousand tons of it.
Back in the thirties, Klaus Mann, son of German novelist Thomas Mann, had described the Jetée as an "enchanted Moorish palace" that was "frankly hideous, in abominable taste:' And yet, he admitted in the same breath, when it sparkled in the night, glowing like "the sumptuous centre of some enormous jewel,” irony evaporated and the Jetée truIy was an enchanted palace.
The Germans scavenged the Jetée's brass and bronze, its electric cabIe, its zinc counters, stripping it of finery that had delighted generations of visitors. A small army of workers dismantled the rest of the edifice. Soon its great cupola was just a filigree of bare ironwork. Finally, Nice's Eiffel Tower was reduced to stumpy pylons-in the right light, they looked like tombstones-washed by the sea.
Soon after their arrival, the Germans moved key offices into Nice hotels. The German commander installed himself at the Atlantic, on boulevard Victor-Hugo. The navy took over the camouflaged Hotel Suisse, built into the Chateau Hill. The Gestapo got the Hermitage. The Milice, the French Gestapo with whom the Germans collaborated, got the Concordia. As for the Jew-hunting operation that followed German armies across Europe, this, too, had its headquarters. Arriving in Nice on September 10, 1943, on the heels of the Wehrmacht, was SS Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, fresh from rounding up Jews in Austria and Greece. Brunner, a thirty-one-year-old Austrian, was charged with overseeing the final solution of the Jewish problem in the AIpes-Maritimes. He established his headquarters at the Hotel Excelsior.

In the first half of 2009, an estimated 631 recorded acts of antisemitism took place in France, more than the whole of 2008. Speaking to the World Jewish Congress in December 2009, the French Interior Minister Hortefeux described the acts of antisemitism as "a poison to our republic." He also announced that he would appoint a special coordinator for fighting racism and anti-Semitism. The French diplomat Christophe Bigot, French Ambassador to Israel, said President Nicolas Sarkozy was fighting anti-Semitism firmly. "This matter is one of Sarkozy's top priorities since his term as interior minister, and of course now as president," he said. "If a Jew is hurt in France, the entire French republic is hurt."
Bigot rejected the possibility that the rise in anti-Semitism was related to the Muslim community in France, saying that "it's hard to determine who is behind this. Unfortunately, there are a number of sectors in society – both in the extreme Right and in the extreme Left – that view anti-Semitism as a way to express their frustration."

Originally known as the Saint-Ermin, the Excelsior - it had no connection to the old Excelsior Regina - had gone up around the turn of the century, and for years had served as one of Nice's many second rank hotels. Today it remains a hotel, a handsome one, all arches and pediments and Belle époque detailing. Its charming inner courtyard, dotted with blue umbrellas, is lush with flowers and bushes. The courtyard's whole interior façade is green with luxuriant ivy that hangs down from iron balconies. The desk clerk gives you a brochure that recounts the hotel's history and architectural features - florid stuff about harmonious proportions and restored ornamental plasterwork. The brochure does not, of course, mention 1943 and 1944, when its wide hallways bore the tread of Alois Brunner and his men, when Jews were stuffed into bedless rooms until they were ready to be marched up the street to the station and loaded onto rail cars.
Nice's Jews had been trapped by fast-changing events. Before the Italians surrendered, an influential Italian Jewish banker had worked out a way to get most of them across the border to Italy or North Africa. But all depended. on word of the Armistice's being delayed for a few weeks. It wasn’t; the announcement came on September 8. "By nightfall," according to one account,

"Nice was one huge party,” with women kissing Italian soldiers, accordions playing, couples dancing in the street. The jubilation, however, was short-lived. When Hitler sent his crack Panzer divisions into northern Italy and the Italian-occupied zone of France, panic seized Nice's Jews, now swollen to perhaps twenty thousand. Desperate to reach safe haven, a few would trek for days through the AIps. Most, though, stayed in the city and nervously waited. On September 9, the day after the announcement, German troops crossed the Var; two days later, they arrived in Nice.
Immediately, Brunner's men set to work. They picked up forty-five Jews as they tried to cross the Var, arrested a hundred more at the train station on September 13. Even from high up in her apartment over rue de Rivoli, Elizabeth Foster could sec what was going on. "Poor souls;' she wrote on September 21. "All Jews are arrested wherever found, their belongings confiscated.”

In menacing black Citroëns, the Germans and their French henchmen hunted down Nice's Jews. They'd abruptly surround an intersection, a market, or a street and stop anyone they even remotely suspected. They'd subject the men to "medical examinations"; those circumcised, including some Christians and Muslims, were seized on the spot. Women were judged Jewish on the basis of facial features. A Catholic nurse was arrested because her name was Esther. Official papers meant nothing; they were assumed fake.
Brought by truck to the Excelsior-Brunner would watch them pull up from a second-story balcony overlooking rue Durante - the Jews were relieved of their possessions; their money and jewelry were supposed to reimburse the hotel for food and lodging during the days or weeks before they went to Drancy. Many were tortured for information about brothers, parents, and children not yet caught in the net. One begged an attending physician for a lethal injection; refused, he threw himself from a window. Some young Jewish women, it was rumoured, were kept at the Excelsior, sterilized, then shipped out "for the pleasure of the soldiers on the eastern front.”
Finally, in groups of sixty or so at a time, they'd be herded to the station, a few hundred shuffling paces up the street. "The road between the sinister hotel-prison 'Excelsior' and the station became, by one 1944 account, "a Calvary for the Jewish population of Nice. Two or three times a week the same heart-rending procession takes place, before a silent, tearful crowd held back by a large police contingent."Then it was onto the train. Some Jews, picked up on the beach, arrived at Drancy in shorts, shivering.
Many of the first seizures took place in hotels. The Germans would barricade the street, burst into the hotel, and haul off anyone suspected as Jewish. They picked up Joseph and Etka Dyzenchanz, Polish Jews in their sixties, who were staying at the Hotel P.L.M. ("Moderate prices, open all year" said the hotel's ad in a 1939 guidebook.) They picked up Abram Klajman, forty-two, and his family, at the Hotel Busby. ("Every Modern Comfort.”) One who survived the war, Léon Poliakov, then staying at Hotel de Lausanne, on rue Rossini, noticed that the Germans hit ten of Nice's 170 or so hotels each night. Before going to bed, he'd reassure himself that there was only a one-in-seventeen chance they'd come for him.

Early on, the Gestapo stopped a married Jewish couple in the lobby of the Negresco.
"May I go upstairs to get my coat?" asked the wife.
"Yes, but if you try to get away, your husband will answer for it.” When she didn't come right back down, they went up to the room, only to find her dead; she had poisoned herself
Soon the Jews abandoned the hotels that had given them such fleeting refuge. The Splendid, a hotel doing a particularly brisk business in refugee Jews, lost two-thirds of its trade within a month. A German dispatch exulted in late September.
The city of Nice has lost its ghetto appearance. The Jews no longer circulate. The synagogues are dosed. And the Promenade des Anglais offers to Aryan walkers numerous chairs which, up to now, were occupied by Jews.
Tourist Nice had become judenrein, free of Jews. The manhunt moved from hotels and other tourist haunts to hospitals, apartments, basements, and other refuges. In the end, the Germans in Nice wound up shipping off to Drancy about three thousand Jews, most of whom died at Auschwitz. After the initial easy harvest, the Germans had increasingly to rely on informers who--paid a hundred, a thousand, even five thousand francs per Jewish head-would come by the Excelsior to report, and collect.
On August 15, 1944, two months after D-Day in Normandy, the Allies landed across a forty-mile-wide front near Saint-Raphaël and quickly moved inland. Four days later, about a week before the city's liberation, Elizabeth Foster noted how few blows the Niçois were striking against the occupiers, even now, with the issue little in doubt and the Germans set to pull out. "If one lives on the Riviera it is very hard to believe in the Resurrection of France,” she wrote. The rest of the country, she felt, had exhibited courage, patience, and now joy. But not, from all she could see, Nice. "I try not to forget that the Riviera is, as someone said of Palm Beach, an atmosphere which “melts the moral marrow."
Tourist towns, she was saying, did not make for men and women ardent of principle. As for Nice. whether because of its historically blurred national identity, or its sweet Italian streak, or tolerance born of welcoming visitors from everywhere, it couldn't be much bothered with choosing sides. Italians? French? Germans? Americans? Did it matter in the end? Not so long as visitors filled the hotels, crowded the clubs, and left fat tips.
The Niçois, it seemed to Foster, wanted nothing more than that the war end - whoever won.

The Zionist Youth helped by the provision of false identity cards, work cards, cash assistance, and help to escape to Switzerland. The Jewish Scouts also provided various false documents, with the help of resistance fighters like Andrey Konstantinow, who was killed in prison in Nice, February 10, 1944.

World War II left people with plenty to say. The workers liberated from their factories, the lovers arm in arm, were gone. In their stead were Nazi stormtroopers, Jews running for their lives, Resistance fighters, black-marketeers, most of them riven by urgency, worry, or fear; these were Nice's wartime visitors, and later they'd have no want of life-and-death drama with which to regale their grandchildren.
Here, then, is the perverse paradox of tourism: It is mostly banal, it is often artificial and contrived, it makes little claim on the intellect. And yet it stands high among the dividends of peace. For it supplies some of those rare moments of life at its sweetest - of repose, amusement, pleasure, and joy - for which the mass of men and women ache.

Late 20th Century
In the wake of the Holocaust 180,000 Jews remained in France, some of whom were refugees from Eastern Europe. In 1951 the population was 250,000. In the 1940s and 1950s Jewish refugees from Europe resettled in France. They were later joined by large numbers of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews from France's North African colonies who quickly assimilated in France, their numbers increased after French decolonization of its territories abroad in 1962 and anti-Semitism in these newly formed nation-states.
In total, it is estimated that between 1956 and 1967, about 235.000 North African jews from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco immigrated to France due to the decline of the French empire and following the Six-Day War. Hence, by 1968, Jews of North African origin were a majority of the Jews of France. The North African Jews enjoyed a successful social and economic integration in France while reinvigorating its Jewish life. Kosher restaurants and Jewish schools multiplied, in particular since the 1980s and the religious renewal of the younger generation.
France initially supported Israel, voting for its formation and supporting it militarily and technically. After the Six-Day War in 1967, however, France progressively shifted towards a more pro-Palestinian view.

Today
There are between 490,000 to more than 600,000 Jews in France today. In 2009, France's highest court, the council of state issued a ruling recognising the state's responsibility in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during World War II. The report cited "mistakes" in the Vichy regime that had not been forced by the occupiers, stating that the state "allowed or facilitated the deportation from France of victims of anti-Semitism".

Aliyah
Between 2001 and 2005, an estimated 12,000 French Jews took Aliyah to Israel. Several émigrés cited anti-semitism and the growing Arab population as reasons for leaving. At a welcoming ceremony for French Jews in the summer of 2004, then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon caused controversy when he advised all French Jews to "move immediately" to Israel and escape what he coined "the wildest anti-semitism" in France.

Antisemitism

In 2004, France experienced rising levels of antisemitism and acts that were publicized around the world. In 2006, rising levels of antisemitism were recorded in French schools. Reports related to the tensions between the children of North African Muslim immigrants and North African Jewish children. The climax was reached when Ilan Halimi was tortured to death by the so-called "Barbarians gang", led by Youssouf Fofana. In 2007, over 7, 000 members of the community petitioned for asylum in the United States, citing antisemitism in France.
Rises in antisemitism in modern France have been linked to the intensifying Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the Faza War in 2009, decreases in antisemitism have been reversed. A report compiled by the Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism singled out France in particular amongst Western countries for antisemitism. Between the start of the Israeli offensive in Gaza in late December and the end of it in January, an estimated hundred antisemitic acts were recorded in France. This compares with a total of 250 antisemitic acts in the whole of 2007.

Grave of the famous writer (Asterix, etc.) René Goscinny
Jewish Cemetary Nice, Côte d'Azur, France