Jews of Touraine Proposal

Due to the overwhelming popularity of my recent post about studying in France, I've decided to give people the specifics of my plans.  The following is the final version of the project proposal for the Susan Tarrow Award.  Thanks to my Mother for helping me beat out a final draft!

Background History:

                On July 10^th, 1940, the legislature of the French 3^rd Republic officially invested Marshall Pétain with full governmental powers, in what jurist René Cassin has called a “coup d’etat constitutionnel.”  Under the influence of their German occupiers, Pétain’s Vichy “French State” began to pass a series of anti-Semitic laws applicable to French Jews.  These included the Statut des Juifs in 1940 and 1941, the creation of a General Commissariat for Jewish Questions and the seizure of Jewish property in 1941, and the requirement that all Jews wear yellow stars sewn onto their outer garments in 1942.  In mid-July of 1942, thousands of Parisian Jews were arrested and detained.  Mass deportations followed, sending most of the detainees to death German death camps, most notably, in Auschwitz.  Concentration camps cropped up across France as well, with three in Paris alone, and a death camp in Alscace.  The Final Solution succeeded in killing tens of thousands of the Jews living in France, mostly by their deportation and subsequent execution in German death camps, especially Auschwitz.  The non-Jewish reaction to these policies was mixed.  At times, French complicity with Nazi policy was blatant, as when German officials requested the names of all Jewish men living in Paris for the purpose of detainment, and French officials responded with lists of women and children to be included for this action.  At other times, in spite of the danger of doing so, many non-Jewish French families sheltered their Jewish neighbors, risking their own incarceration if detected.

                At the time of the advent of the Vichy government, there were some 350,000 Jews living in France, though not all were legal French citizens. More often than not, the casualties of Vichy policies were not French Jews with full citizenship, but rather foreign Jews who had assumed French culture, and, sometimes, French surnames.  This population had been immigrating to France on a large scale since the 1870s, from Poland, from Russia, Rumania, Turkey, and other Eastern European countries.  Their unofficial status exposed them to persecution more readily than Jews with full French citizenship, as they lacked a similar degree of legal protection.

Research Goals:

                Numerous studies exist on Vichy complicity in the Nazis’ Final Solution, on concentration camps, on non-Jews who protected Jews, on daily Jewish life under Vichy, on French Jewish orphans, etc.  However, there is a little known concerning this history of this issue in areas of Occupied France outside of the Ile-de-France.  Because of this, I am pursuing a study of regional persecution of the Jews living in the region of Touraine , which is located in the northwest quadrant of France, in the Loire Valley. The city of Tours is the administrative center of its sous-préfecture, being the tenth largest city in France.   In particular, I am examining the social dynamics within and between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities of this region during the war.  I will be looking at how and why Jews of Touraine were persecuted, detained and deported during this period.  Did the history of persecution in regional areas of France parallel the succession of events occurring in the capital of Paris, or, for that matter, in Germany?

                There currently exist two approaches to the treatment of European Jewry in what became the Holocaust:  Intentionalism and Functionalism.  According to the Intentionalist approach, Jews were victims because the Nazi and Vichy regimes set the goal of the ultimate destruction of the “Jewish race.”  All anti-Semitic acts contributed to the larger “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews.  According to the Functionalist approach, Jews became victims because of social and bureaucratic problems (German historian Hans Mommsen is most famously associated with this position).  Shannon Fogg suggests that the Jews of the Limousin (central France, just south of the occupied zone) were often evicted in spite of the goodwill of their gentile landlords, in order to make room for French families suffering from deprivation and rationing.  Jews proved to be vulnerable targets because of their ambiguous status and lack of legal protection.  The mass deportations, made convenient by Eichmann’s infamous and efficient train network, were no more than a solution to thousands of local, yet thematically related, social and bureaucratic problems.  Shortages in France during the war included housing, labor (soldiers needed to be sent to the front, and the Nazis captured a French slave labor force of 1.2 million), food (fewer farmers, in addition to massive requisitions by the Germans), and cash (from war indemnities).  For my study, I will be looking for evidence as to what extent the Jews of Touraine were detained due to anti-Semitism, social pressures, or both.

Methodology:

                My primary path of research will be in the regional archives of Indre-et-Loire, in the sous-préfecture of Tours, located in the city of Tours.  In particular, there is a portion of the archives dedicated to regional history in the time of World War II.  For example, archive accession 10-W-66 contains the “German administration of the Jewish questions, organization,” accession 46-W-102 contains the official texts on the appropriation of Jewish goods, and 52 W 13 deals specifically with the prefect’s correspondence regarding the regulation, arrest, and internment of “Jews and foreigners.”  These sources are pertinent to my study, but are only part of a larger list of archives which may prove important.  For example, the files of the office of the prefect, of the police department, and of the local administration should reveal some of the nature of regional Jewish persecution.  Is there evidence that it was largely conducted by police and soldiers, or did civilians participate?  If the latter, did Jews ever seek legal protection from the state, and if so, what was the state’s response?  Did French Jews (citizens of the “confession Israëlite”) receive official and unofficial treatment different from that of foreign, non-French Jews?  How many Jews were arrested for internment and deportation?  In addition to the archives mentioned above, there is a collection of documents describing the nearby Jewish concentration camp at la Lande which may provide important statistics for the numbers of people detained from the region.                Another source which may prove important is local newspapers.  Is there any record of the reaction of the local population to the treatment of Jews?  Were there stories published after the war of acts describing resistance to the Vichy policies, especially as regards the sheltering of Jews from persecution?  Is there information regarding the return of Jews to Touraine?  Were they able to function if they did return?  What is the current population in this region? 

                I plan to spend six to seven weeks in the region in and around Tours, consulting as many archival sources for this research as I possibly can.  I will also visit the Jewish section of the municipal cemetery, located just a few minutes’ walk from the archives.  Such a visit might give the names of families whose histories I can trace.   In addition, if I have time, I would like to place this regional study in a larger context.  In order to do this, I would extend my stay an additional week and travel to Paris.  This would allow me to visit the Holocaust archives of France, at the Centre de documentation juive contemporain, which is associated with the Mémorial de la Shoah.  These archives describe the legal and social persecution in World War II France in general, and can provide useful background, primary-source material for the overall history of this study.

Relevant Classwork:

                This project will require reading and understanding primary source documents written in French.  I am fluent in French, having taken French language courses since middle school.  As a French and History major at Cornell, my skills were greatly improved from a semester abroad in Fall, 2011, during which I was enrolled in courses, taught in French, at the University of Paris IV Sorbonne.  Prior to my enrollment at the Sorbonne, I participated in a month-long immersion language course at the Institute de Touraine.  

                Although this is often a difficult area to research, I am drawn to this topic, not only because of my Jewish background, but also because of its relevance in the struggles with immigration and religious discrimination which are still very relevant today.  This semester, I am taking Professor I.V. Hull’s Seminar on European Fascism (History 4570).  The assigned readings of this course, as they pertain to the Third Reich and Vichy regimes, will provide a background to the history of Europe in this period.  More importantly, part of this course is a 15-page research project, and I will be writing one on the topic of Vichy complicity in the Final Solution, and familiarizing myself with secondary-source literature, such as is found in the bibliography below.  This reading will supply some of the background history of the Final Solution in Vichy France.  I also plan to use the research conducted in France for my Senior Honors History Thesis, which I will be writing in Spring , 2013, on the topic of wartime rationing in Vichy France, a matter closely related to the Jewish Question.

Bibliography of Secondary Sources:

Adler, Jacques. 1987. The Jews of Paris and the final solution: communal response and internal conflicts, 1940-1944. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dreyfus, François G. 1990. Histoire de Vichy. Paris: Perrin.

Fogg, Shannon Lee. 2009. The politics of everyday life in Vichy, France: foreigners, undesirables, and strangers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Joly, Laurent. 2006. Vichy dans la "Solution finale": histoire du commissariat général aux questions juives (1941-1944). Paris: Grasset.

Klarsfeld, Serge. 2001. La Shoah en France. la solution finale de la question juive en France 1, Vichy-Auschwitz. Paris: Fayard.

Kritzman, Lawrence D. 1995. Auschwitz and after: race, culture, and "the Jewish question" in France. New York: Routledge.

Lochak, Danièle. 2009. Le droit et les juifs: en France depuis la révolution. Paris: Dalloz.

Marrus, Michael Robert. 1981. Vichy et les juifs. France: Calmann-Lévy.

Budget:

Roundtrip USAir Flight from Ithaca, New York to Paris, Charles-de-Gaulle Airport: $1,650

Roundtrip train from Paris to Tours: €80 = $105

6 weeks’ stay in the Tours youth hostel (breakfast included), at €21.60 per night: €907.20 = $1200

Meals: €7.50 per day = €315 = $420

Tours Subtotal: $3,375

1 week’s lodging in the Latin Quarter youth hostel: €49 per night = €342 = $465

1 week’s additional food: $70

10 Metro tickets: €12.50 = $16.50

Paris Subtotal: $551.50

Grand Total (estimate): $3,926.50

~JD

"Up until our own times, men had only received two sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and morality. One was Plato's and it said: `Morality decides politics'; and the other was Machiavelli's, and it said `Politics have nothing to do with morality.' Today we receive a third. M. Maurras teaches: `Politics decide morality'" (Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, p. 110).