I'd like to thank Judah Bellin for sending me this link to the (translated) transcript of French President Francois Hollande's speech, made on the anniversary of the infamous Vel d'Hiv roundup in Paris. Hollande actually made this speech during the week that I was in Italy, which is rather ironic, and could explain why I didn't hear about it when I was in Europe this summer.
The Vel d'Hiv roundup was a mass arrest of over 13,000 Jews living in Paris in the summer of 1942, when Paris was under German occupation. Many were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz, and many others were interned, temporarily in the Velodrome d'Hiver (hence the name of the event). The raid marked the beginning of such roundups in France. By the end of World War II, approximately 70-76,000 Jews had been deported from France, to be killed in the death camps in Poland, especially Auschwitz. Virtually none returned.
With that introduction, here are my comments on the President's speech:
"The infamy of the Vel d’Hiv was part of an undertaking that had no precedent and has no comparison: the Holocaust." Unfortunately, there were precedents to the Holocaust. The most obvious was the Armenian genocide which took place in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, also under the smoke-screen of war. Estimates vary widely as to the number of Armenian murdered by the bands of thugs hired by the Ottoman government, from as low as 600,000, to over 1.5 million (my own advisor, Prof. Hull, believes that 1.5-2 million Armenians died in the genocide). If these upper estimates are correct, than approximately the same proportions of Armenians died in the Armenian Genocide as the proportion of Jews who died in the Holocaust. Although Kemal Ataturk (the father of the Republic of Turkey) was not personally involved in the massacred, he shielded many high-level former Ottoman officials from post-war justice. Many members of Ataturk's administration were tainted, including his minister of education. Hitler knew that Ottoman officials had evaded justice, and is on-record as having referred to the world's forgetting of the war crime. Just as there is Holocaust denial, there is Armenian Genocide denial; the Turkish government still bars scholars from accessing the relevant archives.
"[The victims] believed that the country of the great Revolution and the City of
Light would be a safe haven for them. They loved the Republic with a
passion born of gratitude." This statement obscures, and, indeed, the entire speech ignores, one of the most salient facts of Jewish Holocaust victims in France: they were not French. The Vichy regime was conservative and nativist, and French antisemitism is not identical to German antisemitism. Whereas the Nazis considered the most dangerous kind of Jew to be the fully assimilated one (and thus the one hardest to detect and to eradicate), Vichy accepted and even protected Jews who had been fully assimilated for several generations. There were several Vichy-era trials of individuals suing to avoid being considered Jewish: some succeeded, by proving that they were observant Catholics, etc.; lack of circumcision was considered significant proof of assimilation. However, in Inquisitorial fear of crypto-Jews, Vichy stripped thousands of recently-naturalized immigrants, many of them Jewish, of their French citizenship (including at least one woman in the region I studied this summer). Moreover, many of the deportees were refugees from Poland, who had fled from the approaching German troops, and had fled to France, still in the time of the Third Republic (which had voted itself out of existence by investing Petain with full powers approximately two years before the Vel d'Hiv roundup). Most deportees were not French citizens: Vichy even agreed to deport additional non-French Jews from the Unoccupied Zone, in exchange for promises from the Nazis that they would spare an equal number of French Jews in the Occupied Zone. It was the unassimilated Jews, who felt the weakest feelings of allegiance to France, who were most likely to be deported. By contrast, assimilated French Jews were more likely to have the connections and resources necessary to evade arrest; sometimes, this was nothing more than a tip-off from a sympathetic policeman, which could mean the difference between life and death for a family.
"Indeed, it was in Paris in 1791, under the National Constituent
Assembly, that Jews had become fully fledged citizens for the first time
in Europe. " This statement should be highly qualified. First, when the First Republican government decided to grant civil rights to Jews, as citizens, they ignored the Ashkenazim. The first Jews to become French were actually the Sephardim, who had come to France from Spain, Portugal, and Navarre (sometimes by way of the Netherlands). Second, the National Assembly desired to give (these) Jews everything as individuals, and nothing as a nation, the very sort of state-within-a-state which the forces Revolution opposed. The granting of citizenship was more a strategy for homogenizing and uniting France than a humanitarian goal in and of itself. The Sephardim were an easier population to work on than the Ashkenazim: it was the Sephardim, in the Netherlands, who, in the 17th century, became the first "secular Jews," i.e. Jews who did not live in Jewish communities (in some cases, ghettos/shtetls) ruled largely by Jewish law. As a fully-assimilated American Jew who openly embraces secular culture, I clearly do not see this kind of development as detrimental: many more traditional Jews, however, do.
"Later, others had found in France a land of welcome, a chance at life, a promise of protection.
" This is correct. Following the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) that resulted in Alsace-Lorraine becoming annexed to the new state of Germany, and inaugurated the French Third Republic, many Alsatian Jews found it safer to emigrate to France, and for their children to learn to speak a new language, than to live in a German state. They were far more welcome in the pluralistic Third Republic; I met an Alsatian (i.e. yekki) family when I was in Paris, and had Shabbat dinner with them.
"The truth is that French police—on the basis of the lists they had
themselves drawn up—undertook to arrest the thousands of innocent people
trapped on July 16, 1942. And that the French gendarmerie escorted them
to the internment camps. The truth is that no German soldiers—not a single one—were mobilized at any stage of the operation. The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France." Absolutely true, and most important part of this speech. The Nazis could never have accomplished what they did in France, had they not received an enormous amount of aid from the French civil bureaucracy and police force.
"To his great credit, President Jacques Chirac recognized this truth, in this very spot on July 16, 1995.
" Whatever else I may think of former President Chirac, he did inaugurate the world's first museum of Jewish art and culture. My cousin Bruno remembers it.
"France, country of the Enlightenment and human rights, land of
welcome and asylum, France, that day, was committing the irreparable. But the truth is also that the crime of the Vel d’Hiv was committed
against France, against her values, against her principles, against her
ideal." The Enlightenment (unlike the Renaissance) was often antisemitic, with such monumental figures as David Hume and Voltaire making antisemitic (as well as racist) remarks. Voltaire, who for the contemporary French, personified the Enlightenment, was one of the most antisemitic writers whose books I have ever read. His Philosophical Dictionary reads like a angry screed against the people who he considered to be a barbarous tribe of Arab swindlers and murderers. He misquotes and misreads to no end the copy of Rashi which he got his hands on (interestingly, his own idea of divinity is not too different from that of Maimonides, whom he never mentions, even once). If Voltaire is truly representative of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment legitimately represents French ideals, then, no, the eviction of the Jews from France is not in contradiction to these ideals. Iconoclast that I am, I believe that there is no such thing as any kind of lasting, essentially French value, principle, or ideal.
"Honor was saved by the Righteous, by all those who were able to rise up
against barbarism, by those anonymous heroes who hid a neighbor here,
helped another there, and risked their lives to save those of innocent
people. By all those French people who enabled three quarters of
France’s Jews to survive." This is all true. However, the French police were also often very incompetent, especially in comparison to the Germans.
"We cannot tolerate the fact that two out of three young French people do not know what the Vel d’Hiv roundup was.
" I did not know this statistic, but it does not surprise me. Nobody know any history anymore.
"The Shoah was not created from a vacuum and did not emerge from nowhere.
True, it was set in motion by the unprecedented and terrifying
combination of single-mindedness in its racist frenzy and industrial
rationality in its execution. But it was also made possible by centuries of blindness, stupidity,
lies, and hatred. It was preceded by many warning signs, which failed to
alert people’s consciences." Yes, I would agree with the entirety of this statement.
"Every Saturday morning, in every French synagogue, at the end of the
service, the prayer of France’s Jews rings out, the prayer they utter
for the homeland they love and want to serve. “May France live in
happiness and prosperity. May unity and harmony make her strong and
great. May she enjoy lasting peace and preserve her spirit of nobility
among the nations.”
" It's true: I've seen it.
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