Richard I. Cohen, The Burden of Conscience. French Jewry 's Response to the Holocaust by N. J. Atkin

Summary

In recent years, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to the anti-semitic policies of the Vichy regime. This has shown that these measures were undertaken by the French government itself, independent of German pressure. As early as July 1940 Vichy implemented new nationality restrictions which deprived some 6,000 Jews of their French citizenship. In October 1940 the regime introduced the infamous Statut des Juifs which excluded Jews from positions of public importance. Further measures confiscated Jewish property and interned Jews in special camps. The purpose of this legislation was to purge French culture of ‘unassimilable elements’. Ultimately Vichy became a participant in the ‘Final Solution’. In the summer of 1942 the regime began to hand over Jews to the Germans for deportation. Close to 80,000 Jews left France for concentration camps in Germany and Eastern Europe. Of these, barely 3 per cent returned alive. Accordingly, we now know a great deal about the origins of Vichy's anti-semitism and the fateful direction in which it turned.

We are less well-informed, however, about French Jewry’ s response to the above measures. This forms the basis of a new study by Richard Cohen. As the author himself states, ‘This book is not another work about the persecution of French Jews and their tragic fate. It is about the Jewish community and its leadership and how they interpreted their reality and responded’ (p. vii). To understand the position of the Jewish leadership, the author adopts a fresh approach to the subject. Too often, he maintains, all that happened during the war is viewed from the perspective of Auschwitz. The result is that Jewish leaders are ‘villified for collaborating with the Germans and damned for aiding the destruction of their fellow Jews’ (p. vii). To avoid such a one-sided analysis, Richard Cohen attempts to illustrate the historical context in which decision-making took place. Obviously this is a daunting task. Yet this well-researched and lucidly written account reveals several of the dilemmas that confronted the Jewish leaders.

His story begins with the fall of France in 1940. For a brief moment, the disparate elements of French Jewry were united behind the war effort.