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Aron Beckerman's City of Light: writing French history and defining immigrant Jewish space in interwar Paris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2015

NICK UNDERWOOD
NICK UNDERWOOD*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Program in Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, Campus Box 122, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
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Abstract:

This article examines the writing of a little-known, but prolific interwar immigrant eastern European Parisian Yiddish writer, Aron Beckerman, to demonstrate how Yiddish journalism played a pivotal role in defining Paris as a simultaneously French and Jewish space to immigrant Jews living in the city. Engaging urban historical theory on the communal-building effect that public space can have, this article argues that within Beckerman's writings on Paris – its history and specific places within the city – we see a Paris emerge that details a universalist republican identity, which, when read through a Jewish lens, leads simultaneously to a particular immigrant, Yiddish-speaking, leftist Jewish understanding of what it meant to be ‘French’.

Type
Special section: Beyond the Pletzl: Jewish urban histories in interwar France
Information
Urban History , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 618 - 634
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

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3 New York Public Library, Holocaust Survivors Project, William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, Renee Alfandary, interviews conducted 30 Apr. and 4 May 1975.

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7 For a study on the development of a simultaneously ‘French’ and ‘Jewish’ identity during the 1920s, see Malinovich, N., French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar.

8 For an analysis of how Paris developed as a ‘global neighborhood’ in the post-World War II period, see Laguerre, M.S., Global Neighborhoods: Jewish Quarters in Paris, London, and Berlin (Albany, 2009)Google Scholar. Also see Noiriel, G., Le creuset français: histoire de l’immigration XIXe – XXe siècle (Paris, 2006 Google Scholar; orig. publ. 1988), who argues that the history of immigration in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not simply a story about assimilation, but that France was a ‘melting pot’ of cultures and peoples.

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13 Les Archives Départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis, Archives du Parti Communiste Français, Fonds David Diamant, Archives Aron Beckerman, 335J 15–16. Letters from YIVO to Beckerman, 6 Dec. 1926 and 15 Nov. 1926. YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, was founded in Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1925 to ‘preserve, study and teach the cultural history of Jewish life throughout Eastern Europe, Germany and Russia’. ‘YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’ accessed 1 Apr. 2014, www.yivoinstitute.org. For more on the history of YIVO see Kuznitz, C., YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See Weinberg, A Community on Trial; Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy; Green, The Pletzl of Paris; Caron, Uneasy Asylum. For a study on immigration, which includes a partial study on Jewish immigration and how it contributed to the development of a sophisticated police surveillance system in Paris between the two World Wars, see Rosenberg, C., Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars (Ithaca, 2006)Google Scholar.

15 For works that engage this historical and personal tension, see Leff, L.M., ‘Jewish solidarity in nineteenth-century France: the evolution of a concept’, Journal of Modern History, 74 (2002), 33–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berkovitz, J., The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit, 1989)Google Scholar; and Hyman, P.E., The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Emancipation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1991)Google Scholar. These works challenge the traditional views of assimilation held by, for example, Marrus, M., The Politics of Assimilation: The French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar.

16 See Schwartz, V., Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1999), 154 Google Scholar; and Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900.

17 For a recent theoretical analysis of the historical connections between Jews’ and the search for meaning in new spaces, see Mann, B.E., Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick, 2012)Google Scholar. For recent studies that apply theories of space and place to argue that Jews’ cities of residence were not mere backdrops and had great effect on the development of new identities, see Nouwen, M.L., Oy. My Buenos Aires: Jewish Immigrants and the Creation of Argentine National Identity (Albuquerque, 2013), 65–75 Google Scholar; and Snyder, S. Coenen, Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2013)Google Scholar.

18 Veidlinger, J., Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington, 2009), 1 Google Scholar.

19 For an in-depth understanding of how historians of medieval Europe treat and understand Charlemagne's legacy and lived history, see Gabriele, M., An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gabriele, M. and Syuckey, J. (eds.), The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wilson, D., Charlemagne (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

20 Recent scholarship of ‘Frenchness’ has shown that during the Third Republic ‘nationality depended on the acquisition of social codes more than on origin or birthplace’, see Weil, P., How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Durham, NC, 2008), 53 Google Scholar. In short, nationality and Frenchness could be acquired, albeit under certain legal parameters, if one wanted it. Additionally, Rogers Brubaker claims that the French understand nationhood as ‘state-centered and assimilationist’. See Brubaker, R., Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 1 Google Scholar.

21 Ilustrirte yidishe prese, 8 Feb. 1935, 4.

22 For more on the nebulous and sometimes problematic relationship that Jews in France had with and within the French state, see Birnbaum, P., The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy (Stanford, 1996)Google Scholar; and idem, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France (New York, 2000). For more on the refugee crisis and the rise of antisemitism in the 1930s in France, see Caron, Uneasy Asylum; and Scott-Weaver, M., ‘Networks and refugees: Salomon Grumbach's activism in late Third Republic France’, French History, 28 (2014), 520–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Ilustrirte yidishe prese, 15 Feb. 1935, 4.

24 Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project (Cambridge, 1999), ixGoogle Scholar. Benjamin began the project in 1927, originally planned as a newspaper article.

25 See also Hutton, P.H., ‘Walter Benjamin: the consolation of history in a Paris exile’, Historical Reflections, 36 (2010), 81 Google Scholar.

26 See Harvey, D., Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York, 2003)Google Scholar; Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space (Malden, 1992)Google Scholar.

27 Michel de Certeau's work on how narrative links places in people's minds allows a clearer conception of how city-dwellers are made to understand and make sense of what they see on a daily basis. See de Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), 115 Google Scholar.

28 Ilustrirte yidishe prese, 1 Mar. 1935, 4.

29 Ibid. To put Beckerman's details in context, historian Alastair Horne, in his history of Paris, describes the events as follows, ‘In 885, when Charlemagne's imperial structure had all but disintegrated and the throne of France was to all intents vacant, there came the city's worst tribulation. Setting forth from England, a force of Norsemen under the command of Siegfried captured Rouen and headed up the Seine. Fourteen hundred boats reached Paris, conveying a formidable force of some 30,000 hirsute warriors. Led by a heroic Comte de Paris, Eudes, who was to prove himself France's homme fort, Paris refused to surrender – the first time that any city had resisted the terrible Norsemen’, Horne, A., Seven Ages of Paris (New York, 2002), 5 Google Scholar.

30 Pariz: yidish hant-bukh: veg vayzer un firer (Paris, 1937).

31 There is a reoccurring theme of ‘rebirth’ that occurs in this section of Pariz, which mirrors that of his columns in Ilustrirte yidishe prese. Additionally, the focus on Paris as central to a triumphalist narrative of French and European history, although not unique in and of itself, lends one to think that Beckerman was, if not the sole author, responsible for the editorial guidance and agenda. What exists in the archives of Beckerman's work in Les Archives Départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis, Archives du Parti Communiste Français, Fonds David Diamant, Archives Aron Beckerman, lacks a full collection of his papers. The other contributors listed are Z. Fridman (Szajkowski) and M. Nadler. Szajkowski's papers at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (RG 800) also do not indicate on what sections he contributed. Given his work on French and Jewish history in the post-World War II period, it is possible that he also worked on the Pariz's ‘The history of Paris’, but the tone of this piece differs significantly from that work. Also Szajkowski's work in the post-war period is mainly on French Jewish history, not broader work on French history as some of Beckerman's writings tended to be. For more on Szajkowski, see Leff, L.M., The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford, 2015)Google Scholar.

32 Pariz, 49.

33 For a detailed account, see Friedman, J. et al., The Trial of the Talmud: Paris, 1240 (Toronto, 2012)Google Scholar.

34 Pariz, 50.

35 Ibid ., 53.

36 For an analysis and refutation of the ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history’, see Baron, S.W., A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, 1937)Google Scholar.

37 The text that accompanied these places were either full of detail or quite lengthy in comparison to other locations, such as the Catacombs, which were typically two to three sentences long.

38 Andrew, D. and Ungar, S., Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 179 Google Scholar.

39 Pariz, 71.

40 Ibid ., 60.

41 See Blower, B., Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford, 2013), 116–17Google Scholar.

42 For further discussion on ‘regeneration’ – a concept based on the Enlightenment notion that people could be remade through increased civil rights and education – within French and Jewish history and how this concept replays in a variety of historical settings, see Rodrigue, A., French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington, 1990)Google Scholar; and Leff, L.M., Sacred Bonds of Solidarity (Stanford, 2006)Google Scholar.

43 A. Prost, ‘Verdun, symbole de la Grande Guerre?’, accessed 28 Apr. 2011, www.memorial-de-verdun.fr/pdf/memoire/prost.pdf.

44 Ousby, I., The Road to Verdun: World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism (New York, 2002), 335 Google Scholar.

45 Pariz, 69.

46 Baumgarten, J. and Astro, A. (trans.), ‘Yiddish in France: a conversation with Rachel Ertel’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 14 (1996), 125–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 The World's Fair was held from 25 May to 25 Nov. 1937. See Herbert, J.D., Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca, 1998)Google Scholar; Fiss, K., Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (Chicago, 2010)Google Scholar; and Peer, S., France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World's Fair (Herndon, 1998)Google Scholar.

48 Le Populaire, 15 Aug. 1937, 3.

49 Naye prese, 12 Aug. 1937, 5.

50 Beckerman spoke on 19 Sept. 1937; see Ershter alveltlekher yidisher kultur-kongres, pariz 17–21 sept (Paris, 1937), 200. See also S. Beeri, ‘The “forgotten” Yiddish Congress, World Yiddish Culture Congress of 1937 in Paris’, unpublished paper presented at the Graduate Conference at New York University, 2006, and Hoffman, M., ‘From Czernowitz to Paris: The International Yiddish Culture Congress of 1937’, in Weiser, K. and Fogel, J.A. (eds.), Czernowitz at 100: The First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective (Lanham, 2010)Google Scholar.

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53 Spero, I. et al., Yizkor-Bukh zum andenk fun 14 umgekumene parizer yidishe shrayber (Paris, 1946)Google Scholar.