December 24, 2004/Tevet 12 5765, Vol. 57, No. 17
Marais continues to thrive in ParisDespite recent rise in anti-Semitism, Jewish area still full of life
NORMAN LEVINE
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 Tourists frequent Mi-Va-Mi, a glatt kosher Israeli restaurant in Paris. Photo courtesy of Norman Levine |
It also has another treasure: the Marais, or the old Jewish quarter of this urban masterpiece.
The Marais is bordered today on the west by the Centre Pompidou, and on the east by the Place des Vosges, a Renaissance-era arched square completed by Henri IV in the 16th century. Its southern boundary is the rue Rivoli, which hugs the Seine River.
The rue des Rosiers is the main artery of the contemporary Marais. After the Holocaust, even under the specter of the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in present-day France, when I walked along the rue des Rosiers the presence of Orthodox Jewry surrounded me. Yarmulkes and tzitzit defined the ambiance, and the heads underneath the yarmulkes were all feverishly talking on cell phones.
Kosher groceries and butcher shops lined the thoroughfare. When my stomach signaled me that it was time for lunch, I stopped at a diner called Mi-Va-Mi (the literal translation is "Who- and-Who") at the corner of the rue des Rosiers and rue des Ecouffes. The Mi-Va-Mi is a glatt kosher restaurant serving strictly Israeli cuisine. I particularly recommend the Israeli Maccabee Beer, which is gentle, with a disposition toward sweetness.
The Mi-Va-Mi is not the only glatt kosher Israeli restaurant in the Marais, as many others reach out far along the rue des Rosiers.
Jewish history is a plurality of subcultures, the adaptation of a people scattered over the face of the earth, and forced to acculturate in multiple environments. The global dispersal of the Jews compelled them to assimilate some of the dominant traditions into which they migrated. Unlike the Ashkenazic invasion of the Lower East Side in Manhattan at the beginning of the 20th century, the subculture of Franco-Judaism was heavily stamped by the Mediterranean heritage, and the Marais illustrates this Iberian-North African influence.
After the death of Muhammad in 632, the Islamic religion advanced across North Africa, and in 711, Islamic armies conquered the Iberian Peninsula. From the eighth century until the 15th century, toleration and cooperation characterized Judeo-Islamic relations within the Arabic Empire, and Moses Maimonides wrote his great work, "Guide to the Perplexed," as a citizen of the Muslim imperium. But the Iberian Peninsula was reconquered by the Spanish Catholic monarchy in the 15th century, and this re-imposition of Vatican orthodoxy caused two expulsions: Islamic Arabs were forced to evacuate the Iberian Peninsula, and in 1492 the Jews were compelled to embark upon a Second Diaspora.
The eviction of the Jews from Catholic Spain in the same year that Columbus discovered the Western Hemisphere brought some of the first Jews to France (the Marais), and to Germany and Eastern Europe, and this was the beginning of the Ashkenazic tradition. At the same time, the Jews of North Africa, the Maghreb, joined the subculture of Sephardism, and continued to enjoy the tolerance of the Islamic sultanite.
In 1830, French armies conquered North Africa, and under its governance the modern countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia took shape. The Sephardic Jews of the Maghreb were subjects of the administration in France.
Paris is not New York, and the tale of these two global metropolises is the plot line for the evolution of two different subcultures, the Ashkenazim in New York, and the Sephardim within the French colonial empire.
The Jews of the Maghreb play a significant role in the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism, which is situated in the Marais at 75 rue de Temple. As the womb of Jewish life in France, it is fitting that the saga of Gallo-Judaism be monopolized by the Marais.
The museum shows pictures of the great French Romantic painter Delacroix, who, fascinated by the colors of exotic territories, painted pictures in the 1840s of Jews in Algeria dressed in North African clothing. The literature of France in the 20th century was ennobled by the writing of Albert Memmi, an Algerian Jew who immigrated to France and in the 1960s and 1970s championed the cause of decolonization.
Paris is also not Berlin or Washington, D.C. The capitals of Germany and the United States have Holocaust museums, but the capital of France does not. The Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in the Marais is not a Holocaust museum, but an accounting of Gallo-Juda-ism and the many Jews crossing from North Africa from medieval times until the modern period.
The museum itself is located in an historic 17th-century mansion, and the architecture abides by the French neo-classical style, reminiscent of the Louvre. Constructed for a high monarchical official, acting as the town hall of Paris during the French revolution of 1789; by the end of the 19th century it had become a center for Jewish craftsmen and workshops. Restored now to its former grandeur, the courtyard of the mansion exhibits a statue of Albert Dreyfus. Standing erect and unbowed, Dreyfus raises a sword that is broken in the middle. The sword is a symbol of France, dishonored by its persecution of Dreyfus, while the proud Dreyfus acts as a fitting contrast between the undaunted man and a shameful country.
The display inside the museum tells the story of Gallo-Judaism until the 1930s. Its discussion of the Dreyfus case was complete, but I felt the exhibits were evasive. First, the museum stops before the Holocaust, and to connect with this gruesome segment of the story it is necessary to go to a different museum, the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyrs, which is found at 37 rue de Turenne, also in the Marais. By dividing the history of Gallo-Judaism into two parts, pre-Holocaust and Holocaust, the French disassociated their country from the Shoah. This de-linkage suggests that the Holocaust was a German import, that France during the German occupation was an aberration from pre-Holocaust Gallo-Jewish relations, which were basically tolerant: Witness the emancipation of the Jews under Napoleon Bonaparte.
On the trail of the Shoah, I pursued my suspicions by walking through the Marais to the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyrs. Occupying a single floor, the Holocaust is presented as an exception, a deviation from Gallo-Jewish assimilation. Although French anti-Semitism of the 1930s is acknowledged, the memorial is in denial regarding the fact that by the end of the 19th century, France was the major source on the continent of anti-Semitic propaganda, exceeding Germany. Before a Russian Tsarist secret agent forged "The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," he went to Paris to do his research.
The memorial places almost all of the responsibility for the shipment of French Jews to Auschwitz on the Vichy Government of Marshall Petain. When the Nazis overran France in 1940, Hitler divided the country into two parts. Vichy France was governed by Marshall Petain - and although the region had autonomy, Petain was nothing but a Quisling, a satrap of the Gestapo. Occupied France consisted of the remainder of the country, and was a colony of the Hitlerian empire. A third part, Free France, bloomed in Morocco and was the headquarters of Charles de Gaulle, who led Free French armies back into Paris in 1944.
The memorial condemns Vichy for its evil collaboration with the German death camps, but exonerates occupied France of any guilt in the Nazi annihilation machine. The memorial makes no mention of any assistance given to the Nazis from any inhabitant of occupied France, but focuses entirely on the French Resistance that saved Jewish lives, and extols the French Jews who participated in the resistance movement. The memorial turns a blind eye to any culpability in occupied France.
At the beginning of World War II, the French Empire still embraced the countries of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, and the fate of the Jews in the Maghreb is also depicted. Anti-Semitism did infest Algeria and Tunisia, and while Jews were not deported to the gas chambers from these countries, their property was confiscated. The kingdom of Morocco is celebrated as an exception to Maghreb anti-Semitism because Sultan V publicly disapproved of anti-Semitism, and Jewish citizens in his kingdom did not suffer persecution during the nightmare of Nazism. The Maghreb is included in the memorial to demonstrate that the essence of French culture, manifested by Sultan V, was synonymous with tolerance and humanity.
In the comparative history of the Holocaust, the French record is not as good as Denmark's, where the whole country resisted the Nazi Final Solution, or as vile as the Germans and Poles, where cooperation in the Shoah was widespread. France stood in the middle.
But to the credit of France, the record needs to show that 330,000 Jews lived in France before World War II and of these 250,000 survived. In addition, France saved 85 percent of all Jewish children. A crypt, which was under renovation during my visit, adjoins the memorial, and pictures showed the crypt as a gravestone designed as the Star of David. The future programs of the Memorial listed a seminar in honor of Jews who fought in the French Resistance. Today, France is the home of the largest Jewish population in western Europe.
The Holocaust Museum in Berlin, on the other hand, presents all the facts, faces all the realities - amounting to an acceptance of the guilt of the Holocaust on a national scale. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is also profound, and such a statement is a tribute to the compassion of the American people. The Marais has no Holocaust museum, no singular script recalling in agony the disappearance of the Jew from 1939 to the Nuremburg Trials. It is an absence that attracts attention. At the least, it leaves a void in the appreciation of a great city.
Despite this void, Jews still crowd the rue des Rosiers, rue de Temple, and rue de Turenne. Despite this emptiness, the Marais continues to thrive. It is a living symbol of the contradictions, ironies, and continuity of Jewish existence in the 20th century.
Norman Levine is an author and free-lance writer living in Phoenix.