Transcription of the speech by
Mr. President,
It is with great restraint that I would like to take the floor today to respond to the unexpected invitation that honors me and greatly disturbs me among those responsible for the Memorial.
In a week, our history and, for some still here, our memory, will be confronted with a date that remains essential: the eightieth anniversary of the status of Jews on October 3, 1940. The Shoah, which we commemorate today as every year, certainly does not begin in France with the publication of this text. In itself, it does not arouse any anti-Semitic mobilization, provokes no roundup, does not lead implacably to the tragic deportation, almost meets with indifference. This text, which defines the Jew in terms of race and not religion, radically excludes them from public life since it decrees in its article 2 that "access to and exercise of the public functions and mandates listed below are prohibited for Jews." On the same day, another law in its article 1 simply states that "foreign nationals of Jewish race may, from the promulgation of this law, be interned in special camps by decision of the prefect of their department of residence", putting an end to the Popular Front’s more open policy towards foreigners. It succeeded the law of 22 July which revised the naturalizations obtained since the liberal law of 10 August 1927 and which particularly targeted foreign Jews who thus became stateless again. Taking up the old slogan of Edouard Drumont,
Thus, to remember today in the specific context of the 80th anniversary of the Statute of the Jews takes a particular turn, here in Paris, where suddenly the destiny of all the Jews of France changes. D'un trait de plume is erased a century and a half of exceptionalism by the brutal questioning of the French integration of Jews within the public space. The counter-revolution that triumphs has never accepted the message of '89, it has always refused the integration of the Jews into the nation decided by the vote of September 1791 and, throughout the nineteenth century, it mobilized in the name of exacerbated nationalism, a conception of race or even a vengeful Catholicism sung by the greatest such as Maurice Barrès.
This counter-revolution attracted the support of the popular masses: it even almost imposed its extreme ideologies during the quintessential anti-Semitic moment that is the Dreyfus affair, which saw huge angry crowds parade through the cities of France shouting, "Death to the Jews." An affair that could only have taken place in France, since it was only in France that emancipated Jews were able to reach the top of the state in large numbers thanks to republican meritocracy.
In this sense, to put it succinctly, the Statute of the Jews of October 1940 is virtually present in the hateful claims of an Edouard Drumont and his acolytes whose main slogan is to eliminate any Jewish presence. Edouard Drumont, still, invents this political anti-Semitism that will spread elsewhere, as in the Weimar Republic when at last Jews will accede to the State, arousing Hitler’s fury against this State considered to be fired on and he swears to bring it down.
Should we therefore heed the warning of Stefan Zweig who, in December 1938, faced with the Nazi threat, advised Jews to avoid "occupying a position of high command and decision-making in public and political life," never to appear "in the first place, the most visible" of the State so as not to feed anti-Semitic passions? Doesn’t this lesson particularly concern French Jews who are crazy about the state? Should they, then as now, move away from the state and live away from power in civil society? Even worse, in a radical way, should they pay more attention to the warning that Yitzhak Baer, the great Israeli historian, formulated as early as 1936 and which he reaffirmed in 1947, because he believed that "Exile (Galut) is and will remain a political enslavement that must be entirely abolished," an enslavement that would be all the more complete because it takes place within a strong state like that of France where Jews, in Baer’s words, "occupy center stage"?
As if to confirm this judgment, the statute of October 1940 gives the Shoah, I repeat it, a truly French dimension since this text, certainly stated in the presence of the Nazi occupier but with complete autonomy, marks the denial of the logic of the State which is turning against its Jews with all the force it possesses due to its long history.
The high public service, once republican in an almost unanimous repudiation and still incomprehensible today, makes every effort to apply scrupulously this status which, despite their protest addressed to the head of state, distances Jewish colleagues from their state. When, later in his speech at Auschwitz on 27 January 2005, President Jacques Chirac evoked the figures of Charlotte Delbo and the women of the convoy of 24 January 1943, of Georgy Halpern, a child of Izieu who died at Auschwitz, and of the communist activist Jean Lemberger, of Sarah and Hersch Beznos and their children and grandchildren deported without return, he also states that “with the emblematic figure of Pierre Masse, here come these "crazy Jews of the Republic". Pierre Masse, Lorrain, lawyer, fighter of the Great War, parliamentarian, minister, wrote before dying gassed on his arrival: "I will end up as a soldier of France and of the law that I have always been." Deputy and senator under the Third Republic, who was also Undersecretary of State for War during World War I, Masse embodies these State Jews devoted to the nation but abandoned in October 1940 by the public authorities and all the more shocked because they put all their passion at the service of this State, not imagining that they could suddenly be excluded from it, as if this absolute trust made even more inconceivable a tragic fate that would frequently strike them.
From July 1986 until the great speech of July 16, 1995, President Chirac was the first head of state to emphasize the betrayal of the State by the regime of Marshal Pétain, a State that now has
; therefore, for Emmanuel Macron, as for Jacques Chirac, Vichy, "it was the government and administration of France,"
The prefects, pillars of the republican state whose immense majority remains in office, thus lead the hunt as I was able to realize by making myself a historian. Born French a few months before the October Statute by declaration of both parents, immigrants from Poland and Germany, I am excluded long in advance from the public service and the republican meritocracy. By consulting, as a historian, the numerous national archives of the Commissariat aux Questions juives, the National Archives or even the local archives of the Hautes Pyrénées where we are refugees, my family and I, I learn that so many official texts designate me aseven as a Jewish child actively sought after, sometimes French, sometimes Polish, who should be arrested with his own. The police reports follow one after another, testifying to the relentlessness of the police in arresting us during the roundups of August 1942 or 1943, their decision to intern my father at the Noe camp, and their tireless determination to deport us. We will never know how many Jewish children of foreign origin but born in France were deported as foreigners. My parents hide, miraculously avoid arrest many times, place my sister and I in multiple unwelcoming institutions before confiding to a peasant couple from Omex, a small Pyrenean village.
Beyond France, the comparative analysis of the Shoah from one country to another according to religious beliefs, economic backwardness, the dimension of social or cultural crisis and so many other variables remains unfinished: it remains so complex that it seems as if impossible. The unique character of the Shoah cannot simply be included in the category of genocides. It seems to escape any form of historical explanation: neither Christian anti-Judaism, nor traditional antisemitism with its prejudices, nor even biological racism, and even less anti-modernism or the crisis of the 30s, its unemployment, the resentment of the middle classes, the loss of bearings, the crisis of democracies, the terror established by Bolshevism or even the demented and unusual personality of Hitler could not apprehend the radical shift of the world that it symbolizes. If Jewish philosophers, writers, and artists remain haunted by the Shoah, the great historians of modern Judaism often seem, on the contrary, paradoxically avoid devoting their work to the extermination of the Jewish people by favoring the so-called normal history of previous periods made as much of happiness as disillusionment, by avoiding to emphasize only the periods of misfortune, by favoring "History without tears". From Salo Baron to Cecil Roth, from Jacob Katz to Yosef Yerushalmi, they prefer to study the way in which Jews have maintained their community structures, forms of sociability and creativity in their daily lives, the way they came out of the ghetto to face the challenges of assimilation while maintaining their orthodoxy and loyalty to Sion, or even to understand the challenges and ambiguities of the royal alliance, the vertical alliance between the Jews and the State, undermined by the Kings themselves. In this sense, they have long, like their students around the world, almost avoided teaching about the Holocaust; indeed, they have frequently refused to allow their students to devote their research to this event, which seems as if it were unthinkable.
Even today, his teaching and the major studies devoted to him are frequently conceived outside the history departments and even the Jewish history departments as if it were a disaster that, by its size and even, its nature, escapes the rules of the historical method. The scientific articles that concern her are most often published in specialized journals, while the major journals of Jewish history give the Holocaust only a measured place. It is that it differs radically from the time of the ghetto, the litany of pogroms, or even anti-Semitic mobilizations: the resilience shown by Jews throughout their history, mutual aid, solidarity, and recourse to the royal alliance, Traditional strategies for confronting hatred are proving this time to be irrelevant, obsolete and powerless. And above all, for many Jewish historians, the Shoah must not lead to a retroactive reading of history, imposing a lachrymal vision that would erase, in the diaspora, its inventiveness, its flourishing.
It is that at the time of pogroms which punctuate "normal" Jewish history also made of "happiness" (Yerushalmi) succeeds the Shoah, the massacre implemented by a State transfigured into an instrument of the forces of evil. In spite of all the criticisms that have been addressed to the monumental work of Raoul Hilberg who ignored the Holocaust by bullets and, in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, wrongly accused the Jews of passivity, he rightly emphasized the essential role of the distorted state bureaucracy in the meticulous organization of the Shoah. This observation applies all the more forcefully in France, where the nation-state has established itself. When the state turns away from its logic to submit to the "forces of evil", the fate of the Jews takes a dramatic turn far more threatening than when they face only popular anger. The rupture of the royal alliance with the State is all the more brutal in that the strong French-style State has long been a protector against anti-Semitic mobilizations and passions, effectively protecting the Jews from the unbridled crowds at the worst moment of the Dreyfus Affair. Many still remember it in 1940, showing themselves, wrongly, unshakably confident.
This betrayal of the state still resonates today. By its very possibility, it still shapes the understanding of our present-day history, and raises legitimate concerns about deadly attacks and anti-Semitic mobilizations, such as in January 2014,
Faced with new threats, the murders of Jewish citizens, from Ilan Halimi, to the children of the Ozar Hatorah school, from Sarah Halimi to Mireille Knoll, and the murderous violence that hits them in a privileged way, such as at the Hyper Kosher at the Porte de Vincennes when Amedy Coulibaly, the murderer, declares, "You Jews love life too much... You are the two things I hate the most in the world: you are Jews and French. By wanting to brutally break up the long marriage between France and the Jews, faced with so many dangers, they must once again imagine an answer, become actors of their own history, to think about their future, to dialogue with the forces of the nation, to try to protect themselves by innovative horizontal alliances that complement the old royal alliance with the State, finally to stand up against any attack on their full and complete belonging to the nation.
Pierre Birnbaum
