France occupies a special place in the collective Jewish psyche. It does so for several positive, and one salient negative, reason: it was the post-revolutionary Convention (parliament) of 1790 that issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Decree of Jewish Emancipation. There too Heine and Börne found asylum, Meyerbeer and Offenbach gained more fame than in their native narrow-minded Germany, Sarah Bernhard became the world's first drama queen, and Léon Blum was the first ever (unbaptised) Jewish prime minister in Europe.

However, it was in the self-same France that during the Dreyfus trial Herzl encountered mobs baying for Jewish blood, and conceived of Zionism as the solution to the perennial Jewish problem. Dreyfus was eventually pardoned, but 40 years later French Nazi collaborators turned the grisly imaginings of the anti-Dreyfusard gutter into reality. Collaboration became France's most shameful secret after Liberation, and the country remained largely in denial until a remarkably frank admission of national guilt by President Chirac in 1997.

The latter also acted as patron to the establishment of a Jewish museum in a renovated 4th-arrondissement palace, in the courtyard of which stands an imposing statue of Captain Dreyfus, the jagged blade of his broken sword in hand. The enlarged photographs (ca. 1930) in the foyer are of Jewish-owned and -staffed workshops producing clothing and leather goods. The immigrants employed there can be seen on other photographs using their scant leisure time to relax or engage in left-wing political activity. (The last-mentioned was graphically evoked in the May Day 1937 chapter of Ilya Ehrenburg's The Fall of Paris). With the next exhibit the mood abruptly darkens. An eye-catching red Nazi placard of 1941 lists the names, and East European provenance, of two dozen executed Jewish resistance fighters. One of the walls in the courtyard, too, is inscribed with dozens of names of Shoah victims. With those two notable exceptions, all the exhibits illustrate the 'normal', chequered, but ultimately upward-spiralling millennial history of the Jews in France.

Nearby, the Place des Vosges, a beautiful colonnaded seventeenth-century square, is of special interest to former German refugees. Its centrepiece is an equestrian statue of Henry IV, the king who gave France freedom of conscience. When Germany's literary elite fled there early in 1933 Lion Feuchtwanger wrote Paris Gazette, a novel about an émigré anti-Nazi newspaper, Joseph Roth indulged his Habsburg nostalgia in Radelzkymarsch, and Heinrich Mann discharged his debt of gratitude to his country of asylum through a biography of Henry IV.

In 1940 the severely depressed Roth managed to drink himself to death just ahead of the Wehrmacht's entry into Paris; fleeing the country, Feuchtwanger had his traumatic experiences later recounted in The Devil in France; Werfel and the elderly Heinrich Mann trudged up the Pyrenees to escape into Spain - while Walter Benjamin found merciful release in suicide.

After such melancholy reflections the visitor seeks solace in the nearby heart of Jewish Paris, the Rue des Rosiers (aka dos Pletzl). Despite the nickname, alas, one barely hears Yiddish there. However, Sephardi-owned restaurants, butcher shops and the like display the notice 'Kasher, Beth Din', which is a sort of compensation.

Another, longer walk brings one across the river to the Left Bank. Ambling along the periphery of the Latin Quarter, the visitor might be intrigued by the street name Le Chat Qui Pêche. I first read Yolàn Földes's Die Strasse der fischenden Katze in 1937. It is the story of Hungarian economic migrants eking out a living in the eponymous street, where they live cheek by jowl with refugees from Lenin's Russia, Fascist Italy and Hitler's Germany. Földes painted a picture of a hard, yet vibrant refugee existence close to the edge of the despair, but hopeful against all the odds. The authoress was not in Paris when the Nazi tide engulfed it, or she would subsequently have withdrawn it from circulation as wildly over-optimistic.

However, fiction writers have a licence to inject feel-good tropes into their narrative which is not granted to historians. This was my reaction to the exhibition 'France in the Second World War', which occupies three floors of that overblown shrine to Napoleon, the Invalides. The exhibition focuses heavily on French resistance to Nazi occupation, but rather skirts round the - understandably sensitive - issue of French collaboration. Display items include proclamations of the Vichy government and photographs of Marshal Pétain addressing large crowds - but there is no pictorial, or any other, record of French policemen or uniformed miliciens rounding up Jews for despatch to Drancy.

Discomfort at these omissions does not mean one concurs in any way with Prime Minister Sharon's maladroit appeal to French Jews to make collective aliyah. Abroad Chirac may be the Palestinians' best friend, but at home French Jewry could not have a better friend in the Elysée Palace. [more...]

'London Jews head north', proclaimed the Jewish Chronicle's front-page headline earlier this year. Although 'north' in this instance meant Bushey rather than Burnley, I consider this just another typical instance of Jews swimming against the tide, the universal direction of which is southward.

In Spain, people head south to the Costa del Sol. In France, they head towards the Riviera and Provence. In Germany, millions annually go so far south that they leave the country altogether, to find themselves in Italy. In so doing they follow the example of Goethe, who undertook two Italian journeys and was inspired to write Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn? (Do you know the country where the lemons bloom?). The English always went everywhere except north. Shelley and Byron died in the south, Kipling lived in the east, and Charles Kingsley wrote Westward Ho. The American thrust has historically been to the west. This was encapsulated 150 years ago in the mantra 'Go west, young man!', coined by the crusading journalist Horace Greely.

Contrarywise, the 'mystic' east has always exerted the strongest pull worldwide, so strong that a distinctive phrase - Drang nach dem Osten - was coined to encapsulate it. In Nazi mouths, that phrase had a horrific connotation, but not all Germans were natural-born aggressors.

To Rilke, the pull of the east meant going to Russia in quest of spiritual enlightenment, whereas Hermann Hesse received good vibes from India. In this he was followed by thousands of young westerners, from the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge to the Beatles.

Their number is dwarfed by that of Muslims who annually go to Mecca - and even by Christians who went on Crusades for the remission of their sins. Pious, unarmed Jews journeyed in the same direction, eager to be on hand at the Coming of the Messiah. They would rub their eyes in wonderment to learn that Shenley is the new Sfad. [more...]

French officials and guards of French-run concentration camps in South West France continued to deport inmates of all nationalities to a near-certain death in Germany even as the country was being liberated, according to an exclusive report in The Guardian newspaper. Other internees continued to be held in those camps by French guards when the war was over until 1949 - proof, the paper alleges, that France went to extraordinary lengths to conceal evidence of collaboration.

A mass of registers, telegrams, manifests and other documents were uncovered in the Toulouse office of France's national archive by 84-year-old Austrian-born Kurt Werner Schaechter. He found both that French officials collaborated with their fleeing Nazi occupiers and that the government of Charles de Gaulle continued to hold hundreds of foreigners in an internment camp near Toulouse for up to four years after the end of World War II

Noé camp, some 25 miles south of Toulouse, was one of 300 camps set up after 1939 to hold Jews, communists and other 'anti-French' militants, gypsies, criminals and enemy aliens. As France was progressively liberated in the summer of 1944, many of Noé's inmates were quickly shipped out, although Allied bombing of the railway lines and intensified fighting meant that many people could not be moved. The last transport left Noé-Longages station on 30 July 1944, with most internees believed to be destined for Dachau. This was two days after Charles de Gaulle's victory parade down the Champs Elysées in Paris.

In February 1946 a letter from the camp's director drew the 'urgent attention' of the prefect in Toulouse to the fact that the money seized from the inmates was no longer adequate to feed and maintain them. Camp accounts confirm that people were still being forced to pay for their incarceration in September 1947. Letters from the interior ministry were dated 5 and 29 March 1949.

'This is an untold story of the dark side of France's liberation 60 years ago', said Mr Schaechter. 'French functionaries were involved in a national scandal that continued until 1949: the despicable treatment of allied and neutral civilians interned during the war.' He believed that they were not released at the end of the war because it would have been too embarrassing. 'The last thing de Gaulle wanted, when he was trying to build up France's image as victor and hero', he said, 'was to reveal the true extent of the collaboration by freeing neutral and allied internees held in French camps by French guards.'

Noé continued to function secretly for several years after the war. Of many elderly and infirm who remained in the camp, some were moved to Pithiviers or Rivesaltes camps (both officially closed) in 1947, others were recorded as 'transferred', and some were marked 'Agreed with Mr Casse - to be lost'.
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Jews count time from the Creation, Christians from the birth of Jesus, and Muslims from Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina. Roman chronology began with the foundation of their city. Finally, because the French Revolutionaries claimed they were restarting the evolution of society from scratch, they declared the overthrow of the king their year Zero, and even renamed the months, turning February into Pluviose (rainy), August into Thermidor (hot), and November into Brumaire (foggy).

Sweeping away the past has also been the motive behind the renaming of many places. Currently, the most eye-catching of these changes are part of the rebranding that followed decolonisation in the Third World. Notable examples are Beijing (formerly Peking), Mumbay (formerly Bombay) and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia).

Something analogous happened half a century earlier. In post-revolutionary Russia the Bolshevik drive to erase any trace of the Tsarist past led to the transformation of St Petersburg into Leningrad, Ekaterinburg into Sverdlovsk and Tsaritsyn into Stalingrad. The autocratic and antisemitic Romanovs have no claim on our pity; even so, detaching the name of a city from that of its founder strikes me as an affront against history. Another offence against history occurred when the Bolsheviks renamed Nizhny Novgorod - a place name evocative of the very soul of Russia - Gorky.

At around the same time as the Communists consolidated their grip on Russia, the Turks drove the Greeks out of their enclaves in Asia Minor. Following their victory, they renamed the city of Smyrna Izmir - a change which sticks in my craw. Not because I am particularly pro-Greek - I would never return the Elgin Marbles - but because Smyrna is a name redolent of classical antiquity. (It was one of the seven Greek towns that disputed the honour of having been the birthplace of Homer.)

Another change of place name I can't warm to is the morphing of Königsberg into Kaliningrad. Admittedly, Königsberg was a stamping ground of Prussian Junkers and Slavophobes, but the name was encrusted with the patina of age - whereas Kaliningrad has neither history nor hinterland, and immortalises a nondescript Soviet apparatchik.

There must be many elderly Germans and Austrians born in historic outposts like Königsberg, Breslau and Pressburg who mourn the disappearance of those place names from the map. If they want to assuage their nostalgia, they should look up a list of Jewish 'show biz greats'. Königsberg appears in all movie reference works as the birth name of Woody Allen, while Pressburg, now Bratislava, was evoked by the name of the great British filmmaker Emeric Pressburger. On a lesser order of magnitude, Breslau, now Wroclaw, lived on in the name of the comic Bernie Bresslaw (and Grünberg - now Zielona Gora - in that of your editor).

From this moderately contentious issue I move on to a literally explosive one. What does the place name Al-Quds mean to you? Very little, I assume. But to a billion Muslims it is the Arabic name of Jerusalem, their third holiest city.

In the hypothetical event of a change of sovereignty over the city and its rebranding as Al-Quds, what, I ask, would be the effect on the Western imagination? The title of Tarquato Tasso's Renaissance epic Gerusalemme Liberata would become quite meaningless; the same holds good for Selma Lagerlöf's story collection Jerusalem, Margaret Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden, and Arnold Wesker's play They Call This Place Jerusalem. Likewise, the words of William Blake's mystical hymn Jerusalem (almost Britain's substitute national anthem) would become unintelligible.

The reason why Blake's words have a special place in the nation's affection is intimately connected with the Jews' Passover 'toast' 'Next year in Jerusalem'. The phrase is not primarily an affirmation of Zionism, but expresses a yearning for a better world. This is an example of the Judeo-Christian heritage at the heart of Western civilisation, for in the Book of Revelation the 'New Jerusalem' symbolises a perfect society. [more...]

On a recent motoring trip through France we passed a German military cemetery near Arras. Looking at the graves, we found that interspersed with the large number of crosses there were some tombstones. On further examination, we discovered that they were inscribed with both Hebrew and German names as these fallen soldiers were obviously Jewish.

We made a note of one such name and later looked it up in the Gedenkbuch for the 12,000 German Jewish soldiers who fell in the First World War. This book was issued by the Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten (RJF) in 1932 with a foreword by President Hindenburg. Its preparation involved many years of devoted labour by the RJF and it consists of an alphabetical list of soldiers together with their place of origin. This is followed by a list of all places of origin together with the names of the fallen, the dates of birth and death, and the names of places of birth which, in most instances, is the same as the places where they lived at the time of enlistment.

What is so remarkable is the hundreds of places listed in the book, showing that Jews lived in so many places in 1914. It even includes three locations in German East Africa where Jewish soldiers lived and died, as well as four villages of the same name, Reichenbach. My own family had relatives and friends throughout the German countryside and, unfortunately, they are all in the list.

Why was the Gedenkbuch compiled? The short answer is antisemitism - which was virulent at that time. Although Jews could not become officers before the war, they did receive commissions during the war. The most insulting and tragic wartime episode was the so-called Judenzahlung, a census of Jews at the front. Jews were suspected by the authorities of shirking their responsibilities. The results were never published.

This census aroused anger among the Jewish soldiers and I remember an old lady telling me that at the time of the census her brother asked their mother to send him a modern Hebrew primer; he said that if he survived the war, he would learn the language and go to Palestine. He did in fact do so and he became a professor at the Hebrew University.

The sacrifice of the German Jewish soldiers was never taken into consideration after the Nazis gained power. Those who survived the war did not receive any privileges and perished in the Holocaust if they were unable to leave Germany. These sacrifices are, of course, but a tragic shadow when compared with the greater tragedy of the Holocaust but it is still a sad reflection even after all these years. [more...]

The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, AJEX, has opened a new and enlarged military museum in Hendon, North London. Its premises at AJEX's head office in Stamford Hill were far too restricting to do justice to a collection which documents, illustrates and records the outstanding contribution made to the British military by men and women of the Jewish faith, of all ranks.

The collection includes the uniforms, insignia and medals of Jewish soldiers, pictures and photographs, even weapons, and the Books of Honour from World Wars I and II. The museum also records the service given by many members of the Jewish refugee community during World War II, from duty in the Pioneer Corps to action with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) behind enemy lines, many making the supreme sacrifice to secure Europe's freedom from Nazi oppression and the defence of their adopted country of allegiance.

AJEX National Chairman Ron Shelley invited historian Professor Sir Martin Gilbert to open the museum. 'This wonderful museum tells many stories of bravery', said Sir Martin, who praised the battlefield contribution made by British Jews from the Boer War to Iraq. He complimented the museum's curator, Henry Morris, and archivist, Martin Sugarman, for their work in re-establishing the museum at its new location.

For further information please contact the Jewish Military Museum, Shield House, Harmony Way (off Victoria Road), Hendon NW4 2BZ Mon-Thurs 10 am-4.30 pm. Viewing is by appointment. Please telephone 0208 202 2323. [more...]

They came in their hundreds, in full force, fighting fit and in fine fettle. The Yekkes were attending an international conference devoted to themselves, held recently in Jerusalem. Its purpose was to examine the heritage of the Jews of Central Europe to various aspects of Israeli society and culture. Jokes were told about Yekkes and by Yekkes and, above all, every session started on time (most unusual for Israel).

The conference, held under the joint auspices of several august bodies, among them the Jerusalem Foundation, various government ministries, the Goethe Institute and the Konrad Adenauer Association, consisted of lectures and symposia on such subjects as 'Was German Jewry a Model of Assimilation?' and 'The Unique Nature of German Zionism' as well as many other equally fascinating topics.

Alongside the conference was an exhibition of photographs depicting the absorption of German immigrants in Israel in the pre-independence period, with professors becoming chicken farmers and physicians building labourers. Many German artists made a notable contribution to the development of art in Israel, and a special exhibition of work by Yekke artists was on display during and after the conference.

The meals at the opening dinner and those served in the restaurant during the conference followed a traditional Yekke menu, and of course there was 'Kaffee und Kuchen' galore. Naturally, the contribution of the Yekkes to every aspect of Israeli life - music, medicine, politics, the theatre and the media was glossed over for lack of time.

Some speakers confessed shamefacedly that they were not 'true' Yekkes but considered themselves Yekkes by adoption, giving rise to a heated discussion as to whether being a Yekke was the result of heredity or the environment. But the general consensus, in true Yekke fashion, was that it was both of the above.
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