In the 1930s, thousands of Jews escaped fascist and antisemitic regimes and fled to France. These refugees joined millions of foreign labourers who had settled in France after the Great War, as well as nearly half a million Spanish republicans seeking asylum after 1936. During this period, France was considered the ‘foremost nation of asylum in the world’, with Paris as its most desirable destination.Footnote 1 Yet France, celebrated through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its republican legacy, was no longer the land of safe haven that persecuted Jews had hoped to find. Xenophobia and resurgent antisemitism combined with fluctuating immigration policies and the Depression to create an environment inhospitable to those seeking residency. Even as the government anxiously tried to ease tensions with aggressive neighbouring powers and repair the economy, Jewish refugees continued to flood Paris. By 1939, roughly 200,000 Jews resided in the capital alone.Footnote 2 Faced with government restrictions and increasing police surveillance, Jewish refugee relief initiatives in Paris operated in a dire urban environment for the better part of a decade. Ideologically divided and competing for dwindling resources, they did not set aside differences or collaborate on efforts until war with Germany was imminent.
Beyond Paris, Jewish refugee relief took on an altogether different character. Located along the frontiers with National Socialist Germany and fascist Italy, respectively, Strasbourg and Nice offer alternative views on the nature of the refugee crisis in France and the ways that Jews overcame obstacles to help asylum-seekers. Whereas friction and ineffectiveness characterized aid efforts in Paris, Strasbourg and Nice present scenarios wherein Jews mobilized to help refugees in an efficient manner. Rather than looking to Paris for assistance, they concentrated their energies on rallying local resources and connections. Notions of French republicanism combined with borderland influences to shape these activities. Living and engaging in cities at the heart of borderlands, ‘site[s] of contact. . .where distinct understandings of language, citizenship, culture and religion interact’, shaped Jewish experiences and outlooks.Footnote 3 Critical to the success of Jewish advocates in each city were broad systems of social and political alliances forged through years of engaging urban associational life. Their informal networks were flexible and enabled Jews to pursue a variety of refugee relief initiatives, from local chapters of national organizations to newly created Jewish, inter-faith and non-sectarian groups. They furthermore allowed for alternative means of safe haven when government restrictions made traditional forms of national welfare or philanthropy impossible.
This article examines Jewish activism in Strasbourg and Nice, two interwar locales situated in borderlands far from the influences and dynamics of Paris. It advances much-needed discourse on the complexity of French Jewish experiences during the refugee crisis and highlights the city as both location and a conduit for diverse activist strategies.Footnote 4 This case-study focuses not on architecture, maps or physical layout of cities; it considers how urban spaces engendered dense thickets of community activism very unlike that which took place in Paris. Such an approach offers a new interpretive framework to consider the ways in which Jews provided critical aid to persecuted coreligionists. As the city with the largest Jewish population, as well as the seats of national Jewish institutions like the Consistory and the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), scholars have tended to focus on Paris as the central interwar narrative for French Jews. Moreover, Paris was the epicentre of immigration, political unrest and antisemitic activity in France. Yet it was a unique urban environment with a specific refugee relief scene. This article challenges portrayals of French Jews during the crisis that centre on Paris and underline division, adherence to specific political paradigms or overall inefficiency.Footnote 5 Taking advantage of an evolution of Jewish life and identity that opened new public spaces to them, Jews employed cities – hubs of intersecting social and political networks – to create multiple opportunities to help refugees.Footnote 6 Ultimately, they utilized frequent opportunities to take part in urban civic life and assemble webs of valuable connections.
This case-study of Strasbourg and Nice opens a window onto three trends that help us rethink the roles of French Jews during the 1930s. First, not all aid was Parisian aid. Jews in these two cities engaged urban social and political structures to take part in a range of organizations that provided vital support to refugees. Through abundant associational affiliations during the 1920s, they forged wide-ranging contacts, Jewish and non-Jewish, and set common goals within the framework of political rights, humanitarianism and social equality. French Jews viewed cities as sites for activism because they represented neutral spaces in which Jews could freely operate and featured bountiful opportunities for public engagement.Footnote 7 Furthermore, urban spaces were ideal social environments for constructing advocacy networks, because cities ‘heightened the tempo of human intercourse’.Footnote 8 In the 1930s, Jews used urban networks and social spaces to create wide systems of social and political alliances that supplied valuable opportunities to advocate for refugees in spite of government policies and growing antisemitism. Second, Jews in interwar Strasbourg and Nice departed from previous generations who held behind-the-scenes collaboration with the government as the best form of self-advocacy. While not bound to assimilation as scholars have previously asserted, they tended to feel uneasy about overtly mobilizing on controversial issues before the twentieth century.Footnote 9 By the interwar years, Jews acted publicly, with associational affiliations as the central vehicle of their activism. Third, while Jewish activists in the provinces did appeal to officials in Paris on occasion, they most frequently invested in personal connections and local efforts, which often bore more fruit than national initiatives. This trend challenges the long-standing idea that Jews in France put too much faith in the French Republic and suffered for it, even before the Vichy Regime of 1940.Footnote 10 Their urbanism was a way of attending to issues closer to home and building upon France's universalist republican tradition.
The work of noted scholars has established cities as locales for popular mobilization. Henri Lefebvre's foundational study of the city and his focus on everyday life in urban settings creates a broad context for this study by highlighting the ways that diverse populations make formal and informal connections through ongoing contact.Footnote 11 Margaret Kohn, in her analysis of working-class movements in Europe, furthers this idea by arguing that ‘shared places help forge communities by enabling and constraining the way in which people come together. Particular places orchestrate social behavior.’Footnote 12 She is not alone in positing cities as nodal points of community movements in the twentieth century. David Harvey's more recent contributions underline how unique urban environments serve as a locus of change and development; the city as a space that galvanizes people to action.Footnote 13 This article illustrates how Jews in two border cities embraced the civic nature of French republicanism and adeptly employed the public sphere to advocate for themselves and others without relying on the government. Strasbourg was home to a Jewish population with deep roots that dealt with antisemitism and the refugee crisis for the better part of the 1930s. Nice, on the other hand, was not a major locale for Jewish life in France and it did not experience the crisis until late in the decade. These differing environments serve to illuminate the strikingly parallel lines of effective public engagement that Jews in each locale followed, creating scenes very unlike that of Paris.
In order to gain fuller understanding of Jewish mobilization and aid networks during the refugee crisis of the 1930s, this piece first will consider the unique circumstances moulding Strasbourg and Nice. The particularity of each borderland locale shaped politics, identity and patterns of activism. It furthermore will consider Jewish involvement in urban associational life before the onset of the crisis in 1933 to demonstrate the nature of Jewish activism during the interwar years and its ability to adapt with evolving circumstances. With the sharp focus that local-level examinations afford, this article will then delve into Jewish refugee relief and advocacy during the crisis in order to locate the ways that Jews utilized public spaces to aid foreigners seeking safe haven in France. The comparative format of this case-study makes clear that differing circumstances notwithstanding, Jews in both cities transcended communal, organizational and political boundaries to help refugees. It moreover illustrates how city settings that protect ‘counterhegemonic ideas and identities’ allow diverse actors to come together in meaningful ways.Footnote 14 Pairing Strasbourg with Nice rather than another major centre of Jewish life in France does not presuppose these cities as the sole locales for such a study. Rather, these microhistories suggest a broader trend of public advocacy among Jews in provincial French cities, whether in Strasbourg, Nice, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux or beyond.
Two urban locales
Along the frontier with Germany and a chief entryway into France for those fleeing the Nazi regime, the refugee situation was front and centre in Strasbourg. Having returned to France in 1919, after German loss in World War I, Strasbourg, capital of Bas-Rhin and Alsace's largest city, was at the heart of Alsatian social, economic and political life. Jews had resided there during the medieval period, along rue des Juifs near the cathedral. Banished from the city for several centuries, it was only after the revolution of 1789 that Alsatian Jews urbanized and joined the middle class, a trend that continued under the German empire from 1871 until the end of World War I. Because the National Assembly emancipated Jews in 1791, Alsatian Jews embraced the French ideals of universalism and democracy. Moreover, the change in status drew continued immigration to the region from central and eastern Europe. From the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, Jewish migration into the Rhineland slowly increased.Footnote 15 By 1919, some 10,000 Jews lived in Strasbourg proper with around 5,000 in the surrounding towns. Unlike the Pletzl in Paris, Jewish residences and businesses were located throughout the city. Jewish communal life in Strasbourg was robust, as Alsatian Jews tended to be more religious than their counterparts elsewhere in France. The Grand Synagogue and Bas-Rhin Consistory, both located on Quai Kléber in the eastern part of the city, as well as the smaller Orthodox Etz Haim synagogue on rue Kageneck therefore represented hubs of Jewish life and, during the 1930s, refugee relief.
On the frontier between France and Germany, circumstances in interwar Strasbourg were especially complex. The local population regularly negotiated competing identities and political ideologies, which fed an autonomist movement that eventually embraced anti-French sentiments. For Alsatian Jews, however, regionalism and loyalty to France were not mutually exclusive; the French nation-state stood for ‘concrete and pragmatic advances that they had made in the realm of civil rights’.Footnote 16 Further complicating matters were influences from National Socialist Germany that contributed to the local prevalence of rightist and antisemitic groups. Anti-Semitism was not simply a German import; in the words of one prefect, it had ‘deep roots’ in the Alsace.Footnote 17 Fed by the Depression and xenophobia, incidents persisted with greater frequency and virulence and became a significant problem in Strasbourg. Yet the city was also a locale for Jewish immigration well before the crisis began. In fact, Adath Israel, the Polish Jewish community, comprised roughly 20 per cent of Strasbourg's Jewish population in 1931.Footnote 18 In 1933, circumstances shifted dramatically. Asylum-seekers traversed the Pont de Kehl and poured into the city, with over 1,200 arriving in the first months alone, prompting government official Guy La Chambre to call it the ‘German infiltration’.Footnote 19 Strasbourg was attractive to refugees on a number of grounds: proximity to homeland, the strong local economy and a sizeable Jewish population already well established in the region. The influx slowed in 1934, but did not end. The minister of foreign affairs soon announced that anyone without papers was to be refused entry and foreigners were redirected to Paris, where they would be subject to vigilant police surveillance.Footnote 20 Even so, by the end of 1934, the number of foreigners in Alsace and Lorraine was well over 100,000.
Nice, unlike Strasbourg, has received little consideration from historians examining Jewish experiences in France, likely because the Jewish population numbered less than 1,000. In terms of size, Marseille was the major Jewish locale in south-eastern France. Yet, Nice provides important details that help recast our conceptions about the roles that Jews undertook in interwar France. The smaller population size did not translate into weaker forms of activism, as Niçois Jews diligently aided thousands of persecuted individuals at the height of the refugee crisis and into World War II. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and just miles from the Italian border, Nice is the capital of the Alpes-Maritimes department. Much like Strasbourg, it is located next to a porous border that allowed significant transnational influences from Italy and the local population embraced a sense of particularism. Feeding this sentiment was the region's fairly recent attachment to France in 1860 and the habitually delayed arrival of social or political developments from elsewhere in France. The city was also the location of the Alpes-Maritimes Consistory and the centre of Jewish life along the French Mediterranean coast. While their roots did not reach as deep as those in Strasbourg, Jews had been residing in Nice since at least the fourteenth century. Since the early modern period, Niçois Jews lived and worked in the city without many of the restrictions that constrained much of European Jewry. By the twentieth century, Niçois Jews were known for civic work, political activism and humanitarian aid.
Nice's interwar socio-political environment was distinct from that of Strasbourg. Because of its proximity to Italy, fascism was the most troubling preoccupation for inhabitants who feared its imminent takeover. Meanwhile, the extreme right, including Action Française, the Camelots du Roi and Jeunesses Patriotes, gained footing in the city and held a good deal of sway. The economy in Nice, which relied heavily on tourism, performed dismally after the onset of the Depression. Despite the prevalence of rightist politics and the harsh economic climate, antisemitism did not have a significant presence and outbreaks were, at most, sporadic. Among the few antisemitic groups in the city was the Communauté Allemande Nationale Socialiste, which never had much of a following.Footnote 21 This lack of antisemitism related to the insular nature of the city's population and the absence of anti-Jewish hatred flowing over the border from fascist Italy, which did not hold antisemitism as a key part of its platform. A final notable divergence from Strasbourg is that the refugee crisis did not arrive in Nice until 1938. Overall, Nice faced a unique set of circumstances influenced by its Mediterranean locale and placement on the Franco-Italian border. Less volatile than Strasbourg, this environment was nonetheless challenging. Jews therefore worked alongside individuals of various political and religious affiliations to combat restrictive forces and preserve the freedoms of French citizenship and, hence, their own position in French society.
Advocacy on the eve of the crisis
In Strasbourg and Nice, Jews’ intersecting spheres of activism strengthened existing ties and forged new ones instrumental in aid efforts during the refugee crisis. Jewish activism did not suddenly arise during the fraught years of the 1930s; it built on a foundation created well before the crisis began. Strasbourg, ‘the heart of a cross-border community’, featured a mature civil society that fostered a rich associational life in which Jews took prominent roles.Footnote 22 For example, the Union of Works for Alsace-Lorraine, which featured Jewish and non-Jewish membership, was created after World War I to support indigent populations within the region.Footnote 23 Some Jewish activists lived outside the city limits, yet they claimed Strasbourg as the central location of their advocacy. For Jews, Strasbourg encompassed valuable resources and antisemitism was less visible in the city than in the surrounding countryside. Jews were active members of numerous organizations throughout the city, including the local chapter of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (LDH), a prominent human rights group, the AIU and Zionist organizations. Through their organizational affiliations, they created enduring alliances with individuals also concerned about human rights, fair politics and the plight of persecuted foreigners. Jews took full advantage of the city's public sphere to advocate confidently for themselves and others. While there was no single locus of Jewish activity in Strasbourg, several organizations were located in close proximity to the Grand Synagogue on Quai Kléber, including the Bas-Rhin Consistory. The Consistory in Strasbourg, unlike in the rest of France, remained a relevant communal institution and, later, became an important site of mobilization during the refugee crisis, even for non-observant Jews. Members of its central committee, especially Sylvain Levy and Georges Schmoll, acted as conduits between refugees in need and those who could offer resources.
In interwar Nice, Jews were deeply engaged in the city's vibrant social and political life. Especially pertinent when comparing Nice with Strasbourg is Eric Hobsbawm's assertion that the city is a ‘geographically limited and coherent unit’, which allows us to study how people residing within a shared space influence aspects of society and politics.Footnote 24 There were overall fewer social barriers for Jews to overcome in Nice than in Strasbourg. The local Chamber of Commerce, for instance, was less wary about foreigners, Paris politics carried little weight in the region and antisemitism was not a major part of local society. This urban environment influenced Jewish conceptions of how to use public spaces, which determined how they carried out their activism.Footnote 25 They habitually asserted independence from Paris leadership and acted as they felt best suited local needs. They also tended to be more secular than in Strasbourg, so their urban networks encompassed fewer communal organizations outside of the Consistory and the Grand Synagogue located on rue Gustave Deloye at the heart of the city. Niçois Jews’ intelligent self-advocacy took advantage of the opportunities that French republicanism offered. The city frequently presented ‘sites of encounter’ where like-minded individuals created ties and sought opportunities to organize.Footnote 26 The Ligue de Défense Républicaine, in which Jews were active members, collaborated with other groups in the city, including the Association Républicain des Ancien Combattants, to fight against fascism. Nice was a space in which Jews took part in multiple organizations to champion publicly republican ideals, human rights and fair politics. Engagement in the LDH connected Jews with like-minded individuals throughout the city and further afield. In this way, Jews in Nice, much like in Strasbourg, created connections that would be indispensable for helping refugees.
The refugee crisis commences
Refugee advocates in France faced numerous obstacles that made their creative and efficient methods of urban engagement all the more necessary. French immigration laws fluctuated throughout the decade, as the government struggled to balance the clashing currents of France's legacy of generous immigration policies and the strong protectionist impulses of middle-class public opinion.Footnote 27 The situation in Paris became so desperate that national organizations were unreliable in providing resources to groups and committees outside the city. As the general secretary of one organization noted, ‘The Paris Committees receive hundreds of letters each day – veritable cries of despair. . .They must limit their efforts to helping. . .the refugees who are already in Paris.’Footnote 28 These factors, in conjunction with growing antisemitism, meant that activists in Strasbourg and Nice needed to exhibit perseverance and creativity if they hoped to aid refugees. After years of engaging in urban organizations representing human rights and republican ideals, they benefited from broad constellations of social and political connections that enabled numerous prospects for refugee relief. They did not rely solely on French government officials to defend them or refugees.
When victims of the Third Reich began seeking asylum in Strasbourg, Jews employed local contacts to ameliorate the difficult circumstances in which foreigners found themselves. They were adept at using public forums to champion causes through a mix of grass-roots initiatives and national organizations with local committees working independently of Paris. They knew how best to mobilize their contacts to aid newcomers. Take, for instance, the Comité Central d’Assistance aux Emigrants Juifs, which was headquartered in Paris. The Strasbourg committee's activities illustrate the push–pull dynamic between Paris and Strasbourg, as the local chapter worked independently of Paris directives. Its activities were wide-ranging, including work placement and lodging for refugees so they were off the streets and out of view of authorities who could arrest them or antisemites who would harass them.Footnote 29 Anti-Semitism and xenophobia in and around Strasbourg made the committee's work all the more challenging. Furthermore, there were limited job openings and business owners fearful of the competition that foreigners represented clamoured loudly, meaning that the committee had to place half of the refugees outside of Alsace. Instead of looking to headquarters in Paris for support or help, members used connections forged through years of advancing Strasbourg's associational aims, including their valuable ally Prefect Roland-Marcel.
It soon became apparent that the depressed economy and immigration policies rendered near impossible any regularization for refugees. ‘When I ask for a work permit for factory workers from Kehl, I receive it immediately!’ indignantly exclaimed one man in Strasbourg, ‘I requested one for a political refugee whose mother is Alsatian and I did not receive it! What is the cause for this?’Footnote 30 Unlike Jewish refugee relief efforts in Paris that, although active, were hampered by division or competition, Jews in Strasbourg routinely combined efforts despite religious or political differences and took part in multiple initiatives, which increased their likelihood of success. Among the numerous examples is the Comité d’Informations et d’Aide aux Refugiés Allemands, founded by local Jewish industrialist and human rights advocate Achille Baumann, which had a roster of members that overlapped with the Comité d’Assistance, among others.Footnote 31 From July to October 1933, a period during which the French government curtailed immigration, members secured job placement for 101 Jewish refugees.Footnote 32 The group extended its reach by collaborating with German refugees in the city and employing the local press to influence public opinion, particularly that of the Strasbourg Chamber of Commerce, which was leery about the ‘danger presented by. . .too many foreigners’ and even participated in street protests.Footnote 33 Such collaboration was necessary, given the precarious climate of the 1930s.
In the midst of the upheaval and growing antisemitism of the 1930s, Strasbourg continued to be a primary nodal point of Jewish activism in provincial France. Urban spaces engendered contact between engaged citizens, allowing Jews to pursue numerous means of refugee advocacy and offer alternative forms of safe haven despite economic and government constraints. At times, this advocacy was simply a printed declaration in the press that German Jews were welcome to live with local families and at others it meant collaborating with groups in the city that expanded their mission to respond to the crisis, including Zionist organizations. Zionism's popularity in Strasbourg provided Zionist leaders the opportunity to reach sizeable audiences, publicly call Jews and non-Jews to fight for refugees and access additional resources. To this end, the Union Régionale des Sionistes de l’Est, headquartered on Quai Kellerman across from the Grand Synagogue, sent 100 to 150 young German Jews into Palestine where they would be safe from Hitler's racial policies, while members of Kéren Keyémet Lésraël and Kéren Hayessod collected donations and helped in relocation efforts.Footnote 34 A crucial point to keep in mind is that members of these organizations were often involved in other initiatives throughout the city, meaning that they not only could bring together different lines of support but also spread awareness about how to get involved.
As the refugee crisis unfolded, Jews in Strasbourg faced a government that could not, or would not, assist them. This dynamic, while strenuous, did not slow their work. Jewish activism in Strasbourg functioned differently from that of Paris, characterized by a desire to look outside of conventional means to aid foreigners as economic and social pressures mounted. Jews exhibited ingenuity and shifted the direction of their efforts to offer safe haven in ways that did not entail government or Paris-based assistance. They did occasionally turn to national political figures in their pursuits, yet they most frequently bypassed Paris and concentrated on resources and organizations based in the city. This trend was furthermore exemplified in Nice, even though circumstances in the city differed from those in Strasbourg. Just because the refugee crisis was not active in Nice before 1938 does not mean that Niçois Jews were hitherto uninvolved in refugee politics.
Although the crisis did not hit Nice until late in the decade, Niçois residents had been faced with the ongoing arrival of Italians fleeing Mussolini's regime since 1922. By 1926, over 40,000 Italians resettled in Nice, comprising roughly a quarter of the total population.Footnote 35 Given this dynamic and their place in Nice's social and political spheres, Jews were accustomed to working publicly to accommodate foreigners. They furthermore took to visible forums throughout the city to decry Nazi antisemitism and insist on persecuted foreigners’ right to asylum in France. In 1934, local Jewish figures created the Comité d’Aide aux Victimes de Hitlérisme, which called for public officials to categorize victims of the Third Reich as refugees and accord them protections in France.Footnote 36 The LDH offered another important channel for advocacy in the city that brought together individuals and resources that would be crucial for working against the odds to aid refugees by the eve of war with Germany. When, in 1936, Paris upheld some of its harshest immigration policies to date and a number of refugees were arrested for residing illegally in Nice, local LDH affiliates demanded their liberation and campaigned in support of Marius Moutet, who led the fight for refugees in the Chamber of Deputies.Footnote 37 Jews also collaborated with fellow LDH member and local socialist politician, Barel, to host an event at the restaurant Bella Viata to rally the city's population in support of refugee rights.Footnote 38 Their work simultaneously called for France to uphold its republican legacy and encouraged mobilization through civic action in Nice. The intimacy of Nice's relatively small public sphere brought activists together with great frequency and allowed alliances to solidify.
The refugee crisis did become a true crisis in Nice when Mussolini issued racial laws in August 1938 that closely mirrored those of the Third Reich. With the newly proclaimed restrictions on citizenship, intermarriage and professional life in Italy, Jews began to flee.Footnote 39 These Jewish refugees were mostly Central Europeans who had escaped persecution and fled to Italy.Footnote 40 They flocked to the Franco-Italian border in September, when the racial laws took effect and Mussolini furthermore decreed that Jews who had settled in Italy after 1919 must leave by March 1939.Footnote 41 Some crossed illegally through Vintimille, just over the frontier in Italy, and Menton, the first French town inside the border.Footnote 42 Others hid in the mountains of the Alpes-Maritimes for fear of expulsion. The influx intensified upon the outbreak of war and Nazi occupation of France, when tens of thousands of Jews fled northern France and sought safety in Nice. In impossible conditions, Jews in Nice doggedly expanded their advocacy by reaching out to local allies and creating innovative solutions for the seemingly endless number of asylum-seekers.
1938 and after
After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, the situation for refugees became dire. By this point, France was not necessarily the first choice of refugees, as authorities carried out surveillance and expulsions, and eventually turned to an internment camp system. The immigration policy of May 1938 furthermore doled out heavy fines, up to a year in prison and expulsion for individuals whose residency was not regularized.Footnote 43 As the threat of war with Germany grew, so did anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish sentiment. The existing pattern of advocacy among Jews in Strasbourg was vital to saving refugees in the face of these tensions. At the height of the crisis, they were able to move between social and political circles and create viable solutions when none seemed readily available. They continued to pursue new initiatives throughout the city, many of which collaborated rather than competed. In addition to official aid committees were individual initiatives. In early 1939, for instance, Isaïe Schwartz, chief rabbi of Strasbourg, helped organize efforts to bring 200 elderly Jews out of the Third Reich, which in this case Interior Minister Albert Sarraut refused to allow.Footnote 44 Recognizing the poor odds of conventional means of aid, Jews in Strasbourg increasingly sought alternative ways to aid refugees, whether that meant offering vacation colonies for foreign Jews to use as residences, enrolling students in educational programs, funding Zionist operations or helping illegal residents to stay off the streets and out of sight of authorities.
Of the thousands of foreigners fleeing persecution, the dilemma for children was particularly upsetting and Strasbourg was a primary destination for many of them. While large organizations like the Union des Sociétés OSE had delegations in the city, Strasbourg-based efforts were crucial.Footnote 45 Adath Israel, the Polish Jewish community that usually kept to itself, reached out to the Consistory to place Jewish youth with local families.Footnote 46 Another case involving Isaïe Schwartz, in late 1938, clearly illustrates the efficiency of connections Jews made in their pursuits. Schwartz learned of two teenage German boys who had illegally entered France.Footnote 47 Despite gaining admittance to an agricultural colony in nearby Bouxwiller, which should have meant they could remain legally in France, the Prefecture, under pressure from Paris, ordered that the boys leave France without delay. In response, one of the boys attempted suicide. Schwartz, whose resources included the Strasbourg chapter of the AIU, the Consistory and the Comité d’Assistance, worked his connections to help the boys. Through the Comité, he successfully helped raise funds to move the boys and, through the AIU, he secured their entrance into a Mickwé Israel school, which the Comité d’Assistance would financially support.Footnote 48 Use of these connections kept the young men out of the grasp of the Third Reich as it prepared to wage war on Europe and European Jewry.
The value of urban networking to aid young refugees in Strasbourg is best exemplified by the actions of Laure Weill. When Hitler came to power in 1933 and the plight of German Jews commenced, Weill began collaborating with local contacts that could help German Jewish youth. As the director of the Home Israélite de Jeunes Filles on rue Séllénick, less than a kilometre's walk from the Quai Kleber, she opened her doors to young female German Jews.Footnote 49 Since founding the home in 1908, she continually broadened her circle in Strasbourg, including Lucien Cromback, who helped build and finance the Home. In 1933, she used public forums and her connections to find volunteers willing to board the German girls in their homes. Although the government refused to grant them long-term residency, Weill spent the next years doggedly working her diverse contacts, forged through years of social engagement, to support the most vulnerable of refugees despite government restrictions.Footnote 50 After the outbreak of war in September 1939, she turned to allies in the city and created an organization that evacuated Jewish children from Alsace and Lorraine, where they were in danger of the oncoming Nazi machine, and moved them to safety with families elsewhere in France.Footnote 51 She furthermore recruited Cromback, Fanny Schwab, her colleague from the Home, and a certain Dr Levy to undertake the risky work of saving children.Footnote 52
Weill's use of Strasbourg's organizational life to build connections during the interwar years created a paradigm that she followed into the war and expanded outside of Alsace, which was evacuated before hostilities openly erupted. Doing so was a great risk that ended up saving Jewish children. Adept at utilizing her allies and looking for new ones, she connected with a Dr Schwartz in Lisbon whose contacts led to the acquisition of US visas for children.Footnote 53 Weill organized departures of children from France to the US in May and August 1941. In May 1942, she obtained an additional 540 signed American visas for children still interned in the French camps in the southern zone. After Pierre Laval, prime minister of Vichy, refused to release the children, Weill discarded legal activism and became a member of the Réseau Garel, a secret network formed in 1943 to rescue Jewish children in the southern zone that ultimately saved 1600 children.
By late 1938, Jews in Strasbourg had been dealing with the refugee crisis for more than five years. In Nice, however, it had just begun. At the centre of the Alpes-Maritimes, Nice represented a last hope for Jews fleeing Italy. Despite the harsh immigration policies of May 1938, refugees continued crossing the frontier at Menton and seeking asylum as Mussolini's deadline for expulsion approached. Although the police continued to intercept illegal immigrants and repatriate them, this border was not particularly well patrolled and desperate foreigners quickly overwhelmed Nice's urban landscape.Footnote 54 The city's economy was still weak and there were finite limits to what residents could offer in terms of housing and material resources. Recognizing the grave nature of this situation, French Jews swiftly organized to meet the needs of new arrivals by locating vital resources. The most effective method of refugee relief in this border city was a bottom-up model that focused on local alliances and public advocacy, continuing a trend that had been set years earlier. The flexibility of Jews’ multi-faceted urban networks allowed them to bypass Paris and increase options for refugee relief.
Because the Jewish population in Nice was much smaller than in Strasbourg, there were fewer refugee committees throughout the city. But engagement was no less fervent or effective. A notable trend of non-sectarian and interfaith alliances was central to the fight for refugees in Nice, which built upon the long-time partnerships between Jews and non-Jews in social and political activism. The Union Magna Carta, for instance, was a non-sectarian group that found ways to furnish legal papers for foreigners who had been stripped of their nationality.Footnote 55 An invaluable ally to the Jewish community in Nice was Monsignor Paul Rémond, bishop of Nice. Rémond and Niçois Jews collaborated on initiatives to increase options for refugees. Rémond was also central to the fight against antisemitism, which had grown in conjunction with the influx of Jewish refugees. Rémond, who reached out to his parishioners on these issues of importance, continued his efforts into the war years and joined Réseau Marcel, an underground rescue network that saved Jews from deportation. In addition to these instances were other small organizations that attended to refugee support, including a Jewish women's aid committee.Footnote 56 The most outstanding example of Jewish urban activism in Nice, however, took the form of the Comité d’Assistance aux Refugiés (CAR), which came together after Mussolini made his September 1938 decree expelling foreign Jews who had settled in Italy since 1919.Footnote 57
Recognizing the dearth of services for the thousands of desperate foreigners in Nice, Jews centralized their refugee aid efforts in December 1938. Instead of working with individual allies and creating multiple committees in the city that would compete for money or resources, they combined their networks. With its mission to assist Jewish victims of ‘racist persecutions’ seeking asylum in France, CAR accommodated refugees to the degree that it did because of the various connections that each member brought with him or her into the organization.Footnote 58 Originally headquartered at the Grand Synagogue on rue Gustave Deloye, members later moved operations to rue Victor Hugo, still in the heart of the city.Footnote 59 CAR's 18-person central committee was comprised of Jews who, through their urban activism, championed republicanism and upheld civil rights for more than 20 years, including Rabbi Pruner, Joseph Babani and Marcel Lowenstein.Footnote 60 Their understanding of how to utilize Nice's social and political resources and galvanize public mobilization was strong. Bishop Rémond attested this fact with this public pronouncement: ‘in my entire career, I have not seen such great charitable work, organized on such a large scale. . .I congratulate you for having in your community. . .men able to carry out such a formidable task.’Footnote 61
From its official creation in December 1938 until July 1939, CAR supplied 1,200 Jewish refugees with lodging, a number that rose exponentially in the following months.Footnote 62 The initial amount of newcomers was much less significant than the throngs that arrived in Strasbourg in 1933 alone, but it was a mere trickle before the deluge of refugees that ensued. Furthermore, the city, which was smaller and less economically stable than Strasbourg, keenly felt the weight of situation. There also was fear that antisemitism would grow due to the overwhelming presence of Jewish refugees. Niçois Jews, therefore, urgently combined resources and connections to provide money, clothes and employment to thousands of asylum-seekers in the city.Footnote 63 They organized a soup kitchen for refugees that initially served about 400–600 meals a day, numbers that increased significantly.Footnote 64 CAR, however, did not stop with basic necessities; it helped foreigners avoid police and border authorities. It sometimes sent emissaries to warn those fleeing Italy about French border crackdowns so they could avoid arrest or repatriation, which would have been disastrous.Footnote 65 CAR was so effective in its endeavours that some authorities worried it would attract more foreigners and, in the words of one official, ‘[lessen] Nice's reputation. . .eventually creating real dangers and grave political tensions’.Footnote 66 Yet the steady flow of individuals crossing on foot from Vintimille continued and local fishermen were even known to sneak Jews into France.Footnote 67 The number of Jews living clandestinely in the Alpes-Maritimes, however, would not have been possible without a certain degree of laxness on the part of the border police, even though they publicly denounced such acts.Footnote 68 The absence of hyper-vigilant policing of foreigners represents another divergence from the situation in Strasbourg, where authorities diligently watched out for illegal residents.
While not marked by the division that plagued refugee relief groups in Paris, members of CAR struggled under the burden of their relentless task and inadequate financial resources. Operating in dire circumstances, pragmatism eventually won out. Marcel Lowenstein contacted the Jewish leadership in Paris to request supplementary funding and received limited help, meaning that the municipal focus of Jewish activism in Nice and the contacts created because of it were of vital importance. One member's connection helped provide low-cost tickets for refugees who wanted to leave Nice and continue their journey elsewhere in France or beyond.Footnote 69 While this request required correspondence with figures in Paris, members most often worked with figures in the city to expedite results. In spring 1939, CAR reached an agreement with authorities in Nice to provide legal papers to refugees living clandestinely in the region.Footnote 70 The committee, in effect, purchased their legal status at the cost of around 550 francs; 150 francs for a visa and 400 francs for an identity card allowing a three-month stay.Footnote 71 Such an agreement would not have been possible in Paris or Strasbourg, where the authorities closely monitored developments and residents were sometimes hostile toward refugees. Members of CAR furthermore found ways to provide refugees with tools crucial to remain successfully in France, even if illegally.
In August 1939, just weeks before Germany invaded Poland, CAR set up a meeting at the Capital Cinema in Nice to educate German and Italian refugees on their rights and responsibilities in France.Footnote 72 Speakers put special emphasis on ways that foreigners could avoid the attention of the police, instructing them to abstain from large groups or ‘making oneself known in public places’.Footnote 73 By this point, many refugees were living clandestinely in the mountainous terrain of the Alpes-Maritimes to avoid arrest. That CAR openly directed foreign Jews to avoid the police signifies that French Jews in Nice, like those in Strasbourg, knew that the government was an unreliable ally long before the establishment of Vichy. Moreover, they took matters into their own hands and were not afraid to oppose the state. Equipping refugees with such techniques was not only practical, but maybe the most effective type of aid that CAR could offer at this point. It was an important precedent, given the thousands of Jews that fled to the Alpes-Maritimes in 1939 and then continued to arrive in the region after the fall of France in 1940, an estimated 25,000 by 1943.Footnote 74 To survive, many lived illegally and CAR helped them do so. Ultimately, CAR was not only an interwar organization. It continued working, expanding its services to refugees, through the first years of the war.Footnote 75 Although facing an increasingly tenuous situation, this small group of Jewish activists ran an operation whose successes, big and small, were directly tied to members’ agile mobilization of ties made through years of urban networking.
Conclusion
Moving from high politics in the French capital to urban networks in two border cities reveals critical facets of Jewish activism during the refugee crisis that challenge the tendency to conflate the situation in Paris with the rest of France. Although circumstances varied in Strasbourg and Nice, Jews in these two borderland cities followed similar patterns of engaging urban civil society to build flexible networks that addressed the plight of refugees from several angles. Their parallel approach to refugee relief suggests an overall trend of effective Jewish activism in provincial France that contrasts vividly with the Parisian case. Their multi-faceted networks offered unique and creative ways to help, and even save, those fleeing persecution. While not the initial goal, their focus on local circumstances and grass-roots efforts critically enabled Jews to continue their work in spite of increasing government repression late in the decade. This local focus was not a challenge to the nation-state, as Murray Bookchin has contended is a feature of municipalism. It was instead a natural extension of their established use of their city's public sphere to create alliances and generate change.
‘The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities’, wrote David Harvey, ‘is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.’Footnote 76 As circumstances continued to worsen for desperate individuals fleeing the Third Reich, Jews in Strasbourg and Nice doggedly exercised this ‘most neglected’ right through perseverance and ingenuity in environments that provided very little recourse. Adapting to a deteriorating situation, including police surveillance, little manpower, internment camps and probable war with Germany, they forged urban networks that enabled valuable avenues to assist refugees. They did not allow circumstances to define or impede their work; rather, they increased contacts with allies and defenders of common values that allowed them to surmount countervailing forces. Even as antisemitism and xenophobia grew, Strasbourg and Nice became sites that represented pro-refugee mobilization and a chance at survival for refugees. Jewish advocates provided needed tools and resources for refugees to remain in France despite the government's best efforts to the contrary. Their pattern of activism during the refugee crisis furthermore prepared Jews for their efforts during the war. Ultimately, the alliances forged, the social capital accrued and the experience gained through their activities during the 1930s strengthened wartime survival tactics, which required resourcefulness, adaptation and connections with those sympathetic to the Jewish plight and willing to help.
