Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

The articles in this volume revolve around movement: social, political, physical, spiritual, and intellectual. Some offer new modes of thinking about shifts in status—from colonial subject to state citizen; others ask about how we adapt to new languages, new ways of thinking, and new forms of artistic expression; while others explore the often-haunting experiences of hiding, dislocation, relocation, and migration (forced and voluntary). The authors examine catalysts in nineteenth and twentieth-century metropolitan and colonial France that shaped difficult decisions uniquely affecting Jews and Muslims to uproot and find means of belonging in new places, new social realities, and within different language communities. Catalysts triggering these movements of people included: changing laws and new legal restrictions, Nazi persecutions, transformations in geo-politics, or new aesthetic vocabularies. This volume offers students and readers new ways of approaching and understanding the constraints and opportunities that shaped Jewish and Muslim—individual and collective—decision-making from late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century metropolitan and colonial France.

More than 150 years after its issuance and six decades since the mass departure of Algerian Jews from Algeria, the bestowal of French citizenship on Algerian Jews through the so-called Crémieux Decree remains one of the most heatedly debated episodes of Arab Jewish history. As historical study of Jewish life in the Arabic-speaking world comes increasingly under the pressure of utterances shaped by conflicts of the present, the degree, motivations and conditions of Algerian Jews’ choice when interacting with or participating in the French state are becoming increasingly hard to grasp and problematize. By deconstructing current narratives of pre-colonial shared worlds destroyed by divide-and-rule measures, this article revisits the question of choice in Jewish experiences of and responses to European colonialism.

Sheikh ͑Abd al-Ḥamīd Ben Bādīs (1889–1940), the most esteemed Islamic scholar (ālim) of interwar Algeria and leader of Algerian Salafist Islamic reform movement, had things to say about Jews and their relationship to Muslims. Writings published in his journal, al-Shihāb (The Meteor) surrounding several incidents of Muslim–Jewish violence in Algeria and Palestine reveal his dual understanding of Jews. He saw Jews as historically woven into the Islamic world—a protected, valued, and culturally vibrant community. But he cast modern-day Jews as a privileged, provocative, and threatening group. Read together, we see a critique of colonialism that he understood as having transformed Jews, derailing a previously harmonious coexistence. Notably, Britain and France's colonial policies had given privileges to Jews that were denied to Muslims, producing social unrest.

At the intersection of Holocaust and World War II studies, a systematic and comparative analysis of Jews’ behaviors in Western Europe remains underexplored. This brief article proposes a methodological framework for studying choices between 1940 and 1945, focusing on the experiences of two Jewish women who survived in Vichy France. Drawing on concepts from French cultural history, I argue for a shift from “survival” as an outcome to “surviving” as a social process, which reframes agency by focusing on intent, process, and wartime perceptions. Ultimately, the article challenges binary frameworks of resistance and compliance, calling for a dynamic and contextualized approach to wartime decision-making.

This article focuses on the work of Ilse Bing, a German Jewish photographer who immigrated to Paris in 1930, was interned in the Gurs camp, and then escaped to New York via Marseille in 1941. In particular, it focuses on three of her self-portraits from 1913 to 1952 to study the development of her practice in photography and self-representation as a child and then an avant-garde woman photographer, depicting Jewishness as both beyond the frame and a crucial part of her trajectory. Finally, the article looks to a counter- example in a wartime identity photograph in Bing's immigration papers, which do not allow for any identity beyond their frame.

Focusing on Jewish child refugees from Central Europe in France and the United States, this article explores the question of language. What does it mean to migrate as a child, alone, and to be forced to adapt to a new language, during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust? Based on ego-documents and oral history interviews, this article questions to what extent the children noticed their passage from one linguistic world to another, and if so, how they discussed it and what they deemed important about it. The article argues that the children were aware of the problems associated with life in a new language. A struggle to communicate plagued postwar encounters with rare surviving family members. The children's observations on language are thus often always a means of alluding to deeper issues of identity and loss.

This article examines the earliest moments of North African Jews’ arrival in France after 1945, focusing on the attitudes and dialogues within Jewish aid organizations. It highlights postwar Jewish identities in France and illustrates that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century categorizations of who belonged had not significantly changed, despite the ruptures of the Holocaust and World War II. While it may be tempting to argue that, in the wake of the Holocaust, Jewish communities in France would freely welcome their coreligionists from North Africa, the reality was more complex. Longstanding categories of difference, once applied to Eastern and Central European Jews seeking refuge in France, were reframed within a colonial context, influencing how Jewish aid organizations perceived and assisted Jews from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.

This article draws on original interviews with Jews who attended the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Morocco and Tunisia and subsequently immigrated to France. Building on recent approaches to Jewish migration history that move beyond persecution narratives as the primary motive for emigration, incorporate network analysis, and recognize agency in how and why people decide to emigrate to one place rather than another, it enriches our understanding of the how and why of the post-1948 Jewish departure from the Muslim world. As the interviewees’ departure narratives well demonstrate, political pressure points and personal circumstances combined with long-range economic, cultural, and educational forces to draw them from the Maghreb to France over the course of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

This article examines the lives, philosophies, and wartime/postwar activism of Edmond Fleg (1874–1963) and Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985), two Jewish intellectuals in twentieth-century France deeply influenced by Henri Bergson's philosophy of time, creativity, and hope. Both Fleg and Jankélévitch were active in the Resistance during World War II. Fleg taught clandestine classes for Jewish youth that promoted pluralism as a strength within the Jewish community and beyond. Jankélévitch wrote anti-fascist works for underground publications and shifted to a deeper engagement with Jewish themes, especially related to messianism and moral responsibility. After the war, Fleg supported the nascent State of Israel while also focusing on the need to nurture diasporic Jewish culture. Jankélévitch balanced loyalty to Israel's existence with the readiness to critique its policies, especially after the 1982 Lebanon invasion, advocating for mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians. Fleg and Jankélévitch model engaged, pluralistic Jewishness grounded in ethical action, intellectual rigor, and openness to change. Their work encourages holding multiple truths in tension—valuing both Jewish particularity and a deep compassion for humanity—and confronting moral crises through study, dialogue, and activism.