L’acculturation des israélites français au sionisme après la Grande Guerre
Catherine Nicault
The French Jews, mainly the left-wing notables, remained for a long time deaf to the lure of Zionism because of their commitment with the ideas of the “French Judaism” ; but after the first World War and during the twenties, they proved better disposed towards it, although that was a period when the “French Judaism” was at its utmost. In order to explain this paradox, the article analyses the international circumstances (creation of a Jewish Home in Palestine under the aegis of the League of Nations, because of the peaceful ideal embodied in this institution), the national ones (the apparent obliteration of anti-Semitism which allows a more audacious definition of one’s identity), and mainly the ideological rush job which builds a very peculiar French Zionism, at the time a humane, peace-looking and universal meaning of Zionism which was then all the more accepted as, and this is strange, it owes much to the old “French Judaism”. This “French Zionism” which irrigated the “Jewish awakening” did not last : strongly linked to the optimism of the ten years following the war, it was not able to survive to the arrival of the dark years.
• La grande guerre : l’occasion d’une certaine percée
• La « génération de Genève » séduite par le sionisme
• Le comité France-Palestine, laboratoire idéologique
• Un sionisme résolument humaniste et pacifiste
• Le recours au mythe historique