Allons au Bosphore! Sephardi Immigrant Space and Communal Life in Interwar Paris

• In Event: Where is Jewish France? Jewish Communities and Identities in Twentieth-Century France and North Africa

Abstract

In the first decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Sephardi Jews migrated out of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and its successor states to build new lives in France, a country with which many already had cultural and linguistic ties. The majority of France’s new Ottoman Sephardi immigrants settled in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, which came to be called “Little Turkey” as a result of the many so-called “Oriental” restaurants, grocers, textile shops, and synagogues that lined its streets. Le Bosphore, a café in the very heart of the neighborhood, became a veritable center of Sephardi immigrant life. For many newcomers, it was their first stop after arriving at Paris’ Gare de Lyon, and a place where friendly faces guided them through housing and employment options over a Turkish coffee or a glass of raki. In the interwar years, it was a dynamic and versatile space that also hosted weddings, housed the meetings of the quarter’s Sephardi youth group and Salonican Zionist faction, and functioned as an office for the many merchants who lacked their own brick and mortar establishments. This paper will use Le Bosphore as a lens into understanding the history and implications of Ottoman Sephardi immigrant daily life in interwar Paris. Drawing from communal archives, periodicals, municipal records, as well as individual memoirs and testimonies, I argue that the “Oriental Israelite” experience overlapped with and was distinct from that of other Jewish community(ies) in France in important ways, differentiating the history of Ottoman Sephardi immigrants to the country from that of their Yiddish-speaking and native French coreligionists. By focusing on the interplay between space and community, this paper reveals that Sephardi immigrants simultaneously preserved elements of Ottoman Jewish culture and developed new communal practices in reaction to changing French and European Jewish contexts. Moreover, they did so in a way that reflected and reshaped the particular backdrop of interwar Paris’ 11th arrondissement.

Author

• Robin Margaret Buller, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill