“I could have mistaken him for a Norman!”: Jews and Farming in Interwar France

• In Event: Critical Crossroads: Jewish Responses and Experiences during the Refugee Crises of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Agriculture was a major component of French Jewish responses to the refugee crises of the 1930s. However, interest in Jewish farming had deep and diffuse roots in the years before Hitler’s rise across the Rhine. Edmond Cahen’s novel Juif, Non! ... Israélite (1930) tells the story of a Jewish soldier who, upon returning from fighting in the First World War, leaves his job as an urban lawyer and takes up the life of a farmer on the fecund lands of the French Southwest. Cahen, a Paris-based editor of the reform-minded periodical Les Archives israélites, had no special ties to the countryside, yet his novel extolled the virtues of farming in an climate becoming increasingly hostile to French Jews and Jewish refugees. Cahen’s work embodied an evolving trend in Jewish cultural and economic life in interwar France that came to full fruition after 1933. During these years, France’s diverse Jewish cultural, social, and economic life was dominated by images and projects developing French and foreign Jews’ relationships with the outdoors, the countryside and the French soil. By 1933, Jewish agricultural and farming projects had fertile ground to serve as both as havens for refugees in addition to enterprises of “French interest,” according to Liberal Jewish activists.
This paper uses archival, press, and literary sources to track and account for interest in agriculture in French Jewish strategies for dealing with the refugee crises of the 1930s. In particular it examines Le Renouveau, a farming colony of Jewish emigrés in southwestern France after Hitler’s rise in Germany and Austria. Linking Jews to the land were important responses to mounting antisemitic and xenophobic rhetoric on the French Far Right through the 1930s. Yet agricultural work also addressed a deeper and broader set of contemporary concerns linking Jews to the rural world and countryside, and drew on late eighteenth and nineteenth century images and ideals of economic utility, integration, and French identity.

author

• Erin Melissa Corber