FOR RELEASE: May 25, 1999
Contact: Linda Myers
Office: (607) 255-9735
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ITHACA, N.Y. -- When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, some 25,000 German Jews fled to France. Now a new book by a Cornell University history professor offers the first major appraisal of French responses to the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s.
Vicki Caron, the author of Uneasy Asylum, France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942, is the Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell and the winner of the 1997 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, awarded by the Wiener Library in London.
Caron's book, published this April by Stanford University Press, demonstrates that although France had initially welcomed Jewish refugees from Germany, by the end of the 1930s Jewish refugees were perceived by many French citizens to be an especially undesirable group of foreigners.
After the Nazis defeated France in June 1940, the country was divided into two primary zones. A new French government came to power and established itself in the spa town of Vichy. It was headed by Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, a French World War I hero then in his 80s. In July 1940, the French parliament voted Petain full powers, and the constitution of the Third Republic was abrogated. Within the first weeks of its existence, Petain's Vichy regime enacted a series of anti-Jewish measures that reflected longstanding demands of the French right.
After the war, the French sought to distance themselves from the Vichy past, asserting that the anti-Jewish measures had been imposed by the Nazis and that only a few anti-Semitic zealots in the administration had supported the anti-Jewish program. Caron presents overwhelming evidence to the contrary. By examining the socioeconomic and political factors
that informed French refugee policy in the 1930s, she shows that Vichy's anti-Semitic program had widespread popular support, especially among middle-class professionals -- doctors, lawyers, merchants and artisans -- who perceived Jews as a competitive threat.
The author also sheds new light on the political behavior of France's Jewish citizens in the 1930s. She refutes the belief that the French Jewish elite, fearful that the refugees' presence might provoke an anti-Semitic backlash, did little to assist the refugees. She shows that instead the French Jewish community was sharply divided over the handling of the refugee crisis. While some Jewish leaders pressed for a hard-line refugee policy, others worked assiduously to provide the refugees with relief and to persuade the government to adopt more liberal refugee policies.
Caron's book reveals the extent to which anti-refugee attitudes and policies in the 1930s paved the way for Vichy's anti-Jewish program, but it also highlights the differences between the refugee policies of the Third Republic and those of the Vichy regime that followed it.
"This highly original, nuanced book is a valuable resource not only for specialists of the Third Republic," writes Carol Fink, a historian at Ohio State University, "but also for scholars of the 1930s, World War II and the Holocaust." The book draws on a rich array of primary sources and archival materials.
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EDITORS: For more information about Uneasy Asylum, France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942, contact Cornell News Service at the telephone number listed above or call the author directly at (607) 275-1226. For a review copy of the book, contact Stanford University Press at (650) 723-9434; fax: (650) 725-0826.
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