Journal of Jewish Identities

From the "Réveil Juif" to the École Maïmonide

Since the early nineteenth century, French-Jewish institutional leaders had endeavored to frame Judaism solely as a religious identity restricted to the precincts of the home or the synagogue. They acted in conformity to the widely understood terms of Jewish emancipation in France, which the [End Page 76] Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre had famously summarized as granting every right to Jews as individual citizens and granting them nothing as a distinctive national entity.* Historical scholarship has evidenced how, from the late nineteenth century, this restrictive conception of Franco-Judaism became gradually contested by Jewish intellectuals and community activists.⁶ Fueled, among other factors, by a fear that an exclusively religious definition of Judaism threatened its survival in an increasingly secularizing French society, a host of new Jewish organizations were created in the first decades of the twentieth century whose aim was to encourage younger generations to engage with previously overlooked aspects of their Jewish identity: the Hebrew language, Jewish literature, history, philosophy, and music.

Aided by the Separation of Church and State in 1905, which broke the Consistory's control over the organization of Jewish institutional life in France, and culminating in what Nadia Malinovich termed the French "Jewish awakening," or "Réveil Juif" of the 1920s, a profusion of new spaces came about where young Jews could seek extra-curricular Jewish education.⁷ While these developments have been amply documented in the historiography, little scholarly attention has been paid to the way in which these fundamental paradigm shifts affected Jewish schooling.

Modern Jewish schools (i.e., Jewish schools combining both religious and secular teaching) existed in France from the early nineteenth century. As Jeffery Haus has shown, although aiming to preserve distinctively Jewish educational spaces, Jewish community leaders, in particular members of the Consistory under whose aegis these schools were established, had to justify their existence to public authorities as serving public utility.⁸ In order to receive the State's official sanction and public subsidies prior to the Separation of Church and State in 1905, Jewish day schools had to demonstrate that they helped the State further its goal of turning the children of traditional Judeo-Alsatian or Yiddish speaking Jewish families into culturally integrated, law abiding, and professionally useful French citizens. Their emphasis thus focused more on giving pupils a French education—French language, history, general knowledge, and professional skills—than on endowing them with a solid Jewish education, which, in any case, most of them received from the traditional families they came from.⁹

While the State agreed to sanction and subsidize Jewish primary schools under these conditions, it systematically refused to consider sanctioning the opening of Jewish secondary schools. The lycées, which had been established by Napoleon to form the State's military and administrative elite, did not serve the same function as primary schools, and the public utility of Jewish secondary schools was thus hard to justify. Furthermore, many Jewish community leaders shared the State's reservations about the legitimacy of Jewish secondary schools. On the one hand, they did not want to give [End Page 77] the impression that they sought to isolate Jewish children from mainstream French society. On the other hand, they were grateful to the French State for offering French Jews such a precious and efficient tool for upward social mobility.¹⁰

In the first decades of their existence, Jewish primary schools were mainly attended by Jewish children from Alsatian families, until the latter, rapidly assimilating into mainstream French society and rising to the highest echelons of its political, cultural, and financial élite, moved away from Jewish educational establishments and were gradually replaced by the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. As France progressed its educational policies and instituted compulsory free and secular education for all children in the early 1880s, Jewish primary schools lost their appeal and state funding after 1905. By the 1930s, only one remained in Paris, the École Lucien de Hirsch.¹¹

Although initially intended to secure institutional spaces for formal Jewish education in France, Jewish schools became gradually conceived as integrational catalysts and charitable organizations reserved for the children of recent immigrants.¹² Most Jewish families preferred sending their children to secular State schools and took pride in their academic success in the prestigious lycées.¹³ Sending their children to secular State schools was not only the best way of ensuring their social progress, it also meant conforming to the widely understood terms of Jewish emancipation: Judaism being a strictly private religious affair and education being a public pursuit, the two were meant to remain separate. However, as concern about the survival of Jewish identity in France intensified and the range of Jewish institutions (and acceptable ways of engaging with one's Jewish identity beyond the strictly religious) increased, Jewish community leaders revisited their approach to formal Jewish education.

In early 1935, Marcus Cohn, a young linguistics scholar from Strasburg, who was also the head of religious teaching at the rabbinical seminary in Paris, was tasked by the Chief Rabbi of Paris to prepare a survey on the state of Jewish education in France.¹⁴ His report noted that most Jewish children in France received a rudimentary Jewish education seldom extending beyond the age of twelve or thirteen when they reached their religious majority. Resultingly, he argued, these adolescents, lacking knowledge and motivation to perpetuate their Jewish heritage, gradually detached themselves from it, posing a threat to the survival of Judaism in France.¹⁵ According to Marcus Cohn, the only way to stem that trend, was to "democratize" the type of intensive training, which combined high-quality religious and secular teaching, available to rabbinical candidates. He proposed to open the rabbinical seminary's preparatory school, known as the Talmud Torah, to adolescents willing to pursue a variety of professional vocations and no longer restrict its intake to future rabbis. That way, French Jewry would count in its midst laymen who would be sufficiently knowledgeable in religious studies and motivated to involve themselves in Jewish institutional life, take new initiatives, and act as "the best auxiliaries to the rabbinate."¹⁶ [End Page 78]

Marcus Cohn's report and recommendations were welcomed and seconded by his superiors beyond his own expectations. A few months after receiving his survey, the Central Consistory's General Assembly announced that France's first Jewish secondary school would be opening the next academic year.¹⁷ The Consistory not only validated Marcus Cohn's call for opening the Talmud Torah to pupils pursuing all types of professional vocations, it decided to turn the institution into an autonomous lycée that would be distinct from the rabbinical seminary.

The school was named École Maïmonide, as a tribute to Moses Maimonides (1135/38–1204) the Spanish philosopher, rabbi, and physician whose intellectual contributions, encompassing both Jewish and secular disciplines, epitomized the type of Jew the school wished to educate. 1935 also marked the 800^th anniversary of the sage's birth.¹⁸ The École Maïmonide opened its doors on the 23^rd of October 1935 in the fifth arrondissement of Paris before moving to the affluent suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt in 1938, where it remains located to the present day.¹⁹

While the secondary literature that exists on the founding of the École Maïmonide suggests that this took place on the periphery of mainstream Jewish institutional life—if not in opposition to it—in actuality, the project received no criticism from the French Jewish establishment. On the contrary, it appears to have been unanimously welcomed and encouraged by the Franco-Jewish notability. Not only did its creation emanate from the Central Consistory's initiative, the French-language Jewish press abounds with articles and reports celebrating the long-overdue creation and legitimacy of a Jewish secondary school in France. The two principal French-language periodicals, L'Univers Israélite and La Tribune Juive, devoted their front pages to the announcement of the school's creation in June 1935, the latter exclaiming: "And so France will be endowed with a Jewish secondary school. The burning wish, forever expressed by those seeking to preserve and revive French Judaism, is about to come true."²⁰ In an article describing the school's first few months, the author concluded his account with a medical metaphor: "spreading through the future [Jewish] community's organs, graduates of the École Maïmonide will ensure that the interrupted flow of the Jewish spirit once again irrigates its worn-out veins."²¹ Even France's Jewish financial and cultural elite mobilized to support the École Maïmonide. Among its first financial backers, one can find the baron Edouard de Rothschild, the banker and art collector Arthur Weisweiller, who became the school's first president, and the art dealer Georges Wildenstein, its first treasurer.²²

Undoubtedly, both the "Réveil Juif" of the preceding decades and its underlying structural causes had prepared the ground for making such a radical departure from traditional views on organized Jewish education palatable to the Franco-Jewish elite. Nonetheless, creating France's first Jewish secondary school represented a much more profound challenge to Franco-Judaism's key assumptions than previous initiatives and cultural manifestations. While proponents of the "Réveil Juif" sought to expand the ways in which French Jews could engage with their Jewish identity beyond its [End Page 79] strictly religious definition, they remained attached to the view that such engagement should remain restricted to extra-curricular activities that would supplement any other public commitment, notably schooling, rather than substitute themselves for it.

Advocates of the École Maïmonide, by contrast, were arguing that extracurricular endeavors were no longer sufficient to ensure the survival of Jewish identity in France. More significantly, they contended that it was the very nature of French public education that was responsible for French Jews' growing indifference to their heritage. Being both strictly secular since 1882 and particularly time-consuming, the French educational system left little time for Jewish children to take up extra-curricular Jewish activities.²³ Hence, for Judaism to survive in France, part of French Jewish youth had to be redirected away from French public institutions and educated in Jewish alternatives instead.

Redirecting Jewish Youth Out of the Lycées without Breaking with Public Education

Maurice Liber's article announcing the upcoming opening of France's first Jewish secondary school stated the perceived root problem: it was the particularly demanding schedule of French public schools that prevented children from taking the time to familiarize themselves with Jewish knowledge in any meaningful way.²⁴

The minutes of the first General Assembly of the École Maïmonide's administrative board, reproduced verbatim in the columns of L'Univers Israélite's November 1936 issue, corroborated Liber's thesis:

The usefulness of a Jewish school can no longer be contested. Experience has shown that one cannot achieve a satisfactory result with a few hours of religious teaching outside and in addition to the already sufficiently heavy workload of the lycées. We wish that for our pupils the study of Judaism becomes an integral part of their general studies and that through them Judaism instead of being learned becomes lived.²⁵

Despite calling for the need for separate Jewish secondary schools, and hence for a degree of separation from mainstream French society, proponents of the École Maïmonide maintained that French Jewry as a whole must in no way break away from public education and, as Maurice Liber put it, "return to an intellectual ghetto."²⁶ While defending the École Maïmonide's necessity, its advocates systematically stressed the fact that Jewish schooling could and should only concern a small minority of French Jewish adolescents.

Having stated the rationale for its creation, the École Maïmonide's administrative board declared: "Undoubtedly such an intensive educational program is hard to achieve for Jewish youth as a whole, all the more because it must not lose touch with French youth belonging to other religions. Nonetheless, [End Page 80] it is no less urgent to form a core, which through its example and its knowledge, will contribute to raising the level of Jewish life in France."²⁷

Furthermore, the founders of the École Maïmonide were worried that by attending an exclusively Jewish milieu, their own pupils would miss out on crucial contact with their non-Jewish peers. They actively sought means to mitigate that risk by organizing certain classes in common with a neighboring secular lycée, the Collège Sainte-Barbe, where their pupils would be able to interact with French children of all backgrounds.²⁸ An initiative that was warmly welcomed by the French-language Jewish press, which remarked: "And -supreme finesse- the pupils, in order not to stay in isolation, follow a few science classes in a neighboring school where they can communicate every day with young Christians their age."²⁹

As well as emphasizing the fact that establishing a Jewish secondary school should in no way be interpreted as a means of isolating Jewish children from their non-Jewish compatriots, the founders of the École Maïmonide were keen to stress the school's commitment to imparting its pupils with a strong sense of French identity. In a brochure published ahead of its opening in October 1935, the school reaffirmed its core objectives: to turn its pupils into "sincere and honest men, both morally and intellectually conscious of their dual duties towards Judaism to which they are the heirs and towards France of which they will become the devoted citizens."³⁰ This commitment materialized through the strict enforcement of the French national syllabus alongside Jewish studies classes, as well as through various demonstrations of patriotism organized by the school. The lavish celebrations organized by the École Maïmonide on its premises to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the French Revolution in June 1939 attest to such patriotic dedication.³¹

As well as redefining the vocation of French Jewish schools (i.e., turning them into vectors of Jewish identity preservation rather than catalysts of French integration), the founders of the École Maïmonide sought to change their character and public. They sought to present Jewish schools no longer as charitable organizations reserved for the most impoverished and newly immigrated sections of Jewish society but as quality institutions capable of accommodating the needs of the Jewish bourgeoisie, whose children the founders deemed most in need of a Jewish education and most likely to lead Jewish organizations in adulthood.³²

However, while happy to support the project morally and financially, the Jewish establishment was reluctant to risk its own children's education and prospects in this new, untested, institution. Unable to recruit the Jewish bourgeoisie's children, Marcus Cohn was thus compelled to go prospecting for pupils in the less affluent neighborhoods of the East of Paris, convincing recently immigrated families to send their children to his school. As Ady Steg, one of these children and future president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, recalled: "convincing them was not too difficult because he was offering glory: he was making us leave the communal [primary] school to join the lycée, there was a sort of intellectual promotion that was quite flattering."³³ [End Page 81]

The school was able to function for four years, with an intake of around one hundred pupils, until it was compelled to shut its doors when the war broke out in September 1939, most of the teaching staff having been drafted in the French army.³⁴ Its pupils were forced to find new institutions, and the school's buildings in Boulogne were left vacant. From October 1940 to April 1943 the buildings were occupied by the German army, which set up a military hospital on the premises, after which the buildings were repossessed by the Union General des Israélites de France (UGIF) and used as a retirement home. Meanwhile, attempts were made to perpetuate the École Maïmonide's pedagogical mission in the non-Occupied Zone through the Petit Séminaire Israélite de Limoges (PSIL).³⁵

Jewish Schooling in the Immediate Postwar Years: The End of a Taboo

The École Maïmonide was the first Jewish school to reopen its doors in France after the war. Although reluctant to resume his pre-war activities and envisaging a new start in Palestine, Marcus Cohn, who had spent the bulk of the war as a Prisoner of War in Germany, was persuaded by his former pupils of the necessity of reopening his school as early as October 1945.³⁶ In the immediate postwar years, the school served a critical role in helping traumatized Jewish children regain a sense of normalcy and interest in academic pursuits. It also tried to endow its pupils with a positive attachment to their Jewish identity, which many leaders of the Jewish community feared was in jeopardy after the traumas associated with it.³⁷

Ultimately, Marcus Cohn did much more than simply re-open his school: he offered his assistance to a new generation of young Jewish community activists who wished to further the development of Jewish educational institutions in France espousing the École Maïmonide's principles. Two new Jewish secondary schools opened in 1948: Yabné in Paris and Aquiba in Strasburg. The École Lucien de Hirsch also re-opened its doors in 1947.³⁸ These schools acknowledged the fact that circumstances forced them to take on new prerogatives, such as providing psychological support to a generation of Jewish children who had just survived the Holocaust and, from the mid 1950s, helping newly resettled North African Jewish families find their bearings in metropolitan France by looking after their children's education. Importantly, however, these institutions believed their priority was to form French Jewry's future institutional elite.^39. The paramount importance of this objective comes across very clearly in a 1958 article for the Journal des communautés written by Théo Dreyfus, who replaced Marcus Cohn as the head of the École Maïmonide when the latter left for Israel in 1950:

Since its reopening in 1945, the École Maïmonide has taken on an extremely important social role by looking after numerous children who had been the victims of Nazism and by preventing them from a disastrous fall, which their solitude would have led them to. […] The École Maïmonide is now [End Page 82] at a crossroads of its history: leaving its social role to the Jewish organizations that specialize in this sector of community life, it intends henceforth to devote itself exclusively to the formation of a future élite.⁴⁰

Referring to the school's new social prerogative in favor of newly resettled North African Jewish families, a report on French Jewish schools published in L'Arche similarly concluded: "Here too the director, like the director of the École Lucien de Hirsch, shared with us his main preoccupation: to make Jewish schools, not just a temporary haven for refugees, but a meeting point for the Jewish élite."⁴¹

French Jewish schools in the immediate postwar period thus wished to remain elite schools. Yet, while in the 1930s, the École Maïmonide's elitism was put forward as a sign that it only sought to recruit a minority of Jewish children, confirming the French Jewish community's commitment to public education for the majority, in the 1940s and 1950s, such a link was no longer made. In fact, when discussing Jewish schooling, the postwar French Jewish press no longer emphasized French Jews' long-standing attachment to public education, nor did it refer to French Jewish schools' desire to avoid isolating their pupils from mainstream French society. After the war, the École Maïmonide no longer organized classes in common with non-Jewish establishments, nor is there any trace of the school's desire to revive them. Not only were such considerations absent, the Jewish press was now dominated by articles deploring the fact that too few Jewish families sent their children to Jewish schools.

This paradigm shift can be explained by a sense of urgency shared by Jewish community leaders that the war and the trauma of the Holocaust could lead families—whose survival for four years had depended on hiding their Jewish roots—to detach themselves irrevocably from their Jewish identity.⁴² A whole generation of young Jewish parents and future parents, it was feared, had grown-up without receiving even a rudimentary domestic Jewish education and hence would be unlikely to pass it on to their children without the help of dedicated Jewish educational establishments. This new pedagogical mission taken on by Jewish schools, i.e., giving pupils a Jewish education that their parents had not received and could not provide themselves, was emphasized in a report describing life at the École Maïmonide in the 1950s. Théo Dreyfus, the new headmaster, recounted the following anecdote: "A father came to see me and made the following confession, 'Last Friday, for the first time in thirty years, we heard the Kiddush [traditional Friday night prayer] at home. It is my daughter, your pupil, who recited it.'"⁴³

In 1954, the Revue du FSJU published a report on French Jewish schools, deploring the fact that wealthy Jewish families living in the West of Paris maintained a distrust of and disdain for Jewish schools, which they imagined to be necessarily inferior to non-Jewish schools.⁴⁴ In the same issue, Claude Kelman, the head of the Fonds social juif unifié (FSJU), the umbrella organization created in 1950 to centralize and allocate social aid across [End Page 83] French Jewish associations, wrote an editorial emphasizing the need for Jewish families to turn to full-time Jewish schooling:

The time is over when the child asked the "catechism classes" to provide the simple complement to an education that would be passed on from generation to generation in the home. […] But since then we have witnessed a gradual fading of Jewish colors from the domestic space. […] Good or bad, it is henceforth on extra-familial Jewish education that the continuity, the future of our community rests.⁴⁵

Similarly, in 1966, Renée (Rina) Neher, a Jewish history teacher married to philosopher André Neher, lamented the fact that despite the hope that they would constitute a more natural public for Jewish schools, too many North African families opted for State schools:

Since 1962 (the year that led to an influx of North African Jews to the Metropole and doubled the number of Jews in France) new [Jewish] schools emerged in the suburbs of Paris, in Lyon, Nice and Marseilles. None covers the full cycle of studies yet: I do not think that in total they exceed 500 pupils. No doubt, in areas where there are [Jewish] schools, parents are tempted to send them there and the number of pupils is growing. But, conversely, in areas where these schools do not exist, we have not seen consequential groups of parents harassing leaders of the central institutions to demand the opening of a full-time Jewish school. There is apparently an abandonment of the Jewish educational force of parents.⁴⁶

These articles reveal that while in the 1930s the rationale for opening a Jewish secondary school was discussed at length in the French Jewish press, the necessity of day schools to ensure the survival of Jewish identity in France was now posed as axiomatic. Furthermore, while before the war, the École Maïmonide was perceived as an exciting new educational experiment that should only concern a minority of French Jewish children, Jewish community activists now sought to encourage more families to send their children to Jewish secondary schools and to consider such establishments as desirable alternatives to public schools.

The notable absence of pre-war concerns about the risk of Jewish school pupils growing up in isolation from mainstream French society and statements about the French Jewish community's commitment to public education can also be tied to a more assertive tone adopted by French Jewish community leaders after the war.⁴⁷ While Vichy's participation in the Holocaust did not give rise to vocal anti-French sentiment within the French Jewish community after the war, certain Jewish community activists believed that since no amount of patriotic dedication or discourse had prevented French Jews from falling prey to antisemitic persecution during the war, they should no longer feel the need to justify their initiatives to their compatriots and should act according to Judaism's best interests rather than external expectations of appropriate behavior.⁴⁸ [End Page 84]

The Exponential Growth of Jewish Schooling in France at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

Although the discourse on Jewish schooling in France evolved significantly in the immediate postwar decades, only a small minority of Jewish families turned to such schools for their children's education. This situation changed dramatically after 1967. Fueled by a mixture of renewed interest in Jewish culture in the aftermath of the Six Day War, the arrival in metropolitan France between 1950 and 1970 of over 200,000 Jews from North Africa, who were both more practicing and more accustomed to sending their children to Jewish schools than their Ashkenazi coreligionists, the success of religious outreach from the Chabad movement in promoting Orthodox Judaism in France, and a gradual decline in the reputation of State schools, demand for Jewish schools grew exponentially.⁴⁹ As early as 1969, demand for places in Jewish schools exceeded availability.

The number of Jewish schools in France consequently rose from four in 1948 to 44 in 1976, 88 in 1986, and 102 in 2008.⁵⁰ This growth was accompanied by a diversification of the type of religious and pedagogical orientations offered by Jewish schools. While the École Maïmonide (as well as Lucien de Hirsch, Yabné, and Aquiba) offered a type of education that could be termed "traditionalist," characterized by a strong attachment to Israel and Zionism, a commitment to excellence in secular studies, a loose adherence to orthodoxy (i.e., orthodox religious teaching but coeducational teaching in secular disciplines and no monitoring of or pressure on families to adhere to orthodox religious practices at home), a whole spectrum of Jewish schools appeared. They ranged from ultra-orthodox yeshivot to secular but culturally Jewish schools, such as the professional schools belonging to the ORT movement.⁵¹ Reflecting this growth and variety of options, in 2012–2013, an independent organization called "Choisir l'école juive" was set-up to help French Jewish parents choose the right Jewish school for their children.⁵² Most French Jewish schools are under "contrat d'association" with the French State, a regime granted to private schools following the Debré law of 1959 whereby the State agrees to subsidize the secular teaching and certain material expenses in private schools in exchange for these schools strictly adhering to the national syllabus and to a certain number of official guidelines, such as making religious teaching optional and not discriminating pupils on the basis of religious belief. This means that the cost of private education in France is generally more affordable than in the United Kingdom or the United States.⁵³

According to the FSJU, the number of children enrolled in French Jewish schools grew from 400 in 1945 to 30,000 in 2006, with a 78% increase between 1988 and 2006.⁵⁴ At the same time as the popularity of orthodox religious practice within the French Jewish community rose, French public schools gradually intensified their enforcement of laïcité, or French secularism, in reaction to fears of Islamic fundamentalism, starting in 1989 with the publicized "Islamic headscarf controversy," when two high-school pupils [End Page 85] were expelled for refusing to take off their headscarves.⁵⁵ This made it harder for practicing French Jews to find compromises with State schools in order to keep Kosher or to miss school on Jewish festivals and on Shabbat. These factors led a growing number of Jewish families to turn to Jewish schools as more comfortable alternatives to public schools.⁵⁶

Corinne Lafitte, headmistress of the École Maïmonide since 2011 confirmed that in the applications she receives from parents wishing to send their children to the school, the main motivation indicated is "we are observant Jews but we can no longer practice in secular schools." She then added: "The Jewish community seems to me more practicing than before, less accommodating. Whereas fifteen or twenty years ago taking an exam on Shabbat did not pose any problem, it now poses a problem to these people. The Republic, used to be more accommodating as well. It would allow Jewish children to find arrangements, to sit exams on other days. Today this is no longer possible. Faced with this absence of help from the Republic, they come to us. Here they can practice and feel relaxed about it."⁵⁷

The fear that their local State schools could not guarantee their children's safety is also a recurring motivation prospective parents put forward in recent application files to the École Maïmonide. Starting in 1980, with a series of terrorist attacks against Jewish sites, including a bombing in front of the Liberal synagogue, rue Copernic in Paris, that killed four people and injured over forty, Jewish institutions gradually increased their security infrastructure, every new wave of violence further intensifying the protective measures in place.⁵⁸ These measures climaxed, in 2015, following the terrorist attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket "Hypercasher" in Paris in January of that year, with French military personnel stationed permanently to guard Jewish schools (among other sensitive sites). While the fear of a rise in antisemitic violence in France since the Second Intifada in 2000 has driven families to seek refuge in Jewish schools, these schools paradoxically have become prime targets of antisemitic terrorism, tragically evidenced in the shooting of a teacher and three children in front of the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012.⁵⁹

Overcoming Insularity, Reasserting French Patriotism: The Return of Old Concerns

Whereas Jewish schools' openness to mainstream French society was no longer addressed explicitly after the Second World War, these schools' increasing physical seclusion from the outside world for security reasons at the turn of the twenty-first century has once again brought that issue to the fore. According to parents' testimonies, this state of permanent threat has consequences not only on the children's psyche at school but also on the way families behave outside of the school's perimeter. The heightened sense of danger projected by the high barriers, the policemen, and the security volunteers that children have to pass by every morning accompanies parents [End Page 86] beyond the school's purview. It makes many of them reluctant to let their children have social interactions and activities beyond their direct parental or institutional control.⁶⁰

Alexis G., a history and geography teacher at the École Maïmonide since 2015, who also teaches in private secular schools in Paris, notes:

I make my senior pupils draw a map of their "personal territory." Basically, I ask them to map the journeys they do, the places they go to. Distances do not count, what counts is how frequently they go to these places: they put the places they go to regularly in the foreground and the places they go to less frequently in the background. It is an interesting exercise because you see that there are pupils who are totally community-bound, sometimes producing maps that only have three elements: the school, the synagogue and Israel, and others who have a totally open life. But in practically every map, one finds this fear of a rampant anti-Semitism which is relayed by the media and which translates into an anxious outlook onto the outside world.

Contrasting these results with the maps he asks his secular school pupils to prepare, the teacher remarks:

In the secular schools, children go out after class, meet-up in Paris. There is a whole social life that takes place outside, which is not so much the case at the École Maïmonide. There is a social life as well but that takes place in a very precise framework: the synagogue, youth movements, holidays in Israel.⁶¹

This contrast between Jewish school children's social outlook and that of their State school counterparts is not only observed from an external vantage point. For many families turning to Jewish schools for the first time, this choice is perceived as a necessary alternative to their local public schools, which they no longer trust, rather than their first preference. An increasing amount of new parents admit to having reluctantly given up on the idea of sending their children to State schools because of the poor academic reputation that has come to be associated with public education over the last decades.⁶² However, echoing the founders of the École Maimonide's initial concerns, they are worried that their children will grow-up in a mono-cultural environment, missing out on crucial interactions with non-Jewish children.

Carine A. whose three children were educated at the École Maïmonide in the mid-2010s, explains:

My husband and I both went to secular schools, we have Jewish and non-Jewish friends. We find that very enriching to have good friends who come from different horizons, from different cultures. We were afraid that by sending our children to a private Jewish lycée their environment would be restricted, that there would be less opportunities to reach out to other people, that their universe would consist solely of Jewish acquaintances.⁶³ [End Page 87]

Such concerns are shared by the pupils themselves who feel anxious about attending university and joining the labor market where they will have to interreact with people from all walks of life. It is not the prospect of meeting people belonging to other faiths, cultures, or socio-economic backgrounds per se that these adolescents fear. On the contrary, they are looking forward to such opportunities. Rather, they are worried that their contemporaries will not understand them, will find them strange or socially "backwards." Noa, a senior year pupil at the École Maïmonide in 2019, explains:

The problem with Maïmo [abbreviated nickname given by pupils to the École Maïmonide] is that we are trapped in a bubble a bit. We do not know the outside world. We live only with people who practice the same religion as us. Next year, we will be going to university. For most people it will feel strange to find themselves with people who are not Jewish, to be with Christians, Atheists, Muslims. The education at Maïmo does not prepare us enough to this world that awaits us, although one positive point at Maïmo is that not all teachers are Jewish.⁶⁴

Noa, who kept in touch with friends from her secular primary school, explains the way in which she feels the pupils coming from the École Maïmonide differ from her public school friends:

My friends who are in public schools do not have the same way of being, the same way of behaving. I impose plenty of limits on myself, whereas they are much less strict. About going out, about alcohol, about cigarettes, about relationships with boys, they are much more open than we are. It is really two ways of thinking. I don't think I could ever be as flexible as they are on certain things but there are positive sides to their attitude, that is: they remain very open-minded.

She adds that this discrepancy in attitudes is precisely what makes her Jewish school comrades so apprehensive about joining their contemporaries at university:

I have a friend who will start her studies at the Sorbonne next academic year and who told me: "I am afraid of finding myself with Christophes, with François, who will look at me and wonder who is this girl, she is in another world." There is a gap. She is apprehensive about this encounter with people who are completely different, with the "pure French."⁶⁵

Similar testimonies from recent pupils of the École Maïmonide indicate that, despite following a common national syllabus and being taught by non-Jewish teachers, they feel isolated from their non-Jewish contemporaries and that this isolation, in turn, has created an inferiority complex, leading them to question their belonging to a common French society.⁶⁶ Interestingly, despite being exposed to signs of heightened anti-Semitic danger, it is not anti-Jewish sentiment or violence they fear particularly. Their greatest [End Page 88] anxiety is to have missed the tacit cultural codes of their generation and to be identified as too socially conservative by their peers due to their upbringing in a privileged and religious environment.

These observations contrast somewhat with those of anthropologist Kimberly Arkin, who carried-out field research in three Jewish schools situated in the periphery of Paris in 2004. While she noted, similarly, that the pupils of the Jewish schools she analyzed experienced a sense of alienation from non-Jewish French society, she identified a form of hostility to the French State and to the French "people," born out of a form of identification to Judaism as an ethno-racial primordial identity that had roots in France's colonial past. My research, carried-out in the years 2019–2022, however, indicates no hostility to the French State, nor to "the French" as a whole and no articulation of a sense of primordial "racialized" Jewish identity that would be incompatible with "Frenchness." The pupils I interviewed articulated a fear of being perceived as non-French or less French by non-Jewish French society. Rather than celebrating their difference from non-Jewish French society, they seemed to deplore it and regret the isolation they experienced from non-Jewish society causing them to feel vulnerable about their identity.

These differences in observation between my research and Kimberley Arkin's conclusions can, in part, be attributed to a difference in political context. Arkin carried out her research in 2004, at the height of the Second Intifada, which saw many French Jews, close to the organized Jewish community, express frustration at French diplomacy and media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This sense of frustration diminished in subsequent years due to a comparatively more favorable tone adopted toward Israel by the French political establishment, as well as greater acknowledgment from French authorities of French Jews' concerns about the rise of antisemitism in the country.⁶⁷ Another notable difference between my research and Kimberly Arkin's is the pupils' socio-economic backgrounds. Being implanted in the affluent West of Paris, the École Maïmonide's pupils come from more privileged and educated backgrounds than those of the schools in Kimberly Arkin's enquiry.⁶⁸

The École Maïmonde's current pedagogical staff is aware of its pupils' increasing isolation from mainstream French society and tries to actively address it by insisting on organizing its sports classes in shared municipal grounds rather than on school premises and by participating in local events and cultural outings. According to Corinne Lafitte, the school would like to offer its pupils as many opportunities as possible to interact with the world surrounding them. However, she indicated that these initiatives are hard to put in place not only because of security constraints but also because of an ideological reluctance of certain secular schools and public institutions to establish partnerships with a religious private school.⁶⁹

As well as trying to create opportunities for its pupils to interact with mainstream French society, the École Maïmonide is keen, once again, to reassert its patriotic credentials. The headmistress explains: [End Page 89]

It is important to me that my pupils participate in the rekindling of the flame of the Unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, honor the Republic and its soldiers who fought for the nation. My students go to the neighboring retirement home for war veterans to commemorate V-day. On the 11^th of November they take part in the laying of the wreath in memory of French soldiers. I am very attached to our pupils having a Republican conscience."⁷⁰

The rationale behind the return of demonstrations of patriotism at the École Maïmonide in the mid-2000s, after their decades-long eclipse following the Second World War, is never made explicit. Importantly, however, it has come about in an ideological context in which religious institutions and behaviors are subject to increased scrutiny both by the State and a general public concerned about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and attentive to signs of religious "separatism" across the board.⁷¹ While in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish institutional leaders believed that the need to justify their religious behavior's compatibility with French Republican values was no longer warranted, the desire to distinguish themselves from Muslim fundamentalists has once again led them to produce tangible evidence of their commitment to the Republic. Besides, for many Jewish institutional leaders, the Republic is perceived as the Jewish community's best shield against contemporary anti-Semitism and terrorism.⁷²

Although it is possible to ascribe political motives to French Jewish institutions' recent reassertion of patriotic values, these manifestations are also a sign of French Jews' profound attachment to their country. While the terror attacks that shook France, and the Jewish community in particular, in 2012 and 2015, gave rise to fears of mass departures of French Jews to Israel, they also led many among them to reflect on and celebrate their sense of belonging to the French nation, its culture, and its history.⁷³ Manuel Valls, French prime minister at the time of the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercasher supermarket, famously declared in front of the French parliament: "France without Jews would no longer be France," comforting but also echoing the Jewish community's own feelings and reflection.⁷⁴

The École Maïmonide's most recent development attests to that ideological climate. In 2016, the school decided to open a branch in Israel on the Alliance Israélite Universelle's campus in Mikve Israel, close to Tel-Aviv.⁷⁵ The aim was to enable French Jewish families who had recently moved to Israel—and whose numbers were expected to grow substantially in subsequent years—to be able to give their children a sense of continuity with the education they had received in France: i.e., combining the French national school curriculum with Jewish studies.⁷⁶ Beyond enabling educational continuity, the goal was also to help these children remain connected to their French heritage.⁷⁷ Sylvia Elbaze, the Israeli school's headmistress explained: "Our pupils must conserve their cultural richness. They must continue to possess a strong grasp of the French language, to write in it, to understand it, to read it. Incidentally, pupils often confess to me that it is here [in Israel] that they realize the extent to which they are attached to their French [End Page 90] identity."⁷⁸ This statement suggests an almost complete reversal of the École Maïmonide's original mission: initially designed to enable French citizens to remain attached to and invested in Jewish life, the school now endeavors to encourage children who are about to start their lives in a Jewish State to remain connected to their French heritage.⁷⁹

Conclusion

This historical case study of France's first Jewish secondary school sheds new light on the cyclical nature of the organized French Jewish community's search for a balance between its desire to preserve Jewish identity through a degree of separation from mainstream French society and its aspiration to remain fully integrated to the French nation and its Republican ideals. While secondary Jewish schools emerged in France in the 1930s in a context of heightened anxiety about the survival of Jewish life in the country, French Judaism today is undergoing a period of unprecedented dynamism characterized by a rise in religious practice, the multiplication and diversification of religious and cultural institutions, as well as the exponential growth of full time Jewish schooling. Despite fears that a resurgence of antisemitic violence in France could lead to an exodus of French Jews, the notion that French integration poses an existential threat to the survival of Jewish life in France no longer preoccupies Jewish institutional leaders. Decades-old concerns about convincing French Jews to involve themselves more in Jewish institutional life and to send their children to Jewish schools—without disappearing entirely—have now gradually given way to concerns about avoiding the ghettoization of the Jewish population and enabling it to remain connected to non-Jewish French society and Republican values.

Annex – Interview Methodology

For this research project, I carried-out over fifty interviews between 2016 and 2021. The interviews were conducted in a semi-directed fashion: I asked each category of interviewees (former and current pupils, parents, teachers, and administrative staff) the same set of pre-prepared questions based on the core themes that I was interested in exploring (religious practice, Zionism, and French identity) but then allowed our exchanges to develop freely. In a number of instances, when the interviewee had been involved with the school over a long period, I asked for additional interview sessions with the same person. The interviews were mainly conducted in French (one interview was conducted in English). The interviews were carried out over the phone or in person in France and in Israel. I also consulted the transcripts of interviews that film director, Emil Weiss, carried-out in 1996 for an unfinished documentary project on the school's history. [End Page 91]