2023-08-13 06:00:03
The remarks on the “denaturalization” of the Jews of France, made by Pierre Hillard [un essayiste complotiste et antisémite] during the summer university in Civitas, testify to the persistence of a Maurrassism that we had hoped had disappeared. They will cause, let us hope, the announced dissolution of this collective which dishonors the name of “civitas”, citizenship in Latin. No one seriously imagines a return to Catholicism as the state religion, as Hillard and his followers wish, but his remarks contribute to making the Jews of France foreigners. Also, let’s consider them from a historical point of view, because they are a falsification. Contrary to what Hillard asserts, the Jews were not “naturalized” in 1791 but “emancipated”.
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Let us therefore return to the premises as attested by archeology and history: Jews have lived on French territory since antiquity. They were probably present in southern Gaul from the beginning of Romanization, even before the spread of Christianity.
If the archives of their presence are rare for the high Middle Ages, on the other hand, Jewish communities exist throughout the territory in the classical Middle Ages, as evidenced by the countless “streets to the Jews”. What is less known is that the Capetians were the first European sovereigns to expel them: Philippe Auguste in 1182 – a century before Edward I of England –, Philippe le Bel in 1306, Charles VI in 1394 – a century before the Catholic Monarchs in Spain. This pioneering and stubborn ostracism of the kings of France, not very glorious it is true, is hardly taught.
After these expulsions with their procession of spoliations, the Jews did not disappear for all that: the popes protected them in their French states of Avignon and Comtat Venaissin.
In the middle of the 16th century, Henry II authorized Rhenish Jews to resettle in Lorraine after the capture of Metz, and did the same on the Aquitaine coast with converts persecuted by the Inquisition fleeing Spain and Portugal. Finally, in 1648, the attachment of Alsace by the Treaty of Westphalia integrated into France an important Jewish community that had never been permanently expelled from this land of the Empire.
Deep patriotic feeling
This means that on the eve of the Revolution there were approximately 40,000 Jews in France, divided into four communities: the Pope’s Jews, the Alsatians, the Lorrains and the Aquitaine, living in Bordeaux and Bayonne (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) , but also in towns such as Peyrehorade (Landes), Bidache or La Bastide-Clairence (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). Without omitting the Jews who circulated in the kingdom despite the edict of banishment of 1394. This is why, on September 27, 1791, the Constituent Assembly did not “naturalize” “immigrants”, as Hillard asserts: it emancipated subjects of non-law under the Old Regime, in application of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789.
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