French Jews and Assimilation

It’s become conventional wisdom to tut-tut about how foolish the French have been, to let all those Muslims into the country and then leave them parked, as it were, until they decide to make trouble. Writing in the 1927, Joseph Roth offers another take on the issue. As a “wandering Jew,” after Vienna and Berlin, he found Paris a paradise:

Eastern Jews are allowed to live as they please in Paris. They may send their children to Jewish schools or French. The Paris-born children of Eastern Jews may acquire French citizenship. France needs inhabitants. It seems to be positively its duty to be underpopulated and forever to stand in need of new inhabitants, and to make foreigners into Frenchmen. In that lies both its strength and its weakness.

Admittedly there is anti-Semitism in France, even outside royalist circles. But it is not one hundred proof. Eastern Jews, accustomed to a far stronger, cruder, more brutal anti-Semitism, are perfectly happy with the French version.

And why not? They enjoy religious, cultural, and national rights. They are allowed to speak Yiddish as loudly and as much as they like. They are even allowed to speak bad French without incurring hostility.

—Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise 147 (2005)

But there is a complication:

The consequence of such leniency is that they learn French, and that their children no longer speak Yiddish.

x—Id.

Oh really? Now, that is one part of the program that didn’t seem to carry