Jews, Muslims, Migration: Jewish identity in France through a series of exhibitions

Having fallen back in love with learning on his year abroad, Toby Kunin considers the lessons that the Jewish community can draw from the museums of Paris.

Over the last year I have rediscovered my love of learning. After ten years of standardized testing I thought that it was gone forever, just some naive childhood flirtation with the world around me. How wrong I was! All it took was moving to Paris… Much of this joy came from within the classroom - it’s amazing how interesting lectures can be when you have free reign over what you study, and no threat of failure. For the first time ever, I was given the opportunity to engage with my identity, my Jewishness, in an academic way. I was able to do this directly, through a Jewish History class, but also indirectly through courses on Zionism, Middle Eastern Cinema, Post-Socialist Eastern Europe, Migration in France and on and on. My interests and my work collided. I rambled at length about Al-Andalus and Babi Yar, Yael Bartana and Han- nah Arendt in somewhat erratic essays. But my most significant learning happened beyond the classroom, in some of Paris’ numerous museums. A few of these exhibitions particularly stood out to me.

Juifs d’Orient at the Institut du Monde Arabe.

Growing up between North Leeds and Noam camp, the Jewishness I knew was almost exclusively Ashkenazi. When Jews from beyond Europe were mentioned it was normally either as a footnote, or as some kind of ‘gotcha’ card in debates around Israel. But here I was, in a museum dedicated to the Arab world, seeing Jewish life from across the Middle East and North Africa explored on its own terms and for its own sake. The exhibition traced the history back over two thousand years, with stone carvings followed by Geniza fragments followed by Ottoman posters followed by dresses and chanukiot. The exhibition explored the complex interaction between Jews and their neighbors in the region, neither perfect coexistence, nor eternal subjugation. You can watch in real time how the forces of modern history, especially colonialism and nationalism, pushed communities apart. The exhibition rounds off with the double tragedy for many of these Jewish communities, first of mass displacements and then for most an unwelcome arrival in Israel. A video tells the story of a family dressed up in their Shabbos best, ready for their journey to the Holy Land, only to be greeted with delousing spray and a tent.

Juifs et musulmans at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration

The natural follow up came in another exhibition, this time at the National Immigration Museum. The exhibition tracked the histories of Jews and Muslims living under French colonial rule, their journeys to France and their reception. My ever patient Muslim flatmate accompanied me here too, and we traded comments about our co-religionists’ changing fates - the favoring of Jews over Muslims under the Crémieux Decree, the swift reversal of fates under Vichy statutes (which persisted months after liberation) and the collective failure of the French State to- wards all new arrivals in the postwar years. Thinking about these exhibitions, a quote from Isaac Deutscher lingers in my head, as he laments his prior “confidence in European society and civilisation, which that society and civilisation [had] not justified.”.

Two other exhibitions really cemented that for me: ‘Paris pour École, 1905-1940’ at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, and ‘Lettres à Camondo’ at the Musée Nissim de Camondo. The two were very different in content - one contemporary ceramics in a Louis XVI style manor, the other paintings and drawings by Chagall, Soutine, and Modigliani among others - but shared this same narrative arc. They show Jews arriving in France, falling in love with it, and ultimately being betrayed. Many of the lives within both stories end in Auschwitz, via Drancy.

Paris pour École explored the incredible contribution made by emigre artists, largely Jews, to modern art in Paris. Centered around a repurposed wine cellar built by Gustave Eiffel (really!), some of the most exciting work of the earlier Twentieth Century emanated from these squalid studios, as well as various Yiddish ‘zines. Far too many of these artists’ plaques ended in 1943 and many of their stories and work remain lost - the exhibition ended with a poem by Chagall - ‘To the martyred artists’. ‘Lettres à Camondo’ told a very different story, of the heir to an Ottoman Jewish banking family, infatuated with French patrimony, who donates his collection to the state after his son’s death fighting for France in the First World War. His loyalty is repaid with the deportation of all his surviving descendents. However intoxicating nationalism and imperialism can be, history suggests that they have never been kind to Jews in the long run. This is not to say we must live our lives in a state of constant dread, but a reminder that we can do better. As Israel’s new government embraces the global nationalist right and moves closer to a system of colonial domination of the Occupied Territories, I hope that these lessons from France might serve as a cautionary tale.