A disproportionately large number of French Jews took part in the fight against the German and Vichy authorities during World War II. While many did so out of a conviction that they were fighting for France’s true values, writes Reneé Poznanski, they met suspicion on the part of many of their fellow resisters:
One could hardly be surprised to find a large majority of Jews on the side of those who defended the Third Republic and opposed the new authoritarian government that emerged following the [fall of France in 1940], a government that rejected republican values. If the Resistance was the true France, the Jews, otherwise rejected by the France of Vichy, could integrate themselves in that true France as in the past. . . .
In spite of all this, the massive presence of Jews in the Resistance remained extremely discrete. Raymond Aron was criticized after the war for having given minimal coverage to the fate of the Jews in La France Libre, the magazine for which he was responsible in London. He explained this by saying that he was acting as a Frenchman and added that he had probably spoken little about it precisely because he was Jewish: as a Jew he did not want to feed adverse propaganda. But in his writing he also evokes a tacit “convention of silence” that reigned in London and discouraged explicit discussion of the persecution of Jews. Jewish résistants feared that the Resistance might be seen as essentially Jewish and preferred to rest in the shadows.
This declared desire for integration and an avoidance of specific objectives was also fed by the existence of a widespread xenophobia mixed with a more or less latent anti-Semitism throughout the French population. The idea that there was a “Jewish problem” was universally accepted in France, even within the Resistance itself. A certain number of movements founded . . . to struggle against the German occupation took some time to separate themselves from Marshal Pétain, whose reforms they at least partly supported. This climate also explains the discretion with which Jewish résistants merged with the French Resistance in general, sometimes even muffling personal tragedies—it was thus that [the Jewish Resistance leader] Raymond Aubrac said nothing about the arrest and deportation of his father. Added to this was the desire to prove, in the face of anti-Semitic stereotypes, that Jews were not political manipulators but rather active participants in combat.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/201308/was-the-french-resistance-jewish