The Acculturation of French Israelites to Zionism in the 1920s

French Jews, mainly left-wing notables, remained for a long time deaf to the lure of Zionism because of their commitment to the ideals of French Judaism. However, following the First World War and during the 1920s, they proved better disposed toward it even if this was a period during which French Judaism was at its zenith. To explain this paradox, this paper analyzes the international circumstances, including the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine under the aegis of the League of Nations thanks to the peaceful ideal embodied in this institution, national factors such as the apparent obliteration of anti-Semitism, which allowed for a more audacious definition of one’s identity, and especially the ideological process of hurriedly constructing a highly peculiar form of French Zionism through a humane, peace-oriented, and universal definition of a Zionism that, curiously, was all the more acceptable as it owed much to the old French Judaism. However, this French Zionism, which irrigated the Jewish Awakening, did not last. Strongly linked to the optimism of the decade following the war, it was unable to survive the arrival of the dark years.