Marc Bloch must be understood in the loyalty to the Nation of the Jewish Alsatians-Mosellans, like his parents who opted for France after the lost war which had amputated the nation.
The word Jew uttered today, after the genocide and the creation of the State of Israel, obviously does not refer to what it meant for the young student at the École Normale Supérieure at the beginning of the 20th century and then in his responsibilities as an intellectual, as an active and reserve officer, and even less to what he had to endure from July 1940 when he became an outcast of a “French State” which excluded Jews from society.
Marc Bloch’s Judaism is, however, often reduced to the quote: “I only ever claim my origin in one case: in front of an anti-Semite”, which he wrote in his book The Strange Defeat, which reinvents the Israelite as a Sartrean Jew avant la lettre.
As if declaring himself Jewish consisted for him only of facing insults and redeeming his flouted honor, the better to prove that he was a “good Frenchman”. The modest “of Jewish origin” that some like to use because it says everything and nothing about Bloch’s Judaism.
Generation of the Dreyfus affair
“I am Jewish” is a positive statement, which does not renounce the capital letter which in French is used for the people, not for religion.
To know which Jew Marc Bloch was, we must look to the rest of his life, going back to his grandfather Marc, whose first name he bears, a teacher at the Jewish community school in Strasbourg after having been the only Jewish student at the teacher training college. We must remember his membership in what he called “the forefront of the generation of the Dreyfus affair”, in republican commitment.
If he knew well that the “Affaire” had been a peak of anti-Semitism and a catalyst for Jewish identity, Marc Bloch also made it a marker of the greatness of the Republic, which can betray and wrongly condemn, but knows how to find within it the men capable of leading it back to the right path of truth and honor, which was true until 1940.
The Nazi threat
He appreciates this secularization of the State, a French exception in Europe. At the other end of his life, when he wrote Témoignage 1940, which became the posthumous Strange Defeat, Marc Bloch said “I” in a militant act when the Jews, universalist French citizens, were excluded from society,
He had never taken the Nazi threat lightly and had discovered that his non-election to the Collège de France was motivated in part by anti-Semitism, including that of “upstart Jews”, as he said.
He then undertakes an x-ray of French society at the time of “the most atrocious collapse in our history”, and recalls the love story with his homeland of a fighter in two world wars, 1914-1918, 1939-1940, heir to a Jewish line of soldiers since the French Revolution.
“A world assailed by the most atrocious barbarity”
He was a victim of “the great iniquity”, dismissed from his post as professor at the Sorbonne, even before the “status of the Jews” of October 3, 1940. He and his wife Simonne would soon be deprived of their requisitioned Parisian apartment, robbed of all their possessions, even the children’s toys.
In his “testament” letter of March 18, 1941, Bloch returns to his relationship with Judaism. He does not want “Hebrew prayers” to be “recited” at his tomb.
On the other hand, he said loudly and firmly: “but it would be even more odious to me if in this act of probity no one could see anything that resembled a cowardly denial. I therefore affirm, if necessary in the face of death, that I was born Jewish; that I have never thought of defending myself from it nor found any reason to be tempted to do so. In a world assailed by the most atrocious barbarism, does not the generous tradition of the Hebrew prophets, which Christianity, in its purest form, took up to expand it, remain one of our best reasons to live, to believe and to fight? »
Resistant Jew
Invited to the New School for Social Research in New York, he renounced going there out of self-sacrifice for his family, because neither his older children nor his mother could benefit from a visa, while in the name of friendship and intellectual fidelity, he accepted, not without fighting with Lucien Febvre, that his Jewish name be withdrawn from the publication of the Annales.
In 1944, Otto Abetz triumphed in the arrest of the resistance fighter “French Jew named Block, whose pseudonym was Narbonne”. Narbonne, where, in the Middle Ages, there had been a “king of the Jews”. The historian had made truth his emblem, to the point of asking that “Dilexit veritatem” (“I have cherished the truth”) be engraved on his tomb, the motto of Ernest Renan, whose sayings on Judaism and the Talmud he annotated in 1917 in The History of the People of Israel.
A few years ago, one of his great-granddaughters who did not know Judaism placed a beautiful stone there to honor him. Since then, other visitors versed in the rites place pebbles next to the first, reinventor of tradition. There is no coincidence.
Annette Becker is the author, with Étienne Bloch, of Marc Bloch. History, war, the Resistance, Gallimard, 2006, 1,184 p., €33.
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