Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust

Historical analysis of Jewish leadership during the Holocaust period, often with a sharply accusatory message, has now come to France.' Controversy began in 1980, when Maurice Rajsfus, a leftwing journalist whose immigrant parents were murdered in the Holocaust, published Des Juifs dans la collaboration, a harsh indictment of established Jewry, whom he accused of sacrificing foreign Jews while pursuing their own, class-based interests. Since then, we have learned considerably more. Jacques Adler, who survived the war and participated as a young man in a Jewish unit of the Communist resistance, has published a much more careful study, an abridgment of his doctoral thesis at the University of Melbourne. An historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Richard Cohen, has edited the remarkable wartime diary of Raymond-Raoul Lambert, arguably the most important French Jewish official in contact with the Vichy government and the Germans during the war. In addition, Cohen has just completed an extensive analysis of the Vichy-imposed Jewish council, a book that should appear soon. Several other investigations, including some studies of the Jewish resistance movements, have put the issue into wider perspective.2

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