Medieval French Jews

In an article in the Winter/Spring 2026 issue of Inroads, I discussed The Emperor of Lies, Steve Sem-Sandberg’s remarkable book about the Łódź ghetto, in the context of my growing up in Canada after World War II as the child of Polish Jews from Łódź who were the only ones in their families to survive the Holocaust. Here I consider what would be entailed by expanding the story to that of the wider community in which my parents grew up.

Five years ago I published Participant Observer, a memoir covering the years of my political involvement beginning as a university student in Canada in the 1960s. At the time and until recently, I never seriously considered going further back to the story of the generations that preceded mine. I had other writing priorities and the geographical and historical research required was clearly beyond my capacity. But this has changed: with AI, it has now become possible to systematically scan available relevant information to enter the wider community of my forebears.

I never learned much from my parents about their families: it was clearly too painful for them to remember, and they did not wish to burden my brother Arthur and me. Yet their relationship to their new Canadian home was constrained by those experiences; however welcoming their new North American home, they identified first as Jews. Beyond business and family, the priority was supporting the Jewish community at home and, increasingly, in Israel.

But Arthur and I were not bound by these limitations. Second- and third-generation Canadian Jews such as Lea Roback even provided us with role models who made common cause with the wider progressive movements in Canada. And there were many more in the United States. As I recounted in my autobiography. I discovered the progressive Jews in “the movement” when I was based at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s.

Thus, my relationship to the wider society was not comparable to that of my parents, something that made them both proud and uncomfortable. Returning to Quebec in the early 1970s after completing my graduate studies in Ontario, I was welcome to assume my Canadian (or – by the sixties – Québécois) identity. The same was true for Arthur.

Of course, having been brought up in a Jewish environment, we were especially attuned to Jewish history and culture – and Israeli developments, which we could not discuss with our father, who was becoming active in right-wing Zionism. After his too-early death in 1971, we watched even mainstream Jewish organizations defend the indefensible, resorting to calling Israel’s critics antisemites. Ironically, as we found ourselves having to disassociate ourselves from the actions and assertions of Israel and its supporters, we were in effect reasserting our Jewishness.

The Holocaust and Zionism

This is the current context in which I have been thinking and reading about the Jewish past, to approach a question beyond that explored in my autobiographical writings: How has the Holocaust affected our understanding of the historical relationship between the Jews and those around them?

In my autobiography I briefly draw attention to impressive German colleagues whom I came to know as a young academic, colleagues who faced up to what their parents’ generation had done. I have frequently been impressed by how, in apparent contrast to most Austrians and certain eastern Europeans, Germans like Hartmund Lutz, professor at the University of Greifswald in the former East Germany, made no effort to whitewash their country’s past; quite the contrary.

Over the years, I participated in activities organized by German diplomats, drawing lessons from the Nazi past. In 1997, I took an intensive summer German language course in Staufen, in Germany’s southwest. There I came to know Gerhard Kahl. Gerhard, retired from international development work, recounted how during the war his family had sheltered and helped German Jews escape to nearby Switzerland.

It was then that I began to think systematically about the effect of the Holocaust on our understanding of the history of Jews’ relations with their European neighbours. In the mainstream Jewish community, the result was to effectively end the contestation of Zionism. Zionism in interwar Europe, to which my father was enlisted as a teenager, was contested not only by religious separatists awaiting the messiah but also by many secular Jews who foresaw a future for their people in which they would constitute an ethnoreligious group no more but no less legitimate than the national majority.

For more than a generation, coinciding with the adult lives of my parents, the Holocaust put an end to such an aspiration. Apart from ultra-Orthodox Jews still waiting for the messiah, Zionism was now effectively uncontested. As we were growing up in the postwar decades, our father attained a standard of living in Canada that allowed him to support Israel more, he assured us, than if we lived in Israel with its socialist restrictions. He was disappointed, but sophisticated enough not to be surprised, that for many Jews of my brother’s and my generation who grew up after World War II, “Israel right or wrong” would no longer suffice.

Had there been no Hitler …

I end here on a question, a thought experiment: Just as the Nazi experience altered our understanding of the relationship of the Jews to the gentile world in the decades after the war, could it also have altered our understanding of what came before? Had there been no Hitler, no Holocaust, the world prior to the arrival of the Nazis would still be the same, but what of our understanding of it?

Had the Nazis failed to take over Germany, a real possibility at the time, would European Jews’ understanding of their own history differ from that taught in light of the Holocaust? Would they not have questioned the legitimation of their passivity – God’s will – vis-à-vis antisemitic violence: the Inquisition, pogroms …

Accepting that until the modern era in Europe there was little room for any groups that rejected Christianity, we are left with the question of the Jews’ relationship to the gentile world after the Reformation: were they still bound to be victims? The answer, I suggest, lies in the notion of the “chosen people,” the assumption that that there are divine expectations unique to the Jews that encompassed choices built on the assumption that God will take care of us when we are in danger – if not in this world, then in the next.

To the extent that leadership in the Jewish community lay in the hands of clergy who fostered the chosen people myth, concessions violating God’s rules to those making threats were ruled out. So were compromises with one side or the other in periods of conflict. Instead, the Jews in effect invited attacks from both, and gained a reputation as unreasonable if not fanatical.

After the Holocaust, Zionism replaced the chosen people as the unchallengeable unifying myth. As I write in March, Israel’s soldiers are on the offensive against its neighbours. Hardly a promising context in which to ask such problematic questions about the past.