Part of this process involves a debate over two exceptionally painful and poignant questions: complicity and resistance. Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from Nazism in the 1930s, did more than anyone else to open this debate twenty-five years ago with her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Having covered the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker, Arendt reflected on the reaction of the Jewish communities under Nazi control to the prospect of impending destruction. Her conclusions were melancholy and unflattering. She argued, first, that there was a significant element of Jewish complicity in the Nazi extermination program through the agency of the Jewish councils (Judenräte) set up by the Nazis as their link with Jews in the conquered territories. In an attempt to save a portion of their communities from the Holocaust, the Judenräte were prepared to strike deals with the Nazis which delivered up large numbers for deportation and death, refusing to face the unspeakable reality that the Nazi aim was to exterminate all Jews. Arendt argued, further, that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was insignificant and that this was shameful. Her conclusions, that the Eichmann trial had been staged to solve the Jewish conscience, and that Eichmann himself was too insignificant to warrant the attention given to him, understandably outraged and horrified many Jews. The large flow of literature concerning the Holocaust since Arendt’s book illustrates the continuing preoccupation with these two central questions. The results have been a much profounder understanding of the appalling choices faced by the Judenräte, as well as detailed documentation of numerous examples of Jewish armed resistance, even within the extermination camps.

Jacques Adler’s book, written by a survivor of the Jewish resistance to Nazism in France, illuminates the way in which these processes operated within the Franco-Jewish community. Unlike Hannah Arendt, Adler is not concerned to praise or to blame; understanding and explanation are his objectives throughout the book. As he writes, ‘the choice of policies finally adopted by the Jewish organizations to counter the German and Vichy challenges can only be understood if we examine the reasons that led them to follow such a course of action’.

Adler identifies three basic strategies associated with major groups within the Jewish community. First was the legalistic approach taken by the Central Consistory, the official leadership body of the Jewish community. The Consistory dates from the Napoleonic period, when Jews were granted civil rights. It was an ‘establishment’ body having close links with the French government. Its president, Jacques Helbronner, had been associated with Marshal Petain, head of the Vichy government, during the 1914–18 and was a member of the Conseil d’Etat the highest French legal and judicial body. The Consistory pinned its faith on the assumption that the Vichy regime would protect the established Jewish community, which could be dissociated from the large number of immigrant Jews (mainly from Eastern Europe) who had come to France between the two world wars. In effect, it was prepared to abandon the immigrants to their fate under the Nazis because they were not ‘Frenchmen’.

The second strategy was pursued by a diverse group of organizations representing both ‘French’ and immigrant Jews (although mainly the latter) linked in the Amelot Committee (so-called because it was formed at a meeting in the Rue Amelot in Paris). The Amelot Committee was primarily concerned to protect the lives and welfare of the immigrant Jews, and also to build up resistance groups using both legal and illegal methods. Its position was that ‘the only way to meet the crisis was for the Jews themselves to mobilize their human and material resources and that in the final analysis the Jews could only depend upon themselves’.

The third strategy was that of the Communists, mostly immigrants, who were primarily concerned with supporting the activities of the French Communist Party (PCF) in its campaign of resistance against the Nazis. At all times, Adler notes, ‘the Communist leadership acted as part of the French Communist Resistance’. They attacked German lines of communication, not the trains taking the Jews to the death camps. Moreover, their obvious subordination to the political line of the PCF led to their isolation from the Jewish population. It also led to disaster, because in July 1943 the Jewish Communist organization in Paris was virtually destroyed by the Gestapo. Had the PCF allowed them to leave and disperse, the sacrifice of hundreds of Jewish Communist activists could have been avoided.

This painful and tragic episode has become the subject of renewed discussion in France since the arrest and trial of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo commander in Lyons. It is widely said in France that many people in authority did not want the trial because it would raise too many questions about their own actions during the war, and that the PCF is not anxious to reopen the controversies about its subservience to Stalin’s policies.

Adler’s views are not entirely clear. On the one hand, he regards the Communist strategy as ‘the only one that would have best succeeded in frustrating the murderous Nazi plan’, but he also underlines the serious consequences of the refusal by the Jewish Communist leadership to recognize that Nazism did not treat the Jews like other Frenchmen. As a member of the Resistance, he may have felt the same ambivalence at the time, and perhaps it remains with him.

He is not, however, ambivalent about the policy of the Central Consistory and its subsidiary Judenräte organization, UGIF, created at the behest of the Vichy government, in trying to save French Jewry at the expense of the immigrants. Recent Jewish historiography in Australia has focused strongly on the lukewarm attitude of the established Jewish community towards refugees from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. The anger and bitterness of the immigrants, who now constitute a majority within the Jewish community, is clearly reflected in this literature, which also has its counterparts in the United States and to a lesser extent in Britain. Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish writer who survived Auschwitz, uses an ancient rabbinical injunction as the title of his book about the Jewish resistance in Russia: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?’