Dommage c'est comme ça le seconde article
In France the size of the Jewish population passed from 200 000 in 1930 to 300 000 in 1939, it was multiplied by 1.5 in 9 years only, for a national population of 41 millions, meanings that Jewish accounted for 0,7% of the French population. Most new comers were Ashkenazi Jews, massively came to France from 1920 onward, as result of revived antisemitism in Central Europe and Eastern. But also as a result of the Communist Revolution of 1917 in Russia.
The number of Sephadic Jews – from the Mediterranean countries or result of Inquisition in Spain, also known in France as l'Alliance Israëlite Universelle, which was an international association, committed the promotion of the Jewish religion on the one hand, and also the promotion of French. It managed a number a French speaking schools, lots of them in Greece and Turkey. In the early 1920's Turkey still had 100 000 Jews after WWI, as against only 20 000 today.
So in Britain many Jews settled from 1933 onward, clearly after Adolf Hitler's election. Not only from Germany and Austria (around 40 000), and 40 0000 from Poland, Hungaria, Czechoslovakia or indeed Italy. It is estimated that the size of the Jewish population in Britain passed from 297 000 in 1926 to 370 000 in 1938. Two thirds of whom living in the greater London area.
In France, despite the major contribution to intellectual, economic, or political life – with Jewish as Marc Chagall, Henry Bergson, André Maurois, André Citroën, or even Léon Blum – French Jews were the targets of different forms of Antisemitism. On the one hand a traditional form, which is present among the Bourgeoisie which perceived Jews as outsiders (as with Roman Catholics), and also on the other hand a more conjectural form influenced by the context of the day, from among vast swathes of the working classes. The vast majority of Jews that settled in France were manual workers, small-shops keepers, craftsman. The settlement of Jews have brought wages down and led the deterioration of the working conditions. Paradoxically, there was also the belief that Jewish capitalists dominated workers and exploited proletarians. Such stereotypes were actually fueled by the French Press.
As a result of that volatile climate, antisemitic groups known as “les ligues” in French, emerged in some places in the 1930's. The most famous groups were “les croix de feu”, “les camelots du roi” a royalist group, “jeunesses patriotes”, “francisme” or even “l'Action Française”. All these groups advocated so called national preference policies in terms of employment, and indeed, the mandatory repatriation of migrants and especially of Jewish workers.
In Britain, hostility to Jews was not new either, they had become emancipated in 1858 only versus 1791 in France due to the Revolution. Just naming other cases of emancipation : 1830 in Greece, 1834 in the Netherlands, 1835 in Sweden, 1839 in the Ottoman Empire, 1849 in Denmark, 1871 in Germany and 1917 in Russia.
In Britain, hostility to Jews was fueled by the republication of the book “The Protocol of the elders of Ziou” which was an antisemitic oaks, a fake, which described a Jewish plan for global domination. This was taken very seriously by upper middle class newspapers read by the elites. That book proved a great influence on British antisemitism and fascism in the 1930's. The most influential group of fascists in the UK was the BUF, “the British Union of Fascists” founded in 1932 by the first cousin of Queen Elizabeth and a one time member of the Conservative and Labour parties. Initially the main inspiration behind BUF had been Italian Fascism and Mussolini’s personality. But increasingly in the late 1930's they became virulently antisemitic, fans of Hitler. As a result, the BUF became in 1936 “The British Union of Fascists and National Socialists” and it changed again in 1937 as the “British Union”. Another group was the “Imperial Fascist League”. But those groups never succeeded in rallying many members. It claimed at most at 57 000 members, so a limited membership, the members were known as the Black Shirts. They never stood any general election.
