North African Jews at the Pletzl: An Unrecognized and Forgotten Ordeal (1920–1945)
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During the period between the two World Wars, a Jewish community from North Africa, mainly from Algeria, settled in the Parisian Yiddishland. The people of this community chose the southern part of the Marais district, on the other side of the Rivoli street, and thus succeeded in maintaining their ways of life unchanged, that were the habits and customs of the country they left years and even decades earlier. Owing to the power of these specific characteristics, the relations with their Yiddish-speaking coreligionists from Central and Oriental Europe, who were then more numerous in this area of Paris, were seriously restricted. And this, in spite of the fact that acculturation and modernity are already operating among these “oriental” Jews, for instance mixed marriages which will prove of great help during the Occupation. Moreover, some features which belonged in common to the Jews and the Arabs of North Africa – the Arabic language, certain surnames and names – will sometimes contribute to bring confusion and disarray among the persecutors. It remains that imprisonment in camps by the Nazis meant losses for many families, which, because they had crossed over the Mediterranean Sea in better times, shared the fatal destiny of the Jews in France as well as the hardships of after-war: plundered or missing property, flats taken up.
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