Clean Claws, Kosher Beavers, and New French Jews: Class, Ethnicity, and the Eclaireurs Israélites de France between the World Wars

In 1929, at the first meeting of the national council of the Éclaireurs israélites de France, France’s Jewish Scouting movement, Robert Gamzon, “Concerned Beaver,” announced to his fellow ÉI leaders: “we are not yet very Jewish, nor are we very ‘Scout,’ but we are trying to become both, and to be surpassed by the generation we want to elevate.” Gamzon, who had founded the ÉI in 1923 at the age of seventeen, articulated a physical and pedagogical program aimed to regenerate French Jewry from its source: youth.  In a world ravaged by four years of war, largely on French soil, the ÉI reflected broader French and European interests in youth movements. Yet in its aspirations as a Jewish project, the ÉI reveals diverse and lively considerations of a postwar circumstance particular to France’s Jewish population: the immigration of thousands of Eastern European Jews.

As Jewish social workers labored to ameliorate poor Eastern European migrants’ lives, the ÉI’s youthful organizers drew on outside models, especially Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts, and developed their own programs to fortify France’s native-born middle-class Jews against living images of broader communal decline. However, a new French Jew that was “always prepared” was a muddled and multivalent vision in violent flux in the interwar period.  Using organizational press, and oral sources, this paper argues that prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, the ÉI operated as an active laboratory for a peculiar French-Jewish cultural experiment that has escaped the purview of many scholars. The regeneration of French Jewish life in the interwar period was not simply a goal pursued by religious communal authorities, intellectuals, or elite philanthropists with regard to poor Jewish immigrants, but rather a sundry cultural, religious, and social project embraced by ordinary, young middle-class Jews and their families in Paris, and beyond.