The privilege of sharing the same tormentors only reinforced the Protestants’ feelings of solidarity with the Jewish people. Not surprisingly, then, as the evidence of Dreyfus’ innocence began to accumulate, Huguenots were disproportionately represented among the captain’s defenders. This is not to say that Catholics were absent from the fight; indeed the most heroic figure of the affair, and the one most instrumental in bringing the truth to light, was a conservative Catholic named Colonel Georges Picquart. Nonetheless, among Christians, only Huguenots as a group sided with the cause of truth and justice in the case of Alfred Dreyfus. Protestant parishes wrote to the captain’s wife to express their support. The Protestant Senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, seconded by his nephew Charles Risler and fellow Huguenots Gabriel Monod, Francis de Pressensé, Raoul Allier, and Ferdinand Buisson, led the political campaign for a retrial. Finally, when the question of a retrial came to parliament, only one conservative member voted in its favor: Conrad de Witt, a son-in-law to former prime minister François Guizot, another Protestant. De Witt knew very well that this vote would be the end of his career. Nevertheless, like many of his fellow Protestants, he placed the defense of the Jews before social and professional considerations.

The most recent outburst of solidarity with the Jews took place forty years later, in the 1930s, as a wave of murderous anti-Semitism swept through Germany and then all of Europe. Protestant writer after writer waged a fierce intellectual and theological battle against Jew hatred, pointing out the absurdity of its Christian variety. The most moving of these many texts is the one by Pastor Freddy Durrleman, broadcast on Radio-Paris a few weeks after Hitler’s ascent to power: “All the nations in the world have spilled Jewish blood like water,” said Durrleman. “Brothers of Israel, the so-called Christian world has sinned against you, and for this we are humbled and repentant…. It is an honor for me, who am not of Israel, to publicly state my admiration and gratitude to those who were, on the whole, the best and greatest part in the whole history of mankind’s minds and hearts: The prophets of old Israel.”²¹

After the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, however, words were obviously not enough. While the Vichy government joined enthusiastically in the Germans’ genocidal agenda, Protestant institutions tried in vain to intervene on the Jews’ behalf. The diary of Pastor Marc Boegner, then-president of the Protestant Federation, traces his repeated attempts to convince Pétain to change his “Jewish policy.”²² René Gillouin, a far-right Huguenot and until then a personal friend of Pétain, made similar repeated (though useless) attempts on behalf of the Jews, eventually cutting off all ties with him when his pleas went unanswered.²³

Others understood that pleas alone would lead to nothing and decided to act. Some of these acts were purely symbolic, yet brave nonetheless. An example is that of the student Henri Plard, who attended Protestant services with a yellow star sewn to his shirt and spent three months imprisoned in Drancy, the French concentration camp, for being a “friend of the Jews.”²⁴ Perhaps most significantly, however, several organized networks were established by Protestant institutions to save Jews from the Nazis.

At the Oratoire parish in Paris, for example, Pastor Paul Vergara and his assistant Marcelle Guillemot smuggled more than sixty Jewish children to safety by hiding them with Huguenot families. My great-grandparents, Emily and Marc Pernot, and their daughter (and my grandmother) Elisabeth, were among the families who risked everything to save these children, and looked after them with love and care during their stay in their home. In 1943, however, the Oratoire network was dismantled by the Gestapo, and its members went into hiding. Raoul Girardet, my grandfather, fought the occupiers as a member of the Resistance. He was captured in March 1944 and sentenced to deportation. The train in which he was heading to Dachau in June was stopped momentarily on account of America’s bombing of the tracks; Raoul managed to escape and hid in the woods. Had he not been successful, I would not be here to tell his story, for the tracks were quickly repaired and the prisoners who arrived at Dachau immediately killed. But then, if Raoul hadn’t taken the ultimate risk, I, his grandson, would be a lesser man today.

But perhaps the most moving example of Protestant efforts on behalf of French Jewry occurred in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small, all-Protestant town in southern France. There, the whole community gave haven to more than three thousand Jews, mostly children, during the war. When a family volunteered to hide a child, Pastor André Trocmé would say, “I will bring you tomorrow the Old Testament that you have asked for.” Nazi patrols came in search of the Jews repeatedly, but all were safely hidden. Everybody knew, but no one ever spoke.

Regrettably, however, the leadership of the Reformed Church, the Huguenots’ official body, has of late adopted a more distant tone towards the State of Israel. This surprising estrangement can be partly explained by the Huguenots’ recent acceptance into the French establishment. As Catholic hatred waned to “residual” levels, some Protestants, especially the socially elite, may have felt that echoing the majority’s prejudices was a legitimate price to pay for that acceptance. Thus have several Protestant leaders, such as left-wing politician Pierre Joxe,²⁵ joined in the Israel bashing.

Part of the new coldness towards Israel can also be explained by the opposite phenomenon in Huguenot history: That is, not by a break with Huguenot traditions, but rather by an ill-informed feeling of continuity. Until recently, the victim status enjoyed by the Palestinians led some French Protestants to look past their theological roots to the idea of a compulsory “solidarity with the victim.” Thus did they transfer onto the Palestinians what they interpreted as a historical sympathy for the underdog, who is viewed, according to the discourse of modernity, as somehow more “pure” than the stronger party. Calvin, of course, would have laughed at the idea that anyone, powerful or not, could be considered pure. Moreover, in Israel’s comparatively decent behavior towards its enemies, the Reformer would likely have seen yet one more proof that God shows his love for the Jews by giving them the strength to overcome, to a large degree, the deep corruption that is the lot of all humans. But then, in one of history’s greatest ironies, Calvin was dropped long ago from the list of required reading in French Protestant circles.

This ignorance, in fact, has led to the most preposterous of public stances among many Protestants today. The intellectual Jean Baubérot, who as a young man was a member of the Jewish-Christian Friendship Association, changed his tack after the 1967 war and published a hastily written condemnation of Israel.²⁶ For a while, some Protestants also identified with the situation of Muslim minorities in Europe, which reminded them of their own past. During the latest Intifada, for instance, the Reformed Church sent two “special representatives” to live for several months in the Palestinian territories and report back on their experiences. The first representative, Pastor Gilbert Charbonnier, spent six months in Ramallah and managed to see only “oppression”—apparently, he was blind to the joyful demonstrations in the street whenever Jews were murdered. Far too embarrassing for the Church, he was replaced by the youthful and well-meaning Carola Cameran, who returned only with pat appeals for peace and is not, thankfully, encumbered by the same ideological judgments.

As the seriousness of militant Islam’s threat to the West has become clearer, more and more Protestants are returning to their philo-Semitic roots. For example, Jeanne-Hélène Kaltenbach, an intellectual who spent most of her life engaging with Muslim leaders, even co-writing with her husband a book heralding the coming of a moderate, civilized Islam,²⁷ changed her views after September 11; one year to the day after that event, she published a damning indictment of France’s appeasement towards radical Islam’s agenda.²⁸ Even Baubérot, though not yet really a Zionist, has expressed his regret for the excessive tone of his 1971 book.

And there is reason to believe that even more Protestants will soon see the light: Not even these last few, overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian decades can succeed in changing the Protestant’s deepest mindset. We are, after all, the ones who suffered at the hands of the dragonnades, and the ones whose ancestors refused to relent under pressure from the greatest king on earth; surely, we owe it to our brave ancestors to live up to their example. Above all, however, we must remember that our religious beliefs offer us no rewards for obeying human authorities, be they a church, a state, or the sacrosanct Majority Opinion. Only by acting in conformity with our true religious beliefs—which, in turn, requires a strength that can only be God-given—can we hope to come down on the side of truth and justice.

We are not many. But we French Huguenots—or, at least, those of us who know our own history—are linked with the Jewish people by too many bonds of culture, history, and religious beliefs to betray that old alliance. The world is now experiencing a new wave of Jew hatred, with many Muslims hoping openly for a new Holocaust and most Europeans all too willing to let one happen. The most tenacious, vilest, and oldest of hatreds is reaching a new high. In such dark and troubled times, may the God of Israel give us the strength to proclaim our everlasting gratitude to the Jews. May he give us the grace, which we do not deserve, of sharing their torments today and their victory tomorrow.

 

Armand Laferrère is a former adviser to the French minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a member of the board of directors of the Franco-Israeli Friendship Association. His last essay in AZURE was “Rethinking International Law” (AZURE 22, Autumn 2005).

Notes:

1. Compare That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) to later texts, such as Against the Sabbatarians (1538).

2. The accusation of “literalism” is, of course, outrageous when one keeps in mind the extraordinary variety of interpretations of the Jewish Bible in the talmudic and rabbinic traditions. Ignorance of the Talmud, and a systematic refusal to learn about it, may indeed be the largest blind spot in the history of Christian thought.

3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989), book 2, ch. 16, p. 505, book 3, ch. 14, pp. 770, 772, book 3, ch. 23, p. 958.

4. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2:16, p. 509.

5. Théodore de Bèze, Sermons on the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus-Christ, 1590, quoted in Patrick Cabanel, Jews and Protestants in France: A Friendship of Choice, 16th-21st Centuries (Paris: Fayard, 2004), p. 26 [French].