Contradictions: Contextualizing Social Solidarity and Jewish Exclusion in World War II France

[...]some argue that the more apt comparison is not between Nazism's genocidal agenda and today, but rather between modern politics and the collaborationist Vichy regime.1 American politicians supportive of the "morally disastrous and legally dubious acts" of Donald Trump have been labeled "Vichy Republicans" for their willingness to make accommodations to Trump's exclusionary ideologies and values.2 While America under Trump is not completely analogous to France under occupation by a foreign power, if we extend the parallels from politics into the realm of society in times of extreme stress, the comparison with Vichy still holds. [...]Sémelin argues that Jews in France found significant support despite state-sanctioned antisemitism and that, "the maintenance of these social bonds between Jews and non-Jews was paramount when it came to thwarting a genocidal enterprise whose intention was to create an ever-widening gulf between the designated victims and the general population. "11 Calling this widespread movement of spontaneous help offered to Jews "social reactivity," Sémelin concludes, "These scattered and multiform responses from individual 'helpers' threw a protective and beneficent mantle over a group of people who had become the pariahs of the regime. The Vichy regime did not enact any "new basic anti-Jewish legislation" after December 11, 1942, but 1943 and 1944 still held disastrous consequences for thousands of Jews in France.16 The year 1942 was the height of deportations from France: 27,500 Jews in the greater Paris region were deported to death camps that year, and another 11,000 would be sent to the east from the capital in 1943 and 1944.17 As Sémelin notes, the difference between the numbers of French and foreign Jews deported is significant, a fact that he attributes to differences in social integration and networks.