André Spire, France’s Prophet of Dis-Assimilation

André Spire (1868-1966) lived multiple rich lives across two centuries, which were long enough to see himself vindicated. Poet, activist, civil servant, negotiator, he became the enfant terrible of French Jewry upon the publication of his Poèmes Juifs in 1908. Proclaiming a renaissance of Jewish art and literature in France, his poetry collection was a succès à scandale that mocked the bourgeois quest for social acceptance and economic gain, repudiating the dominant ethos of assimilation and embracing the Jewish nationalist cause. Life imitated art: He soon emerged as France’s foremost Zionist, speaking at the Paris Peace Conference and securing his country’s endorsement of the Balfour Declaration. Not the sort to push himself to the front of the parade, he assumed secondary titles in the organizations he had himself founded. This aversion to self-promotion has sometimes occluded his central role in these events.

Ever since emancipation, Jewish existence has oscillated between the poles of assimilation and return. Like the French Jews of the belle époque, American Jews have seen their certainties melt into air since the Hamas pogrom. Trusted institutions—chief among them the universities—seethe with crude anti-Jewish resentment and prejudice only lightly disguised as a hatred for “genocidal Zionism.” The dream of an insouciant, seamless integration in which Jewish particularity can be easily celebrated and easily evaded has been shattered. And in that nightmare has begun a responsibility to reassess our relationship to the majority society and how it wishes to define us. Spire’s poetry and prose—in addition to his exceptional life—ought to serve as a guide in that process.

Born to a family of Franco Jewish industrialists in the eastern city of Nancy, Spire had an enchanted upbringing—excursions into the woods, instruction in sports, immersion in literature, music, and the humanities. Judaism, in the attenuated form generated by a century of assimilation, was a garment worn lightly—ever present but hardly exigent. French Jews expressed a serene confidence in these middle decades of the 19th century—the new republican regime born from the defeat from the Franco-Prussian War seemed to have cleared away the rubble of la France ancienne of throne and altar. The French Revolution’s implicit accord with the Jews—acculturation in exchange for admission—appeared to have succeeded. No Jewish community in the world could rival the French Jews in terms of political rights and social mobility.

The French Jewish fusion reached its apogee in the penultimate decade of the 19th century—on the centenary of the Revolution, rabbis delivered sermons hailing the event as “a great social Passover” and saluting France as the heir of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth. But the antisemitic tempest’s nimbus had already appeared at France’s eastern horizon. In 1888, Maurice Barrès, the city’s literary icon and exponent of romantic nationalism, smeared Spire’s father, Édouard, as a representative of “Jewish Capital.” At a real estate auction, one of Barrès’ henchmen tried to outbid Édouard for a house, declaring “this French home will not be owned by that dirty Jew.” André, then performing his compulsory military service in a mounted division, challenged the offender to a duel. He moved to Paris and earned a spot through competitive examination on the Conseil d’Etat, the prestigious legal body that ensures legislation respects the constitution.

Spire soon attracted the notice of the antisemites at La Libre Parole, Édouard Drumont’s notorious penny press, who slimed him and other Jews as having cheated to secure their position on the Conseil d’État. He met insolence with intransigence, demanding that the author face him in a duel; Spire, as he would later recall, received “three centimeters of iron in the forearm” for his moxie.

The fin-de-siècle in Paris had raised conviviality to an art form—the café-concert on the square, the refined conversation in the salon, the costume ball at the dance hall. French Jews were no strangers to these rococo delights—Jacques Offenbach practically created the comic opera; Paris’ greatest salonnières, Geneviève Straus (Georges Bizet’s wife) and Léontine Lippmann (muse to Anatole France), were Jews. But André was a Spire, not a Swann (though he did count Proust as an acquaintance!). He detested the drawing rooms and table settings of the bourgeois; he preferred the factory floor and scanty cupboards of the proletariat.

Spire’s philanthropic instinct arose from his outrage at the inequalities of industrial society, to which he had been exposed at an early age through his father’s business. Édouard Spire paid for workers’ compensation and maternity leave long before the law mandated it. But these were modest salves for the ravages of “the satanic mills.” André observed in his memoirs that in the factory “the ruddy, gay boys from school turn[ed] pale and jaundiced, flowers wilting straightaway; the girls becoming premature shriveled, embittered crones.”

Encountering the destitute of the capital, he and several colleagues decided to form a charitable organization, La Société des Visiteurs, which in today’s parlance would be termed a social services agency. The initiative, which helped tens of thousands of people over its 20-year run, tried to help its beneficiaries turn their lives around. The visitors consulted with the needy and determined what had caused their descent into poverty, e.g., an accident, an ailment, etc., and then provided funds and services to remedy for this. The organization arranged for doctors’ visits, personal hygiene and grooming, and children’s activities. Spire added on to this a popular education initiative, L’Enseignement mutuel, in order that bourgeois and proletarian might learn from each other—the former about the conditions of the lower classes, and the latter about the high culture of the age.

The Dreyfus affair, in which bourgeois liberals and socialist workers saved the French Republic from its monarchist, ultra-Montanist enemies, lent energy and urgency to Spire’s endeavors. Spire belonged to a generation of privileged men who discarded the economic liberalism of their fathers to clamor for labor rights and far-reaching social reform. Even as he still backed private charity, he increasingly believed that the state had to be the prime agent of economic uplift. He oriented his own career around that aim, transferring from the Conseil d’État to the Labor Ministry, where he conducted research into new regimes of factory inspection and labor arbitration.

Spire’s brief brought him to the East End of London. Westminster had adopted reforms to curb abuses against laborers who turned out piecework at home—many of these laborers happened to be Jewish women. Eastern European Jews had streamed in by the tens of thousands to the United Kingdom from the Russian Empire. Spire encountered a community whose Jewishness encompassed its national identity, language, culture, religion, and politics. He reveled in the East Enders’ vitality and unabashed expression of a distinct cultural identity.

French Jews, he now saw, had paid too high a price for their economic and social integration—having been accepted on sufferance after divesting themselves of pride of culture and origins. The French Revolution’s creation of a civic nation in which adherence to the rights of man mattered more than descent or religion could not be gainsaid. Spire never renounced the heritage of the 18th century, and framed his battle against antisemitism in terms of a wider war on racism and inequality. But the men of ’89 had conflated universalism and uniformity, equality and sameness. French Jews’ distinct past, he now saw, ought not be viewed as an impediment to a common present and future.

Spire’s desire to revise the brutal bargain of emancipation presaged his adoption of Zionism. Eastern European Jewish newcomers—whether to France or Britain—began to change the century-old conversation in both countries about emancipation and assimilation. The Zionist movement was making inroads among the nascent, burgeoning immigrant communities of Paris; the death in 1904 of its tragic hero, Theodor Herzl, intensified the discussion.

Spire declared himself a Zionist for the first time in a letter to his mother, dated Oct. 12, 1904. “I believe that the doctrine of assimilation is a false promise, and I have too much admiration for the Jewish race to desire its absorption. But a nation in perpetual exile cannot be happy. It needs a territory. Thus, I feel that I am a Zionist,” he reasoned. He continued: “I do not feel much enthusiasm to live with Poles [Polish Jews], but it would be much better to live with them than with many Christians … So, ‘next year in Jerusalem.’”

He elaborated further on his evolution in a second missive dispatched to his mother on Oct. 26, 1904: “Living in a new state would be very seductive to me … and above all working for the improvement of the Jews of the East and Russia. They cannot live in their country and when they emigrate, you curse them,” he admonished. “When a flood of Poles arrives in Nancy, I see all of you blanch. Because they disturb you in your blissful assimilation,” he added. He concluded that even French Jews content in their assimilation ought to embrace Zionism out of self-interest—a Jewish state would receive those Eastern European Jews who incensed antisemites upon their arrival in the West.

The next month, November 1904, marked a pivotal event: the appearance of the French translation of Israel Zangwill’s short story “Chad Gadya” in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Zangwill, a British Jewish dramatist and advocate of territorialism (i.e., the founding of a Jewish state in a land that was not necessarily Palestine), captured the anguish of many in the tale of an assimilated Jew returning home to Venice for a Passover Seder. The ceremonial meal, and one of its last songs, “Chad Gadya,” remind him of all that he lost in the brutal bargain of assimilation. Estranged from his native milieu and barred from full integration into broader European society, he drowns himself in a Venice canal.

Spire recounted a half-century later the tremendous effect the story had on him, recalling: “‘Chad Gadya’ revealed a profusion of images, captivated me with its multiple associations. It had the same effect on me as a crystal in an oversaturated liquid. This was no less than a return, a conversion … I became a Jew with a capital ´J.’ And in addition to a French poet, a Jewish poet, too.”

The appearance of Poèmes Juifs (1908) announced Spire’s debut as an unbending opponent of assimilation and indefatigable proponent of Zionism. The poet did not mince words, prefacing the collection with this verse: “You ask me why I love these pariahs / the sole proletariat for which I still can hope.”

Spire’s poems savaged the Franco Jewish consensus and the figure of the assimilated Jew. In “Assimilation,” he mocks a Jewish bourgeois who seeks to blend into the crowd. The poem’s unnamed protagonist scrutinizes himself for the slightest deviation from the norm—in deportment, speech, hand gestures, nose shape, hair texture—and reassures himself that he can fit in. The poet breaks in in the last stanzas to upbraid this French Jewish bourgeois:

You are so pleased with yourself!
Your nose is almost symmetrical, goodness me!
And then again, many Christians have a nose somewhat askew.


You are so pleased with yourself!
Your hair barely curls anymore, goodness me!
And then again not all Christians have straight hair.
You are so pleased with yourself!
You are almost no longer dolichocephalic!
And then again not all Christians have a rounded cranium!


You are so pleased with yourself!
Your facial expression is almost completely a cipher!
And then again many Christians move their face muscles!


You are so pleased with yourself!
Your shoulders and arms hardly gesticulate!
And then again Christians sometimes speak with their hands!


You are so pleased with yourself!
The Christians invite you to all their parties!
And you carry yourself almost as badly as they do!


In a button-down, polo, smoking jacket, or blazer,
You have learned to crow: “Delicious, Admirable!”
With the same aplomb as the rest of them!


You are so pleased with yourself!
They are taking you along with them to finish out the night,
There where all their amusements will end!


Hands full, mouths full,
They are having a grand time!


What are you doing in your corner, awkward and sad?
So pitiful, so contemptible
Jew, you lack nerve!


So many contortions, constraints,
So much avoidance to remain there.

Carry yourself correctly, do like the others
Or they will laugh at your nose.

And chase away your old noble soul,
Which even here seeks you out.

Spire’s dandy goes so far as to deny the realities of his own body in a bid for social admission. He amputates parts of his essential being—even according to Spire, his soul. And the operation does not succeed; a gaffe could result in him being noticed as a Jew and ridiculed for his appearance. Such a figure rates as affected and contemptible—he has relinquished his dignity and self-respect and failed to gain much in return.

The alternative to the lily-livered Israélite in Spire’s new mythos comes in the form of a new Jewish man ready to avenge the indignities of millennia. In “Écoute, Israel,” Spire advances an argument common to the Zionists of the age: The Jewish people must not patiently wait for their salvation in God’s good time. Rather, in a form of secular messianism, they must abandon the quiescence of the prophets and embrace the agency of the moderns. He concludes the poem—which in an Orthodox setting might be considered a blasphemy against Judaism’s holiest prayer—in this spirit:

Hear O Israel:
The torrents still disgorge round stones,
For the slings of future Davids,
The quarries are full of grindstones,
To sharpen the tips of your old swords,
You will find forges, hammers, anvils,
To repair the plowshares of your old carts,
And curved Brownings that roar at each shot.
Hear O Israel:
To arms!

In this poetry collection—the content of which proved so explosive that Spire had to find a second publisher—the artist strove to redefine French Jews’ relationship to France. Spire could not renounce the French canon on which he had been reared. He had no desire to cast aside the land and language of his birth—and as a poet, how could he do so. But he was also conscious that France, once the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, had a history of denigrating the figure of the Jew. He exhorted his fellow French Jews to resist forms of assimilation that entailed the community’s wholesale disappearance.

Toward this end, Spire subverted and reinterpreted the traditional image of the Jew. The two poems below are emblematic of this campaign. The first, treating the artistic depiction of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in the statues of the Strasbourg Cathedral, exalts the oft-scorned figure of the Jew. The second, at once an homage to and an accusation against France, insists on a right to what, in current parlance, might be termed biculturalism.

The Old Testament

She appeared before me last night—defeated, blind-folded, bowed and bent.
She appeared before me last night, as I saw her on the pillar of her cathedral, her pink sandstone hand resting on the snapped staff of her standard, the accursed one, her book overturned, her chaste waist encased in the folds of the tunic;
She appeared before me last night, the desolate one.


“It will all be for naught,” she said. “You will never truly love their theaters, their museums, their palaces, their divertissements.
Toward sadness, toward pain, you sank at a young age. Beauty will seem to you a luxury, luxury an abomination, distractions a theft.
Your neighbors, your friends, you will feel that you love them.
Really? But what sets your heart aflutter?
It is only when you hear a lightly rasping voice, see jittery hands, see piercing eyes.
When a voice requesting your aid cries out: ‘You owe me it.’
Because he alone is your brother, who has the same soul as you, who declares himself your peer.


You will want to sing the praises of the audacious and strong;
You will love only the dreamers unarmed against life.
You will try to listen to the merry songs of peasants, the abrupt step of soldiers, and the graceful circle dances of little girls.
You will have an ear only for the tears that fall from the four corners of the earth.”

To France

O adorable country,
You who have absorbed so many races,
Do you want to absorb me too?
Your language molds my spirit.
You obligate me to have a clarity of thought.
You force my face into a smile.
And your great well-tended plains,
Your managed forests,
Your forests where one no longer has any fear,
And the gentleness of your angles,
The slow rivers, towns, and vineyards.
Here I am almost well-nigh seduced.


Am I to love to your verbal jousting,
Your frills, ribbons;
The cafe-concerts, and the tiny theaters;
The decorations, the salons?
Am I to be sure of myself?
Am I to be rendered square and regular,
Like your vegetable patches?
Thin, extenuated, exhausted
Like the trimmed oaks of your hedgerows?


Am I to stretch myself out on the ground?
Like one of those peaceable apple trees?
Counting on one hand rhymed verses
For coquets decked out in ruffles?


Even politeness, me, too, you would like to render bland.
Humor, here it is to constrict my soul.
O warmth, o sadness, o passion, o folly!
The indomitable geniuses to whom I am promised
Where would I be without you?
Come to my aid now, and defend me against the implacable reason of this blissful land.

To the métier of the poet, Spire soon added the role of publicist, becoming one of the Zionist movement’s chief spokesmen in France. In a piece run in L’Opinion in 1913, he argued that Jewish nationalism represented a solution for the proletariat that was Eastern European Jewry. The arrival of Ostjuden in France—distinctive in their dress, speech, and manners—created a false impression that a large swathe of French Jewry had failed to acculturate. A Jewish state or national home would resolve such a predicament in “ridding [Western European Jewry] of the inevitable competition of a Jewish proletariat pushed from one country to the next by political oppression and economic misery.” Elsewhere, he mocked “this Jewish bourgeoisie that purports to be elite because it has burrowed a hole in the French bourgeoisie, complete with its mansions in posh quarters, limousines, and wintertime descents to the sun via Sud-Express and the Train-Bleu.”

Spire alternated between imploring the Jewish elite to aid the Jewish proletariat and excoriating them for not doing so. In 1918, as the fate of Palestine was being debated, he penned a history of the Zionist movement for the Revue de Paris, in which he deplored that the “Jewish masses” and “poor people” had been deserted by “leaders of men” who were either too selfish or not idealistic enough to take up the mantle.

The poet’s sorties against Franco Jewish officialdom grew more ferocious amid postwar deliberations on the status of Palestine. France vacillated on the correct position to adopt in regard to “the Jewish national home” as envisioned in the Balfour Declaration.

Spire, in assuming the post of secretary general for La Ligue des Amis du Sionisme, was sought out by elements in the government favorable to the movement. André Tardieu, Georges Clemenceau’s aide-de-camp at Versailles, chose the poet and civil servant as a conduit between Zionist leaders and the French government. French Jewry’s top honchos inveighed against the nationalists. In order to placate them, both French Jewish Zionists and anti-Zionists were invited to present their case at the peace conference. Spire spoke for the former, while Sylvain Lévi, a scholar of Sanskrit, professor at the College de France, and future president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle represented official Franco Judaism. Lévi warned that a Jewish national home could become a hothouse of “Bolshevism” and raised the specter of “dual nationality” endangering Western Jews. Chaim Weizmann, who was in the audience, refused to shake hands with Lévi, calling him a traitor.

Spire concurred, and painted a devastating portrait of the Franco Jewish grandee in a recollection penned soon after the event. Lévi had become a “poor servant of his country” and “an enemy of his race.” As the beneficiary of “a privileged situation” who belonged to “those small clans spending their lives between the Jardin des Plantes and the Boulevard Saint-Michel [the toniest sections of Paris]” he could not comprehend the plight of Eastern European Jewry, let alone the modern world. Lévi had indeed visited the Holy Land, but as a habitue of “the frosted panes of the College de France” had been “blinded by the sunlight of the Orient.” He had returned to France to regurgitate his own preconceptions. Spire encouraged Lévi to return to his bubble: “The peace is here. We are demobilizing. Everyone must go back to his place. The horse to the racetrack, the professor to his obscurity.”

Spire closed his essay by citing a Talmudic legend in which an ascetic leaves his cave and hectors the am haaretz (salt of the earth) for being covered in sweat and caked in dirt. In the tale, God reproaches the sage for his severity: “Would you prefer, my friend, that they had white hands and a white soul like you and the whole world went hungry tonight?”

Here, Spire reprised against the French Jewish bourgeoisie the attacks he had leveled at the broader French bourgeoisie. The Jewish nationalist cause was framed in terms of class. Franco Jewish institutions represented the interests of comfortable, native-born notables desperate to protect their own position at any cost. Thrown to the wolves were the Jewish common man and woman.

At other times, Spire indicated that even the Franco Jewish elite might be redeemable. Writing in the Pages Libres in 1904, in the earliest of his essays on Zionism, he implied the movement could exercise a salutary effect on diaspora Jewry, too. Addressing “those who would hesitate to exile themselves from countries in which some have tried to make us believe we have a homeland,” he posed this question: “But what stops those Jews whose soul is more European than Jewish from spending most of their time in a European country, much like the men of all nations, who when residing in a foreign land feel stronger when their homeland is stronger?” He argued, “We will feel more protected than we do now in our current homelands, because we will no longer be wretches to whom one deigned to grant rights, but nationals of a great power capable of enforcing these rights, even by force.”

André Spire had the good fortune to see the mirage of his 30s become the reality of his 80s. The new Jewish state elevated his brother-in-arms, Chaim Weizmann, to the office of the presidency. Franco Judaism’s chieftains—a few of whom carried the assimilationist faith to the gas chamber—had to concede that he had been right. Spire himself was a marked man after the fall of France. He and his wife, Therese, secured an exit visa from the Vichy regime authorities in the spring of 1941, finding a wartime refuge in New York City. Spire’s editors had once lampooned him for his Zionism, affixing the title “Shall We Go to Jerusalem?” to an article of his. In the last decades of his long life, he could respond in the affirmative.

No time is the same, and the antisemitism of 19th-century France bears only a vague resemblance to the animus American Jews now encounter. André Spire cannot serve as a mold for the contemporary Jew—no one can, insofar as each man in each generation must resolve for himself the dialectic of assimilation and return.

But he can impart a set of lessons to contemporary American Jews. Never accept others’ distorted image of the Jew. Do not cede to the false promise of assimilation. Never simper after fair-weather friends. Transform sources of shame into points of pride. Give no quarter to antisemites. André Spire belongs to the useful and beloved past we must recover in order to make a Jewish future that may be as sustaining as the one that he helped to bring into being in the face of the most destructive hatred that the Jewish people had ever known.