Lyn Julius
Adolf Cremieux, the Alliance and Romania

Lyn Julius - Adolf Cremieux, the Alliance and Romania

- Tonight, I will be telling you about the great 19th century champion of Jewish rights, Adolphe Crémieux. As you’ve been hearing from Trudy, both Crémieux and Sir Moses Montefiore went to Bucharest to plead for the equal rights for the Jews of Romania. Crémieux was then the president of the Alliance Israeli Universal, and remained president until his death. But before we get on with the Romanian chapter of Crémieux’s distinguished career, let me take you back to France. Why was the Alliance founded and what did it achieve? The Alliance Israeli Universal is also known as the AIU. It is called in Israel, and it’s often confused with the Alliance Française, but that is a completely different organisation. I myself always thought that the Alliance, or the AIU, was a network of Jewish schools, predominantly in the Muslim world. My parents and grandparents attended the Alliance School in Baghdad and they received a superb western education. They were taught four languages, science, maths, and also practical skills. Up until the founding of the Alliance, most Jews had only received a religious education and girls had not been educated at all. And this is the Alliance Israélite School, the Girls School, in Baghdad. By 1914, the Alliance had established 184 schools and had educated 45,000 Jewish children. One third were girls. It had also established a teacher-training school in Paris, and dispatched its teachers to far-flung corners of the Jewish world to equip Jews with the skills to thrive in the modern world. These teachers were the eyes and ears of the Alliance, reporting back to Paris any abuses they witnessed in the communities they served.

But education was not initially the AIU’s objective. The AIU has been called the first international NGO. Its objective was emancipation. At the turn of the 19th century, only 400,000 Jews out 5 million worldwide had civil rights. The founders of the AIU were 17 men, sons of the French Revolution. They were optimists, they wanted to spread the values of emancipation and enlightenment. They were Saint-Simonians. The Count de Saint-Simonian was the founder of a social reform movement that believed in the regeneration of society through science. The 17 were young intellectuals between the ages of 30 and 45. There was only one rabbi among them. None were members of the wealthy kleptocracy, which would dominate the community towards the end of the 19th century, the Ephrussis, Pereires, the Rothschilds, and the . The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 was their watch word. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. The 1781, or 1791 law on Jewish emancipation confirmed that Jews could be citizens without let or hindrance. The AIU manifesto had three objectives, One, to work everywhere for the emancipation and spiritual progress of the Jews. Two, to lend effective aid to those who suffer because they are Jews. And three, to encourage all publications likely to lead to this result. To save persecuted communities, It was not enough just to donate charity, but to mould people, to enable them to defend themselves as a kind of political philanthropy. Two events in particular galvanised the 17 into action.

The first was the Damascus affair of 1840. This was an accusation of ritual murder against the Jews of Damascus in Syria. At the time, Syria belonged to the Pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali. The Jews were accused of murdering a monk, Father Thomas. The anti-Semitic French consol, Ratti-Menton, blamed the Jews. A confession was extracted under torture from a Jewish barber named Negrin, and eight Jewish notables were imprisoned and tortured. One died, and one converted to Islam. Adolphe Crémieux and Sir Moses Montefiore were sent to Egypt to intercede for the prisoners’ release with the Pasha. The second event was the Mortara affair in 1858. This cause célèbre concerned the seizure by the Papal States of a six-year-old boy named Edgardo Mortara, who was taken from his Jewish family in Bologna. The child was dangerously ill, and assuming he would die, his Catholic nanny administered an emergency baptism to the boy, but he recovered. And here you see the Papal guards arriving to take away the boy and bring him up as a Catholic, and the mother is fainting. Eventually he became a priest and he never returned to his family. And so to prevent such abuses, the Alliance was founded in 1860. Crémieux was the most eminent French Jew, and one of the greatest lawyers and statesmen of his time. But his name does not appear among the 17 founders.

Yet, he sat on the AIU’s Central Committee and no decision was made without Crémieux’s approval. In 1863, Adolphe Crémieux was named President of the AIU and he remained president until his death in 1880. A speech he made in 1864 was typical. He began with congratulations on the AIU’s achievements, invoked the glorious past of the Hebrew prophets, paid tribute to the moral values of Judaism and monotheism. He emphasised that the role of the AIU was to fight prejudice against Jews and ignorance and lobby princes and ministries. So who was Adolphe Crémieux? Isaac Adolphe Moise Crémieux was born in Nîmes on April 22, 1796. He died in Paris on February 9, 1880. Nîmes was in the former Comtat Venaissin, which was a Papal State ceded to France in 1791, so just after the revolution. All the Jews there became French citizens, and Crémieux belonged to the first generation of Jews to benefit from equal rights. Nîmes only had 86 Jewish families, 371 Jews. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of anti-Semitism in the city. Crémieux himself got into a lot of fist fights. “When I was a child, the Jews counted for nothing,” he said. All his life he was to fight for the principles of the French Revolution, for a free press and liberal values. He defended persecuted Protestants, journalists persecuted for political motives, Republican insurgents, slave rebels in Martinique, Saint-Simonians suspected of subversion. He was a Freemason and twice a minister under the second and third republic.

And he fought for the republic, together with such figures as the writer Victor Hugo, and the statesman Léon Gambetta, Crémieux’s former secretary. Adolphe’s father, David, had a silk manufacturing business and he was a Jacobin in the French Revolution. In fact, he lost most of his money supporting the revolution and was jailed for owing money to his creditors. Much later, Adolphe Crémieux learnt about his father’s debts. He did not rest until he had found all David’s creditors or their heirs. And he returned to them, not only the principle, which most of them had forgotten, but also 36 years worth of accumulated interest. Thus, his father’s name was rehabilitated. Adolphe Crémieux was an academic prodigy, sent to the Napoleonic school, the Lycée Impérial in Paris, as a boarder. There were only six Jewish students, all from the Crémieux family. He was a brilliant prize-winning student. Owing to his fantastic memory and eloquence, he was soon nicknamed “The Lawyer.” He loved the theatre too, where it’s often said actors and barristers are cut from the same cloth. At school, Crémieux was an ardent admirer of Napoleon the First, it was he who headed a delegation of the pupils of the Lycée. They pleaded with the Emperor after his return from the island of Elba, not to revert to the old education system.

At first, the students were not allowed into the court at the Tulleries. Hearing the commotion, Napoleon himself appeared and said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Obviously, modesty was not his foremost attribute. For many years, Crémieux remained faithful to Napoleon, the idol of his youth. This put him at loggerheads with the royalists. Remember that after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the Bourbon dynasty returned to the throne. Louis XVIII, Charles X, and the more liberal Louis Phillippe, held power until the revolution of 1848. Crémieux was the advisor and friend of Napoleon supporters, the Bonapartistes, until he became disillusioned with Louis Napoleon, Napoleon’s nephew, who seized power to become the emperor, Napoleon III. Crémieux graduated from Aix-en-Provence University in Law, and was admitted to the bar at Nîmes on attaining his majority. The court president asked if he would take the oath known as the More Judaico, that’s according to the Jewish custom in Latin. This was a humiliating oath, which sometimes involved the Jew wearing thorns on his head and holding the Torah while heaping biblical curses on himself. Crémieux was offended. “Am I in a synagogue? No, I am in an audience chamber. "Am I in Jerusalem? In Palestine? "No, I am in Nîmes, in France. "Am I only a Jew? "No, I am also a French citizen. "Therefore, I take the oath of a Jewish French citizen.” The court agreed. The More Judaico had been abolished by the French Revolution, but was still being applied.

Adolphe Crémieux became famous for advocating for the abolition of the oath through a case brought before the court of Nîmes in 1827. In Alsace in 1839, Lazare Isidor, a rabbi of Phalsbourg, refused to open his synagogue for such an oath. He was prosecuted for contempt of court and he was defended by Crémieux and acquitted. And this sketch is from Frankfurt, and it shows the More Judaico as it was practised in Germany. You can see the Jew standing half naked on a pig, or a sow, his hand on the Bible open at a page of curses. As late as in 1902, a court in Romania upheld that country’s version of the oath. The French Supreme Court finally declared the oath unconstitutional and it was abolished in 1846. Crémieux soon became the premier lawyer in the south of France. He was a brilliant orator and a skillful advocate. Combining eloquence with a wide knowledge of the law, rare powers of assimilation, clarity, irony, and the faculty of inspiring others with his own enthusiasm. Many of the most important cases in the south of France were soon entrusted to him. Nîmes, and here you see it with the Roman arena in the foreground. Nîmes had a large population of Protestants. In fact, a third of the town was Protestant, and the liberals were all Protestants and Jews. After the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815, the town was the scene of “The White Terror,” royalists against the Protestants. Bandits roamed the town, looting and murdering. The Crémieux family home itself was pillaged, and the family forced to move a short distance away. After 1817, a bandit called Trestaillon was no longer terrorising the Protestants of Nîmes.

But Crémieux brought several criminal lawsuits against the gangster. Crémieux became known as “Council for the Protestants.” He defended a man called , who was accused of murder and under sentence of death, and got him acquitted. He defended a captain who got excited after a good meal and a dance, and shouted “Long live Napoleon the Great!” In 1819, he defended three young men who were accused of singing the revolutionary hymn, “La Marseillaise.” And he parses the lyrics line by line, he dwells on the verse, “Amour sacré de la Patrie,” sacred love of the motherland. The entire jury rises, gripped with patriotic fervour. The accused are acquitted. In case that verse is not familiar to you, as it was not familiar to me, it actually comes up in the sixth of seven stanzas. When you hear “La Marseillaise,” people never usually get further than the first stanza and the chorus. After obtaining the abolition of the More Judaico, Crémieux soon turned his attention to defending Jewish rights. There was much to be done. The restored monarchy under Louis XVIII imposed exorbitant taxes on the Jewish community. In 1817, 40 years before the Mortara affair shook the Jews of France into founding the Alliance Israélite, the teenage daughters of the Jew Moises Carcassonne were secretly baptised. Carcassonne did not have recourse to the courts. In 1824, Adolphe Crémieux married Amelie Silny, who came from a family of prosperous Jewish merchants in Metz in Lorraine. It was to be a very happy marriage. After the revolution of 1830, Crémieux moved from Nîmes to Paris.

He becomes a Supreme Court barrister, he defends press freedom and acts for political opponents of the royalists. In 1831, he gets the state to pay the salaries of rabbis as it does for the clergy. Every year he asks for a raise for them. In 1832, he delivers the eulogy at the death of , who defended Jewish rights. In 1840, Crémieux played an important part in securing the acquittal through the Pasha Muhammad Ali of the Jewish victims of the famous Damascus ritual murder case. And on his return from the Orient, he was greeted with much enthusiasm by the Jews of Vienna. He was also received by Prince Metternich, the then Chancellor of the Austrian Empire. And in 1842, Crémieux enters French politics. In 1843, Crémieux becomes president of the Consistoire Central des Juifs de France. That’s the Central Consistory of the Jews of France, the administrative authority for all French Jews. However, he resigned two years later when it became known that his wife had had their children baptised without his knowledge. And that is why Crémieux does not figure officially among the founders of the Alliance. The decision to baptise Crémieux’s children did not seem to disrupt the marriage. Adolphe Crémieux doted on his wife, but did not interfere with the upbringing of the children. It was said that he never made a decision without consulting her. This was obviously not necessarily true of Madame Crémieux. But still, Crémieux could not allow himself to stop defending Jews. In 1845, he defended two Jews in Oran, Algeria. The prosecutor alluded to the fact that they were Jews. Crémieux rose to his feet. “It is my honour to be a Jew and also my duty, "which I have never failed, "not to let pass any attack against my co-religionists.”

As well as being an eloquent lawyer, Crémieux was a great conversationalist, witty and cheerful. But Crémieux was also a man of principle. He never sacrificed his convictions to his personal interests. And later when he was a deputy, he did not care if he upset the Rothschilds in advocating the acquisition of the railroads by the government. Crémieux was ready to aid his co-religionists, but not when they had done wrong. Take the case of Simon Deutz, a German Jew converted to Christianity, who became a confidant of the Duchess du Berry. The Duchess tried to start a civil war in 1832 against Louis Philippe, so as to instal her Bourbon son on the throne. But Deutz betrayed her and denounced her to Louis Philippe. Crémieux refused to aid Deutz, who had appealed to him as a fellow Jew. Madame Crémieux seemed to be a personality in her own right. She had a salon in Nîmes, and then in Paris. It was apparently one of the most sought after, after Betty de Rothschilds. At the Crémieux salon, the most celebrated singers of the opera and of the Theatre des Italiens appeared. And on one occasion, they were accompanied by Rossini, Mayerbeer, and Auber. Early in 1848, popular unrest toppled King Louis Philippe, and led to revolutions sweeping across Europe. In February 1848, Crémieux was chosen by the Republicans to serve as a member of the provisional government. As a minister of justice, he abolished the death penalty for political offences.

He abolished prison for debtors. And that same year, he helped end slavery in all French colonies, for which some have called him the French Abraham Lincoln. In this, France was well ahead of the US, where slavery was only abolished in 1865. And this is a letter Crémieux wrote, congratulating the US on the abolition of slavery. As a public figure, Crémieux was mocked for his looks. The caricaturist, Honoré Daumier, did these two lithographs, both poking fun at his ugliness. The first was in 1848, and the caption reads, “A great lover of change. "It would not make him less happy if one day he changed his face.” The other was produced in 1849 and captioned, “Monsieur Crémieux looking for an apartment. "If I rent this lodging, "I would like the landlord to take down "this dreadful portrait. "Oh, but good, god, it’s a mirror.” A conflict between the Republicans and socialists broke out. Crémieux resigned his office, but continued to sit in the constituent assembly. At first, he supported Louis Napoleon, but when he discovered the prince was no true Republican, but wanted to reestablish Napoleon’s empire, he broke with him. After Louis Napoleon engineered a coup in December 1851, Crémieux was arrested and imprisoned for 10 days. He then stayed out of politics for almost 20 years. In 1869, he was recalled to parliament and elected as a Republican deputy for Paris, and in 1870 served as a minister of Justice. That year he pushed through the law named after him, which imposed French nationality on the Jews of Algeria, the Décret Crémieux. He resigned with his colleagues in February 1871. Eight months later, he was again elected a deputy, then life senator in 1875, the highest distinction a public figure could receive.

His concern for minorities both inside and outside France was a constant theme. As a young man, he had advocated for the Protestants of Nîmes. And in 1860, during the war in Lebanon, he made an appeal on behalf of the Christians. “The Christians of the East are subjected to the most "horrible persecution, torture, rape, assassination, "pillage, burning, the murder of women, children, "and old people, "even mutilation of corpses, "whose soul crime is that they worship Christ.” He advocated that a permanent committee in every country with eyes open for all victims of fanaticism, without distinction of religion, must be created and supported. Romania was one of the main subjects of concern for the Alliance. They were also worried about Jewish rights in Bulgaria, Russia, and Serbia. Crémieux was usually successful in his diplomatic campaigns, but obtaining equal rights for Jews in Romania was one of the most frustrating of his endeavours. At the beginning of the 19th century, the population was in the main Romanian in nationality and Orthodox in religion. In the second half of the century, however, Russian Jews moved in ever-increasing numbers into Romania. And in 1859, about 118,000 Jews lived in Moldavia and 9,200 in Wallachia. By 1899, the number had increased to 210,000 in Moldavia and 68,000 in Wallachia.

The Jews thus formed a minority of about a quarter of a million in a population of 6 million. They were nominally under Ottoman rule, but the British and French increased their influence and supported autonomy from Turkey for what would be, excuse me, what would become Romania. The Jews were in a worse situation in Romania than in Russia. The Jews of Russia were citizens. The new rulers of Romania set out not only to deny Jews ordinary civic rights, but to place them outside the law. The Convention of Paris in 1858 had stipulated, as a condition of Romania’s autonomy from Turkey, that all Moldavians and Wallachians shall be equal in the eyes of the law with regard to taxation and shall be equally admissible to public employment. That was Article 46. However, under pressure from the prince of Moldavia, the great powers agreed that only Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia should have political rights. Jews were prevented from buying rural property, so they tended to congregate in the large cities, particularly in Bucharest and Iași. They were merchants or petty traders. In the countryside, they acted as stewards of large estates, as inkeepers selling alcoholic drinks, and as money lenders, occupations that could bring them into conflict with the peasant population.

At this point, the Alliance became involved. In 1866, the Romanian government introduced an amendment into its constitution, conferring citizenship on its inhabitants. Crémieux travelled to Bucharest, the capitol, to win votes for this proposal. Prince Carol, the future King Carol I of Romania, invited him to his table and a meeting of parliament was held in his honour. Crémieux delivered an address on the absurdity of religious hatred, and the necessity for men to be equal. He left Bucharest with high hopes, but an uprising broke out. In panic, the deputies refused to grant Jews political rights. The central synagogue in Bucharest was destroyed in the unrest. The instigator of the persecution of Romanian Jews was none other than Ion Brătianu, Carol’s influential minister. Ironically, Brătianu had been one of Crémieux’s admirers, 20 years earlier when he was a student in Paris. Brătianu sent the Frenchman Emile Picault, one of the prince’s private secretaries, to Paris to meet the directors of the AIU in person, this was in July 1867, and to give them as good an account of the government’s position as he was able. With Crémieux presiding, the meeting passed off civilly enough, but Picault’s efforts to mollify the Parisian notables failed. His assurances of the good intentions of the Romanian government failed to correspond to what the AIU knew of the true conditions on the ground in Romania itself. Crémieux wrote to Prince Carol, calling on him to dismiss Brătianu in no uncertain terms, and to stop the persecution of the Jews. He urged the government to follow up by complying with Article 46 of the International Convention of 1858 for the equality of all citizens.

In November 1867, Brătianu himself came to Paris and conferred with the heads of the Alliance. The Romanian government made promises but did nothing. The AIU sent letters written by Crémieux to all ambassadors, politicians and presidents asking for the great powers to secure protection for the Jews. Crémieux even wrote to Lord Beaconsfield, that’s Disraeli. That year, Sir Moses Montefiore visited Romania to plead for Jewish rights. The Hohenzollern Prince Carol, he was from a minor family of German royals, only recently installed as ruler of the country, was still impressionable enough to be embarrassed by the image Romania and he himself might be presenting to Europe, and he took action. Brătianu was made to resign, Crémieux then addressed himself directly to Prince Carol. His language was imperious, indignant and self-assured, “The moment has come, Prince,” Crémieux wrote, “to employ legitimate authority "and break off this odious course of events. "Brătianu should be dismissed in no uncertain terms. "That savage measures taken against the Jews "should be annulled. "The unfortunates who had been torn violently "from their homes must be allowed to return. "For the rest, "inform the country that nothing will be neglected "to erase the traces of this evil. "Pursue without respite the newspapers that have "for the past year continually engaged in incitement "to hatred, contempt, assassination, "and expulsion of the Jews. "Dismiss all the cowardly officials "who have lent a violent hand to this dreadful persecution "and deal energetically with all violence directed at the Jews from this time on.”

This may have made unpleasant reading for Prince Carol, but it remained without real effect. Brătianu was not dismissed in no uncertain terms. He was on the contrary, given a new post. A greatly agitated Adolphe Crémieux turned to Napoleon III in 1867 to protest against the Romanian’s conduct. He asked for an audience. The emperor assured him that this oppression can neither be tolerated nor understood. As good as his word, the emperor telegraphed a reprimand to Bucharest, sarcastically noting, “I cannot believe that your Highness’s government "authorises measures so incompatible with humanity and civilization.” The Romanian press was unrestrained in its attacks. Officials who engaged in active persecution of Jews were not removed from office. And after 1870 and the plummeting of French prestige, after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, Emile Picault, a Frenchman, was out of favour in Bucharest anyway, and the channel he had opened to Western Jewry collapsed. Despite intervention by the great powers, the government persisted in oppressing the Jews. The Congress of Berlin presented a further opportunity to place the status of the Jews in Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria on the agenda. It was a gathering of the great European powers in 1878 to settle the future of the Balkans in Near East after the war between Russia and Turkey in 1877. It was held between June and July, 1878. It was attended by representatives of Austria-Hungary, France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, and Turkey, the Balkan and Danubian states, that’s Greece. Montenegro, Romania and Serbia were also represented.

Among its most influential members was the head of the British delegation, Benjamin Disraeli, who you see here wearing this sort of dark suit on the left-hand side, standing on the left. The AIU sent three members to Berlin. Independence for the Danubian states was contingent on equal civil rights being granted to members of all religions and races. The Congress dealt successfully with Bulgaria, Serbia, East Romania, which corresponds to southern Bulgaria today. To the French delegate to the Congress, who went by the very English name of Waddington, Crémieux wrote, “Do not give in to Brătianu. "Romania is the nation most devoid "of any sentiment of justice. "She violates promises. "She tramples engagements underfoot. "She engages in the most shameful "and unbelievable persecution.” The Russian foreign minister tried to block the great power consensus, arguing that the Jews of Russia and Romania were a social scourge. Not to be confused with the fine merchants of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. But the French, supported by Bismarck, finally won the battle at the Congress of Berlin. It was a hollow victory. Most Romanian leaders regarded the measure as an unwarranted interference in their internal affairs.

The government never fully complied with the intent of the treaty. In 1879, under great pressure, it was agreed that individual Jews could become naturalised citizens. However, only 2000 Jews were naturalised in the following 30 years. On the one hand, the Romanian campaign was the zenith of the Alliance’s efforts to lobby on behalf of oppressed Jews wherever they were. The AIU was at the height of its international diplomatic powers. The campaign was well organised and supported at the highest echelons. To anti-Semites, however, it only confirmed their belief in the international Jewish conspiracy to control the world. In fact, the boardroom at the former Alliance headquarters at 45 Rue La Bruyére in Paris, was considered the epicentre of Jewish power, where the elders of Zion met to plot their evil designs. On the other hand, the Romanian case was proof that the Alliance had failed. Jews in one part of Europe were powerless to help their compatriots in another. On January 30, 1880, Crémieux lost his wife, who since 1824 had been his constant companion and helper.

Both had frequently said that neither could live without the other, and Crémieux’s death occurred 10 days after that of his wife. He is buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse, and here is his grave. A street is named after him in Jerusalem’s German colony, and also in the French Carmel district in Haifa, as well as in Central Tel Aviv. But the street sign in Tel Aviv actually read, Adolphe, accidentally leaving off the surname in Hebrew. And it caused consternation amongst the residents, reminding them of an entirely different Adolphe instead. But I will leave you with this image of the Rue Crémieux in the 12th arrondissement in Paris. It’s one of the most attractive and colourful streets, very popular with tourists. And perhaps it’s a reminder in contrast to the sort of rather grand grey boulevards of Paris. Perhaps it’s a nice reminder of the sunny and colourful town of Nîmes, where Adolphe Crémieux was born. So with that, I am very happy to answer any questions if you have any.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you.

Yes, “Napoleon’s behaviour, truthfully, was not egocentric. "He was reminding the crowd of the words "of kindness and defence spoken by Jesus.” Yes. I didn’t mean that he wasn’t that. I didn’t mean this, this to be, you know, a slight on on what Jesus said. What I was saying is that I think it’s quite arrogant for Napoleon to be repeating the words of Jesus as if he himself was Jesus. That’s how I took it.

Q: Shelly Shapiro, “Did Crémieux’s wife have herself baptised "as well as her daughters?”

A: Actually, I don’t know if she did. Thank you very much, Stuart.

Thank you, Carl. I don’t know if there’s, there are any other.

Oh, “Most interesting,” thank you, Erica.

Q: James Levy, “Was Crémieux given a Jewish funeral?”

A: Well, Montparnasse is not actually a Jewish cemetery, but it is quite possible that somebody recited Kaddish for him. And he certainly identified as a Jew all his life, so I think he would be, would’ve been very upset if he hadn’t had some sort of Jewish funeral.

Q - [Host] Therese says that her grandmother was born in Botosani in 1880, and her registration identifies her as a citizen of Austria. Can you explain?

A - Can I explain? Well, as you know, Romania was divided into two, the Austria-Hungarian empire had had part of it. So perhaps that is why she was a citizen of Austria still, because Romania was created out of bits of the Austria-Hungarian empire and the Russian empire, Moldova, which is now, which is now an independent entity.

Oh, nice to hear from Brian, listening from Jerusalem. Now he knows why his grandparents had to leave Botosani in Romania for Manchester. Oh, it’s nice to hear from you, Brian.

Q: “How is it that such a towering figure is not known more?” says Erica.

A: Well, that’s a very good question. I reckon it’s because, well, he’s probably pretty well known in France, so I think that’s probably the answer to that. He’s not well known internationally though, that is absolutely true.

Q: And Monica asks, “What was the reason she baptised the children?”

A: Well, I think there was this pressure, social pressure, in the 19th century to assimilate. And certainly baptism was the passport to everything, to every job. Even though the French revolution had abolished all the restrictions and had declared all the Jews to be emancipated citizens, I think she probably thought she was doing the best for them, giving them the greatest opportunities for their future. And, that’s why she did it. I mean, it’s a terrible indictment, isn’t it, that she had to do this, or she felt she had to do this. But certainly, you know, it was happening all over Europe. German Jews were baptising their children, Austrian Jews, everybody, everybody was at it.

Thank you, Nanette.

Q: “And did any of the children return to Judaism?”

A: I don’t think they did. One of, one of his granddaughters, actually, well his daughter was a writer and a musician. And his granddaughter, who was called Amelie, married a sculptor called Paul Langowski, who is best known for actually sculpting the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. So that, that shows how far they’ve sort of progressed away from Judaism, really. I don’t think any of them returned to Judaism.

And thank you Mimi, for your kind words.

And uh, oh, a kibbutz, Karmiyyah, is actually named for Crémieux, I didn’t know that, that’s wonderful. That’s good, so not just the street names.

Q: “And what happened to his daughters,” asks Shelly, “in World War II?”

A: Well, obviously they weren’t identified as Jews because there’s no record of them being deported, or anything like that.

• [Host] I think that’s about it, thank you so much.

• No, thank you. And thank everyone for listening.