ABSTRACT
French ‘social anti-Semitism’ differed from its English counterpart both by its theoretical and pseudo-intellectual basis, and by the extent of its prevalence within society. It stressed the essential cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘Israelites’, and the ‘separateness’ of the Jews within France, while developing a series of facile generalisations about the inferior nature of the Jewish intellect. An examination of Lacretelle’s 1922 novel Silbermann, and of the reviews devoted to it by a whole range of major critics, shows the prevalence of these attitudes. This phenomenon provided a backdrop for the more dangerous form of anti-Semitism that flourished in France in the late 1930s, and inoculated many in the French public from any concern for the fate of the Jews in occupied France – though the realisation, by some of these people, of the realities of wartime treatment of the Jews, led many of them to completely revise their attitudes.
