Race, corps et dégénérescence chez les Éclaireurs israélites dans l’Entre-deux-guerres

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Race, the Body, and Degeneration in the Jewish Scouting Movement in the Interwar YearsThe Éclaireurs israélites de France (EIF), founded in 1923, have been the subject of a number of scholarly studies focusing on the movement’s religious, moral, and/or political nature, its role as a node of Jewish resistance against persecution during the Holocaust, or its character as an incubator for Zionism before the establishment of the state of Israel. While these are all significant dimensions of the movement’s history, they obscure the degree to which Jewish youth also participated in broader French (and European) interwar projects of national racial reconstruction. This article reexamines the educational programing among EIF scout leaders, movement organizers, and young scouts as vitally concerned with defining and redesigning Jewishness by using the terms and categories of race. Natural and social sciences formed the unequivocal bases of scouting programs aimed at “building new Jews,” while religious and theological issues remained under heated debate until the outbreak of the Second World War. This study contributes to a larger argument that during the 1920s and 30s, physical health and wellness emerged as central imperatives of France’s transforming Jewish community, mirroring, building on, and sometimes resisting broader French interests in public hygiene, national demographic reconstruction, and various styles of eugenic racial thinking.