Cet article envisage à travers l’itinéraire sioniste d’André Blumel les relations entre la gauche française et l’État d’Israël. Proche de Léon Blum, dont il fut directeur de Cabinet durant le Front populaire, mais se rapprochant progressivement des communistes, Blumel demeura jusqu’en 1966 une figure clefs des milieux sionistes français. Conciliant divers engagements – pourtant apparemment contradictoires – son parcours permet de comprendre la complexité des liens et des conflits qui caractérisèrent cette relation.
André Blumel, a French zionist This paper is dedicated to André Blumel. Despite of his close ties with Léon Blum, Blumel was also involved after the Second World War in the communist circles. However he was indisputably one of the most eminent advocates of the Zionist cause, before and after the creation of the State of Israel. Despite of his political contradictions, his route allows a better understanding of the complex Franco Israeli relations.André Blumel’s long career in the Socialist Party lasted from 1914 to 1939. He had close ties with Léon Blum who, as leader of the Popular Front government, nominated Blumel as his Chief Advisor and also chose him as his defense lawyer in the only case of anti-Semitism which Blum thought fit to bring before the courts. Blumel moved closer to Communism during the Second World War, under the banner of anti-fascism, becoming a noted Communist sympathizer. That was how he came to be the defense lawyer of Pierre Daix, the Editor of the Communist review Les lettres françaises, in the lawsuit against Kravchenko.The common commitment of Blumel and Blum to the Zionist cause prevented this major political divergence from leading to a split between the two men. Blumel was indisputably one of the most active advocates of the Israeli cause, both before and after the creation of the State of Israel. He became the President of the KKL-JNF and of the French Zionist Federation, and he also played a key role in organizing the immigration of Jewish refugees, as shown by his response to the crisis of the Exodus: he mobilized all his contacts in the Ministry of the Interior where he had been Principal Private Secretary to Adrien Tixier and where Edouard Depreux worked, a close friend from the days of the Resistance. Blumel’s itinerary sheds light on Léon Blum and his circle (Marc Jarblum, Jules Moch and Edouard Depreux) in their struggle for the creation of the State of Israel, and suggests that this group was one of the most significant sources of support for the Zionist cause in France. Whereas, between 1946 and 1949, Blumel’s crypto-communism did not conflict with his Zionism (due to the USSR’s crucial backing of the creation of the State of Israel), Stalin’s declared anti-semitism as from the beginning of the 1950s radically changed the situation. In a similar move to that of the Israeli Left, and particularly the MAPAM, after the traumatic Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia (in which two Israelis were convicted and most of the Czech Jewish Communist leaders were executed), Blumel distanced himself temporarily from Communism and created the Cercle Bernard Lazare. In the eyes of Israel, his knowledge of Communist circles still singled him out as a good intermediary on the issue of Soviet Jewry.MAPAI sympathizers in the Jewish Agency nonetheless attacked Blumel, as President of the French Zionist Federation, for his close ties with Communist circles, causing a series of crises within the French organization, particularly in 1958 and 1959. The key cause of these conflicts was the Jewish Agency’s attempt, from its headquarters in Jerusalem, to maintain control of Zionist activity in France, whereas Blumel wanted to be given a totally free rein. Nahum Goldman, the President of the World Zionist Organization, was called in to adjudicate and, in the light of the significant role Blumel had played between 1945 and 1949, Goldman ruled systematically in Blumel's favour. Blumel was additionally supported by revisionist Zionists within French Zionist movements (as a way of expressing their opposition to the MAPAI).Despite this support, Blumel finally broke publicly with the Israeli political establishment, even before the 6-Day War, in an open letter addressed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abba Eban, in 1966. He went on to devote his energies to the France-USSR Society, as its President.
