Aux débuts de la communauté juive de Clermont-Ferrand

Résumé 0

This Jewish group, already somewhat bulky in 1808, remains a community both particular and isolated. Depending on a distant Bordeaux Consistory far from any synagogue (the nearest ore being that of Saint Etienne) deprived of its own rabbi, it develops a structure around a peddler who became a wealthy wholesaler, Israel Waël, the actual center of the local Jewish life. It was nevertheless after his death in 1838 that the community had its own synagogue, and only in 1854 it obtained a state-appointed rabbi and only about 1880 that it had a cemetery adjoining the communal one. A poor and small community, mainly of Ashkenazi origin, a sociological gap maintains it apart from the Bordeaux Consistory, typical of the sefardi aristocracy ; however their relations, in spite of being infrequent, remain courteous. The mayors and the prefects behave with benevolence towards it, and this is altogether the reason and the consequence of an easy integration of the members of this community in the city.