In Paris recently, in the Jewish quarter, I “came to jeer but remained to cheer” at L’Ecole de Travail when its director, Felix Meyer, informed me that the chief aim of the institution was: “to make an assimilable element out of the rising generation of foreign-born Jews in France.” For a brief moment it sounded like a plot to stamp out Judaism, but my visit enlightened me on many points.
From “The School of Work”—the only institution of its kind in the whole Diaspora—there flows into the industrial life of France a thin stream of young Jewish skilled workers who take their places in factories, shops, yards and mills; a stream that deepens the impress Jewish workers have for three-quarters of a century been tracing across the countenance of French labor. Graduating full-fledged, thoroughly apprenticed artisans and craftsmen, these immigrant Jewish youths gain a welcome in the fabriques unknown, undreamt of, by Jews elsewhere; for the French hold dear any man who knows his trade.
PROBLEM OF “WILD BOYS”
During the tumultuous years of the early nineteenth century the Jewish children of Paris wallowed uncared for in the narrow, crooked, bogged streets in the vicinity of the Bastille and the Hotel de Ville, very much like the “wild boys” of Moscow immediately after the Russian Revolution. These children of Eastern and Central European refugees roamed in packs, illiterate, squalid, depraved, and virtually parentless; their parents either serving in debtors’ jails or in the third Napoleon’s conscripted armies. Faced with the terrible prospect of raising a generation of apaches, the dispirited Jewish community despaired but attempted nothing.
Then, in 1857, three Jewish students, Narciss Levan (who later founded the Universelle Alliance Israelite), his brother, Manuel, later a famous physician, and Eugene Manuel, in after year the poet and dramatist so beloved by the French, evolved a crude method of coping with the situation. They went out into the streets and won the confidence of the young hoodlums by kind words and friendly acts, after which they induced them to come daily to the home of one of the three students to study French, arithmetic and other useful subjects.
Overnight the brothers Levan and their co-worker Manuel found their haphazard venture too large and too vital to be conducted in hit-or-miss fashion. The wealthier Jews of the city were approached with a pragmatic argument: the only existing trade school for untrained and unprepared immigrant Jewish youths.
RACIAL PRIDE STIRRED
The racial pride of the community was stirred, and within a few short years the three benevolent pied pipers who had rounded up the Jewish gutter rats, saw a building put up on the Rue Guillmites to house their inspired idea. Here all the boys who could be handled came to study practical arts under the supervision of a workingman named Weil.
Like all innovations whose necessity is promptly recognized, the School thrived.
In 1873 the building was purchased which the School now occupies, a sturdy six-story structure on the quaint, canyon-like Rue des Rosiers, the heart of the oldest Jewish vicinage of Paris and historically as rich as the Montmartre. A plan was adopted for more effectual functioning. Those with bourgeois aspirations, the physically and mentally unfit, and the incorrigibles had to go elsewhere, as they could anyhow not derive any benefit here. The money problem still loomed large. But soon thereafter, Goldschmidt, the secretary of Baron de Hirsch, left in his will 570,000 francs for the institution, beginning a flow of donations that has financially secured the Ecole de Travail for its task of moulding good will between the French people and the Jews.
THE DAY’S PROGRAM
We walked along a cobblestone-paved arcade to a large square inner court. It was close to six o’clock in the evening. Not a soul was to be met in the corridors and rooms through which we passed. The students had not yet come home from their work, M. Meyer explained. Every morning they arose at six and made ready to go to the factories and shops where they were serving their apprenticeships. At noon they returned for a communal lunch in the refectoire, leaving again till sundown. The practical phase of their daily curriculum over, from six to eight (except for dinner) they were free to do as they pleased—the School was fully equipped for entertaining, healthful and instructive diversion.
At eight o’clock arrived the professors and instructors, some of them on the faculties of Paris’ great universities, who instructed the students of L’Ecole de Travail in art, geometry, physics, mechanics, chemistry, bookkeeping, French literature, foreign languages, hygiene, etc.
JEWISH PROLETARIANISM
“Once a year our board of directors meets to examine the many applicants for admission into the next year’s class. The matter of selection has always been a hard problem here. Remember, this is not a charity institution. An orphan can expect no preference over another boy. There are other bureaux for that. What we aim to do, principally, is to develop a Jewish proletarian element here in France where proletarians—I include the peasantry—is the bedrock of the nation and is composed of people with an inordinate love of their social function. For Jewry to overlook the opportunity to enter into the industrial life of France at its foundation, would be rank negligence. For centuries the European countries prohibited our people from sitting down at the work bench besides non-Jews, their rulers fearing our people would soon identify our interests with those of the rest of the people and cease to amass fortunes at usury for the nobles to bleed us of. Our Jews here are not bourgeois-inclined, like the American Jews.
“Every Jewish boy (preferably the foreign born, who does not acclimatize himself easily) who comes to us is given a medical examination. We try to place him in a class where he will be trained to do the work he has the strongest predilection for. If later on he the displays talent in another direction, we do not hesitate to shift him in order to encourage that talent.
AGAINST THE HOME INFLUENCE
“With the consent of the parents, of course, the child comes to live at the school. He remains for three years, working, studying, playing, and graduates a skilled worker with an understanding of French and of the French. Only boys from thirteen to fifteen are eligible for admission, due to the French law against apprentices below that age. And we keep them here only because the home influence, usually a foreign one, conflicts with our influence here. On Sundays the boys are free to visit their homes, of course.
“They all go to the Temple for services, on Saturday.”
The matter of employment of students had some interesting sidelights. It took years to establish contact with factories and other industrial enterprises of Paris and environs, in order to open avenues of apprenticeship for the students. Today, however, the cooperation of Jewish and non-Jewish industrialists alike, is commendable. The Ecole boys often get better wages than ordinary apprentices, and upon graduating, are sent all over France to waiting jobs.
With no small measure of pride, Monsieur Meyer ushered me into the trophy room to show me the Prix Montyon of L’Academie Francaise, gained in 1921, and the 1930 prize of the Societies d’Encouragement Pour I’ Industries National. Only after years of ceaseless effort had M. Meyer been able to get the French government to recognize the School and grant it a yearly subsidy.
The boys were arriving. They walked quietly and cheerfully along the corridors and up the stairways. A bit serious of visage but not school boyishly sullen.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
