The French decree forbidding Jews, among other things, to serve as jurors in French courts was for the first time applied today at the first annual sitting of the Court of Assizes in Paris.
The presiding judge, suspecting the names of two members of the jury as being Jewish, questioned them about their racial origin at the beginning of the session. The jurors admitted that they are Jews, whereupon they were ordered to leave the jury box.
Anti-Jewish propaganda assumed new impetus in the Paris press during the last few days. Utilizing the fact that the police in Paris arrested this week a number of foreign Jews, as well as Italian and Spaniards, for wearing the French tricolored national insignia, the Temps Nouveaux in its issue yesterday demanded that Paris be cleaned “of all doubtful foreign and Jewish elements who are accomplices of de-Gaullism”. Simultaneously the Croix du People, organ of the French anti-Semitic Jacques Doriot, editorially demanded stricter measures against Jewish doctors. The article asserts that among the 6,000 doctors in the Seine district in which the city of Paris is included there are 2,000 Jews.
“Twenty-two percent of the whole French medical corps are Jews”, the anti-Semitic newspaper writes, “and ninety percent of the doctors who have been naturalized between 1920 and 1940 are similarly Jews. These Jewish doctors continue to carry on their practice using various tricks to avoid the anti-Jewish laws. They are even protected by certain liberal French circles from among whom they obtain signatures for petitions in their favor.” The editorial calls for a decree restricting Jewish doctors to two percent modeled along the same lines as that applied to Jewish lawyers. “The Jewish question dominates all problems of the hour”, the article concludes.
The Institute for Jewish Studies in Paris, a new anti-Jewish institution, published a call yesterday advising “all French Aryan doctors who want to rid the medical profession of Jews” to communicate with the Institute.
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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.
