LOSING ONE’S HOME: JEWISH SPOLIATION IN PARIS 1940-1946

Isabelle Backouche, Sarah Gensburger, Eric Le Bourhis

La Découverte, 446 pages, 2025)

√ An untold story of Jewish spoliation in Paris

√ Based on a ten-year study of previously unseen archival documents

√ A fluid account interweaving the history of the Holocaust and that of housing

At the outbreak of the Second World War, the estimated 200,000 Jews living in and around Paris rented their homes, like most Parisians. The Nazis, when they arrived in June 1940, began the systematic arrest and deportation of Jews, seizing all their goods and property. At the Liberation, the returning survivors found their apartments occupied…

This book tells the story of a forgotten spoliation, district by district, street by street. During the Occupation, thousands of Parisian tenants were evicted from their apartments because they were identified as Jews. In Prewar Paris, only 7% of city properties were exclusively owner-occupied and rental agreements were passed on through generations of the same family. Tenancies were protected and rents, controlled since 1918, were low. From 1942 onward, various procedures and policies orchestrated by the Vichy authorities, with the support of the occupying forces, seized this rental stock to satisfy a Parisian population in need of housing. The arsenal of anti-Jewish policies was put to use to satisfy a large rental market implicating landlords, civil servants, disaster victims, neighbors, concierges,  janitors and “recruited” applicants - in short, Parisian society in all its diversity.

The compelling narrative of this massive eviction from which reparation was never made bear witness to the mechanisms by which Jews were eliminated from Parisian society.

Isabelle Backouche is an historian at The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. She has been a member of the Comité d’Histoire de la Ville de Paris since 2007, and is also a member of the Commission nationale des monuments historiques. In 2016, she published Paris transformé. Le Marais 1900-1980: de l’îlot insalubre au secteur sauvegardé (Creaphis, 2019).

Sarah Gensburger is a sociologist at CNRS/Sciences Po Paris and the author of Qui pose les questions mémorielles ? (CNRS Éditions, 2023). Her publications in English include: with Sandrine Lefranc Beyond Memory: Can We Really Learn from the Past (Palgrave, 2020), Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris 1940-1944 (Indiana University Press, 2015) and National Policy, Global Memory: The Commemoration of the Righteous among the Nations from Jerusalem to Paris (Berghahn Books, 2016).

Eric Le Bourhis is an historian specialized in urban history, associate professor at the Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris and member of the Europe Eurasia Research Center (CREE). He is the co-Autor of Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East and Central Europe: A People's Justice? (University of Rochester Press, 2022.)