The first Jews to settle in French Indo-China, which comprised of modern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, arrived during the French colonization of that part of Asia beginning in the 1840’s. A mention of a Jewish presence in Indo-China appeared in the London Jewish Chronicle and later in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia. Among the best-known Jews in Indo-China at the time was Jules Rueff. There is a brief entry on him in the Dictionaire National des Contemporaines (Paris, 1901) and another entry in the 1916 Jewish Encyclopedia published in New York. He was born in Paris in 1854, went to Indo-China in 1872 to seek his fortune, and became one of the lead-ing French pioneers in that colony. He was the originator of the plan to build a railway from Saigon to Mytho in Cochin-Chine and was a founder and director of Messageries Fluviales des Cochine-Chine, a shipping company operating mainly along the Mekong River. He was also involved in organiz-ing various trade fairs in France and advocatorganiz-ing for Indo-China’s needs to various French governments. Another well-known French Jew, Sylvain Levi (1863-1935), one of France’s leading scholars of the Orient in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, was involved in establishing the Hanoi branch of the Ecole francaise d’Éxtreme Orient in 1902. There are no reports of the existence of any Jewish communal organizations or facilities, or of the existence of a synagogue or Jewish cemetery in Hanoi, Haiphong, or Saigon.
Information on the number of Jews in French Indo-China on the eve of the Second World War was supplied by the American Jewish Committee in 1940. They claimed that of a total population of some 15 million people, there were about a thousand Jews living in Hanoi, Saigon, Tourane, and Haiphong.
Most of them were engaged in trade, free professions, school teaching, or banking and finance. Some were officials of the French colonial administra-tion, and a few served in the French army. Apart from this report, there is virtually no knowledge about this community, including whether there was intermarriage and to what extent the Jews were integrated into French colo-nial society. There is no reference to Jews being involved in the local media or academia (apart from one case), and no suggestion as to whether they took part in the growing local nationalist movement. Apparently few bothered to
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Jews in the Japanese - Occupied Territories during the War Years
learn the local language, and for the most part they kept to themselves, trying to maintain a very low profile in a society that resembled French society, which was somewhat tinged with antisemitism. There is no evidence of overt antisemitism in Indo-China before the outbreak of the war in 1939.
All this changed when French Indo-China continued to be governed by the French colonial administration after the collapse of France in June 1940.
Unlike Indonesia, whose governor general chose to accept the authority of the Dutch government-in-exile in London, the French colonial adminis-tration was responsible to the Vichy regime, headed by Marshall Philippe Petain (1856-1951). The governor general, Rear Admiral Jean Decoux (1884-1963), negotiated an agreement with the Japanese government which permitted Japan to station troops in Tonkin, use its naval and air facilities, and stop the supply of weapons flowing from Indo-China to nationalist China. Otherwise the Japanese did not interfere with the running of the colony and left it to the French administration. Indo-China became, in fact, a Japanese protectorate where the Japanese army was supreme.
Following the collapse of France, Field Marshal Phillippe Petain emerged as chef d’etat and heralded a new National Revolution that made antisemitism one of its main pillars. One of the first manifestations of the new anti-Jewish policy was the revocation of the Cremieux Decree of 1870, which had allowed French Jews to become French citizens. On October 8, 1940, the Vichy government in France issued a series of anti-Jewish laws known as the “statute des Juifs,” which applied to all Jews living in France and in territories under French rule. These statutes defined who would be considered Jewish (any person who had two or three grandpar-ents of the Jewish race), and included in that category Jews who had con-verted to Catholicism. According to official French colonial documents, there were 140 Jews living in Indo-China at the time, including 18 children.
It can be assumed that this 140 referred to families, which brings the prob-able number of individuals closer to the American Jewish Committee fig-ures. A decree issued on October 18, 1940, banned Jews from working in the civil service, the army, or the diplomatic corps, and prevented them from holding teaching positions, editing newspapers, and directing films and plays. They were later forbidden to work for commercial companies that had contracts from public bodies. Jews were forbidden to work in the media, theater, radio, films, and public relations and were required to fill out detailed questionnaires regarding their origins, nationality, civil status, religion, financial assets and property. In a statute dated June 24, 1941, Jews were excluded from working in banks and insurance companies, and
banned from involvement in stock trading and real estate. The number of Jewish university students was limited to three percent of the total student population, and the number of Jewish school children was limited to 2% of the population. The Jews of Indo-China were effectively being barred from almost all of the positions they had held for decades. As a rule, the local administration headed since the end of June 1940 by Governor General Admiral Jean Decoux tried to implement the new rules to the letter.
To judge from the existing colonial-era documents in both Vietnam and France, it seems that Admiral Decoux, like many other senior French naval officers, had a tendency toward antisemitism. He was determined to imple-ment the anti-Jewish decrees to the letter, without questioning the need to follow them in a remote area of Asia where there was no German presence.
Those decrees were dissimilar to the anti-Jewish laws that were fully imple-mented against Jews in French North Africa until late 1942, which included internment in camps and forced labor. In some instances the Commission General aux Questions Juives in Vichy was asked by the governor general not to insist that Jews be removed from the army, because of growing tension and border incidents with Thailand that required French military interven-tion. Decoux raised another issue: how would the local population view the anti-Jewish measures, which of course involved European people? In some cases, local officials decided to ignore the new statutes. While the Jewish secretary of the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Suzanne Karpeles, was dismissed, the director of the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient, George Cosedes, remained at his post. Some Jews were able to continue running their businesses after “contributing” money to the colonial administration.
In other cases, Jewish properety was seized, as were bank accounts.
Apart from these troubles, the Jews were not interned or otherwise molested. What was done to them took place without any Japanese involve-ment, and was due to orders that came directly from the Vichy regime.
There is no evidence that the Japanese military authorities in any way interfered in the manner in which the French administration dealt with the Jewish population. The Japanese simply demanded that the French keep an eye on the Jews and prohibited them from admitting additional Jews to the colony. They did not insist on any specific acts of discrimination, and the local Jewish community survived the war virtually intact. There are no reports of Jewish refugees from Europe or occupied China seeking refuge in China. There is also virtually no evidence that Jews living in Indo-China on the eve of or during the war who attempted to escape to other locations.
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Jews in the Japanese - Occupied Territories during the War Years
The Vichy anti-Jewish laws were not automatically rescinded in the summer of 1944 when France was liberated from the Germans. Although the entire colony was seized by the Japanese in March 1945, the French civil servants did not want to annul the anti-Jewish statutes overnight, lest they be seen by the local population as having pursued a wrong policy. But in effect the anti-Jewish laws were no longer implemented. Much depended on the attitude of the local French colonial administrators. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945 and the Pacific War ended in August of the same year, most of the Jews of Indo-China emigrated to France. Admiral Decoux returned to France, where he was tried and sentenced to two years in prison for collaborating with the Vichy regime. He insisted that Japan was totally uninvolved in the policies he had pursued against the Jews of Indo-China. The remaing Jews left that country when it was divided in 1954 and the French presence ended.