French Doors

Although the Alsace region is part of France today, this strip on the country’s northeastern tip, with its world-famous wine growing villages, has been ping-ponged between France and Germany numerous times over the last few hundred years. Yet despite the persecution the Jews of Alsace faced over the thousand years of their sojourn in this province of both French and German influences, Judaism in Alsace took on its own distinct character.

As we’ll be driving through this picturesque, old-world countryside, we have more than a wine route in mind. Jewish history in Alsace reaches back across the centuries, to at least 1165, making the communities here some of the oldest still-functioning kehillos in Europe. After all the years of national transfers and geographic shakeups, we’re traveling through these parts to see if we can find local Jews still keeping the ancient customs and conversant in the old Judeo-Alsatian dialect.

On the train up from Basel, the closest Swiss city to the French border, we pass the village of Ensisheim, where the Maharam of Rothenburg was held captive from 1286 until his death in 1293. Nothing remains of the castle fortress where Rav Meir was jailed, so we decide not to stop there, but continue through rural northeastern France to our first destination, the history-rich medieval town of Colmar.

Still Holding On

The first thing we notice, as our local guide and driver Reb Yehoshua Klein swings his car out of the train station, is a square named Place du Capitaine Dreyfus. The anti-Semitic scandal in which Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Alsatian officer in the French army, was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans rocked Western Europe in 1894, though it seems strangely out of place in this beautiful town today. Dreyfus (which Mr. Klein says is a reference to the Shalosh Regalim — “three feet” in Yiddish), is a common Alsatian Jewish last name, along with Bloch, Blum, Weil, and Levi, to name a few others.