At this time, there were about three hundred thousand self-identified Jews in France. About half of them, at least at first, lived in the northern, Occupied Zone, but soon tens of thousands began immigrating to the southern, Unoccupied Zone. European, North African, and Middle Eastern Jews had seen the capital of France as a “new Jerusalem” since 1791, when the Assemblée nationale had given them full civil rights, later confirmed, though with occasional bureaucratic hiccups, by Napoleon I. Beginning with the enormous political upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century across Europe, Jews from eastern Europe, and many from the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey and the Levant, sought France as a refuge. Some came because they tired of the official anti-Semitism, the pogroms, and the lack of economic opportunity in their homelands. Others came because of their progressive political beliefs. Of course, millions had to remain in Poland and Russia, in ancestral shtetls, villages, small towns, and large cities.
