The following is an excerpt from a recent book by Prof. Weisberg
concerning the treatment of East European (and Asian) minority groups 
identified with Judaism.  It deals with the Mosaic Georgians, Karaites,
Jugutis, Subbotniks, Ismaelites and Armenians(!).

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Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, Richard H. Weisberg

Published for the
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA)
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS,Washington Square, New York
Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH 1996

[dust-cover comment]
 "Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France tells an appalling and still-
contemporary story of the xenophobia of lawyers and of genocide and law.
Weisberg has labored meticulously through archival and contemporary sources
to document the lowest hour of the French legal profession. This is not only a
monumental work of record but also an essay in interpretation of the failure of
law."
    Peter Goodrich
    Birkbeck College
    University of London


[excerpt]
Chapter Six. Out-Naziing the Masters [table of contents]
  A.   How Seriously Should the Baptismal Act Be Taken? [not included]
  B.   Are Mosaic Georgians Jewish? Are Sepharadim Christian ?
       Franco-Nazi Disputes about Ethnic Groupings and
       the Religious Laws
  C.   Mixed Heritage and Mixed Marriage as an Element [not included]
       in Ultimate Religious Persecution
  D.   Law and Pillage: Keeping Pace (at a Minimum) [not included]
       with the Occupiers

[footnote references are not complete due to the difficulty for the
 OCR program in recognising them]

Chapter Six
[...]
 Members of lesser known and statutorily unrecognized groups who had
some Jewish grandparental heritage but felt they were religiously non-
suspect may have had their problems under Vichy law. But surpassing
these and in greater jeopardy were members of the Mosaic Georgian sect,
who honored and revered the Torah and hence were suspect even as a
religious matter. By German approximation early in 1941, there were
some fifty Mosaic Georgians in France whose fate would have to be
decided under the religious laws.

 The occupiers quickly made clear their own sense that these individuals
were not Jewish, both by the Nazis' race-oriented lights and by their
view of the sect's religious practices, too. "These Georgians are not 
Semites but rather Chaldeans converted to Judaism and having emigrated, in
antiquity, to the Caucasus." As to their religious practice, what was most
important to the Germans was that the group never revered the Talmud.
They were relieved, under German interpretations, of al1 Jewish obliga-
tions, even including the need to have their property handed over for
aryanization, always a particular area of Nazi interest. (68)

 The French rigorously refused to adopt German standards on the Georgians. 
Ditte's colleague at CGQJ, Armilhon, who increasingly had authority over 
such questions,(69) reflected the increasing harshness of the Dar-

67 A. Filonoff to Vichy, 28 July 1941, AN AJ's,148.
68 AN AJ3s, 148. See Billig's excellent account of this Franco-German 
   dispute, Commissariat général de Questions Juives (CGQJ), vol. I, 337ff.
69 Ibid., vol. 2, 226.

p218

quier period at the agency in opining strongly in mid-1943 (after some
equivocation beforehand):
 "French law incontestably views these Georgians of Mosaic belief as covered 
by the racial statute. This derives from the fact that the statute is
essentially based in determining the race of an individual upon the religion
practiced by his grandparents." (70)

CGQJ eventually allowed that the German opinion on the sect might re-
lieve its followers from having to wear the Star. But, remarkably:
"This exemption from wearing the Star does not lead, ipso facto, to the re-
moval of trustees [administrateurs provisoires] that it was thought should be
placed on the property of Georgians of Mosaic belief. In fact, I am deciding
now that, in all cases, Georgians of Mosaic belief should be subject to ar-
yanization measures."(71)

At least fifteen Georgian business people are cited in 1944 as being tar-
gets of persecution under the final Vichy definition of their religious
sect.(72)

 That German emphasis on race occasionally and ironically assisted
groups whom the French were managing to persecute religiously is borne
out in the analogous case of the Karaites. This Jewish sect numbered in
France no more than 270 people.(73) The Karaites believe in the Penta-
teuch and their name itself derives from the Hebrew for "scriptures,"(74)
but they reject the Talmud. The Karaites came into existence some time
around the eighth century.(75)

 Debate about the status of this tiny group began in 1941 and engages
the attention of the Roman Catholic Church, from whose Parisian arch-
diocese the cleric Bénusart writes as follows in December:


70 Ibid., vol. 1, 339.
71 Ibid., vol. 1, 340.
72 AN AJ3s,148.
73 Memorandum, probably internally prepared by the CGQJ on 8 February  1943,
describing thé Karaites, whose status was still being contested, YV 0-9/20-5; see Michael
Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books,1981 ),
93, who put the figure at 250. A later analyst puts it at 240, see below at note 84.
74 YV 0-9/20-5.
75 Vichy expert Peter[?] Bogdanovitch eventually opined that the Karaites were not Jewish;
see AN AJ3g,148.

p219
 "The Karaite religion is practiced by a small number of Russians established
in France after the Revolution, for the most part. It is considered by the
Catholic Church as completely autonomous, and leaning more towards Islam
than the Jewish religion. The Imperial Russian government recognized this
independence, by the way, and exempted Karaites from measures taken by
the Empire against Jews."(76)

 Metropolitain Séraphin also moved to dissociate Karaites from Ju-
daism." And the Nazis quickly took the same position they had taken
on the Mosaic Georgians. So did self styled "ethnographical experts"
such as Professor Montandon, whose distinctions between hereditary ra-
cial qualities and those he favored ("based on all qualities of the man:
physical, mental, moral") had been well noted and utilized on just such
issues.(78)

 After some internal discussion at CGQJ, Cabanis of that agency in-
formed the Justice Minister in March 1942, that the agency considered
Karaites to be Jewish.(79) The Interior Ministry wrote to a Catholic
Church official (Père Robert Léon) that Vichy believed the sect broke off
from Jews only because of a theological quibble and decreed Karaites as
falling under the statutory definition.(80) Many months later, as Vichy
seemed to be changing its mind, a compendious analysis called for
adoption of the German approach. It sympathized with the Karaites,
opining that "For these people, then, the French legislation has proven
more severe than the German measures, even on their terrain of race and
the fight against Jews.... [But] the Karaites seem not to be of the
(biologically) Jewish race."(81)

 Ultimately, the Karaites fared better than the Georgians. By early 1943,
possibly because of such studious research, and surely because of the dili-
gent efforts of Paul Bogdanovitch, an increasingly influential authority
at the Office of Russian Emigrés in France, Vichy policy shifted. Bog-
danovitch, who as we shall see was by no means a reliable force for good
in these kinds of disputes, finally opined that the Karaites were not

76 CDJC XXXII, 108.
77 YV 0-9/20-5, 5.
78 Ibid., 6; on Montandon, see below, text at note 103.
79 YV 0-9/20-5, 3.
80 AN AJ3s,148.
81 Ibid., 8.

p220

Jewish for the purposes of the religious law. Bogdanovitch apparently
convinced Darquier,(82) and Vichy informed its regional directors that
"the Karaites are no longer to be considered as Jews."(83)

 One of the ironies, again, of these debates, is the elevation of race over
religion in the attempts to protect minorities from the stain of Judaism.
As one observer put it, to persecute Georgians, Karaites and other such
sects would be to puzzle "the great mass" of French public opinion, which is
indifferent to religious ideas and has even a hostile and skeptical tendency
[toward religion]. Public opinion does admit well the notion that there is a
Jewish race; it accepts that but has never concerned itself with the Jewish
religion. If you tell people that to be Jewish you must be in the Jewish
religion, they're ready to believe that not to be Jewish requires belonging
to the Christian religion. The case of half Jews confirms their view. The
Jewish question will seem to them like a form of clericalism and a religious
bromide. "You know," said a street vendor in the presence of one of our
friends, "I'll need to push my wagon with a baptismal certificate in my
pocket." ... In privileging religion above race, one flies in the face (this
time, for no reason whatsoever) of the occupying authorities.(84)

 Did the average Frenchman better understand the Jew as a racial entity
than as a participant in an organized religious group? In a legal area that
ambiguously combined the language of race and religion, such popular
views might indeed have affected both administrative and judicial policy.
CGQJ's first leader, Xavier Vallat, seemed as a theoretical matter to have
preferred a religious conception of Jewish status, as we saw in his ex-
changes with Barthélemy from early 1942 (85); yet, as time went on, both
he and his successor, Darquier, inevitably became involved in what
seemed to many an offcial racism,(86) backed by native French concep-
tions. Ironically,  their zealous (nay,  compulsive) overinclusiveness
coerced the language of race from the lips of legal players trying hard to
protect these smaller groups; doubly ironic, such language evoked Nazi
decisions that had long since left these groups alone. The resultant dis-

82 AN AJ3x,148.
83 Ibid., memorandum, 22 January 1943.
84 Analysis, uncertain date and origin, CDJC CXIV-25.
85 See chapter 4, text at note 144.
86 Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 93.

[...]
p222

Jugutis were Jews for their statutory purposes.(90) In August 1941, Kraeh-
ling may have had reason for optimism, although he was mistaken at the
time in urging similar treatment for his clients as he thought was going
to be given to the Georgians - and we know how they eventually fared.
But 1942 and 1943 brought no resolution to the question of his clients'
status; the Nazis were not, in fact, uniformly favorable to the Jugutis (as
they had been to the Georgians and the Karaites),(91) although CGQJ by
early in 1942 expressly restated the Nazi position as exempting them.(92)

 While the Nazi position was crystallizing around the earlier view
Kraehling confidently expected, Vichy held firm against his clients. As
late as May 1943, the Swiss had to intervene on behalf of what they
called "Iranian emigrés of the Jugutis faith" who found themselves under
Vichy authority, pleading for "treatment similar to that applied to their
co-religionists in the Occupied Zone."(93) At least four of their sect, in-
cluding Kraehling's client Abramoff, were arrested, and Abramoffs gro-
cery store was also aryanized.(94) It was not until mid-1943 that Vichy
declared Jugutis to be racially uncompromised. Abramoff seems to have
been released and his store de-aryanized.(95)

 Private legal advocacy also was needed to keep the Subbotniks distinct
from all Jewish tincture. A lawyer listed as LaPaulle had been represent-
ing four members of the sect since 1941 in dialogue with Ditte of CGQJ;
the agency was at first as unremittingly against the Subbotniks as it had
been against the Russian Orthodox. Ditte maintained that these little
"Mosaic" groups could not be distinguished one from the other, at least
not in a manner convincing to his agency.(96)

 Lawyer LaPaulle argued into mid-1942 that Russian law exempted
Subbotniks from antisemitic measures (although allowing that the group

90 AN AJ3s,148.
91 Ibid. Rdthke, for one, is cited as saying that "Jugutis must not be thought of a priori
as non-Jews. Each case must be examined on its own."
92 CGQJ aryanization department,  19 January 1942, YV 0-9/20-4.
93 AN AJ3s,148.
94 Ibid.
95 On 3 March 1943, an "Aron Abramow" is referred to in a letter from the police to
CGQJ, in which "the annulment of his declaration as a Jew" is reported, ibid.
96 AN AJ3s,148. We shall meet Lapaulle, most probably this same lawyer, at chapter 8,
note 150.

p223

had "Judaizing tendencies"), perhaps assimilating analogous arguments
made for the Karaites. Like the latter, however, his clients were made to
suffer longer than they had under either Russian or Nazi definitions.
Surely, too, his argument stressing religious distinctions between Sub-
botniks and Jews were unlikely to find favor in Vichy eyes, since the
régime proved itself less amenable to these than even the Germans, who
were interested to learn that Mosaic Georgians rejected the Talmud. Still,
LaPaulle tried:
 "The best proof that Subbotniks are in no way a Mosaic sect is that they
 accept the New Testament,  which  is totally rejected by the Jewish
 religion."(97)

 Only in the case of the Ismaelites, a Shiite Muslim sect with 500,000
members worldwide - all of whom would surely have been shocked to
hear someone call them Jews! - did Vichy finally show itself less perse-
cutory than the Germans. It took until 21 January 1944, however. While
the Germans continued to examine this sect's members case by case,
Vichy decided that these Muslims were indeed not Jews.(98)

 Stranger and stranger, and increasingly reliant on "expert" assistance
Vichy's ruggedly individualistic stance on race extended to Armenians.
Throughout 1943 and into 1944 this ethnically distinct group found some
of its members fighting racial battles it thought had been won a full ten
years and more ago, at the very origins of the Third Reich. On 3 July
1933, the Interior Minister of the Reich had issued an "Expert Racial
Letter" classifying Armenians as Aryans.(99) Vichy for awhile tended to
agree, but then some creeping aryanization of Armenian-held property
began to occur. The problem seems to have been a typically Vichy-based
legalistic distinction - applicable to the Armenians but not to the earlier
groups discussed - between nationality and religion.

 In early 1943, CGQJ asked its regional directors dealing with the ar-
yanization of Jewish property not to bother Armenians, since "there are
no Armenian Jews [sic]." [...]

97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.