The Cohn-Bendit Family

Before the men, the name. To bear Cohn is to bear the claim — transmitted from father to son according to custom — of a priestly descent reaching back to Aaron, brother of Moses. In the Jewish tradition, the kohen is not a title of nobility but a charge of service: to bless the assembly, to watch over purity, to abstain from certain proximities. That the Cohn-Bendit lineage had, in the twentieth century, largely departed from religious practice — Erich Cohn-Bendit describing himself as an atheist — only sharpens a fruitful paradox: the name carried a priestly Memory that deeds no longer prolonged liturgically, yet that history prolonged otherwise, through service rendered to others.

The element Bendit, for its part, inscribes the family within the vast Ashkenaze onomastic tradition, where names were often fixed late, through the emancipation edicts that, in the German states of the early nineteenth century, required Jews to adopt stable patronyms. The compound form Cohn-Bendit bears witness to these strategies of distinction, common when a name as widespread as Cohn needed to be singularized. A methodological note of caution is warranted here: the study of Jewish names, while it illuminates origins and trajectories, cannot by itself establish a continuous lineage [Toledano, 2003]. This chapter therefore belongs to transmitted memory rather than to the archive: it says what the name means, not what a proven genealogy would demonstrate across thirty generations.

It is already, however, the expression of a cardinal virtue of Israel: fidelity to transmission. Even secularized, a family that preserves the priestly name keeps alive a thread of collective Memory — that of a people who, dispersed, recognized one another through their names. In this sense, the Cohn-Bendits partake of the long memorial endurance of Ashkenaze Judaism.

The lineage enters documented history with Erich (or Eric) Cohn-Bendit, born in Berlin in 1902 and died in 1959. Trained as a jurist, he practiced in the German capital of the Weimar Republic as a lawyer. In Berlin, Erich Cohn-Bendit was one of the lawyers for the Rote Hilfe (Red Aid), an international revolutionary solidarity organization, and he was a friend of the philosopher Hannah Arendt. This commitment is not anecdotal: it defines the man. Erich Cohn-Bendit was a Berlin lawyer, a declared atheist and convinced Trotskyist, who had worked as a defense attorney for the Rote Hilfe and represented Hans Litten — that same Hans Litten who, in 1931, dared to summon Hitler to appear in court and was, after 1933, martyred by the Nazi regime.

Defending poor militants, taking the side of political defendants, upholding the law in the face of rising brown-shirted violence: such was the expression, in a perfectly secular life, of one of the highest virtues of the Jewish tradition — tsedek, justice, and the duty to aid the oppressed. Judaism has never separated piety from social justice; the prophets made it the heart of their message. That an atheist lawyer of priestly lineage should have devoted his robes to the defense of the weak extends, by secular means, a very ancient prophetic imperative. This is a lived "intersection": the Jewish heritage is expressed no longer in prayer but in pleading.

His wife, Herta, née David, deserves to be named as his equal. Herta Cohn-Bendit, née David in 1908 in Poznań, also a lawyer, came from a traditionalist Ashkenazi Jewish family. A couple of jurists, a couple of exiles: their shared destiny gives the lineage roots that are at once Berliner and Polish, Prussian and Ashkenazi.

The year 1933 breaks everything. Erich Cohn-Bendit leaves Germany during the winter of 1933, in the wake of Hitler's rise to power. In Paris, the family joins the constellation of German Jewish intellectuals in exile. In Paris, his parents became members of a circle of Jewish intellectuals that included Walter Benjamin and Heinrich Blücher — the companion, precisely, of Hannah Arendt. The lineage thus finds itself at the very heart of that German intellectual diaspora which, driven out by Nazism, refounded a part of European thought in the twentieth century.

Then came the war and the machinery of Vichy. The family takes refuge in the Southwest. The parents had taken refuge as early as 1940 in Montauban, among the Jewish families protected, during the war, by Monseigneur Théas. This detail connects the fate of the Cohn-Bendits to one of the rare centers of spiritual resistance within the French clergy: Pierre-Marie Théas, bishop of Montauban, who had a solemn protest against antisemitic persecutions read from the pulpit in 1942. The Cohn-Bendits go underground, take refuge in Moissac in the Tarn-et-Garonne and take the name Delpioux; at the Liberation, they return to Montauban on 29 August 1944.

The context of this clandestine existence was that of a methodical killing machine, whose calendar and scale historiography has established [Klarsfeld, 1993] [Paxton, 1972] [Poznanski, 1994]. The family was not spared in its branch that remained in Germany. Several of their relatives who had stayed in Berlin were deported to Riga in 1942–1943, where they perished or were murdered — a Memory documented by the great works of victim enumeration [Klarsfeld, 1978] [Klarsfeld, 2001]. Here is knotted the gravest tension of any Jewish lineage of the twentieth century: some saved by flight and a false name, others swallowed up. The survivor bears forever the name of the disappeared.

That this rescue was made possible by a Catholic bishop also speaks to a virtue that the Jewish tradition honors above all others: hakhnassat orhim, the welcoming of the stranger and the persecuted, and the recognition of the "righteous." The family, itself the embodiment of the condition of exile, received the help of others — and one will see that they returned it.

The birth of Daniel seals the survival. The second son, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, comes into the world on April 4, 1945, in Montauban — on the very threshold of Liberation, like a living challenge hurled at vanquished barbarism. But the most moving chapter of the family's virtue is written in the immediate postwar years, when survivors turned toward orphans.

Between 1945 and 1948, the Cohn-Bendits are responsible for the "Colonie Juliette" — named after Juliette Stern —, an establishment for children of former Jewish deportees located in Cailly-sur-Eure, in the Eure. To care for the children of the Shoah, for those whose parents did not return from the camps, is to fulfill in its purest form one of the most insistent commandments of the tradition of Israel: the protection of the orphan (yatom), which the Torah and the prophets place among the most sacred duties. Herta and Erich, themselves survivors through a false name, devote these years to the recovery of a wounded generation. Charity (tsedaka) and care for the other do not remain abstractions here: they take on the concrete face of a children's home.

The commitment continues in the transmission of Jewish knowledge. The Cohn-Bendits then return to Paris, with Herta becoming bursar of the École Maïmonide, in Boulogne-Billancourt — the first major Jewish school in France reconstituted after the war, placed under the patronage of the greatest of medieval philosophers and codifiers. To serve the institution that educates French Jewish youth is to participate, humbly but genuinely, in the spiritual reconstruction of a decimated community. Here again, involvement in collective Jewish life is inscribed in deeds, not in discourse.

The fate of Erich Cohn-Bendit came to a paradoxical conclusion. Unable to practice his profession in France, where he would have had to complete a new university curriculum, Erich Cohn-Bendit decided in 1952 to return to Germany and became a lawyer in Frankfurt. Returning to the country that had driven out and murdered his people was a weighty choice, explained only by professional necessity, yet one that placed the lawyer at the heart of the intellectual life of the nascent Federal Republic. He was in close contact with members of the Frankfurt School — Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno — as well as with Bertolt Brecht and Hélène Weigel, and counted Bruno Bettelheim among his clients.

This proximity to the Frankfurt School was no coincidence: critical theory was, in part, the work of German Jewish intellectuals seeking to understand how a civilization had tipped into crime. Erich Cohn-Bendit, a lawyer rather than a philosopher, was a professional and personal fellow traveler within that world. His death in 1959 closes the life of a man who embodied, from beginning to end, the figure of the committed Jewish jurist — one for whom the law is a bulwark against arbitrary power. His memory connects the lineage to one of the great contributions of German Judaism to universal thought: the critical imperative, the refusal of submission, the lucid analysis of political evil.

Two sons extend the lineage. Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (1936-2021) was a French politician, Daniel's elder brother; a teacher, he devoted his life to pedagogy and new educational methods. Making education a cause means taking up anew one of the oldest Jewish imperatives: study and its transmission (talmud Torah), even in an entirely secularized form, oriented toward the emancipation of the child.

The younger, however, would bring the name worldwide renown. Marc Daniel Cohn-Bendit, born on 4 April 1945 in Montauban, is a Franco-German politician, active both in Germany and in France, born to Jewish parents from Germany who were far-left militants and later anti-Nazis. A libertarian activist who studied at the University of Paris-Nanterre, he rose to prominence during the May 68 movement, of which he was one of the spokespeople. A symbol of the student uprising, long barred from entering France, he later became a Green member of the European Parliament, one of the leading voices of continental federalism.

His Jewish identity was at the heart of his public destiny: it was as a Jew that the Gaullist authorities sought to stigmatize him in 1968, and it was through the famous expression of solidarity — "we are all German Jews" — that French youth responded to his expulsion. There lies a striking intersection between the particular and the universal: a Jewish identity, designated as stigma, turned into an emblem of a broader fraternity. In this, Daniel Cohn-Bendit embodies a figure both very ancient and very modern: that of the cosmopolitan Jew, without any assigned border, whose belonging to a dispersed people is converted into commitment to the common city. The Jewish tradition, which has always meditated on the tension between attachment to Israel and service to the nations among which it lived, finds here a contemporary expression.

From the Berlin lawyer defending the oppressed to the orator of Nanterre, the Cohn-Bendit lineage traces a coherent trajectory beneath the apparent rupture of secularization. The priestly name was no longer honored at the altar, but its spirit of service migrated toward the courtroom, the orphans' home, the classroom, and the assembly hall. What this family will have expressed, above all other virtues, is justice in the service of the oppressed — the prophetic tsedek: defending political defendants in the face of nascent Nazism, saving one's own under the assumed name of Delpioux, sheltering the children of the deported at the Colonie Juliette, serving the École Maïmonide, then carrying into European public life an unrelenting demand for emancipation.

To this cardinal virtue others are joined, all born of established fact: the care of the orphan and the stranger, fidelity to the Memory of those lost in Riga, the contribution to critical thought through fellowship with the École de Francfort, the educational transmission embodied by Gabriel. The shadows are not silenced: the avowed atheism, the distance from practice, the pain of a return to the Germany of crime, half a family swallowed by the Shoah. It is precisely in this interweaving of light and mourning that the Cohn-Bendit lineage joins the collective Memory of Israel: a people who, struck down, made of justice and care for the other not a consolation, but a task. In this sense, a family of priests turned laypeople will have, through law and through action, continued to fulfill the most ancient of blessings: to watch over humankind.