The Liebman Family

The history of the Liebman family in France is first inscribed in the broader history of the entry of Jews into the nation. The rabbinical geography of medieval and modern France, patiently reconstructed by scholars, shows how ancient and dense Jewish settlements were before the great expulsions; it is this topographic and communal knowledge that the Gallia Judaica of Henri Gross assembles, a geographical dictionary of France based on rabbinical sources, which remains the reference work for situating communities in the long term [Gross, 1897]. Ashkenazi surnames of the Liebman type, however, belong to a more recent stratum, that of families coming from Alsace, Lorraine, or the Rhenish and Germanic margins, whose settlement and Francization accelerated in the nineteenth century.

This century is that of the "Franco-Jewish moment," when the Republic promises equality and when French Jews, in their majority, embrace a double loyalty: to Judaism and to France. Pierre Nora showed how this memory became tied to the "places" of national consciousness, the synagogue and the secular school, the Law of Moses and the laws of the Republic coexisting in the same civic piety [Nora, 1992]. A family such as the Liebman participated then, in its humility, in a virtue that the Jewish tradition calls implication in collective life, tiqoun olam, the "repair of the world": to serve the city without renouncing the covenant. The name itself—"the beloved," "the dear one"—seems to condense this hope for recognition at last acquired.

Emancipatory hope clashed, in the very last years of the nineteenth century, with antisemitism of a new virulence. Pierre Birnbaum captured this turning point by reconstructing, through the year 1898, this "antisemitic moment" when, from city to city, crowds attacked Jewish shops and persons against the backdrop of the Dreyfus Affair [Birnbaum, 1998]. Jewish families in the provinces, often modest—peddlers turned shopkeepers, cattle merchants, cloth dealers, artisans—then experienced in their flesh the fragility of the republican promise.

We must keep perspective here: we do not possess, for the Liebman family, any nominative document attesting their presence in any particular episode of 1898, and it would be dishonest to assign them a role that no archive documents. But their condition as Jews of France in this era places them, in all likelihood, within the scope of this collective trial. What tradition retains from these years is a discreet and tenacious virtue: the courage to remain, to not renounce, to continue to pray, to conduct commerce and to educate one's children amid insult. The relationship to the stranger and to difference, a cardinal value of Judaism—"you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 10:19)—is then reversed: it is the Jew of France, citizen with full rights, whom one demands become a stranger again in his own country. The Liebman lineage, by holding firm, participates in its own way in the long patience of Israel.

The rupture of 1940 brought the Liebman, like all Jews of France, into catastrophe. Robert Paxton established that Vichy's anti-Jewish policy was not simply dictated by the occupier but proceeded from the French State's own initiative, animated by its own "National Revolution" [Paxton, 1972]; Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton subsequently demonstrated, with archival support, the administrative machinery that led from the Statute of Jews of October 1940 to roundups and deportations [Marrus, 1981]. Serge Klarsfeld demonstrated, in his study on Vichy's role in the final solution, how the collaboration of the French State apparatus was decisive in directing victims to Auschwitz [Klarsfeld, 1983].

It is in the Memorial of the Deportation of Jews of France, the monumental work of Serge Klarsfeld, that the name becomes trace: each convoy is reconstructed there name by name, tearing the deported from statistical anonymity to restore to them an identity [Klarsfeld, 1978]. This work of naming is itself an act arising from a major Jewish virtue — zakhor, the imperative of remembrance: "remember, do not forget". Renée Poznanski has moreover described the daily life of Jews of France under the Occupation, the vise of censuses, the wearing of the star and spoliation, but also the resources of mutual aid that organized themselves [Poznanski, 1997]. For the Liebman documented during this period, as for so many others, the name "the beloved" then takes on tragic irony: the Republic that had made them citizens delivers them to filing and persecution. Faithfulness to life, the protection of one's own, charity toward the most exposed — these are the virtues that this ordeal lays bare.

Facing annihilation, a part of French Jewry chose action. Lucien Lazare documented this specific Jewish resistance — networks of forged papers, escape routes to Switzerland and Spain, massive rescue of children by organizations such as OSE and the Éclaireurs israélites [Lazare, 1987]. Lucien Lazare showed that this resistance was not only military but first and foremost a rescue enterprise, animated by the conviction that saving a life is equivalent to saving an entire world — a Talmudic principle from the tractate Sanhédrin that these fighters made their own.

Here again, rigor is necessary: we do not have a personal file linking with certainty a Liebman to any specific network. But collective history illuminates singular destiny. The care given to others, active kindness, clandestine hospitality offered to the hunted — these virtues that tradition ranks under hesed, charity, and under the redemption of captives (pidyon shvuyim) — were the work of thousands of anonymous people. By recalling them here, the Great Book connects the memory of the Liebman to that of a generation which, in the night, chose to extend a hand. Renée Poznanski and Lucien Lazare converge in emphasizing that these gestures were often the work of ordinary people, neither professional heroes nor saints, but faithful to a simple moral imperative: not to abandon [Poznanski, 1997] [Lazare, 1987].

The Liebman surname also traverses the second twentieth century through the traits of intellectual commitment. With no established genealogical link to the Liebman families of France but within the same onomastic family and the same French-speaking Ashkenazi diaspora, the figure of historian Marcel Liebman (Brussels, 1929-1986), from a Jewish family marked by the deportation of relatives during the war, illustrates a virtue peculiar to modern Judaism: the contribution to thought through fidelity to social justice and to the memory of the persecuted. A historian of the labor movement, he made his condition as a survivor an imperative of analysis and critical consciousness. We mention this figure "according to commonly received biographical tradition," lacking the opportunity, within the scope of the present volume, to verify all its elements against primary archival sources.

The postwar period is also when a pernicious counter-memory emerged in France: denialism. Valérie Igounet retraced its genesis and networks, showing how the denial of the Shoah became an organized ideological enterprise [Igounet, 2000]. Zeev Sternhell, for his part, brought to light the French roots of an ideology "neither right nor left" in which fascism found fertile ground [Sternhell, 1983]. Faced with these falsifications, the virtue that the Liebman lineage can embody — and that all those who hold historical knowledge high embody — is that of truth as duty: the refusal to let lies be told about the dead. Talmudic wisdom already taught that "the seal of the Holy One, blessed be He, is truth" (emet); the historian and the witness are, in the modern city, its guardians.

There remains, at the end of the archive, what only tradition transmits: the meaning of the name. "Liebman" — the beloved man, the dear man — belongs to that category of affectionate surnames where the community said, before any civil register, the tenderness of a father for a son, of a house for one of its own. In the Ashkenazi world, the Yiddish name Lieb or Leybe often served as the affective equivalent of the Hebrew name Yehouda/Aryeh (the lion, through the classical play of Jacob's blessing to Judah, "lion cub") or as a translation of Yedidyah, "beloved of God," the second name given to King Solomon. This onomastic memory is received by tradition more than established by document: we present it as such, without forcing proof of it.

What the name carries, then, is a discreet theology of love: the love of God for Israel (ahavat olam), the love of one's neighbor (ve'ahavta lere'akha kamokha) elevated by Rabbi Aqiba to the "great principle of the Torah," and the humility that consists in receiving oneself as "beloved" before believing oneself worthy. In transmitting such a name, the Liebman lineage — whatever the branches and uncertainties of its genealogy — transmits an exhortation: to be worthy of the affection received, to return it to the world in the form of justice and kindness.

At the end of this journey, the Liebman lineage presents itself less as a reconstituted family tree — its branches remain, as they stand, uncertain and unconnected — than as a constellation of Jewish destinies in France caught up in the grand narrative of the twentieth century: emancipation and its fragility [Nora, 1992], fin-de-siècle antisemitism [Birnbaum, 1998], the Vichy catastrophe [Paxton, 1972] [Klarsfeld, 1978], rescue and resistance [Lazare, 1987] [Poznanski, 1997], and finally the post-war struggle for truth against denial [Igounet, 2000].

Among all the virtues that the Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries, the one that the Liebman lineage will have, above all others, best expressed is zakhor — the duty of memory and truth. Not through an isolated feat of brilliance, but through the very logic of its name and its condition: a surname that speaks of love received, a family whose destiny survives only because memorials, historians, and witnesses refused oblivion and falsehood. In embodying this fidelity to the memory of the persecuted and to truth against those who deny it, the Liebman participate in Israel's most ancient vocation: to be, across generations and continents, the people who remember. Where the archive falls silent, memory keeps watch; and it is perhaps there, more than in any other register, that this name "beloved" finds its true lineage.