A Very Jewish Christmas

As far as tourists are concerned, Paris is mostly closed on Christmas day. Of the major sights, only the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Georges Pompidou remain open. Some corner cafés are open, but outside of Belleville, most shops and restaurants are closed. (As you might expect, all the Chinese restaurants on Rue de Belleville were open.) Luckily, one museum was not only open but also new to Maggie and me, so on Friday, we joined Jake and Joy for a stroll through the Museum of Jewish Art and History.

Located in a 17th-century mansion in the Marais, the building itself is very beautiful, and everything inside is polished and new. (Pictures are not allowed - this picture of the museum's courtyard was taken outside a security window. Notice that the left-side wall is a façade, as the building behind it is not part of this hôtel particulier (private mansion).) 

Audioguides were free, and there were lots of objets d'art and paintings to ogle, as well as texts to read. I enjoyed some of the maps showing how various waves of Jewish diasporic movement affected France, and the Dreyfus Affair was given a thorough treatment. On the other hand, I felt like the museum tried too hard to juggle explanations of Jewish rituals and theology, history and culture, past and present, and ended up unfocused and a little detached.

Part of the problem is that the museum's chronology only goes up to the Second World War - for the rest, Paris has a separate museum called Memorial to the Shoah (Holocaust). After having been to Jewish Museums in Prague and Berlin, it's unsatisfying to see Jewish history chopped up into pre- and during/post-Holocaust. The best thing to do probably would have been to go directly from the Museum of Jewish Art and History to the Memorial to the Shoah, but that wasn't in the cards.

What was in the cards after our museum visit was lunch. For that, we walked to the nearby Rue des Rosiers and sat down at Chez Marianne, one of many Israeli- and Yiddish-style restaurants on the street. (I vetoed straight-up falafel, as I've eaten too much recently.) We shared a sampler plate that included tarama, feta, Turkish salad, falafel, kefta, tuna salad, hummus, tabbouleh, tzaziki, and pastrami. With some white wine and pita, it was delish! And that concluded our Very Jewish Christmas, since that night, Maggie and I made carbonade, then we all went out to check out Christmas lights.

Our Very Jewish Christmas inspired me to think about Parisian Jewish geography (real geography, as opposed to the American social networking kind). All of the major monuments to Judaism and Jewish history are neatly located in or near the Marais, which traditionally includes the distinctive Jewish quarter of Paris. In the map below, this geographic logic is clear: the Museum of Jewish Art and History (top) and the Memorial to the Shoah (center) bookend the Rue des Rosiers, the epicenter of Jewish life in Paris (cluster), and the Memorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (bottom) isn't far away in a park behind Notre Dame.