A plague outbreak – “DISEASE NO. 9” – in Paris in 1920 blamed mainly on Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, turned out to be France’s antisemitic fake news!
By Michel Levine
(Translation from article published by the Auschwitz Foundation in French in the magazine “Témoigner” N°140 April 2025.)
During World War I, antisemitic movements largely suspended their rhetoric in the name of national unity, redirecting hostility from Jews to Germans. Even ardent nationalist Maurice Barrès began honoring Jewish soldiers who died for France. This wartime truce was symbolized by Rabbi-Chaplain Abraham Bloch offering a crucifix to a dying Christian soldier before being mortally wounded himself.
RENEWAL OF HATRED
After the war, the November 1919 elections brought political newcomers who formed the National Bloc – a coalition manipulated by Georges Clemenceau and Action Française. For the first time, Charles Maurras‘ movement overcame its contempt for the Republic’s electoral process, promoting candidates steeped in antisemitism now enhanced with racialist theory.
The 1920 publication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” provided pseudo-historical validation for anti-Jewish campaigns. This fabricated document detailing an alleged international Jewish conspiracy was crafted in 1901 by the Russian secret police to weaponize hatred. Distributed worldwide in millions of copies, the Protocols were exploited by leaders who recognized their fraudulent nature – as Joseph Goebbels confessed:
“I believe in the intrinsic truth, but not in the factual truth of the Protocols.”
THE JEWISH PLAGUE
In spring 1920, plague cases emerged in Paris’s impoverished outskirts. The epidemic spread among fifty thousand social outcasts, including eight thousand recent immigrants. Authorities identified the source: rats carrying plague-infected fleas had escaped from a barge delivering British coal. To prevent panic, officials designated the outbreak “Disease No. 9” – plague’s registry number – while the public dubbed it the “rag-pickers’ plague.” This final plague outbreak in Paris caused only 34 deaths before subsiding.
Initially, public opinion remained indifferent to a disease affecting society’s “invisible” members. But soon, newspapers began amplifying alarming rumors. Le Petit Bleu de Paris explicitly identified supposed culprits:
“The epidemics that have devastated . . . certain regions of Europe were due to the introduction, by Orientals, of Yersin’s bacillus.”
These mysterious Asian carriers were allegedly spreading:
“…the doctrines of defeatist Bolshevism.”
UNDER THE TARNISHED GOLD OF THE REPUBLIC
On December 2, 1920, the French Senate convened an extraordinary session addressing the plague affecting Paris. The session unleashed a torrent of hatred and prejudice from these “wise men” of the Republic. Adrien Gaudin de Villaine, known for anti-republican positions, challenged the health minister:
“Paris and its suburbs are threatened… by a contagion that doctors call disease No. 9… Everywhere people with strange appearances, in heterogeneous rags, speaking incomprehensible language… all Jews and all speaking ‘Yiddish’… I add that the infant mortality in Paris… is also a consequence… of this invasion of exotic people…”
Senator Dominique Delahaye proposed:
“A first method of control would consist, since you cannot delouse them, of making them pay a certain sum upon entry; after which, they would be subjected to a continuous tribute“—unwittingly proposing a return to centuries-old discriminatory practice.
Confronted with this disturbing rhetoric, a few senators attempted to redirect the debate toward actual public health issues. The bacteriologist Émile Roux from the Pasteur Institute later countered these claims:
“The rare cases of bubonic plague observed did not occur among the immigrants accused in the Senate… the disease… was brought… by plague-infected rats arriving with barges delivering English coal.”
Only the Socialists and organizations like the League of Human Rights mounted genuine responses to this venomous wave. Le Populaire denounced an “odious calumny” that used disease No. 9 as a weapon against proletarians vilified simply for being foreigners.
UNCERTAINTIES
If this malignant rumor did not fundamentally alter how “native” French viewed their Jewish fellow citizens, it was because the social climate was not particularly receptive. The country was focused on healing war wounds, and the barely lethal disease No. 9 seemed insignificant compared to the devastation of war and the “Spanish” flu.
In May 1924, elections witnessed the defeat of the National Bloc and the rise of the Left-Wing Coalition. Yet this represented only a brief respite. The 1930s would witness dictatorships seizing power across Europe and unspeakable racial hatred culminating in the Holocaust.
As historian Léon Poliakov presciently observed:
“The only certainty I have today regarding antisemitism and racism… is that all this will continue. We cannot predict exactly in what form, nor with what intensity. But we can be convinced that it will not cease.”
Nor will cease, one hopes, the determined struggle against the poisoning consciences.
About the writer:
Michel Levine is a historian of Human Rights and the author of a work dedicated to the major cases of the League of Human Rights (Unclassified Cases. Unpublished Archives of the League of Human Rights, Paris, Fayard, 1973).
Further publications include a historical investigation on the repression of Algerian demonstrations in Paris in October 1961 (The October Ratonnades. A Collective Murder in Paris in 1961, Paris, Ramsay, 1985; reissue Jean- Claude Gawsewitch Publisher, 2001.)
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