Élisée Reclus et les Juifs : étude géographique d’un peuple sans État

Abstract

Two recent biographies of Élisée Reclus allude to his pretended “anti-Semitism”, without presenting, however, any documental evidence of this assertion. This gives to us the occasion to clarify the approach of a nineteenth-century geographer and anarchist on a people which was at that time dispersed, and which had just started to elaborate the Zionist idea. What are the geographical ideas of Reclus, who deals in his monumental work with hundreds of Jewish communities, on their territorial status, and more broadly on the stateless peoples? What are his political ideas, which we can infer from his articles and correspondences, on the pogroms and the other persecutions suffered by the Jews? In this paper, we systematicallys explore the reclusian corpus to find answers to these questions.

Keywords

• Reclus
• universal geography
• Jews
• anti-semitism
• anarchism