My Testament — The Resistance and the Discovery of Bahya ibn Paquda
Autobiographical account of André Chouraqui's involvement in the French Resistance during the Occupation, and his discovery of the Jewish mystic Bahya ibn Paquda whose work he translated in hiding.
During the terrible years of the Nazi occupation, I had the good fortune to translate Bahya ibn Paquda, a great Jewish mystic of the 11th century. Like many Jews whose status had just been revised by the Vichy government, I was expelled from Clermont-Ferrand. Marshal Pétain and his ministers had just abolished, retroactively, the Crémieux Decree, which seventy years earlier had granted the Jews French nationality.
So I took refuge in Tence, in the Haute-Loire, with Pastor Roland Leenhardt. It was also during this exile in Tence that I met Dr. Paul Héritier. A few kilometres away, in Chaumargeais, he welcomed me into the house where he was born. He gave me its keys, urging me to do whatever I wished with it to “save human lives and help bring about the liberation of France.”
In Chaumargeais, in the heart of France and one of the most active centres of the Resistance, I became the representative of the OSE, the children’s aid organization. Our work was backed by Pastors Leenhardt, Trocmé and Theis, supported by a Protestant population united as one.
And so it was in the rare hours of leisure left to me by my activities in the maquis that I undertook the translation of Bahya ibn Paquda’s fundamental work, Duties of the Heart. I had found the book in one of the libraries plundered by the German occupiers. It lay in a pile of volumes destined to feed the Nazi book burning.