A French court this week-end ordered the withholding from sale of 300,000 copies of the 1960 edition of “Petit Larousse, ” French best-selling dictionary, for presenting Leon Blum, the late Jewish Premier of France, in an anti-Semitic light.
The dictionary alleged that Mr. Blum’s real name was Karfulkenstein and characterized him in terms which his family and friends considered as having the same anti-Semitic undertone as when French anti-Semites claimed before the war that Mr. Blum was of Bulgarian origin. Mr.Blum, who was born in Paris in 1872, came from an Alsatian-Jewish family that has been French for at least 200 years.
In court yesterday, the Larousse publishers admitted that errors had been made in presenting Mr. Blum’s biography and apologized to the Blum family. The publishers explained that errors were made by a man whom they fired a year ago for inserting false information. They offered to paste corrections in all copies in stock and in the hands of bookstores. The court ordered that no copies should be sold before the correction is made.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
