Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives

1941-05/1943

The Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives was founded in Paris in 1941-05, mostly funded by the SS, and headed by a bizarre character, Paul Sezille, a former colonial officer whose philosophy was that ‘the Jew must disappear for many future generations’. The pseudo-academic Institute was supposed to study and draw attention to all Jewish matters. It did this by organizing meetings addressed by anti-Jewish speakers, covering the walls of Paris with anti-Semitic posters and using issuing malevolent anti-Semitic pamphlets. The IEQJ was transformed in 1943 into the Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives et Ethnoraciales (IEQJE). The IEQJE was headed for a while by the well-known ‘academic’ anthropologist and ethnologist George Montandon, an extreme anti-Semitic who worked for the CGQJ as a scientific expert on race, and who claimed the ability to identify Jews by their physical characteristics.