2023-12-11 17:41:04
Louis de Funès’ masterpiece was published 50 years ago. It is as current as it is out of time.
On October 18, 1973, one of the funniest films I know premiered. “The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob,” directed by Gérard Oury and starring Louis de Funès, is a firework of gags. In case you don’t know him, the very racist industrialist Victor Pivert is forced under the most hairy circumstances to disguise himself as a Hasidic rabbi with the Arab revolutionary Mohammed Larbi Slimane in order to escape both the henchmen of the regime that Slimane hopes to overthrow and the French police. The story behind the film and its actors is remarkable. Gérard Oury, whose full name was Max-Gérard Houry Tannenbaum, came from an irreligious family. He only survived the Shoah thanks to a successful escape, during which he did not recognize his daughter, Danièle Thompson, in order to spare her the stigmatization under the Nuremberg racial laws (she later co-wrote the script). Oury was completely secular, but fascinated by the Hasidic Jews of the Marais. To bring them closer to the public, to spread the message of religious reconciliation and tolerance and to top it all off with the cocktail cherry Louis de Funès: that was his aim. Filming began a few months after the Munich attack by Palestinian terrorists. Shortly before the premiere, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel. In protest against the film (which she had not seen), the wife of Jewish producer Georges Cravenne, who was passionate about the Palestinian cause, hijacked a flight from Nice to Cairo. During a stopover, all the hostages were released, but she was shot. “People always ask me if they could do ‘Rabbi Jacob’ again. But even back then we asked ourselves about its feasibility,” said Danièle Thompson in 2018. It was comforting that it was successful.
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