In late December 1954, an unusual request arrived at Israel’s Ministry of Welfare. International superstar Josephine Baker, then one of the most famous women in the world, wanted to adopt a Jewish Israeli child and add them to the “Rainbow Tribe” she had created.
The Rainbow Tribe was Baker’s ambitious social experiment: a family composed of adopted children from different religions, cultures, and ethnic backgrounds, assembled in the spirit of peace and brotherhood among nations. Through this family, Baker hoped to prove that human beings could live together in harmony. By that point, she had already adopted five children, and in her view, a family that aspired to represent the entire world could not be complete without a Jewish son or daughter.
Israel’s Minister of Religious Affairs at the time, Moshe Shapira, rejected her request outright. In the official statement announcing the decision, the ministry explained that “the State cannot permit a Jewish child to leave Israel at a time when every effort is being made to bring Jewish children to the country.”
Israel’s refusal did not prevent Baker from adding a Jewish child to her Rainbow Tribe. Some time later, she adopted a French boy, naming him Moïse – the French form of Moses – and raised him as a Jew in every respect. To ensure that he remained connected to his Jewish heritage, Baker arranged for him to study Hebrew and Torah. She even hired a private chef to make sure he would always have kosher food.
Yet Baker’s connection to Israel and the Jewish people did not begin with this unusual adoption request. It started much earlier, and continued long after Israel declined her appeal.
Early Life
Josephine Baker was born into extremely humble circumstances.
She was born on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a poor single mother of African American and Native American descent. By the age of eight, she was already helping support her family. In 1919, she joined a dance troupe, and her life changed forever. For the first time, she traveled across the United States on tour.
Originally hired as a backup dancer and singer, Baker’s charisma and ambition soon transformed her into the troupe’s biggest star.
She later moved to Harlem, which was then experiencing a remarkable cultural renaissance. Even amid Harlem’s vibrant artistic scene, Baker quickly rose to prominence. In 1925, she decided to move to Paris, one of the world’s great cultural capitals, where she was free of the racial segregation laws that existed in her country of birth.
In Paris, Baker discovered that while France had no formal racial segregation, racism and prejudice were very much alive. Black people were often viewed as “exotic,” and French society, influenced in part by its colonial empire, was in the midst of a cultural fascination with everything deemed exotic.
Baker embraced that fascination completely, and turned it into a highly successful business model.
Although she was American and had never set foot on the African continent, she wholeheartedly adopted the image of the “exotic African.” She created a dance performance known as Danse Sauvage (“The Savage Dance”), centered around the famous “Banana Dance” she developed. Wearing a skirt made of sixteen artificial bananas, Baker performed a provocative hip-shaking routine that captivated French audiences.
The show was a sensation. Baker became an international star, embarked on global tours, and by the late 1920s and 1930s had become the highest-paid female entertainer in France.
Beyond her dance performances, Baker also recorded songs, appeared in films, and leveraged her name and public image in a way that would feel familiar to modern-day influencers. She launched a range of products bearing her name, including cosmetics and hair-care lines, among them a product designed to darken the skin.
Baker never concealed the considerable wealth she amassed and lived a notably lavish lifestyle. She purchased a grand estate at Les Milandes in the Dordogne region of southern France, where she even established a private zoo. She also brought members of her family from St. Louis to live with her at the estate and was among the first to embrace a range technologies designed to make life easier, including a private airplane.
Nazi Soldiers and a Glass of Brandy
Then World War II broke out.
Unlike many other Americans living in France at the time, who chose to return to the United States following the German invasion, Baker decided to join the French war effort.
She contacted French intelligence officer Jacques Abtey and told him:
“France made me what I am today, and I am prepared to give my life for France. Captain, you may do with me as you wish, for France.”
After the war, Abtey recalled that he initially thought Baker was joking. But the moment she made it clear she was serious, he realized what an extraordinary asset he had on his hands. Baker received the rank of lieutenant in the French Air Force and became one of the most important figures in the French Resistance.
Throughout the war years, Baker and Abtey traveled across Europe as an entertainer and her “personal manager.” They carried messages between Resistance fighters and their leadership, which had been dispersed across various European countries. Baker concealed the messages inside her sheet music, where they were written in invisible ink, visible only when treated with a special powder. Sometimes, she even hid them in her underwear. She also used her private airplane to transport essential supplies between military camps.
Her estate, too, was enlisted in service of the Resistance, becoming a center for sheltering and assisting Resistance members, as well as a refuge for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Among them was an elderly Belgian couple whom Baker personally brought to the estate from an underground shelter in a Paris church. She also paid out of her own pocket for food, lodging, and forged documents that enabled people to escape France.
The extensive activity taking place at the estate did not go unnoticed by the Nazis. One night, their suspicions were aroused and they knocked on the door, while no fewer than ten Resistance fighters were hiding in Baker’s basement. Baker remained calm. She invited the German soldiers to watch a private dance performance, generously served them glasses of brandy (a rare and expensive luxury during the war), and even gave them personalized autographs. In the end, the soldiers forgot – or at least agreed to overlook – the reason they had come.
In 1943, Baker embarked on a world tour aimed at raising funds for the French Resistance. As part of that tour, she also performed throughout the Middle East, appearing in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, and, for the first time, in the Land of Israel, where she performed in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. The Palestine Post (which later became the Jerusalem Post) emphasized the importance of Baker’s performances in maintaining French morale and raising funds for the Resistance, even describing her as “a veritable Joan of Arc”:
At the end of the war, Baker’s achievements did not go unnoticed by the French authorities. In 1946, she was awarded the Legion of Honour, France’s highest civilian distinction, for her assistance to the Resistance during the war. She was the first American woman to receive the honor.
When Baker Sent Her Jewish Son to a Kibbutz
Baker was married four times during her life. It was her third husband, the French Jewish industrialist Jean Lion, who strengthened her ties to Judaism and Israel. Their marriage in 1937 made her a French citizen and also exposed her firsthand to European antisemitism and the persecution of Jews across the continent.
But even before she came to understand the depth of antisemitism in Europe, Baker had devoted her life to fighting racism. Having grown up in the segregated American South, she experienced racism firsthand from birth. When she moved to Harlem, she became aware of antisemitism directed at Jews and, like others associated with the Harlem Renaissance, including Louis Armstrong, came to see Jews as partners in the struggle against racism.
Although Lion and Baker’s marriage did not last long and ended three years after they wed, it proved especially significant for Baker. She never formally converted to Judaism, but Brian Bouillon-Baker, one of her children, wrote in his memoir that Baker tended to maintain a Jewish lifestyle in her home. Most nights, Brian claimed, Baker would kneel beside her bed and pray from a small French-language prayer book.
During World War II, when French Jews began being deported to Auschwitz, Jean Lion approached Baker and asked her to help save family members who had been imprisoned in the Drancy internment camp. Despite the fact that the couple had already separated, Baker did not hesitate and arranged for the family to be smuggled to the United States. Lion and his relatives survived.
Her marriage to Lion also had a direct impact on Baker’s path to motherhood. Early in their marriage, Baker became pregnant but suffered a miscarriage. Afterwards, she was told that she would never be able to conceive again.
All of this, together with the fact that she could not have children of her own, led Baker to establish the Rainbow Tribe in 1950: a family of adopted children from around the world who would grow up together as a kind of microcosm of humanity, while each maintained a deep connection to their own cultural and religious identity. Through this experiment, she hoped to demonstrate that people from different backgrounds could live together in harmony without abandoning their respective cultural or religious heritages.
Between 1950 and 1961, she adopted twelve children: Akio from Japan, Janot from South Korea; Luis from Colombia; Brian from Algeria (a Muslim); Jari from Finland; Jean-Claude from France; Moïse from France (who, as noted, was raised as a Jew); Marianne from France; Koffi from Côte d’Ivoire; Mara from Venezuela; Noël from France; and Stellina from Morocco.
In Baker’s view, such a family also had to include a Jewish child, and she therefore submitted a request to Israel’s Ministry of Welfare for permission to adopt one. The ministry saw things differently and rejected her application. Baker refused to give up, and in 1954 she adopted a child through the French welfare system, named him Moïse, and raised him as a Jew, although the child himself was most likely not born Jewish.
Baker’s worldview was radical in many respects and, among other things, helped revolutionize prevailing ideas about a child’s best interests in adoption. Before Baker, the common assumption was that adopted children should assimilate as fully as possible into their adoptive family and culture.
Baker, by contrast, took her children’s multicultural upbringing very seriously. In 1974, she told Al HaMishmar:
“I have 12 children, and I tried to give them as much as possible. Each of my children speaks at least three languages. During childhood, they should know English, French, and Spanish. Later on, the more languages they know, the better they will understand other people and be able to connect with them.” One of those children was, of course, Moïse, whom she raised as a Jew. Baker took his Jewish education very seriously. In addition to providing him with kosher food and a private tutor in Hebrew and Judaism, she also sent him to be educated on a kibbutz in Israel. In April 1970, Maariv reported that Baker had arrived in Israel with Moïse, then sixteen years old, in order to send him to a kibbutz for a two-year stay (though the name of the kibbutz was not reported).
Although her request to adopt a child from Israel had been denied, Baker harbored no resentment toward the country and returned for another visit in 1954. Baker, whose public appearances were always theatrical affairs, stepped off the plane at Lod Airport with a monkey perched on her shoulder – one of the pet monkeys she kept in the “zoo” at her estate.
In December 1974, she returned to Israel once again, this time for a whirlwind one-day visit to perform at a fundraising event for the Variety organization. Al HaMishmar reported that the first place Baker went after landing was the Western Wall, where she prayed. She told the newspaper:
“I come to Israel as a person returning home. I feel as comfortable here as I do in my own house.”
Baker also confided to the reporter that she was in a bad mood because her nineteen-year-old son Moïse had informed her the previous evening that he had decided to get married, even though she felt he was still too young.
Although the reporter expressed surprise at her remarks – after all, Baker seemed so full of life – the entertainer, then sixty-eight years old, told her that she was already preparing for retirement.
She knew what she was talking about.
A few months after that visit, Baker announced that she would embark on one final tour, which would also mark fifty years since her move to Paris. But she managed to perform only the gala opening night of the farewell tour she had planned.
The night after that opening performance, she died in her sleep. She was found in bed, surrounded by newspaper reviews of the show.
In 2021, her remains were interred in the Panthéon in Paris, where she now rests alongside some of France’s greatest figures, including Victor Hugo and Voltaire.
