AGDE

AGDE (Heb. אקדי or אגדי), town 13 mi. (20 km.) E. of Béziers in southern France. Jews are mentioned in Canon 40 promulgated by the Council of Agde held by the church there in 506. By the middle of the 13th century Jews had settled permanently in Agde under the jurisdiction of the bishop. The majority of these became liable to the crown tax in 1278. The Jews of Agde buried their dead in the cemetery of nearby Béziers. After the general expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of France in 1306, some of the Agde community found refuge in Perpignan and carpentras , then not under French suzerainty. At the beginning of World War II about 2,000 Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany were sent to a forced labor camp near Agde, the number increasing to 3,000 after the Franco-German armistice in June 1940. Most of them were deported on Aug. 24, 1942. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gross, Gal Jud, 21 ff.; G. Saige, Juifs du Languedoc (1881), 5, 34, 39, 225, 309; B. Blumenkranz, in: Mélanges le Bras (1965), 1055; Z. Szajkowski, Analytical Franco-Jewish Gazetteer, 1939–5 (1966), 198. (Bernhard Blumenkranz)