ANCHEL, ROBERT

ANCHEL, ROBERT (1880–1951), French historian. An archivist-paleographer, he worked from 1912 until 1940 in the Archives Nationales in his native Paris. His major work was Crimes et châtiments au XVIIIe siècle (1934). Anchel devoted much of his scholarly activity to Jewish history. His principal contributions are Napoléon et les Juifs (1928), Notes sur les frais du culte juif de 1815 à 1831 (1928), and Les Juifs de France (1946), a fragmentary but useful work. An objective, scrupulous historian, Anchel's work is characterized by the painstaking precision of an archivist, accompanied by the broad perspective of a historian. His presentation, however, is sometimes influenced by his desire to demonstrate the antiquity of the Jewish settlement in France and its continuity from the Middle Ages until the contemporary period, sometimes on the basis of slender evidence. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Feuerwerker, in: REJ, 112 (1953), 53–56; Livret de L'Ecole des Chartes (1936), 143; Revue Historique, 158 (1928), 296–383; Mathiez, in: Annales historiques de la révolution Française, 5 (1928), 372–83. (Georges Weill)