Rue des Rosiers is one of the central streets of the Jewish Marais, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. It belongs to the area known as the Pletzl, a Yiddish word usually translated as “little square” or “little place”. From the late nineteenth century onward, this part of the Marais became one of the main centres of Jewish immigrant life in Paris.

Medieval Jewish Memory in the Marais

The Jewish memory of this area is older than the modern neighbourhood. Jewish presence in the Marais is documented from the thirteenth century, before the expulsions that marked Jewish life in medieval France. This earlier layer does not mean that Rue des Rosiers preserved an uninterrupted Jewish community across the centuries. It does, however, place the street within a wider medieval geography of Jewish Paris.

After Jewish emancipation in 1791, Jewish families gradually returned to this part of the city. In the early nineteenth century, Jews from Alsace and eastern France were among those who settled in the district. Later, from the 1880s onward, the area received larger numbers of Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, many fleeing poverty, antisemitism and persecution.

Rue des Rosiers and the Pletzl

Rue des Rosiers became one of the symbolic streets of the Yiddish-speaking Jewish quarter. Around it developed synagogues, small prayer rooms, kosher butchers, bakeries, restaurants, bookshops, workshops, mutual aid networks and political activity. The street was not only a religious space. It was also a dense immigrant environment, shaped by work, language, food, education and everyday communal life.

The Pletzl was especially associated with Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. Even so, the Jewish Marais was never a single, fixed identity. It changed according to migration, religious practice, economic life and the wider pressures of Parisian urban history.

During the Second World War, the Jewish Marais was devastated by arrests, deportations and murder. The district lost a large part of its Jewish population during the Shoah. Memorial plaques, school commemorations and nearby institutions of Shoah memory still mark this history in the urban landscape.

Post-war Jewish Marais

After the war, Jewish life returned to Rue des Rosiers and the surrounding streets. In the 1960s and 1970s, the neighbourhood was also reshaped by the arrival of Jews from North Africa. This added new religious, culinary and cultural layers to the older Ashkenazi Pletzl.

Today, Rue des Rosiers remains one of the best-known Jewish streets in Paris. It is connected to Jewish food places, bookshops, synagogues nearby, memorial plaques and routes associated with the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme. At the same time, the street has been strongly transformed by fashion stores, tourism and gentrification.

Rue des Rosiers is therefore not a frozen Jewish quarter. It is a street where medieval memory, immigrant Jewish life, Shoah memory, post-war renewal and contemporary commercial change remain visible in the same urban space.

The Former Hammam Saint-Paul is located at 4 rue des Rosiers, in the Marais, one of the main areas of Jewish memory in Paris. Its façade still preserves the painted inscription “Hammam Saint-Paul”, together with visible signs for “Sauna” and “Piscine” above the upper windows.

Public baths in the Marais

The building was constructed in 1856. In 1863, it began operating as a public bathhouse under the name Bains romains, or Roman Baths. At that time, many Parisian apartments did not have private bathrooms. Public baths, steam rooms and swimming pools were therefore part of the practical infrastructure of urban life.

The documentation describes the establishment as a public bathhouse, with a swimming pool, steam room, hydrotherapy room and later bathing cabins. It should not be confused with a mikveh. The available sources identify the place as a hammam and bathhouse, not as a Jewish ritual bath.

Former Hammam Saint-Paul and the Jewish Marais

Its Jewish significance comes from location and social use. The Former Hammam Saint-Paul stood in the heart of the Jewish Marais, around Rue des Rosiers and Place Saint-Paul, the area often called the Pletzl, from the Yiddish word for “little place”.

From the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, this part of the Marais was shaped by successive Jewish populations. Around Rue des Rosiers, Jewish residents opened shops and workshops, built synagogues, created associations and formed one of the best-known Jewish neighbourhoods of Paris.

In this context, the Hammam Saint-Paul belonged to the everyday geography of the Jewish Marais. Architectural and local history sources describe it as frequented by the Jewish community established in the neighbourhood from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the post-war decades.

The 1928 façade

In 1928, the architects Boucheron and Jouhaud modernized the façade. Their intervention gave the building its most recognizable surviving appearance, with red granito, yellow painted lettering and sculpted signs marking the sauna and swimming pool.

Municipal records also preserve details of the older bathing complex. By 1894, the site included a building on the street and a structure extending into the courtyard. In 1899, the baths were raised by one floor, under the architect Bastouil, to add bathing rooms.

The 1928 project for the “grands bains romains” shows a functional bathing circuit. It included a rest room on two levels, a pool, two sudatories and service areas arranged around a defined route through the building.

Closure and surviving trace

The establishment closed at the end of the 1980s, after around 130 years of use as a bathhouse. It was then converted into commercial and office space, and most of its interior fittings and decoration disappeared.

In 2009, the building became home to a COS clothing store. The interior has been modernized, but the façade still preserves the old Hammam Saint-Paul inscription, the sauna and swimming pool signs, the sculpted lion heads and the red granito surface associated with the 1928 modernization.

The Former Hammam Saint-Paul remains a surviving urban trace of the social life of the Jewish Marais, preserved today mainly through its façade at 4 rue des Rosiers.

Rue Ferdinand-Duval is a short street in the Marais, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. It runs into Rue des Rosiers, one of the best-known streets of the Jewish Marais, and belongs to the area often called the Pletzl, the Yiddish term for “little place”.

Today, Rue Ferdinand-Duval is not an isolated historical site. It is part of the living Jewish geography of the Marais, close to kosher shops, Jewish restaurants, bookshops, synagogues, memorial plaques and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme. The street belongs to the same urban fabric that connects medieval Jewish Paris, the immigrant Jewish quarter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and post-war Jewish memory.

Medieval Jewish Memory in Paris

Before receiving its current name, the street was known as Rue des Juifs, the Street of the Jews. The official list of old Paris street names records Rue des Juifs as the former name of today’s Rue Ferdinand-Duval.

The Jewish memory of this wider area is medieval. References from 1224 mention a Rue de la Juifverie, and in 1241 a Rue de la Vieille Juifverie appears in the same broader Parisian sector. In 1287, a house sold to the Temple is described as having belonged to Jews and as standing at the corner of the Rue des Juifs. These records connect the street name to property, residence and the medieval Jewish geography of Paris.

The area was deeply affected by the expulsions and returns that marked Jewish life in medieval France. The expulsion ordered by Philip IV in 1306, later returns, and the final expulsion from the kingdom in 1394 changed the Jewish presence in Paris. Even so, the memory of Jewish residence remained fixed in street names.

Rue des Juifs and the Hôtel des Juifs

At number 20 Rue Ferdinand-Duval, the courtyard preserves an hôtel particulier historically known as the Hôtel des Juifs, also associated in heritage literature with the Hôtel de Cormery. Its name is linked to the memory of Manessier de Vesoul, a royal officer connected to the Jews of northern France in the late fourteenth century. Eugène Atget photographed the building in 1910, and the image is preserved in the collections of the Musée Carnavalet.

The name Rue des Juifs continued to appear in later records. On the Vassalieu plan of Paris from 1609, the street appears as “R. d. Iuifz”. It is also cited as “rue des Juifz” in a manuscript from 1636. The name therefore survived in the official and cartographic memory of Paris long after the medieval Jewish community had been removed from the city.

Rue Ferdinand-Duval and the Pletzl

In the nineteenth century, the Marais again became a major Jewish neighbourhood. From the 1880s onward, Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe settled around Rue des Rosiers, Rue des Écouffes and Rue des Juifs. This new Yiddish-speaking community gave the area the name Pletzl and filled it with workshops, food shops, religious life, political activity and mutual aid institutions.

In 1898, during the period of the Dreyfus Affair, merchants from the street petitioned the Paris municipal council to change the name Rue des Juifs. On 7 December 1900, a prefectural order renamed the street Rue Ferdinand-Duval. The decision was approved by decree on 6 January 1901. The new name honoured Émile Gustave Ferdinand Duval, born in 1827 and died in 1896, a former prefect of the Seine and municipal councillor.

The renaming belongs to the political and social atmosphere of the Dreyfus period, when Jewish identity, antisemitism and public language were central issues in France. The old name was removed from the official street map, but the Jewish history of the place remained.

Today, Rue Ferdinand-Duval is one of the streets through which the Jewish history of the Marais can still be read in the city itself: in its former name, in its connection to Rue des Rosiers, in the memory of the Hôtel des Juifs, and in its place within the contemporary Jewish quarter of Paris.