Josephine Baker: Dancer, spy, and champion against racism and antisemitism

I had always associated Josephine Baker with Isadora Duncan. Both were US-born dancers who left their country of birth for the charms of Paris. They were also both celebrated for their stage attire – Duncan for her white Greek tunic and bare feet; Baker for her famous mini-skirt of artificial bananas. But the similarities end there. Duncan, while eschewing the inflexibility of traditional ballet, was essentially a classical dancer.

Baker, some quarter of a century later, embraced the age of jazz and melded it in Danse Sauvage (“savage dance”) with the rhythms of her forebears. She debuted the dance in 1925 at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as part of La Revue nègre (“The Black Review”) in a sensational, career-defining performance.

Unlike Duncan, who played out her life in the fast lane of fame, Baker led a very secretive second life as a wartime spy for the Allies during World War II.

Freda Baker McDonald was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906. Her mother was a Black native-born American. Baker claimed at one point that her father was a Jewish tailor, but this appears to have been part of her shrewdly curated mystique.

She was raised in a milieu of poverty and racial intolerance. She scavenged for food in garbage cans. To earn money for the family, she worked in a laundry, and then as a domestic for white families.

In 1917, aged 11, she witnessed terrible anti-Black violence in East St. Louis. Years later, she recalled “watching the glow of Negro homes lighting the sky… frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families.”

The Birth of a Nation has been likened to Hitler filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, which, in its argument for evil, extolled and idealized Nazi tropes. In New York, Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, a delegate to the 1898 Zionist Congress in Basel, an associate of Theodor Herzl’s, and supporter of the Balfour Declaration, commented after seeing Griffith’s film that it was “an indescribable… libel on a race of human beings.”

There’s a clear link between the treatment of Blacks in the United States and what was to befall the Jews in Europe some two decades later.

This evolved into the two consistent threads in Baker’s life: her protection of the Jews before, during, and after the war; and her work for Black civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1960s.

Baker introduced an eye-catching soupçon of comedy into her appearances, and in 1925 felt sufficiently confident to sail for Paris, both to further her career and to escape the racial prejudice prevalent in the US.

In September 1939, Baker, now a European superstar, was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency, as an “honorary correspondent.” This title was reserved for “people acting voluntarily out of pure patriotism.” No pay was involved. She would work with Jacques Abtey, a seasoned French counter-intelligence agent, who became the great love of her life.

With a chameleonic gift for mingling with bureaucrats of all persuasions in nightclubs and embassies, Baker procured valuable intelligence by charming German diplomats and French collaborators, collecting information on German troop movements.

Abtey’s Deuxième Bureau shared all this intelligence with the Secret Intelligence Service in London. The head of the organization’s French operations was Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale, charming, suave, impeccably dressed with gold Cartier cufflinks, chauffeured around Paris in a Rolls-Royce, and invariably imbibing vintage champagne.

Dunderdale’s friend was Ian Fleming, who had served in Royal Naval intelligence and had the ear of prime minister Winston Churchill, to whom he would pass gleaned intelligence. During the war, Fleming had organized Operation Goldeneye to counter German forces, should they invade the Iberian Peninsula. Goldeneye was subsequently the name of Fleming’s Jamaican home, where he morphed into a world-famous author and would go on to write the James Bond novels, modeling his iconic fictional hero on Dunderdale.

By now, Baker had been taught by Abtey how to use a pistol and was provided with a cyanide pill in the event of her capture. The jeopardy in which she placed herself throughout this period was not the stuff of Bond fantasy adventures but real. The consequences of failure were unthinkable.

Her personal life was somewhat convoluted. She married a train porter at 13, divorcing shortly afterward. In 1921, she married William Howard Baker. This union was also dissolved but, with her career starting to bloom, she retained his surname.

Alleged affairs followed with Belgian novelist Georges Simenon (creator of the fictional Detective Maigret), and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the French architect known as Le Corbusier.

In 1937, Baker fell for French industrialist Jean Lion, who was Jewish.

His parents were stunned when the engagement was announced, but they gradually warmed to their celebrated daughter-in-law. Following the marriage, disillusioned with the treatment of Black people in America, Baker obtained French citizenship.

As the wife of a Jew, she witnessed first-hand the virulent antisemitism of France’s collaborationist Vichy regime, which enforced the restrictive Nuremberg Laws against the Jews, interning tens of thousands in the French-run concentration camps at Saint-Cyprien and Le Vernet.

However, the couple’s relationship was doomed from the start. They were both extremely ambitious, with neither willing to defer to the other. Furthermore, Baker had become pregnant, having long yearned for a child, but unfortunately miscarried. Important consequences flowed from this break-up.

In order to repair her wounded spirits, Baker set off to the beautiful French countryside of the Dordogne. She wandered into a 15th-century manor house, the Château des Milandes, which she promptly rented in 1940 and subsequently purchased in 1947.

This château was to become the vital base for her covert war operations and for secreting the Jews she was protecting.

Shortly before Hitler and his cohorts advanced toward the Eiffel Tower, Baker headed south to the château, her car stashed with hoarded petrol disguised in used champagne bottles, an armory of weapons for the underground resistance, and a prohibited radio transmitter in order to retain contact with the Allied forces.

Also in tow were fugitives from the Nazis that she had welcomed into her Paris residence, which included an elderly Jewish couple from Belgium whom Baker had rescued from a shelter beneath L’Eglise de la Sainte-Trinité.

They were not the only Jews for whom Baker, out of her own pocket, had provided food, lodging, and forged documents to facilitate their escape. She had used her piloting skills (Jean Lion having gifted her flying lessons) to transport aid to refugees in the Low Countries, selling her own valuables to raise money for them.

Away from Paris, Baker’s long-felt desire for children (“I want a baby more than anything in the world,” she once confided to her doctor, which prompted a sharp retort: “A child? Don’t you know there’s a war on, Madame?”) manifested itself in her gradual adoption of some 12 children of varying provenance, which she referred to as her “Rainbow Tribe.”

She wanted to prove that “children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers.”

Their nationalities included French, Algerian, Moroccan, Japanese, Korean, Colombian, Venezuelan, and Finnish, and they were raised with different religious affiliations, such as Catholic and Muslim.

It has been said that she attempted to adopt a child from Israel but that her request was denied. What is clear is that one of the children, Moise, was Jewish, as confirmed by Baker in a TV documentary. Indeed, Moise’s brother Brian Bouillon-Baker, who was recently involved in the unveiling of a new mural of Baker in Paris, told me that Moise was a French Jewish baby adopted by Baker from a Parisian orphanage. Moise died in 1999.

In 1947, Baker married French composer Jo Bouillon and, with him, continued to accumulate the Rainbow Tribe.

They divorced 14 years later.

It’s a moot point as to whether Baker ever converted to Judaism, although it has been claimed that despite being a Black woman (with a Jewish husband) and at increased risk of Nazi oppression, she made the brave decision to do so.

Brian Bouillon-Baker informed me that his mother didn’t officially convert to Judaism. However, she certainly embraced the Jewish faith when she was with Lion. It’s also clear that she had a pluralistic and moralistic outlook.

Most nights, she would kneel at her bedside and pray from a tiny Jewish prayer book, reading the French translation of the original Hebrew. When so many Jews were being exterminated for their religion, Baker, perhaps not even of the faith, found comfort in this spirituality.

We may never know whether she converted to Judaism, but what we do know is that Baker’s great support for the Jewish cause never wavered.

Baker’s visits to Germany in the 1920s reflect that country’s changing reaction to her as a Black American. In 1926, when she left Paris and embarked on a European tour, she was welcomed with open arms in post-World War I Berlin, entrancing audiences with her rhythmic primitivism.

But when she returned there two years later, the extreme Nazi ideology was sweeping the country, and she was labeled, particularly by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, as decadent and racially impure, an insult to the Aryan race of Übermenschen.

Moreover, her Berlin tour had been arranged by the Rotter brothers, who were Jewish and ran the major Berlin theaters. They were compelled to escape to Czechoslovakia but were subsequently tracked down and murdered by the Gestapo.

Chastened by this experience and by what happened to the Jews who were helping her, Baker thereafter gave Germany a wide berth.

These instincts were confirmed when, on November 9, 1938, on Kristallnacht – “the night of broken glass” – the Nazis destroyed Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools, together with some 1,400 synagogues and 7,000 businesses. Baker, married to a Jewish man, needed to be on her guard.

Baker spent much of World War II in Morocco. North Africa had become a pivot in the military balance. Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps had been remorselessly consolidating Nazi gains across the area and appeared unstoppable.

The Allies, with Churchill prompting president Franklin Roosevelt, saw the strategic significance of Morocco, and in particular its port of Casablanca overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar, as a key pawn to control.

This would cut off the German U-boats that were causing havoc among Allied convoys. It would also provide a launching point for an Allied landing that could turn the war in their favor. Morocco was therefore flooded with German Abwehr (counterintelligence) and Allied spies, Baker among them.

From her base there, Baker traveled to Spain and Portugal, smuggling documents by pinning them into her undergarments, in order to apprise the Allies of imperative intelligence, such as the German plan to occupy neutral Portugal and use its ports.

Baker’s work contributed to the success of Operation Torch and the launch of an Allied bridgehead to Europe, which in due course precipitated, in Churchill’s words, “not… the beginning of the end, but… the end of the beginning.”

Throughout these operations, Baker was chronically ill, often seriously, and was sporadically hospitalized. “I’m much too busy to die,” she was famously quoted as saying. This echoes in the title of the 2021 James Bond film No Time to Die.

Casablanca was the 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman that vividly portrayed the North African scenario. It’s the story of a nightclub owner in Morocco approached by an old flame seeking his help to flee the country. This mirrors the earlier real-life version when Jean Lion, from whom Baker was by then separated, had visited her and implored her help in securing his Jewish family’s escape to safety.

Baker had obliged, securing their passage to the US and saving them from the death camps. The film, intended to illuminate the plight of the countless refugees seeking exit visas in order to escape to the New World, was rushed into release to tie in with the Allied invasion of North Africa and in advance of the high-level conference in Casablanca itself between Churchill and Roosevelt. The original play was inspired by the trip that Murray Burnett and his wife, Joan Alison, took to Nazi-occupied Vienna to help their Jewish relatives, and the terrible antisemitism and refugee problems they witnessed. The chief screenwriters were Julius and Philip Epstein, Jewish twins born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, who were well aware of the powder keg that Casablanca was at the time.

The four Warner brothers who produced Casablanca were Hirsz, Aaron, Szmul, and Itzhak. They had immigrated from Poland in the late 1880s, and their Jewish heritage played a significant role in their filmmaking, challenging antisemitism and promoting social justice, principles in respect of which Baker was simultaneously immersed.

While there’s not a single reference to Jews anywhere in the film, its Jewish soul can be felt throughout, touching on the ethics of responsibility and the true meaning of love. Ironically, some of the Nazi officers in the film were portrayed by Jewish actors who were themselves refugees from Nazi Germany.

The French Nazi collaborator Captain Renault, played by Claude Rains, turns volte-face at the end of the film and sails into the sunset on the side of good. And how appropriate that this all took place in Casablanca, a city which has had a continuous Jewish presence since Roman times, some 2,000 years ago.

Following VE Day on May 8, 1945, Baker finally returned to Germany, cramming in the Allied troops for daily, almost round-the-clock, morale-boosting performances in Berlin. Then, in response to a plea for any entertainer who would be willing to enter the typhus-ravaged Buchenwald concentration camp, which had just been liberated by the US Army under Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, Baker offered her services.

She sang for the living who were still trying to hold onto life. She sang for the Jews, Poles, Roma, the mentally ill, and physically disabled. She sang in a voice imbued with emotion, offering hope and a soothing balm to thousands of souls. And at that moment she realized that all she had been fighting for, all her efforts to decry the horrors of Nazism and to shield the Jewish people from this suffering, had been vindicated.

On May 12, 1957, Baker gave a speech in Paris at the International League Against Antisemitism, in which she eloquently extolled the virtues of her adopted homeland: “When I was sick, I was so happy… that a white doctor was not ashamed to treat me… Here, I knew that I could live for a cause, and this cause is human brotherhood.”

In the US, she suffered further racial discrimination and refused to perform to segregated audiences. In 1963, she spoke at the March on Washington in support of the American Civil Rights Movement alongside Martin Luther King, proudly wearing her French Air Force uniform.

Five years later, King was assassinated and King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, offered the leadership of the movement to Baker. She reluctantly declined, saying that her adopted children needed their mother. In these Washington and Paris speeches, she inextricably entwined the joint causes of Black civil rights and the fight against antisemitism. She was to remain a staunch supporter of the Antisemitism League for the rest of her life.

Baker’s choice of lyrics in her songs carries great weight in evaluating her emotional sensibilities. Her signature song was “J’ai Deux Amours” (“I have two loves”), a heartfelt paean to her birth country of America and to Paris, the capital of her adopted homeland of France.

This was never more symbolic than when the Nazis were rampant in Europe and, through the monumental efforts of Baker and her network (the enemy’s secret plans to invade Britain via bases in Ireland and Wales were inscribed in invisible ink on Baker’s scores of “J’ai Deux Amours”), the US was persuaded to enter the fray and transform the course of the war.

She sang “My Yiddishe Momme” to troops far from home, who were yearning for a comforting dose of heimische reminiscence. She had also carefully selected a song by George Gershwin – the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe whose parents moved to New York because of the increasing anti-Jewish sentiment in Russia.

Some eight years older than Baker, Gershwin would have heard about the St. Louis race riots and, living among Jewish, Irish, and Italian communities, would have been hard-wired to immigration concerns. Floating between a palette of jazz and classical music, he wrote the opera Porgy and Bess, the tale of a disabled street beggar trying to rescue his woman from the clutches of her violent lover and her drug dealer.

Although Gershwin may have intended the work to illustrate the suffering and hardship of Black people, it initially courted controversy in its stylized depiction of African-Americans in a similar way to The Birth of a Nation and was considered racist during the 1970s Civil Rights Movement (in which Baker herself took part).

It’s now seen as a piece of its time, the New York Metropolitan Opera’s 2019 production described as “splendid” by

Role models never die, and Baker, aka La Bakaire, has recently been transformed into a paradigm for Black artists.

Among those who have paid tribute to her are Diana Ross in her Tony Award-winning Broadway and television shows, while Beyoncé performed Baker’s signature banana dance at Radio City’s Fashion Rocks concert in 2006, identifying with Baker’s freedom of expression and recognizing her as the original diva in that she “just danced from her heart.”

Vogue opines that the original dance “radically redefined notions of race and gender… that continues to echo from… Prada to Beyoncé.”

Baker would have appreciated those sentiments.

For a flavor of the glamour and perils of Baker’s life, head to the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. In addition to Baker being featured in the permanent exhibition, the museum has also run frequent celebratory events, such as “Sexuality and Subterfuge: A Night of Spying, Secrets, and Scandal.” In 2023, “Dinner with a Spy” was held at Chez Baker in New York City, a restaurant founded in 1986 by Jean-Claude Baker, one of Baker’s adopted children. Her memory continues to be perpetuated.

On April 8, 1975, Baker starred in a retrospective revue at the Bobino music hall theater in her beloved Paris, celebrating her 50 years in show business. The show was financed by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, together with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Among those in attendance on opening night were Sophia Loren, Mick Jagger, Diana Ross, and Liza Minnelli.

Four days later, aged 68, Baker was found lying peacefully in her bed, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, surrounded by newspapers carrying glowing reports of her performances. She passed as she would have wished, with a quietude reflecting the code of silence she had maintained throughout her secret “other life” as an anti-Nazi spy, taking many of those confidences with her to the grave.

For her war efforts, Baker was awarded the Medal of Resistance and the Croix de Guerre, and was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. On November 30, 2021, almost five decades after her death, a symbolic casket containing soil from Baker’s various places of residence was interred in the crypt of the Pantheon, a monument in Paris reserved for those considered as the nation’s principal national heroes. Her legacy was cited as a Resistance fighter, an anti-Nazi, and a civil rights figurehead

The belated achievement of this honor is paralleled in the recent vote of the French National Assembly to make Alfred Dreyfus a brigadier general. Dreyfus was the Jewish army captain from Alsace who in 1894 was wrongly convicted of selling secrets to the Germans and was sentenced to life imprisonment in a penal colony off South America. He was exonerated in 1906.

This latter-day promotion has prompted speculation that French President Emmanuel Macron may now confer upon Dreyfus the ultimate accolade of interment in the Pantheon, linking him not only with Baker but also with other significant figures such as Victor Hugo and Marie Curie. This would represent a symbolic emblem at a time when France is facing a huge wave of antisemitism.

At Baker’s ceremony in the Pantheon in November 2021, attended by eight of her children, Macron described Baker as “a woman defending humankind.” There can be no greater epitaph. At sunset in New York on that day, the Empire State Building was illuminated in blue, white, and red in Baker’s honor. Brian Bouillon-Baker, a prime mover in the petition to commemorate his mother’s achievements, proudly observed: “Her native country was remembering her at last.”

Throughout her life, Josephine Baker fought tooth and nail against racism and antisemitism. Her legacy compels us to realize that the present needs to be viewed through the prism of the past, and that the world must heed the lessons of history in order to ensure a better future.

With grateful thanks to Damien Lewis, who kindly gave me permission to use material from his wonderful book The Flame of Resistance: American Beauty, French Heroine, British Spy (Quercus Editions Ltd, 2022); Agent Baker: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy (Public Affairs, 2023, US Edition), a Vanity Fair and The New Yorker Best Book of the Year.