The French Mandate in Syria was a period of intense stress and transformation for Aleppo’s Jewish community. This politically marginalized, yet prosperous, community was battered by the great famine of World War I, and the prolonged economic and political crises that followed. After the occupation of Aleppo by French forces, the French Mandate administration, the Syrian Arab nationalist movement that grew up to oppose it, and the burgeoning Zionist movement all competed for and demanded the Jewish community’s allegiance. The French authorities needed Jewish support to justify their claim that they were in Syria to protect religious minorities from their Muslim neighbors; Syrian nationalists needed Jewish support to refute that claim; and Zionist activists needed Jewish support for their contention that Jews could only be safe and free in their own nation-state. Because Aleppo’s Jews were in a position to do great damage to the legitimacy of all three of these actors, the demands for their allegiance became increasingly threatening over time. At the same time, the Jewish community itself was divided by internal power struggles between its existing notable class, its religious establishment, and a new generation of Western-educated professionals. These “enlightened men” saw their community’s temporal and spiritual leadership as corrupt and backwards, and themselves as the vanguard of progress and civilization for “eastern” Jews. At stake in this conflict was control over the Aleppine Jewish community’s autonomous governing bodies, established in the Tanzimat era, which managed the community’s schools, welfare programs and collective property. The conflict between these two groups were exacerbated by the French authorities’ refusal to regulate the functioning of these governing bodies, as the Ottoman authorities had done. This conflict weakened the community at precisely the moment when a worldwide economic depression and rising political conflict in the region posed the greatest danger. Already in the mid-1930s, Aleppo’s Jewish leaders saw the growing number of people from their community emigrating as an existential threat. This paper uses the correspondence of two headmasters of the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in Aleppo, as well French and British diplomatic sources and Arabic periodicals, to explore these internal conflicts and external pressures. It seeks to reveal the local factors behind the destruction of Syria’s Jewish communities after 1948, a tragedy that is often discussed only in reference to the creation of the State of Israel.