in Hanoi in 1902. The Alliance Israélite Universelle appears to have had some activity in Haiphong during the 1920s. According to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, between 1929 and 1932, the U.S. Consul in Saigon was a diplomat named Henry Samuel Waterman, who was Jewish. In 1930, Waterman reported back to the United States about the growth of communism in Vietnam, but his superiors at the State Department discounted his report, saying that the "French authorities have been stuffing him with a lot of hot air about the communistic menace." It turned out however, that Waterman's reports describing the Cong San were accurate, and referred to the Dang Cong San Viet Nam (Vietnamese Communist Party), directed from Moscow and Canton, and indeed there was a "growing threat to colonial rule in Southeast Asia." World War II and Vichy France As late as 1939, the estimated combined population of the Jewish communities of Haiphong, Hanoi, Saigon and Tourane in French Indochina numbered approximately 1,000 individuals. There were also reportedly eighty Jews in Tonkin during the period of Vichy rule, of which forty-nine were in the military and twenty-seven were in the foreign legion. In 1940 the antisemitic Vichy-France Law on the status of Jews was implemented in French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) by its Governor Jean Decoux. In November 1940, Jewish people were limited to certain professions, and in July 1941 Jewish children were not allowed to be more than 2% of public school students. By October 1942, fifteen government employees were dismissed from their positions for being Jewish (among the fifteen was Suzanne Karpeles, the director of the Buddhist Institutes in Phnom Penh and Vientiane), and Jews were "fired from a wide range of professions, from banking to the insurance, advertising, administration and business sectors." One such individual, Leo Lippmann, the former director of the Hanoi tram company, was dismissed from his position even after resigning from his post to assume a lesser position. However, since he had been categorized as a Jew because he had two Jewish grandparents and a Jewish wife, Lipmann divorced and no longer fell under the Jewish Statute. When it was deemed by state officials that the statute would have an adverse effect upon their racial Vichy motives for the region – such as the case of Georges Coedès, an employee at the government sponsored École française d'Extrême-Orient (French School of the Far East), who was