French Jewish History

Our current moment appears a propitious one for French Jewish history, though perhaps less so for Jews in France. The history of Jews in France is that of a deeply rooted minority. French Jews enjoyed the privilege, and burden, of being the first minority to navigate the demands of citizenship within a modern nation-state with adherence to a sense of cultural, religious, or social difference. French Jewish historians have recognized this fact and sought to demonstrate how the study of Jews can open a vista on the workings and the weaknesses of French republican politics and society. Many French Jewish historians, often originally trained as modern Europeanists and French historians, have approached their topic of study armed with the same methodological agendas and perspectives that drove their peers in European and French history. Yet the work of French Jewish historians has traditionally been perceived as siloed in the field of French history, considered a subset of the discipline rather than producing cutting-edge scholarship that must be integrated and responded to by other scholars of French history. But the two fields of inquiry are not so separate. Historians of French Jewry and of France share the same set of questions that animate their scholarship. Each field can shed light on and enrich the other.The earliest French Jewish historians turned their attention to the French Revolution, for it allowed them to revisit an age-old question in Jewish history: was it good or bad for the Jews? As Maurice Samuels's article in this forum details, this issue remained a contentious one. Some historians saw in the Revolution the lamentable dissolution of Jewish communal bonds, whereas more recent historiographical schools have maintained that signs of Jewish ethnicity persisted into the modern period, albeit in altered forms. At its core, this debate centered on the question of how French Jews could mark themselves as Jewish in a state that demanded assimilation. But this issue extends beyond the domain of Jewish history. It demonstrates the ways in which the agendas of French Jewish historians have always remained in sync with major trends in French historiography. Most recently, for instance, the topic of minorities living in the metropole, such as North African Muslims, has generated a fecund field of scholarship that has sought to mine how public displays of religiosity and political affiliation can disrupt long-held French ideals of republican citizenship. Similarly, at its heart the debate about whether the modern French Jewish experience can be characterized by assimilation or acculturation hits on the nature of citizenship and belonging in the modern French state. The pithy question of whether it was “good or bad for the Jews” ultimately allows us to consider the nature of republican universalism, a subject that continues to shape the experience of all minorities in contemporary France as well as much recent scholarly literature.The legacy of colonialism remains an equally thorny topic and one that French Jewish history has traditionally been well positioned to mine. The history of French Jews is that of a diasporic group with well-established institutions that sought to cement transnational connections with other Jews around the globe, especially in French colonies. Given this history, French Jewish historians, such as Ethan B. Katz and Joshua Schreier featured in this forum, have eagerly embraced and enriched French history's imperial turn. In a sense, this renewed scholarly interest in the relationship between Jews in the Hexagon and those abroad gained traction through the pioneering scholarship of Aron Rodrigue, whose work on the Alliance Israélite Universelle documented the organization's efforts to import France's “civilizing mission” to the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.1 But this more recent imperial turn, as embodied by Katz and Schreier, delves deeper than the relationship between organizations and republican values to document the subtle and complex interactions among minority groups in French colonies. Scholars of imperialism have long insisted that we must take in the view from the colony, as well as from the metropole. In the case of French imperialism in Algeria in particular, and as both Katz and Schreier demonstrate, the history of Jews opens such vistas. But Jews, too, were new citizens in the metropole, and they were the object of discussions around who, in the colony, might become a citizen, as well as actively intervening in such discussions. In both of these cases, Jews were, as Ronald Schechter has shown for the case of the Revolution, “good to think with.”2 If Jews might become citizens, or colonial subjects, then what did these categories mean?As nations across the globe grapple with the rise of anti-Semitism, and some Jews in France feel especially unmoored by a resurgence of anti-Jewish sentiment, the work of putting the pressures placed on French Jews in historical context appears as pressing as ever. Yet events in contemporary France challenge us to look at old questions anew, such as the nature of the French state, the relationship of France and the world, and the interactions among minorities. The contributions in this forum represent some of the most compelling new directions in the field, and they exemplify a moment in which French Jewish historiography has been enlivened by recent events in France and new methodological agendas set out in the larger field.The authors are grateful for the generous stewardship of Vicki Caron in the production of this special forum, and they thank Carol Harrison for her invaluable guidance in bringing it to fruition

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• French Jews, Turkish Jews

  Donald Quataert, Aron Rodrigue•History of Education Quarterly•1992

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