The history of Jews and Judaism in France falls into two broad sections: before and after the emancipation act of 1791, which accorded full citizenship to the Jewish ‘nations’. The early pre-Revolutionary history could be summarized as a brief golden age, up to the First Crusade (1096), followed by the long, dark Middle Ages of persecution, increasing segregation, and a series of expulsions and readmissions, depending on the state of the royal coffers.
On the eve of the Revolution, though the 1394 expulsion edict remained in force, a Jewish community of some 40, 000 was unevenly concentrated in two main areas: a relatively wealthy, privileged, and well-established minority of Sephardis (Jews of Spanish origin) in the Bordeaux and Bayonne areas, and the majority (78 per cent) of poor and unassimilated Ashkenazis (east-European Jews) living under severe residential and professional restrictions in Metz, Alsace, and Lorraine. Not surprisingly, the first protests against the chaotic and degrading system of privileges, really a denial of rights, came from the north-eastern community leaders (Cerf Berr, Isaie Beer Bing, and Berr-Isaac-Berr. They proved to be remarkable fighters as the discussion on how to improve Jewry's lot developed into the much wider emancipation debate.
The conclusion to that debate in 1791 constitutes a momentous event in modern Jewish history and had a profound influence on shaping French-Jewish mentality. Yesterday they had still been slaves, the Lorraine leader told his community on Day One of the New Era; today they were not only men and citizens but Frenchmen. Much of what came to be known as Franco-Judaism is already present in the ‘before and after’ view of things expressed here. With the implicit rejection of what went before, a great deal of French as well as Jewish history was repressed. Acceptable French history began with the Revolution which, in its turn, closed Jewish history. It was inappropriate, Théodore Reinach observed in 1884, to speak of French Jews after 1791. Even the term ‘Jewish’ caused embarrassment because of its alleged association with Judaea and Jerusalem. The most striking expression of Franco-Judaism is found in the rabbinical sermons delivered on the occasion of the centenary of the Revolution (La Révolution française et le rabbinat français). Not only was 1789 celebrated as the modern Passover, the second Sinai Law, the coming of the Messianic age; but values and aspirations which had once formed the patrimony of Israel were transferred to France, as if the former's role had been absorbed, fulfilled by the latter. Exit Israel in a blaze of glory, having given birth to 1789. The rabbinate and the Consistoire, the main official bodies and both centralized Napoleonic institutions, proved ideal for spreading Franco-Judaism, a creation after the emperor's own heart. He had gone to dramatic length, in convening the Grand Sanhedrin (1807), to ensure that Jewish law should be compatible with state law. At critical antisemitic moments the poetry of civis gallicus sum dictated a political strategy of silence, of waiting for non-Jewish personalities to take up the fight.
The Dreyfus Affair was one such moment. With some notable exceptions (e.g. Bernard-Lazare, Joseph Reinach) the community remained silent, hoping that the storm would pass. Assimilation had broken down one essential survival mechanism: solidarity. Blum deplored this silence in the 1930s, and was in turn regarded with suspicion by the Jewish Establishment both for his politics—not in tune with its rather conservative republicanism—and for his undiplomatic open Jewishness and support of immigrants. It became increasingly difficult to live up to the image of total assimilation; the Vichy years further complicated matters [see Occupation and Resistance], though even then we have some moving testimonies of how Marc Bloch, for example, was sustained by the poetry of being French (L'Étrange Défaite, 1946).
Alongside mainstream Franco-Judaism, we find variants, opposition, even French Zionists (Bernard-Lazare, André Spire). There were French-Jewish writers such as Edmond Fleg, who came to understand his Frenchness better after he had discovered his Jewishness. Generally, it would seem as if artists had fewer complexes about having ‘plusieurs patries’ than the Establishment. At least this used to be the case. The Jewish community today, the biggest and most active in Europe, much revitalized by a considerable contingent of North African Jews, appears to thrive on its internal diversity as well as on an uninhibited affirmation of ethnicity within the larger context of French society.
[Nelly Wilson]
Bibliography
- Rabi, Anatomie du judaïsme français (1962)
- B. Philippe, Être juif dans la société française (1979)
