Die Kehrseite der Emanzipation in Frankreich: Judenfeindschaft im Elsass 1778 bis 1848 (review)

Abstract

Die Kehrseite der Emanzipation in Frankreich: Judenfeindschaft im Elsass 1778 bis 1848, by Daniel Gerson. Vol. 1 of Antisemitismus: Geschichte und Strukturen, ed. Wolfgang Benz. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006. 332 pp. euro24.95. The German word Kehrseite is roughly equivalent to English downside or side, as in side of coin, and a book titled Die Kehrseite der Emanzipation in Frankreich suggests that of Jews in France was something other than an unequivocal boon. This in itself is not startling. It has become a truism that legal equality of Jews and Gentiles acknowledged by French Revolution came at price of relinquishing communal autonomy Jews had enjoyed under Old Regime, and that Jews would have to place French nation above any particularistic loyalties to their coreligionists. In this way, it has often been argued, an erosion of Jewish identity and pressure to assimilate into Gentile society were downsides to emancipation. What has not been argued by historians, as far as I know, is that antisemitism was price Jews paid for their emancipation. Yet subtitle of Daniel Gerson's book, Judenfeindschaft im Elsass 1778 bis 1848, suggests that Judeophobia or antisemitism (which author treats as synonymous) in was Kehrseite to emancipation. The problems with such a claim are obvious. To begin with, it reproduces assertions of those deputies in revolutionary National Assembly who in 1789-91 argued that elevation of Jews to status of citizens would provoke anti-Jewish riots in Alsace, province then containing majority of France's Jews. Moreover, antisemitism could not have been downside to emancipation in 1778, since by everyone's reckoning Jews were not yet emancipated. Indeed, Gerson himself claims that even law of September 27, 1791 itself, which is most often cited as guaranteeing equality of Jews, did not mark a true emancipation, since discriminatory legislation followed very next day; he argues that emancipation only came in 1831, when July Monarchy of King Louis-Philippe paid salaries of rabbis, as it did for priests and Protestant ministers. In any event, Gerson himself does not believe that antisemitism grew out of emancipation. Although he closely follows Arthur Hertzberg's 1968 Enlightenment and Jews in his portrayal of philosophes and revolutionaries as antisemitic, he actually argues for persistence of religiously motivated, medieval Jew-hatred among non-Jewish population of rural well into nineteenth century. Thus antisemitism existed in spite of Emancipation, not as its consequence. The survival of traditional prejudice against Jews in remote towns, villages and hamlets of after 1789, however, is only surprising if one attributes miraculous nation-building powers to Revolution, which no one since nineteenth-century nationalist historian Jules Michelet has done. Therefore much of Gerson's book is predictable. Chapter one reveals author's thesis that the legal emancipation [die rechtliche Gleichstellung] of France's Jews did not mean an end to discrimination and oppression for Israelites [Israeliten] of Alsace (p. 11). Chapters two, three, and four, respectively, closely follow secondary sources on Jewish question at end of Ancien Regime, emancipation of Jews during Revolution, and Napoleon's discriminatory measures. (In chapter three author makes skillful use of Swiss archives to establish number of Jews-roughly 800-who sought refuge in Basel in wake of attacks by peasants in 1789, but he does little to integrate this documentation into a larger argument and otherwise relies heavily on secondary sources. …