Détours et retours de la tradition chez les Juifs de France aujourd'hui - Essai d'analyse et d'interprétation

Abstract

Two centuries after their emancipation by the French Revolution, the integration of French Jewry appears to have been successfully achieved. But one question is raised: what has been its cost in terms of fidelity toward Jewish tradition? Following two distinct directions, the author analyses first the emancipatory logic of French politics toward its minorities. She examines the content and the effects of the two main conditions imposed on the Jews for their acceptance as French citizens: the renouncement of their collective and national identity as members of a Jewish “nation” and the confessionalization of their religious belonging, transforming them into a religious minority. The second direction is orientated towards the Jewish tradition, or, more precisely, traditions, as long as it includes the profane as well as the religious traditions. What is meant, then, by the very term “tradition”, according to tradition itself and according to the use made through the reference to tradition among certain contemporary Jewish circles? In a third section, the author endeavours to articulate these two perspectives. She tries to show how the requirements of both universes, culturally, ideologically, intellectually and politically so alien to each other, have become accommodated into a very specific phenomenon called “franco-judaïsm”. She also shows the distance separating this modality of Jewishness from the one expressed by the Jewish East-European immigrants settled in France by the turn of the century. She finally demonstrates how Jewish tradition, after undergoing a complicated inner process of recomposition, has succeeded in integrating itself into the cultural landscape of French Jewry and how it is on its way to becoming a commodity, thrown onto the free market of modern cultural consumerism.