Julie Kalman . Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth‐Century France . New York : Cambridge University Press . 2010 . Pp. xii, 234. $85.00.

Abstract

Julie Kalman's book introduces readers to a whole cast of hitherto unfamiliar characters in the history of French antisemitism: Silvestre de Sacy, Félicité de Lamennais, Charles-Joseph Bail, the Ratisbonne brothers, David Drach, Simon Deutz, and many others. Exploring the less-well-known terrain of France from the Restoration to the Revolution of 1848, Kalman finds a shared discourse of anti-Judaism that established continuities between the French Revolution and the Dreyfus Affair. These anti-Jewish motifs derived from the depths of the Catholic imaginary and were shared by Ultras/Legitimists (many of whom were, of course, dogmatically Catholic) as well as by Republicans. Each drew upon established traditions of anti-Jewish stereotypes of the Jewish body to fantasize about solutions to the body politic. The Judeophobic discursive mix Kalman reconstructs is, however, only partly contextualized. She pays little heed to the institutional and social changes in France from 1815 to 1848, which dramatically altered the texture of Jewish life, but about which she says little.