The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 131 one receive the first blow, or merely avoid and parry those aimed at him."5 SelfDefense in International Law carries forward the classic scholarship ofGrotius and Pufendorff, with particular reference to Israel and anticipatory self-defense. As a jurisprudential case study, it deserves to be a modern classic in its own right. All readers ofShofar who are interested in the nexus between international law and Israeli security studies would benefit from Professor McConnack's outstanding work. Louis Rene Beres Department of Political Science Purdue University The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israelite Universelle, by Michael Graetz, translated by Jane Marie Todd. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. 340 pp. $49.50. This volume first appeared in Hebrew in 1982, in French translation in 1989, and then in English, based on the French text, in 1996. The translations do not appear to have been updated by the author to reflect new work since the original edition, although several chapters of the French edition have been deleted from the English, for unexplained reasons. The jacket blurb speaks of the book as a "deft revision of the accepted picture ofFrench Jewry," a somewhat puzzling remark in regard to a work that is now over fifteen years old-what is "the" accepted picture? Are we not dealing with a variety of them in a field that is fertile and very much ir flux since this book was published? Perhaps "once accepted views" would have been a more satisfactory fonnulation. Such reservations aside, the book contains much of interest and value, recognizing that its audience will be mostly specialists, even specialists among specialists, certainly people intimately familiar with French history, to say nothing ofJewish history. Having been twice translated may account for some of the stylistic oddities, opaque passages, and organizational clumsiness of the work. One must wonder if any editors examined the text after the translator had finished. A few sentences fairly beg for editorial intervention; they simply are not idiomatic English, whereas others are prolix and meandering in a way that may come across more acceptably in French or Hebrew but in English appear unpolished, undisciplined, or simply not well written, although undoubtedly the translator faced some difficult, perhaps impossible decisions. Some 5See: Samuel Pufendorff, On the Duty ofMan and Citizen According to Natural Law, Vol. II, tr. Frank Gardner Moore (New York: Oceana Publications, Inc., 1964), p. 32. 132 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 chapters are burdened by repetitiveness (e.g., providing almost exactly the same identifying or background information that was provided in a previous chapter), while, in other places, key interpretive issues are made in an overly condensed, almost Delphic way; throughout connections are sometimes left unclear, points not adequately pulled together. Graetz persuasively argues that change among French Jews was more gradual than usually believed. Even the ostensibly sudden and sweeping transformations incorporated in the Constitution of 1791, ending the status of Jews as a corporate entity under the Old Regime and granting them civil equality in a modern nation, had important precedents and priming experiences in the Ancien Regime. De Tocqueville is relevant here as elsewhere. In these and many other areas, Graetz commendably offers us a narrative that avoids simplistic assumptions about historical causation-indeed, throughout this volume an unusual feel for rich historical texture, subtleties, ambiguities , and paradoxes is in evidence. Textbooks and general background accounts inform us that it was the Mortara Affair of 1858 that led to the creation ofthe Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1860. Graetz, with nods to Braudel, Le Goff, Agulhon and other French luminaries, explores the experiences and attitudes of Jews in the preceding decades in ways that make the Mortara Affair understandable more as a catalyst than a cause. He similarly demonstrates that such seemingly polar opposites as assimilation and Jewish particularism, rather than existing in hostile and separate worlds, often worked upon one another in a fruitful dialectic; pride in being Jewish persisted even in those who seemed to reject Jewish tradition in toto and who at times vigorously attacked the older Jewish establishment. At any rate, enthusiastic assimilation into the French nation and disdain for much...