New Perspectives on Challenges of Modernity in France JAY R. BERKOVITZ. Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860. Jewish Culture and Contexts Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. viii + 333.ALYSSA GOLDSTEIN SEPINWALL. The Abbe Gregoire and French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism. The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 341.OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO, Michael Meyer aptly observed that Jewish experience varied from region to region, making it difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint historical periods, such as advent of modernity. As he wrote, Scattered among nations, Jews have participated to varying degrees in simultaneous and successive foreign civilizations while at same time carrying on their own heritage.1 Two recently published books, one by Jay Berkovitz and other by Alyssa Goldstein Sepmwall, clearly demonstrate value of regional and national studies of modernity. When read in tandem, internal Jewish perspective provided by Berkovitz and vast global perspective offered by Sepmwall highlight distinctive national and regional features that marked adjustment to modernity experienced by minorities under French rule.Jay Berkovitz's Rites and Passages is a cultural history of FrancoJewish community between late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Berkovitz focuses on the progressive refashioning of traditional values in encounter with secularization, modernity, and non-Jewish ideas and symbols (p. 91). His examination of how Jewish self-image shifted is based on internal Jewish sources analyzed over longue duree. This methodology enables him to explore critical regional distinctions among French Jews, both between Sephardim of Bordeaux and their Ashkenazic brethren, as well as within Ashkenazic communities, where he separates between urban Jews of Paris and Metz, and Jews of rural Alsace (pp. 14-27, 35-58, 85).Berkovitz claims that certain modern trends, including changes in Jewish identity and Jewish communities, were apparent during ancien regime. These include an erosion of religious practices among urban elite and growing subordination of rabbinate to lay parnasim and merchants m Bordeaux and m Metz. Berkovitz's critical contribution and innovation is his assertion that visible changes m identity preceded Revolution and Emancipation. Berkovitz convincingly argues that during late eighteenth century a regional Franco-Jewish identity emerged m Alsace and Lorraine, one that was m direct tension with these Jews' previous identification with pan-Ashkenaz. Whereas during two centuries before 1789, shared rituals, educational patterns, and judicial structures encouraged unity across Rhine and further east, m decades before Revolution, Jews living m both villages of Alsace and m city of Metz began to forge an additional and separate local identity, reflected m particular customs and liturgy and in selfsufficient communal structures (pp. 73-83).Other discernible elements of modernity were also visible m prerevolutionary France, including a small group of maskilim, comprising essayists, Hebraists, and poets. It was common for these maskilim to engage m contemporary political discussions, arguing that Judaism was compatible with citizenship (pp. 94-97; 174-77).Having identified seeds of change m prerevolutionary period, Berkovitz claims that m short term, French Revolution hindered, rather than helped, modernization of French Jewry, particularly among Ashkenazim. In wake of Revolution, acute anti-Jewish hostility, deteriorating economic conditions, religious persecution, emigration of an entire generation of yeshivah students and rabbis, and closing of schools, synagogues and two Hebrew presses impeded Jewish community's ability to adjust to their new civic status (p. …