French Jewry Research Articles

“Morts pour la France”: Commemoration and Community Building among Ottoman Sephardim in Interwar Paris

In interwar Paris, a community of Sephardi immigrants originally from the Ottoman Empire raised a monument paying tribute to Ottoman Jews who fought for France during World War I. Its construction, which spanned over a decade, underscored the evolution of Ottoman Sephardi immigrant collective identity, goals, and anxieties in France between the close of World War I and the eve of World War II. When the memorial was first proposed in 1919, it was seen as a means of emphasizing the Ottoman Sephardi immigrant sphere as separate from that of French Jewry and other Jewish immigrant groups in the country. However, when it was finally erected in June 1935, at a time of heightened xenophobia and antisemitism within France's borders, the monument had taken on new significance. No longer a statement of Sephardi difference, it became a message of Jewish unity, patriotism, and belonging to the French Third Republic.

Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz by Jay R. Berkovitz

Reviewed by: Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz by Jay R. Berkovitz Ronald B. Schechter Jay R. Berkovitz. Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz. Studies in Jewish History and Culture 60. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xv + 404 pp. Once upon a time, historians of eighteenth-century French Jewry believed that the Ashkenazic Jews of eastern France were isolated from the surrounding gentile society, that their institutions, laws, and attitudes separated them from their non-Jewish neighbors. I was one of those historians. Jay Berkovitz, in his magisterial Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz, has shown that we were wrong. The reason is that we relied on a corpus of published French and German sources, written by Maskilim—Jewish exponents of the Enlightenment—and gentile reformers, including prominent figures in the French Revolution, who fought for Jewish civic equality and citizenship. Berkovitz was in the highly unusual position to delve into a different kind of source, namely the pinkas of the beit din, or rabbinical court, of Metz, a city in [End Page 167] eastern France that was unique in having a legally authorized Jewish community, or kehillah. (The community of Nancy was effectively a colony of the Metz kehillah.) A pinkas was a register, and there were various types: pinkasei kahal, or communal registers; pinkasei beit knesset, or synagogue registers; pinkasim containing information about confraternities, financial records, wills, etc. These tell us a great deal about internal Jewish life, but the genre most valuable to social and legal historians is the pinkas beit din, or register of the rabbinical court. There are extant examples of this last type of pinkas, notably for the communities of Hamburg, Prague, and Frankfurt, though none is nearly as complete as that of the beit din of Metz. Housed in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, this manuscript had been almost completely neglected by previous historians, who lacked either the linguistic and paleographic skills, or the patience, to explore in any depth the two folio volumes of 241 pages containing roughly 400,000 words and covering 1663 cases from 1771 to 1789. Berkovitz first began working with this source in 2003, and in 2014 he did a great service for historians of early modern Ashkenazic Jewry by publishing a meticulously edited volume of it—Protocols of Justice: The Pinkas of the Metz Rabbinic Court, 1771–1789. The pinkas beit din provides a wealth of information about commerce, inheritance practices, social hierarchies, family disputes, religious beliefs and practices, marriage, divorce, and the history of women, gender, and sexuality. In Law's Dominion, Berkovitz combines it with other sources, internal to the community and external, to produce the most exhaustive possible account of Jewish life in Metz. Chapter 1 describes the legal sources available to historians of the Jews of Metz, namely: responsa, or questions posed to rabbis by other communities and the rabbis' responses; communal registers, including records of the lay leaders' legislation; and the pinkas beit din. Chapter 2 provides a brief history of the Metz kehillah, with an emphasis on "ritual and identity," material culture, and "economic integration." Chapter 3 introduces the governing institutions that constituted and guaranteed communal autonomy and shows how they provided for social welfare and poor relief, policed moral and religious conduct, and interacted with the French civil courts that decided cases between Jews. Chapter 4 discusses the sources judges relied on, chiefly the Talmud and legal codes deriving from it, especially the sixteenth-century Shulḥan ʿarukh, and gives an account of judicial procedure and delineates the functions of the beit din. Chapter 5 is a fascinating analysis of the impact of French courts, law, and judicial procedure on the rabbis' jurisprudence, and the acculturation and integration Jews experienced with the legal culture of the surrounding gentile society. Chapter 6 delves into the social history revealed by the court records, especially practices of guardianship and inheritance, two perennial sources of dispute, and the establishment and funding of charitable foundations through legacies. Finally, chapter 8 explores the much-underestimated power of women in the community's...

Breaking Up is Hard to Do? Restructuring French Jewry in Post-Separation France

Breaking Up is Hard to Do? Restructuring French Jewry in Post-Separation France

Memorials of the Borgel Cemetery

The article of the leading Tunisian historian, specialist in the national liberation movement and the fate of the Jewish community of Tunisia, Habib Kazdaghli analyses the three monuments dedicated to the victims of world wars, erected at the Borgel cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in the city of Tunisia. The article looks into the place of the monuments in the architectural complex of the cemetery, the circumstances of their construction, examines how their architecture reflected the specificity of the ethno-political development of the Jewish community and the peculiarities of the modernization processes. The author uses extensive material from the Tunisian Jewish press, which previously rarely presented the subject of academic research, as well as epigraphic materials. In the analysis of the monument dedicated to the Jews who died during the First World War, the author notes that its construction testified to the formation in the Jewish community of a non-religious cult of honouring the memory of the dead. At the same time, analysis of the monuments to victims of forced labour camps and deportations shows that their very erection placed the Jewish community of Tunisia in a broader historical and political context, making its tragedy a part of the global tragedy of the Jewish people and all humanity as a whole. It also linked the fate of Tunisian Jewry with the fate of European Jewry and, first of all, French Jewry, which acquired a special political meaning in the context of the national liberation movement and the processes of decolonization that unfolded after World War II.

The pursuit of the Sanhedrin: the Hungarian Jewish Congress in the tradition of nineteenth-century synods

ABSTRACT This article studies the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869 from a European perspective. During the run-up to the Congress, the Jewish press discussed intensely the organizational models found in Jewish history, in modern Jewries abroad, as well as in the minority churches of Hungary. Central European Jews challenged the success narrative that had come to be associated with the Napoleonic Sanhedrin and the central administration of French Jewry. Comparison with other religious unification attempts can teach us about the expectations that were projected onto the effort to control the Hungarian Jewish pluralization processes with the devices of parliamentary democracy.

Imaginaire colonial et reconfigurations du judaïsme en France : une régénération ?

The regeneration project transformed the relationships between French and Maghrebi Jewish Communities. These representations, full of colonial utopias, embodying the salvation of the Jews from Morocco, became crucially true when those Jews arriving in France were thought to regenerate French judaïsm, which was undergoing a deep crisis.Analyzing the Alliance Archives and other community journals, the authors examine those changes, insisting on solidarity and fraternity, thus departing from a former paternalist attitude towards Moroccan Jews. They also showed how the arrival of North-African Jews in France changed the configuration of French Jewry after World-War II.

La famille après la Shoah : les maisons d’enfants à l’épreuve de la reconstruction

This article examines the crisis that confronted French Jewry as it struggled to reconstruct families that had been torn asunder by the war in the first few years following the Liberation.. At the moment when politicians and psychologists throughout Europe promoted the family as instrumental to social reconstruction, Jewish child welfare activists preferred a collectivist approach. This article focuses on the debates, as well as the policies and educational programs instituted by postwar child welfare workers, as they experimented with new models for social organization.

From assimilation to Jewish identity: The dilemmas of French Jewry under the Occupation

Following the Napoleonic edict granting citizenship to the Jews, and the implementation of laws consolidating the secularism of the Third Republic, France seemed to have confirmed its status as a land of freedom for European Jews. This changed with the collaboration of Vichy France with the Nazi Occupation. This article studies personal writings, principally diaries, in order to discover the forms of experience of the crisis of identity that beset the Jews of France in the ‘Dark Years’ following this. It shows that under the secularist model of assimilation, this resolved into a series of dilemmas: israélite ou juif, French or Jewish, secular or religiously observant, nationalist, communist or Zionist. The article ends with the key figure of Wladimir Rabinovitch, bringing the account into the second half of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding some key international changes, the terms of these dilemmas has not changed.1

Progressive Judaism in France

AbstractProgressive Judaism became institutionalized in 1907 with the inauguration of the Union Libérale Israélite synagogue in Paris. During the nineteenth century, although Reform ideas were discussed and in some cases implemented (e.g. use of organ, reduction of piyutim), the Central Consistory prevented the creation of an independent Progressive synagogue. Today, the Progressive movement in France is relatively underdeveloped, with thirteen synagogues, full-time rabbis serving only Parisian congregations and no national movement structure. In recent years, however, there have been some positive developments such as the creation of a rabbinical body of French-speaking Progressive rabbis, an annual summer camp and the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation to promote Progressive Judaism. As French Jewry faces major challenges such as the persistence of a virulent form of anti-Semitism and the departure of thousands of active French Jews each year to Israel, the USA, Canada and elsewhere, Progressive Jews in France ask themselves what the future holds for them.

Young French Jews of 1968: Oral Histories

Young French Jews of 1968:Oral Histories Robert Weiner (bio) This article showcases the oral histories of four French Jews who participated in the tumultuous social protests of the late 1960s. The full texts of these interviews appear in An Uncertain Future: Voices of a French Jewish Community, 1940–2012, a compilation of oral histories edited by myself and Richard E. Sharpless.1 In order to contextualize their illuminating recollections, I have introduced this material with a general description of French Jewry during this turbulent time and the important events that shaped my interlocutors’ opinions and actions during the late 1960s and beyond. I have selected narratives that provide us with important clues as to how young Jews navigated the French environment during the 1960s and early 1970s, and how they understood the defining moments of the period, such as the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1968 student rebellions. The young Jews living in France in the late 1960s were hardly a homogenous group. During this time, the French-Jewish population was comprised of five hundred thousand souls, roughly divided in half between Jews of European descent and Jews of North African background. Throughout this period, most of the French Jewish leadership was made up of Ashkenazic Jews, most of whom were quite acculturated to French ways. Jewish immigrants from Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria settled in France more recently than their European coreligionists; generally between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s. During this period of youth revolt, the newly arrived, and generally more ethno-traditional, North African Jews were also grappling with the disruptive process of adaptation and integration, and struggling with changes in their social and economic status. The distinct backgrounds of young, French Jews influenced the ways in which they understood the events of 1967 and 1968. For the many Ashkenazic French Jews whose families had direct experience with the Holocaust, the history of the Jewish genocide in Europe, and their knowledge of the shameful collaboration of France’s Vichy regime with the Nazis, served as a foundational lens through which they viewed the youth revolt of the late 1960s.2 This did not necessarily play out in the same way for young French Jews of Middle Eastern descent, for whom the decolonization and emigration experience from North Africa had greater salience. Generally, Ashkenazic Jews were raised with a more left-leaning orientation than Jews of Middle Eastern backgrounds, owing to the socialist and [End Page 179] unionist traditions of Eastern European Jews and the history of leftwing resistance to Nazism. In contrast, although some Maghreban Jews sympathized with the revolutionary nationalist decolonization movements, most realized that greater security lie with French control over North Africa and thus were pushed rightward.3 Young French Jews, therefore, wrestled with a variety of political legacies as they negotiated the youth revolts of the late 1960s and 1970s. The repercussions of the Six-Day War tended to separate even many leftist Ashkenazic Jews from their non-Jewish, New-Left counterparts, many of whom began to view Israel as one of the many European colonialist enterprises that they objected to throughout the world. This, combined with President Charles de Gaulle’s infamous 1967 charge that Jews were “an elitist people, sure of themselves and domineering,” made many young Jews feel insecure about their position in French society.4 The following oral histories recall the experiences of three Ashkenazic Jews and one North African Jew, all of whom came of age during the late 1960s and lived through the student rebellions of the spring of 1968. The French student riots in May and June 1968 were part of a worldwide phenomenon, but were conditioned by particular French historical and cultural precedents, as well as by the horribly crowded, bureaucratic, and authoritarian French higher education system. These riots, which quickly gained extensive working-class and middle-class support, shook the waning de Gaulle presidency to its core and played a considerable role in the president’s resignation one year later, under the cover of a failed referendum.5 Indeed, the events of 1968 transformed French attitudes toward authority, youth culture, gender relations, and identity politics, and this was equally true within the...

The modernity of others: Jewish anti-Catholicism in Germany and France

The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

Righteous Realism Versus Postmodern Play: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in Female-Authored French Fiction

This article analyses literary mediations of francophone Jewish attitudes towards Israel, and particularly towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Its primary corpus comprises two female-authored novels published during the Second Intifada: Olivia Rosenthal's Les Fantaisies spéculatives de J.H. le sémite (2005) and Chantal Osterreicher's L'Insouciance d'Adèle (2006). It demonstrates how these two texts represent antithetical stances towards Israel, the former intermittently critical and even censorious, the latter defensive and at least partly valorising. Given the status of both authors as French-born Jews (although Osterreicher now lives in Israel), both of these texts can be seen to mediate heterodox attitudes to the conflict. But the heterodoxy depends upon the context in which the reader places the two authors. In the context of the twenty-first-century France in which it was published, which, like most other countries in the global mediasphere, is heavily critical of Israel, Osterreicher's text is acidly contestatory of default-position anti-Zionism. On the other hand, in the context of the French Jewry to which Rosenthal belongs, which has traditionally evinced unflinching solidarity with Israel, her own critique of that country's dealings with Palestinians is equally contestatory, and, despite its ludicity, is no less impactful than Osterreicher's reverse discourse. A final axis of enquiry is the extent to which there may be some consensus as well as obvious dissensus between these two ostensibly antinomous texts.

French Halakhic Tradition in the Late Middle Ages

This study examines the legal writings of the two leading rabbinic figures in French Jewry in the mid-fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It characterizes their legal and Talmudic methodology and argues that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French scholars in Italy were generally following in the footsteps of their predecessors in France. Furthermore, it argues for the ongoing existence of a uniquely French subtradition within the larger Ashkenazic tradition in the late Middle Ages.

Un aspetto delle relazioni intercomunitarie ebraiche nel Mediterraneo: gli ebrei francesi e i loro correligionari italiani al tempo del fascismo (1922-1939)

Between the two wars, while splits within French jewry were deapening, with the advent of a lot of foreign Jews, French Jews, who were onlooking the status of the jewish world in general, were quite interested by their Italian coreligionists, who indeed appeared to them as the best assimilated of the whole Europe. They made important contact with Italian Jews, whose they praised the model of integration. This article intends to show which influence the increasing opposition between republican France and fascist Italy had on those intercommunity relations.

L'immigration des Juifs d'Algérie en France métropolitaine

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of the relations between American and French Jewry as Algerian Jews fled to France in the summer of 1962, a key moment in the “sephardization” of French Jewish life. It studies the relationship between the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the major American philanthropic organization, and the Fonds Social Juif Unifie, a French institution that had been established by the JDC in 1949 to collect and distribute funds to French Jewish organizations. Contrary to previous analyses, this article shows that the reception of Algerian Jewry in France was not a strictly French affair, between the State and its Jewish population, but instead a transnational collaboration, involving both American and French actors. Indeed, the JDC’s deep-seated influence in French Jewish life in the years following the Shoah was still being felt in France in the early 1960s, both from a financial and political point of view. In the spring of 1962, the FSJU publicly criticized the JDC, leading to a conflict of seemingly minor significance. Nonetheless, the “rebellion” of the FSJU occurred during the Algerian crisis, providing the young French organization with an opportunity to prove itself capable of managing an emergency situation. The Algerian crisis thus not only renewed French Jewish life after the Shoah from a spiritual and demographic point of view : it provided a “coming-of-age” experience for the FSJU, and greater independence for French Jewish life.

New Perspectives on the Challenges of Modernity in France

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. …

France and the Partition Plan: 1947–1948

France and the Partition Plan: 1947–1948

Parasites from all Civilizations: The Croix de Feu/Parti Social Français Confronts French Jewry, 1931-1939

Refuting claims made by several historians that the Croix de Feu/Parti social français were non-exclusionary, this article demonstrates the prevalence of anti-Semitism and xenophobia throughout the league's metropolitan and Algerian sections. CDF/PSF leadership and rank-and-file alike prioritized the notion of the enemy, and their plans for les exclus augured similar developments under the Vichy regime. Although less rabidly xenophobic than his colleagues, whose opinions variously promoted denaturalization and outright elimination, group leader Colonel Françaois de la Rocque was nonetheless prone to racist and exclusionary doctrine, arguing that foreign Jews and immigrants were the enemies of la patrie, and should necessarily be expunged from the new nation. The article describes the wide range of xenophobia present in group actions and discourse, while positioning the CDF/PSF within the broader context of French and Algerian society.

To be European or Not, That is My Question

European Judaism celebrates its 40th year of existence, but 'European Judaism' still does not exist, and it is doubtful whether it ever will. There are Anglo-Jewry, French Jewry, Jews in Germany (NB, not deutsches Judentum), Dutch and Italian Jewry, etc. But there is no European Jewish identity, nor a European Jewish intellectual life. And that is to say that the Jews of Europe have a minimal impact on the Jewish world. Today, as forty or fifty years ago, or even more so, there are two centres of Judaism in the world: North America and Israel. Of course, European Judaism is not to be blamed for this state of affairs, for the nationalisms of Europe's Jewish communities. It is impossible for a journal to shape, on its own, intellectual history. But maybe we could have made a bigger effort and have had some impact trying to do so.

The Relationship of Edmond Fleg and André Neher

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is only natural if not essential to reflect upon and evaluate the relationship that existed between Edmond Fleg (1874–1963) and André Neher (1914–1988), two eminent Jewish thinkers who exerted a profound influence upon French Jewry of the twentieth century and perhaps on Jews in the rest of the world considering the number of their works that were translated in several languages. As a son of moderately observant Jews, Fleg became a part of the Parisian intellectual and artistic life as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and a successful playwright and theatre critic.