French Jews Research Articles

Jews, Modernity, and the Fiction of Ben-Levi

This article presents the work of Ben-Lévi [pseud. Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878], who published a series of short stories in the Archives Israélites de France, the leading French Jewish newspaper, during the 1840s. One of the first Jews to write fiction in French, Ben-Lévi offers a portrait of a community caught between tradition and progress. Combining the "realist" literary codes of Balzac with the "idealist" codes of Sand, his stories hold up a critical mirror to the assimilating Jewish bourgeoisie of the era and show how a reformed Judaism could help resolve the dilemmas of modernity. Ben-Lévi's forgotten fictions reveal the agency and creativity of nineteenth-century French Jews in the face of momentous social change while also demonstrating the versatility of French literary models. (MS)

Metaphors of Modernity: Prostitutes, Bankers, and Other Jews in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes

Why are the brothels of modern French literature filled with Jewish prostitutes? From Vanda in Huysmans's A Rebours, qui remplissait chez Madame Laure l'indispensable role de la belle Juive (119), to in Maupassant's Mademoiselle Fifi, who kills a Prussian officer out of patriotic devotion, Jewish women seduce men powerless to resist their fatal attractions. Not do the walls of the bordello confine their numbers, which include both the glamorous actress Josepha in Balzac's Cousine Bette, whose deadly charm destroys respectable families, as well as the affreuse Juive of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, whose corps vendu inspires the poet with both lust and horror. Tapping into fantasies of the oriental exotic, fictional Jewish prostitutes, like Rachel quand du seigneur in Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, perform a part that is always already a fiction, a sexual and racial masquerade designed to arouse mysterious passions: C'est une Juive! ca ne vous dit rien? tempts Rachel's procuress in Proust's novel, hoping to whet the appetite of the narrator; Pensez donc, mon petit, une Juive, il me semble que ca doit etre affolant! Rah! (556). Prostitution has emerged in recent years as a critical locus for investigations into the imbrication of the social and the symbolic in modern French culture. Following Alain Corbin's pathbreaking history of prostitution and its regulation in nineteenth-century France, T.J. Clark, Peter Brooks, Charles Bernheimer, and Jann Matlock have all pointed to the importance of the prostitute in the cultural imagination of the time, showing how the prostitute's body inscribes class as well as gender hierarchies. (1) Building on their work, I want to explore the ways in which this body becomes still more marked in certain narratives. How do the vexed categories of race and religion further inflect our understanding of an already overdetermined figure? And what does this figure have to tell us about modernity? My discussion will focus on perhaps the first, and certainly the paradigmatic, literary representation of the Jewish prostitute, Balzac's Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes, published between 1838 and 1847. The Jewish prostitute surfaces in French literature at just the moment (the July Monarchy) that significant numbers of French Jews rose to positions of prominence. (2) The decades of the 1830s and 40s also saw the transformations associated with modernity--by which I mean the economic, social, and cultural effects of industrial capitalism--begin to take root in French culture, especially in Paris. In what follows, I argue that the Jew comes to serve as a privileged screen for the projection of anxieties about modernity in both literature and other discourses from the time. But whereas the male Jew tends to incarnate the negative aspects of modernity, the Jewish prostitute embodies a far wider range of associations. A counterpoint to the scorned figure of the Jewish banker or usurer, the Jewish prostitute elicits desire as well as disgust, lust as well as loathing. She thus provides Balzac as well as later writers with a means of registering the complex affective ambivalence at the heart of modernity--an ambivalence that many theorists have tended to overlook. Balzac's ambivalent handling of the Jewish prostitute in Splendeurs et miseres, brings into focus the realist novel's conflicted relation to the culture of capitalism, which it simultaneously criticizes and mythologizes. Before turning to the novel, a historical question arises: was the Jewish prostitute actually a myth? Might this literary obsession have sprung from empirical rather than merely fantasmatic sources? Given that historical documents on nineteenth-century prostitution were themselves not immune to fantasmatic projections, such a question is difficult to answer with certainty. Anecdotes provide some evidence. We know, for example, that there were Jews among the upper crust of the capital's courtesans, who may have provided models for Balzac's Esther or Josepha: the Russian-born Therese Lachmann (known as La Paiva), as well as the Dutch-born mother of the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, achieved fame as professional demi-mondaines in Paris during the July Monarchy. …

Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris

‘Möbel-Aktion’ was the name given to the Third Reich’s policy of seizing the contents of Jewish homes in occupied Western Europe. After hundreds of thousands of Dutch, Belgian and French Jews fled antisemitic persecution, many of their homes were pillaged and their domestic belongings seized for shipment to the East to furnish German homes. But by the spring of 1944, with the war going badly and trains urgently needed for other purposes, this project was abandoned, leaving behind substantial quantities of furniture, clothing, dishes and other household items. This article analyses, from the point of view of both the returnees and the state, the structure put in place by the French provisional government in autumn 1944 to attempt to reunite returnees with their possessions. Using the archives generated by these processes, supplemented by juridical texts and memoirs, this article demonstrates how refugees narrativized their losses and rights and the emotional, psychological and political uses to which refugees put these requests for restitution. This moment is particularly important because it is one of the few, until very recently, in which the French state acknowledged, however obliquely, the particular experience of the Jewish victims of the German Occupation and Vichy Regime.

Ronald Schechter. Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. viii, 331 pp.

This book searchingly reexamines and sheds much new light on subjects that might already seem to have received more than enough scholarly attention. Ronald Schechter succeeds in offering an intriguing new account of the attitude of the thinkers of the French Enlightenment, some of their heirs, and some of their enemies toward the Jews. He also presents a challenging, if less than fully convincing, interpretation of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French Jews' response to what was being said about them and what was happening to them.

The post-Holocaust Jew in the age of postcolonialism: La Haine revisited

This article expands on previous discussions of La Haine by concentrating specifically on the construction of the image of the Jew within the film's representation of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-religious trio. Through this exploration, the article not only raises questions regarding self-representation of ‘the Jew’ in La Haine, but also reflects on the justified ethical questions raised by the beur film-makers who criticized Kassovitz on issues pertaining to ‘authenticity’, the legitimacy of representing ‘other’ communities, and the commercial exploitation of oppressed minorities in and by cinema. By shifting the boundaries of the debate on La Haine from the banlieue genre to the relationship between what I call the ‘post-Holocaust’ French Jew and the postcolonial context that characterizes the condition of contemporary France, this article attempts to offer a different perspective on this highly controversial film.

Self-definition and self-defense: Jewish racial identity in nineteenth-century France

This article examines how and why French Jews began to speak of themselves as a “race.” Though we often assume that Jewish racial identity was an invention of anti-Semites in the 1880s, Jewish publicists had in fact adopted this language as early as the 1820s. Far from unwittingly appropriating the language of their detractors, Jews borrowed the language of race from scholars neutral or sympathetic to their cause in ways that made sense in light of their larger strategies of self-defense. The scholars who pioneered modern race theory were not the late nineteenth-century Social Darwinists; they were romantic historians like the Thierrys and Michelet, who saw France as a nation composed of a plurality of peoples who had come together over time to form a unified nation. Race thus provided a framework for understanding difference as legitimate, useful and dignified at a moment when anti-Jewish publicists attacked Jews as anti-social and immoral people who brought only harm to France. Looking at what French Jews borrowed from these early historians allows us to see the interconnections between Jewish self-defense and Jewish self-definition. In seeking to guarantee their rights and social status, French Jews appropriated new terms of understanding who they were.

Race and the construction of Jewish identity in French and American Jewish fiction of the 1920s

In both the United States and France, Jewish-fiction writers of the 1920s often invoked the idea of Jewish racial unity as a non-rational, uncontrollable force separating Jews from mainstream society irrespective of their desire for integration. This genre of fiction reveals an ambivalent attitude towards race-thinking. The notion that there are intractable physical differences between groups threatened the Jews’ status as fully privileged co-citizens. Yet a racialized self-understanding provided them with a way to articulate the intangible bonds of community, which their official status as a purely “religious” group normally held them back from expressing openly. The common trope of the failed Jewish-Gentile romance best expresses the dual desire of French and American Jews for acceptance and distinctiveness. A sense of racial identity often leads protagonists to reject a non-Jewish lover or spouse and draw strength from a renewed sense of connection with the Jewish people. More often than not, however, these figures are left with feelings of ambivalence and regret, as they realize that their universalist dream of uniting with someone from a different “racial” background is not possible in the real world, where their Jewish particularism inevitably dooms such relationships to failure.

Lois C. Dubin. The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ix, 335 pp.

The scope of research devoted to the entrance of European Jews into the modern civic realm has expanded steadily in the last two decades. Historians have turned their attention to communities formerly considered only marginally important because of their small size, their location at the periphery of Europe's most significant political and cultural developments, or their failure to correspond to the models of emancipation and enlightenment derived from the historical experience of French and German Jews. This new direction in Jewish historical writing has generated an ever-increasing body of social–historical data and is marked by a growing emphasis on regional factors, particularly urban–rural differences, and a new appreciation for class and gender as categories of analysis. The result—a more highly nuanced picture of modernization—has firmly discredited the dominant Germanocentric perspective favored by previous generations of historians. Now, thanks to the publication of Lois Dubin's outstanding book, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste, our understanding of the forces that shaped modern Jewish society and culture has been advanced appreciably. Dubin has succeeded in producing a balanced reassessment of much of the conventional thinking about periodization, modernization, and the role of Haskalah and Emancipation.

Susan L. Einbinder. Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. x, 219 pp.

Can medieval Jewish poetry teach us history? Asked differently, can scholars draw on medieval poetry (piyyutim) to reconstruct historical events? In Beautiful Death, Einbinder narrows down this matter to the case of Ashkenazic martyrological poetry. To answer this question, Einbinder has analyzed over seventy Hebrew poems from northern France, England, and Germany; they span the period following the First Crusade (1096), ending with the Rindfleisch massacres of 1298 in Germany and King Philip IV's expulsion of the French Jews in 1306.

De l'Empire à la République : les Juifs de France et la guerre de 1870-1871

Overshadowed by the second act of the confrontation between France and Germany which goes on since Guillaume II to Hitler, the first act, that of 1870-1871, is indeed the very first traumatic experience inflicted by this tragedy. Philippe-E. Landau analyzes how the French Jews lived through the invasion of the country and the horrors of war, the end of the Empire which had been a lucky period for them, and the birth of the third Republic about which they knew nothing, the bloody fight between Communards and the government troops, the first days of the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. He resets the spy mania of 1870 and the promulgation of the Crémieux decree by the republican government in the long-lasting history of antisemitism in France as well as in Algeria.

Les Combats des lumières: recueil d’études sur le dix-huitième siècle by Roland Mortier (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 987 and imaginative flightsof fancy which punctuate most of the letters maintain a wider interest: he wishes he had a Pegasus to flyover the Channel to join Mme de Gouville at the opera; Rabelais's Panurge is evoked to illustrate his attempts to get his debtors to pay him, afterwhich he wryly remarks that 'les solliciteurs ne s'amusent pas a lire Rabelais' (p. 54); he gives his opinion on the recently published Telemaqueby Fenelon; and, perhaps above all, he wistfully regrets the absence or death of friends from his past. This book will serve, therefore, both as invaluable documentary material for Saint-Evremond scholars and as a fine introduction to a master of the epistolary art. Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Nicholas Hammond Les Combats des lumieres: recueil d'etudes sur le dix-huitieme siecle. By Roland Mortier, with a preface by Robert Darnton. Ferney-Voltaire: Centre in? ternational d'etude du xvme siecle. 2000. xlix + 42ipp. ISBN 2-84559-005-9. Superlatives come all too easily when reviewing Roland Mortier's work. His prodigious output has comprised, in the decade 1991-2000, well over eighty articles, plus three books and five editions (two of them critical editions of important works by Voltaire). This weighty volume is a rich selection of all that scholarship: twenty-three articles, to which is added a monograph on the Venetian writer Cataneo, origin? ally published in 1965 {Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 32: 91-268). The range of topics covered here is no less remarkable: not only Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and the Encyclopedie, but also such diverse matters as the 'mythe de la clarte francaise sous l'eclairage des Lumieres', the iconic representation of Marat's death during the Revolutionary period, the image of Machiavelli in the eighteenth century, and the development of landscape painting after 1760. The ambit of Mortier's writ? ings takes in not only such important figures as Montesquieu (visited repeatedly) and Fontenelle but the less well known like the prince de Ligne and the virtually unheardof like the economist the comte de Proli. In the glorious treasure-house literary and linguistic criticism, history of ideas, and history of art all intermingle, the author pursuing his enquiry of the Enlightenment into its multifarious domains. Nor is this exploration limited only to francophone writings. Cataneo, Kant, Burke, and Horace Walpole are all studied in their original languages. This generic compilation is at least the thirdto come fromthe author, to place alongside the Clarteset ombresdu Siecle des lumieres(Geneva: Droz, 1969: seven articles) and Le Coeur et la raison (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1990: 35 articles). How to account forsuch unremitting investigations ?To startwith, of course, an extraordinary fund of energy, worthy of his great hero Diderot. But that serves to explain only the quantity, and offersno explanation forthe consistently rigorous scholarship of these pages. One must add the relentless curiosity of which Robert Darnton writes in his elegantly generous preface. Above all, perhaps, Mortier has a unique capacity for synthesis. Once the primary reading has been carried out unstintedly, ideas and patterns seem to fall effortlesslyinto place, presented with a commanding lucidity. Many ofthese pieces of? fera tour d'horizon such as to make them ideal models to set before the novice research student: 'Voltaire et la dignite de l'ecrivain' (pp. 151-59), 'Diderot et la fonction du geste' (pp. 223-33), Taresse et travail dans l'introspectionde Rousseau' (pp. 272-83). Some tackle highly sensitive subjects, none more so than the attitude ofthephilosophes towards Judaism, where a close look at the social background ofthe French Jews in the eighteenth century, linked to the generally accepted view of their religion as the cradle of Christianity, produces a study of even-handed sympathies while acknowledging the problems encountered by the philosophes in the face of alterity. But this author has always maintained that, to understand the Enlightenment, one must not restrictstudy to the major writers. Such an attitude is now commonplace. It 988 Reviews was not so when firstexpressed by Mortier, at least fortyyears ago. This approach is given substance in the present book. An article about the Utopian thinker Anacharsis Cloots (pp. 385-94...

Pierre Goldman and the Beginnings of jeune litterature juive

Very few Jewish writers of the twentieth century have enjoyed a reception comparable to that of the political activist, self-styled guerrilla, gangster, and author Pierre Goldman. In 1979, the assassination of the thirty-five year old Goldman by members of a right-wing commando provoked an outcry from the general public and prompted a reevaluation of the dangers of anti-Semitism among French Jews. The Marxist critic Regis Debray and the Jewish writer Helene Cixous responded to Goldman's slaying by devoting entire books to the question of how his life and death came to challenge the very foundation of the grande nation. The novelist Catherine Axelrad suggested in her novel La Varsovienne (1990) that the circumstances of Goldman's murder--his killers had never been found and remained at large--enabled the extreme Left to offer quasi-national funerals for the revolution. More than 15,000 people attended his funeral, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Yves Montand, and many of the Jewish student leaders who never had gained Goldman's support. (1) For many of his peers, the killing of the Jewish enfant terrible brought the issue of their own status and safety as outspoken Jews to the forefront. The journalist Luc Rosenzweig--a colleague of Goldman at Liberation--took the event as incentive to conduct a series of interviews with young Jews, which he later published as La France juive, a title sardonically alluding to Edouard Drumont's notorious anti-Semite pamphlet La France from 1886. According to Rosenzweig, the hors-la-loi Goldman became a martyr for those who, facing the choice between Judaism (particularism) and the University (universalism), chose the latter. (2) Rosenzweig's collection of interviews came to stand as powerful homage to Goldman, not as a political extremist, but as a persecuted Jew whose death told the story of France's inability to render justice to its Jewish citizens. In his preface, Rosenzweig, the son of German communists, wrote: En tuant Pierre Goldman, ses assassins, quels qu'ils soient, ont tente de mettre un terme definitif a une histoire que la France traine comme un boulet: celle de la lachete collective d'un peuple qui accepte d'envoyer 'ses' juifs a la mort. (3) In the first survey of the emerging jeune litterature juive presented in 1982, the literary critic Lazare Bitoun explained the impact of Goldman's life and memoirs by pointing to Goldman's rejection of the discourse of victimization. Instead of using the israelite et sa connotation aigre-douce de la langue francaise, Goldman had had the courage to replace it le mot Juif qui revendique et affirme une difference. (4) The opening line from his autobiography Souvenirs obscurs d'un Juif polonais ne en France (published in 1975), which contained in condensed form his historical, generational, and biographical point of departure, was canonized by his peers and the authors following him: suis ne le 22 juin 1944 a Lyon, en France, en France occupee par les nazis (longtemps j'ai pense que j'etais ne et mort le 22 juin 1944).... Je n'avais pas l'age de combattre, mais, a peine en vie, j'eus l'age de pouvoir perir dans les crematoires de Pologne (27). It is this line that Henry Raczymow uses almost ten years later as an epigraph to his novel Un cri sans voix, in which he describes the lethal fate suffered decades after the Shoah by a young Jewish woman whose identification with the resistance fighters from the Warsaw ghetto ultimately leads her to commit suicide in 1982. Another Jewish writer of Goldman's generation, Myriam Anissimov, dedicated one of her books to Goldman. Even authors of Sephardic background, such as the Algerian-born Jean-Luc Allouche, turned to Goldman as a Jew who --because he could never be assimilated--embodied the absolute stranger, the lueur d'une derniere fraternite desesperee. (5) Allouche had remembered in his autobiography how he, a Maghrebi-born Jew, had felt quite vexed by a slogan celebrating solidarity with the student leader Danny Cohn-Bendit during the student protests: . …

L'éducation juive à Marseille sous Vichy (1940-1943) : une renaissance circonstancielle

The Jewish educational structures in Marseilles were of the current israelite type and in few numbers. But after 1940, because a relative freedom of practicing religion was left by Vichy administration and also because many French Jews and refugees retire to Marseilles, these structures increased. Eager to maintain Judaism alive among the young, the central consistory together with organisations such as OSE and ORT took many initiatives actuated by the confessional approach belonging to « israelistism ». But the various ultra orthodox groups stranded in the city do not remain behindhand, as well as the Zionistic organization favouring a more cultural practice of Judaism.Different levels then, an educational juxtaposition following the complex outlines of the new local Jewish geography, which do not impede with a kind of a cooperation between the refugees spokesmen and the local notabilities centered on the common object as defined by Edmond Fleg : to make « inside Judaism [...] a refuge », a place for resisting in front of the humiliations and danger of the times being. These endeavours unfortunately come to an end in 1943 and 1944 when physical survival becomes the first aim for a Jew in Marseilles.

Last Exit from Vichy France: The Martinique Escape Route and the Ambiguities of Emigration

Previous articleNext article No AccessLast Exit from Vichy France: The Martinique Escape Route and the Ambiguities of Emigration*Eric Jennings Eric JenningsUniversity of Toronto Search for more articles by this author University of TorontoPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 74, Number 2June 2002 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/343409 Views: 98Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref ©2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Dominique CHATHUANT D’une République à l’autre : ascension et survie politique de Maurice Satineau (1891-1945), Bulletin de la Société d'Histoire de la Guadeloupe , no.178178 (Jan 2017): 9.https://doi.org/10.7202/1045699arAlice L. Conklin Bibliographie, (Jan 2015): 487–523.https://doi.org/10.4000/books.mnhn.4240William F.S. Miles La créolité et les Juifs de la Martinique1, Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe Revue du Centre de recherche sur les pouvoirs locaux dans la Caraïbe , no.1616 (Jan 2010): 129–162.https://doi.org/10.4000/plc.823Eric T. Jennings, Sébastien Verney Vichy aux Colonies. L'exportation des statuts des Juifs dans l'Empire, Archives Juives 41, no.11 (Jan 2008): 108.https://doi.org/10.3917/aj.411.0108

Jewish Solidarity in Nineteenth‐Century France: The Evolution of a Concept

Previous articleNext article No AccessJewish Solidarity in Nineteenth‐Century France: The Evolution of a Concept*Lisa Moses LeffLisa Moses LeffSouthwestern University Search for more articles by this author Southwestern UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 74, Number 1March 2002 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/343367 Views: 91Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref ©2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:NICK UNDERWOOD Aron Beckerman's City of Light: writing French history and defining immigrant Jewish space in interwar Paris, Urban History 43, no.44 (Oct 2015): 618–634.https://doi.org/10.1017/S096392681500084XPaola Ferruta Das Weiblich-Männliche in der saint-simonistischen Debatte um 1830, Trajectoires , no.11 (Nov 2007).https://doi.org/10.4000/trajectoires.101Charles Tilly Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000, 43 (May 2010).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511756092

Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State and Community in Modern France (review)

by Pierre Birnbaum. New York: Hill & Wang, 2000. 324 pp. $30.00.American readers unfamiliar with work of French historian cum political scientist cum sociologist Pierre Birnbaum will find an intellectual treat awaiting them. Author of recently translated works such as his celebrated study of French Jews in political structures of Third Republic, The Jews of Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy, as well of his sweeping Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Leon Blum to Present, Birnbaum stands as one of leading French Jewish thinkers of our day. One of his latest books, Jewish Destinies, collects a series of intriguing, informative, elegantly written and passionate essays on some vital and perennial aspects of Jewish identity. Although these essays set their problems, for most part, in context of modern France -- Jewish identity in France, Dreyfus Affair, Jewish cemetery desecration in Carpenteras, revolutionary Jacobin attitudes to Jewish particularism, role and character of antisemitism among Roman Catholics and military -- their substance will be pertinent to readers everywhere concerned with issues of Jewish identity in post-Enlightenment world. For example, can dilemmas of Enlightenment universalism and Jewish particularism be resolved in any felicitous way? How profoundly is Jewish identity still rooted even in assimilated Jews, or in those converted to Christianity? What are conditions for its often stunning and remarkable reappearance? Why, in both France and United States, have Jews historically been drawn to certain academic fields of study, such as sociology? Does this imply that there is a Jewish way of doing sociology -- say one that trades on Jewish experiences of marginalization and rich particularism? But besides forays into these fascinating and important issues, American readers may hopefully come to discover great value in about our problems within comparative context of French problems of a parallel sort. Our two countries are remarkably and often maddeningly alike but not alike at all, thus providing makings of perfect formula for comparative study. We are at once not alike, because of our dominant Protestantism and France's deep Catholic history, in our tendencies to localism over against French centralization, in our cherishing of religion in public life, but France's fierce history of anti-clericalism, and such. But, we are at same time perhaps too much alike in our common Enlightenment histories, in our greater traditions of kinds of political diversity, in our common liberationist and revolutionary traditions, in our vivid individualisms, and so on. I believe both are true at same time, giving us ample reason to think United States by way of thinking France.Birnbaum's intellect so dazzles reader, and these essays are such a treat to read, that it would be wise, however, occasionally to check their smoothly drawn conclusions against whatever pertinent specialized knowledge one might possess. Of particular interest to this reviewer was Birnbaum's chapter on sociologist Emile Durkheim's involvement in Dreyfus Affair, here used to establish Durkheim's credentials as Jewish, despite often anti-Jewish and assimilationist orientation of his life. The chapter collects a remarkable range of data -- some published, some not, but much of it never before assembled in same publication -- aiming to show how intensely Durkheim was affected by straggles over fate of Dreyfus. In this, Pierre Birnbaum has succeeded without qualification in filling in many gaps in life story of Durkheim and his relation to the Affair. It seems to this reviewer indisputable that the Affair shook many influential French Jews out of a kind of ethical and assimilationist slumber, causing them in consequence to reassess wisdom and practical possibility of denying or effacing Jewish identity in hostile antisemitic environments. …

Actitudes sefardíes del siglo XIX y pensamiento sansimoniano reflejados en las carreras de Emile e Isaac Péreire, fundadores del Crédit Mobilier

The brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire were born at the beginning of the 19th century in the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community of Bordeaux, at a time when French Jews were moving towards full integration with society. They had been brought up in a Sephardi educational tradition reformed in the context of the Enlightenment. Consequently, they found their own views reflected in the Saint-Simonian movement and subscribed to its principles throughout their career, which they devoted to industrial progress on the basis of the prosperity of the small saver.

Algumas raízes do anti-semitismo no Brasil ou um outro olhar sobre Paris

A construcao da cultura passa por multiplas influencias culturais. A dinâmica cultural desmente pretensas posicoes etnocentricas. Ao longo do tempo a historia brasileira se viu vinculada a varios sistemas socioculturais e, nos dois ultimos seculos, as influencias iberica, africana e indigena houve intensa incorporacao da cultura francesa e anglo-saxonica que somadas, moldaram, em grande parte, nossos coracoes e mentes. Neste trabalho se focaliza a influencia da cultura e do catolicismo conservador frances na formacao do anti-semitismo brasileiro. A partir da analise da iconografia religiosa se observara uma das fontes da construcao da diabolizacao do judeu no imaginario popular e culto. A construcao da exclusao social dos judeus franceses e sua deportacao para campos de concentracao sera observada atraves de um roteiro pelo Marais, o bairro judaico de Paris. A arquitetura concentracionista de Corbusier completa o quadro da exclusao social. Todos estes elementos, reunidos, permitem entender, em parte, como foi sendo construida a imagem do judeu imigrante no Brasil expressa por varios autores.

Translation and Westernization:Gulliver's Travelsin Ladino

leksander Ben Ghiat's translation ofJonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is an important literary document as well as a valuable resource for the student of Sephardic social and intellectual history, and my goal in this article is to provide a philological analysis of it.' Ben Ghiat was a prolific writer. He was born in Izmir, Turkey, and received his education there, first in a meldar (a Jewish religious primary school), then in one of the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU). These schools were opened in the Ottoman Empire after 1860 by French Jews, whose goal was to bring Western cultural values, progress, and moral education to their Oriental co-religionists. The AIU saw its work as a civilizing mission. The general system of teaching imitated those principles dominant in nineteenth-century Republican France. At first the teachers came from Paris, but later they were recruited in the Middle East and instructed in France. For the

Trender i modernt franskt-judiskt tänkande

The Jewish community in today’s France is the biggest in Europe and the third biggest in the world (next to the USA and Israel) with more than 600 000 members. The French Jews were the first in Europe to be emancipated and they showed strong assimilationistic tendencies, but during the second half of the 20 th century, they developed a strong and proud Jewish identity. The Jewish community is, however, deeply divided: mainly into secular Jews and into religious Jews who are moving in the direction of a stricter Orthodoxy. The towering figure in modern French-Jewish thinking is Emmanuel Levinas, the well-known Lithuanian-born philosopher. Among his disciples one can find such secular Jews as Alain Finkielkraut and such Ultra-Orthodox ones as the former Maoist Benny Levy. The most important thinker within the centrist modern Orthodox position is Shmuel Trigano, a prolific Sephardic Jew born in Algeria. The Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel have raised the question of the French tradition of reducing religion into a private thing. Many defend the French republican model with a secular state granting freedom of religion to individuals, while other look for a more communitarian and collective way of expressing Jewishness in France. This debate between “republicans” and “contrarevolutionairies” was particularly heated on the occasion of the bicentennary of the French revolution in 1989.