The Jews of Modern France (review)

The Jews of Modern France. By Paula E. Hyman (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 283 pp. $45.00 cloth $16.95 paper

This lucidly written book is the first in a series devoted to providing a systematic overview of the major Jewries of the modern world. It is only fitting that the series begins with France, a country that, since World War II, has seen the emergence of the largest Jewish community in Western or Central Europe (a development examined in Hyman's last chapter, "The Renewed Community"). Not only does Hyman tap a wide variety of sources--from historical, sociological, and religious studies to newspapers, letters, and polling results--but she also treats with great analytical sophistication and judiciousness such issues as the impact of state policy on Jewish status, the nature of antisemitism, the choices of Jews in redefining their identity and reforming Judaism, their political ideologies and activism, and the experience of immigrants.

Hyman's book considers the history of Jews in France from the ancien régime to the present. Throughout, the author emphasizes the complexity of the interactions between Jews and non-Jews, neither group being monolithic nor static, both being internally divided by social class, cultural traditions, regional legacies, and political attitudes, and both participating in a continually changing society. Hyman sometimes raises matters that have led to conflicting scholarly interpretations and then proceeds to complicate the issue further in ways that enrich our understanding (57, 109-111, 145).

At the heart of Hyman's book is the choice that Jews faced between assimilationist and particularistic ("the right to be the same" and "the right to be different") responses to antisemitism. Before 1940, many Jews in France found assimilation--or rather, as Hyman refines the issue, "acculturation"--to their political, social, and economic benefit, seeing it as a strategy that eventually triumphed during the Dreyfus Affair. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, following Vichy's participation in the Holocaust during World War II and the postwar immigration of large numbers of more assertive and orthodox North African Jews into France, there was a massive shift in Jewish attitudes toward greater ethnicity. A strong Zionist orientation challenged "the emancipationist paradigm of Jewish modernity that had been set in motion by the Revolution [of 1789]" and that Hyman herself clearly favors (211).

For Hyman, Enlightenment universalism had its benefits but also its "deleterious consequences," including "enforced conformity" (217). In the name of multi-culturalism, she praises Shmuel Trigano, an intellectual who "has blazed the trail of Sephardi militancy" in France and who believes that the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition presents an important resource "for the creation of a postmodern society" (209, 218) This view is consistent with Hyman's sympathy for members of the Generation of 1968 who discarded the "leftist pieties" of their youth and with her criticism of "antisemites of the Left" who see the Palestinians as the "true" Jews of their time and hence Israel as "the source of all evil in the world" (204, 199, 210). Yet, one wonders, how Jews, especially working-class Jews, would fare in France without the continued existence of certain leftist pieties?

Robert J. Soucy
Oberlin College

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