New Perspectives on the Challenges of Modernity in France

Over thirty years ago, Michael Meyer aptly observed that the Jewish experience varied from region to region, making it difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint historical periods, such as the advent of modernity. As he wrote, “Scattered among the nations, the Jews have participated to varying degrees in simultaneous and successive foreign civilizations while at the same time carrying on their own heritage.”¹ Two recently published books, one by Jay Berkovitz and the other by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, clearly demonstrate the value of regional and national studies of modernity. When read in tandem, the internal Jewish perspective provided by Berkovitz and the vast global perspective offered by Sepinwall highlight the distinctive national and regional features that marked the adjustment to modernity experienced by minorities under French rule.

Jay Berkovitz's Rites and Passages is a cultural history of the Franco-Jewish community between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Berkovitz focuses on “the progressive refashioning of traditional values in the encounter with secularization, modernity, and non-Jewish ideas and symbols” (p. 91). His examination of how the Jewish self-image shifted is based on internal Jewish sources analyzed over the longue durée. This methodology enables him to explore critical regional distinctions among French Jews, both between the Sephardim of Bordeaux and their Ashkenazic brethren, as well as within the Ashkenazic communities, where he separates between the urban Jews of Paris and Metz, and the 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 the ancien regime. These include an erosion of religious practices among the urban elite and the growing subordination of the rabbinate to lay parnasim and merchants in Bordeaux and in Metz. Berkovitz's critical contribution and innovation is his assertion that visible changes in identity preceded the Revolution and Emancipation. Berkovitz convincingly argues that during the late eighteenth century a regional Franco-Jewish identity emerged in Alsace and Lorraine, one that was in direct tension with these Jews’ previous identification with pan-Ashkenaz. Whereas during the two centuries before 1789, shared rituals, educational patterns, and judicial structures encouraged unity across the Rhine and further east, in the decades before the Revolution, the Jews living in both the villages of Alsace and in the city of Metz began to forge an additional and separate local identity, reflected in particular customs and liturgy and in selfsufficient communal structures (pp. 73–83).

Other discernible elements of modernity were also visible in prerevolutionary France, including a small group of maskilim, comprising essayists, Hebraists, and poets. It was common for these maskilim to engage in contemporary political discussions, arguing that Judaism was compatible with citizenship (pp. 94–97; 174–77).

Having identified the seeds of change in the prerevolutionary period, Berkovitz claims that in the short term, the French Revolution hindered, rather than helped, the modernization of French Jewry, particularly among Ashkenazim. In the wake of the Revolution, “acute anti-Jewish hostility, deteriorating economic conditions, religious persecution, the emigration of an entire generation of yeshivah students and rabbis, and the closing of schools, synagogues and the two Hebrew presses” impeded the Jewish community's ability to adjust to their new civic status (p. 91). It was only under Napoleon (chapter 5) and in later years, under the Bourbon Restoration (chapter 6) and the July Monarchy (chapter 9) that the Jewish community recovered and began to adapt culturally.

The civic equality bestowed upon Jews...