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138 SHOFAR This fascinating study will find an audience among both specialists and general readers. Occasional errors occur, such as a mention of the League of Women Voters before it was founded or assigning a leadership role to women in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union who, despite their key role in the success of the union, were virtually shut out of office. Some repetition, most glaringly exemplified in the author's need to define the word minyon at least four times, and the tendency to summarize more than is necessary, do not seriously lessen the value of this important study. Sally M. Miller Department of History University of the Pacific Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France Since 1968, by Judith Friedlander. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 249 pp. $27.50. In his discussion of the Jewish enlightenment, which was more like the German Aufldiirnng than the secularistic French movement, Paul Johnson creates a typology of Jewish intellectuals. "The fiery Talmud scholar; the mystic-enthusiast; the urbane rationalist-the whole of modern Jewry was to be written round these three archetypes" (A History of the Jews (Harper and Row, 1987, p. 300). The model for the first type is the gaon of Vilna, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-97), violent critic of hasidism. In post-1968 France many Jews, searching for a new identity and often "an ersatz messiah, "stumbled upon cultural and political models that suggested new ways for them to live as Jews ..." (p. 2). Friedlander uses the Vilna connection, both real and symbolic, to provide the structure of her book and the core of her discussion of squabbling Jewish intellectual groups. The beginning of the emancipation of European Jews began in the enlightenment, but it was the French and Napoleonic revolutions that turned them into citizens and transformed the issue of Jewishness. Catholics had a similar if not more serious problem with the demands of freedom and citizenship, which appeared to them to be a secular, nationalistic, and antireligious Gleichschaltung. Although contemporary French Jews discuss similar issues, their discourse differs from that of Catholics not only in its religious context but also because of the horror and burden of the Shoah and the controversial issues of the relation of French Jews to the state of Israel. Vilna on the Seine is a book about intellectuals and, to a lesser extent, their ideas, a mixture of biography and thought. The analysis is simple, without the theoretical baggage we expect in the work of anthropologists. (Friedlander is a member of this tribe.) The book gives a solid introduction VoLume 10, No.1 FaLL 1991 139 to the contemporary Jewish intellectual scene in France, although some parts, like the chapter on Mordecai Litvine's "Yiddish translation" of the European enlightenment, carefully avoid any discussion of ideas. All of the personal trivia is interesting, but there is too much of it in such a short book on intellectuals. There is even a paragraph on blintzes. Now there is a subject crying out for original treatment in the history of Jewish thought, much in the manner of Michel Onfray's brilliant study of the philosopher's gut, subtitled Critique de La raison dietique (1989). No trace of Sartre's crustacean nightmares sullies Friedlander's discussion of the curious relations between Benny Levy and the guru, who was fascinated by Levy's switch from Mao to Moses and his obsession with Jewish texts. Beauvoir, a, Catholic renegade, was not amused. The chapter on Emmanual Levinas and his disciple Alain Finkielkraut does include a discussion of the debate over the universalism of the Enlightenment with its basic hostility to cultural and ethnic diversity. The reader hungers for more of this type of analysis. An appendix aggravates the encyclopaedic vices of the book by presenting potted biographies of people not discussed in the text. How far can one go in a revolt against The New CuLturaL History (title of a book [1989] edited by Lynn Hunt)? Perhaps we are all eager to embrace the deceptive simplicity of primitive narrative: Yale University Press has orchestrated a symphony of friendly blurbs, including one from Mary Douglas, to seduce buyers and brainwash readers. In spite...

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