Studying the Era of Emancipation: The State of Franco-Jewish Local History

Studying the Era ofEmancipation in Franco-Jewish Local History 63 STUDYING THE ERA OF EMANCIPATION: mE STATE OF FRANCO-JEWISH LOCAL HISTORY by Lee Shai Weissbach Lee Shai Weissbach is Professor of History at the University of Louisville. He received his undergraduate training at the University of Cincinnati and earned his doctorate at Harvard University in 1975. A specialist in social history, Weissbach has written on a wide variety of topics, with special emphasis on the experience ofJews in France and in the United States. His book Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century France: Assuring the Future Haroest was published in 1989, and his case study of synagogue design and congregational history, The Synagogues of Kentucky: Architecture and History, was published in 1995. Weissbach's current research supported by a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1995-96, is a history of small Jewish communities in the United States. In a commentary on American Jewish historiography written twenty years ago, Oscar Handlin observed that in the decades after World War II, "perhaps the largest single contribution [to American Jewish history] was that incorporated in the chronicles of particular communities." And Jonathan Sarna, in a review essay written ten years ago, noted that "community history is one of the oldest and most popular forms of American Jewish historical writing." Today, studies of individual Jewish communities in the United States continue to appear, and they remain an 64 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 important element in American Jewish historiography.l Of course the proliferation of Jewish communal histories in the United States is explained in part by the huge number of individual Jewish centers that came into being in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As early as 1880, there were already 160 cities and towns in the U.S. with Jewish populations of at least 100, and by the 1920s there were some 700 communities in the country with Jewish populations of that size.2 In France, as in the United States, the century and a half prior to World War II was characterized by a significant growth in the number of individual Jewish communities. While the creation of new communities in the U.S. was associated with the founding of new cities on the frontier and the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from abroad, however, the establishment of new communities in France was related primarily to political change. Before the French Revolution of 1789, medieval restrictions on Jewish settlement in the country still applied almost everywhere, and so established Jewish communities could be found in only a few parts of the kingdom. Some 30,000 Jews lived in the eastern border regions of France, mainly in various small towns in Alsace and in the cities of Metz and Nancy in Lorraine, places where officials had used local prerogatives to allow limited Jewish settlement. Another 5,000 or so Jews lived in the southwest, at Bordeaux and Bayonne, where they had first settled as Mananos fleeing Spanish and Portuguese persecution. There were also about 500 Jews living under quasi-legal conditions in Paris on the eve of the Revolution, and a small number of others living under precarious circumstances in a few more towns, mainly in the South. Finally, there were perhaps 2,000Jews living in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, Papal territories that were soon to come under French control.3 'Oscar Handlin, "A Twenty Year Retrospect of American Jewish Historiography," in Americanjewisb Historical Quarterly 65 (June 1976), p. 298; Jonathan D. Sarna, "Jewish Community Histories: Recent Non-Academic Contributions," in jouN/al ofAmerican Etbnic History 6 (Fall 1986), p. 62. 2See Lee Shai Weissbach, "The Jewish Communities of the United States on the Eve of Mass Migration: Some Comments on Geography and Bibliography," in American jewisb History 78 (Sept. 1988). 3See Simon Schwarzfuchs, Dujuif a Z'israelite: bistoire d'une mutation (1770-1870) (paris, 1989), pp. 19-37; Patrick Girard, Pour Ie meilleur et pour Ze pire: vingt sti!cZes d'bistoire juive en France (paris, 1986), pp. 169-199; Arthur Hertzberg, The Frencb Enligbterlment and tbejews: The Origins ofMOderrl Anti-Semitism (New York, 1968), pp. 84-137, 321; and Zosa...