Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815

Introduction

shachoch, or, a discourse on the method In Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi reminds us that the biblical command “Remember!” (“Zakhor”) and the Jewish traditions of remembrance paradoxically conflict with the requirements of modern historiography, despite their common attention to the past. Thus the moral imperative to remember Egyptian bondage, the destruction of Jerusalem, the martyrs to the faith, and so many other aspects and events of the Jewish past is at cross-purposes with the critical scrutiny of the historical record that the intellectual progeny of Ranke, Jewish and otherwise, have adopted as their professional credo.1 Similarly, the memory of (often traumatic) events in the relatively recent Jewish past, particularly from the late nineteenth century, can easily obscure the history that came before. When investigating the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in France from the death of Louis XIV to the fall of Napoleon, it is difficult to forget that in the 1880s and 1890s French politicians would win elections on the sole platform of hating Jews; that Édouard Drumont’s virulent La France juive would be a bestseller ; that French citizens were all too ready to presume the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus; that a hero of World War I so famous for his desire to spare French blood on the battlefield would compete with the Nazis in enacting anti-Semitic legislation during World War II; that the French police would round up Jewish children and send them to their death at Introduction 1 Auschwitz; that President Charles de Gaulle would discourse on Jewish arrogance in the midst of the Six-Day War; that in 1980 a prime minister would distinguish between Jews and “innocent Frenchmen” who were killed in an anti-Semitic terrorist attack; that even the dead among the Jews would fail to find rest in the cemetery of Carpentras; that JeanMarie Le Pen would impatiently dismiss the Holocaust as consisting of historical “details” and openly suspect Jewish officials of dual loyalties. These images, to borrow the language of memory theorist Maurice Halbwachs, are “gripping abbreviations” that simplify an otherwise complex history.2 Alternatively, one might say that they constitute a mnemonic prism through which observers of the past, professional or otherwise, typically view the history of preceding periods. Whether informed by a moral imperative to remember or the simple impossibility of forgetting, this prism has long determined the questions that historians have posed about an undeniably important period of Jewish history. It has favored a teleological approach in which the past prefigures the future. Thus those who have valued tolerance of difference and seen postrevolutionary France as conducive to a pluralistic society have tended to highlight the positive elements of Jewish history in the age of enlightenment and revolution.3 In contrast to this Franco-Jewish variation on the Whig interpretation of history,4 much of the twentiethcentury historiography of French Jewry concentrated on the negative aspects of the Enlightenment and Revolution (including the Napoleonic period). As early as 1928, Robert Anchel emphasized the oppressive side to Napoleon’s administration of his Jewish subjects, thus challenging a long tradition of regarding the emperor as a liberator of previously oppressed Jews.5 If Anchel was before his time in his willingness to criticize a founding father of modern France, in the aftermath of the Holocaust such iconoclastic attacks came with increasing frequency. Initially these revisions of the historical record tended to come from beyond France’s borders. In 1968 an American, Arthur Hertzberg, vilified Voltaire as a patriarch of modern anti-Semitism, and in 1979 the Israeli Simon Schwarzfuchs reiterated Anchel’s opinion of Napoleon as an oppressor of the Jews.6 By the time of the bicentennial of the Revolution, however, French writers joined the increasingly monophonic chorus of its detractors by pointing to its perceived offenses against the Jews. The greatest of these was, paradoxically, their admission to legal equality, an act that subsequent generations would call emancipation.7 The assault on emancipation was facilitated by at least three factors: a more critical stance among historians toward the very Revolution that 2 Introduction enacted the emancipation; the latest outbreak of a “Vichy syndrome” that defined the health of the French polity in terms of its historical attitudes toward and treatment of Jews; and the reassessment of republican assimilationist ideology in light of assertions, from many groups within French society, of...