Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology

1. Durkheim’s Sociology and French Antisemitism

1 Durkheim’s Sociology and French Antisemitism CHAD ALAN GOLDBERG “The fundamental ideas of European sociology,” Robert Nisbet has argued, “are best understood as responses to the problem of order created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the collapse of the old regime” under the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution .1 Much the same could be said about nineteenth-century European antisemitism. Antisemitism, the historian Stephen Wilson has suggested, was “a rejection of modern society, as antisemites conceived and experienced it,” which offered a “mythical explanation and a scapegoat” to account for and exorcise poorly understood processes of social change.2 But even when modernity was interpreted in less threatening and more positive terms as an emancipatory and progressive development, the Jews could serve equally well to signify the threat of restoration and reaction. Moreover this function of the Jews as symbols of modernity or its antithesis was not unique to antisemitism; within classical sociological theory too, the Jews were identified, for example, with capitalist modernization (Marx, Sombart) or, conversely, with a traditionalistic economic ethos (Weber). All of this suggests that European sociology emerged not only alongside of and within the same milieu as nineteenth-century European antisemitism but also in relation to it. This would mean that the ideas of European sociology and antisemitism were not only responses to the same revolutions; they were also responses to each other. This chapter investigates the relationship between European sociology and nineteenth-century European antisemitism through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. The importance of Durkheim to the emergence of European sociology and the importance of France to the history of European antisemitism make them 46 Goldberg well suited for this investigation. The interplay between Durkheim’s sociology and French antisemitism was sometimes explicit, as in the remarks that Durkheim published about antisemitism during the Dreyfus affair,3 but it was more often implicit, requiring careful exegesis to reconstruct it. I seek to accomplish this below, focusing on one side of this relationship—Durkheim’s response to antisemitism—and one of the two revolutions that Nisbet identified: the French Revolution.4 The chapter proceeds in four steps. I begin by distinguishing and briefly sketching reactionary and radical forms of antisemitism in nineteenthcentury France. While this dichotomous conception admittedly simplifies French antisemitism, eliding a variety of nuances, overlapping themes, and ambiguities, it usefully captures the elements that are most essential for the purposes of this study. I then discuss how Durkheim’s sociology responded to each form of antisemitism. I suggest that his remarks about the Jews directly addressed antisemitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its historical legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French antisemitism. In other words, he also challenged antisemitism in a roundabout way by showing that its tenets were derived from and rested upon a fundamentally flawed understanding of the Revolution to which it was, in part, a response. In sum I argue that Durkheim’s work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of antisemitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of these findings. A few caveats are in order. To provide a comprehensive account of Durkheim’s ideas about the Jews and Judaism, one would need to describe fully both the development of his sociological work in general, including its various phases and changes in direction, as well as his social and historical milieu. Among the pertinent aspects of this milieu would be the history and composition of the heterogeneous Jewish population in France, the changing and contested definitions of Jewish identity in nineteenth-century Europe, and the critical events that raised Durkheim’s awareness of antisemitism and shaped the development of his thinking . These events would undoubtedly include the 1892 Panama scandal in France and the antisemitic reaction to it; the Dreyfus affair between Durkheim’s Sociology and Antisemitism 47 1894 and 1906, in which Durkheim was involved as an active Dreyfusard; Durkheim’s work during World War I on behalf of Jewish immigrants from Russia; and developments in Russia itself, including pogroms in 1903 and 1905 and the emancipation of Russian Jewry in...