Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860 (review)

The Jews of France, who were the first in Europe to be emancipated, are often seen as a laboratory model for the process of Jewish liberation. But, like every other case in Europe, France had its own singular conditions and its Jews had their own singular characteristics. The commonly received narrative holds that the French Revolution constituted a radical watershed in the history of the French Jews, wrenching them out of a quasimedieval existence and thrusting them into modernity.

Berkovitz contests this narrative in his erudite and extensively researched book. Following Shochat's path-breaking—and still controversial—study of German Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Berkovitz argues that the Ashkenazic communities of Metz and Alsace, as well as the Sephardic communities of southern France, were already exhibiting various signs of modernity in the century and a half before the Revolution.¹ Like Shochat, he points to increasingly tolerant interaction with Christians, the breakdown of communal authority in such areas as sexual morality and dress, and shifts of authority from rabbis to lay leaders. In the analytically most interesting argument in the book, he claims that the shift of authority enabled policies that were informed less by traditional legal categories than by a new sense of a "public interest" independent of religious values. In addition, the Alsatian community began to distinguish itself from its Ashkenazi cultural matrix to the east, thus forming the basis for a modern national French Jewish community.

For the period after the Revolution, Berkovitz offers similarly contrarian interpretations. Far from immediately improving the Jews' lot, the Revolution at times worsened it, retarding modernization, because of the general chaos caused by the Reign of Terror, anti-religious outbursts generally, and anti-Jewish sentiments stirred up by the Revolution. Many traditional Jews, such as yeshivah students and rabbis, fled France. But the Jews also embraced the revolutionary idea of régénération, which was often used by their enemies, as a motto for moderate reform. Under this slogan, the Jews believed that they could transform aspects of their lives without discarding the traditionalist core. New rituals were developed that identified traditional Jewish values with the patrie. If the Jews of pre-Revolutionary France were protomodern, the post-Revolutionary Jewish community held to traditional mores much longer than has previously been admitted.

Berkovitz also offers a radical interpretation of the famous Napoleonic Sanhedrin. Whereas other interpreters have seen the Jews' responses to the emperor as servile and apologetic, Berkovitz claims that many of their positions were rooted in rabbinic innovations regarding Jewish-Christian relations from the centuries before the Revolution.

Although much of this book is straightforward social, political, and intellectual history, Berkovitz also stakes a claim to an anthropological approach in his title. He gives an interesting account of the folkloric traditions of the Alsatian Jews, especially the ones surrounding life-cycle issues, which were not greatly different from those among other European, and non-European, Jewish communities—belief in demons, use of amulets, etc. On this level, the pre-Revolutionary Alsatian Jews hardly anticipated modernity; nor had they begun to differentiate themselves nationally. Berkovitz also sketches out, though more briefly, some of the new rituals of the nineteenth century, such as the confirmation rite. However, his thesis that the Revolution constituted less than an abrupt caesura might well lead to the supposition that the older rituals and practices persisted into the nineteenth century. When did they disappear? Why? The ritual approach that Berkovitz promises is only partly fulfilled.

Berkovitz's thesis is intriguing, but it suffers from some of the same defects as Shochat's. That preachers attacked public morals may say more about the preachers than about the morals. Changes in communal power may look like incipient modernization, but such changes have occurred in earlier periods. More persuasive is Berkovitz's argument that the Revolution was less than an unmitigated blessing for the...