Jewish Scholarship and Identity in Nineteenth-Century France

In a letter to Leopold Zunz in the fall of 1822, the French orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy predicted that the important work of Wissenschaft des Judentums would never gain the appreciation it deserved in France because the Jewish community there showed so little interest in intellectual affairs. ¹ Two decades later, commenting on the failure of French Jews to embrace ritual reform as did their German coreligionists, Abraham Geiger went a step further, holding the paucity of Jewish intellectual life responsible for the disappointing lack of progress in the realm of religion. With impassivity rampant, he was convinced that only a movement devoted to the scientific study of Judaism could save French Jewry from the portentous effects of indifference.² In accordance with de Sacy and Geiger’s views, the achievements of French Jewish scholarship have been commonly dismissed as inconsequential, as at best only a faint echo of the more celebrated and undeniably more important trends that prevailed across the Rhine. ³ There is no doubt that the disintegration of French universities, both in the aftermath of the Revolution and as a direct result of Napoleonic policy, was a limiting factor in the development of modern Jewish scholarship. ⁴ It is also abundantly clear that Jewish scholarship in France was never entirely free of German influence. In the revolutionary period, French maskilim such as Zalkind Hourwitz, Isaïe Berr Bing, and Berr Isaac Berr were profoundly inspired by Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah movement that formed around Mendelssohn in Berlin. During the Napoleonic régime especially, this relationship of intellectual indebtedness to German Jewry would intensify. Continuous contact with German scholars, together with the training received at German universities, fostered a greater awareness of the methods and objectives of the nascent Wissenschaft des Judentums movement among French Jewish intellectuals, influencing their work in several important areas.

The two regnant assumptions concerning Franco-Jewish scholarship—its meager value and its distinctly German provenance—are, nonetheless, in serious need of reexamination. Geiger’s judgment has gone unchallenged because the scholarship produced in France before the mid-nineteenth century is still largely unknown to most students of the period. The second claim, that modern Jewish studies was without any roots in French soil but was imported from central and eastern Europe by immigrant scholars, and only came of age in the 1860s, ⁵ ignores the body of work produced in France beginning in the third decade of the last century. It will become clear in this paper that Franco-Jewish scholarship, though certainly not autonomous, developed an independent character reflecting the matrix of political and intellectual issues peculiar to France.

The patterns of Jewish scholarship in nineteenth-century France offer a valuable perspective on the complexities facing Jews in the post-emancipation era. Accompanying the process of legal emancipation was a progressive liberation from the intellectual constraints of the Jewish tradition. In response to unprecedented demands to fulfill the duties of citizenship and to become part of “la grande famille française,” Jewish scholars took the lead in redefining the meaning of Jewish tradition and history. Toward this end, Jewish intellectuals appropriated the methods and tools of modern scholarship and began to subject classical Jewish literature to critical examination. Clearly the direct and natural outgrowth of ongoing secularization, this critical-scientific approach was generally adopted wherever religious authority had weakened. It emerged not only as a novel interpretive mode for the explication of ancient and medieval texts, but also as a new source of prestige for those able to meet the scholarly standards set by the wider academic community. In this way, modern scholarship served as a vehicle by which intellectuals were able to attain power and influence within the Jewish community. In the case of Germany, their efforts resulted in the forging of a close relationship between critical scholarship on the one hand, and the struggle on behalf of emancipation and religious reform on the other. ⁶ The work of Leopold Zunz, like that of Abraham Geiger and Zacharias Frankel, was motivated by a desire both to prove the worthiness of Jews as citizens and to substantiate...