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  • Die Kehrseite der Emanzipation in Frankreich: Judenfeindschaft im Elsass 1778 bis 1848
  • Ronald Schechter
Die Kehrseite der Emanzipation in Frankreich: Judenfeindschaft im Elsass 1778 bis 1848, by Daniel Gerson. Vol. 1 of Antisemitismus: Geschichte und Strukturen, ed. Wolfgang Benz. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006. 332 pp. €24.95.

The German word Kehrseite is roughly equivalent to the English “downside” or “other side,” as in the “other side of the coin,” and a book titled Die Kehrseite der Emanzipation in Frankreich suggests that the “emancipation” of Jews in France was something other than an unequivocal boon. This in itself is not startling. It has become a truism that the legal equality of Jews and Gentiles acknowledged by the French Revolution came at the price of relinquishing the communal autonomy the Jews had enjoyed under the Old Regime, and that the Jews would have to place the French nation above any “particularistic” loyalties to their coreligionists. In this way, it has often been argued, an erosion of Jewish identity and pressure to assimilate into Gentile society were the “downsides” to emancipation. What has not been argued by historians, as far as I know, is that antisemitism was the price Jews paid for their emancipation. Yet the subtitle of Daniel Gerson’s book, Judenfeindschaft im Elsass 1778 bis 1848, suggests that Judeophobia or antisemitism (which the author treats as synonymous) in Alsace was the Kehrseite to emancipation.

The problems with such a claim are obvious. To begin with, it reproduces the assertions of those deputies in the revolutionary National Assembly who in 1789–91 argued that the elevation of Jews to the status of citizens would provoke anti-Jewish riots in Alsace, the province then containing the majority of France’s Jews. Moreover, antisemitism could not have been the “downside” to emancipation in 1778, since by everyone’s reckoning the Jews were not yet emancipated. Indeed, Gerson himself claims that even the law of September 27, 1791 itself, which is most often cited as guaranteeing the equality of the Jews, did not mark a true emancipation, since discriminatory legislation followed the very next day; he argues that emancipation only came in 1831, when the July Monarchy of King Louis-Philippe paid the salaries of rabbis, as it did for priests and Protestant ministers.

In any event, Gerson himself does not believe that antisemitism grew out of emancipation. Although he closely follows Arthur Hertzberg’s 1968 Enlightenment [End Page 185] and the Jews in his portrayal of philosophes and revolutionaries as antisemitic, he actually argues for the persistence of religiously motivated, medieval Jew-hatred among the non-Jewish population of rural Alsace well into the nineteenth century. Thus antisemitism existed in spite of Emancipation, not as its consequence.

The survival of traditional prejudice against Jews in the remote towns, villages and hamlets of Alsace after 1789, however, is only surprising if one attributes miraculous nation-building powers to the Revolution, which no one since the nineteenth-century nationalist historian Jules Michelet has done. Therefore much of Gerson’s book is predictable. Chapter one reveals the author’s thesis that “the legal emancipation [die rechtliche Gleichstellung] of France’s Jews did not mean an end to discrimination and oppression for the Israelites [Israeliten] of Alsace” (p. 11). Chapters two, three, and four, respectively, closely follow secondary sources on the Jewish question at the end of the Ancien Régime, the emancipation of the Jews during the Revolution, and Napoleon’s discriminatory measures. (In chapter three the author makes skillful use of Swiss archives to establish the number of Jews—roughly 800—who sought refuge in Basel in the wake of attacks by peasants in 1789, but he does little to integrate this documentation into a larger argument and otherwise relies heavily on secondary sources.) Midway through the book, in chapter five, which focuses on antisemitism during the period of the Bourbon Restoration (1815–30), Gerson finally presents a significant body of primary research, but his sources are mainly petitions by antisemitic Alsatians who predictably denounce the Jews as usurers and enemies of the Christian faith and call for an extension of Napoleon’s laws of exception restricting Jewish commerce. Chapter six focuses on antisemitic...

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