Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics ed. by Sarah Hammerschlag (review)

No college-level textbook devoted to modern French culture would be complete without including the Dreyfus Affair, the Vichy regime's roundup and deportation of French Jews during World War II, and the current malaise among France's Jewish population—the third largest in the world—in the face of renewed anti-Semitism. Yet until now, few resources readily available to scholars and students of contemporary French and Francophone studies have provided sufficient religious, political, or historical context to frame the critical questions posed at these defining moments in the relationship between France's Jewish population and the French state. Sarah Hammerschlag's masterfully edited anthology addresses this need by giving voice to French Jewish thinkers—from Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, Sarah Kofman, and Albert Memmi to Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, Alain Finkielkraut, Hélène Cixous, and Jacques Derrida, among others—in their efforts to formulate and reformulate their beliefs, philosophies, and positions at major moments of crisis and change. The initial essays in this volume illustrate how, after France granted citizenship to its Jewish population in 1791, the majority of France's Jews proved eager to align themselves with the laws and norms of French society. Jewish scholars sought in the texts of the ancient prophets a consonance between Judaism and the humanist values of the French Revolution. Following the Dreyfus Affair, however, intellectuals disillusioned with the empty promises of assimilation sought to redefine French Judaism and began to explore other strains of Jewish thought, including those introduced by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Such efforts to reframe Jewish identity took a cataclysmic turn in 1940 when Maréchal Pétain's regime barred Jews from civil service and revoked citizenship of Algerian Jews. In reflections written during the Second World War, Jewish thinkers returned to resources within their faith tradition to cope with unprecedented persecution and loss. After the war, some writers posited Judaism as an alternative to the worldview of the Christian West. The essays comprising the second half of the book respond to the following key events that altered the notion of what it meant to identify oneself as Jewish within secular France: the creation of the State of Israel, the emigration of nearly 250,000 North African Jews to France following the Algerian War, the Six-Day War, and more recently the departure of thousands of Jews for Israel in response to a resurge in anti-Semitic attacks. Beyond its rich content, the strengths of this anthology are multiple. The clear, compelling introduction to the volume as a whole, to each thematic section, and to the authors' lives, works, and theories make the essays accessible even for non-specialists. Moreover, the fluid translations are particularly noteworthy in their comprehensible rendering of the writings of stylistically different, highly complex philosophers. While the anthology does assume a grasp of some common Hebrew terms, judicious footnotes offer helpful explanations of less commonly known aspects of Jewish practices and history.