-
1. Foundations
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
9 1 Foundations The Historical Setting Like France itself, French Jewry hardly constituted a cohesive, unified entity by the 1790s, or even by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Conceptions of the relationship between being Jewish and being French in the aftermath of the Revolution were equally diverse. As some scholars have suggested, French Jews repeatedly adapted their sense of themselves in response to changing political, intellectual, social, and economic forces.1 Debates over Jewish education in France took similar twists and turns in the course of the nineteenth century. While these negotiations were products of specific points in time, they unfolded against a backdrop of ideas and expectations emanating from the historical context in which French Jews found themselves. At the time of the French Revolution in 1789, Jews constituted a tiny minority within France. Numbering between 40,000 and 50,000 souls, French Jewry made up less than 1 percent of France’s approximately five million inhabitants. Geographically, French Jews lived in three main areas. While Paris and its environs would become the largest population center by the end of the nineteenth century, in 1800 the bulk of the Jewish population —around 30,000—resided in the northeastern departments of Alsace and Lorraine. Alsatian Jews spoke mostly Yiddish and German and followed the Ashkenazic religious ritual, which placed a great weight on rabbinic authority. Some resided in larger urban centers, such as Strasbourg, Metz, and Mulhouse, while others dwelled in smaller towns and communes. Paula Hyman counts Jews living in about 16 percent of Alsace’s 1,150 C H A P T E R 1 10 communes on the eve of the Revolution; after their emancipation in 1791, Jews migrated within the region to larger urban areas. As the Alsatian Jewish population expanded in the nineteenth century, its demographic concentration also increased.2 Many Alsatian Jews lived in poverty; others lived comfortably; a few were more than comfortable. Most engaged in trade of some sort, while some prospered in the textile industry.3 Alsatian Jews, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, maintained a corporate communal structure that oversaw all aspects of Jewish civic and religious life. As an autonomous structure, the Jewish community (in Hebrew, kahal) administered justice to its members according to Jewish religious law (halakhah), and saw to the operation and maintenance of Jewish religious edifices and institutions. Its leaders, or syndics, tended to come from the wealthiest men in the community . The syndics managed the payment of communal taxes to the secular authorities and served as the main liaison between them and the Jewish community they served. The kahal financed its operation through the levying of taxes among its members, usually on some sort of sliding scale in which the richest members paid the most.4 The second largest Jewish population in France at the end of the eighteenth century was the 5,000 or so Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux. This community had largely descended from Iberian Jewish converts to Catholicism (conversos), some of whom secretly retained Jewish religious practices. Many of these conversos had left Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century seeking commercial opportunity, which some found in southwestern France. A number of bordelais Sephardim, particularly international merchants such as the Gradis family, had achieved considerable economic success and with it a certain social integration.5 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Sephardim of Bordeaux emerged as an openly Jewish community whose status as a corporate community provided relative protection from widescale persecution. Their religious tradition emphasized traditional observance , to be sure, but with a greater acceptance of rationalist thinking and a rabbinate more deferential to lay authorities.6 The Sephardim of Bordeaux also adopted a more insular attitude toward their fellow Jews, resisting Jewish immigration from the Papal States and the Yiddish-speaking regions to the northeast. After the Revolution, their leaders sought to prevent legal unification with the Ashkenazic population of the northeast, fearing both financial liability for Alsatian communal debts (a real concern) and the loss of their social distinctions. The third major Jewish population center on the eve of the Revolution was in the papal states of Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, and l’Isle- [3.236.19.251] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:47 GMT) Foundations 11 sur-Sogue. These Jews eventually entered Sephardic society and expanded Jewish settlement to cities such as Lyon and Paris. Although papal Jews melded well with their Sephardic brothers and sisters, they retained certain linguistic distinctions...