The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (review)

172 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 would seem incumbent on its press to have impeccable standards, which in this case would include submitting the manuscript to an editor competent in Jewish history and rabbinic Hebrew. Here is a small sampling of the problem. The word nefesh ("soul") is confounded with neshef ("evening," here = "evening entertainment") so neshefPurim is rendered "the Soul of Purim" (p. 140). The Hebrew for "by this ring" in the marriage formula is transcribed betaha at tsot (p. 31). Flavio Josephus would be better recognized by English speakers as Flavius, just as Frenk Leibowitz would be by his usual English name of Jacob Frank (pp. 105, 44). A note explains with some surprise that ma nishtana is taken to be an exclamation rather than a question-probably the original meaning -and no notice is taken of the different Sephardi order (p. 25). The phrase en yevando a los kuatro kantones un buketo ... should be rendered "raising towards each of the four corners (or directions) a bouquet," not "carrying" (p. 19). Yom Hashishi is declared to be the beginning of a Sabbath psalm, when in fact it is a quotation from the book of Genesis. Examples of this kind of thing might be multiplied. Please, U of C Press, do a little better than the local football team. Alan D. Com: Department of Hebrew Studies University ofWisconsin-Milw~.ukee The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, by Paula E. Hyman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. 214 pp. $29.95. At the time of the French Revolution, French Jewry was not a homogeneous society but rather was composed offour regional communities : Alsace-Lorraine, the Guyenne in the Southwest, the Papal States, and Paris. Of the four, Alsatian Jewry was the largest, numbering over half the total Jewish population of about 40,000 souls. It remained the predominant component in the Jewish population of France until the loss of the Eastern provinces in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. In recent years a number of important works on the history and culture of Alsatian Jewry have appeared in French. These, together with several classic French studies published at the turn of the century, constitute a significant literature worthy of the subject. However, a comprehensive English language study of Alsatian Jewry in modern times has long been a desideratum. With the publication of The Emancipation Book Reviews 173 of the Jews of Alsace by Paula Hyman, Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University, this gap has been filled. As indicated in the subtitle, Hyman's book is more than just a narrow history of the legal process of attaining citizenship-it is a broad study of the cultural consequences of that political event, surveying "Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century." Drawing on a wealth of archival and other primary sources as well as the vast secondary literature, I-lyman portrays the impact of emancipation and modernity on the major areas ofJewish life: economics, demography, education, social mobility, domestic life, and religion. In evaluating the changes that overtook Alsatian Jewry, the author avoids the simplistic equation of emancipation and assimilation. The centrifugal forces set in motion within the Jewish community by the French Revolution did not wipe the slate of tradition clean. The centripetal forces of continuity and stability were indeed undermined in the first half of the nineteenth century, but, as I-lyman shows, they did not loose their grip on Jewish life until the latter half of the century. The overemphasis on change and discontinuity in modern Jewish historiography, so carefully eschewed by Hyman, has gone hand in hand with the writing of history from above. In the case of French Jewish history this has meant the viewing of history almost exclusively through the eyes and activities of the elite, the secular, urban, bourgeois leadership that was in the forefront of the movement for acculturation, or "regeneration." Hyman has avoided this pitfall and has, to the extent that the sources allow, given voice to the "inarticulate Jewish masses" of A1sace. While its subject is the jews of Alsace, Hyman's book is more than...