The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present. - Review - book review

Judaism, Wntr, 2001 by Irwin Wall

The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present. By ESTHER BENBASSA. Translated by M. B DE BEVOISE. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

The Jews of Modern France. By PAULA HYMAN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

The Jewish community of France today numbers about 600,000, slightly more than 1% of the French population, and it constitutes the third largest Jewish community of the diaspora after those of the United States and Russia. It is also an economically successful, vibrant, and culturally brilliant community whose artistic and intellectual output and creativity in French and Jewish thought and culture is too little appreciated either in the United Sates or Israel. But this influence and these numbers are a recent phenomenon. As late as the end of the nineteenth century there were only about 100,000 Jews in France and at the time of the Great Revolution of 1789 there were scarcely 40,000. And although the Jews have been continuously present in France since Roman times--they arrived centuries before the Franks themselves--their numbers were always small and their presence often tenuous in the extreme. They were twice threatened with extinction: they were expelled from the country in the thirteenth century and they were hounded and persecuted in the twentieth century when 20 % of them suffered mass deportation to death camps. But France was also the first European country that emancipated them; consequently, their impact on it, even when their numbers were small, was enormous, as was the French impact on them, and through them, Jews throughout the world.

We now have two brief but thorough histories of the Jews of France available to Anglophone readers, a translation of Esther Benbassa's well-received history of the French Jews from ancient times to today, and Paula Hyman's concise study of French Jews since the Great Revolution of 1789. Both are excellent syntheses of the most recent scholarship on French Jews, of which there has been a great deal in recent years. Benbassa's work has the advantage of providing useful information on the earlier history of the Jews of France that is accurate and insightful, but Hyman's study is the more readable and imaginative of the two, more analytical and daring while an easier and more pleasant read.

The experience of the Jews of France has been central to Jewish history, our authors assure us, both because of the impact upon them of the emancipation, which took on an importance for Jews everywhere beyond the nation's borders, and because of the French Jews' outreach to and expression of solidarity with other Jewish communities in the nineteenth century, which became very much a model for Jewish communities later and in our own times. Indeed, as Paula Hyman puts it, the Revolution thrust 40,000 French Jews into the forefront of Jewish history.

The strength of Benbassa's book is that it demonstrates that the Jews of France were of very great importance to world Jewry even in the Middle Ages. They enjoyed a period of cultural brilliance in the Carolingian empire of the eighth century, and again in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, centered on the prosperous trade of the Champagne region; Rashi, whose biblical commentary is fundamental and Talmudic commentary became authoritative in subsequent interpretations was born in the city of Troyes in 1040, and it was from there that he put his imprint on Jewish tradition, all the while carrying on a polemic against the Aristotelian-philosophical school of medieval Judaism exemplified by Maimonides. The Tosefists were followers of Rashi in France who continued the defense of his legal and exegetical tradition and whose commentaries appear along with his in modem printed versions of the Talmud.

The Talmud was, however, publicly burned in France in 1242, and Jews suffered the first of several expulsions from the country early in the thirteenth century, although they were also frequently invited back because of the need for their money-lending and trading skills. In 1306 Philip the Fair made their expulsion definitive, and as many as 50,000 may have emigrated to Alsace, the Rhineland, or even Poland. France for some centuries was almost Judenrein, and a contemporary visitor to the newly-established Jewish museum in the Marais district of Paris cannot help but be struck by the absence of cultural artifacts of French provenance from the late medieval and early modem periods of history; the bulk of the very fine collection assembled there that dates from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries comes from Italy.

The Jews remained a tiny presence in the Papal territories of Avignon and the Comtat over the years of their banishment in France proper, however, and one may visit restored synagogues and even archeological digs reestablishing the contours of the medieval ghetto today in unlikely places like Carp entras and elsewhere in Provence. The return of the Jews to France proper took place in two stages: from 1580 to 1640 some thousands of "New Christians" or Marranos from Portugal fled and established themselves in the Southwest around and in Bordeaux. Tolerated initially as Christians, by the eighteenth century they had reestablished themselves as Jewish in practice and identity while some of them amassed fortunes, primarily in the colonial trade with the French West Indies. In 1552 the French monarchy conquered Metz, the capital of Lorraine, incorporating the Westernmost edge of Ashkenazi Jewry, and with the annexation of Alsace in 1648 about 25,000 more Jews were incorporated into France, making for a bifurcated b ut distinctive Jewish presence. The Sephardic Jews of the Southwest by the eighteenth century appeared to be almost fully integrated into French society and scorned their fellow-Jews of Alsace with their traditional ways, a fact symbolized by the fact that the revolutionary Assembly of 1989 emancipated the Jews in two stages, the "Portuguese" Jews as they were still known in January 1790, the more numerous Alsatian Jews in September 1791.