French-Jewish assimilation reassessed: a review of the recent literature

Judaism, Spring, 1993 by Vicki Caron

Graetz insists, quite persuasively in my view, that historians in the past have overemphasized the experience of the Jewish "center" and have ignored almost completely the experience of the "periphery." But, as he shows, the two groups cannot be so neatly separated, and, he maintains, the time has now come to give the "periphery" its proper due. This line of inquiry sends Graetz off on fascinating forays into previously unchartered waters. Graetz's discussion of Jewish involvement in the Saint-Simonian movement is truly pathbreaking, and he shows that even this most "neutral" sphere of French society remained strongly tinged with Christian and often anti-Jewish values. Similarly, his analysis of anti-Jewish tendencies in 19th-century French Biblical scholarship provides a brilliant complement to Uriel Tal's treatment of German trends.(12) Indeed, despite Graetz's contention that his primary focus is the "periphery," this study, to its credit, deals at least as extensively with the "center" and the interaction between these two spheres.

Yet, despite the extraordinary richness of the individual parts of Graetz's book, as a whole it is marred by its farfetched thesis. First, there is no compelling reason to read all of French Jewish history during the first two-thirds of the 19th century as inexorably leading up to a single event -- the creation of the Alliance israelite universelle. There is even less ground for the contention that the emergence of this organization was, somehow, part of a larger historical process that inevitably culminated in Zionism. Indeed, Zionism, even in the 20th century, remained very much a minority phenomenon among French Jews, and the AIU, to put it mildly, was never among the movement's more avid supporters. True, early Zionist thinkers like Moses Hess may have expected the AIU to play a key role in the implementation of their Zionist schemes, but these schemes never materialized, and, in the end, they provide a flimsly hook upon which to hang the bold claim of the AIU's proto-Zionist tendencies. Graetz seems to be suggesting that any Jewish organization that pursued specifically Jewish political ends must, ipso facto, have been Zionist. Such a claim, however, has no foundation and severely distorts the entire history of modern Jewish political behavior.

Moreover, although Graetz's concepts of "center" and "periphery" are enormously useful, his central contention that the AIU was the creation of "peripheral" Jews is unsubstantiated. Indeed, he himself points out that only one of the Alliance's founders -- Jules Carvallo -- had been a member of the Saint-Simonian movement. Moreover, a full 20 percent of the organization's founders -- again according to Graetz's own calculations -- had previously been members of the Consistory. Adolphe Cremieux, the most prominent of the AIU's founders, had even served as the Consistory's president. Thus, as both Schwarzfuchs and Berkovitz note, the founders of the Alliance, with the possible exception of Eugene Manuel, were not peripheral Jews at all. Finally, Graetz's argument rests heavily on the supposition that a significant number of peripheral Jews made their way back to the Jewish fold, but, once again, where is the evidence? Graetz is surely right to contend that some of these intellectuals, like Joseph Salvador, experienced an awakening of their Jewish consciousness, but there is no basis for arguing that they returned to the Jewish mainstream and reconstituted a new "center."(13) Hence, despite the tremendous value of the individual parts of Graetz's study, the book as a whole is flawed by its over-reliance on an outdated Zionist historiographical model. In the final analysis, Graetz's major contribution is not his thesis; rather, it is the masterful way in which he has integrated the story of "peripheral" Jews into the larger story of Jewish assimilation.