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

Judaism, Spring, 1993 by Vicki Caron

How then can we account for this two-year time lag? As Badinter well illustrates, the major factor militating against immediate and complete emancipation was the tremendous force of popular anti-Semitism in Northeastern France. Unlike their Sephardic coreligionists, the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine had made no progress toward acculturation during the ancien regime: they lived in their own separate communities governed by Talmudic law; they spoke Yiddish, not French; and they were involved in economic practices widely considered degenerate: peddling, second-hand trading, and moneylending. Long banned from owning land, and unrestricted by Church regulations governing the lending of money, Jewish traders, most of whom lived on the edge of poverty themselves, provided the chief source of agricultural credit in the area. This situation was fraught with tension since the peasantry, often unable to repay their debts, deeply resented their Jewish creditors and feared that, if emancipation were to succeed, the Jews might ultimately seize their land. Thus, Jacobin defenders of the peasantry in Alsace spearheaded a violent campaign in 1789 to crush their feared Jewish exploiters. The counter-revolutionary right, represented by the Church and the nobility, was no less hostile. In part, their resentment stemmed from traditional Christian anti-Jewish prejudice, but economic concerns played a role here as well. With the nationalization of their properties, they, too, feared that their former estates would fall into the hands of the Jews. Hence, emancipation was no simple unfolding of the rational and enlightened principals of 1789; rather, it was the fruit of a long, drawn-out battle between ideological liberals, on the one hand, and anti-Semites of a variety of political stripes, on the other.

To be sure, much of Badinter's story is not new. Nevertheless, the way in which he tells it -- as a closely detailed chronological narrative of every stage at which the debate unfolded -- highlights just how uncertain the final outcome actually was. Indeed, he shows that there were moments when the weight of anti-Jewish opinion seemed so overwhelming that pro-emancipation spokesmen had little choice but to stall the debate in order to avert premature defeat.

If the cause of Jewish emancipation was as tenuous as Badinter suggests, whey, then, did it triumph in the end? Had the driving force of revolutionary principles alone been responsible, the National Assembly in 1791 would have been forced to have emancipated slaves as well, which it failed to do. Moreover, as Badinter repeatedly reminds us, the cause of Jewish emancipation did not rank high on the political agenda of the National Assembly; the vast majority of delegates were indifferent to the fate of the Jews. Hence, Badinter argues, emancipation would not have triumphed had it not been for the remarkable lobbying efforts of two important groups: first, the Jews themselves, who were not nearly as passive as historians in the past have portrayed them to be; and, second, the pro-Jewish camp in the National Assembly, headed by the Abbe Gregoire.