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

Judaism, Spring, 1993 by Vicki Caron

To be sure, patterns of Jewish ethnic cohesiveness would have been more striking had Piette looked more closely at the occupational distribution of Jews, in comparison to that of the total Parisian population. Moreover, one must wonder why, if Jewish and Christian members of the bourgeoisie really shared so much in common, the rate of intermarriage remained so low. And, finally, a different picture of the pace of change might have emerged had Piette carried her statistical analysis beyond 1840. Indeed, David Cohen had suggested that the period in which French Jewry experienced the most rapid embourgeoisement in the 19th century was the Second Empire (1852-1870), and it would be worthwhile to trace the degree to which the socio-economic transformation of the Jews continued to parallel general trends.(9) Nevertheless, Piette's stress on the importance of class, and her attempt to place the history of Jewish socio-economic change within a comparative context, add an important dimension to our understanding of assimilation.

Yet, when Piette goes beyond her statistical analysis to explore cultural and religious change -- an examination based largely on qualitative sources -- she arrives at very different conclusions regarding the persistence of ethnicity. Like Berkovitz, she, too, argues that the philosophy of those Jews who sought to achieve a balance between a strong, separate Jewish identity, on the one hand, and socio-economic integration, on the other (she calls them "reformers" rather than "regenerators"), ultimately prevailed over both the orthodox and the radical assimilationists. Indeed, a principal reason for concluding her study in 1840 was that, in 1839, the Jewish community announced its decision to establish a separate Jewish hospital, in spite of fierce opposition from the radical assimilationists who believed that such separate institutions would impede integration. Thus, like Berkovitz, Piette claims that the Jewish community's insistence upon a separate sphere of Jewish institutional life -- hospitals, schools, and philanthropies -- constituted an important turning point.

Ultimately, however, Piette stops short of answering the key question raised by her study -- why, at the very moment when Parisian Jews were becoming socially and economically more like their French compatriots, should they have chosen to stress their cultural and religious uniqueness? To be sure, she suggests some possible reasons. The persistence of anti-Semitism, manifested both in the conversionary pressures of the 1820s and 1830s, as well as continued occupational and educational discrimination, were certainly factors. Moreover, as she points out, Protestants and Catholics had their separate institutions, so Jews were simply following the dominant cultural mode. And, she speculates, as the most religiously indifferent Jews abandoned the community, the ranks of the radical assimilationists diminished, thus opening the door for the more moderate reformers. But, there may also have been an important internal factor at work that Piette has largely ignored -- the significant internal migration of Jews to Paris during this period -- especially from Alsace and Lorraine.(10) Although Piette discusses the demographic impact of this migration, noting that, between 1809 and 1840, the size of the Paris Jewish community tripled, largely as a result of this influx, she fails to consider the cultural and religious repercussions of such a vast and ongoing migration. The Jews who arrived in Paris from the northeastern provinces were staunchly traditional and exerted a strong brake on any extreme assimilationist tendencies. Moreover, the fact that the Central Consistory represented not only Paris, but all French Jews, meant that in formulating its policies it had to consider the more traditional Jewish populations of these frontier departments, who, in 1866, still constituted 57 percent of all French Jewry. Hence, while Piette's analysis is rich and suggestive on many levels, it also highlights the problem of isolating Parisian Jewry from the larger French context.