Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France [Hardcover]

Pierre Birnbaum (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2000

A trenchant analysis of the place of minorities in a national culture.

Can members of minority cultures be full and equal citizens of a democratic state? Or do community allegiances override loyalty to the state? And who defines a minority community-its members or the state? Pierre Birnbaum asks these crucial questions about France-a nation where 89 percent of the people feel that racism is widespread and 70 percent agree that there are "too many Arabs." Arabs are today's targets, but racism has also been directed at other groups, including Jews.

Jews became full citizens of France only at the Revolution, and historians have traditionally held that the state, in thus emancipating Jews and allowing them to join French society as individuals, severed the ties that had once bound the Jewish community together. But Birnbaum shows that the history of Jews in France-and of attitudes toward them-is not so linear. Rather, he finds that anti-Semitism has risen and fallen along with other forms of racism and xenophobia, and he argues that Jews in France today are once again viewed as members of an isolated community-no matter what their degree of assimilation. Birnbaum's conclusions about state and community have broad-reaching implications for all societies that struggle to incorporate minority groups-including the United States.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's a truism that French Jews, the first granted equal rights in Europe, are less closely tied together than Jews in other lands. After all, one of the main champions of emancipating the Jews during the French Revolution, Abbe Henri Gregoire, did so in the hopes of converting them. In this series of essays, the author, a professor of political science at the Sorbonne, shows that the history and present of French Jews as a minority in relation to the larger community is much more complex. But Birnbaum considers this relationship in a curious, and limited, way: rather than retracing the history of French Jewry, most of the book tracks the history of anti-Semitism. Despite the desire to belong to France, the author notes that when anti-Semitism rears its ugly head, as during the Dreyfus Affair, when a French Jewish army officer was accused of treason, and during WWII, when a Nazi collaborationist regime ruled France, French Jewish intellectuals, despite their universalist leanings, demonstrate an allegiance to other Jews. Nor has the question of anti-Semitism disappeared: the author notes that while a majority of French citizens condemned the 1990 digging up and impaling of a Jewish body in the town of Carpentras, the event also created an anti-Semitic backlash. As the author puts it, for Jews "it is no small feat to negotiate the arduous path between citizenship and community, assimilation and identity." But a description of the history of what French Jews have created, rather than what they and their fellow French citizens have reacted to, would have helped readers better understand that path.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

While France enters the next millennium as an embattled multicultural society, like much of the rest of the West, Birnbaum (Political Science/the Sorbonne; Anti-Semitism in France, not reviewed) ponders the nation's Jews as a weathervane for social change. Although the Jews of France were emancipated by the Revolution, and their position in an ambiguously secular French society advanced further by Napoleon, their place in the nation has always been uncertain, often troubled. Birnbaum begins his series of interlocking essays with an examination of the evolution of the free Franco-Jewish community. Just as the society itself was ambiguous in its secularismafter all, the Jacobins had knocked the Church from its privileged place alongside the Bourbon thronethe status of another religious community was inevitably problematic as well. Jews found that they were able to rise as full participants in French civil society, but that freedom also made them more visible targets of virulent anti-Semitism. Birnbaum is most original and successful in his five pivotal essays on the poisonous atmosphere surrounding the Dreyfus affair. His detailed analysis of the anti-Dreyfusards, their opposition to the Republic, and their open and vicious anti-Semitism presents a different picture of L'Affaire than the one most familiar to Americans. Even more than the final essays on contemporary France, this section is pointedly suggestive about recent history. The Catholic Church's role in the anti-Dreyfus movements makes the post-WWII efforts of some Catholic priests to shield such enemies of France as Klaus Barbie and Marcel Papon less baffling. Regrettably, although his analyses are long on insight and intelligence, Birnbaum is a dry writer, and much of this important volume, despite its many resonances for Americas own multicultural debates, is a hard slog. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; 1 edition (February 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809061015
• ISBN-13: 978-0809061013
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,454,936 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Way to Tackle French Jewish History, July 31, 2000

By 

Reuven Muller (Silver Spring, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France (Hardcover)

Pierre Birnbaum's book has an envious quality among history books to transcend describing events by time but rather movements in thought. He describes events from as early as the French Revolution in the same breath as current happenings. He is not shy to express a viewpoint that strongly supports the French model of the Jewish Citizen. Birnbaum is confounded with the destiny of french Jewry because French Jews today do not all share his vision of the Republic. This Americanization of France (multi-culturism, etc.) and the traditions of the Sephardic immigrants frighten Birnbaum slightly, but he does not provide firm answers as to what exactly he is afraid of. The book also covers many overlooked topics through many primary sources.