RESEARCH General History

THE JEWS
U.S., France assimilated Jews in different ways, book says

Andrea Lynn, Humanities & Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

3/1/03

Photo by Bill Wiegand In his new book, "The Jews and the Nation" (Princeton University Press), Frederic Cople Jaher demonstrates that America and France traveled down radically different roads from revolution to state formation, 1775-1815.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Consider two countries – both caught in the vise grip of revolution, both grappling with standards of citizenship and minority populations challenging those standards. One country has democratic/liberal pretensions, the other, authoritarian tendencies.

Which system will grant its minority full civic rights without subjecting it to tests of loyalty and to subjugation, sometimes violent? Which will better protect the rights of the marginalized enclave?

In his new book, "The Jews and the Nation" (Princeton University Press), Frederic Cople Jaher demonstrates that America and France traveled down radically different roads from revolution to state formation, 1775-1815. In the end, emancipation for Jews would be "most complete in America, but the transition from alienation and oppression to civic rights and integration was greater in France."

The differences, argues Jaher, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, can be explained in part by the fact that the nearly homogenous France "demanded unity through national solidity," while America, a country of immigrants, "was committed to unity in national diversity."

But there are many other differences. In France, the Jewish population was large and deeply rooted, older and more family structured, and had greater institutional resources to protect its ethnic and religious identity. In the United States, Jews populated a few tiny enclaves, but they more often worked and lived alongside others, and they spoke English.
American Jews moreover tended to be adaptable to the national culture, voluntaristic in association and affiliation, and loosely organized. "In these respects, the enclave harmonized with its nation of affiliation."

The Jewish community in pre-revolutionary France was seen as "a nation-within-a-nation" where the primary affiliation was to their religion. They were "isolated by their own aloofness, rites, and rituals, which reinforced Judaic uniqueness, and by their lack of fluency in the French language and customs." In addition, French Jews were widely regarded as being usurers.

Most French people felt that the Jews should divest themselves of their "distasteful traits" and become completely French or be set apart. The Old Regime would ghettoize its Jews, exclude them from various vocations, limit their authority and eventually revoke their freedom. "In the Revolution and the First Empire, the emerging modern nation struggled to modify these attitudes and conventions and to admit the Jews to citizenship. Thus did the treatment of the Jews reflect on French political culture."

According to Jaher, America was the first nation that didn’t have a medieval past that demonized, segregated, banished and massacred Jews. "They were equal citizens at the founding of the American nation," Jaher said, "so it was difficult to look upon them as an alien element against which the United States had to mobilize. Loyalty to a new homeland supplanted hope of return to the Holy Land. The secular, not the sacred, directed the Jewish mission. Citizenship took priority over creed, modernity over history, and diaspora patriotism over Judaic messianism."