Jews in France

In the first English-language edition of a general, synthetic history of French Jewry from antiquity to the present, Esther Benbassa tells the intriguing tale of the social, economic, and cultural vicissitudes of a people in diaspora. With verve and insight, she reveals the diversity of Jewish life throughout France's regions, while showing how Jewish identity has constantly redefined itself in a country known for both the Rights of Man and the Dreyfus affair. Beginning with late antiquity, she charts the migrations of Jews into France and traces their fortunes through the making of the French kingdom, the Revolution, the rise of modern anti-Semitism, and the current renewal of interest in Judaism.As early as the fourth century, Jews inhabited Roman Gaul, and by the reign of Charlemagne, some figured prominently at court. The perception of Jewish influence on France's rulers contributed to a clash between church and monarchy that would culminate in the mass expulsion of Jews in the fourteenth century. The book examines the re-entry of small numbers of Jews as New Christians in the Southwest and the emergence of a new French Jewish population with the country's acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine.The saga of modernity comes next, beginning with the French Revolution and the granting of citizenship to French Jews. Detailed yet quick-paced discussions of key episodes follow: progress made toward social and political integration, the shifting social and demographic profiles of Jews in the 1800s, Jewish participation in the economy and the arts, the mass migrations from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, the Dreyfus affair, persecution under Vichy, the Holocaust, and the postwar arrival of North African Jews.Reinterpreting such themes as assimilation, acculturation, and pluralism, Benbassa finds that French Jews have integrated successfully without always risking loss of identity. Published to great acclaim in France, this book brings important current issues to bear on the study of Judaism in general, while making for dramatic reading.

By drawing on an array of primary sources and archive material, this text offers the first major appraisal of French responses to the Jewish refugee crisis after 1933. It explores French policies and attitudes from three interrelated vantage points.

"Rarely have I encountered a collection of essays that coheres so well around an overarching theme. This will be an important resource."--Hillel J. Kieval, author of "Languages of Community"

The Final Solution clarifies the key questions surrounding the attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Drawing on important new research, these authoritative essays focus on the preconditions and antecedents for the 'Final Solution' and examine the immediate origins of the genocidal decision.Contributors also examine the responses of peoples and governments in Germany, occupied Europe, the USA and among Jews worldwide. The controversial conversions of this study challenge many of our accepted ideas about the period.

This volume about the Vichy years and the German Occupation of 1940-1944 uses as a starting point Robert Paxton's Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, which provided a meticulously documented portrait of a nation consumed by indecision and self-doubt. The essays by the foremost scholars in the field place the Occupation of France in the context of other episodes in French history, and in the context of other occupied countries during World War II. They consider communities of belief during the Vichy years, examine how the experience of war and occupation shaped the everyday lives of people, and look at the ongoing reconstruction of the memory of the Vichy years.This collection of essays takes up where Paxton left off and shows how the last twenty-five years of scholarship have made problematic the tidy categories used to describe behaviour during the Vichy years. The authors point to new directions in the field and address both the myth of the 'nation of forty million resisters' that Paxton demolished and the creation of a new myth -- that the French have failed or refused to confront their past.

The essays in this collection, drawn from a Hofstra University bicentennial conference on the French Revolution, seek to come to terms, often from conflicting points of view, with the complex relationship between events and their representations. The question "How did the lived experience that eventually became known as the French Revolution come to be organized?" provides a common thread for the collection. Individual chapters examine the Revolution from the vantage points of theology and philosophy, theater and literature, as well as politics and history.

Very little attention has been focused on French attitudes toward Jews between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Dreyfus Affair. This book fills that vacuum. Antisemitism During the French Second Empire analyzes the development of antisemitism in French life from 1850 to 1870. Based on archival material and contemporary press and journals the author traces through World War II to the present the antecedents of prejudice that poisoned French life during the Dreyfus Affair.

A path-breaking study of the Jews in France from the time of the philosophies through the Revolution and up to Napoleon.Examines how Jews were thought of during this time, by both French writers and the Jews themselves.