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Chapter One

A Jacobin Regenerator.

Abbé Grégoire

Near the end of historian Yosef Yerushalmi's admirable study of Isaac Cardoso, the name of Abbé Henri Grégoire is mentioned for the first time. Yerushalmi remarks that to the author of the Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs, Cardoso's work was already a mere curiosity. As an uncompromising champion of Jewish emancipation under the guidance of a centralized Jacobin state, the abbé was quick to "sound the death knell of the Jewish society that Cardoso had known and celebrated." Indeed, it is hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between Cardoso and Grégoire. Cardoso represented the Jewish halacha tradition and its insistence that Jews and non-Jews live separately; rejecting Christianity and fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, he chose to live among fellow Jews in the ghetto of Verona. Grégoire, on the other hand, openly sought to "regenerate" Jews by converting them to Catholicism of a distinctly Jansenist stripe. For Cardoso, the survival of Jewish tradition seemed to require an ingrown, close-knit community. For Grégoire, Jewish emancipation and access to citizenship could come about only if the Jewish community ceased to live apart from the rest of society. This debate would prove crucial, and its terms have remained all but constant ever since. Obviously it raised the more general issue of whether particularist commitments have any place in a modernized society based primarily on universalist, rationalist, and, ultimately, secularist principles. What place might Jews as such occupy in a society that henceforth recognized only "citizens" and vigorously combated all forms of particularist organization, from the guild to the region--a society that sought to confine the expression of religious beliefs to the private sphere? Between Cardoso's radical solution, which questioned the very possibility of an "open society," and universalist assimilation pure and simple, was there room in modern France, with its strong and venerable centralist traditions, for an alternative path to modernization?

Rejecting the Cardoso solution, many French Jews from the end of the eighteenth century to the present have enthusiastically embraced the universalist possibilities opened up by the French Revolution, largely thanks to the efforts of Abbé Grégoire. Faith in the Republic's power to emancipate has seldom flagged. In 1973, an organization whose orientation was fundamentally Zionist solemnly planted trees in a Paris square near the house in which Grégoire died. This odd homage to a man who was at once deeply Catholic and profoundly committed to the assimilation of French Jews was far from an isolated occurrence. In Lunéville, where the abbé delivered his first pro-Jewish sermons, the local Jewish community's admiration is still such that, after a statue of him was destroyed during World War II, members of the community contributed to a fund for replacing it, just as they had contributed to the construction of the original in 1859. In the dark years between the two world wars, when anti-Semitism was on the rise, politician Louis Darquier de Pellepoix delivered a long speech to the municipal council of Paris attacking Léon Blum and the Jews. Amid tumult and shouting, the eldest member of the council, Paul Fleurot, rose in rebuttal: he gravely invoked Grégoire's role in the emancipation of the Jews--an emancipation which in his view had long since been accomplished. A few years earlier, in April 1931, P. Grunebaum-Ballin, the president of the prefectoral council of the Seine and later an eminent member of the Conseil d'Etat, celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the abbé's death with a long lecture to the Cercle d'Etudes Juives and the Société des Etudes Juives. With emotion in his voice, he, too, stressed "Grégoire's constant solicitude for the regeneration of the children of Israel."

Not long before, on the rue Racine in Paris on May 25, 1926, Samuel Schwartzbard murdered Simon Petlyura, the man responsible for horrible pogroms against the Jews of the Ukraine shortly after World War I. This slaying provoked considerable debate around the world, especially among Jews. When Schwartzbard was tried two years later, his lawyer, Henry Torrès, ended a lengthy plea on behalf of the defendant with a reference to Abbé Grégoire, which he hoped would persuade the court to free the accused forthwith. Addressing the jurors, he said "It is not just the voice of Schwartzbard's attorney that you hear, it is also the voice of thousands upon thousands of victims [of anti-Semitic violence]. And besides those voices you also hear the voices of Abbé Grégoire, Mirabeau, Gambetta, and Victor Hugo." Clearly, invoking Grégoire's name had become something of a ritual for French Jews, who believed that he had played a crucial role in setting them free. Go back a few more years: in 1890, Mardochée Vidal-Naquet, president of the Consistoire Israélite of Marseilles, also expressed his view that Grégoire was "the first person to speak out in our behalf." Or take the case of Théodore Reinach, a historian, future deputy, and brother of Joseph and Salomon Reinach, all three of whom would later become active champions of Dreyfus and exemplars of Jewish assimilation. Théodore Reinach, a man with many degrees whose abundant talents won him appointment to any number of eminent positions, published a History of the Israelites from the Time of the Diaspora to the Present in 1885; within a short period of time, the book became a standard reference. Commenting on Grégoire's efforts, he noted that "intelligent people regarded the enthusiastic curé's proposed reforms as utopian, but before long those utopias became realities. Grégoire enjoyed the privilege of seeing his dreams fulfilled." In May 1831, when Grégoire died, Adolphe Crémieux, another living symbol of Jewish emancipation, spoke at his graveside about the gratitude felt by "regenerated" Jews, while pupils from Jewish schools, led by their teachers, solemnly filed past. Crémieux, remembered as the author of the Crémieux Decree, which extended French nationality to the Jews of Algeria, apostrophized the deceased: "Can you hear me, O priest of Jesus Christ? Jews throughout the world will mourn your passing." On another occasion he described Grégoire as "a great citizen, a simple priest who spoke out courageously in favor of emancipation for the Jews and toleration for their religion."

During Grégoire's lifetime, the chorus of Jewish praise was all but unanimous: while traveling through Amsterdam as a senator of the Empire, the abbé was welcomed by all three of the city's synagogues and heard his name included in the verses of a prayer of thanksgiving in Hebrew. He was received just as respectfully in Göttingen, Germany. A short while earlier, on January 23, 1790, the Jews of Bayonne and Bordeaux sent a delegation to thank the celebrated priest and "pay him a deserved tribute of praise and gratitude for the wondrous boons that your efforts have secured for our less fortunate brethren." Furthermore, as Grégoire himself noted in his Mémoires: "All the synagogues of France prayed publicly for me and voted to thank me." What uncommon action was it that won for Grégoire the unstinting gratitude of French Jews?

In 1785, the Société Royale des Sciences et des Arts of Metz announced the results of an essay contest on "the most useful and least cumbersome type of wine press" and proclaimed that the topic for 1786 would be how "to ensure the livelihood of bastards and make them more useful to the state." The subject for 1787, however, was rather different in nature. The essayists were asked to respond to the question whether "there are ways to make the Jews of France happier and more useful." Nine contestants responded to this challenge, including Grégoire, who in 1788 was chosen as one of five finalists. Meanwhile, some of the more outrageous contributions were eliminated. The Benedictine monk Chais, for example, had suggested that, "since the Jews are birds of prey, tey must be not killed but tamed by having their beaks and claws snipped." And d'Haillecourt, a procureur in the Parlement of Metz, argued that the most effective way of dealing with them was simply to deport them all to Guyana. On August 25, 1788, the long-awaited result was announced by a jury that included Pierre-Louis Roederer, later to win fame as a patriote member of the Constituent Assembly and senator under Napoleon. Three winners were proclaimed: a lawyer from Nancy by the name of Thiery; Zalkind Hourwitz, who described himself as a "Polish Jew"; and Abbé Grégoire. Grégoire, who had delivered his first sermon in favor of Jewish emancipation in 1785, when the first new authorized synagogue was being built in Lorraine, courageously took up the defense of the Jews at a time when they were totally ostracized and exposed to repeated humiliations, to say nothing of being burdened with special taxes, which left them destitute and subject to draconian regulations that limited their movements, confined them to cramped ghettos, prevented them from buying land or becoming farmers, kept them out of most professions, and imposed dress restrictions that set them apart from Christian society. For Grégoire, in his celebrated Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs , which marked a decisive turning point in the history of Jewish emancipation, the solution was clear: with the Age of Enlightenment the time had come to "regenerate" the Jews so that they, too, could become citizens. As a faithful adept of natural-rights philosophy, he was determined to rescue the Jews from vices forced upon them by a Christian society that had lost touch with its original principles. Repudiating the deep-seated anti-Semitism of men like Voltaire and Holbach, Grégoire followed Montesquieu in blaming the climate and social conditions for the real depravity into which, as he saw it, the Jews had fallen. In order to regenerate this depraved people, Grégoire believed, it was enough to bring them Enlightenment and Reason. The need was urgent, moreover, because the abbé claimed to know from personal experience in his native Lorraine that the Jews there had fallen very low indeed.

His description of the Jewish people, to which he wholeheartedly subscribed, was apocalyptic to say the least: "ardent to multiply," Jews "pullulate" in "sad hovels from which foul odors perpetually emanate, and which are apt to spread and even cause epidemics.... Would anyone believe that in Metz the synagogue filed papers to bring legal action against several Jews guilty of the abominable crime of wishing to cleanse themselves? Despite the great `pride' they maintain in their `debasement,' their `moral depravity' is total. In short, they have rarely been able to rise to the same level of human dignity as their fellows." Grégoire, soon to become known as an ardent defender of the Jews, nevertheless held that they were "parasitic plants that eat away at the substance of the tree to which they attach themselves." Their usurious ways had reduced "many Christians to begging."

Such was Grégoire's understanding of the issues. His problem was how to bring the precious benefits of Enlightenment to this debased people. To begin with, he recommended "eliminating the argot, the Tudesco-Hebraic-Rabbinical jargon used by German Jews, which is intelligible to no one but themselves and useful only for compounding ignorance or masking dishonesty." Next, he suggested exposing "the myths of the Talmud," that "sewer into which the wildest fantasies of the human mind have been funneled," and eradicating the Jews' "burlesque" religious rituals and traditions, which to him were mere "trifles." He persisted in this judgment of the Jews as late as 1806, when he argued that "their encyclopedia is the Talmud ... a great work [which] contains flecks of gold scattered throughout a great deal of muck." Berr Isaac Berr a syndic of the Jews of Lorraine and a proponent of emancipation who arranged for the Jews of Nancy to take the civic oath, was nevertheless quick to reject this idea. In a letter to Grégoire, he wrote: "With a stroke of the pen you condemn some sixty volumes containing 3,047 folio pages written by men the last of whom lived roughly four hundred years after Jesus Christ." To Grégoire's charge that the Jews "shrivel their souls with stupid ideas that weigh down their memory," Berr replied: "This work truly is an encyclopedia, which is filled with enlightened ideas and rare and precious principles."

True to the logic of his Jacobin beliefs, Grégoire demurred. In order to put an end to the Jews' misguided ways and make them at last happy and useful citizens, he was prepared to use the most expeditious means available. Like later Jacobins impatient of particularism in all its forms and ready to apply extreme pressure to eradicate communities based on age-old traditions and values, Abbé Grégoire urged that the Jews be "melded into the mass of the nation" in order to bring about a true "dissolution of [their] communities." In order to "bind them to the state" all the more effectively, he proposed "limiting the number of Jews who may live in each village or town in proportion to its size." The next step was to reshape people's minds. In keeping with the precepts of the philosophes , Grégoire argued that the best way to "regenerate" the Jews was through the ineluctable effects of education: "Let us take hold of the generation that has just been born and is now hastening toward puberty" and channel it into state schools. If these children were treated with kindness ( affabilité ), they would, "whether they like it or not, absorb sound ideas that will act as an antidote to the absurdities with which their families fill their minds." The best way to overcome "prejudice" and consolidate the national identity was to instill civic spirit through the teaching of French: this would ensure the regeneration of "savage" France. Grégoire would later make this theme familiar through his well-known "Report on the Need for, and Means of, Abolishing Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language." The logic remained the same: Yiddish was just one of the many patois that must be condemned to the guillotine in order to pave the way for the birth of the new man, educated by the Enlightenment and unmoved by "prejudice" or "superstition." Hostile to particularism in all its forms, Grégoire, a consistent Montagnard, was unremitting in his search for ways to unify the nation.

A century later, the anti-Semitic journalist and politician Edouard Drumont noted the vehemence of Grégoire's criticism of the Jews in his France juive and then added this comment: "As for the ideas of a man who says, `Here is the plague, I insist that the entire country be inoculated with it,' I confess that they surpass my understanding." With only slight exaggeration, one might almost say that the diagnoses offered by Abbé Grégoire, the emancipator, and Edouard Drumont, the indefatigable anti-Semite, were virtually identical: they differed only as to their proposed remedies. Grégoire hoped to regenerate the Jews so as to reveal the humanity within them, whereas Drumont wished merely to liquidate them physically or else expel them from French society, which in his view was fundamentally Christian. In reality, Grégoire hoped that by appealing to Reason he might turn the Jews into Catholics, just like other Frenchmen, whereas Drumont rejected the idea that conversion was even possible. Drumont failed to understand that Abbé Grégoire remained a man of the Enlightenment who believed in human nature. He did not know that Grégoire, who was linked to the Jansenist tendency in Catholicism and also influenced by the millenarian doctrines of his time, was interested in the Old Testament. As a "republican Christian," he looked forward to the conversion of the Jews as proof that a regenerated Church could be reconciled with the Republic. With Enlightenment ideas, he hoped that it might be possible to persuade Jews to throw in their lot with republican Christians so that they would not have to be banished from the sort of organic society that conservatives of every stripe, from Louis de Bonald to Drumont, imagined. "Granting complete freedom to the Jews," he argued, "will mark a major step toward their reform, regeneration, and I daresay conversion." In a later work, the Histoire des sectes religieuses , he added: "The large-scale conversion of Jews to Protestantism and Catholicism is one of the most remarkable facts about the nineteenth century. A start has been made.... Let us atone for the crimes of our ancestors by redoubling our kindness toward the children of Israel, and, with our prayers, our wishes, and our love, let us hasten the moment when, joined together under the banner of the cross, they [the Jews] will worship together with us at the foot of the same altar." Their conversion was peculiarly compatible with the revolutionary ideal: Grégoire employed "all his moral authority in bolstering the institutions of Christendom, which must live in symbiosis with the revolutionary ideal." The man who assumed leadership of the Constitutional Church was thus by all appearances a Jacobin priest eager to use every available means to persuade the Jews to embrace a Christianity which had itself been "regenerated."

Courageously confronting the hostility both of the Catholic hierarchy, which accused him of transforming his diocese into a "little synagogue," and of revolutionaries such as Camille Desmoulins, who were no less vitriolic, Grégoire, the " ami des Noirs ," or "friend of the Blacks," who opposed slavery and racism in all their forms, spoke out on several occasions in revolutionary assemblies in favor of citizenship for the Jews. Thanks to his efforts, a delegation of Alsatian Jews was received by the Assembly on October 14, 1789, and Berr Isaac Berr, the uncontested leader of the group, for the first time took the floor "on behalf of the unhappy descendants of the oldest of all peoples." In December 1789, the Assembly debated the issue of whether non-Catholics could be elected to municipal office. On that occasion, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, who shared Grégoire's views, uttered his famous remark: "We must deny everything to the Jews as Nation, in the sense of a constituted body, and grant them everything as individuals." Despite the support of Robespierre, nothing was done, because opposition in the Assembly remained too strong, and it was not until many subsequent debates had passed that a decree was issued on September 27, 1791, which finally granted emancipation as a logical consequence of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. At a time when many Jews were already present in the ranks of the National Guard in Paris and the revolutionary armies, they were at last granted the right to take the civic oath along with other Frenchmen.

In fact, this forced the revolutionaries to confront a crucial issue: where to draw the dividing line between the public and private spheres. Could Jews enter the public sphere without converting? Could they, in private, simply be French citizens of the Jewish faith? Could they vote (and, within a short time, run) in elections while maintaining a clear allegiance to the Jewish synagogue? In France, a country with a strong state equipped with a powerful bureaucracy and clearly delineated frontiers, the boundary between public and private was defined by three things: the right to vote, access to civil service positions and thus to the machinery of government, and the degree of compatibility between the preservation of communal structures and acceptance of a citizenship that was inevitably based on a more universalist definition. In this specific state context, the meaning of citizenship was multidimensional, and along each axis it could vary from the particular, communal, or local to something more general. In terms of a "sense of belonging," this meaning now shifted from the local and communal toward the broader society. The public-private axis was defined by two different poles: the "civic," which emphasized the nation and its glory, a powerful force in the revolutionary period, and the "civil," which was characterized by a withdrawal into the private realm, in this instance a particular religious community.

As the state acquired even greater power during the revolutionary period, several questions arose. Were the emancipation and "regeneration" of the Jews total and complete? Was their admission into public life without restriction? Did it imply the disappearance of any sense of "civil" commitment to their community? These soon became burning issues as the various participants in the debate were obliged to decide whether or not Jews should be allowed to vote along with other citizens, and whether or not they should be permitted to run for office. For Abbé Grégoire, the solution was simple: the Jews should "be melded, as it were, into the national mass and made citizens throughout the country." In his celebrated Essai , the abbé implied that, once the Jews were "regenerated," they should be counted as active citizens identical in every respect to other French citizens. And he was not the only person to take this view: speaking on behalf of his fellow Protestants, Jean-Paul Rabaut-Saint-Etienne, a pastor and deputy from Nîmes, also insisted on equal rights for the Jews: "I am asking that this be done for this Asiatic people [such was his characterization of the Jews] uprooted from their native soil and for almost eighteen centuries banished and persecuted and forced to wander, who would, if incorporated with us by virtue of our laws, adopt our customs and mores." Not everyone was prepared to move so quickly, however. In Bordeaux, when an assembly was convoked to choose deputies for the Estates General, the rules already declared the Jews to be a "constitutive element of the state." In fact, the Jews of that great port city were already highly assimilated and integrated into the local commercial and financial bourgeoisie, which was deeply involved in trade with England, the Netherlands, and colonies such as Martinique and Santo Domingo. As such, they had for centuries enjoyed certain privileges tantamount to provisional citizenship. They now chose four delegates to represent them, one of whom, David Gradis, a member of the city's leading Jewish family, was almost elected to the Estates General. By contrast, in Bayonne, "the Portuguese nation" merely participated in the drafting of cahiers de doléances , or lists of grievances to be presented to the king, but played no part in electing deputies to the Estates General. The same was true of other Jewish communities in eastern France. Thus, at this stage of the revolutionary process, Jews seldom enjoyed the right to vote. By a vote of 408 to 403, that right was again denied them on December 24, 1789, when the Constituent Assembly decided not to grant the right to vote in municipal elections to non-Catholics. The Jews of Bordeaux were thereby stripped of one of their former privileges. But on January 24, 1790, the Assembly finally granted Jews of Portuguese, Spanish, and Avignonnais extraction the rights of active citizens. It was not until September 27, 1791, of course, that all Jews became citizens. At that time it was further stipulated that once they had taken the civic oath they were to be granted the right to vote and to run for office. Between December 1791 and April 1792, many Jews in cities such as Paris, Nancy, and Metz took the oath en masse in public ceremonies.

Having achieved this all-important right of access to the public sphere, Jews still needed genuine entrée to the civil service if they wished to exercise the sovereign power of the state. Article Six of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen explicitly stated that "the law is the expression of the general will.... All citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally entitled to all public dignities, places, and employments according to their capacities and without distinction other than that of their virtues and talents." Accordingly, meritocratic recruitment for government posts should not have been an issue. On this crucial point, Abbé Grégoire's response at first glance seems quite clear: because "the Jews are children of the state," there could be no question but that the doors of lycées and universities must be opened to them. As one commentator has noted, "As early as 1789, Grégoire championed the regeneration of the Jews through study.... Obviously the Jewish population did not turn a deaf ear to his proposals, and during the revolutionary period Jewish prejudices against secular education in the French language waned in the east as well as in the south, where Jews prided themselves on being more civilized." "Let us make them more like us," Grégoire urged, "let us teach them our customs, let us encourage them to develop their talents and virtues, let us bind them to the state by according them hope of public consideration and the right to hold any office in the various classes of society.... Of course we do not propose allowing Jews to be prosecutors. The reason for this will be clear. But in admitting them to the bar as lawyers, might we not exempt them from the oath of Catholicism?" Not only were Jews to be offered admission to state schools and universities, they were also to be granted access to most of the positions from which they had once been barred. Nevertheless, what the abbé believed would be "clear" to any astute reader of his text was not just that Jews should still be denied access to the prestigious post of prosecutor but that they should also be barred from any of the corps d'état , or central departments of the governmental apparatus, that enjoyed authority of any kind. For Grégoire, one suspects, it was utterly unthinkable that even a converted Jew should aspire to become a high functionary, much less a minister of government, in a society on the road to Enlightenment but still fundamentally committed to Catholicism. His argument was clearly stated, moreover, and largely in tune with the liberal economic theories that would soon hold sway: in order to encourage the Jews to convert, he said, "entice them, lure them with favor, consideration, and self-interest." Here at last we encounter the key word "interest": it was in the Jews' own interest to convert, in the hope of perhaps eventually gaining access to the highest government posts. For Heine, writing at a later date, conversion would be "the price of access to European culture."

Thiery, the lawyer who shared the Metz academy prize with Grégoire, spoke even more plainly on the matter. The Jews, he wrote, "cannot lay claim to dignities and distinctions. Not that the requisite genius, courage, and qualities are not found in all estates. And sooner or later, education, and the new character that it may bestow upon the Jews, may make them capable of such things. But how can they rule over us while professing principles and sentiments that, though foreign to us, are nevertheless an integral part of their law and therefore impossible for them to give up? How can they fill the impressive posts in which our religion displays its grandeur and majesty? How could they simultaneously perform the rites and ceremonies that their religion prescribes? And if such a mixture were possible, would it not be reprehensible? Must we not first and foremost preserve the pre-eminence and power that Christianity now enjoys?" The "impressive posts" of which Thiery speaks are no doubt the same ones that Grégoire had in mind in rejecting the notion that they might be awarded to Jews. By contrast, W. C. Dohm, who at the behest of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn wrote an important work "on the political reform of the Jews" that was soon translated into French and cited by both Mirabeau and Grégoire, asked whether "our governments cannot admit Jews to public employments at once. Indeed, if they are to enjoy all the rights of the citizen, it would seem that they cannot be barred from aspiring to the glory of serving the state and that, if their applications are supported by the requisite abilities, they must be granted such posts." Clearly, Dohm, whose solution fairly closely reflected Mendelssohn's thinking, was far more favorable to the idea of awarding public posts to Jews than was either Grégoire or Thiery. Yet the issue was so important that, despite his generous intentions, Dohm nevertheless concludes, "In most cases it will be more advantageous to the state if the Jew works not in the chancellery but in a workshop or behind a plow." On this point and others that we will examine later, Mirabeau, who took his inspiration fairly directly from Dohm's work, proved to be far more liberal and open-minded. He stated that the Jews "have shown themselves to advantage in public affairs." And following Mirabeau's lead, the Courrier de Provence asked a simple question and answered it: "Do they [the Jews] obey all the laws of the State? [Then] one cannot refuse to grant them all national rights." Despite such favorable pronouncements, French Jews who wished to go into government service would for many years to come be obliged to convert. It was not until the Second Empire and, to an even greater extent, the Third Republic that this obligation was finally lifted, thereby allowing Jews full exercise of both "civil" and "civic" rights.

We come now to the third of the conditions defining the boundary between public and private mentioned above: namely, the degree to which it was acceptable to maintain ties to a community as opposed to allegiance to the nation taken in its most universalistic sense. Grégoire, both in his Lunéville sermons and in revolutionary, debates, vigorously defended the notion that it was possible for the Jews to regenerate themselves and thereby gain access at last to Enlightenment. He did not shrink, however, from the idea of using coercive means if necessary: the "authority of the state" could be employed to "meld" the Jews into the "national mass," to break down communal bonds by "isolating" them as individuals, and to prevent the use of a foreign language. To his way of thinking, "Once the Jew becomes a member of the nation, loyal to the state, ... his esprit de corps will be seen to diminish." It is essential, he added, to "isolate [the Jews], to prevent insofar as possible all communication between them." In his "motion in favor of the Jews" of 1789, Grégoire clung to the same centralist notion of government: "The Jews will share in all the benefits accruing to citizens. Hence there should be no syndic to manage the civil affairs of Jewish communities; there should be no Jewish communities; they should be members of our communities.... One great advantage [of this arrangement] is that it then becomes possible to apply the same principles of reform to the nation as a whole, because the nation now has but one character. Let us devise a detailed plan that will make use of all available means."

Grégoire thus revealed himself as a committed Jacobin unwilling to envision a republic tolerant of particularisms of the sort that Mirabeau, in his own essay Sur la réforme politique des Juifs , demonstrated his willingness to accept. Among those who debated the destiny of the Jews during the French Revolution, Mirabeau's position was unique. On the one hand were universalistic revolutionaries prepared to transform Jews into human beings and citizens; on the other were Catholic counterrevolutionaries hostile to what they regarded as a "deicide" people and determined either to confine them to ghettos or to expel them from France altogether. Nearly everyone on both sides of the issue rejected the idea of allowing the Jews to maintain their own communal institutions within a society that welcomed them as active citizens. During the debate over the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Mirabeau was one of the few who spoke out clearly against an official religion of any sort. In opposition to both the counterrevolutionaries and Abbé Grégoire, he was never anything less than respectful toward the distinctive rites of Judaism. He denounced criticism of the Jewish religion as "slander," and in regard to its characteristic rituals asked, "What religion does not have them? What kind of reason is that to deny human beings the rights of humanity?" Once again he adopted a point of view similar to that which would later be championed by the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, who maintained that it was "in order to be better citizens that we are asking to keep our synagogue, our rabbis, and our syndics." By contrast, the Jews of Bordeaux opposed their coreligionists from Alsace, who claimed "to be ruled by their own laws and to constitute a class of citizens separate from all others." This, the Bordeaux Jews alleged, was the product of "ill-considered religious zeal." As for themselves, having already largely rejected the Talmud and redefined Judaism in terms of eighteenth-century rationalism, they looked forward to the day when there would be no more Jewish "nation" and a Jew would therefore be indistinguishable from any other Frenchman. Indeed, the Bordeaux Jews already played an important role in society and controlled substantial businesses. Thus they subscribed to an emancipation of the "atomizing" sort envisioned by Abbé Grégoire, whereas their coreligionists from Alsace, whose views they utterly rejected, found it easier to embrace the ideas of Mirabeau, a liberal hostile to the purely rationalistic tendencies of Jacobinism. The Jews of Paris took an even more uncompromising procentralist Jacobin stance, for they stated in advance their willingness to submit "to a uniform plan of law enforcement and jurisprudence."

Mirabeau followed Dohm's argument every step of the way, and Dohm had of course written his text at the behest of Moses Mendelssohn, the celebrated German Jewish philosopher and adept of the Enlightenment, in response to an appeal from a group of Alsatian Jews, including Cerf Berr. Although both Dohm and Mirabeau claimed to take their inspiration from Mendelssohn, they did not entirely share the philosopher's assimilationist views. In his book Jerusalem , which persuaded many Jews to embark upon a process of emancipation that implied a high degree of assimilation, Mendelssohn did, however, call upon his readers "not to create harmony where diversity is obviously the plan and ultimate goal of Providence." And he did call upon Jews in particular to "compromise with the customs and constitution of the country in which you find yourselves, but steadfastly cling to the religion of your fathers." Yet he argued that the Jewish faith was primarily a matter of law, reason, and ethics, and not necessarily linked to strong communal institutions, which he saw no reason to defend in a society that to his mind seemed imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment. For him, "the true and divine religion has no need of arms or fingers, it is pure spirit and pure heart." If it is true that Abbé Grégoire was using "regeneration" as a pretext when in reality he hoped to convert the Jews to a renewed Catholicism, and if the Jacobins, in their efforts to impose a single standard on all rational minds, hoped to subordinate all religions to a new civic spirit, Mendelssohn for his part did indeed hope to "regenerate" the synagogue as part of a newly enlightened society, but not at the expense of an independent Jewish spirit.

In his book On the Political Reform of the Jews , Dohm forthrightly insisted that "granting autonomy to the Jews will have no negative consequences." The government, he added, should "allow each of these small, particular societies to have its own esprit de corps and even to persist in its own prejudices so long as these do no harm, but it should strive to inspire in each of its members a greater degree of loyalty to the state. It will attain what should be its main goal when the titles of gentleman, peasant, scholar, artisan, Christian, and Jew are all subordinate to the title of citizen." Dohm, unlike Mendelssohn, many of whose views he shared, and also unlike Grégoire, therefore explicitly accepted the notion that the Jews might, for example, keep their own judges to settle matters of concern only to themselves: "These judges, like those of the higher courts to which the parties could appeal the decision of the Jewish judge, would of course base their judgment on no law other than that of the Jews."

What this shows is that another way was possible. Few people cared to take it, however, in an age wedded to belief in universalism, which measured progress according to a single standard. The alternative path to citizenship would have permitted greater respect for cultural and regional differences than Grégoire and the Jacobins were prepared to allow. In this respect they followed in the footsteps of the absolute monarchy: they persistently used state power in even the most minor matters in order to enforce a universalistic vision of society and a strictly rationalist conception of liberty. Had the revolutionary assemblies subscribed instead to Mirabeau's more liberal view, the many traditions and cultures that were an integral part of the history of French society might have been preserved in a more vital form. Yet such a possibility was scarcely compatible with centralizing tendencies that had originated centuries earlier, as France found its own distinctive path out of a particularly intense form of feudalism. The growth of the state, together with its extremely powerful influence on the social system as a whole, led inevitably to unification, while undermining, even in the early modern period, all attempts by groups within society to organize themselves. If the French state was a force for liberation and emancipation, it did little to encourage liberalism or democracy of the sort found in England and America, where a balance of powers was achieved through pluralism. Thus Mirabeau's strategy for political change had little chance of succeeding in opposition to the statist, centralist policies adopted by the Jacobins, which were in a sense better adapted to the functional realities that existed in France.

In light of this hostility to diversity, the Revolution can in some respects be described as what Arthur Herzberg calls a "totalitarian democracy." As far as the "regeneration" of the Jews was concerned, Herzberg has no doubt that "the Revolution was `totalitarian.' Almost all those who helped to emancipate the Jews, from Grégoire through Robespierre, had in mind some vision of what they ought to be made to become." Accordingly, some Jewish historians began to point out the cost of the emancipation process, which threatened to erase what was distinctively Jewish about Judaism along with all other forms of particularism. Some of these attacks were more vehement than others, but ultimately they succeeded in raising serious questions about the work of Abbé Grégoire and French Judaism generally, which, as Simon Dubnov has said, achieved total assimilation by dissolving the "Jewish nation." Dubnov deplores the fact that, as a consequence of this type of emancipation, "many Jews went into government service and the professions, but few took an interest in the fate of their people." By contrast, James Darmesteter applauds the fact that, "as of September 28, 1791, there was nothing more to be said about the history of the Jews in France. From then on there was only the history of French Judaism." For the celebrated professor of Orientalism, whose election to the Collège de France was in itself symbolic of the ultimate intellectual distinction that emancipated French Jews could achieve thanks to the efforts of Grégoire and Mirabeau, the French Revolution marked the end of "the material history of the Jewish people, because for the first time Jewish thought was in harmony rather than in conflict with the conscience of mankind."

Thus a debate arose between those who with growing vehemence rejected French-style emancipation, which they accused of destroying the Jews' sense of constituting a people, and those who maintained that, on the contrary, it marked a new "exodus from Egypt," which, though admittedly lacking a collective dimension, guaranteed every citizen the right to practice his or her religion in private. Looked at in this way, Jews were citizens with rights and duties identical to those of all other citizens. They differed from others only in claiming a distinctive religious identity. No longer did they constitute a "Jewish people" that somehow transcended the definition of citizenship. In the new French society, to be an emancipated Jew was simply to be an israélite --a French citizen of the Jewish faith. Such was the understanding of the vast majority of French Jews by the end of the eighteenth century. Most remained quite cool, for example, to Zionist ideas for promoting a rebirth of the Jewish people.

Yet few French Jews converted to Catholicism in the nineteenth century, as Abbé Grégoire had hoped they would. Few, in other words, chose "exit" as their option from economist Albert Hirschman's well-known trinity: exit, voice, and loyalty. To be sure, some did choose to pay what Heine called the "price of entry" into bourgeois society.

To mention one lesser-known instance of conversion whose political implications might not have pleased the Jacobin Grégoire, the renowned journalist Gaston Polonais converted on October 30, 1902, at the Church of Saint Thomas in a ceremony attended by François Coppée, Jules Lemaître (who played a leading role in various anti-Semitic movements), Arthur Meyer (a previous convert who shared Polonais's political allegiances), and Generals Gonze and Boisdeffre, known for their hostility to Captain Dreyfus. Father Domenech interrogated the convert:

"Gaston-Joseph, do you renounce Satan?"

"I do."

"Do you renounce Judaic perfidy and Hebraic superstition?"

"I do."

"Gaston-Joseph, do you wish to be baptized?"

"I do."

Whereupon the bells of Saint Thomas pealed for joy.

This account is especially noteworthy in that historians have turned up relatively few detailed descriptions of conversion ceremonies. Conversion was apparently rare. Attendance at services and frequency of marriage outside the faith are better indicators of the strength of Jewish religious commitment, then as now. Indeed, the religious commitment of all faiths has been affected not so much, as Grégoire had hoped, by conversion as by the secular education offered by republican public schools. In view of this, what basis might exist for a Jewish identity in a France whose guiding principles are universalism, secularism, and social mobility? In a France where traditional allegiances have diminished and people's goals and aspirations have become increasingly individualized? In a France with little tolerance for any form of particularism in a public sphere set aside exclusively for "citizens" defined in universalistic terms? If the efforts of the "regenerators" of 1789 have largely stripped the "Jewish nation" of legitimacy within the "Republic one and indivisible," and if the Jewish religion no longer seems capable of defining, by itself, a specific identity within contemporary France, has emancipation without conversion finally reduced Jewish consciousness to nothing more than "imaginary" identification with a sentimental version of Zionism? If so, the revolutionaries of 1789 would surely be pleased. Yet Grégoire himself would not be entirely satisfied, for he could not help deploring Catholicism's failure. Nor would nineteenth-century israélites such as Darmesteter and many others be pleased by the decline of the religious as such.

As enthusiasm for the regenerative ambitions of 1789 recedes into the past along with challenges to the legacy of the process of emancipation launched by the Revolution, we seem now to be moving into a new era. People tired of mere talk have begun to discover the reality of different cultures and traditions that somehow survived the tempests and enthusiasms of the past two centuries and in one way or another adapted to change while holding on to their essential core. It is this reality, even more than the broad revival of religious practice in a variety of forms, that justifies the claim that a Jewish identity persists in France and is flourishing even now. Where this will lead remains to be seen.

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Jewish Destinies; Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France

0809061015

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