Modernity and Bourgeois Life
Page 51
The relative ease with which Jews were accepted into English life, even in the face of persisting anti-Semitic feeling, combined with other features of society there to give a distinctively modern cast to Jewish existence. One reason for this was that the informal, voluntary nature of Jewish communities, in contrast to the official character these retained elsewhere, rendered internal discipline much weaker. As a recent historian notes, the general level of Jewish religious observance in England by the mid eighteenth century was “markedly lower” than elsewhere; dietary laws were widely ignored, and the limited number of businessmen who attended synagogue on Saturdays were said to rush off afterwards to do business at the stock exchange or in coffee houses. Such growing secularism was evident elsewhere to be sure (Jonathan Israel views it as part of the general decline in Jewish life during the Enlightenment), but two things distinguished it: first, the greater social acceptance of Jews, especially in upper-class circles, both in London and in country life; and second the circumstance that these developments occurred in general without benefit of the movement of Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, through which figures such as Moses Mendelssohn sought to provide a coherent intellectual basis for moving Judaism closer to modern society and culture. The greater ease with which English Jews made their way into the society around them, and the less formal character of their own communities, meant that they “felt no need” for such explicit justifications. This pragmatism made them resemble the British non-Jews in whose midst they lived. The Haskalah drew the attention of some English Jews all the same, and it seems significant that once it did those influenced by it attacked traditional Jewish practice with particular boldness. Isaac Disraeli (father of the future prime minister) dubbed old-style rabbis “dictators of the human intellect.”16
Similar features continued to characterize English Jewish life in the nineteenth century. The modernized religious practice of Reform Judaism never achieved the importance in Britain it did elsewhere (particularly in Germany); such congregations did appear, offering shorter, more restrained, and more accessible services. But those in Manchester and Bradford were founded by German immigrants, while the one in London (which arose out of a largely personal split inside the Sephardic synagogue) preserved features of the service abandoned by consistent advocates of Reform elsewhere, keeping Hebrew as the language of worship and retaining prayers for the return to Zion, and referring to Jews as “chosen.” The reason for this contrast, Todd Endelman suggests, was that English Jews felt “no compelling need to alter the public face of Judaism.” It may be that these retentions were in part encouraged by the devotion to ancient ritual and ceremony inside the established English Church, together with the impulse to return to tradition that fed the contemporary Oxford Movement, but a deeper ground was that English society, for all the reasons we have already stressed, made no clear demand that Jews refashion themselves in such ways. Full emancipation for Jews was resisted by some conservatives, but its enactment (the acceptance of Jews as MPs in 1858 marked the final stage) came without any demand that Jews prove their fitness by abandoning the features that distinguished them from others. As with the secularization of Jewish life evident a century earlier, Jews in the nineteenth century did not have to justify becoming more modern either to themselves or to others, because, like much else in England, to do so required a less explicit break with the past than elsewhere.17
The similarities and differences between this story and its French analogue are extremely instructive. By the mid nineteenth century Jewish life in France resembled its British counterpart in a number of ways, but its path to this condition was bumpier and more abrupt, and its later history much more difficult. In principle Old Regime Jews, like Protestants after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, were outsiders to France, enjoying no civil status; even their births were officially unrecognized since to record them was the province of the Church, which registered only infants who were baptized. But principle was seldom the last word in a regime ruled by privilege; in fact Jews had certain rights as members of communities, officially recognized by the king in return for fees and taxes. The nature of these rights differed from place to place. In Alsace and Lorraine, the largest region of French Jewish life before the end of the eighteenth century, Jews could not be citizens of towns, but their communities governed many aspects of existence for their members, led by rabbis and prominent lay figures. A few Jews in eastern French cities were well-off; most were modest pedlars and artisans. By contrast, the smaller number in both Avignon and in the region of Bordeaux, mostly Sephardi and considerably more prosperous, had citizen rights and duties on a nearly equal basis with Christians; when the Estates General was called in 1789 they participated in the elections for it (in contrast to their Ashkenazi cousins in Alsace and Lorraine). The few Jews who lived in Paris at this time had neither political rights in the city nor any organization of their own, remaining theoretically under the jurisdiction of the communities from which they had come to the capital. The law granting Jews citizenship in 1791 marked a greater change for these Parisians and for Jews in eastern France than for those in the south and west, but what tied it to political reforms all over Europe in the period was that it made all Jews citizens on the same basis, in accord with the general elimination of bodies intermediate between individuals and the state. In the case of Jews, however, a vestige of the old order returned in 1808, when Napoleon set up a Consistory charged with overseeing Jewish religious practice and assuring its compatibility with the duties of Jews as citizens. The Consistory’s local sections were responsible to the central one in Paris, and it was part of the system through which the government oversaw all religious life in the country. Until 1831, Jewish practice was distinct in that rabbis were paid by the congregations they served, not by the state, which bore the salaries of priests and ministers, but after this date rabbis received state salaries too. Jewish men could enroll in universities, become lawyers, and hold public office. Thus Jews were now at once full citizens and members of an officially recognized minority.18
This new political status would be one chief basis for the transformation of French Jewish life; the other was the freedom of movement that now allowed Jews to live anywhere in the country (a provision restricted in 1808 but restored after Napoleon’s fall), and that led to a rapid increase in the number who moved to the capital. In 1800 there were around 3,000 Jews in Paris; the number swelled to 8,000 in 1841, 25,000 in 1861, and over 40,000 by 1880; by then nearly a third of French Jews lived in Paris, at a time when the city contained less than 5 percent of the country’s population as a whole. This mushrooming reflected a search for opportunities both economic and cultural that Jews were more ready to seize than many others, and it was well under way before the transformation of the city’s economy brought by railroad building and urban reconstruction in the Second Empire. The Jewish influx was unusual in drawing its numbers from regions far from Paris even before the mid century, at a time when other immigration to the capital still came largely from the nearby regions that had long been its chief source. In addition, those who made the trip achieved greater upward mobility than did the Parisian population as a whole, so that by 1851 a smaller proportion of Jews belonged to the peuple than was true of the city as a whole, and a larger percentage were entering the liberal professions. Some faced discrimination to be sure, and opportunities in teaching suffered after the Falloux law (1851) gave Catholics more influence in education, but those affected in such ways could find other careers, in law or the press. Jewish success had more to do with the end of Old Regime restrictions on movement and on entry into careers than with economic or industrial change; the most eminent among wealthy businesspeople were not manufacturers but constituents of the Haute Banque such as the Rothschilds, Foulds, and Péreires, or merchants who served the state by provisioning armies. They provided the leaders of the Paris Consistory, alongside professionals and intellectuals such as Adolphe Crémieux, lawyer and later republican politician, who
came to Paris from Nîmes in 1830, and the philosopher Adolphe Franck, born in the region of Nancy and (like Durkheim later) destined for a rabbinical career before turning to a secular one. Some of these prominent Jews, like their English cousins, had close relations with important government figures. A parallel movement to the one they effected in Paris took place in eastern French cities such as Strasbourg and Mulhouse, to which rural Jewish families ready to distance themselves from traditional communal life, but either unable or unwilling to try their luck in the capital, migrated or sent their sons, and with similar success. Alfred Dreyfus’s family was one example, achieving eminence in the Mulhouse textile industry. But the Paris Jews, with their greater chance for national notability and their closeness to political power, became the dominant figures in nineteenth-century French Jewish life. This Jewish elite, as Michael Graetz writes, “in large measure stood for the modernity of an open Western society, with its opportunities for upward mobility and for economic and social integration.”19
Not all French Jews were able to profit from these openings, however, and relations between the favored ones in Paris and their co-religionists elsewhere were sometimes strained. Facing both greater prejudice and more widespread poverty, some in the provinces complained that the Parisians failed to use their resources to come to their aid. This was not wholly true, since Parisians did set up initiatives to provide education and charity for their poorer co-religionists, especially in Alsace, but the results were limited, and certain cases, for instance involving provincial Jews accused of crimes, became flash points for tensions between the two groups. If the efforts the Parisians put forth for their Jewish fellow-citizens remained modest, however, some of them reached out more energetically on behalf of Jews at a greater distance, seeing the issue of Jewish well-being in broad global terms. In 1840 they participated actively in the defense of Jews in Damascus accused of killing a Christian in order to use his blood in the Passover ritual (the “blood libel” by then had a long history, dating from the Middle Ages). In 1860 they formed the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an international organization through which French and British Jews sought to aid their counterparts elsewhere (Germans did not participate, for reasons to which we will come in a moment).20
Secure in their position as citizens, and accepted as such by many around them (despite the persistence, as elsewhere, of anti-Semitic feelings and ideas), Jews in Paris and other cities became at once French and Jewish, “assimilated,” as Phyllis Cohen Albert notes, in the sense of living publicly like those around them, but without seeking to efface the marks of their origin. They “adopted the French language, norms and values, and merged them with their own traditions. They did not rush to disappear into the general French society, or to divest themselves of their own associations.” Becoming French was a spontaneous process (sometimes dubbed “acculturation” as opposed to assimilation) that seemingly involved little tension; as the influential philosopher Léon Brunschwig remarked: “My father was a rabbi and I am an assimilated professor, but I am not an assimlator at all; I never made the decision to be a Frenchman. I became one all alone and quite naturally.” Such experiences give the lie to the myth that the country’s Jacobin traditions required that Jewish citizens efface any marks that distinguished them outwardly from others, a notion fed by some rabbis and concerned laypeople who feared the decline of religious observance among people such as Brunschwig and sought to counter it.21
But this sense that French Jews could move easily between their two identities, combining or separating them in accord with different situations, was sorely challenged by the anti-Semitic agitation of the fin-de-siècle and the Dreyfus Affair that made it so prominent in public life. About the Affair itself we do not need to say much, but we should remember that what made it bulk so large in both French and Jewish history was less the well of anti-Semitic feeling on which Dreyfus’s enemies drew (since it had never dried up) than the recognition by conservative enemies of the Third Republic that it could serve their aim of trying to discredit the regime. What set the stage for the Affair was first the visible improvement in the status and position of Jews since the early part of the century, and second that France was (as discussed in Chapter 6) the only country whose politics revolved around a public debate between what Maurice Agulhon calls competing “legitimacies,” warring conceptions of how the nation should constitute itself. Anti-Jewish rhetoric was a vehicle for associating the republic with rootless cosmopolitanism, disloyalty to French traditions, and a litany of anti-modernist complaints that included excess individualism, rationalism, materialism, and immorality. Anti-Semitism was part of the search for symbols around which to rally political support, but it was real Jews who bore the brunt of its feverish and strident claims, making the comfortable harmony between being French and being Jewish felt by figures such as Crémieux or Brunschwig far more difficult to sustain.
One result was that anxious French Jews now began to aim for a more thoroughgoing kind of assimilation. A revealing dimension of the change was linguistic: until the 1890s the two terms juif and israélite were largely interchangeable. The first was the more common, although both were already used in the eighteenth century; after emancipation the prominent Alsatian manufacturer and political figure Berr Isaac Berr sought to give greater relief to the second because it had fewer links to traditional anti-Semitism. He used both words about himself, however, as did many other nineteenth-century Jews, employing them to refer to themselves as at once a religious, ethnic and cultural group; by contrast anti-Semitic literature strongly favored juif, finding it particularly suited to the biological understanding of racial differences that spread from the 1880s. In response, Jews began to call themselves israélites, hoping that the term would convey a mere difference in origin compatible with being like their fellow-citizens in other respects. The first to dwell on the distinction was Bernard Lazare, a writer, literary critic and philosophical anarchist who was one of the first public defenders of Dreyfus. His family (enriched by his father’s innovative use of the Jacquard weaving loom in Toulouse) was assimilated much in the manner Phyllis Cohen Alpert describes, living like those around them while continuing to celebrate the principal Jewish holidays. But Lazare, troubled by the upsurge in anti-Jewish rhetoric promoted by anti-Republican nationalists (Édouard Drumont published his foetid polemic La France juive in 1886), called attention to the change by writing a history of anti-Semitism soon after he moved to Paris. Published just at the time of Dreyfus’s first trial in 1894, the book encouraged members of the Captain’s family to turn to him for aid, and he devoted much energy and time to the Dreyfusard cause.
Lazare was also moved to insist on the term israélite by his distaste for the East European Jews then arriving in large numbers in Paris (some fleeing pogroms), whose traditional ghetto dress and behavior contrasted with people like himself who had absorbed the country’s values and culture. The newcomers, he thought, not unjustifiably drew the label juifs to themselves. Echoing anti-Semitic ideas long advanced in radical anti-capitalist circles (and voiced decades earlier by Marx), Lazare saw the new arrivals as partly responsible for anti-Jewish feeling because of their attachment to peddling, pawnbroking, and shady dealing. In response he advocated a more thoroughgoing assimilation, now necessary in order to make clear that people like him were not juifs but israélites. As the power of the anti-Semitism brought to the light by the Affair became more evident, however, Lazare began to see such changes as insufficient or bootless; growing pessimistic about the future of Jewish life in Europe he turned to Zionism, working for a time with Theodore Herzl before deciding that his own visionary anarchism was incompatible with Herzl’s “bourgeois” liberalism. His campaign to alter the language French Jews used about themselves seems to have generated little following at the time, perhaps because it called attention to the very vulnerability of Jews in the fin-de-siècle he sought to counter, but many followed his recommendation later, once the Dreyfus agitation had passed.22