The French Enlightenment and the Jews Book

When the French Revolution began in 1789, there were approximately 33,000 Jews living in France. 80 percent of them were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim. The other 20 percent were French-speaking Sephardim. Neither group yet enjoyed the privileges of citizenship but, based on political advances over the preceding two centuries, things were moving in the right direction. "By the 1780s," writes Arthur Hertzberg in The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism, "advanced thinkers had largely settled the idea that Jews belonged within European society, and the medieval premise, that they ought to be excluded was, at the very least, no longer self-evident." It would be easy to read 'advanced thinkers' and assume that enlightened thought was behind this sea-change, that a generation of philosophes, primarily men of the left, had used reason to combat old-fashioned anti-Jewish arguments rooted in Christian theology. That would be a mistake. As Hertzberg convincingly shows, the growing liberalization of policy towards the Jews during the 17th and 18th centuries was firmly rooted, first, in the interests of the state and, second, in the belief that the state could modernize the individual.

The story of the Sephardim, who at the time resided in the southwestern port cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne, lends credence to the idea that the Jews could be useful to the state and at the same time implement modernizing reforms within their own community. After emigrating from Spain and Portugal in the 16th century as Marranos, they slowly built a very organized, highly successful community that took advantage of economic opportunities related to the sea trade. The most successful members of this community extended their family networks throughout the new world and, through the facilitation of trade between France, West Africa, and the Americas, helped shape the mercantilist direction of the 18th century French economy and, thereby, enrich the royal treasury. In Bordeaux especially, they were supported by local elites because they didn't compete with local guilds and their trade increased demand for local products such as whiskey, gunpowder, knives, and cloth. The wealthiest Sephardic families also led the way when it came to integration into French society. By the 1740s the community in Bordeaux had dropped Ladino in favor of French and was employing lobbyists in Paris to advocate for its interests. Combined, both its economic power and relatively greater acculturation into French society reinforced the idea that Jews could confer economic advantage to governing elites and at least achieve a modicum of internal "enlightened" reforms within their own community.

For the Ashkenazim of eastern France, political advancement came far less easily and was ultimately, at least before the Revolution, far less successful. The story of origins, for the Ashkenazim, is important. Unlike their Sephardim cousins, they didn't come en masse to France voluntarily, or for economic opportunity. France came to them through its acquisition of the former German-ruled territory of Alsace. Customary laws of the time prevented France from expelling the already existing residents of a territory gained in battle and over the years the community, primarily centered in and around the city of Metz and in the hinterlands north of Strasbourg, grew rapidly. Because these Jews were excluded from ordinary economic pursuits'they even had to have express written consent from the King to buy property and build family homes'they primarily made their livelihoods through money-lending. The profession was not a lucrative one and the percentage of indigents in these communities was much higher, proportionally, than that of the Jewish communities in southwestern France. Though the Alsatian Jews did provide liquidity to French peasants, their more important function for the French state was trade, specifically the import of war materiels. The fact that they were bringing these goods in, often illegally, from the east made it even more important as it deprived French rivals, namely Austria and the German states, of their own production, whether that be weapons, draft animals, or foodstuffs. If this satisfied one aspect of what the French state hoped for from its Jewish communities, it didn't help with the second. Perhaps because there was less overall wealth, or perhaps because there was more westward migration from poorer parts of Europe, the Ashkenazi community had great difficulty making internal reforms. Modernization came much slower in this part of France.

You'll note from that summary of what each Jewish community looked like in the lead up to emancipation that there is quite a bit of detail. That's a strength of Hertzberg's history. But for the generalist reader, it's also a potential sink. The longest of the book's ten chapters is the seventh, entitled The Jewish Community. In it, Hertzberg goes to great length to document both the internal governance structures and most salient debates within each community. It's clear that he's at his very best when it comes to archival work, but it's equally clear that he could have done a better job balancing the discussion en route to advancing his overall argument. Conversely, the best chapters are those that focus on the state's mercantilist economics, or those that tend to the intellectual history of the era. In both, though, there remain pitfalls. The section on physiocratic economics is too small and ripe for more research (even half a century later.) And with regards to the intellectual history laid out, excepting Spinoza, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, the general reader is likely to find himself in the company of strangers. Here, though, I think it's important to recognize a more salient point than this hindrance might suggest on surface. Yes, there are a lot of names, many of them minor intellectual figures in the broad arc of history, but the fact that so many people were publishing so much in the way of ideas is in and of itself fascinating. It speaks to the intellectual fervor of the era that there are more pamphlets mentioned in this book than there are handed out at your average Jehovah's Witness rally. And the number of books, including those banned or censored, that shaped the intellectual climate of the day is impressive, even by the standards of our contemporary media-saturated environment. It's easy to appreciate any society where annual essay contests, such as the one held on the Jewish question by the city of Metz in 1787, carry so much weight when it comes to general public opinion.

The textual culture of 18th century France speaks to a middle class that was increasingly literate. Unfortunately increasingly literate didn't necessarily mean increasingly liberal, especially with regards to its opinions of the Jews. Anti-Semitism, both in thought and in action, was widespread and commonplace. Among the illiterate classes, the peasantry, it still took the old-fashioned form of a theological-based anti-Semitism, most classically expressed in the idea that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. For the middle classes, and many of the thought-leading philosophes, anti-Semitism wasn't something necessitated by the Jews of a millennia and a half earlier, but instead by the failure of those Jews' contemporary co-religionists to shed their ancient practices (especially Talmud study) and fully integrate into society. An interesting side note to this discussion, though, was the way in which a large number of commentators sympathetic to that anti-Semitic attitude began to recognize, from an early humanist perspective, that the Jews were as much victims of their exclusion as they were responsible for it. Hertzberg doesn't dwell on this in the way you might imagine a contemporary scholar would but instead, in a sort of half-hearted way, makes the case that this new, fashionable anti-Semitism was really a throwback to the secular Roman anti-Semitism of antiquity. There's been many books on anti-Semitism since this one was published, none of which I've read. I would guess, though, that Hertzberg has strong footing to stand on when he documents an evolution in the reasons that were used to justify anti-Semitism in 18th century France. Whether or not the same claim can be made for his relating it to classical anti-Semitism, I leave to people more learned on the matter.

Admittedly I read some obscure books and this was one of them. The reasons for this are complicated. It has partly to do with the fact that I love to browse the shelves of second-hand bookstores, and partly to do with the fact that obscure books are often full of equally obscure yet very interesting references, making it something of a self-reinforcing phenomenon. More than anything, though, I think there's a philosophical reason for it. It stems from a deeply held belief of mine that we as a society produce more knowledge than we can collectively process. It's true that specialists are likely consumers of books like The French Enlightenment and the Jews that are relevant to their own disciplines. But the knowledge they gain from such books is situated on vertical chains, and such texts fit neatly into a large but limited whole that's not easily applied exogenously. Generalists, on the other hand, tend to read horizontally across disciplines and focus only on the latest wavetops. The risk for them, as I see it, is that they are reading scholarship that is mostly response to what came just before it, and that work response to that which came just before it, and so on and so forth. Very quickly you can see how even scholarship can fall victim to a Facebook-like echo chamber that prevents the application of novel thought. Being a generalist who willingly reads across disciplines, I like the idea that reading a book from the bowels of a body knowledge rather than its head, might lead me down roads otherwise not taken. Or to switch operative metaphors in light of that one potentially leading down some rather unpleasant paths, I prefer my late-night visits to obscure works in eclectic intellectual neighborhoods. Do I get lost once in awhile? Yes. But just as often, some months later usually, I find there's a new me in the world. The new me that Hertzberg has posthumously birthed, in this case, is someone who I think understands just a little bit better that bigotry is a Pandora's box not easily closed, even by the most thought-full of men. © Jeffrey L. Otto, November 15, 2016