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Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic
Fashioning Jewishness in France
By Kimberly A. Arkin Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8600-3
CHAPTER 1
French "Natives" and Native Jews
[W]e insist on declaring that we were born French, that we are French, and that we shall always remain French. We form neither a race nor a people, but an integral part of the nation from which nothing could separate us.... Frenchmen, not through adoption, but from the beginning. Frenchmen not in name only but with all our hearts and all our ardent convictions. The great majority of the Jews of France ... ask you with confidence not to let the gesture [the new anti-Jewish law] that has been announced be carried out and to save once more French unity.
—Letter to Marshal Pétain signed "Parisian Jews," April 14, 1941 (cited in Birnbaum 1996:350)
I know the colonizer from the inside almost as well as I know the colonized. But I must explain: I said that I was a Tunisian national. Like all other Tunisians I was treated as a second-class citizen, deprived of political rights, refused admission to most civil service departments, etc. But I was not a Moslem. In a country where so many groups, each jealous of its own physiognomy, lived side by side, this was of considerable importance. The Jewish population identified as much with the colonizers as with the colonized. They were undeniably "natives," as they were then called, as near as possible to Moslems in poverty, language, sensibilities, customs, taste in music, odors and cooking. However, unlike the Moslems, they passionately endeavored to identify themselves with the French.... For better or for worse, the Jew found himself one small notch above the Moslem on the pyramid which is the basis of all colonial societies. His privileges were laughable, but they were enough to make him proud and to make him hope that he was not part of the mass of Moslems which constituted the base of the pyramid.
—Memmi 1991:xiii–xiv
A central claim of this book is that young Sephardi Jews are multiply liminal in France and that they respond to that liminality by racializing Jewishness. Understanding this claim requires an exploration of the historical forces that produced French Jews, and particularly North African Jews, as liminal beings uncomfortably situated between Frenchness and foreignness, Europeanness and Arabness, religious particularity and secular universality. It also requires exploring how and why primordial difference has, at least for some young Jews, become an overdetermined mode of both understanding and constructing Jewishness, Frenchness, and Arabness. In this chapter, I will argue that, in different ways, the construction of Jewishness in post-Revolutionary France and under French colonialism in North Africa created the conditions of possibility for understanding Jewishness as ontological difference and race. In the Metropole, this was driven by the impossibility of advocating for Jewish "nativeness" to France, or what the Parisian Jews quoted above called being "Frenchmen, not through adoption, but from the beginning," without simultaneously constructing and reifying the essentialized category of "Jew." However inadvertent, this reification elided vast differences in history, religious practice, language, and social class among various populations of Metropolitan French Jews. While the specter of homogenized, essential Jewish difference haunted the post-Revolutionary French Metropolitan project, it was one of the foundations for colonial practice in North Africa. In the colonies, as Albert Memmi suggests in the epigraph above, Jewishness became a privileged way of at least partially escaping "nativeness," which was assimilated to Arabness, primitivism, and the impossibility of Frenchness. But in making Jewishness one of the few roads to Frenchness in all three North African colonies, French colonial officials, Metropolitan Jewish organizations, and indigenous Jews themselves turned Jewishness into an inescapable essence. I thus argue that the very practices that allowed for the (endlessly deferred) possibility of Jewish Frenchness in the colonies also may have ultimately made Frenchness impossible, with considerable implications for postcolonial French Jewish practice.
From Nations to Nation: Constructing a Metropolitan Jewish "Community"
In a literal sense, Jews might be considered "native" to the French nation-state. There have been Jews living in the territory we now call "France" since the Roman period, when they formed part of the avant-garde of merchants and colonizers seeking profit in their newly acquired lands (Bourdrel 2004:13). Despite a series of never-completed, always short-lived expulsions that occurred in the medieval and early modern periods, there have always been Jews living in the Hexagone. But as a number of writers have noted, claiming nativeness has only a tangential relationship to the gross materiality of geography and birth (Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000). It is a deeply ideological claim that rests on particular assumptions about the nature of society and community.
In the French context, national "nativeness" had little meaning prior to the Revolution. Relations between subject and state in premodern France were hardly based on notions of national belonging in which firmly bounded territorial units coincided with the limits of state practices and subjective imaginaries. As Benedict Anderson has written: "It is characteristic that there has not been an 'English' dynasty ruling in London since the eleventh century (if then); and what 'nationality' are we to assign to the Bourbons?" (1991:21). Well into the 17th century, members of a single generation living in the borderlands of what we would now call "France" might find themselves sequential subjects to a "French" king, a "Spanish" (or "German") king, and a local lord with his own army, all without changing lifeways, languages, or practices (Sahlins 1990:1427–1428). At that time one belonged to a locality, a lord, and, perhaps most abstractly, to the "Christian nation," a global ecumene of the baptized incarnated in local forms of power and authority legitimated through relations with the Church (Anderson 1991).
The Revolution proposed abolishing these uneven, hierarchical linkages between various categories of subject and ruler, replacing them with a "flat" vision of the nation as a limited, predominantly political community whose general will expressed itself through state policy. Within orthodox interpretations of such an imaginary, origins were irrelevant. Worse, they were anti-Revolutionary, vitiating the idea of national unity as a conscious political contract uniting individuals whose differences of birth were to be invisible or meaningless (Noiriel 1996:39). Thus the aristocratic émigrés who fled territorial France during the Revolution, members of a class that had literally and symbolically embodied the French state prior to 1789, were denied French nationality and citizenship rights under the Revolutionary constitution on the grounds of their political and ideological unfitness. But while political ideology often trumped birth or "rootedness" in determining who could claim Revolutionary "Frenchness," it did not always do so. As members of the National Assembly debated designing uniforms for French citizens, established a public deistic religion, and proposed a school system that would eliminate local dialects and superstitions, it became clear that even Revolutionary "Frenchness" had (or needed) a cultural content (Ozouf 1988). This, in turn, implied that certain kinds of people by virtue of birth had privileged access to French national culture while others did not. Some people were naturally French (native) while others were irredeemably foreign. These contradictory principles ultimately created an impossible structural bind for Jews. While theoretically abolishing corporate groups that might mediate between the state and its citizens, Revolutionary debates and post-Revolutionary government actions turned Jews living in France into a legal and potentially ideological "community" for the first time.
Prior to the Revolution, Jews lived in more or less autonomous communities run by governing coalitions of religious and wealthy lay leaders. In addition to regulating daily life—access to ritually slaughtered meat, life-cycle rituals, and education—rabbinical courts adjudicated civil matters involving Jews. Although criminal cases, even those involving only Jews, were within the crown's jurisdiction, rabbis and dayanim (religious judges) often (but not always) prevented Jews from having recourse to "Christian" courts (Hertzberg 1990:58). In other words, a Jew was born into a community that took responsibility for him or her from birth until death, "assuring his or her security and representation vis-à-vis various powers" (Benbassa 1997:54). Under these circumstances, the idea of the Jew as an individual who could be abstracted from the practices and structures associated with his or her collectivity made little sense. According to Simon Schwarzfuchs: "This mode of organization, which lasted until the emancipation period, assumed that Jews did not exist as individuals, but as organized collectivities, communities whose territorial definition was often variable. The isolated, independent Jew did not exist: he always was part of a group" (1989:33).
As a result of this fragmented, local mode of communal organization, there was no national French Jewish community prior to the Revolution. By the time the French crown finished annexing territories in the 18th century, there were at least four geographically, culturally, and judicially distinct groups of Jews in France, all clustered near literal borderlands: a small but influential community of "Portuguese or Spanish" Marranos, or crypto-Jews, settled in southwestern France, particularly in and around Bordeaux; the papal Jews of Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, and Isle-sur-Sorgue who lived under Vatican protection until the Revolution; a tiny, diverse, illegal, and therefore largely unstructured group of Parisian Jews; and "German" Jews living in Alsace and Lorraine, northeastern provinces recently captured from the Prussians (Hyman 1998).
With an estimated population of twenty to thirty thousand, the "German," or Ashkenazi, Jews made up the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population living within what would become modern France (Hyman 1998:21). But most of the wealth and all of the cultural capital lay in the hands of the Bordeaux Jews, also called Sephardim, who were often merchants, French-speaking, and highly assimilated. Ashkenazim, on the other hand, were poor and socially and physically isolated from non-Jews. In addition, unlike most Bordeaux Jews, Ashkenazim observed Jewish laws governing the most minute details of everyday life. In the years leading up to and even following the Revolution, Bordeaux's Jewish elites worked rather tirelessly to maintain this highly unequal status quo, protesting in the 1780s that any attempt to regulate Jews qua Jews "would be creating an incoherent and monstrous hodge-podge of people who are fundamentally [essentiellement] different in their mores, their language, their occupations, their prejudices, and a mass [foule] of other nuances that separate them" (cited in Schwarzfuchs 1989:92). As the National Assembly began debates in 1789 about which, if any, Jews should be made into French citizens, Sephardi representatives continued arguing that, in contrast to the barbaric "German" Jewish masses, they were uniquely fit for Frenchness.
When all Jews living in France were emancipated by the Revolutionary National Assembly in 1791—almost two full years after that body issued the seeming and the Citizen—they were simultaneously individualized as potentially full and equal citizens and collectivized as a national Jewish community for the first time (Hertzberg 1990). While being exhorted to dissolve all subnational loyalties and attachments, they were also made to swear allegiance to the Republic as a group—a measure that had not been required of any other minority. Although the Revolutionary state assumed the debt of almost all newly dissolved corporations, including the Catholic Church, it refused to do so for the traditional local organizations that managed Jewish political and religious life (Hyman 1998:34). Instead, individual Jews were held responsible for their collective past, a move that served to recreate collectivity in the present.
"Only Paradoxes to Offer"
This tension around Jewishness—individual religious conviction versus inescapable collective identity—persisted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, often leaving French Jews in the impossible position of denying their collective difference by invoking it (Fernando 2009; Scott 1996). Not only had the old, local Jewish collectivities been abolished, there had never been a "French" Jewish community into which Jews could retreat. Yet as indivudals, Jews' capacity for "native" Frenchness was always questioned and often dismissed as impossible because ties of kinship and culture were presumed to bind Jews to one another within and across national boundaries.
Napoléon's Consistoire, the central religious authority designed to regulate Jewish conduct, illustrates this dynamic. It ultimately had a paradoxical effect, promoting a certain kind of assimilation while simultaneously insisting on the necessity of collective regulation of French Jewish conduct. From 1808 until the separation of church and state under the Third Republic in 1905, the Consistoire attempted to control the form and content of French Jewishness. Every department with more than 2,000 residents was to be provided with a synagogue, rabbi, and local consistory, an elected board whose electors were named by the government (Albert 1977:58-60). Under the impetus of the reform-minded laymen who controlled the consistorial board, religious practice was changed to more closely resemble Christianity, thus lessening the appearance of Jewish difference even in the "private" realm of organized worship (Albert 1977; Graetz 1996:56–63). By the mid-19th century, consistorial rabbis wore uniforms—a black robe, long white lace collar, and black hat—that had been inspired by priestly dress. Baby-naming ceremonies were initiated for boys and girls as a structural equivalent to baptism. French became the language for sermons and synagogue business, replacing Hebrew and Yiddish. Weddings—which traditionally took place in the home, without officiating clergy—were transformed into synagogue ceremonies celebrated by consistorial rabbis. Undermining traditional Jewish orthopraxis, a standardized "catechism"—a set of belief statements to which students were expected to consent—was even introduced as the foundation for bar mitzvah preparation.
It is not that these attempts to control both public and private Jewish practice worked. They did not. Observant Jews, many of whom still lived in Alsace-Lorraine, created small, independent prayer groups that bypassed the Consistoire entirely. The Consistoire fought these attempts tooth and nail. Throughout the 19th century, central and local consistory officials solicited police assistance in hunting down and rooting out unauthorized prayer groups, small orthodox synagogues (shuls), and renegade rabbis (Albert 1977:52). Later in the century, as the observant Eastern European immigrant population grew, the Consistoire changed tactics, forcing members of "illegal" minyanim (plural for minyan, or religious quorum) to become dues-paying members; in return, Consistoire leaders occasionally proposed subsidizing the salaries of (presumably appropriate) rabbis (Green 1986:81–83). After the 1905 law separating church and state, when the Consistoire lost both its exclusive standing and its state subsidies, efforts to co-opt all Jews were redoubled.
Despite these failures, the effort and elite imaginaries that inspired Consistoire practices had a dramatic impact on the kinds of identity narratives available to French Jews more generally, creating what historians now call "Franco-Judaism" (Birnbaum 1996; Landau 1990; Nicault 1990). This impact could be felt from the pulpit, in the classroom, and on the pages of the new national Jewish press. Franco-Judaism did not mean abandoning a notion of distinctive Jewish identity, but rather reframing Jewishness so that it overlapped with the post-Revolutionary French nation. As many Jewish elites suggested, Judaism and French nationalism seemed to share a common project and tension—that of a supposedly universal message carried and incarnated by a particularly defined group of people. Throughout the 19th century, and increasingly after the establishment of the Third Republic in the 1870s, consistorial rabbis, community periodicals, and Jewish elites rewrote the messianic strain of traditional Judaism as a foreshadowing of the Revolution and the construction of the French nation-state. The messiah was in fact the emancipation and Paris the new Jerusalem. Jews, chosen by God to be a "light among the nations," were simply the forerunners of French citizens, who would spread the universal message of liberty, fraternity, and equality throughout the world. Being a good Jew meant being a good Frenchman, and vice versa.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic by Kimberly A. Arkin. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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