Edmond Fleg And Jewish Minority Culture In Twentieth Century France

Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, the first critical biography of the leading French writer Edmond Fleg (1874–1963), explores his role in forging a modern French Jewish identity before and after the Second World War. Through his writings – plays, novels, poems, and essays based on Jewish and Christian texts – Fleg fashioned a minority identity within the context of French Third Republic universalism. At the heart of his work we find a radical ecumenism, a rejection of exclusive and homogenous nationalism, and a deep understanding of the necessity of supporting vibrant minority subcultures within the context of a liberal democratic republic. This account is both individual and social, pointing to the ways in which Fleg acted within the possibilities and constraints of his milieu and used his writing to engage with and shape the discursive fabric of twentieth-century French culture. This book appeals to a number of scholarly audiences, including historians and literary critics who work on modern France and Jewish and religious studies and those who focus on issues of identity and difference, as well as a more general audience interested in Modern France and/or modern Jewish history.

This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. This stimulating and original book makes a major contribution to our understanding of modern Jewish history as well as to the history of the Jews in France and to the larger discourse about modern Jewish identities.

How can immortality be a curse? According to the Wandering Jew legend, as Jesus made his way to Calvary, a man refused him rest, cruelly taunting him to hurry to meet his fate. In response, Jesus cursed the man to wander until the Second Coming. Since the medieval period, the legend has inspired hundreds of adaptations by artists and writers. Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew, the first English-language study of the legend in over fifty years, is also the first to examine the influence of the legend’s medieval and early modern sources over the centuries into the present day. Using the lens of memory studies, the work shows how the Christian tradition of the legend centered the memory of the Passion at the heart of the Wandering Jew’s curse. Instrument of Memory also shows how Jewish artists and writers have reimagined the legend through Jewish memory traditions. Through this focus on memory, Jewish adapters of the legend create complex renderings of the Wandering Jew that recognize not only the entanglement of Jewish and Christian memory, but also the impact of that entanglement on Jewish subjects. This book presents a complex, sympathetic, and more fully realized version of the legend while challenging the limits of the presentism of memory studies.

The Jews of Modern France: Images and Identitiesfocuses on the shifting boundaries between inner-directed and outer-directed Jewish concerns, behaviors and attitudes in France over the course of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Delves into Jewish religion and culture at a time of profound social and political revolution in the wider European culture. In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. General and Jewish scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking many of the most crucial aspects of French Jewish history. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien regime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community--including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien regime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation. "Although the French National Assembly granted Jews citizenship in 1791, this magisterial book argues that the meanings of this revolutionary watershed must be understood through much longer-running discussions and complex variations among French Jews. . . . This detailed volume . . . should interest a wide range of scholars in religious and civic history."--Choice Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity. Jay R. Berkovitz is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France.

This book focuses on the tension between the modernising thrust that places France on a trajectory of convergence with comparable liberal democracies and the defence of a national specificity that can act as a brake, complicating France’s relationship with its neighbours, its present and its past. This ambivalence in French political and social life stems from the conscious attempt to rebuild the nation after the trauma of Occupation during World War II and the new beginning provided by the Liberation. The government of the Fourth Republic embraced the pursuit of a modernisation that would enable it to regain its place among the world’s leading democratic states. However, this modernising ambition co-exists with the belief in a specific destiny and a unique sense of mission that are intrinsic to the emergence of a sense of nationhood after the revolution of 1789. Raymond defines a critical perspective that draws together historical, economic, social, and political issues into a coherent understanding of what makes France the way it is today. Written with both academic rigour and a highly accessible clarity of style, this volume is a valuable resource for students, educators, and researchers in French and European Studies.

Historians, since the 1960s, argue that the French economy performed as well as did any economy in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to the opportunities for profit available on the market, especially the large consumer market in Paris. Whatever economic weaknesses existed did not stem from the social structure but from exogenous forces such as wars, the lack of natural resources or slow demographic growth. This book challenges the foregoing consensus by showing that the French economy performed poorly relative to its rivals because of noncapitalist social relations. Specifically, peasants and artisans controlled lands and workshops in autonomous communities and did not have to improve labor productivity to survive. Merchants and manufacturers cornered markets instead of being subject to the market’s competitive imperatives. Thus, distinctive features of capitalism—primitive accumulation (the dispossession of peasants and artisans) and the competitive obligation faced by merchants and manufacturers to reinvest profits in order to keep the profits—did not prevail until the state imposed them in a process lasting for a century after the 1850s. For this reason, it was not until the 1960s that France caught up to (and in some cases surpassed) its economic rivals.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 has traditionally been seen as a limited conflict between French and German forces. This edited volume challenges this view and shows that it was a war of ideas, values, and perceptions, which transformed the political, diplomatic, and military culture across Europe. Based on interdisciplinary research, the book suggests that the war raised new questions about power, the nation, violence, and notions of civilization, which brought about a decisive shift in how warfare was experienced and perceived. While the Franco-Prussian War may have begun as a traditional dynastic struggle, it became a modern war and an important precursor to the First World War in its use of new weaponry and industrialized warfare. At the same time, the development of humanitarian movements and international law on the conduct of war meant that the fighting was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny, while new technologies accelerated the pace at which narratives about the war were constructed and consumed. This volume will appeal to scholars in the fields of war studies, international relations and diplomacy, and intellectual and cultural history. It will also be a useful addition to undergraduate and postgraduate courses on nineteenth-century European history and cultural studies.