UFR Langues

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.

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After 1948, several upheavals—the creation of the State of Israel, decolonization and Arab nationalism—forced the vast majority of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire to leave their lands of origin. While most of these Sephardic Jews went to Israel, and a substantial minority—especially those from the former French colonies in North Africa—resettled in France and Canada, a small number made their way to the United States. While Sephardim still comprise only a small fraction of an overwhelmingly Ashkenazic American Jewish population, their numbers have increased considerably in the post-World War II era.

The American Friends of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a non-profit organization created in New York City in 1947 to garner funds for the AIU’s then extensive network of schools in the Arab world, provides a window into the evolution of Sephardic integration, identity and self-representation in the post-World War II United States. While it was primarily a fundraising group, the Friends also functioned as a vehicle for Sephardic expression and community building in the United States, as well as a space where Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews worked together—and were sometimes at odds with one another. As such, a study of the Friends—the personal histories and perspectives of the people who founded and maintained it, the tactics it used in its attempts to solicit funds, as well as the reasons for its limited success and its ultimate demise—is a particularly interesting vantage point from which to explore the evolution of both Ashkenazic-Sephardic relations and each groups’ perceptions of each other in the United States over the past 60 years.

Scholarship on immigration to the United States in the postwar era has emphasized the diversity of geographical, religious, cultural and class backgrounds of the “new new immigrants.” This diversity, combined with a shift in American popular culture and government policy away from assimilation and toward multiculturalism, argue sociologists Rubén G. Rumbaut, Alejandro Portes and others, has splintered the notion of what it means to “become American.” Rather than integrating into an undifferentiated “America society,” post-World War II immigrants have experienced “segmented integration” into any number of particular American subcultures.

In a similar vein, rather than using terms such as “Jewish culture” or “Jewish diaspora” in the singular, scholars such as Moshe Rosman and David Biale have used these terms in the plural, thus drawing our attention to the range of Jewish experiences in a wide variety of historical contexts. This focus on diversity has been particularly important within the field of Sephardic studies, as scholars such as Jonathan Ray and Aviva Ben-Ur have pointed out that “Jewish” has often been equated with “Ashkenazic” among contemporary historians. They have suggested that the Sephardim have functioned as a “subethnic” group in the contemporary Jewish world. As a “minority within a minority,” American Jews of Sephardic origins have thus faced not only the challenge of integration into American life in general, but also that of integration into an overwhelmingly Ashkenazic Jewish mainstream community.

The story of the American Friends of the AIU is a story of competing and overlapping identities. On the one hand, the Sephardic Jews who were the driving force behind the organization saw the group as an opportunity to forge a new network of Sephardic Jews in the United States and, in so doing, to educate both American society as a whole and American Jews in particular, about the history, culture, and material needs of Jews in the Arab world and the former Ottoman empire. On the other hand, these individuals naturally sought out connections with members of the larger American Jewish community as they integrated into American society and moved up the economic ladder. As we shall see, this “push and pull” of post-World War II Sephardim toward the American Jewish majority shaped the motives of Sephardim who joined the Friends, as well as relations between Sephardim and Ashkenazim within the organization.

Sephardic Jews who became involved with the Friends represented a particular stratum within the modern Sephardic—and Sephardic American—world.

This article outlines the basic contours of the development of Reform Judaism in Western Europe and the United States, and looks at historians’ debates as to the reasons for the successes and failures of Reform in particular national contexts. For much of the twentieth century, Reform Judaism received little attention from scholars of Jewish history, who understood the movement first and foremost as part of the assimilatory bent of Jews in the Western World. More recent scholarship, by contrast, has looked to a complex array of ideological, cultural, and political motivations that led nineteenth century Jews down the path of religious reform. It has also highlighted the many factors, including a country’s particular religious and political culture, Jewish legal status, and the extent of governmental authority over religious institutions, which must be taken into consideration to account for why the Reform movement was more successful in some countries than in others.

This article is a study of the emergence of American Muslim identity in the 1980s and 1990s through analysis of debates on education and child-rearing in the magazine Islamic Horizons. This Journal, created in 1983, is the oldest Muslim press organ still in existence today in the United States. The efforts of Islamic Horizons to bridge the cultural gap, as well as the numerous debates published between immigrants and second-generation Muslims, make it a particularly interesting venue to study tensions between the desires for integration and communal cohesion among American Muslims prior to September 11th.

In the twenties, Jews occupied an increasingly visible place in the French public sphere. More than ever before, they felt free to explore the particularities of Jewish identity and culture in the mo-dern world in literature, theatre and debating clubs. Both Jewish authors’ choice of themes and contemporary criticism of their writing reveal many of the tensions and conflicts that the Jewish “revival” of the 1920s raised within the French Jewish community. Some French Jews saw no need for self-censorship and welcomed what they saw as an opportunity to counter stereotypes and share the reality of Jewish life, with all its diversity and contradictions. Others, by contrast, expressed concern that this literary “revival” was popularizing dangerously sensationalist, stereotyped images of Jews and Judaism to the French public. These concerns were heightened by the fact that many Jewish authors of the day conveyed an image of Jewishness as an indelible “racial” trait not dissimilar to that of the antisemitic movement, which, critics portentously suggested, had perhaps not had its final word in France.

Among the Jewish reviews born in France in the wake of the “ Jewish Revival ” in the twenties, Menorah was one of the first as well as one of those which lasted fot the longest time. Originally financed by the World Zionist Organization, it was created by Jacques and M. O. Camhy, and had been managed since 1924 by Gustave Kahn. The analysis of its editorial politics and its choice of themes reveal the tendencies of the French Zionism in those years, and more specifically of the coming together between Jewish nationalism and the progressist ideals of Justice and Peace dear to the “ Geneva generation ” and of the Jewish culture and identity.

In both the United States and France, Jewish fiction writers of the 1920s often invoked the idea of Jewish racial unity as a non-rational, uncontrollable force that separates Jews from the mainstream society irrespective of their conscious desire for integration. This genre of fiction reveals an ambivalent attitude towards  race-thinking. On the one hand, the notion that there are  intractable physical differences between groups threatened the Jews’ status as fully privileged co-citizens. On the other hand,  a racialized self-understanding provided them with a way to articulate the intangible bonds of community that their official status as a purely “religious” group normally held them back from openly expressing. The common trope of the failed Jewish-Gentile romance best expresses French and American Jews’ dual desire for acceptance and  distinctiveness. A sense of racial identity often leads protagonists to reject a non-Jewish lover or spouse and draw strength from a renewed sense of connection with the Jewish people. More often than not, however, these figures are left with feelings of ambivalence and regret, as they realize that their universalist dream of uniting with someone from a different “racial” background is not possible in the real world, where their Jewish particularism inevitably dooms such relationships to failure.

This paper explores the image of the Jew as Oriental in French Jewish literature and political discourse in the fin-de-siècle and inter-war years. During the nineteenth century, French Jews sought to distance themselves from their alleged ‘Oriental’ origins in order to facilitate their integration into the larger society. Beginning in the early twentieth century, by contrast, certain French Jews began to describe their imagined connection to the Orient as an aspect of the Jewish personality of which to be proud. This reinvention of the Jew as Oriental, however, was often linked to feelings of loss and alienation, a theme which many Jewish authors emphasised in their novels, plays and poetry. For many of these same figures, embracing Zionism provided a way to overcome this sense of alienation. By linking Zionism to the kind of ‘humanist orientalism’ prominent in French progressive circles during this period, they were able to give validity to their sense of ‘feeling different’ while at the same time expressing their complete devotion to France and to a universalist world perspective.

À la suite de l'Affaire Dreyfus, un nombre croissant de Juifs français ont commencé à remettre en question la définition de leur judaïté dans une société où ils bénéficiaient d'une émancipation politique complète. L'auteur explore cet essor culturel, que les contemporains eux-mêmes désignaient par le terme de " réveil juif ", caractérisé par de nombreux débats entre divers groupes : religieux et laïques, orthodoxes et libéraux, sionistes et assimilationnistes. À travers son analyse de la vie associative, de la presse et de la littérature juive en France entre 1900 et 1932, l'auteur montre que pour cette génération de Juifs français, il s'agissait de trouver de nouveaux moyens d'être " à la fois Juifs et Français ". Cette quête identitaire a aussi contribué à la reformulation du concept d'identité française.