THE JEWS OF FRANCE

An overly brief, dryly informative history or the world’s fifth largest Jewish community (after the US, Israel, Russia, and Ukraine). The strong suits of Benbassa (Jewish history/Paris IV-Sorbonne; Hahn Nahum: A Sepharilic Chief Rabbi in Politics, 1892-1923, etc.) are social and institutional history. She provides the reader with a wealth of statistics on such matters as French-Jewish demography, vocational and class structure, and fertility rates. Benbassa also writes well about the strongly regional nature of French-Jewish history, at least until Napoleonic reforms began to unify the community in the early nineteenth century. During the first two years of the French Revolution, for instance, she shows how the Sephardic Jews of the southeast were granted basic civic rights before their Ashkenazic brethren in the areas north and east of Paris. Finally, Benbassa does an excellent job of explaining how important French-Jewish intellectuals developed a strongly integrationist, but not assimilationist, doctrine known as “Franco-Judaism” and of discussing the death and life of French Jews during the Holocaust (about three-quarters survived). However, this book is far too brief for its subject—the first signs of French Jewry go back to the fourth century—and its pacing is highly uneven. Again, while there are long lists of prominent Jews in modern France’s business and professional life, religious, cultural and intellectual life generally are given short shrift. For example, although Benbassa devotes several pages to Jews active in the Left during the late 1960s, there is only one sentence on the great Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas, perhaps the most influential Jewish thinker of the post-Holocaust period. Finally, a number of important facts and quotations, such as de Gaulle’s oft-quoted, oft-criticized 1967 statement that the Jews comprise “an elite people, sure of itself and domineering,” are relegated to endnotes. Benbassa’s history, then, informs the way most encyclopedia entries do: It is helpfully fact-laden, but its lack of sparkle—particularly the absence of memorable anecdotes and quotations—leaves the reader hungry for a more colorful history.