Jewish Ideas of France

Migration, Diaspora, and Empire

Meredith Scott, Nick Underwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040369524
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This innovative exploration of Jewish experiences in France and the Francophone world through nuanced questions and representations offers an intertwining of perspectives that challenge geographical, chronological, and theoretical boundaries.

Engaging the transnational, it brings together studies highlighting the importance of migration, diaspora, identity, and empire for Jewish communities in metropolitan France and beyond. New and emerging scholars are invited into conversation with established thinkers to capture the present and future of French, Francophone, and Jewish Studies. Because identities are layered and multifaceted, the multidisciplinary studies in this volume are intended to illustrate how frameworks interact, overlap, and shift. The result of these efforts is a collection of essays that reveals the complex interplay between French and Jewish identities and how they have changed over time. Grounded in historical, literary, visual, sociological, and legal analyses, they delve into questions of gender, race, religion, empire, migration, culture, and communal life. Taken together, they problematize the categories often created to make meaning of complex dynamics.

This book is an important secondary source for researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers interested in world history, Jewish Studies, French Studies, European Studies, and immigration and diaspora studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Varied Jewish Ideas of France
• Part I Identities
• 1 “They Are the Smart Set”: Female Society Portraiture and Jewish Class Aspirations in Nineteenth-Century France
• 2 Les angles morts de l’universalisme: Whiteness and Jewishness in Adolphe Crémieux’s Legal Writings
• 3 Fascism and Antifascism: North African Jews and French Republican Values in the 1930s1
• 4 Beyond a Jewish “Colonial Fracture”: Assimilation and Persecution in Roger Ikor and Albert Memmi’s 1955 Novels
• 5 French Jewry Confronts the Separation of Church and State: Challenges and Opportunities1
• 6 Franco-Judaism: Diverse, in Flux, and Transnational
• Part II Movements
• 7 Defying the Soviet Regime, Embracing the French Republic: Jewish-Russian Émigrés’ Publishing Activities in Interwar France
• 8 “Undesirables” in France: Ilse Bing, Luise Straus-Ernst, and German-Jewish Women During the Second World War
• 9 Mediterranean Crossings: Egyptian Jews and France
• 10 Mediating Migration, Brokering Belonging: The Moroccan Alliance Israélite Universelle Teachers’ Union, 1943–1964
• 11 The Politics of the Arab-Jew: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Futures in North African Jewish Writing of the 1980s
• Index