Assimilation in a Closed Society

...From Dreyfus to Vichy, based on a wide reading of the pertinent sources, constitutes a solid contribution to social history in the academic mode...

...the immigrants were overwhelmingly working class and generally impoverished...

...Although her book is filled with the sound and fury of clashing ideologies and cultures, it offers scant evidence of the individual human costs of these conflicts...

...French Jews maintained a narrowly defined range of institutions...

...But it was a situation destined not to last...

...In fact, however, as Paula Hyman demonstrates in her important study, the openness of French society with regard to the Jews, certainly prior to World War II, was quite problematic...

...At the same time, some members of the younger generation of native Jews, particularly among the intelligentsia, adopted the ethnic Jewishness of the immigrants as their own...

...the immigrants founded a plethora of institutions . . . involved with issues other than the native-approved items of religion and philanthropy...

...In France the conflict between native and immigrant Jews was exacerbated by the timing of Jewish immigration...

...True, the terms of emancipation require Jewishness to be expressed in an exclusively religious manner, but that is not particularly troubling...

...Since native Jewish leaders insisted that accommodation take place strictly on their terms, newcomers and natives remained badly divided till the very end of the Third Republic...

...They learned French, sent their children to public schools, and participated in the activities of the general labor movement...

...While the Jewish communities of both the United States and Great Britain had several relatively quiet decades in which to integrate their immigrant populations, French Jews had to deal with highly politicized newcomers in particularly difficult times . . . Moreover, the absence of any notion of cultural pluralism in the French polity confirmed in French Jewry . . . their sense of the urgency of assimilating the immigrants to their own model of Jewish communal behavior...

...Beyond the information it conveys about Jewish life in France, however, From Dreyfus to Vichy makes us aware of the small margin that separates Jewish triumph from tragedy in modern societies...

...This reassertion of Jewish identity within the fold of native Jewry, Hyman shows, had important reverberations in shaping attitudes toward Zionism and in determining the direction of various youth movements...

...One only wishes that Hyman had made a greater effort—as did Irving Howe in his nonacademic World of Our Fathers—to people her pages with flesh-and-blood human beings, rather than such abstract entities as "natives" and "immigrants...

...The response of the Jewish leadership was self-destructive in the extreme...

...The actual differences and areas of conflict between the two Jewish groups are neatly summarized by Hyman as follows: "French Jewry had gradually achieved a consensus as to the nature of Jewish identity in France...

...in Western Europe...

...If historical hindsight enables us to see the tragic nature of the conditions of modern Jewish life in France, this does not mean that the actual participants in the events of the time viewed matters in the same way...

...French Jews, they firmly declared, are Frenchmen: their political rights are legally guaranteed...

...here, because of the traditions of democracy and cultural pluralism that have prevailed, Jews have fared extraordinarily well...

...Although her own sympathies are clearly with the immigrants, Hyman goes out of her way to present the conflict between the natives and the newcomers in a thoroughly objective manner...

...It was their failure to assimilate, so the argument ran, that had provided an opening for the xenophobia of the Right...

...And more disturbing still, a sizable sector of the immigrant population was drawn not to the respectable republican politics of the native Jewry but to working class organizations and aggressively Leftist political activity...

...The Jews had mortgaged their future to the triumph of democratic values, but these proved less and less attractive to Frenchmen as the economic crisis of the 1830s deepened...

...Hyman's discussion of the tensions between native and immigrant Jews makes for painful reading, particularly since the reader is aware that in the end both groups met a common fate at the hands of the Nazis and their French collaborators...

...They saw the tepid religious confessionalism of their elders as lacking in both self-respect and in the possibility for Jewish survival, and looked upon East European Jews as models of Jewish authenticity...

...Native Jewish leaders were not satisfied because the newcomers retained a strong sense of Jewish ethnicity, and the self-conscious natives regarded this as anathema in the context of the French environment...

...On the contrary, for well over a century following the emancipation of French Jewry (1790-91), their leaders remained convinced that the Jews of France were the beneficiaries of a benign dispensation...

...But despite the wide gulf separating them, the two groups did exert some influence on each other's outlook...

...Democratic values never gained strong and lasting acceptance among Frenchmen, and conservative forces felt free to challenge the right of Jews to participate in the mainstream of national life...

...Moreover, French national tradition made no allowance for the type of cultural pluralism that would permit a full expression of Jewishness...

...Why and how the French-Jewish symbiosis broke down are described in detail in From Dreyfus to Vichy...

...In short, through the end of World War I, the leaders of French Jewry regarded their community as the "most successfully assimilated and most stable...

...Having stressed the point that native Jews defined their Jewishness in strictly religious terms, Hyman tells us virtually nothing about the actual content of that confessional Judaism...

...The paradigm of the open society, of course, is the United States...

...Taken together, these two factors spelled tragedy for the Jews of France...

...Immigrant Jews, it is important to note, quickly adopted the native goal of integration into the larger French society...

...Reviewed by David Singer Editor, "American Jewish Year Book" It is a truism of modern Jewish history that Jews have experienced very different fates in open and closed societies...

...Instead of facing up to the fact that French society had failed them, they laid blame for the situation on the thousands of East European Jewish immigrants who had flocked to France in the post-World War I period...

...As for the immigrant Jews, we learn a great deal about their view of the native Jewry, but precious little about their perspective on French society...

...The difference is not just between open and closed societies, it is also between those open societies where traditions of democracy and cultural pluralism are firmly established and those where they are even slightly shaky...

...the immigrants challenged that consensus and reestablished ethnicity as an openly acknowledged element of Jewish identity...

...East European Jewish immigration to France came late...

...their economic situation is steadily improving...

...the majority of immigrants chose France as their ultimate destination only in the interwar period...

...their intellectual contributions—look, for example, at the philosopher Henri Berg-son and the sociologist Emile Durk-heim—are constantly growing...

...it was in France, after all, that Jews first achieved full civic emancipation...

...in any case, Jewish culture is inferior and Jews are fully prepared to accept cultural assimilation as the price of religious acceptance...

...Native Jewry was largely middle class...

...The constant influx of new immigrants tended to retard the integration process and keep visible a foreign Jewish population in France's major cities...

...France, too, would appear to offer an example of an open society in which Jewish life has flourished...

...Thus, she writes: "In every country in which East European Jews settled, they clashed with the native Jewish community to which they turned for aid...

...In the 1930s, facing the dual problems of a contracting economy and expanding xenophobia, native Jews became ever more insistent that the pace of immigrant acculturation be quickened and that immigrants defer to native political leadership to forestall anti-Semitic incidents...

...Moreover, within its own frame of reference the book has some lacunae...

...Anti-Semitic forces now came to the fore, depicting the Jews as aliens bent upon exploiting the French economy and corrupting the country's traditions...

...Soon, intracommunal name-calling largely replaced the struggle against anti-Semitism...