Berkovitz Jay R. Rites and Passages The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. — 333 p.In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. 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 régime. 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...This book delves deeply into the dynamics of Jewish society and culture in an era when, according to most accounts, the most interesting events and developments were taking place outside the Jewish community. Accordingly, the history of European Jewry has focused mainly on the process leading to the attainment of citizenship, on what was expected of Jews in.
Leadership, Community, and Ritual in the Ancien R�gime.
Communal Authority and Leadership.
The wealth of theories seeking to establish when the modern era began reflects a wide range of historical methodologies and considerable disagreement on the essence of modernity itself. In view of the panoply of political, cultural, social, and economic conditions affecting Jewish life in Europe, historians have understandably found it difficult to concur on the types of.
Secularization, Consumption, and Communal Controls.
If the autonomous kehillah was the last bastion of tradition, the strict regulation of public life would appear to be its most abiding feature. Each community determined modes of acceptable social and religious conduct by striking a balance between its recourse to the medieval rabbinic tradition,on the one hand, and the exigencies of public policy on the other.
Ritual and Religious Culture in Alsace-Lorraine.
Rituals observed during the ancien r�gime served discrete social and cultural purposes, though the two realms were hardly unconnected. Biblical and talmudic Judaism prescribed strict social separation from the potentially harmful cultural influences of neighboring peoples. This demand was amplified in medieval rabbinic literature to include restrictions on the con-.
Revolution, R�g�n�ration, and Emancipation.
The Ordeal of Citizenship, 1782–1799.
Heightened anxiety within the Jewish communities of France in the last years of the ancien r�gime grew in anticipation of the turbulent changes widely expected to transform society at large. Jews encountered pressing demands from diverse quarters to redefine their relationship to the society around them and prove themselves capable of meeting new and unprecedented
Religion, State, and Community: The Impact of Napoleonic Reform.
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the persistence of anti-Jewish discrimination and the occasional outbursts of violence against Jews coexisted alongside France's steadfast commitment to their civic equality. This unwavering pledge has endured because the emancipation of the Jews has remained interwoven with the revolutionary legacy.
The "Jewish Question" During the Bourbon Restoration.
With the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy in 1815, an era of renewed confidence in France's commitment to its revolutionary heritage began to reverberate distinctly within the Jewish community.1 In the political arena and at the communal level, French Jewry displayed a consciousness of the dramatic changes precipitated by the Revolution and a vitality that contrasted.
III. Transformations in Jewish Self-Understanding.
Scholarship and Identity: La Science de Juda�sme.
In a letter to Leopold Zunz, in the fall of 1822, French orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy predicted that the important work of Wissenschaft des Judentums would never gain the appreciation it deserved in France because the Jewish community there showed so little interest in intellectual affairs.1 Two decades later, commenting on the failure of French Jews to embrace ritual.
Rabbinic Authority and Ritual Reform.
The battle lines separating reformers and traditionalists in nineteenth-century Europe arc commonly assumed to be clear and well defined. From 1817, with the establishment of the New Israelite Temple Association in Hamburg, the nascent Reform movement broke progressively with the normative halakhic tradition. Almost immediately, reformers encountered vehement.
Patrie et Religion: The Social and Religious Implications of Civic Equality.
Even after nearly a half-century had elapsed since the Revolution of 1789, several fundamental questions concerning the compatibility of Judaism with citizenship remained unresolved. No longer was the issue whether ritual observance impeded the fulfillment of civic duties. Rather, an internal Jewish debate centered on how much of the legacy of traditional Judaism.Nowhere was the transition from ghetto to emancipation more dramatic, or more celebrated, than in France. Some two years after the storming of the Bastille, the National Assembly formally removed all disabilities pertaining to the Jews and declared them citizens of France. In response, French Jews identified enthusiastically with the fledging republic. In Paris.
List of Abbreviations.

Acknowledgments.The idea for this book first took root in a lecture I delivered in Jerusalem at a conference sponsored by the Zalman Shazar Center for the History of the Jewish People, at the bicentennial of the French Revolution. My interest in the impact of the Revolution on French Jewry has, since then, converged with a longstanding personal fascination with ritual.