Rites and Passages

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 regime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish communityincluding the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution.Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien regime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation.Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.

Auteur
Jay R. Berkovitz is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France.

Contenu

Introduction

PART I. LEADERSHIP, COMMUNITY, AND RITUAL IN THE ANCIEN RÉGIME

1. Communal Authority and Leadership
2. Secularization, Consumption, and Communal Controls
3. Ritual and Religious Culture in Alsace-Lorraine

PART II. REVOLUTION, RÉGÉNÉRATION, AND EMANCIPATION

4. The Ordeal of Citizenship, 1782-1799
5. Religion, State, and Community: The Impact of Napoleonic Reform
6. The "Jewish Question" During the Bourbon Restoration

PART III. TRANSFORMATIONS IN JEWISH SELF-UNDERSTANDING

7. Scholarship and Identity: La Science de Judaïsme
8. Rabbinic Authority and Ritual Reform
9. Patrie et Religion: The Social and Religious Implications of Civic Equality

Conclusion

Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments