Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models (review)

Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models, edited by Michael Brenner, Vicki Caron, and Uri R. Kaufmann. London and Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. 245 pp. euro54.00. Historiographically, this book reflects two encouraging departures of recent years, each in its early stages but long overdue. One is the comparative study of European Jewish communities, which even in the most minimal form of juxtaposition only properly began during the 1990s, when a number of collaborative volumes sought to locate Jewish experiences within a paradigmatic framework of "emancipation and assimilation," usually on the basis of generally conceived "national" differences. While long before this Jacob Katz and others had certainly formulated a general European narrative of the Jewish advance "toward modernity," brutally severed of course by Nazism, they rarely did so by means of concretely conceived case studies, as opposed to the general sweep of their account. Secondly, during this same period comparative studies of German and French history began appearing for the first time tout court, usually focusing on the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These ranged from Rogers Brubaker's 1992 study of citizenship and nationhood in the two countries to a few pioneering binational monographs on topics like the reciprocal imagery of national rivalry (Michael Jeismann), the symbolism of national monuments (Charlotte Tacke), and the nationalist attitudes of the respective industrial and bureaucratic elites (Moritz Follmer). The volume under review, which dates from a conference organized by the Leo Baeck Institute in Tutzing in May 2001, builds on both these literatures and carries the doubled enterprise-exploring the dynamics and boundaries of Jewish emancipation on the basis of carefully developed Franco-German comparisons-a valuable stage further. As it happens, the most successful of the volume's contributions are the ones taking a more familiar intellectual history approach, which also comprise the largest methodological cluster in the book, or five essays out of the twelve. These include Frances Malino's brief conspectus of "Jewish Enlightenment in Berlin and Paris" (pp. 27-34) and the companion essay by Perrine Simon-Nahum on Jewish scholarship in the two countries (pp. 39-49); Silvia Cresti's valuable treatment of the debates among German and French Jews during the Franco-Prussian War (pp. 93-103); Pierre Birnbaum's astute comparison of Durkheim and Simmel (pp. 169-95); and Steven Aschheim's rather idiosyncratic reflections on German and French intellectuality, "Towards the Phenomenology of the Jewish Intellectual" (pp. 199-216). But these authors seldom venture much beyond some well established routines of understanding. …