Jewish Identities in France: An Analysis of Contemporary French Jewry

By Schnapper, Dominique, Arthur Goldhammer, (Trans.)
University of Chicago Press, 1983, Hardcover, 182 pp., Out of print, ISBN: 0226739104

Jews have lived in the region that would become France since the time of the Roman Empire.

Surviving a long history of frequent persecutions as well as the secularizing and assimilationist forces of modernity, the French Jews persist.

They persist, however, in different ways and to different degrees in their relation to their Jewish traditions. Basing her analysis on a series of probing interviews with a wide range of French Jews in four communities, Dominique Schnapper here reveals the variety of ways these groups identify with and maintain their Jewish heritage while adapting their cultural traditions to the requirements of life in a predominately Christian industrial society.

French Jewry is typologically divisible into three main groups. The first consists of practicing Jews, those who occasionally or regularly carry out the specific forms of Jewish religious observance. The second is made up of the militants, those whose Jewish identity is derived from the transformation of the experience and consciousness of Judaism into political or social activism. Third, there are the Israelites, nonpracticing and largely assimilated individuals upon whom others impose Judaism – whether because of a Jewish name or an occupation that in France is associated with the social image of the Jew, or because of social and family connections.

In addition to the wealth of specific information it provides about Jews in contemporary France, Schnapper’s study is enriched by theoretical reflection on the nature of attachment to ethnic, religious, and national communities and identities. The case of French Jewry becomes an example of the more general problem of the interactions (or compromises) that take place between cultural traditions worthy of the attention of all those interested in the subject of ethnicity.