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164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)
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- [00:06]
A
Hello and welcome to recall this book where we invite scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues, problems and events. I'm one of your longtime hosts from Brandeis University, John Plotz. So our topic today is on one level, a straightforward one, what it means and meant for Jewish immigrants to be either integrated or assimilated and into Western European and New World societies. So specifically, our guest today. And Maury, I'm going to introduce you in a minute, but hello. Has written a marvelous book exploring how that story goes inside France, long known. And Maury, maybe you'll dispute this picture, but I think long known as a nation very conducive to a sort of universalist integration for Jews in the, I guess, post Napoleonic era. So there's so many wrinkles to this tale. I think probably a lot of listeners are familiar with the story we might call how the Jews became white in the United States in the early 20th century. And of course, by comparison, few of us could ignore the way that integration and assimilation and those are sort of two related categories that we want to unpack today, went so hideously, tragically wrong and off the rails in mid 20th century Germany and hence for big basically all of Europe as well. But those cases, the sort of German tragedy and the American whitewashing, I guess we could call it, are not the only examples. And in some ways the most fascinating case of all is the nation that my guest today, Maury Samuels of Yale University, has spent his scholarly career studying that is France. Okay, so Maury, you have many books. I'm not going to talk about them all, but I think at least three, three of them relate to this story. There is Inventing the Israelite from 2010 and the Right to Difference 2016. And finally, most recently, as part of the Jewish Lives series by Yale University Press, Alfred Dreyfuss, the Man at the center of the Affair. And can I just stop? Did I miss any other books that are on this? Okay.
- [02:12]
B
Well, yeah, I mean, there's also the Betrayal of the Duchess, which is about the first anti Semitic affair.
- [02:20]
A
Oh, right. Okay. Okay. Okay. My fault. Thank you. So he's also. So among other things, Yale Mori has been since 2011, the Director and was in fact the inaugural director of the Yale Program for the Study of Anti Semitism, which you have held, I guess, through, I guess we might call them fat years and lean years. I don't, I don't know if you want to characterize this year, but through splendid times and through challenging ones. But, but so, Maury, you And I have known each other even longer, I think since 1987.
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B
Yeah. I was wondering if you were going to disclose that you went to college. And grad school.
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A
And grad school. That's true. I do not remember where we first met. Do you remember?
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B
Probably in the Dunster House dining hall.
- [03:04]
A
That seems very likely. Yeah. But I never really thought I would be squaring up to a zoom screen with you. But I'm really delighted to. And I will just start by saying that I absolutely adore this book that I hold in my hot little hand about Dreyfus. And it opened up for me so many fascinating topics, not just about the particularity of the fate of Jews in France, but also much broader. It helped me think in a different way about the role. About the pivotal or problematic role that Jews have played inside cosmopolitan Western societies. Or maybe now we should say, quote, cosmopolitan Western societies. So if you think about the notion of the Great Replacement Theory and the role that Jews play in it, you know, just. There's so many ways in which there's. There's a kind of centrality of this category, whether we call it an ethnic or racial or religious category. And you really helped me think about that. And you really helped me think about the difference between what it means to be assimilated and integrated into one of these societies. You helped me think about how Hannah Arendt is wrong about these categories, which. Something I hate to admit, but it is always helpful when it's pointed out to me. And so, you know, welcome. It's great to have you here.
- [04:16]
B
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here and to get to talk about this stuff with you. And I, you know, I could effusively praise, you know, your books also. And anyway, it's exciting.
- [04:26]
A
Don't do that. Don't do that. Yeah. It would be much shorter conversation. And we don't need to do it anyway. So, Morri, like, we love to start off just as a way of getting the ball rolling, to invite people to begin laying out, you know, what. What the key claims are of a recent book. It's say it's intervention or the things you think that any possible reader ought to know about it.
- [04:46]
B
Sure. So I was invited to write this biography of Dreyfus, of Alfred Dreyfus, for the Jewish Lives series at Yale Press. And they said from the beginning that the point was not to uncover original research, which I did try to do a little bit, and I'll come back to that, but to have a kind of fresh take on the person so for Dreyfus, that was a hard thing to do in a way because there's so much written about him. I think I say in the book that after the French Revolution, it's the next most written about event in French history. So I spent a lot of time reading all that scholarship. I was familiar with a lot of it. But I did more reading and I came to the conclusion that the Jewish dimension of the affair was kind of underplayed in a lot of the scholarship. And so that's not to say that people don't mention that Dreyfus is Jewish. Like literally every book, you know, says that Dreyfus is Jewish. If people know anything about Dreyfus, it's that he was a Jewish officer in the French army. But Jewishness is rarely the focus of scholarship about Dreyfus or about the Dreyfus affair.
- [06:11]
A
And. Hey, Maury, this is. I should have backed you up here. To begin, give us the, I won't say the Wikipedia account, but give us the Shilling Life account. So he was a, he was a high officer in the French army, accused of.
- [06:22]
B
Yeah, yeah, okay. So the, the short version is that in 1894, he, Alfred Dreyfus, who was a, a captain in the French army and an intern on the army's general staff, which was pretty high up, was falsely accused of having sold military secrets to Germany. He was given a very short court martial, found guilty based on trumped up evidence. Lawyers didn't, that his, the prosecution did not show to his lawyers and sent off to serve a life sentence on Devil's island off the coast of South America. This incredibly brutal prison where he was the only prisoner. Meanwhile, back at home, his, his wife and his brother tried to prove his innocence. They, you know, spent years trying to interest people in the case. They eventually did. There were, they, there were a few, they uncovered proof, first of all that of who the real traitor was. And it was this guy named Esterhazy. They gradually got some prominent people interested in Dreyfus plight, including the popular novelist Emile Zola, who writes the famous article J' Accuse, I accuse, which basically, basically blew the lid off the case, showing how the army had conspired to frame Dreyfus and to protect the real traitor. So he was brought back for a second trial. He was unbelievably found guilty yet again, even though the evidence was so blatant that he was innocent. And at that point the French government realized it had a real scandal on its hands that it had to put to rest. Other countries were threatening to Boycott France if they didn't free Dreyfus. And so he was given a pardon. That was in 1899, but it took until 1906 for the army finally to declare Dreyfus fully innocent and reinstate him in the army.
- [08:43]
A
Okay, great. Now, and actually, can I just ask about the Zola thing? Am I right in remembering that Jeques is also sort of a pivotal turning point in, in Zola's career, but maybe even in the sort of the status of the notion of the public intellectual?
- [08:55]
B
Yeah, totally. So. So Zola was a prominent and, and wealthy writer and he really took a, a major risk in doing this, something that he knew he was doing by accusing the top brass of the army of basically collusion and cover up. His gambit was that he was forcing them to sue him for slander, which would bring. That would be a civil case, unlike the military court martials of Dreyfus where they were able to suppress evidence. So in a civil case they would, the evidence would come to light. And that's exactly what happened. So he did bring more evidence to light, but they found him guilty of slander. He was forced to go into exile in, in England. He escaped to England for a couple of years and then he came back when there was a general amnesty after the Dreyfus's pardon. But people say that Zola may have been murdered by a pro, an anti Dreyfusard. Excuse me, because he was found dead a couple years later of carbon monoxide poisoning and his chimney had been stopped up. So, you know, he definitely is like a true hero of the affair.
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A
Wow, I totally miss that.
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B
Yeah. And as you said, the notion of the public intellectual, of someone who is known for writing or for scientific achievement, but weighs in, takes a stand on a political issue. That notion of the intellectual, of that definition of the intellectual really dates to the affair.
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A
So this is just one thread to pull. And we don't have to if you don't want to, but one thing I really liked, and you're going to correct the formulation for me, but there's a sort of nice Venn diagram formulation you had. Not that that there are forces. I mean, I guess to call all reactionary forces anti modernist is wrong, but there are forces that are seen as in, in opposition to modernizing or modernity. Obviously, Zola is presumably the incarnation of modernity in many ways. And I think the way you characterized it is that not, is that not every force of modernity and not every modernizer is Jewish, but Jews basically connote modernity. Is that.
- [11:20]
B
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And also, yeah, the Jews became a kind of metaphor for modernity. They were associated with modernity in the writings of anti Semites going back to really, you could say like the 1840s in France. And they were seen as avatars of the new capitalist system of finance capitalism. But they were also.
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A
Karl Marx says the same thing, doesn't he?
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B
Yeah, in the 1840s, he writes on the Jewish question. He's actually living in Paris at that point. Yeah. And writes that Jews, you know, the. Judaism is a religion of huckstering and, you know, but the difference is that Marx, who himself had been born Jewish, doesn't single out individual actual Jews. He, you know, it's really more of a metaphor for him. Whereas the anti Semites really did start labeling, you know, attacking individual Jews. And that really comes to a kind of Peak in 1886 in France when this journalist named Edouard Drumont writes a book called La France Juive. So Jewish France, it's like a thousand page screed basically associating Jews with everything that's bad about the modern world from capitalism, but, you know, to. But everything basically to, you know, urbanization, to, you know, all kinds of, you know, nefarious ploys. And he is. It's like a litany of attacks on specific Jews. And that's what really kind of sets the table for the Dreyfus affair eight years later.
- [13:08]
A
So this is, this is. May seem too arcane, but I. Since I wrote about Daniel Deronda at some point in my career, and I think a lot about George Eliot, one thing you see in England is that for sure, Jews, let's say, for a writer like Trollope, whom I host.
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B
Yeah, in the way we live now.
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A
Yeah, the way we live now. But actually other places too. I'm always reading a Trollope novel that I completely enjoy, and then all of a sudden there's a random minister who converted from Judaism and he turns out to be the worst minister there is. I mean, it's everywhere but for Trollope, they clearly connote that kind of incarnation of modernity run amok. The worst kind of reification.
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B
Yeah, Even that ability to change your.
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A
Identity, of course, being prote.
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B
Right.
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A
But I guess the wrinkle I was going to get at is that at least in England, they also stand for some kind of ancient biblical wisdom, let's say, like some, you know, the, the, the, you know, I don't know.
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B
I think, yeah, there's a Protestant philo Semitism that is very noticeable in, In England. I mean, the Same thing. I could say, you know, the, the founders of Yale were part of that and that's why Yale has Hebrew on its, you know, motto.
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A
That's interesting. I didn't know that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That doesn't explain Brandeis, however. But yes, okay, right.
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B
You know, Lux. Yes, I know. Great. But the joke was that at Yale, you know, that if you could actually read the motto, you would not be let in. That was, you know.
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A
Oh, that's really funny. But actually you're going. You're taking it a different way from the way I meant it. So can I just. My thought was that in England, and I think this is true of Daniel Deronda, it. There's something admirable and yet passe and residual. In other words, that the Jews are an ancient desert people. Like they have, in Werner Zombaard's terms, they have the kind of ancient, you know, sort of an ancient ethnic particularity which makes them subject to a different kind of prejudice. I hear your point about how that might be admired, but I think it's also denigrated at the same time.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, there's. That's certainly part of the kind of supersessionist, you know, ethos of, of Christianity.
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A
Exactly. The people of the, of the people of the book and then the people. This.
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B
Yeah, I think it's true of both Protestants and Cath. But in France they have less of the. I say it is.
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A
Okay.
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B
And you know, they. And in fact, you know, the Protestants in France are also like a very discriminated against minority, very similar to Jews and they kind of. They were by and large not opposed to Dreyfus. They were. Some of they. They were.
- [15:48]
A
That's interesting actually. Maybe that's a good occasion to dig into the particularity because one. Another thing I learned from your wonderful book was that there's not. I mean, even setting aside North Africa, there's not one, but two distinct Jewish communities, like long standing communities. One which is, I believe, called Sephardic down in the south, and then another Alsatian German, which I suppose is an Ashkenazi.
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B
Yes, exactly. Yeah. So one of the particular. Particularities of French Franco Judaism, as people call it, is this mixing of different kinds of Jews. So. So I mean, just a short thing is the Jews were kicked out of France, of the Kingdom of France at the end of the 14th century and technically not allowed to reside in the kingdom until the French Revolution. But there were some exceptions. So there were a couple thousand Jews who fled. Sephardic Jews who fled Spain and Portugal during the Spanish Inquisition who settled in the southwest, like around Bordeaux. There was also a small community of Jews in Provence who had never left. But that part of didn't. That area didn't become part of France until after the French Revolution. Those Jews were locked in ghettos until the revolution. And then there was a community of about 20 to 30,000 Jews who were Ashkenazic in Alsace and Lorraine, so in eastern France. And when France acquired those territories in the 17th century, they considered expelling the Jews, Louis XIV, but he allows them to stay. But there are all kinds of restrictions. They're banned from living in towns and cities, they're restricted to certain occupations, which is why a lot become money lenders and kind of small scale commerce. And the main thing that distinguishes the French case is that all of these Jews were emancipated during the French Revolution. So they were the first Jews in Europe to gain full civil rights. And it happens in 1790 for the Sephardic Jews, in 1791 for the Ashkenazi Jews. And that's long before other countries. So in England, Jews have a lot of rights, but they can't sit in parliament until the 1850s. Unconverted Jews can't sit in parliament. And in most of the German states they don't get full civil rights until 1870. So France is really ahead of the game where Jews have total and complete equality as of 1791, which is what allows a Jew like Dreyfus to achieve such a high rank in the army.
- [18:29]
C
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- [18:59]
A
That's great. So, okay, so I want to go down the Dreyfus pathway, but can I just put down a pin here? Because talking about 1790 and 91 made me of course think about Haiti and how the French Revolution is also a problem. You know, like the American Revolution, it's a problem of management of colonial affairs as well. So obviously Haitians get treated very differently in the French Revolution. Is there any connection? Is there any story is because in.
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B
Fact the big defender of the Jews in the. The. Among the revolutionaries is this guy named the Abbey Gregoire, who was a revolutionary priest from Lorraine, who was also the big defender of the slaves of the blacks in the colonies. So the revolutionaries emancipate the Jews. They then emancipate later the black slaves in the colonies. I should say, of course, that all of this only applies to men because women don't get the vote in France until after, after the Second World War. So this is men. And then famously and horrifically, France backslides under Napoleon where he re. Enslaves the. The. The blacks, but he maintains Jewish emancipation with some exceptions. So he passes these kind of harsh laws that only apply to Jews, which is really in, you know, you know, like, violates the principle of the revolution of equality before the law. So some people talk about him undoing Jewish emancipation as well, but it's, you know, that is partly the case and then that under the restoration in the 1820s, they get rid of those restrictive laws. So by the 1820s, again, the Jews have full. And then of course, the, the France frees the slaves definitively in 1848.
- [21:03]
A
Yeah, so. So the reason I'm. I want to get. The reason I'm putting that down is that I would love to get to a 20th century question, which is the question of, you know, I mentioned the great replacement theory more recently, and I'm thinking about this status that Jews have where they get. In some ways they are the victims of colonialist practices and practices of like, civil inequality and then in other ways. And you could think about the story that people tell about Jewish slave owners in America. They're also beneficiaries of, of like an inegalitarian society. So in a way, the reason to raise North Africa was to sort of get at that question, which we may not be able to get.
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B
Yeah, no, it's a, it's a really interesting question. And I think looking at North Africa is, is totally right on in Algeria. So France conquers Algeria in 1830 and it gets this population of indigenous Muslims and Jews. And Jews actually are pretty numerous in Algeria, especially in the cities. And at first, France treats the Jews and the Muslims the same, so it does not give Jews civil rights. But then in 1870, it gives the Jews citizenship in Algeria, but not the Muslims. So it's a clear case of using. Pitting one ethnic group against another. And, you know, scholars have said that the revolutionaries were doing something kind of similar that they gave, you know, people have asked, like, why did they bother to give Citizenship to the Jews. I mean, there were only like 40,000 Jews out of 25 million French people. They were this like, really, you know, you know, very marginal group, literally on the margin. They lived on the margins on the borders of French society, but also they spoke Yiddish. They were really not part of French society. Why did they bother, you know, to debate this, let alone, you know, to give it, to give citizenship to Jews when they had so many other issues on their mind? And, you know, I argue in my book the Right to Difference, that they did it because the Jews were so different that it allowed them to show just how universalist they could be. So that. That the Jews were a good test case for that. And as other scholars have pointed out, partly they were a good test case because there weren't that many of them. So there wasn't that much except at stake when they gave the Jews.
- [23:35]
A
So a distinction would be like, I just happened to read that Yuri Slezkin book, the Jewish Century. And in Germany, the Jews, like, the number of. I feel like in Berlin, 70% of the lawyers were Jewish. Some very large percentage of professors were Jew. In other words, they were actually a substantial enough population.
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B
Right. There were. There were many more. I mean, you know, there were, you know, Hundreds of thousands versus just, you know, 40. So, yeah.
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A
So just to pick up your point about the periphery, I want to bring us back to Dreyfus, because the particular case you're making about his integrated, slash assimilated family is so interesting. You speak of them as being on the margin, but of course, by Dreyfus's generation, a lot of the family are in fact living in Paris. Right? Well, or some of the family sort of.
- [24:22]
B
Yeah. I mean, he's born in Mulhouse, which is in Alsace, almost in the far eastern part of France on the border with Switzerland. But then France loses those provinces in 1870, which is a key part of the story. And during the Franco Prussian War, the newly unified Germany takes Alsace and Lorraine, occupying Dreyfus homeland. His family, like many of the Jews in Alsace, opt for French citizenship.
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A
And.
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B
And Dreyfus, Alfred Dreyfus is a young man, young boy at that point, and he gets sent to boarding school in Paris, but the family maintains its residency in Alsace throughout this. This period. So his family is not for the most part in Paris, but he marries into a really well integrated Parisian Jewish family. So his wife, Lucie Adamar, is from a family that's kind farther along on the path towards integration than his.
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A
Interesting. And so none of the family are particularly religious. Their Sense of themselves as Jewish is. Maybe that's what we could talk about is what it means for them to consider themselves.
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B
Yeah, it's really interesting. So that's one of the things I tried to ask in the book, like, what did Jewishness mean for Dreyfus and his family? And I'm building here on there's a good book by an American scholar named Michael Burns called Dreyfus A Family Affair, where he. He talks about the different members of the family. So it's true that Dreyfus himself was not religious personally. Like, he was a scientist. He saw himself as like, a scientist and a rationalist. But Lucy, his wife, was pretty religious. And I found. Which was really interesting. I got to work in the archive of the Jewish Museum in Paris, where they have a big collection given by Dreyfus's descendants fairly recently. And there are lots of Jewish ritual objects in there, like Yahtzite calendars, where they would, you know, know when to say prayers for dead relatives based on the Hebrew calendar, Lucy's Hebrew prayer book. So, you know, what I found was that they were. They were nominally Orthodox. And that's like, you know, another thing that distinguishes French Judaism from German or American, which is that the Reform movement never really takes hold. So if you're gonna practice at all, it's going to be in official Orthodox synagogues, which are run by this kind of government ministry called the consistory, which is under the umbrella of the government. But Dreyfus and his wife were married in synagogue, so I wouldn't say that they were not practicing. They attended on holidays. They attended synagogue. They were married in the. The. By the chief rabbi of France who was a friend of the family. You know, so it wasn't. It wasn't like they were, you know, completely assimilated Jews in that sense.
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A
So I guess I hadn't thought about that. So the Reform movement, forgive me, this is just ignorant. So it starts already in the late 19th century. It's starting in Germany.
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B
No, it starts in the early 19th century, actually. Yeah, it starts in Germany in the early 19th century. And it's. You know, the German case is different because in Germany, the Jews are trying to prove their worthiness for emancipation, and part of that is by modernizing Jewish religious practice. And so the Reform movement is part of that. And it's also a kind of way that Jewish leaders find to kind of keep Jews affiliated. So they kind of relax some of the requirements of being Jewish to. Through the Reform movement. And that spreads to America. When a lot of German Jews start immigrating to the United states in the 1840s. So there's a splintering of Judaism in those countries. That doesn't happen in France because, as I say, it's. It's tightly controlled by the consistory.
- [28:39]
A
So. So can I use that. This, I think, connects with Marx on the Jewish question and the huckster ism. Maybe it even connects to Eliot's notion in Daniel Deronda that that's admirable about Jews is how, like, visibly other they are. So there's clearly the anti Semitism of Germany, and I think we need to probably fit in the story of the Roma here as well. But it has to do with, like, groups that are dangerously parasitical because they're invisibly different or something. Like, what's at stake is the problem that they might be truly different, although, you know, although superficially the same. And I hear you saying from your other book, which, forgive me, Maury, I don't. I. I do not remember that book, that Your argument about the difference. But I hear you saying that in France, the appeal of toleration is predicated on palpable, marked difference. So is that consistent or is that like.
- [29:37]
B
Yeah, I mean, so what happens is that was true during the French Revolution when the Jews were very different. But what happens is as soon as they get emancipated, they stop being so different. So they start dressing like everybody else, they start speaking like everybody else. They, you know, they. They blend in and that, you know, so other people have theorized that that's what leads to biological racism.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Against Jews. Biological. And so they, yeah, antisemites have to come up with a different basis for Jewish difference, for how to, you know, tell who's a Jew, basically. And so they start to, you know, look at. For racial features, and that's when they really, like, you know, spin a whole thing that the Jew is fundamentally, you know, biologically different.
- [30:26]
A
Yeah, that's really interesting because, I mean, I think I know that story about the rise of biological racism in the 19th century. It's a story in England as well. And I think in America, the easiest path to it is that, like, once slavery has been abolished, you no longer have legal compartmentalization. So you need a different kind of biopolitics. But it's fascinating to think about historically the need to differentiate Jews and the need to differentiate black, Black, like, ex slave, quote, you know, population.
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B
Definitely. And there's a lot of overlap and kind of cross pollination between European racists who were very fixated on Jews and American racists who are fixated on blacks.
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A
That's fascinating.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So, I mean, okay, so there's so many different paths here, but, like, can we. Can we think a little bit about. Part of your intervention in the book, I think, is to say that there's no element. And this, I think, is part of the correction against Arendt, who I know is no historical authority on this, but there's no. It's wrong to think about Dreyfus as attempting to move away from or deny that Jewish.
- [31:35]
B
Yeah, so that's a big. You asked me, like, what are the. What are some of the big takeaways of the book? And that's a big one. So Hannah Arendt, in the Origins of To Totalitarianism is trying to make this argument that French Jews were unprepared for World War II and, you know, the Holocaust. And she does this kind of, you know, historical sketch where she shows how they, you know, she says they were in the midst of a disintegrating, assimil process of assimilation where they, you know, in the rush to become French, they had just abandoned all connections with the Jewish people. And she actually singles out Dreyfus as an example of that, presumably because he became, you know, an army officer. So I try to show in the book, I make a distinction between assimilation, which I think connotes giving up any Jewish affiliation or identity, and integration, which means taking on the Dom, the sort of, you know, feeling part of the dominant culture but maintaining the specificity of your prior identity at the same time. And I say that for Jews in France, like Dreyfus, they're clearly in the second category. So they were a subculture that was fully French. You know, they. He saw no contradiction. Like, like Arendt seems to see a contradiction. Like you can't be an army officer and also be a Jew, which is, of course, what the anti Semites thought. But according to the. The notion of Frenchness inherited from the French Revolution, which is the notion of Frenchness that Dreyfus subscribed to and that the left subscribed to, and that was the official ideology of the Republic, they could be fully French and fully Jewish. There was no contradiction.
- [33:41]
A
Okay, so this is great. I think we're not going to quarrel about this. Exactly. But I want to unpack this a little bit more because as you were speaking, I was thinking about. There's so many ways that I think you and I discussed before how our own family background plays into this. And for me, you know, I grew up certainly very, very much thinking of myself as American. Not really. Certainly knowing that my family were Jewish, but not necessarily taking that as my own identity. And then Thanksgiving, the celebration of Thanksgiving was always incredibly important in my family. And I realized in retrospect, it was kind of a subtract, subtractive thing. Like, we weren't gonna celebrate Christmas for sure. We didn't really. Hanukkah wasn't that big a deal, but Thanksgiving kind of. It ticked all the boxes.
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B
Yeah. And for. In my family, it was like going to Chicago Bears games.
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A
Yeah, you mentioned that. Yeah.
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B
Right. Like, that really replaced. I feel like Shabbat, you know.
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
This is what we do on the weekends.
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A
And if you read Willa Cather on Fourth of July, on, like, the fireworks of Fourth of July, like, there are these images of these kind of. Yeah. I don't know. I mean.
- [34:44]
B
Well, it's because, you know, the United States and France saw themselves as. Or certain, you know, elements of them. Officially, the ideology of both countries was that anyone could take on the national identity.
- [35:01]
A
Right.
- [35:01]
B
They were, you know, open, open societies where identity was based on just believing in the. In the national.
- [35:12]
A
Totally. But, okay, so two different directions on that direction. One, how the Jews became white, which is also how the Irish became white. That in America, there's obviously a highly specific racial exemption for that. Right. That is true. As long as you pass the one drop rule rule. Is there an equivalent for that in France or. No?
- [35:29]
B
Well, it becomes. That's what the debate is about over Jews. So officially, no, you know, officially, Jews are as equal, you know, are equal Frenchmen like anyone else. But of course, there's a large percentage of people in France who don't subscribe to that, who have a much more, I would say kind of German blood and soil idea of who constitutes French person. And, you know, I would say the same thing is true in the US So like, you know, the after, you know, emancipation, the, you know, theology is that everyone is American. But of course, a lot. A lot of people don't believe that. And I think we could. We're seeing now that a lot of people still don't believe that.
- [36:17]
A
Right. That people. That was a dog whistle ideology. That's actually far more than a dog whistle.
- [36:22]
B
This is the conflict. And this is the conflict. This is what the Dreyfus affair ultimately is about. I think this is the. This is the case becomes so interesting to people, and it captures the attention of France and the world because it brought to the fore that. Exactly that conflict. Who has a right to be part of the modern nation State, Is it based on just wanting to be that and being a good, good, loyal citizen, or is it based on blood and ancestry? That's. That was one of the issues, you know, at stake in the Dreyfus affair. That's what, you know, was essentially the Jewish question. That's what the Jewish question was asking. As Jews were flocking to all of these Western European democracies, it was forcing them to confront that fundamental question of who. Who is a citizen?
- [37:20]
A
So this maybe obviates the second strain of my question, but I also want to ask you, and this may be a slightly passe question to. To use. To think about France, but when I think about France and the question of, you know, the. The space for difference in France, like you just described, a situation in which the Dreyfus family, let's say, could unproblematically feel that they remained adherent in their Jewishness, but also that they were fully functioning citizens of.
- [37:47]
B
Of.
- [37:47]
A
Of France. So we hear a lot about this concept of laicity, right? Like. Like the laity ness. Like the. The kind of secular. It's trans secularism. Yeah. So. So how. I mean, how is that squared with the notion of retaining a ethnically slash religiously particular idea?
- [38:10]
B
Right.
- [38:10]
A
Well, identity.
- [38:11]
B
They're. They're in conflict. So that. That's, you know, partly the. That's what the. The kind of. Of what people call the Franco French war, la guerre Franco francaise, is essentially over. That question over, you know, who is. It's this war between the left and the right in France that starts during the French Revolution and arguably is still going on.
- [38:32]
A
Wait, that's just a term of art. I've never heard that expression. It's totally fascinating.
- [38:37]
B
Yeah, it's this internal civil war within France over, you know, what kind of nation they are. And it's also an, you know, do.
- [38:44]
A
We have that in the United States as well then?
- [38:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [38:47]
A
Okay.
- [38:47]
B
And secularism, state secularism is certainly part of it. Like, is France a Catholic country or is France a secular country where religion is a matter of, you know, private conscience and France struggles with that. So officially, you know, the French Revolution radically gets rid of all religion. It banishes the Catholic Church. I mean, it's, you know, was a wild, you know, thing to do. Napoleon invites the church back in, and then over the course of the 19th century, the church reacquires some of its power. There's, though, a struggle between the forces of secularism and the forces of religion, which are basically the forces of Catholicism throughout the century. And that's another thing that's, you know, at stake in the Dreyfus affair. The church plays a really nefarious role. They take a. A strong stance against Dreyfus, and it's partly because they see this as the chance to reimpose their authority.
- [39:50]
A
But I totally get that, Maury. But. But based on the model that I heard you lay out a few minutes ago, wouldn't the very identity of the Dreyfus family be like intention with a secularist account of what France is? Or are you saying.
- [40:06]
B
Well, okay, yeah, that's really interesting because secularism. So laicite means different. It comes to mean something else. So now we tend to think that it means, in the French case, the radical exclusion of religion.
- [40:23]
A
I mean, I think about the ban on Muslim headdress.
- [40:26]
B
Exactly.
- [40:27]
A
Yeah.
- [40:27]
B
So, but the fact is that that's a relatively recent.
- [40:31]
A
I see.
- [40:33]
B
Meaning of laicite. That partly comes into. I mean, it's a complicated history, but it partly comes to mean what it does now, this kind of hard line secularism as a result of the Dreyfus affair. So it's after the Dreyfus affair that the left comes to power and pushes through the separation of church and State in 1905, specifically to get revenge on the church for its role during the Dreyfus affair. Prior to that, in the 19th century, laicite meant that the three major religions in France, so Catholicism, Protestantism, and. And Judaism, and, you know, Catholicism was by far the dominant, like over 95% that they would be treated equally. That's what. So, you know, like, you get, like, in the 1830s, the French government is paying the salaries of priests, ministers and rabbis. Right. Which is really interesting. And that lasts until 1905.
- [41:35]
A
Wow.
- [41:36]
B
Yeah.
- [41:36]
A
Okay, so this is a little bit of a wrench, but like, I just want to get us from Dreyfus and from this turn of the century moment. You also say something. You said something really interesting. I heard you speak recently and you talked about this, you know, the existence within the Jewish community of sort of an impulse, this integrationist impulse. You talked about the rise of Zionism, which we should get to also. And then you also talked about radicalism or socialism. Like, you know, I have had relatives who were Jewish Bund members back in the 30s. So I sort of recognize that all of those things seem to be part of the backstory of the rise of this incredibly fascinating and improbable prime minister, the last prime minister before the fall of the pre Nazi regime, Leon Bloom. So can you just. Again, this is not your book. This is this wonderful book by Pierre Birnbaum. But clearly you've thought about Bloom as well. Can you tell us, can you fit Bloom into the story a little bit?
- [42:34]
B
Yeah, totally. Because in fact, fact, Bloom, his whole career, I would say, is made possible by the Dreyfus affair. So, okay, he's a young man who had, you know, had brilliant studies and attends the kind of top schools and he becomes, he's from a Jewish family. He becomes interested he in the Dreyfus's innocence and becomes a big militant in support of Dreyfus during the Dreyfus affairs. But it's really the affair and the triumph of the left that kind of catapults someone like Bloom into. Into power. So he is, he's from a bourgeois family, but not particularly well to do. They weren't like, you know, they were, you know, kind of, I would say, middle class Jews. But he becomes a socialist and he comes to power, he becomes essentially Prime Minister in France in the 1930s in this popular front against fascism. And he pushes through like incredible progressive legislation in France. So he's the inventor of the weekend, you know, in France and like a paid time off.
- [43:50]
A
Yeah.
- [43:51]
B
And you know, French workers are incredibly indebted to him. But he also, and this is one of the things that I think this book by Pierre Birnbaum that you referred to, which is in the same series as my book, the Jewish life series, that he shows just that Bloom was on the receiving end of horrific antisemitism. I mean, all of the kind of rage against Jews, all of that right wing that, you know, the kind of blood and soil kind of side of the Franco French War, war, they are inflamed with, you know, rage. When he becomes prime minister and in fact, when he's being sworn in, this guy, Xavier Valla makes this speech that's like really famous. And he said, this is the first time I'm gonna get it kind of wrong, but that the peasant nation of France is being governed by a Jew who he calls like a subtle Talmudist.
- [44:51]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [44:52]
B
And the hall erupt, erupts in. You know, it's a shocking thing to say, but, you know, so Bloom becomes, you know, the kind of lightning rod for that same war in the same way that that Dreyfus had been.
- [45:08]
A
I'm trying to remember who it was. One of the former British Conservative prime ministers, I think it might, might have been Heath said of Thatcher's government that there were more Estonians than Etonians in it.
- [45:19]
B
And that's.
- [45:20]
A
It's not as memorable, but it's the equivalent. But, you know, it's also 60 years later.
- [45:24]
B
Yeah.
- [45:26]
A
So just. Yeah, it is. The other thing about Bloom that I was hoping you could contextualize a little bit is that he's. I mean, I don't know how public his private life was, but, I mean, he struck me as almost like a Thomas Hardy character. He's somebody who doesn't really believe in the rules of conventional marriage and. Conventional. Oh, yeah.
- [45:44]
B
He writes this, you know, treatise on marriage. He's also, like, this dandy and kind of, you know, literary critic. I mean, this is one of the things that, like, makes France like that someone who, like, basically writes theater reviews can then become, you know, prime minister. I would love to, if I can just ask you a question about how he compares to Disraeli, because, in fact, in that horrible speech by Xavier Valla, he brings up Disraeli as the example. Like, well, England has already had its Jewish leaderboard, but France hasn't. But, of course, Disraeli had converted. Right.
- [46:19]
A
I think his father converted. I actually think he was born.
- [46:23]
B
I thought he was still. I thought he was converted as a child, maybe.
- [46:26]
A
That's right. He was converted as a child. You're right. But it's certainly below the level of cognition. Yeah.
- [46:31]
B
Yeah.
- [46:31]
A
And though it's interesting, I mean, I. I can't speak too much. I mean, I think he's. I think as a young Tory, he's kind of fascinating. Like, in my mind, I almost connect him with somebody like. Like the George Herbert Walker Bush. Like, it's the world of, like, these conservatives who are conservative, but they make their. They have a. I don't know, there's just something. Do you know the expression, the wet Tories? There was something soft about them.
- [46:55]
B
So he.
- [46:56]
A
He's an interesting. I mean, I suppose the. The best analogy might be you could say that his Jewishness is a little bit like Thatcher's being a woman. That it. It opens up up another side of his identity and makes him be able to govern more effectively as a conservative. But that seems radically different from what Bloom is doing.
- [47:16]
B
Although both of them were kind of dandies. And that is true. And they wrote, you know, like, Disraeli was writing these. These novels.
- [47:24]
A
He was. And the novels are very Jewish. I mean, the novel, like, Koenigsby and Tankred, both have, like, significant Jewish plots in them in which the Jews, by the way, are depicted as, like, heroically residual. You know, they're like the past. You know, past tribal generations.
- [47:40]
B
But I think there was something like, for Disraeli, where it was like his sort of exoticism. Yeah, he played it to his advantage. Whereas, like, you know, Bloom's as a socialist, was theoretically universalist. So I think he's sort of less public about his. But as. As Berenbaum shows, and I found that very interesting, Bloom never tries to hide his Jewishness. And, you know, is. Is pretty open. And so at, you know, his response to that horrifying attack is to say, I have nothing to be ashamed of as a Jew. So he, you know, he kind of stands up for himself and he's, you know, incredibly brave. He's the victim of physical attacks. He's then, you know, put in concentration camps by the Nazis.
- [48:25]
A
That part is incredible to me. It's incredible. They didn't kill him. Him. It's incredible. He became Prime Minister again. Right. It's like he.
- [48:32]
B
What?
- [48:32]
A
Didn't he become prime minister again?
- [48:34]
B
Yeah, he becomes Prime Minister again right after the war. Very short period. Yeah. But they do murder his brother. His brother dies in Auschwitz. And he. But they.
- [48:44]
A
He.
- [48:45]
B
They realize he's so important that they kind of give him privilege treatment in Buchenwald. But, you know, but still, you know, he. He is. He's a. He's a really fascinating character. And the other thing that, that people don't realize and that I think really marks the specificity of France is that he's the first of actually, you know, like half a dozen prime ministers of Jewish origin in France. So, you know, there are many. No other country except for Israel has a record like that. I mean, in America, there's no, you know, we haven't had a leader of government who's Jewish. But in France, there's Pierre Mendez, France in the 1950s. And then. And then, you know, just in the last few years, you know, under Macron, there have been two, you know, not all of them were, you know, practicing Jews like Bloom, but some of them were. So, you know, Mendez, France was also.
- [49:38]
A
That is totally interesting. So, Maura, I'm just going to ask you this. It's not. It's off of our path, but it's like a question I've been bringing up with people who are thinking about kind of the monstrosity of mid 20th century racism. Do you. How do you play out, or do you play out at all, the analogy to other stigmatized groups? You mentioned prat Protestants in France, and that's extremely helpful. But I kind of wanted to ask about the Roma, who probably don't even figure into France at all. But, you know, like.
- [50:05]
B
Yeah, I don't know that much about that. You know, they're not. I mean, they are, you know, a presence. And, like, you know, you see them in, like, Victor Hugo's novel, you know, the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
- [50:17]
A
Yeah.
- [50:18]
B
There's Roma figure, but in France, you know, it's. There's, of course, a, you know, black difference in the colonies.
- [50:27]
A
Yeah.
- [50:27]
B
In. Then in. In North Africa, there's, you know, the issue of the indigenous Arab Muslim population. And that is, you know, that winds up being incredibly significant in France. And still now, you know, that's the dominant question now. So in many ways, you could say that, you know, Muslims are the new Jews in France, that these questions about identity that were worked out by fighting over Jews through the Dreyfus affair, through World War II are now being fought over.
- [51:05]
A
And could you make the cynical argument, which people certainly have made in the British context, that not only would Arab Muslims or Muslims in general, the Middle east be the new Jews, but also that they are in some ways disadvantaged because Jews got preferential treatment in those.
- [51:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, that. That's certainly an argument that people have made in Algeria, you know, that in 1870, the. The Jews get citizenship and the Muslims don't. And that obviously creates, you know, like, further tensions, you know, between those groups. And so then when Algeria gets independence in the, you know, 1962, the Jews are not, you know, considered part of the new nation, and almost all of them leave, you know, at that point. And, you know, so that, to be.
- [52:00]
A
Fair, you could blame that one on the British, though, because you could say that's a product of the way that Israel was precipitated into, like, most favored nation status. You don't think so. You think it's more inter. You think it's internal?
- [52:11]
B
I think it's that. That's probably a more. I think that that's what plays out in other Muslim countries where basically after 1948, Jews leave all Muslim countries for the most part, after the creation of Israel, but for slightly different reasons in different places. So in France, though, in. In Algeria, I think it's. It's largely because the Jews were seen. They were kind of identified with the colonists, you know, so with the pie noir population. And so they're, you know, because they did have, you know, civil rights. They voted in French elections and things like that, whereas, you know, the Muslims didn't. So, yeah, I mean, I think that that. And so, you know, you could say that that. That preferential treatment given to Jews at the time is still, you know, kind of beef, you know, between the communities and, you know, part of the kind of inter. Communal.
- [53:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's totally fine. I mean, we kind of got to leave it there. But I mean, I, I want to do an episode on just like the exact, exact semantic weight of this notion of the replacement theory, because it is bizarre to think about Jews as being the ones who are, quote, doing the replacing in America, in the American context. But what they're replacing white Americans with is.
- [53:27]
B
Right. And of course, that concept comes from this guy, as far as I know, this guy Renaud Camus in France, you know, and people have been like him, thinking, think that, you know, France has, has, you know, that white French people, White Christian French people are being replaced by Arab Muslims.
- [53:47]
A
Yeah, I, I, I still remember my meal at. Is it okay? Forgive me, but the restaurant is called. Is it called no sences. It's like, I remember going there with a highly racially mixed group of French people to eat, like, chunks of meat and pickle.
- [54:02]
B
Yeah, it used to be, like, on the Ile St. Louis. And they, but that, that was the famous thing that in French textbooks. So, you know, France had this idea of assimilating the empire so, like, you could be in, you know, Senegal and, you know, you would be reading, you know, a textbook that said that begins.
- [54:22]
A
Our ancestors, the Gauls had blonde hair and blue eyes. Right. Is that how it begins? Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah. God, yeah. Well, okay, Morrie, final turn to home. As you know, we have this thing on the podcast called Recallable Books. We'd like to close by basically asking if another book which didn't come up today would be of interest to listeners. So do you have something in mind?
- [54:45]
B
Yeah, I mean, I would tell people to read. Well, I'm gonna have two.
- [54:50]
A
Yeah, you can have two.
- [54:51]
B
Okay. So one would be to read Dreyfus own memoir, which is called Five Years of My Life, which is incredibly moving, about his horrific suffering on Devil's island and how he was able to get through it. It, you know, and he. What you really find is that this was an incredibly. He was, first of all a deep thinker, but he was also an incredibly heroic person. And that's one of the arguments I try to make in my book, too, that he's one of the real heroes of the affair. And I think that comes across. And then I think just the best literary evocation of the Dreyfus affair is, of course, Proust's long novel In Search of Lost Time. Some of you know, the Dreyfus affair is a running thing through it and it's totally fascinating. It is.
- [55:39]
A
So point, who is it who says on his deathbed who calls him back to tell him that he's secretly a supporter?
- [55:45]
B
Yeah, so there's the Prince de Guerman.
- [55:47]
A
Right?
- [55:48]
B
Yeah, it turns out, but. And it's a great moment because both he and his wife turn out to be pro Dreyfus, but they won't admit.
- [55:56]
A
It to each other.
- [55:56]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [55:57]
A
Fascinating. Okay, great. Well, I'll put a brief plug in for a book that we discussed on the podcast years ago by Sonali Takar called the The Reform of Race, which is just a way of thinking about how concepts around defining anti Semitism just after World War II were so crucial for post colonial thinking about a lot of the categories we're talking about. Actually, Maury, this is great. Thank you so much.
- [56:23]
B
I really thank you, John. It was really fun. I'm glad we got to do it.
- [56:27]
A
Yeah, me too. So. And thank you all for listening. Recall this book is the creation of John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry. Sound editing is by Kamiyah Bagla, and music comes from a song by Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. We gratefully acknowledge support from Brandeis University and its Mandel center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you with your comments, criticisms, or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoyed today's show, please forward it to five people or write a review and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.