Since the Charlie Hebdo affair a year-and-a-half ago and the gratuitous, as it seemed, attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris, the condition of Jews in France has been a subject of much discussion and concern, and not only in France. An article in the London Telegraph immediately following those murderous events was headlined “Anti-Semitism in France: The Exodus Has Begun.” In fact, both antisemitism and the exodus had begun before (and continue today). A recent article in the Washington Post, “Jews Anxious About Future in France,” cites the statistics of emigration resulting from a “wave of anti-Semitic violence.” This was all the more anxious-making because it was taking place in France, “the historic fount of liberty, equality and fraternity.” A leader of the Jewish community declared: “Jews—who have been living in France for 2,000 years and have been full citizens since 1791—now feel that they are looked upon as second-class citizens.”
But did Jews live so amicably in France for all of those 2,000 years? And was France, for Jews at any rate, the “historic fount of liberty, equality and fraternity” that the French Enlightenment presumably made her? And did Jews there become “full citizens” even in the first benign years, the pre-Terror years, of the French Revolution? Historians have long been familiar with the antisemitism of the philosophes, the mentors of the Enlightenment and revolution—an antisemitism that was overt and aggressive among some, more discreet, barely camouflaged among others. Voltaire was the most notable of these. The great hero of the Enlightenment repeatedly, not in private letters but in his published writings, denounced Jews as barbarous and uncivilized, avaricious and materialistic, and, of course, usurious—the latter although on other occasions he defended the principle of usury against the Catholic church, which condemned it. More ominous, in the light of subsequent history, was Voltaire’s prediction—or threat: “I would not be in the least surprised if these people [Jews] would not some day become deadly to the human race. . . . You [Jews] have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct, and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny.”
“Impertinent fables” was a euphemism for religion, which, for Voltaire as for most of the philosophes, was the original sin. Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, may have been the immediate target of “Écrasez l’infâme.” But Judaism was still more infamous as the progenitor of Christianity and of religion in general—hence, the primary enemy of the reason that was the guiding principle of the Enlightenment. If Rousseau and Montesquieu were honorable exceptions to the prevailing antisemitism (the latter even qualifying as philosemitic), it was because they were not committed to the ideal of reason, thus less hostile to religion in general and Judaism in particular. The missing but dominant element in that liturgy of “liberty, equality and fraternity” was reason, which, in its animus against religion, could, on critical occasions, belie or violate the other principles.
As the heir of the Enlightenment, the revolution inherited its principles—and its ambiguities. These are encapsulated in the debate culminating in the enfranchisement of Jews in 1791, the “full citizenship” cited as one of the memorable achievements of the revolution. The first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, proclaimed in August 1789, pronounced all men “free and equal in rights”; the sixth declared “all citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, . . . equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations.” On the face of it, Jews seemed to be emancipated as “men” and enfranchised as “citizens.” The catch came in the word “citizens.”
Shortly after the declaration, the Constituent Assembly passed decrees distinguishing between “active” and “passive” citizens, only the former having the right to vote and bear arms. In addition to such criteria as age, residence, and taxes, the active citizen also had “to be or have become French.” That clause had special pertinence to Jews, raising the question of whether all Jews, or only some, were or had become French, therefore qualifying as active citizens. In January 1790, a debate on the subject was closed by Mirabeau, a leading member of the assembly, who declared the Jew a citizen only if he was more a man, un homme, than a Jew. A Jew who was more a Jew than un homme could not be a citizen; indeed, anyone who did not want to become un homme should be banished from the new society created by the revolution. The assembly concluded with a compromise provision. By a vote of 374 to 280, the rights of active citizenship were granted to the three or four thousand Sephardi Jews, specified as “Portuguese, Spanish and Avignonnais Jews.”
When the issue came up again the following year, the question focused on the much larger number of Ashkenazi Jews settled mainly in Alsace-Lorraine, who were more conspicuously Jewish. More religious than the Sephardi, less assimilated, and very much a community, the Ashkenazi were charged with being a “nation within a nation.” After a long debate, these thirty thousand Jews were declared citizens—as individuals, only if they gave up membership in a religious community. Count Clermont-Tonnerre, the deputy from Paris and the chief supporter of the motion, put the case most explicitly. Those Jews who wanted to be citizens had to “disavow their judges” and eliminate their “Jewish corporations.” “Jews, as individuals, deserve everything; Jews as a nation nothing. . . . There can only be the individual citizen.” This was the “full citizenship” that is now heralded as a landmark event in the history of Judaism and of France—Jews could be citizens, but not as Jews.
Thirty years later, after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the subject reappeared, in another country, another context, and with another cast of characters. Responding to a surge of antisemitism in Germany, the most eminent philosopher of the time came to the defense of the Jews. Having earlier propounded a philosophy that made reason (a very different reason from that of the philosophes) entirely compatible with religion, Hegel now, in Philosophy of Right, argued for the enfranchisement of Jews as a matter of right. It is as if he had the French decree of 1791 in mind as he now insisted upon their full enfranchisement, as Jews as well as men. Even if they were regarded as a “religious sect” or “foreign race,” this did not deny the fact that “they are, above all, men,” and as such each “a person with rights.” To exclude them from those rights would be a violation of their humanity, and to exclude them from full citizenship a violation of the state as a political institution.
Two decades later, one of Hegel’s former disciples, Bruno Bauer (a left-wing Hegelian, as he is now known), turned against the master, reverting, in effect, to the French Enlightenment’s disparaging view of religion in general and Judaism in particular. “The Jewish Question” (“Die Judenfrage“), published as an article in 1842 and a pamphlet the following year, is known today mainly because it inspired a critique under the same title by Marx, his former pupil. But Bauer’s essay was provocative enough on its own. Decrying all religion as illusory and pernicious, he declared Judaism to be the most degraded form of religion. Against those who defended Jews on the grounds that they had been oppressed and martyred, Bauer insisted that they had brought that condition upon themselves, provoking their enemies by their stubborn adherence to “their law, their language, their whole way of life.” While warring against Christianity, they had the audacity to claim citizenship on a par with Christians, asking the Christian state to abandon its religious principles while holding firmly to their own. Since religion itself was a denial of citizenship, Jews could not claim citizenship unless they ceased being Jews.
Marx’s critique of Bauer the following year gave a new twist to the “Jewish Question.” Bauer was being insufficiently radical in assuming that Jews could be enfranchised if they freed themselves of their religion; religious emancipation fell short of “human emancipation.” Bauer had considered only the “sabbath Jew.” The real problem was the “actual, secular Jew,” the “everyday Jew,” the Jew whose “worldly cult” was “bargaining” and whose “worldly god” was “money.” This was the “practical and real Judaism” from which not only Jews but society itself had to be emancipated. “The social emancipation of the Jew,” Marx concluded, “is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”
This was a dramatic finale to Marx’s “Jewish Question.” Jews were twice-damned, as Jews and as capitalists (“usurers,” as the stereotype had it). In retrospect, however, Bauer’s is really the more radical version, making Jewish identity—a religious, not merely social, identity—the primal source of antisemitism. It was his “Jewish Question” that underlies the equivocal status of Jews in France half-a-century earlier, as well as the perilous condition of Jews in France today.
If Americans can take any comfort in this dispiriting historical retrospect, it is in the thought of how exceptional (as we now say) American history has been—among other things, how different the American Enlightenment and Revolution were from those of the French. Far from seeing reason as antithetical to religion, American thinkers and statesmen, before and after the revolution, believed reason to be entirely compatible with religion and religion an integral part of society. It was just eight years before Bauer’s “Jewish Question” that Tocque-ville decisively refuted it, at least with respect to America. Unlike the philosophes, he wrote, who believed that “religious zeal . . . will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase,” Americans thought religion an ally of both freedom and enlightenment. The first thing that struck Tocqueville on his arrival in the United States was the religious nature of the country. “Among us [the French] I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another; they reigned together on the same soil.” The country where Christianity was most influential, he noted, was also “the most enlightened and free.”
Tocqueville, without ever mentioning Jews, may have had the last word on the Jewish question, as he did on so many others.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author, most recently, of The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill.
