Writings of Yehuda Shabatay   Yehuda Shabatay      List of honorees     Louis Rose Society       Jewishsightseeing home  San Diego Jewish Times

Our Past in Present Tense

The French Revolution and the Jews

The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution, by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, 341 pages, University of California Press, $55 (less on line).

Dr. Yehuda Shabatay                                                                               books
 San Diego Jewish Times, February 24, 2006

Books and courses that deal with Jewish history typically concentrate on the biblical and the post-biblical periods (c. 1800 BCE-200 CE), jump to the 19th and 20th centuries, and then give only slight attention to the time in-between. A couple of exceptions may be a focus on the Golden Age in Spain and the development of the Eastern European communities. But neither authors nor instructors discuss Jewish life in Western Europe prior to and during the French Revolution in particular detail. For that reason alone, I was eager to open Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s recent work on The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism, which was published a few months ago with a generous contribution by the Jewish Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Associates.

Furthermore, I wished to read this book because I happen to know Professor Sepinwall, who teaches history at California State University, San Marcos, as a devoted scholar and a committed Jew. I was not disappointed. The book conveys the author’s enthusiasm for her subject and provides a most exciting insight into the issues French Jews faced at a crucial period of time in our history. And I am pleased to state that its style is most attractive to lay readers and scholars alike. It certainly challenged me to learn more about the French revolutionaries’ and Napoleon’s attitude to the Jews.

As to the book’s main character, I admit that I had never heard of Henri Gregoire before. Now I understand that he was born in 1750 to a family of modest means, in the province of Lorraine, which together with the neighboring Alsace, changed hands between the Germans and the French several times in modern history. Although Gregoire began his career as a simple parish priest, he became a central figure in the French Revolution (1789). He presided over the National Assembly during the storming of the Bastille, and authored some of the most famous reports on revolutionary cultural policy. As a result, he had considerable influence on Christianizing the Revolution and on extending full citizenship to all men under French domain.

The first time he became involved with anything related to the Jews was when, at the age of 37, he entered a contest sponsored by the Metz Academy on the topic: “Are there ways of making the Jews more useful and happier in France?” Gregoire’s second entry to the contest, which shared the top prize, was based on Christian theology as well as on the ideals of the Enlightenment. He suggested “that groups like the Jews who were seen as degenerated needed special help… before they could be fully included in the social body” (p. 56). By taking this stand, “Gregoire charted a middle path between writers who had insisted that Jews were no different in any regard from (or, in some regards were perhaps even better than) other Europeans, and others who saw Jews as incorrigible usurers and Christ-killers who could never be included in civil society. His middle position — an inclusion managed by regeneration — would be adopted by the Revolution” (p. 57).

 “Regeneration,” at first a religious and then a medical term, became a key concept in the revolutionaries’ dictionary. The revolutionaries were convinced that while all human beings were entitled to equality, certain groups of people had to undergo moral and even long-term biological changes. Otherwise, those groups “would endanger the state if not reformed” (p. 73). While Gregoire maintained that the Catholic priesthood, too, needed “regeneration,” his demands of women, the Jews, and the “people of color” (most of whom were slaves), went much farther. After the Sephardim (the Jews of Spanish and of non-European descent), were granted the rights of “active citizens” in January 1790, he blamed the Ashkenazim (of Western and Eastern European origin) for not attaining the same rights. “He noted that he wished them well, but that it was necessary to ‘dissolve them into the national mass’ instead of allowing them to remain a culturally definable group” (p. 95). As it turned out, the Assembly decided to enfranchise all Jews in September 1791.

Though Gregoire stood up for the ultimate acceptance of every human being into the fold, in his greatest work, The History of Religious Sects, he concentrated on the errors of each religion — beside his own, Catholicism. In his desire to make “wayward Christians” see the light, and to bring Jews and Muslims into the Church, he scorned the religious practices of all outsiders. He criticized the Jews’ supposed exclusivity, tried “to prove that the Church has been their most constant defender, notwithstanding their betrayal of Jesus,” and urged the Jews “to move toward Christianity, if not convert outright” (p. 205).

Professor Sepinwall’s analysis of the French revolutionaries’ attitude to the Jews includes references to Napoleon’s decision to reconvene the Sanhedrin (Supreme religious body) after it ceased to exist for almost 14 centuries, and the key questions the Emperor posed to them in order to assure their faithfulness to the land of their domicile that was under French rule. Ultimately, the author provides us with a present-day view of Gregoire’s work, which is of great current value. Our generation, too, faces “friends” who while they support Israel, anticipate the ultimate “regeneration” of all Jews, the day in which we will “see the light” and get rid of all our misunderstandings.

I was particularly touched by the author’s conclusion: “If we retain Gregoire’s passionate belief in human equality… we still need to figure out ways to create sustainable human communities, without requiring a cultural homogenization that can lead both to cultural impoverishment and to deadly resentments” (p. 237). Can we ever reach the point where society no longer expects everyone to become “more like us?” Will we ever forgive minorities for being “different?” These are not philosophical speculations. History has taught us that our very existence depends on the answers our fellow citizens provide, because as long as others see us as “different,” we are in danger.

Dr. Yehuda Shabatay received rabbinical training in Budapest, a master of jurisprudence degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his doctorate in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He was engaged in Jewish educational administration over most of his career and now teaches Jewish studies and history at Palomar College and San Diego State University.