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The many different prayer books published throughout the nineteenth century for the Jews of France mirror the changing identity of French Jews after the 1791 Emancipation. By examining what Genette called the paratext, this study presents a typology of pragmatic, conservative, reformist, and didactic models based on the way each chose to insert and use French translations to respond to the major issues faced by French Jewry: assimilation; the rapid decline in knowledge of Hebrew; the conflicting drives to maintain or eliminate regional and confessional variations; and the education of future generations, including women. Although these issues were dealt with in ideologically different manners, the authors of these works, and the works themselves, often embodied more than one trend, thus reflecting the complexities faced by the Jewish communities themselves.

This book is the first systematic comparison of the civic integration of Jews in the United States and France--specifically, from the two countries' revolutions through the American republic and the Napoleonic era (1775-1815). Frederic Jaher develops a vehicle for a broader and uniquely rich analysis of French and American nation-building and political culture. He returns grand theory to historical scholarship by examining the Jewish encounter with state formation and Jewish acquisition of civic equality from the perspective of the \"paradigm of liberal inclusiveness\" as formulated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Louis Hartz.

Jews and the Militaryis the first comprehensive and comparative look at Jews' involvement in the military and their attitudes toward war from the 1600s until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Derek Penslar shows that although Jews have often been described as people who shun the army, in fact they have frequently been willing, even eager, to do military service, and only a minuscule minority have been pacifists. Penslar demonstrates that Israel's military ethos did not emerge from a vacuum and that long before the state's establishment, Jews had a vested interest in military affairs. Spanning Europe, North America, and the Middle East, Penslar discusses the myths and realities of Jewish draft dodging, how Jews reacted to facing their coreligionists in battle, the careers of Jewish officers and their reception in the Jewish community, the effects of World War I on Jewish veterans, and Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Penslar culminates with a study of Israel's War of Independence as a Jewish world war, which drew on the military expertise and financial support of a mobilized, global Jewish community. He considers how military service was a central issue in debates about Jewish emancipation and a primary indicator of the position of Jews in any given society. Deconstructing old stereotypes,Jews and the Militaryradically transforms our understanding of Jews' historic relationship to war and military power.

Exploring how Algerian Jews responded to and appropriated France's newly conceived \"civilizing mission\" in the mid-nineteenth century, Arabs of the Jewish Faith shows that the ideology, while rooted in French Revolutionary ideals of regeneration, enlightenment, and emancipation, actually developed as a strategic response to the challenges of controlling the unruly and highly diverse populations of Algeria's coastal cities.

Feminism's Empire investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing \"pro-imperialist\" and \"anti-imperialist\" as binary positions . By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed-yet employed-approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of \"nature\" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.

The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

The confluence of Jews and Communism has long been noted by scholars. However, most historiography has treated European contexts, with the addition of some work on the Americas and the Yishuv, but neglected the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Works that do purport to survey and compare the phenomenon across contexts have typically given the MENA short shrift. Further, most discussion of leftist Jewish politics halts after World War II, just when the story is gaining momentum in the MENA, particularly within anticolonial movements. In this article, I draw on Hannah Arendt's work on the so-called conscious pariah to bridge historiographies and link leftist Jews in the MENA, the Americas, and Europe. Using archival sources, newspapers, oral histories, and novels, I present Jewish involvement in the Parti Communist Marocain as a case study to examine the complications of Jewish involvement in leftist politics in concentric geographic, temporal, and historiographic circles. In so doing, I seek to complicate the story of Jewish attraction to internationalism and universalism and the reconciliation of Jewish affiliations and identities with the nation-state and the colonial.

Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that emancipation posed for traditional Jewish beliefs became evident. In the 1830s, a more comprehensive ideology of regeneration emerged through the efforts of younger Jewish scholars and intellectuals. A response to the social and religious implications of emancipation, it was characterized by the demand for the elimination of rituals that violated the French conceptions of civilization and social integration; a drive for greater administrative centralization; and the quest for inter-communal and ethnic unity. In its various elements, regeneration formed a distinct ideology of emancipation that was designed to mediate Jewish interaction with French society and culture. Jay Berkovitz reveals the complexities inherent in the processes of emancipation and modernization, focusing on the efforts of French Jewish leaders to come to terms with the social and religious implications of modernity. All in all, his emphasis on the intellectual history of French Jewry provides a new perspective on a significant chapter of Jewish history.