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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.

Explores the relationship between Judaism, state, and education in France from the establishment of the Jewish Consistory in 1808 until the separation of church and state in 1905.

From the very moment Alfred Dreyfus was placed under arrest for treason and espionage, his entire world was turned upside down, and for the next five years he lived in what he called a phantasmagoria. To keep himself sane, Dreyfus wrote letters to and received letters from his wife Lucie and exercised his intellect through reading the few books and magazines his censors allowed him, writing essays on these and other texts he had read in the past, and working out problems in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. He practiced his English and created strange drawings his prison wardens called architectural or kabbalistic signs. In this volume, Norman Simms explores how Dreyfus kept himself from exploding into madness by reading his essays carefully, placing them in the context of his century, and extrapolating from them the hidden recesses of the Jewish Alsatian background he shared with the Dreyfus family and Lucie Hadamard.

The wars of the twentieth century uprooted people on a previously unimaginable scale to the extent that being a refugee became an increasingly widespread experience. With the arrival of refugees, governments of host countries had to mediate between divided national populations: some wished to welcome those arriving in search of refuge; others preferred a strategy of exclusion or even expulsion. At the same time, refugees had to manage conflicts of the self as they responded to the loss of nat.

In the late eighteenth century, Jewish authors in France and Prussia started to articulate their political ideas through polemics against the Catholic Church. The fact that Jews were able to employ anticlerical tropes despite their precarious legal and social position underscores the importance of anticlerical polemics for the emergence of new forms of civic belonging in a period when Jews became, or dreamed of becoming, citizens for the first time. Anti-Catholicism served as an expression of new horizontal alliances with other social groups and-—in the case of France-—of Jews' dedication to a state defined against anti-revolutionary clergy. Unlike antisemites in the late nineteenth century, who denounced Jews for dividing the nation with their anti-Catholicism, Enlightenment thinkers accepted the anticlericalism of Jews such as Moses Mendelssohn because they saw it as proof of Jews' ability to transcend parochial Jewish concerns.

This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, with emphasis placed on his own writings, including his recently published prison workbooks and his letters to his wife Lucie.Through close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive, intellectual, and Jewish man is revealed than was previously suspected.

Political events in Italy influenced the way the Dreyfus case and the so-called 'Dreyfusard Revolution' were perceived by Italian intellectuals, while events in France influenced the way in which some sectors of Italian political culture interpreted the crisis at the end of the century, and the clash between authoritarian conservatism and democratic liberalism Focusing on those sectors which saw the French Revolution as the beginning of civil and political humanism - the essence of modernity - shows that the myth of modernity was at the centre of Italian political culture regarding the Dreyfus case. The French crisis was interpreted as a global conflict between opposing concepts of man and politics, at stake being the destiny of humanity during a period of change threatening to shatter the pillars of traditional society, dragged through the vortex of modernity. (Quotes from original text)