Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France is a history of the stories the French told about the Jews in their midst during the early nineteenth century. Using a novel cultural analysis that brings together pamphlets, newspaper articles, novels, and works of art, Julie Kalman focuses on the period that historians have explored the least, encompassing the years 1815-1848. Kalman shows that there were significant discussions surrounding France's Jewish population taking place during this period and argues that these discussions are central to our understanding of the history of the Jew's place in France. These stories also allow us to reflect on core questions of French history during this period, a time when the French were questioning the fundamental nature of their own identity.

“Seeks to further our understanding of the relationship between perceptions of Jews and the reality of their existence in nineteenth-century France.” —H-France Review Orientalizing the Jew shows how French travelers depicted Jews in the Orient and then brought these ideas home to orientalize Jews living in their homeland during the 19th century. Julie Kalman draws on narratives, personal and diplomatic correspondence, novels, and plays to show how the “Jews of the East” featured prominently in the minds of the French and how they challenged ideas of the familiar and the exotic. Portraits of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, romanticized Jewish artists, and the wealthy Sephardi families of Algiers come to life. These accounts incite a necessary conversation about Jewish history, the history of anti-Jewish discourses, French history, and theories of Orientalism in order to broaden understandings about Jews of the day. “A well-argued, beautifully written, and intellectually stimulating investigation of representations of Middle Eastern and North African Jews by French Catholic pilgrims, writers, artists, and bureaucrats over the 19th century.” —Maud Mandel, author of Muslims and Jews in France “Jews of France, nominally full citizens since the French Revolution . . . experienced uncertainty regarding whether their status would be reversed with each change of government . . . Kalman’s work contributes significantly to an understanding of that insecurity, as she fleshes out the stereotypes that others, officials, artists, authors and intellectuals, projected onto the Jews living among them inside France.” —French History

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 major cultural, ideological, and social changes that have occurred in Europe in the past century have generated widespread reassessment of European history in terms of its presuppositions, its methodologies, its directions, its emphases, and its scope. This timely volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment. It points to a new framework for the study of Jewish history and helps to contextualize it within the mainstream of historical scholarship.

Saint-Simonians were a group of young engineers and doctors who proposed original solutions to the social and banking crises of the early nineteenth century. Through an examination of the lives, ideals and activities of these men and women, the book analyses the influence of the Saint-Simonians on nineteenth-century French society.

This 1978 book examines the French Jewish writer Bernard-Lazare (1865-1903) and the Dreyfus Affair, in which he was instrumental. The book focuses on the writer's analysis of antisemitism where, initially, he argued for social assimilation only to reject this idea in favour of a concept of cultural pluralism.

The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish “outsiders” to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.