| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Frederic Cople Jaher. The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 295. $45.00.

This comparative study of the treatment of Jews in America and France between 1775 and 1815 argues that America was tolerant while France was intolerant. Whereas Americans welcomed Jews into their pluralistic society, or at least regarded them with benign indifference, Frederic Cople Jaher argues, the French expressed doubts about the ability of Jews to be good citizens. There is little historiographical originality in this dual claim. After all, in 1968 Arthur Hertzberg branded the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution as antisemitic movements—despite the inconvenient fact that France was the first European country to recognize the civil and political equality of Jews and non-Jews (The French Enlightenment and the Jews [1968]). Forty years earlier, Robert Anchel (Napoléon et les juifs [1928]) showed more plausibly, although less surprisingly, that Napoleon Bonaparte, who oppressed millions of people, also discriminated against Jews. (Jaher does not cite Anchel. He does not cite any secondary literature in French and mostly relies on translations for primary sources as well.) The implications for an understanding of France during the revolutionary period are equally unexciting. For more than two decades, since François Furet (Interpreting the French Revolution [1981]) highlighted the revolution's previously ignored authoritarian tendencies, historians have found it easy to argue that the French Revolution was oppressive, although the case of the Jews is a curious one to use in support of this claim.

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