Reviewed by David Waldstreicher | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4

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Reviewed by David Waldstreicher | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and France. By FREDERIC COPLE JAHER. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. x, 312. $ 45.00.) Reviewed by David Waldstreicher , University of Notre Dame
Historians have long lamented the paucity of comparative historical studies, especially of phenomena like nationalism, revolutions, and political culture. Increasingly such work has been left to sociologists and political scientists. The Jews and the Nation is a useful reminder why most historians do not pick up the loaded dice of national comparison.	1
Frederic Jaher begins by lamenting the "microtopical" approach to United States history taken by his colleagues. Attention to oppressed groups leads, he argues, away from larger themes and from events themselves. He offers a slightly qualified defense of Alexis de Tocqueville's and Louis Hartz's basic points about the liberal nature of American society and how it followed from the moderate nature of the American Revolution. The experience of Jews in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France and the United States, he argues, reaffirms Tocquevillian and Hartzian distinctions between the two countries. American citizenship is liberal because it is individualistic and assumes plurality. French citizenship, though not based in romantic notions of blood and land like the later-blooming German variety, sought to assimilate every individual into the category of the people. Because of this totalizing, intolerant strain, France "repeatedly succumbed to antirepublicanism." American democracy, by contrast, "eventually broadened without fundamental upheavals" (p. 45). We have heard it before: "The United States had no medieval past" (p.148); thus illiberal Europe, liberal America.	2
Jaher believes that these results also flowed directly from founding era debates among elites in both nations, which form the majority of his primary sources. Drawing on recent scholarship in French and Jewish history, he argues convincingly over two chapters that the emancipation of French Jewry and its extension by Napoleon's codes and his armies did not really entail freedom or civic equality. As a potentially problematic "nation within a nation" (p. 135), Jews were urged, and sometimes forced, to surrender aspects of their communal autonomy. That they succeeded in preserving their group cohesion reflects only the limits of the French revolutionary transformation of society. Although Jews represented just one-sixth of 1 percent of France's population, insists Jaher, their treatment is a "metaphor for French society," a "microcosm of the Revolution" (p. 136). On the American scene, Jaher dispatches the early republic and its even smaller numbers of Jews in fewer than forty pages. Established traits in American society—the embrace of mobility, the reality of religious pluralism, federalism, and distrust of government—gradually emancipated the Jews. As a result, they acculturated faster.	3
Only this latter dimension, with its intimations of assimilation and disappearance into individuality, makes the description of American Jewish exceptionalism advanced here different from what I read in Jewish religious school textbooks during the 1970s. Thus I was not surprised to see Jaher praise the new Israeli nation for preserving "at least for its citizens (the majority of the inhabitants), democratic rule" (p.218).	. . .

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