1st Edition

Jewish Ideas of France Migration, Diaspora, and Empire

Edited By Meredith Scott, Nick Underwood Copyright 2025
298 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

298 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This innovative exploration of Jewish experiences in France and the Francophone world through nuanced questions and representations offers an intertwining of perspectives that challenge geographical, chronological, and theoretical boundaries. Engaging the transnational, it brings together studies highlighting the importance of migration, diaspora, identity, and empire for Jewish communities in... Read more

Introduction: The Varied Jewish Ideas of France
Meredith Scott and Nick Underwood

Part I: Identities

1. “They Are the Smart Set”: Female Society Portraiture and Jewish Class Aspirations in Nineteenth-Century France
Neta Peretz

2. Les angles morts de l’universalisme: Whiteness and Jewishness in Adolphe Crémieux’s Legal Writings
Noëmie Duhaut

3. Fascism and Antifascism: North African Jews and French Republican Values in the 1930s
Alma Rachel Heckman

4. Beyond a Jewish “Colonial Fracture”: Assimilation and Persecution in Roger Ikor and Albert Memmi’s 1955 Novels
Kat Raichlen

5. French Jewry Confronts the Separation of Church and State: Challenges and Opportunities
Zvi Jonathan Kaplan

6. Franco-Judaism: Diverse, in Flux, and Transnational
Martine Cohen and Emmanuel Bloch

Part II: Movements

7. Defying the Soviet Regime, Embracing the French Republic: Jewish-Russian Émigrés’ Publishing Activities in Interwar France
Alexandra Preitschopf

8. “Undesirables” in France: Ilse Bing, Luise Straus-Ernst, and German-Jewish Women During the Second World War
Julia Elsky and Alissa Schapiro

9. Mediterranean Crossings: Egyptian Jews and France
Aimée Israel-Pelletier

10. Mediating Migration, Brokering Belonging: The Moroccan Alliance Israélite Universelle Teachers’ Union, 1943–1964
Roy Orel Shukrun

11. The Politics of the Arab-Jew: Colonial Histories and Postcolonial Futures in North African Jewish Writing of the 1980s
Mendel Kranz

Biography

Meredith Scott is an Associate Professor of History at the US Air Force Academy, where she teaches European history, genocide, the Holocaust, and global history. Her book The Lifeline: Salomon Grumbach and the Quest for Safety (2022) examines interwar Jewish activism in the realms of human rights, refugees, and democracy.

Nick Underwood is an Assistant Professor of History and the Neilsen-Berger Chair of Judaic Studies at The College of Idaho. He has written widely on topics related to Yiddish culture in twentieth-century France, including his first book, Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France (2022; National Jewish Book Award finalist).