Lisa Moses Leff

Jewish Solidarity in Nineteenth‐Century France: The Evolution of a Concept*

Jewish solidarity has become so integral to Jewish identity that it is usually assumed to be a natural, unchanging part of what it means to be Jewish. Yet, although Jews have always felt responsible for one another in important ways, they only began to use the term “solidarity” to describe those feelings in the second half of the nineteenth century, in France. Using the term reflected more than just the adoption of a new vocabulary. It also reflected a negotiation of French political concepts, through which French Jews rooted Jewish identity in modern political culture. Unlike their ancestors, Jews in nineteenth-century France were no longer legally defined as Jewish, and their understanding of what it meant to be Jewish, the relationship between Judaism and the state, and the purpose of Jewish international connection were all radically reshaped by the experience of emancipation and integration. In using the word “solidarity,” French Jewish leaders redefined an aspect of Jewishness in terms that had just become meaningful in French politics. Since the early 1840s, “solidarity” was used as a political rallying cry for socialists and republicans. Thinkers in these traditions attempted to lend new legitimacy to associations by describing them as building blocks of the new world order that the French had sought to establish since the Revolution. They also developed a new kind of religiosity that fused elements of Revolutionary thought with traditional Catholic notions. By using the term “solidarity” to describe the bonds between dispersed Jews, French Jews were attempting to describe Judaism in this new conversational context. Delving into the history of how Jews came to embrace the term “solidarity” sheds light on the complicated path of French Jewish integration. In so doing, I seek to build on the work of historians who have demonstrated that the process of integration did not erase Jewish identity, nor did it relegate Jewishness strictly to the “private” realm of personal faith or domestic practice, as had been previously assumed. Rather, this was a more complicated process in