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“Fools for Love of the Republic”?

This English translation of Pierre Birnbaum's seminal work, Les Fous de la Republique: Histoire Politique des Juifs d'Etat ("The Fools of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews" [Paris, 1992]), constitutes an important contribution to two themes that have dominated the study of modern French Jewry: the nature of Franco-Jewish assimilation, and the character and function of antisemitism. Ever since the publication of Michael R. Marrus's important book, The Politics of Assimilation (Oxford, 1971), which argued that the majority of nineteenth-century French Jews submerged their particularist Jewish identities in favor of a more universal French republican identity, French Jews have been depicted as the most highly assimilated of all European Jews. Birnbaum's study, which draws on a rich array of previously untapped sources, and most innovatively on the administrative dossiers of 171 Jews who held civil and military posts under the Third Republic (1871—1940), reveals, however, that the integration of Jews into French society was a far more complex process than Marrus suggested. To be sure, according to Birnbaum, there were some Jews who endeavored to efface completely their Jewish identities in favor of the universalist and rationalist values associated with the French Revolution of 1789, and especially with the Third Republic. As the radical secularist and free-thinker Paul Grunebaum-Ballin declared when confronted with the antisemitic legislation of the Vichy regime: "I refuse categorically to consider