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“To Judge and to Be Judged”: Jewish Communal Autonomy in Metz and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Eighteenth-Century France

Once regarded as the defining feature of early modern Jewish life in Europe, communal autonomy has been viewed through the prism of a state within a state, or a nation within a nation. Within this conception, Jews retained the right to be judged by their own laws, and the states which they inhabited demarcated clear boundaries between secular and religious jurisdiction. Yet even before Jewish emancipation, the boundaries between secular and Jewish jurisdictions were not impermeable. Jews were well aware of the power wielded by secular authorities and of the potential benefits of stepping outside the Jewish community to present their cases in front of non-Jewish courts. The present study follows this uneven path, examining the internal strife of the Jewish community of Metz, as well as the triangular relationship that developed between the community, the local parlement, and the French monarch, Louis XV, during the mid-eighteenth century. It uses the experience of the French translation of Jewish law as a lens through which to understand the evolution of Jewish communal autonomy in Metz and the increasingly tense relationship between local and royal authority as the eighteenth century progressed. This episode, perhaps the penultimate chapter in a much longer history, directly challenged notions of sovereignty and forced the concept of legal coexistence to become a reality.