It was in Paris that the process of the legal emancipation of the Jews in Europe began. In 1791, the National Assembly extended to the Jews the “rights of man and of the citizen” that it had proclaimed in 1789. “For the first time in European history”, as the great Jewish historian Jacob Katz observed, “a Jewish group acquired unqualified citizenship.” Napoleon expanded the reach of these liberties to the countries that he conquered, though his record as a liberator was mitigated by certain restrictions and controls that he imposed on the Jewish community. In 1831, the equality of the Jewish religion with the Christian churches was established by law, when the French treasury became responsible for the salaries of Jewish clergy.

France, in other words, was the site of one of the great Jewish engagements with liberalism and one of the great liberal engagements with the Jews. For perfectly understandable reasons, the Jews wagered their happiness on the new philosophical and legal arrangements. Why would Jews, or any oppressed minority, not wish to believe in the mutability of history, in its amenability to the progressive will?

And so the Jews of France came to count themselves among the champions of modernity and its benevolence. The problem, as is well known, was that they discovered also modernity’s malevolence. The legal acceptance of the Jews turned out not to entail their social and cultural acceptance. The integration of Jews into French society, which according to legend was largely harmonious, was never without friction, or worse. The Enlightenment was no less pervaded by anti-Semitism than the Counter-Enlightenment was. The liberal revolution of 1848 unleashed virulent expressions of Jew-hatred. Socialism, too, proved hospitable to the poison.

By the end of the 19th century, French anti-Semitism achieved a fearful prominence in French culture, as Jews were scapegoated by the forces of reaction for the ruptures and the dislocations of republican (and urban) life. All this culminated in the infamous and hideous frenzy of the Dreyfus affair. And despite the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus and the vindication of the Dreyfusards, there soon occurred an ominous revival of anti-Semitism, which set the stage for the darkest hours of all, when France—as Jacques Chirac famously said in 1995 in a commemoration of the most notorious of the deportations of French Jews during the Holocaust—“breaking its word, delivered those under its protection to their executioners.”

Nor was the rise of anti-Semitism to cultural and political prestige the only disappointment for the Jewish belief in France. Even in its origins, the enfranchisement of the Jews in France came with an outrageous condition. Citizenship was premised on a significant degree of self-erasure. The most eloquent advocate for Jewish rights at the National Assembly in 1791, a revolutionary aristocrat named Clermont-Tonnerre, who ringingly declared that Jews “must be citizens,” also stipulated that “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” In 1807, the bizarre Sanhedrin that Napoleon convened in Paris reassured the emperor that “Israel no longer forms a nation,” by which they meant a corporate entity not assimilable to the host country. Juifs became israelites, or more specifically francais israelites, or Frenchmen of Jewish origin. The attenuation of the particularities of Jewish identity, the dream of their disappearance, haunted the universalism of the French civic ideal, and compromised it.