European Jews achieved civil emancipation during the nineteenth century, becoming equal citizens with all the rights and responsibilities of their Gentile compatriots. This book explores for the first time the impact of this emancipation on a traditional Jewish population largely untouched by secular culture. Focusing on the Jews of Alsace, Paula E. Hyman explores their patterns of acculturation and integration in both countryside and city, analyzing the political, social, and economic factors that not only reshaped their behavior and self-understanding but also sustained their traditional Jewish practice. Drawing on governmental sources, literature, memoirs, and communal records, Hyman relates the experiences of ordinary Jews-the cattle dealers, peddlers, and shopkeepers who lived in the villages and small towns of Alsace. She finds that these Jews resisted new outlooks and new spheres of activity, and that their transformation was far slower and more uneven than the rapid acculturation of Jewish urban elites discussed by previous historians. Hyman describes the Alsatian Jews' emergence from cultural and social isolation, the impact of migration and urbanization, their drift from religious orthodoxy, and the alliance of their community leaders with French authorities. Since European Jews were a largely rural population until after mid-century, Hyman's social history of a typical village society has important implications for understanding the development of Jewish modernity throughout Europe

Paula Hyman broadens and revises earlier analyses of Jewish assimilation, which depicted "the Jews" as though they were all men, by focusing on women and the domestic as well as the public realms. Surveying Jewish accommodations to new conditions in Europe and the United States in the years between 1850 and 1950, she retrieves the experience of women as reflected in their writings--memoirs, newspaper and journal articles, and texts of speeches--and finds that Jewish women's patterns of assimilation differed from men's and that an examination of those differences exposes the tensions inherent in the project of Jewish assimilation. Patterns of assimilation varied not only between men and women but also according to geographical locale and social class. Germany, France, England, and the United States offered some degree of civic equality to their Jewish populations, and by the last third of the nineteenth century, their relatively small Jewish communities were generally defined by their middle-class characteristics. In contrast, the eastern European nations contained relatively large and overwhelmingly non-middle-class Jewish population. Hyman considers how these differences between East and West influenced gender norms, which in turn shaped Jewish women's responses to the changing conditions of the modern world, and how they merged in the large communities of eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States. The book concludes with an exploration of the sexual politics of Jewish identity. Hyman argues that the frustration of Jewish men at their "feminization" in societies in which they had achieved political equality and economic success was manifested in their criticism of, and distancing from, Jewish women. The book integrates a wide range of primary and secondary sources to incorporate Jewish women's history into one of the salient themes in modern Jewish history, that of assimilation. The book is addressed to a wide audience: those with an interest in modern Jewish history, in women's history, and in ethnic studies and all who are concerned with the experience and identity of Jews in the modern world.

"The Jews of Modern France" explores the endlessly complex encounter of France and its Jews from just before the Revolution to the eve of the twenty-first century. In the late eighteenth century, some forty thousand Jews lived in scattered communities on the peripheries of the French state, not considered French by others or by themselves. Two hundred years later, in 1989, France celebrated the anniversary of the Revolution with the largest, most vital Jewish population in western and central Europe. Paula Hyman looks closely at the period that began when France's Jews were offered citizenship during the Revolution. She shows how they and succeeding generations embraced the opportunities of integration and acculturation, redefined their identities, adapted their Judaism to the pragmatic and ideological demands of the time, and participated fully in French culture and politics. Within this same period, Jews in France fell victim to a secular political antisemitism that mocked the gains of emancipation, culminating first in the Dreyfus Affair and later in the murder of one-fourth of them in the Holocaust. Yet up to the present day, through successive waves of immigration, Jews have asserted the compatibility of their French identity with various versions of Jewish particularity, including Zionism. This remarkable view in microcosm of the modern Jewish experience will interest general readers and scholars alike.