(Ebook) Challenges of Equality: Judaism, State, and Education in Nineteenth-Century France by Jeffrey Haus ISBN 081433380X

(Ebook) Challenges of Equality: Judaism, State, and Education in Nineteenth-Century France by Jeffrey Haus ISBN 081433380X

Historians have typically characterized nineteenth-century French Jewry as largely eager to assimilate, or, at the very least, passively accommodating to assimilation, with only the most traditional Jews rejecting the trappings of French culture. Through the lens of Jewish primary and rabbinical education, author Jeffrey Haus shows that even integrated French Jews sought to set limits on assimilation and struggled to preserve a sense of Jewish distinctiveness in France. Challenges of Equality argues that Jewish leaders couched their views in terms that the government could understand and accept, portraying a Judaism consistent with the goal of cultural and political unification of the French nation. At the same time, their educational activities asserted the existence of distinctively Jewish cultural space.