Jews, Modernity, and the Fiction of Ben-Levi
This article presents the work of Ben-Lévi [pseud. Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878], who published a series of short stories in the Archives Israélites de France, the leading French Jewish newspaper, during the 1840s. One of the first Jews to write fiction in French, Ben-Lévi offers a portrait of a community caught between tradition and progress. Combining the "realist" literary codes of Balzac with the "idealist" codes of Sand, his stories hold up a critical mirror to the assimilating Jewish bourgeoisie of the era and show how a reformed Judaism could help resolve the dilemmas of modernity. Ben-Lévi's forgotten fictions reveal the agency and creativity of nineteenth-century French Jews in the face of momentous social change while also demonstrating the versatility of French literary models. (MS)
The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century
One of the richest sources of information on how Jews of the period between Napoleon and Dreyfus lived.
Dual heritage or duel of heritages? Englishness and Jewishness in the heritage industry
The construction of an Anglo‐Jewish heritage in the 1890s was part of the struggle against exclusionary tendencies in English culture and politics. Continuing efforts to meld Anglo‐Jewish with English heritage from the 1900s to the 1940s were influenced by the imperative of communal defence and resulted in a distorted historiography along with a selective approach to the preservation of archives and monuments.