As debates have opened up in contemporary political discourse about the relationship between Islam and modernity, historians have been prompted to take a fresh look at nineteenth-century polemics about the Catholic Church. Many have argued that anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism were forged in transnational networks. Looking beyond the national frame, historians of the culture wars which pitted liberals against Catholics in nineteenth-century Europe have made a persuasive case for the importance of cross-border linkages and exchange1. Ari Joskowicz’s brilliant new work “The Modernity of Others: Jewish anti-Catholicism in Germany and France” builds on some of this scholarship, but offers a distinctive and innovative contribution in its own right.

The core of Joskowicz’s argument is that we need to take Jewish anti-Catholicism seriously as an ideology. This is an original case for, as he explains, the dominant historiography sees Jewish anti-Catholicism largely as a defensive response to Catholic anti-Semitism. Joskowicz, in contrast, treats anti-Catholicism as a “foundational element of modern Jewish politics” (p. 3), in the process writings Jews into the culture wars as a “highly visible third party” (p. 2). Drawing on a dizzying range of sources, he examines the different ways in which Jewish public figures – scholars, rabbis, journalists, politicians – deployed anti-Catholicism as a political language. At certain moments, anti-Catholicism became a weapon in the battle for civil rights; at others, as a means of marking out positions in intra-Jewish conflicts. But fundamentally, Jews seized on the cultural tropes which depicted Catholicism as medieval and backward to stake their own claim for modernity. By combating Catholicism, a church which would never shed its medieval nature, Jews could establish their status as rational, progressive and loyal members of the nation-state.

The second original feature of this study is Joskowicz’s attempt to write an entangled history of French and German Jews and their respective attitude to Catholicism. This is a brave undertaking, for the two nations were divided on so many points, not least their confessional identity and their very different histories of Church-State relations. But it pays off as Joskowicz brings to light common reactions as well as points of exchange and interaction. He follows, for example, the influence among German Jews of the Frenchman Joseph Salvador, author of a history of the Hebrew people which was suffused with anticlericalism. With each key event that incited Jewish anticlericalism – the Damascus Affair, the first Vatican Council, the Kulturkampf – Joskowicz charts the similarities in the French and German response, as well as, at times, their reciprocal influence.

At the same time, Joskowicz is rightly sensitive to moments of divergence. In the context of shared fears about Christian conversion of Jews at mid-century, for example, Joskowicz concludes that Jewish intellectuals and activists in the two nations at mid-century failed to forge a sense of working together in a common project. German Jews were just as concerned about Protestant as Catholic proselytism, and, in contrast to their French co-religionists, did not have recourse to a language of anticlericalism to combat it.

This is a study that challenges our approach to the history of French and German Jews, but also to the history of anticlericalism. Building on much recent scholarship, the book unsettles the traditional methodological distinction between anti-Catholicism and anticlericalism. Of course, the two concepts are not identical: anticlericalism could be directed at all churches or religious organisations, and often articulated a set of political and social reforms that went beyond opposition to Catholicism. Yet as Joskowicz demonstrates, the distinction can be unhelpful. Throughout the nineteenth century, anticlericals saw the Catholic Church above all others as the main obstacle. No other Church seemed so aggressively opposed to the liberal and nationalising project of the nineteenth-century; no other Church evoked so powerfully, for better or worse, Europe’s lost medieval past. Moving, as Joskowicz has done, beyond any hard division between anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism has the reward of bringing to light a host of neglected interactions and exchanges.

This is a rich and provocative work, and criticisms may seem churlish. Some are minor, and spring more from the vagaries of modern publishers and their copy-editing processes. The Protestant family pursued by the Jesuits in Eugène Sue’s “Le juif errant” was named Rennepont, not Renneport; what should be ‘polite conversation’ has become ‘polite conservation’ and so on. More fundamentally, we might question the extent to which this is a truly entangled history. At many points it feels more like a traditional comparative study, with the two nations laid side by side. As mentioned, this is not always so; in certain cases, Joskowicz pursues interactions and borrowings across the border. But juxtaposition more than entanglement is the rule here.

A second criticism concerns the focus in the conclusion of the book on the official representatives of the Jewish community. At least in the French context, this has the effect of sidelining individual Jews who did not hold such a position, but who continued to be important and active in the anticlerical movement. Here one could cite the French Jew Paul Grunebaum-Ballin, author of a section of the report of the Briand Commission which formed the basis of the 1905 law separating Church and State in France. In his memoirs, Grunebaum-Ballin wrote of his debt to the république laïque which had, in his mind, opened the possibility of his becoming a full and equal member of the nation. But his republican loyalties did not preclude an ongoing sense of Jewish identity. This part of the book might have been made even richer by incorporating figures who, like Grunebaum-Ballin, were less directly engaged in communal politics.

These are minor criticisms however. Joskowicz has written a very fine study which will greatly interest scholars of Jewish, French and German history, anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism and more broadly, the development of secularism. It is an exciting period when we see works with this level of scholarship and ambition.

Note:
1 Christopher Clark / Wolfram Kaiser (eds.), Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in 19th Century Europe, Cambridge 2003; Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus. Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe, Göttingen, 2010; Yvonne Maria Werner / Jonas Harvard (eds), European Anti-Catholicism in a Comparative and Transnational Perspective, Amsterdam 2013; Lisa Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Säkularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848–1914), Göttingen 2014.