A01=Maurice Samuels
affiliation
algeria
antisemitism
assimilation
Author_Maurice Samuels
badiou
belonging
Category=JBSR
citizenship
civil rights
community
culture
difference
discrimination
dreyfus affair
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equality
erasure
ethnicity
europe
finkielkraut
France
French Revolution
history
integration
islam
jewish star
jewishness
judaism
la grande illusion
literature
loyalty
minority
muslim
nation
national identity
nonfiction
race
renoir
sartre
universalism
vichy
zola
Product details
- ISBN 9780226397054
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 02 Nov 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Universal equality is a treasured political concept in France, but recent anxiety over the country's Muslim minority has led to an emphasis on a new form of universalism, one promoting loyalty to the nation at the expense of all ethnic and religious affiliations. This timely book offers a fresh perspective on the debate by showing that French equality has not always demanded an erasure of differences. Through close and contextualized readings of the way that major novelists, philosophers, filmmakers, and political figures have struggled with the question of integrating Jews into French society, Maurice Samuels draws lessons about how the French have often understood the universal in relation to the particular. Samuels demonstrates that Jewish difference has always been essential to the elaboration of French universalism, whether as its foil or as proof of its reach. He traces the development of this discourse through key moments in French history, from debates over granting Jews civil rights during the Revolution, through the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy, and up to the rise of a "new antisemitism" in recent years.
By recovering the forgotten history of a more open, pluralistic form of French universalism, Samuels points toward new ways of moving beyond current ethnic and religious dilemmas and argues for a more inclusive view of what constitutes political discourse in France.
Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University. He is the author of The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France and Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France.
