2011 Theses Bachelor's

To judge and to be judged': Jewish Communal Autonomy in Metz and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Eighteenth-Century France

Katz, Jordan

Historians have cast the story of Jewish communal autonomy in various lights. Once regarded as the defining feature of early modern Jewish life in Europe, communal autonomy has been viewed through the prism of a state within a state, or a nation within a nation. Within this conception, Jews retained the right to be judged by their own laws, and the states which they inhabited demarcated clear boundaries between secular and religious jurisdiction.

French Jewish emancipation following the French Revolution was, in this view, entirely transformative as the pivotal moment when French Jewish society received equal status under the law. To quote Jacob Katz, “the transformation of Jewish society from prerevolutionary state represents perhaps the greatest upheaval of any sector of European society at that time.”