The Jews, the Revolution, and the Old Regime in French Anti-Semitism and Durkheim's Sociology

Abstract

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist,Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews."The fundamental ideas of European sociology," Robert Nisbet (1966:21) argued, "are best understood as responses to the problem of order created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the collapse of the old regime" under the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. Much the same could be said about nineteenth-century European anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism, the historian Stephen Wilson (1982) has suggested, was "a rejection of modern society, as antisemites conceived and experienced it" (1982:613), which offered a "mythical explanation and a scapegoat" to account for and exorcise poorly understood processes of social change (1982:635). But even when modernity was interpreted in less threatening and more positive terms as an emancipatory and progressive development, the Jews could serve equally well to signify the threat of restoration and reaction. Moreover, this function of the Jews as symbols of modernity or its antithesis was not unique to anti-Semitism; within classical sociological theory, too, the Jews were identified, for example, with capitalist modernization (Marx, Sombart) or, conversely, with a traditionalistic economic ethos (Weber). All of this suggests that European sociology not only emerged alongside of and within the same milieu as nineteenthcentury European anti-Semitism, but also in relation to it. This would mean that the ideas of European sociology and anti-Semitism were not only responses to the same revolutions; they were also responses to each other.