A Short History of Jewish France

Early and Medieval France

If we think about European Jewish history at all, most of us don't associate France with a significant part of that history. However, there have been Jews in France since the earliest years of the Common Era, and in terms of Jewish scholarship, France was one of the most important centers of European Jewish life — the home of world-famous rabbis and yeshivas, including Rabbi Shlomo Itzchaki (Solomon, son of Isaac), known by the acronym Rashi. To this day, Rashi is considered one of the greatest commentators on the Torah.

The sweep of Jewish history in France begins nearly two millennia ago. Though very early evidence of Jewish settlement in France is sketchy at best, and abundant hard physical evidence doesn't really crop up until the fifth century, there is enough to point to the existence of a Jewish community or at least groups of Jews in France in those earliest times. There are even some documents that indicate that Jews may have lived in such geographically disparate cities as Metz, Poitiers, and Avignon as early as the first and fourth centuries. From the fifth century, historians have recognizable evidence of Jewish settlement in Brittany, Clermont-Ferrand, Narbonne, Agde, Valence, and Orléans.

From the fifth century until 751, the Merovingians, a dynasty of Frankish kings, ruled part of France. Clovis I (481–511), founder of the monarchy and grandson of the Franks' chief, Meroveus, converted to Catholicism in 496 and with him most of the rest of the population. Of course this meant that Jews living in the kingdom at the time would have come under the same pressure to convert, and the alternatives to conversion were far from attractive. Bishop Avitus of Clermont-Ferrand, for example, offered the five hundred Jews of his town a choice between baptism and expulsion. That tactic was repeated throughout the Franks' kingdom. Most Jews chose expulsion. Some evidence suggests that a later Merovingian king, Dagobert I (612–39), tried the convert-or-get-out strategy, too, but no details are known about this.

Despite the difficulties — only a taste of what was to come over the next centuries — there was a significant increase in the Jewish population of France in this early period, arising from immigration of Jews from Italy, Spain, and other parts of the Roman Empire, and conversions to Judaism among slaves and members of the poorer classes.

The seventh century saw the demise of the Merovingians and the rise of the Carolingian dynasty under Pépin le Bref (Pépin the Short). Though the dynasty would die out in France by 987, this period proved to be a good one for the kingdom's Jews. It was Pépin's son Charlemagne (Charles the Great) who, through his invasion of Italy to support Pope Leo III, his Christianizing of the Saxons, and his conquest of northern Spain and Bavaria, laid the groundwork for the Holy Roman Empire. As emperor, Charlemagne reigned over a kingdom in which intellectual and artistic pursuits flourished, and with them, the kingdom's Jews. So complete was Jewish integration into the economy that they did business with the royal court, held imperial ambassadorships, and worked in the administration of Catholic organizations. Jews even produced wine for the Mass — viticulture being an almost exclusively Jewish occupation at the time.

During that period, there was a real disparity among attitudes of the king, the locals, and Church officials concerning the Jews. Try as it might, the organized Church was largely unsuccessful in its efforts to stir up anti-Jewish sentiment among the populace, and historians point to this lack of success as evidence of friendly personal and professional relations between Jews and Christians. For example, the Church councils of Meux and Paris in 845 and 846 C.E. tried to implement anti-Jewish legislation, but King Charles the Bald (840–77) would have none of it. Later, on both ends of the eleventh century, Bishops Fulbert and Ivo gave anti-Jewish sermons, promulgated anti-Jewish canons, and preached against Jewish influence in the town of Chartres, near Paris. Neither bishop was taken very seriously.

But that would not always be the case.

For many centuries French Jewry was at the forefront of Jewish scholarship, and in the eleventh century it began to come into its own. The centers of French Jewish learning were in both northern (Troyes) and southern (Narbonne) France. Jewish scholars produced commentaries on the Talmud and on the Torah, and discussions of rabbinical decisions and Jewish liturgy. Those works were the talk of the Jewish scholarly world, and in some cases the Christian, too.

Rashi

Ra(Rabbi)Sh(lomo)I(tzchaki) (1040–1105), the son of a scholarly Jewish family, was born in Troyes, once the capital of Champagne. After going to school in Troyes and then the Talmudic academies of Mainz and Worms (Germany), where he studied with the great Jewish scholars of the time, he returned home and eventually founded his own school. His teachings on the Torah and the Talmud became so renowned that he attracted a considerable following among contemporary Jewish scholars.

Rashi wrote down extensive and laboriously detailed explanations and analyses (known as commentaries) of the texts of the Torah and the Talmud, including a grammar by which they could be studied. Up until this point much scholarly and rabbinical discourse and interpretation was not generally written down, so Rashi's work was groundbreaking, and considering the complexity and enormous length of both the Torah and the Talmud, his work was nothing short of amazing.

The Tosafists

Rashi's students, sons, and sons-in-law continued with his work by commenting on his commentaries. The Hebrew word tosafot means "additions." Rashi's followers used Rashi's own work as a point of departure for additional analysis so that it would become the standard for the study of the Torah and the Talmud within their own schools of rabbinical study.

What made the work of the Tosafists so revolutionary was that through it, Jewish scholars had, for the first time, a logical method of studying Rashi, and through a process of questioning, analyzing, and comparing his writings, they gained greater access to the Torah and the Talmud. As a result they were able to make new and additional interpretations of Jewish law, refine or rethink conclusions to...