ABSTRACT
Confronted by an onslaught against the reigning monarchical system, opponents of the ensuing French Revolution found it impossible to imagine internal explanations for the disaster, often preferring various conspiracy theories: the Jews were not among the groups often cited as the source of the revolution. Yet, one hundred years later when critics began fulminating against the return of liberal values, etched out in the principles of the Third Republic, the Jews were high up on the list of those considered responsible for its creation. Even seventy years later, in the throes of growing criticism of the Third Republic and its anti-French character, the Jews and their ideological and political agents continued to be marked out for their destructive impact on the nature of French society. Whereas in 1789 the emancipation of the Jews of France was still very much up in the air, in the wake of the general declaration of the Rights of Man, one hundred years later the Dreyfus Affair riveted French society, provoking a fissure of remarkable dimensions; and just less than one hundred and fifty years later, French society elected in a democratic process Léon Blum, the first professing Jew to become a prime minister in Europe.
