ABSTRACT
Although nineteenth-century French Jews were under pressure to preserve the gains of the Emancipation through integration into French social, cultural, political, and economic life, they displayed a remarkable sense of ethnic identification and Jewish solidarity. The social and institutional history of nineteenth-century French Jewry demonstrates a sense of ethnicity and solidarity. Jewish geographical distribution was not the same as that of the general French population, and Jews tended to live in areas of Jewish density many times greater than the 0.26 percent that the Jews comprised in the 1861 general French population. The analogous phenomenon in nineteenth-century French Jewry is manifested by the advocates of Reform. Extreme reformers, such as Orly Terquem, proposed ritual changes of a far-reaching nature, including the transfer of the Sabbath to Sunday in order to bring Jewish behavior into line with general French behavior. The impression that Jews felt a sense of ethnicity is further supported by a linguistic analysis of contemporary documents.
