Jews in France typically don’t mark The 14th of July differently than do their fellow citizens.
But just as the holiday — known in France by its calendar date and as Fête Nationale Française (French National Holiday), and elsewhere as Bastille Day — is cause for celebration, it holds meaning for the country’s Jews because it launched the process leading to attaining equal rights in the country for the first time.
That was no small matter, given that France had expelled its Jews in 1394 — and later, when Jews legally returned, only tolerated them.
The term “Bastille Day” is shorthand for a crowd’s storming of Paris’s Bastille fortress in 1789 that started the French Revolution and ultimately overthrew the monarchy. The Bastille riot was “the beginning of the process, but more significant for Jews were 1791 and 1905” — when all French Jews were granted full citizenship and when France instituted a separation between church and state, respectively — said Raphael Hadas-Lebel, a Parisian Jew retired from a distinguished career in national government, including as an advisor to three prime ministers.
The National Library of Israel’s collections contain an eight-page document of an address delivered on August 3, 1789, to the National Constituent Assembly, or legislative body, requesting legal decrees and equal rights for Jews living in Lunéville and Sarreguemines, towns in the northeast province of Lorraine. A digital scan of the document can be found on the NLI website, here.
The document, printed that year, came from secular officials of the areas around those towns, home to a relatively large Jewish population. It demonstrated support for the request submitted by Ashkenazi Jews for full legal equality.
The document and its address were “not unique,” at the time, with other municipalities submitting such requests — but were important “because it reinforced the notion that there was significant support for the demands of the Jews for legal equality,” said Gerard Leval, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who authored a 2021 book published by Hebrew Union College Press, Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution.
Godard, a Catholic, represented municipalities in their motions. He had previously represented other minorities, including a slave seeking freedom and a Protestant defending his property rights. Godard died at 29 in 1791 following a brief illness, possibly typhoid fever. He’d just been elected to France’s first national legislature and taken his oath of office.
Leval’s book includes additional references to municipalities’ shows of support that Godard solicited on behalf of his clients.
Godard’s petitions “would have a decisive effect on the struggle to destroy one of the oldest prejudices infecting the Western world, a struggle to fulfill for the Ashkenazi Jewish community of France its deep-seated desire to become fully integrated into French society while remaining faithful to its religious practices,” the book states.
Approximately 40,000 Jews lived in France at the dawn of the revolution. They were second-class citizens, their residential and professional options limited. The assembly in January 1790 granted Sephardi Jews full citizenship and in September 1791 extended citizenship to Ashkenazi Jews.
“The French Revolution was a very seminal event for Jews that provided opportunities they didn’t have before. … [It] really broke down old prejudices and barriers in ways that hadn’t been seen before,” Leval said in a phone interview.
“Jews for the first time were given full legal rights. That was a pivotal moment for Jews — not to be considered a nation apart, but a people who happened to have a different religion and were citizens like anyone else.”
The revolution in France was part of the enlightenment then advancing across Europe, and the spread of liberty was influenced by the American revolution that began in 1776, he said.
Leval is Jewish, was raised in France by French-Jewish parents, speaks French fluently and visits the country several times each year. His late father moved to France from Poland in 1932, served in the French military during World War II and was wounded in battle in Belgium. His late mother’s ancestors migrated from Bohemia to eastern France in the 1630s.
In a Paris shop many years ago, Leval bought a book for which his maternal grandfather had conducted research. The book is about the emancipation of French Jews; at various points it mentioned Godard. Leval later decided to write an essay on Godard, but became convinced that he merited fuller treatment in a biography. His book includes a portrait of Godard that Leval purchased — the only image known to exist.
The book may be read on-site at the National Library of Israel. It is one of more than 2,000 books in 24 languages about the French Revolution that are available in print and digitally within the building and elsewhere.
The Library’s collections also include dozens of articles, pamphlets and archival documents relating to this subject, some going back to 1789.
Said Leval: “The 14th of July and the French Revolution are a high-water mark for Jewish equality.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
