In this ambitious and imaginative book, Ari Joskowicz focuses on the way in which Jews from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries in France and Germany gave voice to anti-Catholic tropes in an effort to demonstrate that their own religion was more progressive, more rational, and ultimately more modern than its contemporary Catholic counterpart. He argues that by the mid-nineteenth century liberals in both France and Germany began to see Catholics rather than Jews as the principal threat to modernity. Jewish liberals, too, jumped on this anti-Catholic bandwagon, despite the fact that official Jewish community spokesmen remained reluctant to criticize other religions openly. According to Joskowicz, the expression of anti-Catholicism became a gauge by which Jews measured their own integration into the nation. As he states, “In their attempts to become modern citizens and gain acceptance in different national contexts, French and German Jews had little choice but to judge the relative modernity of modern secularism's principal other, namely Catholicism” (277).

Joskowicz acknowledges the important differences between the two national contexts, particularly since France in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which decimated the authority of the Catholic Church, had a significant secular sphere, in contrast to the situation in the German states, where the idea of the Christian state held sway well into the nineteenth century. He nevertheless insists that insofar as both French and German Jews used anti-Catholicism as a tool to promote their own integration, the histories of these two Jewish communities were more “entangled” than previously assumed. The author thus opts to discuss these two national cases in tandem to highlight their overlap, while including separate discussions of each at certain junctures. He also makes clear from the outset that his focus will be on polemics, not on government policies, which means that his principal sources are published texts—books, Jewish periodicals, and transcripts of parliamentary debates. For the most part the book proceeds chronologically, although there is considerable to-ing and fro-ing within individual chapters.

In the introduction and the first part of chapter 1, Joskowicz discusses the theoretical issues at stake. He argues that the term “secularism” did not mean the same thing to everyone everywhere. In France “secularism” was generally understood as implying the existence of a neutral public sphere where religion would not play a role. In the German states (and here the emphasis is on Prussia), religion played a more important public role, and “neutral” in this context inevitably meant Protestant. The author also discusses the terms “anti-clericalism” as opposed to “anti-Catholicism.” The former, he claims, was used more widely in France, whereas the latter was more common in Prussia. From his perspective, however, these terms are roughly equivalent, and he uses them interchangeably. Finally, using Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu's book, Les Doctrines de haine: l'antisémitisme, l'anti-protestantisme, l'anticléricalisme (Paris, 1902), as his starting point, he reminds his readers that Jews were not the only “other” in nineteenth-century Europe. Rather, he claims, Catholics in both nations were victimized as well, sometimes even at the hands of Jews (although the author notes that this rhetorical anti-Catholicism never escalated into physical violence, in contrast to anti-Semitism). Joskowicz ultimately suggests that this process of “othering” can tell us a great deal about how members of all three major confessions viewed their respective standings within the national community.

The first chapter offers a brief overview of the way in which non-Jewish thinkers in France and Germany thought about Jews in relation to Catholics over the course of the long nineteenth century. Although many Enlightenment thinkers were sharply critical of Jews and Judaism, some began to treat Jews and Judaism with greater respect. In Germany, Friedrich Nicolai's Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 (Berlin, 1783–1796), portrayed Jews as hardworking and industrious, as compared to South German Catholics, whom he depicted as profligate and dissolute. In eighteenth-century France, scholars such as Jean Frédéric Bernard, Jacques Basnage, and the Marquis d'Argens began to view religion from an anthropological, rather than a theological, perspective, depicting Judaism as one religion among many. The Marquis d'Argens even described Judaism as superior to Catholicism, which he excoriated as a fanatical, intolerant, and superstitious faith. Voltaire too, despite his vitriolic attacks on Jews and Judaism, always viewed Catholicism as the greatest threat, and both Voltaire and d'Argens pointed to the Catholic Church's long history of anti-Jewish intolerance as the chief indicator of that institution's regressive nature.

Romanticism was significantly more hostile to Judaism. Exponents of this philosophy held Judaism to be an inferior religion, since it was based on law rather than faith, and they staunchly adhered to the idea of the Christian state, which considered Jewish emancipation a threat to the moral fabric of society. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, liberals on both sides of the Rhine began to view Catholicism as more inimical to freedom of conscience than either Protestantism or even Judaism. The Staatslexicon, published in Prussia between 1834 and 1843, argued that Catholics should be ineligible for citizenship unless they relinquished their ultramontane views, and the writer Gustave Freytag, despite his well-known anti-Jewish opinions, nevertheless came to consider Catholics the greatest threat to the state. As he stated in Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (1859–67), Jews had successfully assimilated into the middle class so that by midcentury, “[t]he grandchildren of the Asiatic wandering tribe are our compatriots and brotherly comrades” (55). By contrast, he condemned Catholics as refractory to all modernizing impulses. Similarly, in France Eugène Sue's Le Juif errant (1844–45), painted Jesuits as the principal villains. Even in the late nineteenth century, when anti-Semitism was on the rise, German nationalists like Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Eugen Dühring denigrated Jews and Catholics alike as potential enemies of the state. Indeed, the motto of Heinrich Class's Pan-German League was “Without Judah, without Rome, we will build the all-German dome” (58).

Most of Joskowicz's book, however, deals with Jewish attitudes toward Catholicism and toward the proper role of religion in society. He begins his discussion with Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah. Mendelssohn, he claims, was far more critical of the Catholic Church than scholars have hitherto acknowledged. As Mendelssohn explained in Jerusalem (1783), the Church represented superstition, fanaticism, and especially clericalism, which injected religion into political and social life. By contrast, he painted Judaism as a religion of reason and modernity, particularly insofar as it counseled its adherents only how to behave, and not what to think. Most importantly, by embracing anti-Catholic rhetoric, Mendelssohn allied himself with non-Jewish anticlerical Enlightenment thinkers such as Friedrich Nicolai and d'Argens. In France, the late eighteenth-century antirabbinic polemist, Zalkind Hourwitz, similarly turned standard anti-Semitic charges on their head, claiming that if any religious group threatened the state, it was Catholics, who owed allegiance to the Pope in Rome; he even argued that Catholics should be barred from holding civil and military posts. Commenting on Hourwitz, Joskowicz states, “Perhaps for the first time in modern history, a Jew declared his belonging to the French nation by fully appropriating a radical anticlerical discourse” (82).

To illustrate Jewish anticlericalism during the post-1815 era, when Romanticism was on the ascendancy, Joskowicz focuses on four writers: Joseph Salvador, Léon Halévy, Saul Ascher, and Heinrich Heine. Although Jewish leaders generally abstained from engaging in anticlericalism during these years, Joskowicz argues that a small group of Jews, most of whom were only loosely affiliated with the Jewish community (indeed, some had converted), articulated extremely radical views. According to Salvador, whose mother was Catholic and whose father was a Sephardic Jew, the Mosaic constitution represented the form of religion most in tune with universal, republican principles, whereas the Catholic Church impeded reason and progress. As Salvador declared in Histoire des institutions de Moïse et du peuple hébreu (1828): “Roman Catholicism ... removed all examination and discussion from matters of faith; ... it placed passive obedience above free choice” (104). The Saint-Simonian Léon Halévy, despite the fact that he was married to a Catholic and had permitted the baptism of his son, similarly voiced anti-Catholic sentiments. According to Halévy, Protestantism was superior to Catholicism, since Luther had salvaged the core of the ancient Mosaic tradition, just as Jesus had done. On the other side of the Rhine, the rationalist Saul Ascher, in condemning the chauvinistic German nationalism that had taken root after Napoleon's fall, linked this intolerance, which he labeled “Germanomania,” less to Protestantism than to Catholicism, since he associated Romanticism with a Catholic revival. A young generation of nationalists intended to create German unity “[t]hrough a Protestantism that was exaggerated to the point that it became Catholic” (117). Finally Heine, who unlike Ascher was an exponent of Romanticism, similarly became a sharp critic of the Catholic Church, especially after several Catholic spokesmen persisted in attacking him as a Jew after his conversion to Protestantism.

Yet, according to Joskowicz, it was only in the 1840s and ‘50s that Jewish anticlericalism began to take hold among mainstream Jewish spokesmen. In the German states, this tendency was sparked in part by the rise of the German Catholic movement, which opposed the growing emphasis on miracles and pilgrimages within the Catholic Church. Although some Jewish spokesmen, such as Ludwig Philippson, saw this move toward a national Catholic Church as a dangerous form of modern paganism, others, most notably Abraham Geiger, hailed it as a positive development. As Geiger declared, “The neukatholische movement refreshes the spirit and makes it receptive to a new untarnished understanding of religion.... It also inspires in other denominations ideas ... that are fertile [for the development] of a noble humanity and the purification of religious forms” (140). Jewish leaders, though, began to resist the heavy-handed conversionary pressures exerted by the Catholic clergy. The most notable case was the Terquem affair of 1845, when Dr. Lazard Terquem, whose wife and daughter had already converted to Catholicism, was baptized on his deathbed by the famous Jewish convert, Abbé Theodore Ratisbonne, and buried as a Catholic. The deceased's brother, Olry Terquem, a well-known reformer, was livid and endeavored to revoke this act, maintaining that his brother had fallen under his wife's insidious influence at a moment of weakness, and had always “rejected in horror the mysteries and practices of Catholicism” (156).

It was only after the Damascus affair of 1840, when the Jewish community of Damascus was accused of committing an act of ritual murder against a Capuchin friar, and the 1858 Mortara affair, when Vatican agents kidnapped a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna who had been secretly baptized by his nurse, that Jewish anticlericalism became pervasive. In part this more vigorous reaction was a result of the creation of the Jewish press; the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums was founded in 1837, and in France the Archives israélites and the Univers israélite were founded in 1840 and 1844 respectively. Although the Damascus affair encouraged the formation of alliances between Jews and anticlerical non-Jews, especially in France, Joskowicz notes that it did not lead to a significant increase in Jewish anticlerical polemics, despite a vitriolic anti-Jewish campaign in the Catholic press led by the ultramontane publicist Louis Veuillot. According to Joskowicz's account, only two French Jews publicly attacked the Church. One of them, Rabbi Lion Mayer Lambert, director of the Metz Rabbinical Seminary, declared that the year 1840 had revealed “the most criminal and savage project since the creation of the world,” and he predicted that this Catholic campaign would lead to “nothing less than the extermination of all Hebrews from the surface of the globe” (150). According to Joskowicz, few other Jewish leaders were willing to attack the Church publicly, perhaps due to the fact that French Jewish leaders were pressuring the French government, which protected the rights of the Christian minority in the Middle East, to crack down on the rantings of the French consul in Damascus, who was whipping up the ritual murder frenzy.

The key event that pitted Jews throughout Europe against the Catholic Church was the Mortara affair. This affair led a group of younger Jews to form the Alliance israélite universelle in 1860, and it encouraged French Jews to engage in a polemical battle against Pope Pius IX. They urged the French government to intervene in the Mortara affair, since France provided military protection to the Pope. The French government did ultimately pressure the Vatican to release Edgardo Mortara, though without success. When the Vatican published the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, which condemned modernism, liberalism, and religious toleration as incompatible with Church teachings, followed by the promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1869–70, Jews proceeded to characterize their own religion as modern and rational, in contrast to Catholicism, which they depicted as despotic, authoritarian, irrational, and out of touch with the modern world.

In the final two chapters, Joskowicz examines the degree to which Jews spoke out publicly as Jews during parliamentary debates, particularly during the Kulturkampf in Germany and the Dreyfus affair in France. In contrast to the traditional view that Jewish politicians endeavored to hide their Jewishness in their public lives, preferring to speak only in universal terms, Joskowicz claims that from the mid-nineteenth century on, many Jewish politicians spoke out as Jews in order to defend Jewish rights and honor. In mid-nineteenth-century France, Jewish deputies such as Benoît Fould and especially Adolphe Crémieux had no difficulty demanding equal rights for Jews, and this was the case even in the German states, despite the fact that German Jews were not emancipated until 1871.

Yet according to Joskowicz, Jewish politicians, despite their anti-Catholic views, remained reluctant to embrace radical anticlericalism. While militant Catholics in France blamed Jews, together with Protestants and Freemasons, for the anticlerical laws of the 1880s, in reality only a handful of Jewish spokesmen from the margins of the Jewish community favored such measures. Here Joskowicz agrees with Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, who has argued that French Jewish leaders at this time engaged in “soft clericalism,” largely in an effort to preserve the Napoleonic Concordat, which provided the budget for all officially recognized religious communities, including the Jewish community.

Joskowicz further argues that prior to the Dreyfus affair, French Jews did not conflate anti-Semitism and Catholicism. Rather, they saw anti-Semitism primarily as a German import that would not take root in France. By the time of Dreyfus's arrest at the end of 1894, however, Jewish journalists were beginning to depict anti-Semitism as “the ancient fight of clericalism against Judaism” (259). Still, extreme Jewish anticlerical rhetoric became widespread only in 1899, according to the author, when Prime Minister René Waldeck-Rousseau inaugurated a second round of radical anticlerical measures, culminating in the 1905 law mandating separation of church and state.

Ultimately, the author maintains, Jewish anticlericalism declined in both France and Germany, albeit at slightly different times. In Germany the decline coincided with the end of the Kulturkampf and the rise of political anti-Semitism in the 1880s, which Jews identified not with Catholics but with Protestants. Indeed, Jews forged an alliance with the Catholic Center Party to fight discrimination against all religious minorities. In France, Jewish-Catholic relations improved after 1905, and especially during the union sacrée of World War I, which called on all groups to put aside their animosities and forge a united front against the Central Powers.

Joskowicz's argument that Jewish expression of anti-Catholicism served as a gauge by which Jews measured their integration into their respective nations is convincing. A point that merits more attention is his assessment that Jews engaged in anticlerical expression to the degree that they saw opportunities to forge alliances with anti-Catholic Christians (Protestants in Germany, and Protestants and lapsed Catholics in France, many of whom were also Freemasons). Here, however, some reference to Philip G. Nord's book, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth Century France (Cambridge, MA, 1995), which traces the forging of these alliances during the 1860s, would have been welcome. Joskowicz also makes a persuasive case that the histories of French and German Jews were more “entangled” than previous scholarship has assumed. Indeed, the extent to which German Jews subscribed to anti-Catholicism is striking, although one wonders whether this situation prevailed only in Prussia, rather than in the more Catholic southwest German states. Joskowicz's argument that Jews spoke out publicly as Jews far more frequently than generally believed is also persuasive, and here his work complements that of other scholars, such as Lisa Moses Leff, Pierre Birnbaum, and Marion Kaplan, who have suggested that nineteenth-century European Jews felt confident in their status as citizens.

I do have a few reservations, however, regarding aspects of Joskowicz's analysis. First, by focusing only on rhetoric, and by relying so heavily on published primary sources as opposed to archival sources, he has missed some key moments. To cite just one example, at the time of the Mortara affair, Louis Veuillot launched a virulent anti-Semitic campaign in France and reiterated the charge that the Talmud encouraged Jews to commit ritual murder. In response, the Central Consistory initiated a defamation suit against Veuillot's newspaper, L'Univers. This action challenges Joskowicz's claim that Jewish community leaders remained reluctant to speak out against Catholics prior to the mid-1890s. Second, Joskowicz sometimes slips into using the German case as the norm when it does not apply to France. For example, he claims that Romantic thinkers in both France and Germany criticized Catholics as well as Jews, but this is not the case in France, except insofar as some Catholic romantics pitted an idealized vision of the Church against the Church as it existed at the time. Third, Joskowicz's assertion that Jewish anticlericalism was not inspired by Catholic anti-Semitism is not credible. As he himself shows, it was the anti-Jewish actions of the Vatican, especially during the Mortara affair, as well as the virulent anti-Semitism of ultramontane Catholics, that sparked a strong and enduring hatred for “clericalism” among European Jews. In addition, Joskowicz's claim that French Jewish leaders were initially reluctant to link anti-Semitism to Catholicism, despite the enthusiastic reception granted to Edouard Drumont in Catholic circles, is accurate only up to a point. It is true, as Joskowicz argues, that French Jewish leaders initially perceived anti-Semitism as a German import, and their reluctance to criticize Christian clergy also stemmed from their hope that Protestant and Catholic clergy would join them in denouncing anti-Semitism. But when the Catholic bishops remained silent, and when a number of Christian Democratic priests joined the anti-Semitic camp, Jewish attitudes shifted. By the time of the first Christian Democratic Congress in 1896, which featured Drumont as the banquet speaker, Jewish leaders were decrying clericalism and anti-Semitism as one and the same. As Hippolyte Prague, editor of the Archives israélites, declared, anti-Semitism was “nothing more than a form of militant and impenitent clericalism” (Archives israélites, December 3, 1896, 393–395).

The notion that the “othering” of Catholics was equivalent to the “othering” of Jews also seems problematic, although this view has gained a following of late. In France, where Catholics were the overwhelming majority of the population (over 95%), it is difficult to see them as victims of the secular state, though they never ceased to paint themselves as such. To be sure, Catholics did sometimes defend freedom of religion, and in these cases they were nearly always joined by Jews, for example with regard to the debate over civil burials in the 1880s. More often, however, Catholics defended the notion that they deserved a privileged position, and that the state needed to retain a Christian character. Indeed, this view led many Catholics to endorse legislation to bar Jews from holding civil and military posts, and sometimes even to rescind Jewish emancipation altogether.

Finally, chapter 7, which is titled “Nationalism, Antisemitism, and the Decline of Jewish Anti-Catholicism,” should have been divided into two—with one chapter devoted to the climax of Jewish anti-Catholicism and another to its decline. As the chapter now stands, Jewish roles in promoting anti-Catholicism at the end of the nineteenth century are given relatively short shrift. (Eugène Mayer, editor of the fiercely anticlerical newspaper La Lanterne and the bête noire of political Catholics, is not even mentioned). But it is also true that while German Jews, at least those in Prussia, did perceive Catholicism as a threat, they probably considered the idea of the Christian state, which was clearly linked to Protestantism, to be a matter of greater concern. Here, some comparative discussion of these perceived threats would have been welcome. Notwithstanding these reservations, Joskowicz has written a highly suggestive and well-researched book that will undoubtedly stimulate further research.