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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- One. French "Natives" and Native Jews -- Two. Arab, Jew, Arab Jew -- Three. Four Cubits of Jewish Schooling -- Four. Religion to Race -- Five. Domesticating Diaspora -- Six. Looking Jewish in Paris -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians and nurses working in two state‐funded southern French hospitals, this article explores why and how medical care providers connected their everyday deliberations about patient care to what they considered to be distinctively French forms of medical responsibility. Many healthcare professionals saw French medical morality in opposition to 'Anglo‐Saxon' discourses of individual autonomy and transactional choice. In contrast to such 'transactionalism', they insisted that 'French' ethics required limits that transcended particular circumstances. And yet it was difficult for doctors and nurses working in secular and increasingly neoliberal hospitals to argue against individual transactionalism in an overtly moral register, one that might appear religious and paternalist. Through a close look at two different cases – one in assisted reproduction and one in palliative care – I show how the language of folk psychoanalysis provided some health professionals with a way out of this impasse. Care providers used pseudo‐psychoanalytic accounts of patient subjectivities to depict individuals as incapable of knowing, let alone 'owning' or rationally mastering, themselves. This, in turn, suggests that some aspects of French secularity may be far less Protestant and liberal than contemporary anthropological work tends to assume.

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the "European" Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously "European" Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing "Jewishness" as transparently either "European" or "French." It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group "identity."

Drawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s on, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the "European" Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, disagreements that divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new narratives relied on a very different historicity—or way of reckoning time and causality—than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. And by reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, these pedagogical narratives offered an expansive and homogenously "European" Jewishness. This argument works against a growing post-colonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing "Jewishness" as transparently either "European" or "French." In addition, it highlights the role that historicity—not just history—plays in producing what might count as group "identity."

In 2004 a French Jewish student union ran an ad against anti-Semitism using defaced images of Jesus and Mary. Denounced by an antiracist organization affiliated with Jewish interests, the ad was immediately pulled. Why? While the union intended the campaign to be provocative for what it suggested about anti-Semitism, it may ultimately have been most problematic for what it implied about "Frenchness." This article argues that the campaign's polysemy and ambiguity destabilized religious and national differences presumed to be self-evident in contemporary France. In doing so, it may have undermined mainstream Jewish institutional strategies that relied on the evocation of a stable French national "identity" to both fight anti-Semitism and produce Jewish belonging in France.