Dreyfuss, Mathias <br/><br/>
Looking for French and Jewish ancestors. French-Jewish scholarship between science and remembrance (1870-1940) 

 -  2021.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> This contribution investigates the reconstruction of historically contextualized ancestors through research on French Jewish history from 1880 onward. These ancestors are described as both French and Jewish, culturally and linguistically integrated to French nation as early as in the Middle Ages. The scholarship on French Jewish history fits the intellectual agenda of French israelite elite drawing the long and deep anchoring of Jews in medieval France, in opposition to Edouard Drumont’s assertions arguing the absence of Jews from French patrimony and « race » before the French Revolution in his best-seller La France juive (1886). As a matter of fact, the new relationship to Jewish past stressed by scholars working in the field of French Jewish history in the 1880s contrasts with the global rejection of any reference to Jewish ancestors active before 1789 by French Jewish « regenerateurs », who remained proeminent during the first half of nineteenth century. On the opposite, a new trend emerges in the very last decades of the 19th century : based on research in Jewish archives, it aims at re-evaluating authentically Jewish ancestors in local memories, especially in the annexed lands of Alsace and Moselle. Yet these surveys limit themselves to fragmented relics, product of decades of neglect, dispersion and oblivion, both by Jewish leaders and by the French State.