“This is not a work of intellectual history in the conventional sense,” writes Maurice Samuels in the introduction to this sophisticated, intricately argued book on French intellectuals’ ruminations about the place of Jews in France since the 18th century. A specialist in French literature at Yale, Samuels presents “a series of close readings of texts” about this issue (p. 15). What are these texts about? Part of a continuing discourse on French citizenship, they are ruminations on whether French society should define rights and obligations for individuals irrespective of their religious, ethnic, or cultural origins, or whether those particularities should govern how individuals identify and order themselves within French society. Suggesting that this Manichean view is too simple, Samuels identifies a countertradition within French universalism that embodies a more malleable approach to universal commitments....
