March 28th - Friday Night: The French Revolution, Napoleon and the Jews
     6:00 Shabbat Service and Talk by Dr. Malino
     7:00 Shabbat Dinner and Q & A

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March 29th - Saturday Night: Jews and Judaism in 19th-20th century France and Implications for Today
    7:00 Havdalah, Teaching and Dessert

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The French Jewish Experience: Past and Present

Responding to the massacres at the Charlie Hebdo editorial offices and the Hypercacher supermarket in 2015, the Prime Minister of France, Manuel Valls declared: “If 100,000 French people of Spanish origin were to leave, I would never say that France is no longer France.   But if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France.  The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

Were the Prime Minister’s words merely a rhetorical flourish? Or did the Jews living in France at the end of the 18th century, who made up only a tiny minority of the population, actually play an essential role in the definition of the French Republic?  If so, why and how?  And what might be the implications for the more than 500,000 Jews living in France today, and for Jews around the world? To answer these questions we will begin our journey in 18th century France, when for the first time in Europe Jews were welcomed as citizens.

About Dr. Frances Malino

Frances Malino is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History at Wellesley College.  She is author of The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1978) and A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz (1996) and co-editor of Essays in Modern Jewish History:  a Tribute to Ben Halpern (1982), The Jews in Modern France (1985), Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe (1998), and Voices of the Diaspora: Jewish Women Writing in the New Europe (2005). Her translation with Yaelle Azagury of the novel Mazaltob appeared in the spring of 2024.  Recipient of numerous awards and fellowships she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Ministry of Education in 2012.  She is also a co-founder and current President of Digital Heritage Mapping whose flagship initiative is the Diarna Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life.