Professor and History Dept. Head Bonnie Effros, recipient of the Social Science Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant, June 2025-May 2027 has begun her monograph project: Salomon Reinach and the Politics of Assimilation in Early Twentieth-Century France.
Can you tell us a little bit about your research interests and how they led to your publication/project/award
Although Salomon Reinach (1858-1932) was by any standard an extraordinary individual, he has not yet been the subject of a full-length study. Born to a wealthy, secularized Jewish family that had emigrated from Germany to France in the 1840s, he trained as a classicist and archaeologist at the École normale and the École française d’Athènes before directing the Musée des antiquités nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye from 1902-1932. Reinach also gained a reputation as one of the earliest and most outspoken defenders of Alfred Dreyfus. His research in Orientalism and writings on comparative religion became vehicles by which he advocated for secularism and Jewish assimilation. By assessing Reinach’s life and achievements in historical context, my project will reveal the intersectionality of the politics of race, archaeology, and Jewish identity amidst growing antisemitism and Zionism in early twentieth-century France. This study will make use of his publications and extensive archives in Lyon, Aix-en-Provence, Paris, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye to compose a critical history at the crossroads of national and colonial archaeology, comparative religion, antisemitism, Orientalism, and Zionism.
What are the main arguments/goals of your publication/project?
The central objective of this study is to analyze the dilemma faced by secular Jews who pursued assimilation into French society in the late 19th and early 20th century. Although in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel, they have been viewed as naïvely turning a blind eye to Christian prejudice, I will explore the implications of Salomon Reinach’s argument that Jews could be French, and that the Zionist insistence on Jews being a race was actually the source of greater danger than assimilation. This timely study thus offers new perspectives on the “Jewish Question” in the light of early twentieth-century Zionism, and why Reinach’s contributions deserve serious reconsideration.
What are some of the broader implications of your research?
Modern study of Jewish assimilation and support for the Republic has often been colored by its abrupt end with the establishment of Vichy. This approach has ignored proponents of French universalism such as Reinach because it sees them as irrelevant to modern Jewish historiography as their views contradicted the winning Zionist argument. Scholars such as Pierre Birnbaum have even suggested that Reinach and others who took a secular approach to comparative religion, classical archaeology, and art history, were implicitly expressing a profound desire to erase, forget, or downplay their Jewish identity. To Zionists and Orthodox historians, Reinach’s assimilationist approach represented a complete betrayal of Judaism and superficial devotion to an impossible ideal. They resented his denial of the unique nature of Judaism promoted by the German scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums and his critique of Jewish social scientists who sought to prove the existence of identifiable Jewish racial characteristics. In this project, by contrast, I argue that Reinach’s promotion of French republicanism and secularism was motivated at least in part by his desire that his peers would see him as a French scholar rather than marginalizing him as a Jewish one. The book will seek to rectify the fact that in neither French history nor Jewish studies has Reinach received the attention he merits. This lacuna has not stemmed from the lack of archival resources or the merits of his scholarly contributions. At the heart of reluctance to study Reinach’s ambivalence about his promotion of a French nation that claimed a commitment to universalism in its foundational documents, but in which being French necessitated full assimilation or even Christian conversion. I will demonstrate why Reinach’s denial of the validity of racial categories, used by both Catholic antisemites and Zionist enthusiasts, left him with few potential allies.
What were some of the challenges you faced in your research, and how did you overcome them?
During his career, Reinach published more than 7,000 discrete works, including roughly 100 monographs, which have primarily been studied by classical archaeologists. Relatively little work has been done on his archives, including more than 50,000 documents that he bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence before his death. There is much to be done, but I look forward to spending time in Aix, Paris, and Lyon, in order to advance research for and writing of this future monograph over the coming years.
