“A French Jew Emancipated the Blacks”: Discursive Strategies of French Jews in the Age of Transnational Emancipations

This article examines the rhetorical strategies put in place by French Jewish activists to demand equal civil and political rights for Jews in southeastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. It identifies the parallel they drew between the abolition of slavery and Jewish emancipation as a central plank in this campaign. Through references to the antislavery movement, French Jews sought to make Jewish emancipation a matter of international law and mobilize different constituencies at home and abroad. Drawing on the biblical story of the Exodus, this abolitionist rhetoric was an attempt to challenge the Christian nature of abolitionism and oppose exclusionary views of European society. The emergence of this new emancipatory discourse is analyzed within the national framework of France as well as in a broader eastern European and world context