From the close of the Dreyfus Affair to the outbreak of World War II, the French Jewish community was profoundly altered by the immigration of Eastern European Jews. Bringing with them ethnic definitions of Jewish identity and notions of political activism, the immigrants stimulated a major transformation- demographic, socio-economic, institutional, and ideological- in a French Jewish community that has practiced an ideology of assimilation since the mid-nineteenth century. This book explores this process of transformation against the backdrop of the increasingly xenophobic climate of France at the beginning of the twentieth century. It shows how the French setting shaped the meeting of native and immigrant Jews, and explores why that confrontation proved more difficult in France than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Drawing on new archival sources, the author deals not only with the politics of native and immigrant Jews, but with their social history as well. This work adds a comparative dimension to previous studies of Jewish immigration, most of which have focused on North America, and also provides a view of France from the vantage point of one of her most significant minorities. -- Publisher description