from Jewish Social Studies Volume 10, Number 2

Excerpt from

Totems, Taboos, and Jews: Salomon Reinach and the Politics of Scholarship in Fin-de-Siècle France

Aron Rodrigue

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Salomon Reinach (1858-1932) was one of the leading figures of the Franco-Jewish establishment at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was the vice president of the most important Jewish organization of the time, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, was one of the cofounders of the Jewish Colonization Association, the institution established to help Jews leaving Russia to settle on the land in various parts of the world, and was very active in the Société des Etudes Juives, the famous French society of scholarship on Jews and Judaism, founded in 1880. He was also a good friend of Zadoc Kahn, the chief rabbi of France. Together with his brothers, the deputy Joseph Reinach and the scholar and later deputy Théodore Reinach, he was also one of the earliest of the Dreyfusards, working indefatigably for the exoneration of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

This very Jewishly involved personality was at the same time a fixture in the Parisian intellectual scene, penning numerous works on the classics, Greek archaeology, philology, and ancient religions. A member of the prestigious academy the Institut, professor of the history of art and archaeology at the Ecole du Louvre, director of the Museum of National Antiquities at St. Germain-en-Laye, and director of the journal Revue Archéologique, he was to leave his mark as the major contributor to and propagator of the totem and taboo school of British anthropology in France, applying its findings relentlessly in hundreds of articles to Greek and Roman religion and mythology as well as to Judaism and Christianity, raising the ire of many in the latter two camps.1

My aim here is to analyze the complex trajectory of Salomon Reinach's Jewish and scholarly engagements, to try to read one facet with the light thrown by the other, to explore the dialectics of identity, politics, and scholarship. How did the scholar who came to think that the interdiction on the eating of pork is a vestige of a distant past--when the ancestors of the ancient Hebrews worshiped the wild boar as a totem--function as an engagé Jew in the Jewish politics of this time, and what were the constraints on this involvement? And what does the configuration of the scholar and the Jew in Reinach tell us about the French Jewish world of the turn of the twentieth century?

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