Becoming Jewish in Early Modern France: Documents on Jewish Community-Building in Seventeenth-Century Bayonne and Peyrehorade‪.‬

The history of Sephardi Jews in southwestern France began with the establishment in the mid-sixteenth century of small enclaves of Iberian refugees in the regions of Les Landes and the Pyrenees-Atlantiques. The settlers, most of whom immigrated to France in the 1600s and traced their familial origins to or through Portugal, were so-called conversos or New Christians. (1) Historians' treatments of these immigrants have typically paid much attention to the legal foundations of the "Portuguese" (2) colonies, focusing in particular on the fact that the French crown granted the expatriates lettres-patentes in 1550, and renewed them periodically until 1776. (3) These legal instruments permitted conversos to settle and trade in peace as a cohort of resident aliens--the "Merchants and other Portuguese, called New Christians" (marchands et autres portugaises, appeles nouveaux chretiens)--and, so the standard narratives goes, to finally shed their worst fears and live as Jews, relatively undisturbed, albeit under an almost transparent veil of Catholicity. (Judaism was tacitly tolerated, but had been banned in France since 1394, and would not be fully legalized until the late eighteenth century). (4) Underlying this conventional narrative is the assumption that the Jewishness of the immigrants had been latent as long as the refugees had resided in Iberian realms and been vulnerable to inquisitorial scrutiny, but flowered naturally in a more agreeable French atmosphere. As a prominent scholar put it, "The will of these pioneers [meaning the founders of the Franco-Sephardi enclaves] to create communities testifies indeed to the fidelity of the conversos of the Iberian Peninsula to their ancestral faith." (5) A chief problem with this interpretation is that it does little to illuminate the complex and sometimes contentious process by which a collection of Iberian emigres became communities of French Jews by 1700. This paper seeks to shed light on that very process through an examination of two complementary and unusually revealing legal dossiers from 1674-1678 and 1679-1680, respectively. (6) Here my focus will be on what these documents tell us about the social context of the immigrants and the practical means by which they obtained and internalized the knowledge--the models of belief, ritual practice, and quotidian behavior--that would cause others in the Jewish Diaspora to recognize the makeshift colonies in France, and more importantly, cause the refugees to see themselves, as normatively and unambiguously Jewish. (7) For purposes of this analysis, "Being Jewish," and hence "becoming Jewish," means consciously embracing rabbinic Judaism within a social setting, however imperfectly, as a way of life.