Defying the Logic of the Nation-State: Jewish Internationalism and a Contested Election in the Alliance Israélite Universelle

Abstract: June 1911: the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the premier Jewish philanthropic organization, created in 1860, holds elections for its Central Committee. What had been a staid, largely pro forma procedure for decades turned into an international drama as competing lists, presented by the incumbent Central Committee in Paris and the leaders of the German Alliance committee in Berlin, vied for the votes of tens of thousands of members on four continents. While historians have usually thought of the Alliance as a Franco-Jewish organization and understood it primarily within the context of French Jewish and French colonial history, throughout its existence and until World War I, the largest group among the dues-paying affiliates of the Alliance were in fact German Jews, who outnumbered their French counterparts three to one. During the crisis of 1911, all sides accused one another of betraying the “universal” cosmopolitan ethos of the Alliance and of pursuing narrow, nationalistic, “chauvinistic” goals instead. This essay will explore the battle fought over the Alliance in 1911 to demonstrate how Jewish internationalism persisted throughout the age of emancipation and all the way to the Great War, resisting the homogenizing logic of the European nation-states.