Jewish emancipation and integration in both Revolutions were typified by processes that ended the legal restrictions against Jews, yet neither of these revolutions could be described as Judeophilic. Antisemitism, both among the populace and within elite circles, meant that neither revolution fulfilled their promise to uplift and integrate all of humanity. Part of the basic problem stemmed from the fact that few of the revolutionary leaders gave much thought to the Jewish question before or after the revolution.

In the case of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Era, there was a strong tendency of the state to sweep aside many of the restrictive laws against Jews. This was of a piece with the Revolution's Enlightenment heritage which emphasized a rational legal and social order. The Enlightenment operated under a schema which postulated that disorder and crimes originated from imperfections within society. If Jews were associated with such activities like usury and swindling, then eliminating restrictive laws would end that activity. Very few Revolutionaries would turn the mirror on themselves and conclude that the Jews' negative image was the result of gentiles' own antisemitism; they took this antisemitic image as a given. Napoleon in an 1806 letter to the Minister of the Interior would assert that the integrating the Jews into French society through social institutions like the army would eliminate "the tendency of Jewish people to practice a very great number of activities that are harmful to civilization and to public order in society in all the countries of the world."

Napoleon was in many respects the culmination of the Revolution's Jewish policy. Although the National Assembly had granted Jews full citizenship rights towards the end of its existence, the new revolutionary state also sought to subordinate and systematize Jewish religious and social institutions. Napoleon, who was a systematizer par excellence, convened a council of Jewish elders, the Grand Sanhedrin, to declare that Jewish conscription was religiously valid. This followed other governmental attempts to regulate its Jewish community, whether through dress or the state control over rabbis. Napoleon ushered in the French government's century-long attempt to subordinate religion to the state oversight and control. Berr Isaac Berr, the Alsatian Jewish delegate to the National Assembly, would sum up these initiatives in an 1806 pamphlet:

Hardly had the decree which granted Jews the title of citizen been handed down than they were reproached with not yet having become worthy as a group for this great favor.

Berr's pamphlet prophesied many of the problems that Jews in France would face after the Revolutionary Era. The systematizing and homogenizing processes did turn a number of Jews into Frenchmen over the long term, but the larger acceptance of social antisemitism acted as a counterweight to total integration. Sometimes this discrepancy between legal and social realities would explode, as in the case of the Dreyfus Affair.

The Russian Revolution was a different animal than the French model. At first glance, the doctrinaire Marxism of the Bolsheviks would seem to preclude any attempt at a pro-Jewish policies since Judaism is a form of religious practice. However, it is impossible in many cases to separate out Jewish religious practices from social and cultural ones. The crux of the Jewish Question for the Bolsheviks was whether Judaism was a form of ethnicity or a religion. If it were the former, than Communist Jews would be welcomed into the "Brotherhood of Nations" that the Soviet Union was constructing. Jewish cultural institutions (although not rabbis or religious schools), communities, and languages would enjoy state protection and promotion. If the state leadership decreed Judaism was a religious affiliation, than it was a vestigial remnant of the old order that would have to be eliminated. The Jewish Section of the Communist Party, set up in the 1920s, exemplified this debate as it was the only special section devoted to national minorities that was explicitly temporary.

On the ground of the emerging USSR, Jewish life flourished to a degree in the 1920s and early 30s. Whatever its stance on ethnicity vs. religion, the state had eliminated all the travel restrictions on Jews. Most Jews under the tsars had to live in the so-called Pale of Settlement, an area constituting present day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The only way to leave the Pale was to be a professional like a doctor or lawyer. Many Jews assumed places within the Soviet bureaucracy as the Jewish population was on the whole, one of the better educated and literate groups within the ISSR during its first decade. In places like Byelorussian SSR, the large Jewish population was able to carve out a niche of a unique Soviet Jewish life in cities like Minsk.

The 1930s brought down a clamping down on Jewish life within the Soviet Union. Stalin tended to weigh in on the Judaism as religion faction, and although the idea of Jew as an ethnicity never fully disappeared (Jew would be an ethnic category on Soviet passports right up until the end), the heady days of the 1920s experiments in creating a unique Soviet Jewry were at an end. The Great Terror often disproportionally targeted Jews, partly because many Jews involved in the state bureaucracy were former Bundists (a Jewish socialist party that operated in the Pale before the Revolution). Official declarations of antisemitism were not sanctioned by the state; in fact, it was a disciplinary offense to do so. The rise of National Socialism and the popular antisemitism within Eastern Europe meant that Soviet Jewish policy imparted a Janus-faced quality under Stalin; simultaneously embracing Jews as victims of fascism, but castigating them for retaining an archaic identity.

So as to the question of which revolution had greater integration and assimilation, the answer depends upon how one defines assimilation. On some indices, both Revolutions certainly succeeded. Jews had entered into public life in unprecedented numbers and clearly antisemitic laws were removed. Jews in both instances made a transition from legal subjects to citizens. However, the emancipatory impulses of the Revolutions were mitigated by a very skewed understanding of what exactly constituted a "Jew" in the minds of the revolutionaries. This meant that in both France and the Soviet Union, an unreformed antisemitism remained in place under the surface of its emancipatory rhetoric.

Sources

Bemporad, Elissa. Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Gitelman, Zvi Y. Jewish Nationality and Soviet politics: the Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

_. A century of ambivalence: the Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the present. Indiana University Press, 2001.

Hyman, Paula. The Jews of Modern France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Tozzi, Christopher. "Jews, Soldiering, and Citizenship in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France." The Journal of Modern History 86, no. 2 (2014): 233-257.