The case of Alsatian Jews under German rule after the Prussian victory in the Franco- Prussian war shows the importance of what some border theorists of the past decade have emphasized to supplement the primacy of geography and politics: the relationship of boundaries and cultural identity and the social construction of boundaries. Or, in the words of other theorists, “soft borders”. Even when Alsace was transferred to German control – and all Alsatians, including Jews, lost their French citizenship – the behavior of Alsatian Jews differed in some ways from that of their neighbors.

Before they became French citizens in 1791 as part of the egalitarian enthusiasm of the French Revolution, the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, two provinces of eastern France, had defined their identities in layered terms. They were rooted in the local customs of their village and rural Jewish communities as well as those of their urban center, Metz, and they were conscious of their ties to the greater western Ashkenazi community of Europe of which they were a part. They were also conscious of French rule and the legal restrictions they suffered on their places of residency and their economic pursuits – restrictions which their neighbors enthusiastically supported. The tensions in their identity, between local and regional, tended to be conceptualized in specifically Jewish terms: were they simply a part of western Ashkenazi Jewry, or specifically Jews of Alsace-Lorraine? That tension was concretized in their decision to maintain their own yeshivot and local customs even as they sent their sons eastward to German lands for Talmudic study and purchased Hebrew books published there.

The acquisition of equal civil rights as residents of France, combined with a governmental policy that fostered régénération, the remaking of Jews in the model of good French citizens, created a new tension in the identity of Alsatian Jews: a tension between a national French Jewish identity and a regional Alsatian Jewish identity. In the nineteenth century, most of them – especially those outside the major cities of Strasbourg, Mulhouse, and Metz – resisted the most extreme demands of régénération, retaining a strong measure of traditional religious practice, the use of their own vernacular, jeddich-daitch, and some traditional economic pursuits, such as peddling and cattle dealing. It was only in the 1840s and 1850s, when Jewish public primary schools were established in many communities, that large numbers of young Jews mastered French.