La notion de tolérance dans les milieux juifs de Metz, d’Isaïe Berr-Bing (1787) au Sermon sur la tolérance de Lazare Wogue (1840)

Abstract

In his Lettre (1787), advocating political tolerance towards the Jews of France, Isaiah Berr-Bing, maskil and pupil of Mendelssohn, addresses the French Christians and asks for the emancipation of the Jews. Fifty-three years later, the young rabbi Lazare Wogue published his Sermon sur la Tolerance for his fellow believers in Metz. In the meantime, the concept of tolerance had lost its initial political meaning. It now was brought into play in the theological disputes that were stirring up the Jewish community of Lorraine. Wogue thus uses a concept inherited from the French Enlightenment outside its original context in order to prevent the split between reformists and conservatives within French Judaism.