Abstract: Through a biographic lens, this talk examines the participation of French Jewish elites in imperial formation and expansion. There is no better figure to do so than Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880), a famous lawyer in nineteenth-century France, a key actor in international Jewish politics, and a supporter of France’s colonial project. Scrutinising his activities as a colonial jurist and lawyer, I argue that Jewish legal actors were significant players in delineating French universalism and that law was critical to French Jews for positioning themselves in relation to other marginalised groups and articulating difference – both their own and others’.

Bio: Noëmie Duhaut is Lecturer in Modern European Jewish History at the University of Southampton. Her work has appeared in French Historical Studies, European History Yearbook and Archives juives. She has held research and teaching fellowships at the Leibniz Institute of European History, the German Historical Institute in Paris, the Hebrew University, the Central European University, Dartmouth College, the University of Graz, and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. She is currently finishing a book on Jewish internationalism in the context of post-Ottoman state-building in the Balkans in the nineteenth century and working on a biography of the French Jewish lawyer, politician, and internationalist Adolphe Crémieux.