This major work on the history of French Jewry follows the reshaping of Franco-Jewish identity from legal emancipation after the French Revolution through the creation in 1860 of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the first international Jewish organisation devoted to the struggle for Jewish rights throughout the world. In the wake of emancipation, old Jewish communal structures gave way to new state-sanctioned ones that embodied the new reforming and regenerating zeal of both the French Enlightenment and the Jewish elite. However, the author demonstrates that while the Jewish elite accepted the underlying premises of change, its place in the establishment led it to adopt a gradualist path. It was among young intellectuals that a more radical remaking of modern French Jewish identity took place. They succeeded in creating the Alliance Israelite Universelle and eventually came together with the Jewish communal leadership to bring into being a new Jewish elite that rose to prominence during the Third Republic, shaping a unique Franco-Judaism that was to endure until the Vichy period in the twentieth century.