Jay Berkovitz’s Laws Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz is a richly textured, meticulously researched work of legal history that is important for understanding not only Jewish life on the edge of modernity but the operations of the Old Regime and the legal culture of late French absolutism. This study offers an important and deep analysis of the institutions of Jewish self-governance and their implications for understanding legal and social life of a minority within the legally pluralistic order of late French absolutism.

The book revolves around two arguments: first, that Jewish communal autonomy in the waning years of the Old Regime was anything but waning, and second, that religion not only played a powerful role in Jewish collective life but was dynamic and adaptive. Both arguments grapple with earlier historiographic perspectives that imagined French Jewish life on the eve of emancipation in a state of decline, ready ground for the changes to come. Berkovitz’s portrait of the Jews of eighteenth-century Metz, however, is one of persistence, adaptation, creativity, community, autonomy, and religious fidelity within the structures of French political and legal culture. The book sheds light on the workings not only of the Jewish minority but also of French absolutism, using the test case of a rich source base that is generated not from the royal center or the departmental parlements, but rather by a third space within the French political world.

This book follows upon Berkovitz’s monumental transcription, editing, and publication of the complete manuscript of the Metz rabbinic court (Protocols of Justice: The Pinkas of the Metz Rabbinic Court 1771–1789 [2014]). Berkovitz—and Brill—are to be commended for taking up this project of rethinking and even revising elements of earlier arguments. Berkovitz brings this source—a record of adjudicated cases—into dialogue with two others: the legislative records of the Jewish community and the legal decisions of rabbis, and places them against the backdrop of French legal culture. Combined, Berkovitz brings us a vision both of law as prescribed and law as lived. This allows him to explore both the institutions of Jewish community and activities of ordinary people who passed through those institutions. The resulting analysis reveals the tensions of Jewish life in Metz in the late eighteenth century: individual behavioral acculturation did not weaken communal autonomy, and Jewish religious cohesion did not entail stark separatism.

Law’s Dominion is more than an argument about the degree to which Jewish self-administration in France was a part of its ambient worlds. It is also a study that guides us into the structures that shaped ordinary life. The book is divided into three parts. The first section, “Foundations,” lays out the source and methodological bases of the book as well as the political context of this community, with deep technical expertise on the primary source material and current theoretical literature on legal history. Section 2, “Community, Governance, Authority,” examines the structures and operations of that community both within its own particular bodies and as interdependent entities within the political culture of its place. In the third section, “Family Affairs,” Berkovitz combines sources of the prescription of law with the rulings of the body that adjudicated their applications to shed light on aspects of early modern Jewish social and economic life that often elude the historian’s gaze. Delving into the relationship between law, economics, and gender, the section offers important material on the roles played by women in credit and commerce, and on matters of inheritance and guardianship that were decisive for women’s agency.

Berkovitz profitably draws upon comparative material to indicate similar moves elsewhere in Western and Central Europe, and to urge further research. The book joins other recent scholarship in offering a powerful corrective to the historical view that once saw Jewish communities across Western and Central Europe in the eighteenth century in a state of communal weakening and religious decline—primed for the pathway “out of the ghetto.” By arguing for the coexistence of integration and communal strength, Berkovitz paints a portrait of Jewish law and life that continually bent but did not break. In so doing, Law’s Dominion offers a challenge to historians of the modern era. For, as Berkovitz provocatively shows, if the eighteenth century can be taken—from the perspective of law—to have been a time of deep engagement alongside strong autonomy, then the very features of Jewish modernity in France, with its processes of political and civil emancipation and concomitant religious reform, may themselves not truly be as revolutionary as we once thought.