This book provides a highly original account of the Franco-Jewish political and administrative elite--generals, politicians, judges, magistrates, and prefects--from the final decades of the nineteenth century to the Vichy regime.
United by an extensive network of family relations and a fierce devotion to secular republicanism, these Jews of State (the author's term to distinguish them from their predecessors, court Jews, who were more oriented toward the world of business and banking) formed a group that perpetuated itself over three generations. The book dissolves the supposedly marked dichotomy between assimilated and unassimilated Jews in French society by showing how this Franco-Jewish elite was simultaneously active at the highest levels of French professional and administrative life and deeply involved in Jewish cultural life.

Pierre Birnbaum is Professor of Political Science at the University of Paris I. Among his works translated into English is Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Leon Blum to the Present.