63 Quotes by Tom Reiss

Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime's Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich.

I soon abandoned the question of who Kurban Said or Essad Bey was for the more problematic one - who was Lev Nussimbaum?

The Jewish exodus from North Africa, in the late nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties, brought hundreds of thousands of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews to France.

Until 2005, France had the only senior Catholic prelate in modern times who was born Jewish and still considered himself culturally Jewish: Cardinal Lustiger.

Since 2002, there has been a wave of attacks against Jewish 'persons or property' in France, a great many of them committed by young men living outside Paris, in the vast ghettos called les banlieues.

For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France's record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans.

Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it's a different world than now.

My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with - the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries - is lost, and is not mourned enough.

This is the positive way of seeing the modern Jewish dilemma: I am from everywhere. The negative way is no matter where you go, you find out that you're a victim, that you're unwanted and don't belong.