Florence Abecassis
"French Jewish Women and Internationalist Movements in the Third Republic"
Florence is a PhD candidate in the UCD School of History. She researches the participation of French Jewish women in internationalist networks between 1870 and 1940. Was internationalism a path of emancipation for French Jewish women? If so, what did emancipation look or feel like to them? Did internationalism facilitate their integration into civil and political life as women and as Jews? To answer these questions, she uses the individual experience of six French Jewish women as case studies. She examines the barriers that they faced (different forms of misogyny and antisemitism) and the constraints within which they operated (i.e., social class, wealth, marital status, social norms). She also looks at their specificity as Jews: the risks inherent to internationalism for Jews at a time of rising nationalism and antisemitism, the emergence of Jewish internationalism, and the French Israelite identity and its impact on participation. Her methodology is both thematic and biographical in that her research is equally led by the issues which mobilised these women (civil and political rights for women, abolition of the regulation of prostitution, access to education, religious reform) and the lives of those women. Due to the absence of one central archive that would provide the spine of evidence, she relies on a wide range of primary sources including institutional records, personal memoirs, correspondences, literature and the press.
E-mail: (opens in a new window)florence.abecassis@ucdconnect.ie
PhD Supervisor: (opens in a new window)Prof. William Mulligan
Academic Acheivements:
1997: B.A. in English, Paris 7 Denis Diderot University.
1998: M.A. in English Literature, Paris 7 Denis Diderot University.
2001: H.Dip. in Education, University College Dublin.
2019: Graduate Certificate in Holocaust Education, Trinity College Dublin
Research Interests: 19th Century France, History of Women, Jewish Studies.
Time Period: Third Republic France.