Men of thought, men of action: the Great War, masculinity, and the modernization of the French rabbinate.

This paper explores the evolution of the training and function of the French rabbinate in the interwar period. The First World War thrust Jewish clerics out from obscure institutional positions to the very forefront of national activity as 'soldiers' for their community and for the nation. The war experience furnished the French rabbinate with a set of new vehicles for representing a novel model of Jewish integration. Martial and paternal masculinities were both patriotically French and 'modern' in their embrace of secular social service and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]