A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz Frances Malino Zalkind Hourwitz lived during one of the most critical and contested moments in French, European, and Jewish history. A Polish Jew born in 1751 in a tiny village near Lublin, Hurwitz arrived in France in 1774. Impoverished, self-reliant and uncommonly confrontational, he entered the intellectual and political life of ancien regime Paris. As foreigner, immigrant, revolutionary, and Jew, Hurwitz publicly registered the events swirling around him. At times he was even instrumental in bringing them about. He committed himself to the Revolution and its promise of individual equality, to his fellow Jews and their entitlement to group protection. He self-consciously posited himself at the intersection of Jewish and European history. A Jew in the French Revolution is not a biography in the conventional sense. It is rather a journey from the last years of the ancien regime, through the tumultuous years of the Revolution, to the discipline and order of the Napoleonic Empire. Zalkind Hurwitz is our guide. His friends and enemies, the positions he sought and the failures he experienced, the fears, dreams, and myths which sustained him provide our focus. Through the experience of this one individual, we can better understand the Revolution, Jewish Emancipation, the ambiguities of enlightenment ideology, and the emergence of a new post-revolutionary Jewish identity. Frances Malino is Sophia Moses Robinson Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Wellesley College. She has written numerous books and articles on the history of European Jews, including, with David Sorkin, East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe 1750-1870 (Blackwell, 1990).