Sepinwall opens with the interests that drew her into her subject: gender, Jewish history, colonial rule and what came after it, together with questions about what makes revolutions break out, how claims to religious truth operate in politics and culture, and what happens to ideas as they spread through a society. Studying with Keith Michael Baker, a noted specialist in eighteenth-century France, settled her choice of field.

The chapter then turns to the abbe Henri Gregoire, a white French priest whose career is hard to avoid for anyone working on the French Revolution or on modern Jewish history. In 1788 Gregoire published a well-known essay arguing that Jews should be "regenerated" physically, morally and politically so that they could take a full place in French society. He arrived in Paris the following year for the Estates-General, joined the Revolution, and is remembered as the figure who brought about Jewish emancipation.