Émile Durkheim is born in the German occupied province of Lorraine, to a respectable French Jewish family. His family has a tradition of producing rabbis but Durkheim will break with his faith, any religious faith, in fact, and go on to become one Europe's leading thinkers on sociology and anthropology. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Roger Cotterell, Emile Durkheim: Law in a Moral Domain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 5-6.