D avid S orkin . Jewish Emancipation

In this impressive and ambitious book, David Sorkin, the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University, traces the complex trajectory of Jewish emancipation, the process by which Jews obtained equal civil and legal rights with all other inhabitants of the countries in which they lived. Casting his net wide, Sorkin begins his study in the sixteenth century and ends at the present, analyzing how Jews won, lost, and regained rights in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and North Africa. Deeply immersed in the wide-ranging scholarly literature in English, German, French, and Hebrew, Sorkin insists that the process of emancipation is the central event in modern Jewish history, an event that was both “recurring and interminable” (5)—that is, constantly subject to challenge and renegotiation, still an ongoing issue wherever Jews live. Although Sorkin specializes in the history of German Jews in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he wisely avoids making the experience of Jews in the German states paradigmatic for emancipation in general. His analysis of the situation in the German states and in unified Germany after 1870 is richly nuanced, but Germany is not at the heart of this book. He also eschews a binary division of European Jews into Western European Jews who received emancipation by the last third of the nineteenth century and Eastern European Jews who did not. Indeed, Sorkin divides Europe into three zones of emancipation—Western Europe (England, Holland, and France and their colonies in the New World); Central Europe (the German and Italian states and the Habsburg Monarchy); and Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia, and Romania)—and he traces the complex development of Jewish emancipation in all three zones, including the ways governments copied one another, adhered to models developed elsewhere, and came up with different ways to include and to exclude the Jews from their respective societies. To these European zones, Sorkin adds a “fourth zone” of emancipation: the Ottoman Empire and the states that succeeded it, which followed a different path to Jewish inclusion and exclusion. In all these zones, Sorkin emphasizes the active role that Jewish activists took in their own emancipation.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Emancipation · German · Jewish history · Jewish studies · Judaism · Political science · Politics · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law