Eighteenth-Century Studies

"Jewish emancipation" has a bit of a bad rap. The phrase has come to be associated with, at best, highly contingent political rights in Europe and the futility of Jewish "assimilation," and at worst, failure in the form of the Holocaust. The [End Page 113] success of individual Jews in joining the professions, in economic advancement, and in cultural contributions in places where emancipation was most far-reaching has also been seen as contributing to the birth of modern antisemitism and the antisemites' fear of Jews' infiltration from within European society. But what was, or is, "Jewish emancipation?" Despite the word's connotations today of freedom from bondage by grand declaration, the term "emancipation" as applied to Jews follows the meaning applied to other persecuted religious groups, such as Catholics in England before 1829, and refers to the rather haphazard and variable process of Jews gaining legal rights and joining the body politic. As David Sorkin argues in Jewish Emancipation: A History of Across Five Centuries, when viewed as a long-term process affecting all modern Jews, emancipation is "the principal event of modern Jewish history" (354); to understand modern Jewish history, we therefore need to zoom out and understand the process of how states and Jews struggled to define Jewish rights, individually and as a group. We also need to understand that how states changed the way they governed the political rights of Jews fit into more general processes of modern state formation—as Sorkin convincingly argues, Jewish emancipation cannot be separated from the development of modern citizenship, and modern citizenship cannot be separated from the process in which Europe decorporated its laws and society. When states first created the concept of citizenship, they did not simply shake off the old corporate privileges—religion provided the hierarchy around which modern citizenship was built.

While Sorkin identifies regions with politically similar states (he divides Europe into western, central, and eastern parts, and also discusses the Ottoman Empire and the Atlantic world), his main point is that emancipation is hyper-local; in no two places does the process of Jews gaining political rights unfold the same way. Sorkin argues that much of the groundwork for civil equality, and how the process of emancipation would unravel in a given place, was built when societies were still governed by group privileges and disabilities. In city-states where Jews made up one of several merchant colonies, the privileges Jews gained on par with others translated into civil equality as states adopted modern notions of citizenship. Sorkin begins with an overview of how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of European commercial hubs—Ancona, Venice, Livorno, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London—gave Jews, or sometimes New Christians who reverted back to Judaism, considerable group privileges. Historians have long focused on Amsterdam's role as an early harbinger of Jewish modernity, but Sorkin suggests that what made Amsterdam, along with London and Bordeaux, remarkable, is that in the transition from corporate legal rights to citizenship, the Jews' corporate parity transformed into equal citizenship.

Jews gained similar corporate privileges on par with Christian burghers in cities and towns in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially those owned by members of the Polish nobility, but the partitioning of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century put the fate of Jewish rights in the hands of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. In contrast to western and eastern Europe, the Holy Roman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries granted far-reaching individual rights to a tiny Jewish elite, while resisting the extension of corporate privilege and seeking to limit the presence and visibility of Jews. It is Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765–1790) who would provide a model of contingent emancipation: with each legislative act increasing their privileges, Jews were expected to reciprocate through integration in dress, language, and military service. Joseph II's model of a finely managed, localized, and progressively radical process of integrating...