The purpose of this research is to examine the origin and development of the Jewish people in European history, from the eighteenth century to the current period, with reference to Howard M. Sachar's The Course of Modern Jewish History. The plan of the research will be to follow Sachar's positioning of European Jewish history in the context of emergent nation-state development in Europe from the time of the post-Renaissance period to modern times, particularly noting as appropriate the transforming concept of the Jew as alien to mainstream (and sometimes antagonistic) European culture.
The modern history of the Jews in Europe has its origins as much in what the Jew historically was not, or was perceived as not being, which was European. That is, partly by Jewish and partly by non-Jewish choice, Jews were very much set apart from the rest of the communities in which their culture was not dominant. A concept of Jewish self-government, independence, close community ties, and self-sufficiency emerged in Western Europe as a consequence of this isolation. In its pernicious form it manifest as the Judengasse, or walled ghetto (Sachar 3), which from the point of view of Christians ruling the communities where ghettoes were located was meant less to allow autonomous Jewish activity than to confine the Jews and prevent interchange between Jews and Gentiles.
The religious hegemony of Christianity in Western Europe made Jewish-Gentile communication and commercial intercourse difficult because of the fusion of church and state from the time of Constantine's conversion, through the Middle Ages, and well into the Renaissance, entailed declaration of Christian faith as something of a citizenship requirement. As an established population with a history and culture important and tangential to those of the Christians, the Jews could not be ignored, but neither could they considered full-fledged members of the religious or civil community.
Sacha...