European Jewish History

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

Related Essays

American Jewish History in the 20th Century .... away from the notion that only white Christians of European ancestry were .... upward mobility also introduced an era in American Jewish history of extraordinary .... (2414 10 )

Contribution of Leopold Zunz to Jewish Scholarship .... Jewish scholarship were Jost's multivolume history of the .... historicism illustrate the extremes of Jewish assimilation in European society (Schorsch .... (1947 8 )

Jewish Immigration to America .... the strategies used by Eastern European Jews to .... were desirous to assimilate and "Jewish American writers of .... into the wider American culture" (History 1). Jews .... (1404 6 )

Literary Treatments of Jewish Children .... sustained by Jewish history and tradition" (Levenberg 2874). .... or New York, although the immigrants themselves were frequently products of European village life .... (3843 15 )

Jewish Immigrants to America .... away from the notion that only white Christians of European ancestry were .... upward mobility also introduced an era in American Jewish history of extraordinary .... (2408 10 )

untry. Further, Napoleon reimposed special restrictions on Jewish but not Gentile moneylenders and via the Infamous Decree (52-3) set policies aimed at containing Jewish access to new homes on one hand while mandating that urban Jews who wished to move house leave the city and start farms--thus dispersing a tightly knit political bloc. The encounter between Napoleon's march toward Russia and the German Jews who were in the path manifested the civil patriotism of German Jews even in the face of popular hostility to Jews as aliens and the prevailing view of rulers in Prussia and Bavaria (until Napoleon's victory against the Prussians at Jena) that Jews were really a "state within a state," not full-fledged citizens. Napoleon's emancipation of Prussian Jews actually fostered anti-Jewish feeling within Prussia, with Jews retaining their alien status in popular imagination. In Austria and Hungary, meanwhile, Jewish self-government (and traditional medieval-era restrictions) persisted alongside Hapsburg imperial authority (58-9) until the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 6. It was in the nineteenth century, in the era of the Industrial Revolution, that European Jews as a class and selected Jews of the industrial/financial

Category: History - E