American Jewish Archives Journal.Jews and Revolution.2023.finkelman sussman (original) (raw)
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For decades, the question of whether emancipation was good for the Jews has dominated the literature. In the wake of the Holocaust, this was a painful and urgent question. Was emancipation the breakthrough moment that opened the gates of the ghetto and elevated Jews to citizenship? Or did it bring the false promise of assimilation; the loss of community; and, ultimately, genocide? The history of Jewish emancipation, as David Sorkin states in his Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries, has been "more likely to be extolled or excoriated than rigorously studied" (p. 3). Yet for Sorkin, emancipation, "the process of gaining and retaining, exercising and defending, losing and recovering rights" is the central pillar in modern Jewish history (p. 354). In this book, he sets out to redirect the focus away from polemic and from the events of the twentieth century that became the defining telos of the historiography. Sorkin's refocusing of the question and approach is most welcome. His is a work of impressive breadth that recasts the history and thus allows us to gain new insights and ask new questions. It is a brilliant integration and generally deep engagement with literature across a dizzying array of contexts and periods. Sorkin characterises emancipation as the acquisition of civil and political rights. Over the five centuries he covers, he tells stories of the ways in which Jews both acquired and lost rights, as well as the limitations of rights, and ongoing forms of state and non-state discrimination. For Sorkin, the history of Jewish emancipation is a "complex and multidirectional process" (p. 1). Sorkin's chosen chronology is novel. He does not begin, as so many before him have done, with the sudden and dramatic transition brought about in the status of Jews in the French Revolution. Rather, he begins his book in 1550, as Jews in Eastern and Western Europe (i.e., the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Italian city-states, and the city of Bordeaux) began to gain extensive privileges. Nor does he bring his story to an end, arguing, rather, that this history of rights gained, lost, and regained is ongoing. Sorkin's geographic coverage and conceptualisation is equally innovative. He argues that the conventional "East-West" binary, traditionally placed over the map of Europe, "neither explains the process nor fits the facts" (p. 335). Nor does he take the traditional path of placing Germany at the centre of his story. He argues that dividing Europe into three regions allows us to see distinct political practices and policies. His regions comprise Western Europe: Holland, England, and Francehe also includes the Atlantic world here; Central Europe: German states and the Habsburg empire; and Eastern Europe: Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia, and Congress Poland. To these he adds a fourth region of emancipation, the Ottoman Empire.
The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom
Seventeenth-century political and juridical thinkers mined the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and rabbinic literature for ideas, examples and full-fledged political systems, aiming to apply them to modern Europe. This essay examines several political Hebraists of the seventeenth century, notably Petrus Cuneaus, John Selden, James Harrington and his fellow English republicans, and John Locke. The "Hebrew republic," the polity idealized by early modern Hebraists, is significant above all as a political and juridical model. The essay discerns three clusters of ideas reaped exclusively, or mainly, from Hebraic sources, and interwoven into modern political thought: (1)The importance of the rule of law within fixed borders: a concept of international borders underpinning a novel, natural-law-based theory of the state, law, and rights; (2) the idea of a federal republic, transformed from the tribal Israelite society to Dutch political thinking; and (3) the moral economy of republican social justice. Finally, the essay explains why jurists and political thinkers ceased to read the Bible as a historical and political text in the eighteenth century, and why the earlier legacy of political Hebraism could become valuable again today, both historically and politically.
A Jewish Response to French Antisemitism in Revolutionary Times
In the same years in which Jews were elected to the Dutch national assembly (the Batavian Convention), Jews on Curaçao were characterized in a letter received on the island in an unmistakably anti-Semitic way. The author was the prominent French official Victor Hugues, based in Guadeloupe. Two elders of the local Jewish community responded with a letter that shows a remarkable assertiveness, probably facilitated by the emancipation of Jews in the Dutch metropole. They reminded him of the principles of the French revolution, of which he was a servant. The letter, in the possession today of a private collector, is transcribed and translated here and provided with a context. Keywords Jews – agency – revolution – Curaçao A recently surfaced letter sent in 1798 by two Jews from Curaçao to a high-ranking Frenchman provides an interesting example of Jewish assertiveness