Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered

A group of distinguished historians makes the first systematic attempt to compare the experiences of French and German Jews in the modern era. The cases of France and Germany have often been depicted as the dominant paradigms for understanding the processes of Jewish emancipation and acculturation in Western and Central Europe. In the French case, emancipation was achieved during the French Revolution, and it remained in place until 1940, when the Vichy regime came to power. In Germany, emancipation was a far more gradual and piecemeal process, and even after it was achieved in 1871, popular and governmental antisemitism persisted. The essays in this volume, while buttressing many traditional assumptions regarding these two paths of emancipation, simultaneously challenge many others, and thus force us to reconsider the larger processes of Jewish integration and acculturation.Michael Brenner: Introduction - Simon Schwarzfuchs: Alsace and Southern Germany: The Creation of a Border (Commented by Silvie Anne Goldberg) - Frances Malino: Jewish Enlightenment in Berlin and Paris ( Dominique Bourel) - Perrine Simon-Nahum: Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany and the Science of Judaism in France in the Nineteenth Century: Tradition and Modernity in Jewish Scholarship ( Nils Römer) - Richard I. Cohen: Celebrating Integration in the Public Sphere in Germany and France ( Jakob Vogel) - Uri R. Kaufmann: The Jewish Fight for Emancipation in France and Germany ( Ulrich Wyrwa) - Silvia Cresti: Kultur and Civilisation after the Franco - Prussian War: Debates between German and French Jews ( Sandrine Kott) - Eli Bar-Chen: Two Communities with a Sense of Mission: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden ( Aron Rodrigue) - Christian Wiese: Modern Antisemitism and Jewish Responses in Germany and France, 1880-1914 ( Vicki Caron) - Jaques Ehrenfreund: Citizenship and Acculturation: Some Reflections on German Jews during the Second Empire and French Jews during the Third Republic ( Paula Hyman) - Pierre Birnbaum: In the Academic Sphere: The Cases of Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel ( Peter Pulzer) - Steven E. Aschheim: Towards the Phenomenology of the Jewish Intellectual: The German and French Cases Compared ( Nancy L. Green) - Diana Pinto: Epilogue. French and German Jewries in the New Europe: Convergent Itineraries?