Jewish History

Jews in Europe in the Modern Age: A Socio-Historical Overview by Viktor Karady (Central European University Press) Discusses the socio-historical problem areas related to the presence of Jews in major European societies from the 18th century to our days; differently from most other studies, covers the post-Shoah situation also. The approach is multi-disciplinary, mobilizing resources gained from sociology, demography and political science, based on substantial statistical information.

Presents and compares the different patterns of Jewish policies of the emerging nation states and established empires. Discusses education and socio-professional stratification of Jews. Deals with the challenges of emancipation and assimilation, the emergence of Jewish nationalism in various forms, Zionism above all, as well as antisemitic ideologies. The book ends with a scrutiny of post-Shoah situation opposing in this regard Western Europe to the Sovietised East, discussing finally strategies of dissimulation or reconstruction of Jewish identity.

This book attempts to outline some of the long term processes and structural transformations considered as essential for the interpretation of major changes seen in the European Jewish populations during, approximately, the last two centuries. The focus is laid here on Ash­kenazi Jewry, though occasional references are also made to the des­tinies of Sephardi groups in the Balkans and other Mediterranean countries. Topically, my investigations are marked in chronological order by the beginnings of the decisive diversification of Jewish identity options following the `Berlin Haskalah' (Jewish Enlightenment), the various reactions to the challenges of civil emancipation and chances of integration in emerging nation-states or multi-national empires since the French Revolution, the crises of assimilationism due to the age of political anti-Semitism in the outgoing 19th century, the rise of Nazism and the Shoah, new conditions of social accommodation of survivors since 1945.

The organization of the study, though historical by nature, ignores the criteria of a strictly chronological narrative and responds rather to the needs of an analytical discussion of developments, occurrences and events affecting sizable Jewish clusters and modifying their col­lective attitudes, their relations with given Gentile environments, par­ticularly their chances of professional self-assertion, mobility and creativity.

Thus the first chapter presents the demographic specificities of modern Jewry (notably its very early engagement in the `demographic transition'), as well as striking aspects of the professional and eco­nomic restratification of a proto-bourgeois cluster into a largely mid-

dle class social formation. This gave rise, since the late 19th century, to the spectacularly high share of Jews in entrepreneurial and modern­izing economic, professional as well as intellectual elites in Berlin, Paris, Vienna or Budapest, but also to the `abnormal' social structure of contemporary Jewry (close to the reverse of gentile societies)—much deplored by `enlightened' Jewish reformists and Zionists alike.

The second chapter is entirely dedicated to the three signal models of modern `Jewish policies' in Europe leading ultimately to legal emancipation. This was carried out by and large unconditionally in the West, inspired by the recognition of civil equality as a basic human right following social philosophies of the Enlightenment. Emancipation was much more controversial, conflictual and protracted in Cen­tral Europe where the post feudal powers that be in Germany and the Habsburg Empire tended to link it to certified assimilationist achieve­ments of those concerned. In Eastern Europe full civil emancipation was denied to Jews till the end of the first World War (1919 in Romania, the February 1917 Revolution in Russia).

The third chapter deals with the complex issues connected to the new collective identity options opening up following agendas of social integration and cultural assimilation inaugurated by Moses Men­delssohn's Haskalah movement in Berlin and the first emancipation decrees of the revolutionary National Assembly in France. The crises of assimilationism staged by the emergence of political anti-Semitism in the late 1870s and the 1880s provoked the partial reorientation of modern Jewish identity strategies towards universalistic salvation ideologies (like socialism) on the one hand, Jewish nationalism (Zionism, autonomism, Bund) on the other hand.

The fourth chapter is dedicated to the development and historical transmutations of anti-Judaism, cumulating by the outgoing 19th cen­tury in fateful formulations of the infamous modern `Aryan myth' and racist political anti-Semitism. Based on social Darwinist references this served as the direct harbinger of the Brown Plague under the Third Reich. The devastating consequences of the genocide in various countries under Nazi rule or influence, though an utterly external factor in Jewish social history and thus not a central concern of this book, are summarily evoked here.

The last chapter sums up the new social conditions of Jewish exis­tence in post-Shoah Europe, including the ambiguities of liberation in the sovietized part of the continent, the difficult return and reception of survivors in their home countries, the impact of the State of Israel on the exodus of eastern Jewry. The importance of the reference to Israel, the genocide ('people of the Shoah'), further secularization as well as religious revivalism in the reconstruction of new Jewish iden­tities is discussed in special sub-chapters. The implications and reasons of the attraction exerted by the Communist mirage, the opposition of Soviet type and Western anti-Semitism as well as renovated patterns and new chances of social integration in European societies offer the main topical perspectives for a conclusion that warns against too far fetched optimism as to the secure future of Jews in contemporary Europe.