Ambiguous and Interminable Emancipation

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Jews' “emancipation and civil rights.” The very term “emancipation” came to be widely applied to Jews after “Catholic emancipation” in England (1829). Thus, “Jewish emancipation” concerns first and foremost the Jews' inclusion, elevation, or equalization as a distinct religious group. Only in the twentieth century did emancipation come to designate alterations in the Jews' status as a “nation” or a “race.” The book analyzes the complex and multidirectional process whereby Jews acquired civil and political rights and came to exercise citizenship's prerogatives. Once one realizes that emancipation is an interminable process that is an integral aspect of Jews' contemporary experience, one is forced to acknowledge that there are in fact no settled answers to the most pressing political and indeed existential issues of Jewish life. Neither the establishment of the State of Israel nor the flourishing of American Jewry let alone the rebuilding of Jewish life in Europe has definitively answered emancipation's challenges. The larger struggle for political equality and the full exercise of citizenship, for Jews, by Jews, and for other groups, remains pressing. The only thing one can confidently assert is that this struggle is inherently protean: it will be populated by ever new issues and causes, by proponents and opponents whose appearance and actions one cannot predict.