Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries by David Sorkin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries by David Sorkin Todd Endelman David Sorkin. Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. 528 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000318 David Sorkin's expansive history of Jewish emancipation from the sixteenth century to the present works at two levels. To begin, it is a comprehensive account of how and why Jewish legal status changed—at times, improving; at times, worsening—everywhere in Europe, North America, North Africa, and the Middle East over five centuries. Sorkin casts his net widely. Emancipation's successes and failures in the Caribbean, the Balkans, Canada, and Russia take their place alongside the better-known, almost paradigmatic cases of France and the German states. The only modern communities that are absent are those of Latin America and the Antipodes, omissions that can certainly be forgiven in a work of such scope. He wisely insists that there was no single, universal path to emancipation but multiple paths. In some cases—the United States and France, for example—liberal revolutions paved the way for Jewish legal equality. In others—Germany and Italy—national unification fueled the process. And, in others—such as the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires—the reforming zeal of "enlightened" but authoritarian rulers hoping to remedy the backwardness of their realms was the driving force. Rejecting the "East versus West" binary that is so commonplace in writing modern European Jewish history, Sorkin proposes instead a fourfold geographic division of the early modern and modern Jewish world: western Europe (including North America and the Caribbean); central Europe; eastern Europe; and the lands of Islam. He also introduces two critical distinctions that illuminate the ways in which emancipation struggles unfolded. The first distinction is that between political and civil rights. The former refers to the right to hold office, vote in elections, and gain entry to the civil service. The latter refers to occupational and residential freedoms, the right to own and transmit property, and equality of standing in the judicial system. In Britain and the United States, for example, civil rights preceded political rights. Conflicts over Jewish legal status in the English-speaking world in [End Page 450] the first half of the nineteenth century largely concerned the right to hold office. In terms of their civil rights, Jews in Britain, its colonies, and later the United States were emancipated and enjoyed full civil rights from the very moment of their arrival. In the tsarist empire, by contrast, Jews enjoyed neither political nor civil rights—nor, for that matter, did anyone else. The second distinction Sorkin introduces is that between emancipation "into estates" and emancipation "out of estates." In illiberal states, on the one hand, where membership in corporate bodies and estates determined the privileges any individual enjoyed, emancipation meant the integration of Jews (usually Jews of property) into the existing system. In these instances, Jews received estate-specific privileges rather than nominally universal rights. In liberal states, on the other hand, where civil society, liberal individualism, and natural rights were in the ascendant, emancipation meant something very different: dissolution of the corporate Jewish community and integration into a state of citizens who were, in theory, all equal before the law. The distinction is critical because emancipation "into estates" was more limited in what it offered. However, it was the only possible form emancipation could take in states that lacked a body of rights-enjoying citizens into which Jews could be politically integrated. It is this distinction that underwrites Sorkin's account. He includes shifts in Jewish legal status that historians have not included within the conventional rubric of emancipation, such as those that occurred in eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. While he is careful to distinguish the different political systems in which these shifts occurred, the question still arises as to what is gained—historiographically, theoretically, or strategically—by bringing together under one rubric these various changes. Granting rights in the wake of the French Revolution was a very different phenomenon from bestowing commercial and civil privileges to merchant colonies in port cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Radical, novel ideas powered the former, while the latter represented an...