Civil Emancipation Research Articles

Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture, and Viennese Modernism/Design Dialog: Juden, Kultur, und Wiener Moderne ed. by Elana Shapira

Reviewed by: Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture, and Viennese Modernism/Design Dialog: Juden, Kultur, und Wiener Moderne ed. by Elana Shapira Samuel J. Kessler Elana Shapira, ed., Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture, and Viennese Modernism/ Design Dialog: Juden, Kultur, und Wiener Moderne. Vienna: Böhlau, 2018. 475 pp. In this ambitious and beautiful book, Elana Shapira and a team of scholars, architects, and curators seek to understand the relationship between Jews, Judaism, the city of Vienna, and design in the century before World War II. Divided into five sections ("Narrating Jewish Emancipation," "A Jewish Renaissance—Opening Doors," "Feminist Manifestos—Women Designing Emancipation," "Designed and Un-Designed Identities," and "'In Dialogue'—Cultural Networks"), the essays address a diverse array of topics including public architecture and urban planning; interior design and decoration; schools, teachers, and networks of students and artists; and the newly imagined gendering (that is, the emergence of a feminist discourse) of symbols, spaces, and objects. In twenty-three insightful essays, the volume's contributors engaged with the question of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century Viennese Jews went about fashioning a particular "modern" aesthetic that was unique to their identity and position as both recently emancipated urban migrants and members of an ancient religious/national tradition long [End Page 94] established in Europe but ultimately—perhaps, somewhat, quite a bit, "yes, but"—from "the east." The overarching intellectual project of this volume is argued for clearly and persuasively by Shapira in her introduction: "How can [a history of] design contribute to an understanding of Jews' relationship to their social being and surrounding in Vienna, past and present?" (11). The essays in this volume, Shapira writes, set out to "explore the intricate relationships between buildings, designs, written text and people/networks and how they informed each other in the process of fashioning modern identities with concrete Jewish Viennese identifications" (23). Which, of course, leads to the questions of who are "Jews" and what is "Jewishness" (as this volume understands them) in Viennese modernity? In many ways, the nature of these terms remains somewhat undertheorized throughout these essays, although the through lines among a majority of the authors centers on identity formation in relation to increasing civil emancipation. On the whole, contributors use the terms Jew and Jewish as they please, mostly without problem. Yet as Shapira describes in her introduction, Viennese Jewry in the century before World War II was immensely and continuously self-reflective. It was Jewish "choices regarding which architects and patrons to collaborate with as well as their active coproduction in building, designing, and shaping a new Viennese cultural language that actually defined the Viennese Jews' sense of belonging" (12), she writes. Throughout the volume, one gets the sense (correctly, I believe) that the authors all agree that "being Jewish" was something deeply valuable and genuinely important for almost everyone involved, from patrons to artists to activists. At a moment when it seemed (almost) possible to forsake the particularity of Jewishness for something like cosmopolitanism, many influential Jews in Vienna did no such thing. This volume demonstrates how design (in all its guises) allowed Jews to experiment with new expressions of Jewishness in a uniquely Viennese way. So what, then, is "modernism"? In some cases, it seems to be merely a temporal arbiter (modern denoting from the early nineteenth century through the Anschluss). In other cases, it is philosophical (modern denoting Jewish self-awareness coupled with emancipation). In a different context, such an open-ended definition would pose a problem for the thematic coherence of the various essays, since one does not usually think of the Orientalist fantasy of the Leopoldstadt Temple (essay by Katharina Schoeller, 41–57), designed [End Page 95] by Ludwig Förster, the preeminent architect of the Vormärz, as part of the same "modernism" that motivated the refined simplicity of interiors by Ernst Plischke, one of the leading members of the New Building movement during the interwar period (essay by Eva B. Ottillinger, 413–26). Here, however, the looseness works just fine, for it allows individual authors the historical space to investigate broader themes relating Jewishness to modernism and also makes for some very interesting juxtapositions. For example, a discussion of the color palette employed...

A Cautionary Tale: Discriminatory Lending against Hispanic Farmers and Ranchers in Southern Colorado

AbstractDespite legal and civil emancipation, minorities in the United States continue to face extremely unequal opportunity structures in the financial realm. Evidence of this is found in the fact that segregation between Anglos and minorities has changed little since the civil rights era. This is particularly true for Hispanics, who have actually witnessed an increase in segregation in recent years. Although many factors have contributed to this outcome, unequal access to financial credit has played a particularly important role in maintaining the status quo between Hispanics and Anglos. In this article, I analyze the lasting impact of discriminatory lending within Hispanic communities in southern Colorado. I examine how unfavorable access to credit has contributed to wealth disparities in this region. My results demonstrate that lenders systematically denied Hispanic farmers and ranchers access to subsidized loans throughout the twentieth century. The lack of access to formal banking, the underappreciation of homes and land, and the deliberate isolation of Hispanics from formal institutions forced many Hispanic families to leave the area altogether. Ultimately, unequal access to credit has fostered deep inequalities between Anglos and Hispanics in the region, which, in turn, has reinforced ethnic tension between these two groups.

Commencement of Roma Civic Emancipation

The article offers a correction of the widespread approach in which in the studies of Romani movement for civic emancipation are examined only its international dimensions, leaving behind its origin and first stages, which occurred in individual countries. Based on the research of historical sources we will show the commencement and roots of the Romani movement. The departing point of the research presented in this article is the circumstance that Roma are not a hermetic social and cultural system. They exist in two dimensions, both as separate ethnic communities and as a part of the macro-society in which they live within the respective nation-states. Together with members of the macro-society they experienced breakdowns of old Empires and the establishment of national states. Under the conditions of historical turbulences in the period between two World Wars, Roma developed aspirations for civil emancipation , started to be civically engaged and politically institutionalised. On the basis of archival and media sources the article introduces the first manifestation of civic activities of Roma in an attempt to pursue their ethnic and community rights and their visions about their place in society and the future of their nation. Acknowledgements: This article is written as a part of the research project ‘RomaInterbellum. Roma Civic Emancipation between the Two World Wars’ which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 694656). It reflects only the authors’ view, and the agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Considerations Concerning the Changes About Civil Emancipation, in Accordance with the New Argentinean Civil Code

The Spanish version of this paper can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2610879This article has the main intention to present some comments concerning the new changes in the Argentinean Civil Code, which is going to be in activity this year (2015), in terms of promoting citizenship and engagement of youngsters to the world of job opportunities, effective participation in the task force market and increasing responsibility concerned to humans, specially in relation with a conscious attitude directed to the exercise of social life in terms of rights and obligations, in both perspectives, national and international, mainly in the countries joined in the MERCOSUR.

How Early Did We Become Modern?

How Early Did We Become Modern? Elliott Horowitz ‘‘In recent decades a most impressive and steadily mounting corpus of scholarly monographs and articles has vastly enriched our understanding of the history and culture of European Jewry in early modern times . . . There is undoubtedly a crying need for new general interpretations of the role of Jewry within Europe in this period.’’ This quotation is not taken from David Ruderman’s Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, to which our forum is devoted, but from its predecessor, Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, first published in 1985 and reviewed by Ruderman in these pages.1 Although Israel’s book has subsequently appeared in two revised editions (1989 and 1997), Ruderman, shortly before stepping down after two decades as director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, has boldly taken on the formidable task—as scholarly monographs (some reviewed in this issue) and articles have continued to mount even more steadily—of producing yet another synthetic history of early modern Jewry. Whereas Israel’s synthesis focused on a period of two hundred years which it described as ‘‘the age of mercantilism,’’ thus highlighting its economic significance, Ruderman’s volume, which covers a somewhat longer period of time, is no less forthrightly a ‘‘cultural history.’’ In such a work ‘‘the role of Jewry,’’ to quote Israel, is less relevant than the inner dynamics of the Jewish world, in constant dialogue, as its author stresses, with the surrounding cultures among which early modern Jews resided. Indeed, early in his recent book Ruderman explicitly distances himself from Israel’s ‘‘characterization of Jewish social and cultural history . . . as primarily reflective and derivative of general trends located in non-Jewish society.’’ Ruderman’s critique parallels, and perhaps derives from, Robert Bonfil’s 1984 critique of earlier historical presentations— particularly by Israel’s fellow countryman Cecil Roth—of Italian Jewry [End Page 259] during the Renaissance.2 It is perhaps noteworthy that the scholars rebuked for their ‘‘derivative’’ notions of Jewish history were trained in England, and that their criticizers each earned their doctoral degrees at the Hebrew University, where both studied with Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, the centenary of whose birth occurs this year. In his Short History of the Jewish People, first published in 1936, and in a revised edition seven years later, Roth gave expression to the notion widely then accepted that it was only in the late eighteenth century that ‘‘the Jewish Middle Ages were closed.’’3 Roth, who had earned both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Oxford (D.Phil. 1924), had good reason to be somewhat perplexed about periodization. When that venerable university’s Faculty of Modern History—which has produced such legendary early modernists as Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), Lawrence Stone, (Sir) Keith Thomas, and Peter Burke—opened its doors in the mid-nineteenth century, the year 285 (C.E.) was designated as the beginning of ‘‘modern history,’’ and that still continues to be the case. In the first of his two historiographical appendices Ruderman raises the ‘‘obvious’’ question as to why only in the mid-eighties was Jonathan Israel ‘‘the first to take up the challenge of producing . . . a synthesis that clearly laid out the parameters of an early modern period in Jewish history,’’ a question to which not even a tentative answer is provided. One possible explanation, however, may lie in the surprising longevity of the (now strange) historiographical notion that ‘‘the Jewish Middle Ages,’’ as Roth referred to them, did not follow the periodization of Europe as a whole. Similar to Roth’s assertion was that of Jacob Marcus, who wrote in the introduction to his influential source book The Jew in the Medieval World, first published in 1938, that ‘‘the medieval age comes to an end for Western Jewry with the proclamation of political and civil emancipation in France in September, 1791.’’4 That notion was already expressed a decade earlier by Louis Ginzberg, who also provided it with a distinguished pedigree: ‘‘The middle ages, aptly remarks Zunz,’’ he wrote, ‘‘did not terminate for the Jew until the end of the eighteenth century...

A Jewish Construction of a Catholic Hero: David Levi's "A Pio IX"

Along with liberals and patriots, many Italian Jews rejoiced on June 16, 1846, when Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti was elected Pope Pius IX. They expected the new Pope to reform the Papal State and to favor Italy’s unification, the goal of the Risorgimento national movement. Italian Jews suffered from a lack of civil rights, to different degrees within each Italian State. Therefore, they saw the Risorgimento as an opportunity to overthrow the regimes ruling on the different Italian regions and consequently as a way to achieve full civil emancipation. Italian Jewish intellectuals built a rich narrative on their support for Risorgimento. Part of this narrative is the poem “A Pio IX” (To Pius IX), composed by the Jewish writer David Levi (1816–1898) in 1846 to honor Pio Nono. This paper presents an analysis of Levi’s poem on a number of levels: historically, it provides further literary evidence of the Jews’ desire to praise Pope Pius IX and of their support for Risorgimento; concerning its content, it investigates Levi’s striking use, along with the more secular symbolism of the Enlightenment, of Catholic and Christological symbolism.

Equality under law, the confessional state, and emancipation: the example of the Papal State

Jewish civil emancipation is normally discussed in the context of changes in attitudes toward Jews, commercial restructuring, and the Enlightenment atmosphere, all leading up to the French Revolution and the decision of 1791 to grant French Jews full citizenship. All of these factors were important. However, were it not for the legal revolution that occurred during this time, ending the reign of ius commune and customary law and replacing both with the Napoleonic Code Civil, emancipation would not have occurred, certainly not in the form it did. This was no instant rejection of the past, however, but the result of a lengthy process in which the incompatibility of the Jews’ status as cives in ius commune ran up against, and had to be squared with, the application of that law in a state that was confessional and whose legal system was hierarchical: different laws for different social strata. Ultimately, this incompatibility proved both unbridgeable and intolerable. The choice was either to remove the legal and confessional impediments, that is, to grant Jews full legal equality, or to remain politically mired in the past. The latter was the course of the Papal State. Yet, paradoxically, it is by studying the fortunes of this incompatibility in just this setting that the process, its snares, and the reasons for emancipation, as well as its eventual failure in some places, become clear.

ALGUNOS TEMAS SOBRE EDUCACIÓN EN LA PRENSA LIBERAL SALVADOREÑA (1870 - 1890) MUJERES Y TRABAJADORES DE EDUCACIÓN LAICA

El presente artículo explora de manera sucinta tres problemáticas planteadas por algunos liberales salvadoreños de fines del siglo XIX. La emancipación civil de las mujeres a través de una renovada educación, la creación de escuelas nocturnas para artesanos o de institutos de enseñanza agrícola para jornaleros y la apuesta por una educación laica, se convirtieron en temas que aquellos consideraron claves para el progreso político, social y económico del país. Tales reflexiones son recogidas de ciertos periódicos que circularon entre 1870 y 1890. Ellos son el Diario Oficial, La Discusión, La República, La Unión y el Boletín municipal de Santa Ana. Palabras clave: Liberalismo, Educación, Mujeres, Trabajadores, Educación Laica,Libertad de Enseñanza.

GOTHIC HISTORY AND CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE WORKS OF CHARLES DODD (1672–1743)

ABSTRACTThe clergyman-scholar Charles Dodd used the study of the past to articulate a defence of the English Catholic community that enjoyed a rich legacy. His Church history proclaimed a vision of Catholic patriotism that appealed to the influence of medieval and Reformation history on contemporary religious debates, and informed the later push for civil emancipation. Dodd's work brought together two fashionable but seemingly contrary, historical sensibilities: grounded upon antiquarian recoveries of the gothic past, but shaped by a cosmopolitan spirit of ‘reason’ that drew upon continental reformist schools. Challenging the narratives forged through the Reformation, he pitched his works across a wide spectrum of English scholarly life, seeking dialogue with high-churchmen, constitutionalists, and supporters of religious toleration. But Dodd's later reputation as a herald of Catholic Enlightenment belied the controversies roused in his career. In delivering his view of history, Dodd was forced to suppress radical thoughts on the nature of English monarchy, stumbled into conflicts with fellow clergymen, and risked the taint of heresy with reflections upon the Holy See. Conceived to construct a new intellectual platform for his co-religionists within their national community, his works served inadvertently to reveal the complexity and fragility of English Catholic life.

Vida, obra y muerte de Alfonsina Storni, Delmira Agustini y Ercília Cobra: La construcción de los derechos civiles

Hacia 1920, los derechos civiles de las mujeres fueron discutidos en diversas instancias del espacio público en Argentina, Brasil y Uruguay. No obstante, la sanción de la "capacidad civil plena" fue largamente demorada. En este marco, se observa un fenómeno provocador: la aparición de vidas, obras y muertes de mujeres que tuvieron un sino común. Su estudio permite conocer el proceso de emancipación civil femenina desde una perspectiva novedosa. Una interpretación en términos jurídicos y comparativos permite poner de relieve los límites de un proceso de emancipación del que sin duda estas mujeres fueron parte aunque más no sea a título individual.

The Status of Women and Jews in Moses Mendelssohn's Social Contract Theory: An Exceptional Case1

In part taking up Steven Achheim's call not to retrospectively essentialize the terms Deutschtum and Judentum but, rather, to think them in their “co‐constitutionality”, I argue that such re‐reading points not only to the ways in which a “minority” culture helped shape a “majority” culture in the past, but forward to the claims of contemporary critical political and cultural theory as well. Instead of reading Moses Mendelssohn—the main focus of this essay—as an accommodator to German enlightenment mandates who simply traded Jewish autonomy for civil emancipation, therefore, I suggest re‐reading his Liberal social contract theory in light of contemporary feminist and critical political thought in order to gain a better sense of its novelty and, even, radicality, as well as of how it may provide an alternative, if still imperfect, model of critically thinking together the terms “gender,”“Jewishness,” and “emancipation.”

The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy Görge K. Hasselhoff The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy, by Abraham P. Socher. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. 261 pp. $55.00. Socher's book leaves me as a reader a bit puzzled. It is, indeed, a good introduction into Solomon Maimon's life and thought, collecting a lot of scholarly data and information on him. But, alas, there are also serious mistakes and shortcomings. The writing of the book started in 1993, when Socher as a student first encountered Solomon Maimon's autobiography as well as a footnote on a Hebrew manuscript of Maimon's. With the late Amos Funkenstein he started his dissertation, finished in 2001, on Maimon's concept of autobiography. Although that dissertation seems to having been reworked in some places, the [End Page 210] core remains. Only few sources written after that date are utilized. (There are, for example, at least two articles on Maimonides and Maimon published in a commemorative volume on Maimonides in 2004 which are seemingly unknown to the author. Joseph Soloveitchik deserves the mention of more recent publications than the ones listed on p. 211 n. 38.) Socher's book itself is divided into an introduction, five chapters, a brief conclusion, notes, a select bibliography, and an index (which is not mentioned in the table of contents). For the main part Socher establishes a biography of Maimon. To do this he re-reads the autobiography as well as most other published German and Hebrew writings and the Hebrew manuscript "Hesheq Shelomo." Maimon's single, central philosophical theme is his "noetic, or intellectual, perfection" (p. 159, cf. p. 93). This theme, or concept, is of the antique Aristotelian tradition read through the lenses of both medieval Jewish philosophers and the talmid hakham that he learned in Lithuania. After encountering Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, and Immanuel Kant (or their works) Maimon became a Jewish heretic. His attempt to combine both traditions, the philosophical and the traditional Jewish, made him leave his Jewish home but never let him be a fully accepted philosopher of the German Enlightenment. Socher develops this idea in five steps. First he rewrites Maimon's biography (ch. 1). He then (ch. 2) studies the introduction of the Hebrew manuscript "Hesheq Shelomo" (the title could be rendered as Solomon's desire for knowledge, cf. p. 59), in which Maimon, who still called himself Shelomo ben Yehoshua, develops his concept of perfection in a medieval manner. In the third chapter Socher describes Maimon's contribution to Enlightenment philosophy, namely his Kantian reading of Maimonides and his Maimonidean reading of Kant. Especially the idea that Maimon tried to integrate Hume's scepticism into Kant's transcendental idealism deserves mention. Socher then asks (ch. 4) what it meant that the Jew Shelomo left his home in Lithuania and why he later wrote his partially fictional autobiography: "Maimon's autobiography is an answer, through his own case, not only of the question of Jewish fitness for Enlightenment and civil emancipation but also to the more general but not unrelated question, What is Enlightenment?" (p. 114–5). Finally, Socher highlights Maimon's impact on contemporaries and on later philosophers (ch. 5). As an introduction to Solomon Maimon's life and thought I would recommend Socher's book. On the other hand I hesitate to recommend it as an introduction to a reader who possibly is not acquainted with German Enlightenment or the history of Jewish thought. I do not doubt that Socher is able to read German and that he worked through Maimon's difficult German works. But approximately every fourth German quotation or phrase is written [End Page 211] incorrectly. For example, the German for "perfection" is (already in Maimon's works) written "Vollkommenheit" (with two "m's"; see p. 59, 77, etc.), on p. 111 it should be "antirousseauisch" (anti-Rousseauian), the title of Maimon's book on p. 103 etc. is "Der moralische Skeptiker," the capitalization of German words is quite different from the English, and so on. That leads me to another question. Socher always gives references...

Pio Nono and the Jews: From "Reform" to "Reaction," 1846-1878

Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, elected pope on June 16, 1846, assumed the name Pius IX, in honor of Pius VII, who had issued the dispensation which allowed the epileptic Giovanni to enter the priesthood. Ordained in 1819, he received holy orders not to make a career but to serve as a pastor of souls. Following his first assignment at a Roman orphanage from 1823 to 1825, he accompanied the apostolic delegate to Chile and Peru, in a venture he thought would be more missionary than diplomatic.1 Upon returning from South America, Giovanni was appointed director of the Hospice of San Michele in Rome. Named archbishop of Spoleto in 1827, he served there until 1832, when he was appointed bishop of Imola, where he remained until 1846, even though Gregory XVI had brought him into the college of cardinals six years earlier. In his various posts, he had little interaction with Jews, as is attested by the biographers of his prepapal career.2 The fact that he had friends in the liberal camp led some to judge him more progressive than retrograde. Rumors circulated that he was not opposed to progress, and in 1845 he had outlined a reformist course for the Papal State.3 Although Mastai's fifty-eight-point program did not include the civil emancipation of the Jews, his call for a cautious modernization of the Papal State earned him a liberal reputation. His pontificate (1846-1878), the longest in history, opened with an air of expectation, which was reinforced by his amnesty of July, 1846.4 Liberals, Nationalists, and Jews hoped that the new pope would reconcile liberty and religion, unite Italy, and ameliorate the position of the Jews in the Papal State. Initially, Pio Nono seemed to fulfill expectations, emerging in the eyes of many as the pope-liberator prophesied by the Piedmontese priest Vincenzo Gioberti in his work On the Civil and Moral Primacy of the Italians (1843). Following the revolutionary upheaval of 1848-49, however, the pope who had been hailed as a liberal was denounced as the high priest of reaction and chief protagonist of the Counter-Risorgimento. Thus, while Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour were respectively dubbed the heart, sword, and brains of unification, Pio Nono emerged as the cross of liberals, nationalists, and Jews. In 2000, when John Paul II proceeded with the beatification of Pius IX, the pope who convoked Vatican Council I (1869-70) and waged war against the modern world, alongside John XXIII, who convoked Vatican Council II (1961-1965) and sought an accommodation with it, there was a trinity of opposition from Liberals, Italian Nationalists, and Jews. Many knew of his opposition to Italian unification, which aroused nationalists, as well as his war against modern civilization, concretized in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), which angered Liberals. Although some mentioned his role in the Mortara affair,5 others wondered why Jews opposed his canonization. Not all aspects of Pius IX's reversal of course have been fully explored, including his relationship to the Jews-the focus of this essay. Pio Nono's Jewish policies are here examined in light of the traditional anti-Judaism within the Church, his early reformist program, and finally his conflicts with Italian nationalism and European liberalism and his unsuccessful attempt to preserve the temporal power. Some contend that had Pius continued on his reformist course, Catholic-Jewish relations might have been improved a century earlier and would not have had to wait for John XXIII (1958-1963) and Vatican Council II. Among other things, this essay explores the reasons why this did not occur. From the first, Pio Nono did not envision a Christian-Jewish reconciliation. His reforms were designed to correct abuses and offer assistance rather than to change prevailing structures in either the Church or the Papal State. Assuming the Christian nature of Italy in general and of his state in particular, this pope believed that the clerical nature of his government should continue and saw no reason why Catholicism should not retain its privileged position in the social and political spheres as well as the religious one. …

Religions and Society in Modern Europe by René Rémond

BOOK REVIEWS343 tively minor complaints, compared with the overall contribution the study makes. David Genulcore School ofAdvanced Study, University ofLondon Late Modern European Religions and Society in Modern Europe. By René Rémond. Translated by Antonia Nevill. [The Making of Europe.] (Maiden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. 1999. Pp. viii, 237. $27.95 paperback.) This book is a volume in "The Making of Europe" series, a collaborative effort of five European publishers exploring both the exceptional creativity of their continent's past and the difficulties that this past bequeaths to the nascent European community. The author chosen to examine what religion has contributed to this legacy is René Rémond, one of France's most distinguished historians . His qualifications for the task are unrivaled. Elected in 1998 to fill the chair of François Furet at theAcadémiefrançaise, René Rémond has written or edited over twenty works on, among other subjects, the history of contemporary Europe, the political history of modern France, and the often deeply troubled engagement between the Catholic Church and the democratic and secularizing forces unleashed by the Revolution of 1789. The author's ambitions match his accomplishments. Rémond proposes "to measure" the place "the great organized faiths" have occupied in "people's minds, institutions, laws, customs, collective behaviour, and exchanges of ideas" (pp. 2, 54-55). The starting point of his study is the French Revolution, its terminus contemporary Europe. Adopting the perspective of the longue durée, Rémond seeks "to discern a general direction" in which the relationship between religion and society is headed in all European societies (pp. 10, 128). Rémond insists that his subject is not a study of the variety of juridical regimes that may govern the relationship between church and state.Yet much of the text is devoted to these regimes. In the opening chapters, the author sketches the essential features of the confessional state of the old regime. Subsequent chapters follow the transformation of the confessional state in the aftermath of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The nineteenth century was the period of what Rémond calls the first era of secularization. The abrogation of confessional discrimination under the auspices of a tolerant liberalism yielded, above all in France, to an intolerant campaign of "laicization" aimed at eliminating religious expression from all aspects of public life (p. 144). The second era of secularization took shape in the twentieth century. The great organized faiths, above all Roman Catholicism, responded to the threat of totalitarianism by shedding their opposition to liberalism and reinventing themselves as Tocquevillian intermediary bodies in a fundamentally pluralistic civil society (pp. 70, 170). 344book reviews Rémond's typology of secularization is a useful tool of analysis. Likewise his insistence on the important role religion may play in a vital civil society is welcome . Nevertheless, these contributions are compromised by a variety of flaws. Thus for all that Rémond announces a balanced history of the whole of Europe, he must concede in his conclusion that the "lion's share of the discussion has focused on France" (pp. 216-217). And indeed the comparative dimension of this text often amounts to little more than so many confirmations of a French model. Rémond's treatment of the varieties of European religious experience is equally unbalanced. As Europe's religious "traditional regime" and as Europe's largest religious denomination, Roman Catholicism deserves extensive treatment . This Rémond provides, but to the admitted neglect of the complexity of other religious traditions. Rémond's treatment of both Orthodoxy and Protestantism is at best perfunctory. ForJudaism, the emphasis that Rémond places on civil emancipation needs to be balanced by a far more searching examination of both the rise of political anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Europe and the Holocaust. To his credit Rémond does devote a section to Islam in contemporary Europe.Yet in discussing the difficulty that arises between Islam and secularity he overlooks the obvious reference to Islamic Turkey's secular state. Conceptually, too, Rémond dissatisfies. He tends to collapse "society" into "political society." Certainly the more urban, the more consumerist...

Women in the transition of democracy in post-communist Czechoslovakia: The case of Slovakia

The solution of women’s problems in a democratic context requires not merely being able to exercise the rights which are guaranteed de-iure, but it is equally important to exercise it de-facto. The stage of the citizen’s emancipation process-the citizen being a woman-would, without doubt, be as problematic in the postcommunist society as the illfamed socialist ability to recognise reserves in the efforts in full emancipation of the woman. Quite different from the socialist paradigm here, under democratic circumstances, nothing has been promised. On the contrary, the rights of a female citizen represent only an inalienable precondition for her to incorporate herself into society in the capacity of a fully qualified citizen and shape herself as an autonomous human being. This fact, however, increases extraordinarily the importance of achieving a social and political consensus on the issue of women’s integration into the life of the society and of the social space for their participation in decision making processes and in the distribution of power in the society. Up to now everything witnesses that transformation of our public has solid ground in two reference frames determining the evolution of citizenship. Civil rights and political rights in their renewed form, guarantee for each citizen of our country a compatible chance for positive human citizenship and political selfarticulation. It may be anticipated that women are contented with the concept of self-articulation and that it meets all requirements for their human or civil emancipation. However, another hypothesis may be formulated-do women really know these fundamental documents and the rights and obligations specified in them? The shift in quality from the stage of passive democratisation to participation in democratic reforms, resulting in reconstruction of democracy, presupposes primarily the presence of ‘civil potential’, i.e. the readiness of citizens to manifest the civil self-articulation in a non-political way. The power of this civil potential is strongly dependent on the stage of development of the civil society. In the circumstances of postcommunist societies it is somehow anticipated that after the collapse of totalitarian political systems a phase of restoration of the citizenship would follow, so to say, in conformity with natural laws. We are encountering the fact that while one group of theorists from the ‘West’ points out that a fundamental social precondition of any democracy is the emerging of social actors and social movements at the very moment of the collapse of political systems (Touraine), the other stresses rather the procedural side of the evolution

The emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: acculturation and tradition in the nineteenth century

This wide-ranging book explores for the first time the impact of civil emancipation on a traditional Jewish population largely untouched by secular culture. Drawing on governmental sources, literature, memoirs, and communal records, Paula E. Hyman discusses the effects of modernization on Jews who lived in the villages and small towns of Alsace, analyzing the political, social, and economic factors that not only reshaped their behavior and self-understanding but also sustained their traditional Jewish practice.

The Seven Bishops: A Reconsideration

For Lord Macaulay the defiance offered by the seven bishops to James II marked a turning-point in English history. It was the story of men who would not stand by as a ‘harsh and inexorable prince’ destroyed constitutional liberties, established a military despotism, and imposed Catholicism by force. The great whig historian was not much given to praise of the clergy in general or bishops in particular, but even he could not withhold his admiration from an archbishop of Canterbury ‘who was ready to wear fetters and lay his aged limbs on bare stones rather than betray the interests of the Protestant religion and set the prerogative above the laws.’ Macaulay’s account of the seven bishops is, however, closely bound up with his view of James II as one of the great villains of English history, and recent historians, while enjoying the rich texture of Macaulay’s prose, find it difficult to accept the version of classical whig historiography. In their work James appears as not so much a tyrant as a peculiarly maladroit politician, not so much an absolutist with wide-ranging ambitions as an obstinate man of narrow religious perspectives. His little army was quite incapable of imposing Catholicism by force on a fiercely protestant nation. James’s aim was as simple as it was injudicious: to achieve civil emancipation for the small minority of his catholic co-religionists by a process of political manoeuvre and manipulation. Now, if this re-interpretation be correct, it is time to extend the process into ecclesiastical history and look afresh at the motives and policies of the seven bishops. I would suggest that what emerges is something quite different from the traditional heroic version but nonetheless an instructive study in the clerical mind of the late seventeenth century.

The Jew in the Medieval World. A Source Book 315-1791

To gain an accurate view of medieval Judaism, one must look through the eyes of Jews and their contemporaries. First published in 1938, Jacob Rader Marcus s classic source book on medieval Judaism provides the documents and historical narratives which let the actors and witnesses of events speak for themselves. The medieval epoch in Jewish history begins around the year 315, when the emperor Constantine began enacting disabling laws against the Jews, rendering them second-class citizens. In the centuries following, Jews enjoyed (or suffered under) legislation, either chosen or forced by the state, which differed from the laws for the Christian and Muslim masses. Most states saw the Jews as simply a tolerated group, even when given favorable privileges. The masses often disliked them. Medieval Jewish history presents a picture wherein large patches are characterized by political and social disabilities. Marcus closes the medieval Jewish age (for Western Jewry) in 1791 with the proclamation of political and civil emancipation in France. The 137 sources included in the anthology include historical narratives, codes, legal opinions, martyrologies, memoirs, polemics, epitaphs, advertisements, folk-tales, ethical and pedagogical writings, book prefaces and colophons, commentaries, and communal statutes. These documents are organized in three sections: The first treats the relation of the State to the Jew and reflects the civil and political status of the Jew in the medieval setting. The second deals with the profound influence exerted by the Catholic and Protestant churches on Jewish life and well-being. The final section presents a study of the Jew at home, with four sub-divisions with treat the life of the medieval Jew in its various aspects. Marcus presents the texts themselves, introductions, and lucid notes. Marc Saperstein offers a new introduction and updated bibliography.