Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance

by Michael Goldfarb

Book Overview

For almost 500 years the Jews of Europe were kept apart, confined to ghettos or tiny villages in the countryside. Then, in one extraordinary moment in the French Revolution, the Jews of France were emancipated. Soon the ghetto gates were opened all over Europe. The era of Emancipation had begun. What happened next would change the course of history. Emancipation tells the story of how this isolated minority emerged from the ghetto and against terrible...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416547967
• ISBN13: 9781416547969
• Release Date: November 2009
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Well Researched and EVERYTHING New

Even among the well educated, very few people know the history of the Jewish people in Europe. The author has done an amazing job of writing a very readable, interesting and insightful accounting of this time. My hat is off to him. This is an excellent book. I am married to a Jewish woman, I have been to Israel several times, many of my good friends are Jewish. I knew nothing. Thank you Michael Goldfarb.

Who knew....

This is a fascinating read for non-Jews .... maybe even for members of the tribe. It is well written and hard to put down and I find that an unusual thing to say about a history, but If more history were written this way there would be more people reading it. I bought it on Kindle, a great device with a limited catalog, and would very much like to hear it read by Goldfarb, an occasional radio presenter and reporter for NPR and the BBC. It gave me a better understanding of European history from middle ages till the present and I will likely to re-read it. It is information rich and lends itself to some study especially by those of us who are only casually informed about the history of the Hebrew people - outside of the Bible - and European Liberalism.

Well-researched, and yet nothing new

Mr. Goldfarb has indeed written an excellent history of the emancipation of Europe's Jews, well-researched but adding almost nothing new to the story. He writes with the commendable style of a good journalist who avoids commentary. This is fine as far as it goes, but even in his epilogue, where he depicted individual responses to being emancipated, he seemingly leaves its beneficiaries unable to actualize that status, albeit through no innate fault of their own. Had he shaped his narrative using the term modernity, he might have provided a coherency to the story. He opens with Spinoza, the first 'Modern' Jew, but fails to grasp the import of the word. He correctly focuses on the fact that it was Gentiles who initiated Emancipation, without overtly stating that without them there would have been no Emancipation. Jews locked inside of Ghetto walls were in no position to initiate anything (and as he also states, did not, in many cases, want to). He makes much of the self-emancipation of Jews in Vienna, but does not attach any consequence to the fact that the society they created there was, while German-speaking, not 'German', as pointed out by the reactions of the Anti-Semites he cites. One quibble: Mr. Goldfarb translates all German newspaper names into English every time, but from French only at the first occurence. In addition, he does not translate Alliance Israelite Universelle at all, assuming that his audience is like him, conversant in French. This is confirmed in his bibliography, which includes sources in French, but nothing in German (even if in translation). Perhaps that is an explanation for his usage of 'The Jewish State' as the English translation of 'Der Judenstaat', when in fact it should be 'The Jews' State', not quite the same thing. 'Emancipation into What?' might have been a better title, but the author never asked the question, and so this book remains limited to telling a story without a point.