Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism

This is a timely contribution to some of the most pressing debates facing scholars of Jewish Studies today. It forces us to re-think standard approaches to both antisemitism and liberalism. Its geographic scope offers a model for how scholars can provincialize Europe and engage in a transnational approach to Jewish history. The book crackles with intellectual energy; it is truly a pleasure to read.- Jessica M. Marglin , University of Southern California, USA
Green and Levis Sullam have assembled a collection of original, and provocative essays that, in illuminating the historic relationship between Jews and liberalism, transform our understanding of liberalism itself. - Derek Penslar , Harvard University, USA
This book offers a strikingly new account of Liberalism's relationship to Jews. Previous scholarship stressed that Liberalism had to overcome its abivalence in order to achievea principled stand on granting Jews rights and equality. This volume asserts, through multiple examples, that Liberalism excluded many groups, including Jews, so that the exclusion of Jews was indeed integral to Liberalism and constitutive for it. This is an important volume, with a challenging argument for the present moment.- David Sorkin , Yale University, USA

The emancipatory promise of liberalism and its exclusionary qualities shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.

Integrates established historiographical concerns with the new perspectives opened-up by transnational history and the global and imperial turn Highlights the way in which different chronologies and starting points ensured that quite similar processes could take place in very different contexts at different moments Re-imagines a field that has been shaped by European experiences and paradigms

Auteur

Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford and at Brasenose College, UK.

Simon Levis Sullam is Associate Professor of Modern History at Ca' Foscari, University of Venice, Italy.

Résumé
"All three volumes help move the historiography of antisemitism forward in a way that has long been needed, presenting a panorama of new and interesting perspectives about an old but still important, relevant, and hotly debated theme." (Shulamit Volkov, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 33, 2023)

"The volume is a major contribution to the field of modern Jewish history. It is remarkable for a project with such an ambitious agenda that it largely succeeds to deliver on its promises. ... It should be considered as a major historiographical intervention that will hopefully become a reference point not only for historians of Jews and antisemitism but also for future research on liberalism, colonialism, minorities, genocide, and human rights." (Ludwig Decke, Comparativ -Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung, Vol. 32 (6), 2022)

Contenu

1. Introduction: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: Towards a 21st Century History- Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam.- Part 1: The Limits of Liberalism.- 2. Liberalism and Antisemitism: A Reassessment from the Peripheries- Lisa M. Leff.- 3. Osman Bey's The Conquest of the World by Jews (1873): a Liberal Antisemitism? - Simon Levis Sullam.- 4. Jews and Other Others- Ari Joskowicz.- Part 2: Living Liberalism.- 5. The Material of Race: Caribbean Jews, Clothing, and Manhood in the Age of Emancipation and Liberal Revolution- Laura Leibman.- 6. Liberalism, Antisemitism and Everyday Life in Vienna: The Tragic Case of Heinrich Jaques (1831-1894)- Jonathan Kwan.- 7. Giving and Dying in Liberal Italy: Jewish Men and Women in Italian Culture Wars -Luisa Levi D'Ancona.- Part 3: Rethinking East-West.- 8. Unsettling the Jewish Question from the Margins of Europe: Spanish Liberalism and Sepharad- Michal Rose Friedman.- 9. A Model Millet? Ottoman Jewish Citizenship at the End of Empire -Julia Phillips Cohen.- 10. From East to West: America as the Liberal Melting Pot of Jewish Politics- Matt Silver.- Part 4: Liberalism, Empire, Zionism.- 11. Who Introduced Liberalism into the Damascus Affair (1840)? Center, Periphery, and Networks in the Jewish Response to the Blood Libel- Yaron Tsur.- 12. A Jewish Liberal in Istanbul: Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Young Turks, and the Zionist Press Network, 1908-1911- Ozan Ozavci.- 13. Jews, Imperial Liberalism, and the Predicament of Small Nations: Lewis B. Namier's Gentry Nationalism- Arie M. Dubnov.- Part 5: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Liberalism.- 14. 1848 and Beyond: Jews in the National and International Politics of Secularism and Revolution- Abigail Green.- 15. A Certain Kind of Liberalism: Jewish Minority Rights in Eastern Europe and Beyond- James Loeffler.- 16. The Jewishness of Cold War Liberalism- Malachi Haim Hacohen. -17. Afterword