The Jewish Contribution To European Integration

This edited collection seeks to present a valuable guide to the Jewish contribution to the European integration process, and to enable readers to obtain a better understanding of the unknown Jewish involvement in the European integration project. Adopting both a national and a pan-European approaches, this volume brings together the work of leading international researchers and senior practitioners to cover a wide range of topics with an interdisciplinary approach under three different parts: present challenges, Jews and pan-European identity, and unsung heroes.

This first-of-its-kind edited collection examines the role that Jewish history, values, and individuals played in inspiring and promoting the European integration process.

In the context of unifying Europe, Jews of the “Old Continent” are re-thinking their role as ethno-cultural minority. European Jewry is developing a remarkable new assertiveness, but faces inner divisions and new anti-Semitism. This volume gives insight into controversial experiences and perspectives.

Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.

A unique collection of essays that deal with the intriguing and complex problems connected to the question of Jewish identity in the contemporary world. Concerning the problem of identity formation, this book addresses very important issues: What is the content or meaning of Jewish identity? What has replaced religion in defining the content of Jewishness? How do people in different age groups construct their Jewish identity? In most cases, the authors have combined a variety of research methods: they drew samples or relied on the sample surveys of others; used personal interviews with respondents who are especially knowledgeable about their own Jewish communities, or based their research on participant observation of particular communities or communal institutions.

This book investigates the idea of a distinct ‘Jewish contribution to civilization’ as it has been understood from the seventeenth century to the present. Offering a broad spectrum of academic opinion, it explores the role that the concept has played in Jewish self-definition and how it has influenced the history of the Jews and of others. It also considers the centrality of the concept in modern Jewish culture and for modern Jewish studies.

Contemporary Jewish identity, integration and acculturation in Europe has become an urgent topic in view of the current wave of antisemitism and reliable research on the present state of Jewish identity is scarce. Lilach Lev Ari has chosen three ethnically diverse communities - Paris, Brussels, and Antwerp - that can shed a light on the identity and acculturation of the Jewish minority in Europe. To understand patterns of social integration of native-born and immigrant Jews in the three host societies she applies the correlational quantitative method and has conducted semi-structured interviews. The study can promote further understanding of Jewish continuity within the non-Jewish host societies in a situation, when there is a concern about the resilience and strength of the Jewish communities vis-à-vis new waves of antisemitism.

Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.