The Jews In European History

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.

This history of the Jews in Europe examines the role played by the Jews themselves, across the whole of Europe, during the century and a half leading up to the birth of the nation of Israel, and the state-sponsored genocide of the Holocaust.

The Economic History of European Jews offers a radical revision of demographics and economics. It explains how the presence of Jews was a limited one and their trade was just that, trade by Jews, not “Jewish Trade”.

The major cultural, ideological, and social changes that have occurred in Europe in the past century have generated widespread reassessment of European history in terms of its presuppositions, its methodologies, its directions, its emphases, and its scope. This timely volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment. It points to a new framework for the study of Jewish history and helps to contextualize it within the mainstream of historical scholarship.

A major new interpretation of the Holocaust, contextualizing the destruction of the Jews within Nazi violence against other groups.

Discusses the socio-historical problem areas related to the presence of Jews in major European societies from the 18th century to our days; differently from most other studies, covers the post-Shoah situation also. The approach is multi-disciplinary, mobilizing resources gained from sociology, demography and political science, based on substantial statistical information. Presents and compares the different patterns of Jewish policies of the emerging nation states and established empires. Discusses education and socio-professional stratification of Jews. Deals with the challenges of emancipation and assimilation, the emergence of Jewish nationalism in various forms, Zionism above all, as well as antisemitic ideologies. The book ends with a scrutiny of post-Shoah situation opposing in this regard Western Europe to the Sovietised East, discussing finally strategies of dissimulation or reconstruction of Jewish identity.

Europe is expanding - and therewith remembers its historical basis, which was hidden beneath the shadow of the Cold War for a long time. This return of a common history which is mostly narrated as a history of success today, however contains the perception of transnational traditions at the same time which by contrast should give reason for a critical self-reflection. This volume gives an impulse through a comparative examination of the still highly actual forms of antisemitism in Europe. The focus will be on the developments in the countries from the Baltic States to South Eastern Europe, which usually are little known in Western Europe. At the same time, the specifities of antisemitism in Eastern Europe are incorporated in the theoretical insights of antisemitism research, thus filling a gap that has existed until now.