The Emancipationists

This is the first book to explore the nineteenth-century political movement led by Jewish leaders seeking equality—a movement that historian David Sorkin calls emancipation politics. The emancipationists, most of whom had received a formal secular education, pioneered the key practices of modern Jewish politics: law, philanthropy, the press, and diplomacy. In so doing, Sorkin argues, the emancipationists renovated the venerable “vertical alliance,” the diaspora Jewish practice of aligning with the highest political authority, now the modern administrative and constitutional state. They also forged “horizontal alliances” with social and political groups, first to gain rights and then to defend them in the face of the new political antisemitism.

Sorkin studies this history in five European regions (England, France, Germany, Habsburg lands/Dual Monarchy, and Russia) and the United States over the course of the long nineteenth century (1789†“1914), when emancipation politics developed and took root. These political forms and practices would be characteristic of virtually all Jewish politics to follow—namely, the nationalism, socialism, and religious orthodoxy that organized at the turn of century to compete with the emancipationists and each other.