Jewish Emancipation and Assimilation; 1864-75

The emancipation of the Jews in France is soon followed by their emancipation in the rest of continental and Central Europe.

After having lived for centuries in the confines of Jewish ghettos, Jews living in Western and Central Europe now have a powerful incentive to enter mainstream European society.

However, for the bulk of European Jewry there is no emancipation.
East European Jewry has lived for centuries in kehilot, semiautonomous Jewish municipal corporations that are supported by wealthy Jews.

Life in the kehilot is governed by a powerful caste of learned religious scholars who strictly enforce adherence to the Jewish legal code.

Many Jews find the parochial conformity enforced by the kehilot leadership onerous, and liberal stirring unleashed by the emancipation in the West has an unsettling effect upon the kehilot in the East.

By the early nineteenth century, not only is kehilot life resented but also Russia's tsarist regimes are becoming increasingly absolute.

The Jews of western Europe, who had previously been confined to petty trade and to banking, rapidly rise in academia, medicine, the arts, journalism, and other professions.

This accelerated assimilation of Jews into European society radically alters the nature of relations between Jews and non-Jews.

On the one hand, Jews have to reconcile traditional Judaism, which for nearly 2,000 years before emancipation had developed structures designed to maintain the integrity and separateness of Jewish community life, with a powerful secular culture in which they are now able to participate.

On the other hand, many non-Jews, who before the emancipation had had little or no contact with Jews, increasingly see the Jew as an economic threat.

The rapid success of many Jews fuels this resentment.

Established Christianity, and Roman Catholicism in particular, staunch upholders of the old order, identify the Jews as the major beneficiaries of the French Revolution and as the bearers of a liberal, secular, anticlerical, and often revolutionary threat.

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