During the Middle Ages, Jews
were generally better treated by Islamic rulers than
Christian ones. Despite second-class citizenship, Jews
played prominent roles in Muslim courts, and experienced a
"Golden Age" in the
Moorish Spain about 900-1100, though the situation
deteriorated after that time. History of Jewish communities
indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa is described
in the article Mizrahi Jew.
The European Enlightenment and
Haskalah (1700-1800s)
During the period of the
European Renaissance and Enlightenment, significant changes
were happening within the Jewish community. TheHaskalah
movement paralleled the wider Enlightenment, as Jews began
in the 1700s to campaign for emancipation from restrictive
laws and integration into the wider European society.
Secular and scientific education was added to the
traditional religious instruction received by students, and
interest in a national Jewish identity, including a revival
in the study of Jewish history and Hebrew, started to grow.
Haskalah gave birth to the Reform and Conservative movements
and planted the seeds of Zionism while at the same time
encouraging cultural assimilation into the countries in
which Jews resided. At around the same time another movement
was born, one preaching almost the opposite of Haskalah,
Hasidic Judaism. Hasidic Judiasm began in the 1700s by Rabbi
Israel Baal Shem Tov, and quickly gained a
following with its more exubarent, mystical approach to
religion. These two movements, and the traditional orthodox
approach to Judiasm from which they spring, formed the basis
for the modern divisions within Jewish observance.
At the same time, the outside
world was changing, and debates began over the potential
emancipation of the Jews (granting them equal rights). The
first country to do so was France, during theRevolution in
1789. Even so, Jews were expected to integrate, not continue
their traditions. This ambivalence is demonstrated in the
famous speech of Clermont-Tonnerre before the National
Assembly in 1789:
"We must refuse
everything to the Jews as a nation and accord
everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw
recognition from their judges; they should only have
our judges. We must refuse legal protection to the
maintenance of the so-called laws of their Judaic
organization; they should not be allowed to form in
the state either a political body or an order. They
must be citizens individually. But, some will say to
me, they do not want to be citizens. Well then! If
they do not want to be citizens, they should say so,
and then, we should banish them. It is repugnant to
have in the state an association of non-citizens,
and a nation within the nation. . . "
1800s
Though persecution still
existed, emanicipation spread throughout Europe in the
1800s.Napoleon invited Jews to leave the Jewish ghettos in
Europe and seek refuge in the newly created tolerant
political regimes that offered equality under Napoleonic Law
(see Napoleon and the Jews). By 1871, with Germany’s emancipation of Jews, every European country except Russia
had emancipated its Jews.
Despite increasing
integration of the Jews with secular society, a new form of
anti-Semitism emerged, based on the ideas of race and
nationhood rather than the religious hatred of the Middle
Ages. This form of anti-Semitism held that Jews were a
separate and inferior race from the Aryan people of Western
Europe, and led to the emergence of political parties in
France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary that campaigned on a
platform of rolling back emancipation. This form of
anti-Semitism emerged frequently in European culture, most
famously in the Dreyfus Trial in France. These persecutions,
along with state-sponsored pogroms in Russia in the late
1800s, led a number of Jews to believe that they would only
be safe in their own nation. See Theodor Herzl and Zionism.
At the same time, Jewish
migration to the United States created a new community
in large part freed of the restrictions of Europe. Over 2
million Jews arrived in the United States between 1890 and
1924, most from Russia and Eastern Europe.
1900s
Though Jews became
increasingly integrated in Europe, fighting for their home
countries in World War I and playing important roles in
culture and art during the 20s and 30s, racial anti-Semitism
remained. It reached its most virulent form in the killing
of approximately six million Jews during the
Holocaust, almost completely obliterating the
two-thousand year history of the Jews in Europe. In 1948,
the Jewish state of
Israel was founded, creating the first Jewish nation
since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. Subsequent wars
between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the flight in the
face of persecution of almost all of the 900,000 Jews
previously living in Arab countries. Today, the largest
Jewish communities are in the United States and Israel, with
major communities in France, Russia, England, and Canada.
