Echoes From The Ghetto: A Review of Michael Goldfarb’s Emancipation, How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to the Revolution and Renaissance

by Daniel E. Levenson, ALM

December 10, 2010

In Emancipation, How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to the Revolution and Renaissance, author Michael Goldfarb explores an important period in both European and Jewish history. His lucid descriptions of the oppressive nature of Jewish life in Europe before the Emancipation, as well as the political upheavals which defined revolutionary France and the formation of a unified German state, offer a fascinating glimpse into the climate of political and religious debate in Western Europe during the last decades of the 18th century.

It is particularly interesting to note that many of the ideas about the role of Jews in French society - positive and negative, hateful and sympathetic -which emerged as motivating factors for various positions taken during discussions in this period, were to emerge again a century later when the “appropriate” place of Jews in French society would once more be questioned during the furor which arose over the Dreyfus Affair. While the author does touch on events in other locations, his primary focus is on France and Germany, and the story he tells of the Jews of both nations is useful for thinking not only about Jewish Emancipation in Western Europe, but has much to offer in terms of how we think about Jewish identity today, regardless of where we live.

Mr. Goldfarb opens with a description of an essay contest sponsored by the Metz Royal Society in France, in which the organization put forth two questions, one scientific, the other relating to society. Mr. Goldfarb writes, “The social question was ‘Are there means to render the Jews more useful and happy in France?” (Goldfarb,4). In response to this literary challenge a number of different individuals, including, most notably perhaps, a young Jewish writer who had grown up in relative poverty, named Zulkind Hourwitz, answered the call. It is worth noting that although Hourwitz was ardent in his defense of Jewish rights, he also advocated an assimilationist position which included the idea that: “Jews should not be allowed to use Hebrew or Yiddish in their commercial correspondence. Public schools should be opened to Jewish children so they can learn French, enlighten their conduct and become familiar with Christians. Rabbis and the syndics should be forbidden to force Jews to keep their beards. Jews must be obligated to dress like Christians.” (Goldfarb, 43).

While today we may not think it so strange to expect that Jews living in Western Europe would be able to speak the language of their neighbors and to dress in a similar fashion, such ideas were practically revolutionary in this period. At the time, the majority of Jews on the continent still lived in closed-off communities and suffered heavily under the burden of legal proscriptions and excessive taxes, effectively placing almost all of them at the lowest rungs of the social order. That Hourwitz had managed to rise above meager beginnings to become a well-known writer and intellectual is impressive enough, but that he was able to take part in a national conversation about the present and future state of his people, earning the respect (as well as unfortunately, in some cases, the anger) of non-Jews in France, is perhaps even more so.

In the late 18th century France found itself besieged from within by violent political and social change, which would eventually result in regicide, followed by the rise of Napoleon, events which were to have major consequences not only for the Jews of France, but for both Jew and gentile throughout Europe. Mr. Goldfarb does an excellent job of laying out the relationship between the events which defined Napoleon’s conquest and his interaction with Jewish communities in the various places he sought to conquer. It seems that wherever the French ruler went, he enthusiastically broke down walls of separation between the Jews and the broader community, which earned him the respect of Jews and simultaneously the intense enmity of nearly everyone else. Mr. Goldfarb notes that this, along with his decision to “resurrect” the Sanhedrin as a Jewish legal body, was a source of resentment and anger among Anti-Semites. Mr. Goldfarb writes that, “The Jews and their Emancipation were completely identified with Napoleon, and as ordinary people in the countries he had conquered dreamed of his end, they also dreamed of an end to Jewish rights.” (Goldfarb, 102).

After providing the reader with an excellent view of the situation in France, Mr. Goldfarb turns his attention to the situation in German-controlled territory and Prussia. While there are similarities to be found between French and German attitudes toward Jews, there are also a few noteworthy differences, and Mr. Goldfarb points out one notable area of contrast, writing that, “By the 1790’s while Paris’s Jews, active citizens, were negotiating the dangers of the Reign of Terror, Berlin’s Jews were engaged in a remarkable form of integration: the Jewish salon.” (Goldfarb, 110). The discussions that went on in these salons, the relationships that formed, were as complex and varied as the personalities who attended them. One thing is certain however, for a particular segment of German Jewry during this period it was possible to actively and openly take part in discussions from which they most assuredly would have been excluded in other parts of Europe.

Of course not all of the differences were positive –  in Germany a rise in nationalist sentiment seems to have led to an increase in Anti-Semitic attitudes, founded ironically, the author notes, on an almost completely opposite view of the role of Jews in society than those which drove prejudice against Jews in France. Mr. Goldfarb writes, “It was a profound irony that in France the argument against Emancipation was that Jews were too particular - the nation within the nation – and so could never be French, while in Germany the argument was that they represented the ‘French’ idea of universal brotherhood and so could never be German.” (Goldfarb, 137).

Although both Germany and France had a segment of Jewish society which could fairly be labeled “elite,” the rise of the Rothschild family stands in sharp contrast to the majority of those who comprised this elite, both in terms of the status they achieved and in the ways in which they remained active members of the Jewish community. This was to prove a valuable difference during an incident which became known as the “Damascus Blood Libel Affair,” which Mr. Goldfarb describes in his book. The incident, which involved the spreading of a blood libel against the Jews of Damascus after the disappearance of a local priest, resulted in widespread persecution of Jews in the city, and had far-reaching implications for Jews throughout Europe. The Rothschilds, along with other prominent Jewish thinkers and writers, did what they could to help protect their coreligionists in the Middle East, but it was a disturbing event nonetheless. The battle they fought to clear the name of the Jewish community of Damascus and to protect the Jews who lived there from physical assault and torture was not an easy one, and when the effects were felt in France, the French Prime Minister himself did not help matters by supporting the position of a French diplomat in Damascus who sent in a report backing up the hateful allegations. Such willingness to trade in lies and stereotypes among the French leadership was not mirrored among the British (non-Jewish) political elite, who took an admirable stand, calling for respect for the Jews of both Syria and Great Britain in the same breath, rejecting notions of inherent Jewish racial and social inferiority and discounting any idea of complicity in ritual murder.

For the Jews of Europe who did manage to slip the yoke of oppression and state-sanctioned prejudice, challenges remained. Mr. Goldfarb writes with sensitivity and honesty when he notes that “They may have traveled no farther than the other side of the village or twenty miles up the road to a larger town, but their psychological journeys were every bit as foreign and intense as their brothers and sisters who went down into the bowels of ships in Hamburg and Rotterdam and emerged on the other side of the Atlantic in New York.”” (Goldberg, 245).

As Mr. Goldfarb traces the path and evolutions of various strains of emancipation alongside Jewish reaction to this new-found freedom across France and Germany, he arrives eventually at Dr. Sigmund Freud, who is described as drawing strength from the historical experience of his people. It is also interesting to note that while Freud was not what we might call a “religious” man, that Mr. Goldfarb portrays him as someone who was aware of the presence of Anti-Semitism in Vienna, and who maintained a sense of connection to Jewish history and culture.

While much of Mr. Goldfarb’s book focuses on the struggles – political, cultural and religious – which could rightly be called defining characteristics of the period, he also mentions some of the amazing achievements in the social sciences which can be traced directly to the ideas and freedoms which emerged as a result of the Emancipation. In addition to Freud’s ground-breaking insights in the field of psychology, the author notes the influence which the work of Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson had in philosophy and sociology, which extended well beyond the times and places in which they lived. Without the emancipation, it seems unlikely that these individuals would have had the opportunities they did to interact with the larger society, and the world would certainly be a poorer place for it. Mr. Goldfarb notes the profound change this reflected in society and how Jews were viewed, writing that “What Freud, Einstein, Bergson, Durkheim, and other products of Emancipation were doing was nothing less than reshaping Western man’s understanding of himself, his society, and his place in the universe. These thinkers were not, as they might have been in the time before Emancipation, being arrested, tortured and put to death for blasphemy.” (Goldfarb, 350-1).

In closing, Michael Goldfarb’s book is accessible, interesting and well worth reading. Readers of this book will also no doubt enjoy the section in which the author provides a series of images, including cartoons, drawings, paintings and early photographs, depicting some of the key players and events the described in prose. While Mr. Goldfarb’s prose is without a doubt lucid and engaging, the inclusion of these images adds a nice touch to the overall work. This book is certain to find a wide variety of fans in the future.

Reviewed in this piece: Emancipation, How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to the Revolution and Renaissance by Michael Goldfarb. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2009. 

Copyright Daniel E. Levenson/New Vilna Review 2010.