BOOKS: ‘Emancipation’

EMANCIPATION: HOW LIBERATING EUROPE’S JEWS FROM THE GHETTO LED TO REVOLUTION AND RENAISSANCE
By Michael Goldfarb
Simon & Schuster, $30, 408 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

This one of those marvelous books that not only illuminates an important chain of historical events, but provides timeless — and especially timely — lessons for our own age. Michael Goldfarb, whose work will be familiar to those who listen to public radio, writes that the subject encapsulated in his book’s subtitle had been at the back of his mind for some time.

He was pondering not merely the achievement let loose by the emancipation of European Jewry but also what if any price it had paid. Then the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, sent him as a reporter into Europe’s Muslim communities, which were bitterly and fiercely rejecting integration into the societies of the countries where they lived and embracing symbolic and actual segregation or voluntary ghettoization:

“I realized then that it was worth going through the agony of writing a book that answered the questions “why” and “what price” because the story of Jewish Emancipation had relevance today outside the Jewish community, and not just for the developed world’s immigrant Muslim communities but for other racial and ethnic minority groups in this second age of mass immigration. The story of Jewish Emancipation is not just about a religious minority’s struggles to integrate, it is about a group regarded as an ethnic and racial minority fighting for its place in society.”

Well, if the process of writing “Emancipation” was agony for Michael Goldfarb, it is anything but agonizing for the reader of this impassioned, thoughtfully argued, well-expressed book.

We are so accustomed to wallowing in the well-known horrors of the French Revolution that it is good to learn that something good came out of all that turmoil and mayhem. And unlike the Revolution’s emancipation of women, which did not last, its abolition of the restrictions on Jews happily was lasting in much of Europe.

It is hard to believe that despite the gains of the Enlightenment, Jews were still denied full citizenship and restricted to ghettos throughout much of the continent. Nations there had not followed the example of Oliver Cromwell, who in the mid-17th century ended the ban on Jews in England that had been in force for 500 years, thus opening up the City of London to Jewish merchants and bankers, which helped transform it into a major center of world commerce.

But now Europe was alive with a newly-released pent up energy, as Mr. Goldfarb explains:

“Something quite remarkable happened once the ghetto gates were thrown open … within a few short decades Jews were not only integrating but playing an increasingly important role in the life of Europe. The transformation was startling to those who lived through it. In the early nineteenth century, Isaac D’Israeli, whose family had been expelled from Spain, lived for centuries in Venice, and then wandered north to England via the Netherlands, noted that prior to the Emancipation he could count all the ’Jewish men of genius or talent on his fingers. … The previous centuries have not produced ten great men.’ But now everything was changing fast. His son, Benjamin, would become one the great men of this new era, first as a popular novelist, then as British prime minister.”

And of course, as far as Jewry itself was concerned, that’s where the price comes in: conversion. For general emancipation notwithstanding there were still bars to Jewish achievement, especially in countries such as Britain with an established church. Had Isaac D’Israeli not had his son baptized as an Anglican, he could not have even entered parliament, let alone climbed, in his mordant phrase, to the top of the greasy pole as prime minister, for to do so he would have had to take the oath in the name of Jesus Christ.

It is no accident that it is in countries where there is a firm separation of church and state that Jews have flourished, notably France and the United States. And certainly the inclination toward conversion continues to sap the Jewish community of numbers and of strength, even without legal or civic reasons to do so. The pull to join the majority is always strong and therefore the question of whether the price was worth paying for Jewry remains a hotly debated topic within its communities.

For the larger world, though, there was no price to pay, rather the reverse: an enormous upsurge in both the arts and sciences. As Mr. Goldfarb quotes the left-wing English historian Eric Hobsbawm as writing: “After many centuries during which the intellectual and cultural history of the world … could be written with little reference to the contribution of any Jews, we almost immediately enter the modern era where Jewish names are disproportionately represented.”

You only have to look at the proportion of Jewish Nobel Laureates to validate this statement. And then there are all those cultural icons and superstars. Although there are many who could well do without the contributions of Karl Marx (another converted Jew), this book reminds us of Einstein, Freud, Heine, Kafka — and so many others.

Mr. Goldfarb has rendered an enormous service in pointing out the enormous benefits let forth by liberty and the folly of choosing isolation. He has thus joyfully celebrated the fruits of freedom while pointing out to another monotheistic minority group currently walling itself off in a ghetto of just how impoverishing that process can be. After all, when Islam was in its tolerant Golden Age, look at the contributions it made to science, art and scholarship: emancipating that gene pool into the world at large could yet let free untold advances for all mankind.

• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.