David Sorkin – författare

In the period from 1780 to 1840 German Jewry underwent a twofold revolution that set the basic patterns of its experience for the century to follow: the end of the Jews's feudal status as an autonomous community forced them to face a protracted process of political and civic emancipation and a far-reaching social metamorphosis, while their encounter with the surrounding culture resulted in an intense productivity. In this groundbreaking study, David Sorkin argues that emancipation and the encounter with German culture and society led not to assimilation but to the creation of a new Jewish identity and community - a vibrant subculture - that produced many of Judaism's modern movements and a pantheon of outstanding writers, artists, composers, scientists, and academics.

A thought-provoking exploration of the roots of modern Jewish politicsThis 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.

In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature. Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He demonstrates that, in the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law. Calvinist enlightened orthodoxy, Jewish Haskalah, and reform Catholicism, to name but three such movements, were influential participants in the eighteenth century's burgeoning public sphere and promoted a new ideal of church-state relations.Sorkin shows how they pioneered a religious Enlightenment that embraced the new science of Copernicus and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety. This book reveals how Enlightenment theologians refashioned belief as a solution to the dogmatism and intolerance of previous centuries. Read it and you will never view the Enlightenment the same way.

The first comprehensive history of how Jews became citizens in the modern worldFor all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that they are only part of—and indeed reactions to—the central event of that history: emancipation. In this book, David Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, Jewish Emancipation tells the ongoing story of how Jews have gained, kept, lost, and recovered rights in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Israel.Emancipation, Sorkin shows, was not a one-time or linear event that began with the Enlightenment or French Revolution and culminated with Jews' acquisition of rights in Central Europe in 1867–71 or Russia in 1917. Rather, emancipation was and is a complex, multidirectional, and ambiguous process characterized by deflections and reversals, defeats and successes, triumphs and tragedies. For example, American Jews mobilized twice for emancipation: in the nineteenth century for political rights, and in the twentieth for lost civil rights. Similarly, Israel itself has struggled from the start to institute equality among its heterogeneous citizens.By telling the story of this foundational but neglected event, Jewish Emancipation reveals the lost contours of Jewish history over the past half millennium.

The first comprehensive history of how Jews became citizens in the modern worldFor all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that they are only part of—and indeed reactions to—the central event of that history: emancipation. In this book, David Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, Jewish Emancipation tells the ongoing story of how Jews have gained, kept, lost, and recovered rights in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Israel.Emancipation, Sorkin shows, was not a one-time or linear event that began with the Enlightenment or French Revolution and culminated with Jews' acquisition of rights in Central Europe in 1867–71 or Russia in 1917. Rather, emancipation was and is a complex, multidirectional, and ambiguous process characterized by deflections and reversals, defeats and successes, triumphs and tragedies. For example, American Jews mobilized twice for emancipation: in the nineteenth century for political rights, and in the twentieth for lost civil rights. Similarly, Israel itself has struggled from the start to institute equality among its heterogeneous citizens.By telling the story of this foundational but neglected event, Jewish Emancipation reveals the lost contours of Jewish history over the past half millennium.

This text explores the transformation in Europe from 1750 to 1870, looking at the lives of European Jews who experienced the shift from segregation on the margins of early modern society to integration in the modern nation state. The lives of men, women and children from all social and Jewish spheres are presented, and examined, with emphasis on social experience and attitudes, including cultural outlook and ambition, marriage and family life, and occupations and residence.

This study of German Jewry's contribution to Jewish and German culture.