Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770-1870

Jacob Katz presents the developing interrelationship between Jews and their Gentile environment as a whole, from both Jewish and non-Jewish points of view. If the results of the Jewish emancipation process differed from country to country, the forces effecting the changes were identical — the upheaval of the French Revolution, the loosening of bonds between church and state, and the ideas of the Enlightenment. It was those humanistic ideas that made impossible the Jews’ transition from the ghetto to partial inclusion in society at large and that attracted Jewish intellectuals to the “secular knowledge” of languages, mathematics, philosophy, and the wider world beyond their ancient learning.