Removing the ‘Civic Barrier’: Political and Legal Aspects of Jewish Emancipation

Abstract

When the work of Norbert Elias and some of the central themes of the history of European Jewry are subjected to simultaneous scrutiny, some interesting things emerge. The Eliasian sociological paradigm offers an enhanced understanding of some of the more puzzling aspects of that particular history. Specifically, it assists in the clarification of some of the problems implicit in the unique and frequently tragic Jewish experience of European social and political conditions as they developed and were transformed over a very long period. At the same time, these aspects of European Jewish history test, extend and add a new kind of substance to Elias’s central thesis. This was the principal contention of the previous chapter. There, however, the argument was considered in quite general terms over a long historical span. In this and following sections, I propose to test this thesis more precisely by examining it in the context of some more specific ‘episodes’ in Jewish history. The first of these episodes is the period of Jewish Emancipation beginning in the late eighteenth century. This is a key period in Jewish history and it would be difficult to over-estimate its importance.