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principles, ‘they at once displayed all the qualities that make for good citizenship … and Portsmouth gladly bears testimony to the loyalty, the zeal, and the camaraderie of the entire community’. 9 Such mutual congratulation was to be replicated within Jewish historiography. In 1935, in a lecture in memory of the Jewish historian and daughter of Emanuel Emanuel, Lady Magnus, Cecil Roth paid tribute to the ‘notable share which the congregation played in the nineteenth century in civic life and in the movement for Jewish emancipation’. 10 Fifty years later, Aubrey
2 Marx's defence of Jewish emancipation and critique of the Jewish question The Jew … must cease to be a Jew if he will not allow himself to be hindered by his law from fulfilling his duties to the State and his fellow-citizens. (Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage ) 1 The Jews (like the Christians) are fully politically emancipated in various states. Both Jews and Christians are far from being
Universalism has acted as a stimulus for Jewish emancipation, that is, for civil, political and social inclusion. It has also been a source of anti-Jewish prejudice up to and beyond the classic antisemitism of the modern period. While the experience of Jews is by no means unique in this respect, one of the peculiarities of the 'anti-Judaic' tradition has been to represent Jews in some important regard as the 'other' of the universal: as the personification either of a particularism opposed to the universal, or of a false universalism concealing Jewish self-interest. The former contrasts the particularism of the Jews to the universality of bourgeois civil society. The latter contrasts the bad universalism of the 'rootless cosmopolitan Jew' to the good universalism of whatever universal is advanced: nation, race or class. This book explores debates over Jewish emancipation within the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, contrasting the work of two leading protagonists of Jewish emancipation: Christian von Dohm and Moses Mendelssohn. It discusses the emancipatory power of Karl Marx's critique of Bruno Bauer's opposition to Jewish emancipation and endorsement of The Jewish Question. Marxist debates over the growth of anti-Semitism; Hannah Arendt's critique of three types of Jewish responsiveness--assimilationism, Zionism and cosmopolitanism-- to anti-Semitism; and the endeavours of a leading postwar critical theorist, Jurgen Habermas are also discussed. Finally, the book focuses its critique on left antizionists who threaten to reinstate the Jewish question when they identify Israel and Zionism as the enemies of universalism.
1 Struggles within Enlightenment: Jewish emancipation and the Jewish question The principle of modern states has enormous strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfilment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity while at the same time bringing it back to substantial unity and so preserving this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself
, in this sense, deeply and mutually imbricated. Jewish experiences of universalism have been correspondingly equivocal. Universalism has acted as a stimulus for Jewish emancipation, that is, for civil, political and social inclusion; it has also been a source (though by no means the only source) of anti-Jewish prejudice up to and beyond the classic antisemitism of the modern period. While the experience of Jews is by no means unique in this respect, one of the
, antisemitism never gained access to British politics and parliament, neither the British Brothers League nor the various fascist parties after the First World War. The most successful history of Jewish emancipation in Europe was readily explained with the strengths of British liberalism, tolerance and fairness.24 Even Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) made use of these national virtues when he explained that British fascists were certainly no antisemites. After all, antisemitism was un-British because it clashed with British fairness. Recent literature has
in the Enlightenment in quite different ways and for quite different ends than it was by antisemites, in support of Jewish emancipation rather than against it, the Enlightenment provided ‘classic antisemitism its theoretical basis’. 9 She argued that what distinguished modern secular antisemitism from medieval religious hatred of Jews, was a legacy of Enlightenment: it was the abstraction of ‘the Jew’ as a principle of evil
Jewish population of the city and region remained devoted to the German language and its culture. What our book needed to illuminate and explain was the continuing vitality and strength of this identification – due, no doubt, to the positive connections so many of Czernowitz’s Jews had drawn between Jewish emancipation and assimilation in the imperial Habsburg realm, and the significant social, political 195 Poetics and cultural rewards that this process had yielded – rewards of full citizenship rights and professional and economic opportunities that were increasingly
address to the JHSE, pointed out that ‘When Jewish emancipation was being discussed in Parliament in 1833, the Duke of Wellington admitted that fifteen Jewish officers had fought with him at Waterloo’, adding evidence of those who had served under Nelson and fought at Trafalgar. 75 A different reading of Jewish emancipation and its local input and ramifications will be left to Chapter 5 . Here, a more critical perspective of the impact of the Napoleonic era on ‘semitic discourse’ is necessary. It will be provided with specific reference to the Jews of Portsmouth and
Street, Rochelle Lane and French Street’. 13 Ruddock’s phrase, ‘there remains no trace’, has been echoed throughout this study. Whether it be the medieval Jews of Winchester, or the early modern Port Jews of naval Portsmouth, or the pioneers of Jewish emancipation and civic contribution in nineteenth-century Portsmouth and Southampton, or the transmigrants from the fin de siècle to the 1920s, or the various Jewish communities that both flourished and disappeared across Hampshire from the Victorian era through to the Second World War, the