The idea of a Jewish European history might seem rather odd. If the book at hand were a history of the Jews in Europe, then this would be a European Jewish history; if it were a history of Europe that emphasized the large participation of European Jews in that history, then it would still be only a European history, albeit one that had corrected the frequent, alarming silence about the immense part played by Jews in European culture. This book is aimed at that goal, but it is attempting to do so by writing a European history from the perspective of traditional, rabbinic Judaism and its modern Jewish successors through what Hacohen sees as the main lens by which traditional Jews saw European Christianity, which was the biblical story of Jacob and Esau. Hence this is European history from a deliberately Jewish perspective: Jewish European history.

It is a bold project that offeres many fascinating concepts and themes, and it has certainly produced a mine of evidence that would not normally figure in a European history that had Jews at or near its center. I applaud the effort, and Jacob & Esau will, it is hoped, open the way to a more inclusive approach from European historians (including Habsburg ones) to the (traditional, rabbinic) Jewish aspect to their subject. I am not sure, however, that this version of a Jewish European history quite succeeds in getting us where we need to be.

One reason is that the book appears to be two books in one: the major part is an intellectual history of the Jacob & Esau theme as it developed within rabbinic Jewish exegesis, Christian exegesis, and their more modern religious counterparts such as Reform Judaism and liberal Protestantism, as well as literary modernism (German, Yiddish and Hebrew), and post-Holocaust and contemporary literature (mostly German and Hebrew); the minor theme, in chapters seven, eight, and twelve, is more a straightforward history of the relationship between the pluralist empire of the Habsburg monarchy and its Jews, the effect of its disappearance in 1918 on the Jewish situation (severe), and postwar Austrian and European developments whereby a new Jewish intelligentsia has become, finally, “European.” Hacohen acknowledges these two different narratives and sees them as complementary, but I do not quite see it like that. Each on its own has its merits, especially the minor theme for Habsburg historians, but they do not mesh very well. One is left wondering why they are in the same book, unless it is, as Hacohen at one point comments, that the more standard Habsburg narrative is necessary to get over the period where Jacob & Esau was no longer of much validity or relevance to the figures in Vienna 1900 and Austrian socialism, such as Karl Popper and Otto Bauer, whom he wants to discuss. If that is the case, however, then one wonders whether Jacob & Esau has quite the relevance that Hacohen, intent on introducing a traditional Jewish perspective into the debate on the “Jewish” part of European modern culture and thought, wants to have for it. His very interesting chapter on the ironies of Erich Auerbach being seen as a major Jewish figure in modern European culture and thought, when he was, as far as Hacohen is concerned, only ever a “cultural Christian” in his work, points to his determination to correct the record, and bring back traditional, rabbinic Judaism into a respected place among the sources of European modernity, but his “secular” chapters on the monarchy and Austrian modernity suggest otherwise.

The second point is that there appears to be a conceptual flaw at the very heart of the book when it comes to the relationship between Jewish emancipation, the nation-state, nationalism, empires, Jewish identity, and pluralism. For Hacohen, emancipation, a radical rethinking of the place of Jews within corporate Europe, was from the very start and always thereafter, a side product of nationalism—not liberalism or the exigencies of the modern, bureaucratic state, but the nationalist part of the “nation-state.” Hence, when nationalism's own logic ended up in the total, indeed totalitarian, exclusion of difference in National Socialism, the Jews were destroyed by the very cause that had emancipated them in the first place. They were much better off in pluralist empires like the Habsburg monarchy, or even in forms of “illiberal multiculturalism,” such as the monarchy before its liberalization in the mid-nineteenth century, where at least they could exist as a (persecuted and discriminated against) autonomous community. This is very shaky ground.

If one chooses to compare Germany and the Habsburg monarchy, Hacohen's main comparison, perhaps one can see why he would think this. The need for post-1871 Germany to create one German identity through “negative integration,” whereby not being “Jewish” was one qualification for German authenticity, is a powerful theme; in contrast, the imperial Austrian lack of a national identity can be seen as providing more latitude for Jews to be more identifiably “Jewish.” Nonetheless, most states in Europe did not emancipate their Jews as part of creating an ethnonational nation, but rather as a result of liberal and modern concepts of the citizen. Jews in Germany were given rights largely equal to those of Prussians, Hanoverians, and so forth, before there was a national German Empire, and even longer before it veered off into ethnonationalism. Obversely, the monarchy can just as well be seen as having stoked extreme nationalisms by its frustrating the desire for power of national elites, indulging those elites’ abuse of what powers they did have against minorities, and hence making the monarchy one of the polities most redolent with political antisemitism by 1914. The “pluralist empire” was not quite the Edenic place one might expect for Jacob's successors, reading Hacohen. There were more than enough Esaus-in-the-making around by 1914, whether rabbinic Jewish sources saw it that way or not.

With these qualifications in mind, this book is a laudatory attempt at rethinking the Jewish part of European history, and deserves major attention, also from Habsburg historians. Not least of its virtues is honesty when it comes to Jewish hostility to Christians over many centuries, and the ways in which Jewish exegesis of Jacob & Esau in contemporary Israel, now strangely directed as it was not before against Arabs and Palestinians, has been instrumentalized to justify imperialist Jewish ethnonationalism. The fact that some Israeli thinkers now prefer Esau to Jacob as a model for Jewish action is but one of the (more alarming) gems that Hacohen's prodigious research provides the reader in his survey of two millennia of Jewish (and Christian) interpretations of this particular brotherly relationship.