Periodization in Jewish historiography has often hinged on a divide between “ghetto” and “emancipation.” This classical schema, adopted by two great twentieth-century Jewish historians, Salo W. Baron and Jacob Katz, in their respective interpretations of the rupture of Jewish modernity, distinguished between an “age of the ghetto” or “ghetto times” marked by social apartness and communal self-government and an “age of emancipation” characterized by the exchange of collective privileges for individual rights. The contours of the ghetto era were uncertain; some traced it to the creation of mandatory and exclusive Jewish quarters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; others associated it with the Jewish Middle Ages writ large. The age of emancipation, by contrast, had a more definitive beginning, middle, and end: it started in the final quarter of the eighteenth century with the mooting (and, in the French Revolution, the enactment) of equal rights for Jews and culminated in western and central Europe by 1870 with emancipation in unified Italy and Germany as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in eastern Europe in 1917 with the Russian Revolution's emancipation of the Jews. This schema always had a Eurocentric bias; it skipped over parts of the Arab world in which Jews remained formally and in some cases de facto a merely tolerated religious minority after 1917. It also sat somewhat uneasily with the widespread revocation of rights in Nazi Germany and throughout east-central Europe in the interwar period. But the general consensus that the story of Jewish emancipation was concentrated into the period between the 1770s and 1917 endured.

In his new path-breaking and comprehensive legal and political history of Jewish emancipation, David Sorkin rejects this periodization of emancipation. On one hand, he starts his account some two hundred years earlier, claiming that emancipation—“the principal event” (2) of modern Jewish history—has been at the heart of the Jewish experience for the past four and a half centuries. On the other hand, he denies the existence of any clear conclusion to this history. He treats emancipation, which he defines as “the acquisition, loss, or recovery” of any of the complete ensemble of civil and political rights, as an ongoing process lasting into the present rather than a circumscribed period. “Emancipation,” he writes, “was ambiguous and interminable. It was neither a one-time, chronologically discrete event nor a linear one. It was recurring. Jews gained and lost and regained and re-lost rights” (356).

Despite the centrality of emancipation to modern Jewish history, it has historically eluded synthetic treatment. Katz's 1973 book Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870, was, for decades, the lone single-authored history of the process and ideological project of emancipation, and even it focused in the main on western and central Europe. Pierre Birnbaum's and Ira Katznelson's 1995 anthology Paths of Emancipation demonstrated how emancipation varied by country and region, and several monographs exist on emancipation in specific locales. Sorkin's book, however, is the first truly global history of Jewish emancipation. According to Sorkin, the relative dearth of scholarship on emancipation is not coincidental. Controversy has long haunted the subject, leading to a greater emphasis on indicting or defending than understanding. Jewish nationalists and ultra-Orthodox Jews have blamed emancipation for abrogating traditional Jewish autonomy and promoting assimilation; liberal integrationists have “portrayed emancipation as a form of providential progress from the dark night of persecution and subjugation to the blazing sunlight of toleration and equality” (3). Opponents, moreover, have cited the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel as evidence of emancipation's failure. Even if not invoked so tendentiously, these two mid-twentieth century events, in their magnitude, have “obstructed our field of vision” and obscured the degree to which “both are part and parcel of the long history of Jewish emancipation. They were reactions to, indeed developments from emancipation. In philosophical parlance, they were epiphenomena. Emancipation was, and remains, the principal event” (2).

As part of his historical revision, Sorkin contests the notion that emancipation was, in all cases, a surrender of communal privileges for citizenship as individuals. This view is synonymous with what is probably the most oft-quoted statement in the history of Jewish emancipation, Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre's insistence in the French National Assembly in 1789 that “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” But emancipation in fact contained more nuance. Clermont-Tonnerre's vision entailed moving Jews “out of” estates, that is, stripping them of corporate or quasi-corporate status in return for full and equal rights. Yet in other states emancipation was more ambiguous; it involved not only moving Jews “out of” estates (by dismantling or weakening Jewish autonomy) but admitting them “into” existing estates, for example, guilds.

Similarly, there were two different models of emancipation. The French Revolutionary approach espoused by Clermont-Tonnerre was sweeping and unconditional; it was premised on the granting of complete legal parity to Jews, with the hope this would encourage assimilation but without clear strings attached. Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, by contrast, created the model of a gradual and conditional conferring of rights in the different edicts of tolerance he issued for the Jews living in various parts of his empire in the 1780s. Here, rights were only partial and coexisted with restrictions, with further liberties made contingent on the reform of Jewish society. The combination of Jews obtaining rights by moving both “into” and “out of” estates was more common in this model, making emancipation ambiguous.

Sorkin identifies four main regions where emancipation happened and followed different paths. In western Europe, from which Jews were largely expelled in the late Middle Ages, rulers began inviting Jewish (and sometimes converso) merchants in particular to resettle in port cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as part of mercantilist policy. Often, rulers induced these Jews to relocate by offering them substantial civil privileges (to wit, freedom of settlement, residence, trade, and worship), at times even approaching civil parity with Christian merchants. In cities such as Ancona, Venice, Livorno, Bordeaux, and Hamburg, Jews were granted charters that enumerated rights and restrictions on a corporate basis; in Amsterdam and London, by contrast, Jews settled without special charters and obtained rights as individuals in these nascent civil societies. What Jews still lacked were political rights, for instance, the right to vote or to hold public office. When the struggle for emancipation commenced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus of the Jewish campaign in western Europe was thus mostly limited to the securing of full political rights that would complement the civil rights (or corporate privileges reclassified as individual liberties) they already enjoyed.

In central Europe (the German states and the Habsburg Empire), with the exception of a few wealthy individuals (so-called court Jews) who gained extensive privileges thanks to the services they provided to princes and emperors, Jews were hemmed in by various laws that restricted where they could live and how they could work. While they came to possess juridical equality in the courts of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period, gaining the right to be plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses while swearing an oath on the Torah, for the most part they were relegated to a clearly “inferior legal status” (9). As a result, within this region, “The struggle for rights was broad in scope, encompassing both civil and political rights, and prolonged, lasting for most of a century” (10). Rights were generally granted incrementally, as part of a conditional emancipation dependent on Jews’ pursuing a thorough revamping of their social, economic, and religious life to make themselves more useful subjects of the state. Another characteristic of this region was the endurance of vestiges of corporate power well into the nineteenth century. Jews thus gained rights both by being moved “into” estates and “out of” estates. Because of the persistence of corporate institutions, there was also a dualism of local citizenship versus state citizenship—the state might grant civil rights, including freedom of residence, but often towns and municipalities did not follow suit.

In eastern Europe, Jews had gained extensive privileges under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This was largely the result of the alliance they formed with the nobles who exercised de facto rule over much of the commonwealth, in particular the eastern sections where most of the Jews were concentrated. The shtetls were generally market towns located on nobles’ vast estates, where Jews provided services ranging from managing the economies of these estates to tax-farming to trade. The Jews thus gained collective privileges on par with those enjoyed by Christian burghers. As a result of the partitioning of Poland out of existence by the surrounding empires in the late eighteenth century, most notably czarist Russia (which inherited most of Poland's Jews), efforts to translate the Jews’ privileges into rights faltered. As a result, here too the struggle for rights was both broad in scope and protracted. Russia followed central European models in making rights contingent on civic improvement (though they did so in a particularly coercive manner) and in moving Jews “into” estates, though these estates were not long-existing centers of independent corporate power but rather newly devised groups that were thoroughly subordinate to czarist autocracy. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the czarist regime reversed its piecemeal efforts at integration, imposing quotas for Jews in secondary schools and universities and limiting Jewish admission to the bar. Unlike in western and central Europe, Jews gained political rights (following the 1905 revolution) before they gained civil rights.

In the Ottoman Empire, as part of the far-reaching reforms (Tanzimat) the sultans pursued in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Jews gained legal equality without having to forego all forms of communal autonomy. Rather, the Ottoman Empire restructured the various religious communities into millets that retained control over education and personal status, for example, marriage, divorce, and burial. “There was no possibility,” Sorkin explains, “of existing as a ‘non-Muslim Ottoman’ outside of a millet. No civil society existed into which members of different religions could integrate” (267).

France offers an example of the overlap of two regional patterns. On the eve of the 1789 revolution, France contained two Jewish communities that were geographically and culturally distinct. In the southwestern port city of Bordeaux lived a Sephardic community descended from converso merchants who had first settled in the area in the mid-sixteenth century. These merchants had been granted letters patent (lettres patentes) that guaranteed them freedom of movement, commerce, and property ownership. In 1723, King Louis XV officially recognized their religion, allowing them to live openly as Jews (though many had already begun doing so) and confirming their former privileges. As a result, when the National Assembly introduced two forms of citizenship in 1789—“passive” citizenship equivalent to civil rights based on the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” as well as “active” citizenship tantamount to political rights—all that remained at issue for the Jews of Bordeaux was procuring the latter.

The same could not be said of the much larger community of Ashkenazi Jews in the northeastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. These Jews had come under French rule as a result of imperial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were subject to strict restrictions on where they could live and what occupations they could pursue (peddling, moneylending, and trade in cattle, horses, and old clothes). In other words, as opposed to the “western European” Bordeaux Jews, the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine conformed much more closely to the “central European” model. Unable to resolve the issue of Jewish citizenship in one fell swoop, the National Assembly proceeded first to emancipate the Jews of Bordeaux, Bayonne, and Avignon in January 1790. The decree was relatively modest in scale; it extended the existing civil rights the community had gained corporately by lettres patentes while adding solely “the rights of active citizens” (97), that is, political rights. The National Assembly only emancipated the remaining Jews of the northeast and Paris on the eve of its adjournment in September 1791, after it had already approved a new constitution that “definitively established the criteria for citizenship” (99). The decree gave the Jews of the northeast both civil and political rights while stripping them of their former corporate privileges, moving them completely “out of” estates. “In contrast to the Jews of Bordeaux's seamless transition, here was a true rupture, the repeal of a century or more of legislation” (99).

As a result of the revolution, “full emancipation or equal rights irrevocably became associated with the ideas of 1789. When and where those ideas triumphed, so did Jewish emancipation. When and where opponents triumphed, Jewish emancipation suffered either abridgment or outright abrogation” (101). The French model was initially exported to Italy and central Europe during Napoleon's victorious campaigns, which brought the razing of ghetto walls and Jewish emancipation in their wake. But unconditional emancipation generally went into retreat along with the French army after its defeat in 1814. This led to a rollback of Jewish rights in the lands conquered or trounced by Napoleon; in some cases, such as the Papal States and other Italian states, it even resulted in their re-ghettoization. (The ghetto of Rome, the last of the old ghettos to fall, lasted until the defeat of the Papal States and the unification of Italy in 1870.) The demise of the French model of unconditional emancipation meant that the late Joseph II's incremental quid pro quo of rights in return for civic improvement (or “regeneration”) carried the day in central Europe. Even Napoleon moved to a more conditional approach by revisiting the issue of Jewish emancipation in 1806 when he convened the Assembly of Jewish Notables from throughout his empire to answer a series of pointed questions concerning Jewish law and Jewish loyalty to France. By canceling the debts owed by non-Jews to Jews in the northeast and restricting their right of residence in France in 1808 (the “infamous decree”), Napoleon reneged on the legal equality the Alsatian Jews had received in 1791 and embraced a model of rights for regeneration. (The Bourbon Restoration that succeeded Napoleon, however, allowed the decree to lapse in 1818 and thus largely returned to the unconditional approach, with only a few exceptions that were resolved by the post-1830 Orléans monarchy.)

A novel aspect of Sorkin's book is his challenge to the notion of American exceptionalism. Within Jewish history, this is manifest in the long-standing argument that the Jews of the United States never experienced a process of emancipation because they were subsumed under the Constitution's guarantee of freedom of religion in the First Amendment and the prohibition of religious tests for public office in Article VI. Yet at the time many understood these rights as valid only at the federal level (the Supreme Court determined that the Bill of Rights applied to the states only in 1940). Many states preserved their established churches from the colonial period and continued to restrict Jews (and other non-Protestant dissenters) from holding public office. The situation in the United States was thus broadly similar to the western European (and in particular the British) model, where Jews enjoyed substantial civil rights from the time of their settlement and had to mobilize only to secure full political rights. The last state to allow non-Protestants to hold office, New Hampshire, only did so in 1876.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Diaspora Jewish nationalists in central and eastern Europe began to clamor for national minority rights in addition to full civil and political rights. As Simon Dubnow, one of the founders of Diaspora Jewish nationalism, wrote, “True emancipation means not only liberation of the individual human being, but also of the individual nationality.” The most expansive vision of national minority rights encompassed both cultural rights (the recognition of Yiddish and in some cases Hebrew as official languages, state funding for Jewish schools) and political rights (the creation of a democratically elected national assembly with legislative and administrative power). Although the autonomist project was initially pursued within the framework of the multinational czarist and Habsburg Empires, it was only in the wake of World War I, following the demise of these empires, that it bore any fruit. The various successor states founded on the ruins of the two empires reluctantly agreed to treaties with the Great Powers that established national minority rights that were merely cultural in scope. Not only did the new states mostly ignore the minority rights treaties, but many took drastic measures to curtail Jewish civil and political rights as well, whether by seeking to deprive Jews of citizenship (Poland) or imposing racial quotas on Jews admitted to universities (Hungary).

The 1930s saw continued deterioration of Jewish legal status in east-central Europe, as authoritarian governments, led by Nazi Germany's example, sought to undo Jewish emancipation. “The Nazis,” Sorkin explains, “peeled away the Jews’ rights layer after layer in an almost exact reversal of the emancipation process” (289–90). In one of their first measures, enacted only a few months after the Nazi seizure of power in early 1933, they emasculated Jewish political rights by barring Jews from civil service. Later, in the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, they stripped Jews of full citizenship and demoted them to the newly created category of “state members” (Staatsangehörige) “whose rights, if any, were undetermined” (290). On this basis, they then proceeded to deprive Jews of their civil rights, including freedom of occupation, property ownership, and residence. The assault on Jewish legal status continued through the deportation of German Jewry to the ghettos and concentration and death camps in eastern Europe starting in late 1941, when the Nazis passed a denaturalization law that permitted the state to confiscate whatever remained of the deportees’ property. Interwar Poland relentlessly sought to exclude Jews from the economy; the various states allied with the Nazis did worse, adopting racial definitions of Jews that discriminated against them systematically. Following World War II, while most states that had denaturalized Jews quickly restored their citizenship, they dragged their feet on restitution of property and reparations; the process of pursuing the latter is ongoing.

Though not included as one of his regions of emancipation, Sorkin adds a chapter on the Jews of the Maghreb (North Africa) and Mashreq (Middle East). Jews had long dwelled in these areas as a subjugated but protected minority (dhimmi) under Islamic rule. The rise of French and British colonial regimes and protectorates throughout the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently brought equal rights to Jews, albeit often only after a long-drawn-out process. But it proved to be a brittle emancipation that provided little protection for Jews amid the decolonization that followed World War I and Arab outrage over the founding of the State of Israel. As a result, Jews emigrated en masse from places like Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s, most often to Israel and France. Few Jews remain in the Maghreb and Mashreq today; Morocco, with some three to four thousand Jews as of 2015, has the largest Jewish population of the aforementioned countries.

Sorkin concludes his survey with two chapters on Israel and the postwar United States, respectively. Although its Declaration of Independence of May 1948 guaranteed to “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed, or sex,” Israel soon undermined this promise by passing two successive laws that distinguished between Jewish citizenship, which was based on descent (jus sanguinis) and could be obtained by any Jew upon immigration (the 1950 Law of Return), and non-Jewish citizenship, which was based solely on residence or naturalization (jus soli). There remains an “ethnic hierarchy” (338) between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews who immigrated to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa in vast numbers in the first two decades of statehood; the Mizrahim still by and large possess less economic and cultural capital. (Somewhat surprisingly, Sorkin neglects to address where the wave of ex-Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel en masse beginning in the early 1990s stand in this “hierarchy.”) Palestinian Israelis, who lived under martial law until 1966, are at the very bottom of the hierarchy; their municipalities receive less state funding than Jewish municipalities, and they continue to suffer from circumscribed “employment opportunities, educational options, and health care” (340). The effective preservation of the millet system in Israel empowers the Orthodox Jews with control over all Jewish citizens in matters of personal status; there is no civil marriage in Israel, and other denominations of Judaism remain unrecognized.

In the United States, the exclusion of Jews, which had begun on the eve of the mass immigration of East European Jews in the 1870s, was substantially exacerbated in the interwar period. Congress passed the National Origins Act (1921–1924), which severely restricted Jewish immigration; colleges and universities adopted quotas to reduce the number of Jews; restrictive covenants limited Jewish housing options; and “entire sectors of the economy” (347) were closed to Jews. In the postwar era, Jewish civil defense organizations like the American Jewish Congress formed coalitions with other groups—including African American groups such as the NAACP and the National Urban League—to bring an end to inequality. At least in the area of law, their efforts largely succeeded. Jews made considerable social and economic gains, obtaining “full rights in housing, employment, and education” (350) in what Sorkin labels their “second emancipation” (346).

This thoroughly researched book is an essential addition to the library of modern Jewish history. Not only does it furnish detailed information about the idiosyncrasies and specific legislation of the emancipation process by region and country, but it also discerns common patterns and continuities across geographical divides (for example, the predominance of Joseph II's conditional model of emancipation throughout central Europe). Sorkin's main thesis, however, that emancipation extends back to the sixteenth century and is interminable, is not entirely persuasive. As Sorkin himself concedes, the privileges Jewish merchants obtained upon resettling in western Europe in the early modern period were not unprecedented. “Jews had possessed citizenship in various towns or cities during the Middle Ages,” he writes (17). Nevertheless, Sorkin holds that, after Jews had been expelled for so long, “such privileges were unquestionably novel” (17), but were they the first fruits of emancipation in all cases? Sorkin is able to demonstrate that, in some cases, the civil privileges that Jews acquired were eventually converted into individual rights, as in the example of the Bordeaux Jews. But among the communities he includes in his overview of early modern “merchant colonies” (the title of chapter 1) are the Jews of Venice. The Jewish merchants of Venice may have enjoyed trading privileges that compared favorably to native merchants; at the same time, they were forced to live in a ghetto that only fell in 1797 due to the pressure of Napoleon's forces encamped on the other side of the lagoon. Is this truly an instance of continuity between the early modern and the modern?

Additionally, the argument that early modern developments prefigured modern ones only works in the case of western Europe, and then only partially. Sorkin's discussion of central Europe demonstrates that Jews may have enjoyed juridical equality in the Holy Roman Empire, but were otherwise largely deprived of civic rights. And in eastern Europe, the transition from the early modern period to the age of partitions and their aftermath, on balance, led to a decline in Jewish legal status. It would seem more fitting to claim that in analyzing the sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth century, Sorkin is addressing not the early history of emancipation, but rather its prehistory. Similarly, the claim that emancipation is ongoing, though suggestive, is also somewhat dubious. Sorkin is right to flag the shortcomings of citizenship and democracy in contemporary Israel. But despite the rise in antisemitism and the fraying of democracy (especially in east-central Europe) in the past decade, where else in the world, outside countries such as Iran, are the civil and political rights of Jews in particular currently at stake? It may be premature to ever declare emancipation to have ended because the past has shown how easily it can be unraveled. Still, Jewish emancipation is no longer the issue it was in the nineteenth century or even in the post–World War II era. That is one of the major ways the Jewish present differs from the Jewish past.