Emancipation

Since the early nineteenth century, “emancipation” has been the catch phrase used to designate the release of Jews from an inferior political status through the acquisition of equal rights. The term is inherently ambiguous: “Emancipation” conflates the status and its attainment, and it assumes a single goal and process of achievement. Many historians identify “equal rights” narrowly with national citizenship in the modern state, failing to account for the diversity of Jewish experiences across Europe. Jews gained equality through myriad processes, in such polities as the city-state, nation-state, or nationalities-state; they attained citizenship by residence (jus soli) or by descent (jus sanguinis). Equality included such statuses as corporate parity, juridical equality, recognition as the “subject” of a ruler or state, and local or municipal citizenship. Moreover, equality came in various forms and was often partial and nowhere irrevocable: it could be and was lost and regained. Emancipation involved virtually every aspect of Jewish life: occupations, education, religion, and communal solidarity. It had its enthusiastic proponents, who saw it as the messianic end of diasporic Jewish inferiority, and antagonists, who saw it as a threat to the existence of Judaism or Jews. While emancipation has been studied as a local, municipal, regional, national, and continent-wide development, there is no established consensus about so basic an issue as chronology. Some scholars who employ a narrow definition of equality date the process from the creation of modern citizenship during the French Revolution (1790–1791) (Dubnow) or write of a “long century” of emancipation extending from the American and French Revolutions to the Russian Revolution (Birnbaum and Katznelson 1995, cited under Anthologies). Others see an earlier inception with the Enlightenment debates about the Jews’ political status (circa 1770) (Katz 1973, cited under General Overviews), or the Peace of Westphalia’s promulgation of a toleration (1648) that eventually spilled over to the Jews (Baron 1960, cited under General Overviews). Some see the conclusion of the process around 1870 with the unifications of Germany and Italy and the restructuring of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Katz 1973, cited under General Overviews); others date the end to the equality of Jews in Russia (April 1917), the minority rights treaties in the East Central European successor states, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia (1921–1925), and autonomy in Birobizhan (1934) and the new Soviet Constitution (1936) (Mahler 1941, cited under Document Collections). This entry surveys four centuries of emancipation (1550 to 1950). While many historians have equated emancipation with the modern Jewish experience itself, this article treats emancipation exclusively as a legal and political process.