Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism

"This volume is important and refreshing. The individual chapters shed new light on old questions or illuminate little known histories with larger implications. The book has the potential to bridge multiple fields and shift paradigms." - Ethan Katz , Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA "Offers a strikingly new and provocative account of Liberalism's relationship to Jews. Previous scholarship stressed that Liberalism had to overcome its ambivalence in order to achieve a principled stand on granting Jews rights and equality. This volume asserts instead, in great detail and through multiple examples, that Liberalism excluded many groups including Jews, so that the exclusion of Jews was indeed integral to Liberalism and constitutive for it. This is an important volume with a challenging argument for the present moment." - David Sorkin , Lucy G. Moses Professor of Jewish History, Yale University, USA This edited collection re-imagines a field that has been shaped by European experiences and paradigms in the light of a broader historiographical moment that has tended to provincialize Europe and to explore issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, without taking much account of Jews. The volume integrates established historiographical concerns like liberalism, emancipation and antisemitism that have traditionally been studied in national, local and primarily European contexts, with the new perspectives opened-up by transnational history and the global and imperial turn. Rather than seeking to establish a one-size fits all model, the volume highlights the way in which different chronologies and starting points ensured that quite similar processes could take place in very different contexts at different moments.