The Jews in the Modern Age

Providing a broad as well as a pointillist overview of modern Jewish history on a global scale from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book analyzes how the Jewish people have been dramatically transformed by the forces of social, economic, political, technological, and demographic change.

Now in a new edition as a split volume, this second volume of a comprehensive history of the Jews includes topics such as the impact on Jewish society of the Enlightenment as well as its Jewish equivalent, the Haskalah; religious innovations in eastern and central Europe; the processes of emancipation and Jewish acculturation; the modern economic history of the Jewish people, which includes their embourgeoisement in central and western Europe, and the growth of a giant Jewish proletariat in eastern Europe; the emergence of an antisemitic politics that sought to roll back Jewish gains; and the variety of Jewish responses to those illiberal forces, especially in the form of vibrant Jewish political cultures, among them Zionism, socialism, and mass migration. Middle Eastern Jewish communities were likewise impacted by the forces of modernity in ways particular to them, and that history is addressed, as is the emergence and consolidation of the state of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust and the dissolution of Jewish communities across the Muslim world. Currently, illiberal forces are again on the march from both the right and the left, helping to foster a global upsurge of antisemitic violence and online hate.

The book is useful not just for those interested in the Jews themselves but also for readers open to learning about global history from the vantage point of an ethnic minority deeply impacted by modernity, both its blessings as well as its horrors.

John M. Efron is Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California at Berkeley. He specializes in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. He is the author of German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (2016) and All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat (2025).