Glorious, Accursed Europe (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry) - Hardcover

Reinharz, Jehuda; Shavit, Yaacov

9781584658436: Glorious, Accursed Europe (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1584658436 ISBN 13: 9781584658436

Publisher: Brandeis University Press, 2010

This volume offers a fascinating look at the complex relationship between Jews and Europe during the past two hundred years, and how the European Jewish and non-Jewish intelligentsia interpreted the modern Jewish experience, primarily in Germany, Russia, and Central and Eastern Europe. Beginning with premodern European attitudes toward Jews, Reinharz and Shavit move quickly to “the glorious nineteenth century,” a period in which Jewish dreams of true assimilation came up against modern antisemitism. Later chapters explore the fin-de-si�cle “crisis of modernity”; the myth of the modern European Jew; expectations and fears in the interwar period; differences between European nations in their attitude toward Jews; the views of Zionists and early settlers of Palestine and Israel toward the Europe left behind; and views of contemporary Israeli intellectuals toward Europe, including its new Muslim population―the latest incarnation of the Jewish Question in Europe.

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About the Author:

JEHUDA REINHARZ is the Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History at Brandeis University. YAACOV SHAVIT is a Professor in the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University.

Review:

“In 1945, Europe’s ‘Jewish Century’ came to an end; the ‘Promised Land’ has moved to Israel and America. Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit recreate the glories of the 19th century, with Jews acting as ferment of creativity precisely because they were both insiders and outsiders. It is a story of joy and foreboding, subtly told and deeply researched—a treasure-trove of historical scholarship.” (Josef Joffe, Editor, Die Zeit, Hamburg, and Senior Fellow, Stanford University)

“This fascinating book deals with a curiously neglected subject: the Jewish discovery of Europe in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the love-hate relationship (more love than hate) which lasted for a long time, the great attraction Europe had not only for the Jews who lived in Europe but also those who left it—for America or Palestine. It is a major contribution to the cultural history of our time. It will be of great interest to the general reader and the experts too will find much that they did not know.” (Walter Laqueur)

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