front cover of Comparing Jewish Societies
Comparing Jewish Societies
Todd M. Endelman, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Having unfolded in the diverse communities of the diaspora, Jewish experience lends itself almost effortlessly to comparative treatment. The contributors to this volume take up the challenge, examining Jewish societies from medieval to modern times, in Western and Eastern Europe, North and South America, North Africa, India, China, and the Middle East. The essays use the methodological strategies and theoretical insights of history, sociology, anthropology, and political science to explore such topics as Jewish and African nationalism; Arab and Jewish railway workers in British-ruled Palestine; East European Jewish immigrants in New York, London, and Paris; ritual murder trials in fin-de-siècle Central Europe; and Catholic and Jewish enlightenment movements. Further, because of their comparative structure and method, these essays stimulate fresh questions about the larger societies in which Jews lived--their values, practices, and structures. Comparing Jewish Societies will appeal to students and scholars at all levels who wish to break out of old frameworks to observe the Jews and their religion with a new, methodologically sophisticated eye. Todd M. Endelman is William Haber Professor of Modern Jewish History, University of Michigan.
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front cover of The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830
The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830
Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society
Todd M. Endelman
University of Michigan Press, 1999
The movement from tradition to modernity engulfed all of the Jewish communities in the West, but hitherto historians have concentrated on the intellectual revolution in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn in the second half of the eighteenth century as the decisive event in the origins of Jewish modernity. In The Jews of Georgian England, Todd M. Endelman challenges the Germanocentric orientation of the bulk of modern Jewish historiography and argues that the modernization of European Jewry encompassed far more than an intellectual revolution.
His study recounts the rise of the Anglo-Jewish elite--great commercial and financial magnates such as the Goldsmids, the Franks, Samson Gideon, and Joseph Salvador--who rapidly adopted the gentlemanly style of life of the landed class and adjusted their religious practices to harmonize with the standards of upper-class Englishmen. Similarly, the Jewish poor--peddlers, hawkers, and old-clothes men--took easily to many patterns of lower-class life, including crime, street violence, sexual promiscuity, and coarse entertainment.
An impressive marshaling of fact and analysis, The Jews of Georgian England serves to illuminate a significant aspect of the Jewish passage to modernity.
"Contributes to English as well as Jewish history. . . . Every reader will learn something new about the statistics, setting or mores of Jewish life in the eighteenth century. . . ." --American Historical Review
Todd M. Endelman is William Haber Professor of Modern Jewish History, University of Michigan. He is also the author of Comparing Jewish Societies, Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, and Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945.
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