*• 
 
 Ghetto and Emancipation 
 
 By Salo Baron 
 
 \ 
 
 Reprinted from the June 1928 issue of 
 The Menorah Journal 
 63 Fifth Avenue, New York City 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2014 
 
 https://archive.org/details/ghettoemancipatiOObaro 
 
Ghetto and Emancipation 
 
 Shall We Revise the traditional ^Jiewl 
 By Salo Baron 
 
 I 1 1 HE history of the Jews in the last century and a half has turned about 
 1 one central fact: that of Emancipation. But what has Emancipation 
 really meant to the Jew? The generally accepted view has it that 
 be* ore the French Revolution the Jews of Europe lived in a state of extreme 
 wretchedness under medieval conditions, subject to incessant persecution 
 and violence, but that after the Revolution a new era of enlightenment came 
 to the nations, winch forthwith struck off the bonds that fettered the Jew and 
 Dpened up the gates that shut him off from civilized life. Prisoner in the 
 GUietto, denied access to the resources and activities of Western society, dis- 
 ;orted intellectually, morally, spiritually by centuries of isolation and tor- 
 ;ure, the Jew was set free by the Emancipation. In the words of Graetz: 
 ' The Revolution was a judgment which in one day atoned for the sins of a 
 housand years, and which hurled into the dust all who, at the expense 
 •f justice and religion, had created new grades of society. A new day of the 
 x>rd had come 'to humiliate all the proud and high, and to raise up the 
 |Dwly.' For the Jews, too, the most abject and despised people in European 
 ociety, the day of redemption and liberty was to dawn after their long 
 lavery among the nations of Europe. It is noteworthy that England and 
 france, the two European countries which first expelled the Jews, were the 
 rst to reinstate them in the rights of humanity. What Mendelssohn had 
 lought possible at some distant time, and what had been the devout wish 
 : Dohm and Diez, those defenders of the Jews, was realized in France with 
 most magical rapidity." 
 
 l 
 
 2098471 
 
2 
 
 THE MENORAH JOURNAL 
 
 Emancipation, in the judgment of Graetz, Philippson, Dubnow and 
 other historians, was the dawn of a new day after a nightmare of the deepest 
 horror, and this view has been accepted as completely true by Jews, rabbis, 
 scholars and laymen, throughout the Western world. It is in terms of this 
 complete contrast between the black of the Jewish Middle Ages and the 
 white of the post-Emancipation period that most generalizations about 
 the progress of the Jews in modern times are made. Prophecies as to tlie 
 future of the Jew are also of necessity colored by an optimism engendered 
 by this view. If in so short a time the Jew has risen from such great depths, 
 is it not logical to hope that a few more years will bring him perfect freedom? 
 
 Unfortunately, in the light of present historical knowledge, the con- 
 trast on which these hopes are built is open to great qualification. A more 
 critical examination of the supposed gains after the Revolution and fuller 
 information concerning the Jewish Middle Ages both indicate that we mhy 
 have to revaluate radically our notions of Jewish progress under Western 
 liberty. A wider, less prejudiced knowledge of the actual conditions of the 
 Jew in the period of their deepest decline* — during the sixteenth, seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries — seems to necessitate such a revision. If the 
 status of the Jew (his privileges, opportunities, and actual life) in those cen- 
 turies was in fact not as low as we are in the habit of thinking, then the 
 miracle of Emancipation was not so great as we supposed. 
 
 TN the Jewish "Middle Ages," it is said, the Jew did not have "equal 
 rights." But to say that pre-Emancipation Jewry did not have "equal 
 rights " with the rest of the population does not mean that Jewry was the 
 subject of special unfavorable discrimination. The simple fact is that there 
 was no such thing then as "equal rights." In this period the absolute 
 State, like the medieval State, was still largely built on the corporations. 
 The corporations were legally recognized groups of people belonging to dif- 
 ferent corporate organizations, each with distinct rights and duties. The 
 corporation of the nobility had its rights and duties, among them that of 
 administration and defense of the country. The clergy was entrusted with 
 spiritual and cultural affairs. While mercenaries and standing armies had 
 to some extent replaced feudal military, and the Church had begun to give 
 way to secular agencies of culture, the traditional powers of both were still 
 
 * The Jewish "Middle Ages," as Zunz soundly remarks, are not identical with the "Middle Ages" 
 of Europe. The "Dark Ages" of the Jew are roughly comprised by the centuries immediately preceding 
 the French Revolution, the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the "Dark Ages" of Europe 
 were really a time of relative prosperity and high civilization for the Jew. Until the Crusades a majority 
 of Jewry lived under Islamic rule in relatively good circumstances, while even Western Jewry was far 
 superior to its Christian neighbors in culture and economic status. Only in the last centuries of the 
 European Middle Ages did the Jewish Middle Ages set in. The decline was accelerated and continued 
 during the religious wars, particularly in the countries of the counter-Reformation. 
 
 I 
 
GHETTO AND EMANCIPATION 
 
 3 
 
 recognized down to the very opening of the Revolution. The urban citi- 
 zenry (not the peasant or proletarian mass) formed the real third estate, and 
 its chief function was the maintenance of economic life and the replenish- 
 ment of the State treasury. Below these corporations in large was the 
 peasant body, the vast majority of the population, in many countries held 
 in complete serfdom, and everywhere with few rights and many duties. 
 
 It is, then, not surprising and certainly no evidence of discrimination 
 that the Jews did not have "equal rights" — no one had them. Moreover, 
 it may be said that if the Jews had fewer rights than nobles and clergy, their 
 duties were hardly ever greater. Their legal status was comparable to that 
 of the third estate, and, indeed, they were largely an urban group. In some 
 periods they had equal, in some, fewer, in some, more rights than other 
 town inhabitants. At the very opening of the modern period, Jewish rights 
 after a long decline happened to be on the average lower than those of their 
 urban Christian neighbors, yet even then they belonged to the privileged 
 minority which included nobles, clergy and urban citizenry. 
 
 Certainly the Jews had fewer duties and more rights than the great 
 bulk of the population — the enormous mass of peasants, the great majority 
 of whom were little more than appurtenances of the soil on which they were 
 born. When the land was sold they were included in the sale. None could 
 move away without the master's consent. Like cattle they were glebae ad- 
 script^ but less free than cattle to mate. The larger part of their produce 
 went to landlords or to the State. On every important occasion— at a 
 birth, marriage or death — the landlord had rights to be considered. In 
 every legal contest his was the only competent court. Seen by La Bruyere, 
 the peasants in 1689 even in comparatively happy France were "savage- 
 looking beings . . . black, livid, and sunburnt . . . they seem capable of 
 articulation and, when they stand erect, they display human lineaments. 
 They are in fact men. They retire at night into their dens where they live 
 on black bread, water, and roots." 
 
 In contrast to this class, the Jews were well off. They could move 
 freely from place to place with few exceptions, they could marry whomever 
 they wanted, they had their own courts, and were judged according to their 
 own laws. Even in mixed cases with non-Jews, not the local tribunal but 
 usually a special judge appointed by the king or some high official had com- 
 petence. Sometimes, as in Poland, the Jews even exercised influence in the 
 nomination of such a judex judaeorum for mixed cases. 
 
 The disabilities under which medieval Jewry suffered have been made 
 much of. Jews could not own land, or join most of the guilds, and were 
 thereby effectively barred from certain branches of craft and commerce. 
 But these were, in legal theory, restrictions made on the privileges granted 
 them, and not limitations on any general rule of equal rights. Every cor- 
 
4 
 
 THE MENORAH JOURNAL 
 
 poration had similar restrictions, and in this respect the Jews' case was no 
 different in principle from that of other privileged groups. 
 
 True, the Jews were servi earner ae (servants of the Treasury), but this 
 status can neither in theory nor in practice be compared with that of the 
 peasants, who were serfs of their local masters. If one may introduce a 
 modern legal distinction not thoroughly applicable to medieval conditions, 
 this difference becomes clear. The peasants were really serfs in civil law, 
 that is, they belonged to a private owner as a kind of private property. 
 The Jews were, so to speak, serfs in public law, and as such belonged to the 
 ruler as representative or embodiment of the State, and they were inherited 
 by his successor in office through public law. The man elected to the Im- 
 perial throne was their master, and not the private heir of the former Em- 
 peror's private estates, or the heir even of those German countries which, 
 like Austria, he could claim on dynastic grounds. Now we ought not to for- 
 get that even today we are, in effect, serfs of the State in public law, not- 
 withstanding all theories of personal rights, natural rights of citizens, and the 
 sovereignty of the people. In fact, even more so today than formerly. The 
 State can levy taxes little short of confiscatory; it can send us to war; in 
 democratic countries, and even more so in Fascist Italy or Soviet Russia, it is 
 complete master of all lives and property. This situation, expressed in 
 medieval terminology, is a serf relationship applying to all citizens. The 
 Jew then, insofar as he was servus camerae, was in substantially the same 
 position all modern free citizens are in. In a word, the difference in the 
 legal status between Jew and peasant was what David Hume, writing in that 
 period on the condition of ancient slaves, called the difference between "do- 
 mestic slavery '' and "civil subjection." The first, he recognized, is "more 
 cruel and oppressive than any civil subjection whatsoever." 
 
 The Jews' status as servant of the Emperor only, which had been op- 
 posed in vain by Thomas Aquinas and Pope Innocent III (these had it that 
 he was the property of the different kings and princes in Christendom), was 
 based on the erroneous theory that the Holy Roman Emperors of the Ger- 
 man nation were direct successors of the ancient Roman Emperors and thus 
 inherited the authority exercised over Jewish prisoners by Vespasian and 
 Titus after Jerusalem's fall. Vespasian had levied the fiscus Judaicus, 
 and the medieval rulers levied a similar tax — Schutzgeld (protection money). 
 In practice, the theory of Imperial overlordship of Jewry was occasionally a 
 disadvantage, as when the argument was made in fourteenth century France 
 that these subjects of a foreign monarch be expelled from the country. But 
 in general it was a profitable theory, for the Emperor often did provide the 
 protection for which Jewry paid, as when he used his considerable power on 
 their behalf in several of the German free cities, 
 
 Indeed, the status of the Jew in the Middle Ages implied certain priv- 
 
GHETTO AND EMANCIPATION 
 
 5 
 
 ileges which they no longer have under the modern State. Like the other 
 corporations, the Jewish community enjoyed full internal autonomy. Com- 
 plex, isolated, in a sense foreign, it was left more severely alone by the State 
 than most other corporations. Thus the Jewish community of pre-Revolu- 
 tionary days had more competence over its members than the modern 
 Federal, State, and Municipal governments combined. Education, admin- 
 istration of justice between Jew and Jew, taxation for communal and State 
 purposes, health, markets, public order, were all within the jurisdiction of 
 the community-corporation, and, in addition, the Jewish community was 
 the fountain-head of social work of a quality generally superior to that out- 
 side Jewry. The Jewish self-governing bodies issued special regulations and 
 saw to their execution through their own officials. Statute was reinforced 
 by religious, supernatural sanctions as well as by coercive public opinion 
 within the group. For example, a Jew put in Cherem by a Jewish court was 
 practically a lost man, and the Cherem was a fairly common means of im- 
 posing the will of the community on the individual. All this self-governing 
 apparatus disappeared, o*f course, when the Revolution brought "equal 
 rights " to European Jewry. 
 
 4 PHASE of this corporate existence generally regarded by emancipated 
 
 Jewry as an unmitigated evil was the Ghetto. But it must not be for- 
 gotten that the Ghetto grew up voluntarily as a result of Jewish self- 
 government, and it was only in a later development that public law interfered 
 and made it a legal compulsion for all Jews to live in a secluded district in 
 which no Christian was allowed to dwell. To a certain extent the Ghetto in 
 this technical sense was a fruit of the counter-Reformation, having its 
 origin in Pope Paul IV's Bull, Cum nimis absurdam, issued against the Jews 
 in 1555, and in its extreme application it was, of course, obnoxious. In 
 origin, however, the Ghetto was an institution that the Jews had found it to 
 their interest to create themselves. Various corporations in the State had 
 separate streets of their own; the shoemakers, for example, or the bakers, 
 would live each in one neighborhood. In addition to their growing mutual 
 interest as a corporation of money dealers, the Jews wished to be near the 
 Synagogue, then a social as well as a religious center. Furthermore, they 
 saw in the Ghetto a means of defense. Thus, it was the Jews themselves who 
 secured from Bishop Rudiger in Spires in 1084 the right to settle in a sep- 
 arate district and to erect a wall around it. There were locks inside the 
 Ghetto gates in most cases before there were locks outside. The Ghetto, in 
 the non-technical sense, was then a district in which most Jews and few 
 Gentiles lived long before the legal compulsion which came when Christian 
 authority found it necessary to mark the Jews off by residence district, in 
 order to prevent complete social intercourse between them and Christians. 
 
6 
 
 THE MENORAH JOURNAL 
 
 In this Ghetto, before compulsion came and after, Jewry was enabled 
 to live a full, rounded life, apart from the rest of the population, under a 
 corporate governing organization. The JeW, indeed, had in effect a kind of 
 territory and State of his own throughout the Middle Ages and early modern 
 period. The advantages of this autonomy, lost through the Emancipation, 
 were certainly considerable; they must have contributed in large part to- 
 ward the preservation of Jewry as a distinct nationality. 
 
 Again, the terrors of the Inquisition play a large part in all descriptions 
 of the state of medieval Jewry. Its horrors have been fully protrayed, and 
 many assume that whatever normal Jewish life might have beeiy potentially, 
 the constant incursions of the Inquisitor made it abnormal. It should be 
 remembered, however, that the Inquisition was legally institutec|jfroli]y in a 
 few European countries, and even there had no jurisdiction ovep'professing 
 Jews, beyond censoring Hebrew books. Therefore, far from being a special 
 prey of the Inquisition, Jews belonged to a small, privileged group which 
 had virtual immunity from its operations. 
 
 In the eyes of a contemporary European, the Inquisition was no more 
 than an ordinary court of justice, proceeding along the ordinary lines of 
 criminal prosecution in cases of capital crime. Apostasy from Christianity, 
 by an old law of Church and State, was punishable by death. To the re- 
 ligious conscience of the Western man it seemed to be a holy task to burn the 
 body of such a criminal in order to save his soul. According to the interpre- 
 tation of Canon Law prevailing throughout the Renaissance, Maranos 
 (secret Jews) were regarded as apostates. True, the highest Church author- 
 ities taught that enforced baptism was criminal, but most of them understood 
 by force real physical compulsion, the vis absoluta of the old Romans, and in 
 this sense the baptism of few Maranos could be viewed as enforced, even 
 though a strong vis compulsiva existed in the menace of deprivation of for- 
 tune and expulsion. Furthermore, many authorities contended that once 
 baptism occurred, even by compulsion, for the neophyte to return to his 
 former faith would be apostasy. (If the sixteenth century Popes permitted 
 Maranos to return to Judaism in Rome itself, theirs was certainly a laxer 
 attitude than that of earlier and later church teachers and jurists.) At least 
 in pure legal theory, then, the Maranos were apostates. They were, there- 
 fore, subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, and the governments of 
 Spain and Portugal were acting with strict legality in applying to them the 
 strict interpretation of laws concerning apostasy. 
 
 As to the horrible means of procedure depicted with such vividness in 
 the classic histories of Jewry, we must say again, with no effort to justify but 
 in an effort to understand, that they were not extraordinary for their times. 
 The "Inquisition" was a characteristic form of legal procedure, prevailing in 
 civil as well as ecclesiastical courts, in which the judge was at the same time 
 
GHETTO AND EMANCIPATION 
 
 7 
 
 prosecutor and attorney for the defendant. The use of torture was based 
 upon the belief that circumstantial evidence is insufficient, and that a con- 
 fession must therefore be extorted. Many also believed that such bodily 
 sufferings were salutary for the soul. Such principles are shocking to the 
 modern mind, but in a period of such draconic secular law as the Constitutio 
 Criminalis Carolina, issued by the enlightened ruler of Germany, Spain, the 
 Netherlands and all the New World, they are hardly extraordinary. Nor is 
 it surprising that Jews were tortured and killed in an age when not less than 
 40,000 Christian "witches" were burned because they confessed to relations 
 with demons. Regarded by itself or measured by absolute standards, the 
 position of the Jews under the Inquisition was certainly unenviable. But 
 by comparative standards they were, if anything, in a preferred position. 
 For if as apostates or heretics they ran afoul of the Inquisition, they were no 
 worse off than Gentile apostates or heretics, while as professing Jews they 
 were beyond its jurisdiction. 
 
 EGALLY and in theory, we have seen, the status of the Jew was by no 
 
 means an inferior one. But did actual events — persecutions, riots, 
 pogroms, monetary extortions — reduce their theoretical legal privileges to 
 fictions in practice? Even here the traditional answer of Jewish historians 
 does not square with the facts. 
 
 First of all, it is certainly significant that despite minor attacks, peri- 
 odic pogroms, and organized campaigns of conversion, the numbers of 
 Jewry during the last centuries preceding Emancipation increased much 
 more rapidly than the Gentile population.* The Jewish population in the 
 middle of the seventeenth century probably did not exceed 650,000 out of 
 the more than 100,000,000 inhabitants in Europe. In 1900 the Jewish popu- 
 lation of Europe exceeded 8,500,000 while the general population was about 
 400,000,000. That is, the Jewish rate of increase from 1650 down to the 
 beginning of the twentieth century (when the mass of Jewry was still 
 unemancipated) f was three times the rate of Gentile increase. Further- 
 more, in the same period European Jewry built the great American 
 center. 
 
 It may be worth while to analyze in some detail the population increase 
 previous to the Emancipation. From 1650 to 1789, when no Jews were yet 
 
 * Pre-Revolutionary population figures given here are by no means certain. I arrived at them after 
 a careful study of all available source material. It is impossible, of course, to give these sources here or 
 to explain the methods of textual criticism and synthesis used in arriving at the conclusions. It has long 
 been apparent, however, that figures given by our classic histories are far from reasonably exact, which is 
 all that mine pretend to be. 
 
 t It must be borne in mind that Emancipation did not come to Russia, Roumania or Turkey until 
 the present century, while in Austria (including the Jewish masses of Galicia and Hungary) it postdates 
 
 II 
 
 1867. 
 
8 
 
 THE MENORAH JOURNAL 
 
 emancipated, the Jewish population increased from 650,000 to 1,700,000, or 
 more than 160 per cent, while the European general population rOse from 
 100,000,000 to 177,000,000, an increase of only 77 per cent. During the 
 period 1789-1848, when only the Jews of France and Holland (less than 5 
 per cent of all European Jewry) were emancipated, the Jewish population 
 increased from 1,700,000 to 3,700,000, or about 120 per cent. In the same 
 period the general population increased only 40 per cent. Even more amaz- 
 ing are the figures for France and Holland themselves. The chief Jewish 
 settlement in France (Alsace) increased from 3,300 in 1700 (pre-Emancipa- 
 tion) to 26,000 in 1791 (year of the Emancipation), or about 700 per cent, 
 while in the six decades following 1791 their number rose only to about 
 40,000, an increase of less than 50 per cent. In Holland the Jewish settle- 
 ment started in the sixteenth century, developed rapidly during the next 
 200 years, and when Emancipation came there were about 50,000 Jews in the 
 country. During the first decades of the Emancipation the general popu- 
 lation of Holland rose from 1,882,000 (1805) to 2,640,000 (1830), while the 
 Jewish population decreased about 20 per cent. Only about 1840 did it 
 again touch the previous high figure of 50,000. As for Russia, Roumania, 
 Austria and Turkey, to which Emancipation came late, there was a great 
 increase in the Jewish populations century after century. Is it not clear 
 then that, despite the fact that pre-Revolutionary Jewry suffered massacres 
 and other sanguinary persecutions, the population increase went on at least 
 as rapidly before Emancipation as after? 
 
 As a matter of fact, a comparison between the loss of life by violence in 
 the two eras — pre- and post-Emancipation — would probably show little im- 
 provement since the French Revolution. Between Chmielnicki and Hu- 
 man, the two great pogrom movements of earlier East European Jewish 
 history, more than a century intervened, whereas three major pogrom waves 
 have swept Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920, despite the coming of 
 Emancipation. And if the Emancipation era did not relieve the Jew of 
 pogroms, it did burden him in addition with the obligation of military service, 
 from which (except in rare and temporary situations of abnormal character) 
 he had always been free. During the continuous wars of the sixteenth,, 
 seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, when even the non-combatant 
 Christian felt the curse of religious conflict, the Jews were neutral and suf- 
 fered few losses. If they had been combatants they might have lost more 
 than in all the pogroms.* 
 
 * It has been pointed out that the sixteenth century knew altogether twenty-five years, the seven- 
 teenth only twenty-one years, without big international conflagrations, not to speak of smaller wars. 
 What the effects of those wars were upon the numbers of the population even in such a rich country as 
 France, the leading empire of the world at that time, we see best in a short statement like this: "I esti- 
 mate," says Hippolyte Taine, "that in 1715 more than one-third of the population, six millions, perished 
 of hunger and of destitution." 
 
GHETTO AND EMANCIPATION 
 
 9 
 
 HAT of the economic situation of the Jew? Despite all the restrictions 
 
 ™ ~ placed on his activities, it is no exaggeration to say that the average 
 Jewish income much surpassed the average Christian income in pre-R evolu- 
 tionary times. This is hard to prove, and certainly excessive wealth was 
 rare except among high nobles and clergy. But is it not remarkable that 
 the most typical Ghetto in the world, the Frankfort Judengasse, produced 
 in the pre-Emancipation period the greatest banking house of history? And 
 even before Rothschild's day, such Central European Hofjuden as the Op- 
 penheimers and Wertheimers, and such West European bankers as the 
 Pintos, Modonas and others, were not far behind rich Christians in their 
 financial power. 
 
 Paradoxical as it may seem, the very restrictive legislation proved in the 
 long run highly beneficial to Jewish economic development. It forced them 
 into the money trade, and throughout the Middle Ages trained them in indi- 
 vidual enterprise without guild backing, compelled them to set up wide inter- 
 national contacts (the banking house of Lopez was established by five broth- 
 ers in Lisbon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Antwerp and London), and equipped 
 them with vast sums of ready cash. With the dawn of early capitalism, 
 and the need for ready money for the new manufactures and international 
 trading ventures, the Jew fitted readily into the new economic structure. 
 One need not accept Sombart's exaggerations to see that the Jew had an 
 extraordinarily large share in the development of early capitalism, and 
 received corresponding benefits. For several hundred years before the 
 Emancipation many individual Jews were to profit from the old restriction 
 which had trained them in money economy, and some of those profits were 
 to seep down to the Jewish mass. 
 
 There were, of course, many impoverished Jews, particularly in Eastern 
 Europe. But there were not so many of them, even relatively, as there 
 were poor peasants. Their standard of life was everywhere higher than that 
 of the majority of the populace. Particularly in Western and Central 
 Europe the frequent complaints about the extravagance of some Jews, and 
 the luxury laws of certain large Jewish communities, indicate a degree of 
 well-being which is surprising. Furthermore, there existed in the Jewish 
 corporations numerous relief agencies, a whole system of social insurance 
 against need, in startling contrast to the often exposed and defenseless 
 situation of the mass of the population. 
 
 Compared with these advantages, social exclusion from the Gentile 
 world was hardly a calamity. Indeed, to most Jews it was welcome, and 
 the Ghetto found warm champions in every age. There the Jews might live 
 in comparative peace, interrupted less by pogroms than were peasants by 
 wars, engaged in finance and trade at least as profitable as most urban occu- 
 pations, free to worship, and subject to the Inquisition only in extreme situa- 
 
 R: 
 
10 
 
 THE MENORAH JOURNAL 
 
 tions (as after the enforced baptisms in Spain and Portugal) . They had no 
 political rights, of course, but except for nobles and clergy no one did. 
 
 Ill 
 
 T7^7"HEN the modern State came into being and set out to destroy the 
 * * medieval corporations and estates and to build a new citizenship, it 
 could no longer suffer the existence of an autonomous Jewish corporation. 
 Sooner or later it had to give to the Jews equal rights in civil and public law 
 and to impose upon them equal duties in turn. After the French Revolution 
 one state after the other abrogated their economic disabilities, and granted 
 them full freedom of activity. Finally they opened public offices, elective 
 and appointive, to Jews, and made them citizens with "equal rights." 
 
 Emancipation was a necessity even more for the modern State than for 
 Jewry; the Jew's medieval status was anachronistic and had to go. Left to 
 themselves, the Jews might for long have clung to their corporate existence. 
 For Emancipation meant losses as well as gains for Jewry. 
 
 Equal rights meant equal duties, and the Jew now found himself subject 
 to military service. Political equality also meant the dissolution of the 
 autonomous communal organization: the Jews were no longer to be a nation 
 within a nation; they were to be thought of and to think of themselves as 
 individuals connected only by ties of creed — Frenchmen, Germans, English- 
 men of the Jewish "Confession." This meant that politically, culturally 
 and socially the Jew was to be absorbed into the dominant national group. 
 Eventually, it was hoped, his assimilation would be complete. 
 
 In the face of Emancipation traditional Jewish ideology underwent 
 great revision. The concept of the inseparability of nationality and re- , 
 ligion — which had been increasingly abandoned in Europe after the bloody 
 Wars of Religion — had persisted in Judaism down to the Revolution, and 
 after. Now the theory was put forth that the Jewish religion — which the 
 Jew was permitted to keep — must be stripped of all Jewish national ele- 
 ments. For national elements were called secular, and in secular matters 
 the Jew was to avow allegiance to the national ambitions and culture of the 
 land in which he lived. Jewish Reform may be seen as a gigantic effort, 
 partly unconscious, by many of the best minds of Western Jewry to reduce 
 differences between Jew and Gentile to a slight matter of creed, at the same 
 time adopting the Gentile's definition of what was properly a matter of 
 creed. The reality of the living Jewish ethnic organism was to be pared 
 down to the fiction of the Jewish "Confession." Jewish nationality was to 
 be declared dead and buried. Assimilation via Reform was the Jewish 
 destiny, as the nineteenth century European, Jew and non-Jew, saw it. 
 
 There emerged at this point the new Wissenschaft des Judentums, in- 
 trinsically connected with Reformation and Emancipation, a movement of 
 
GHETTO AND EMANCIPATION 
 
 11 
 
 scholars anxious to assist the completion of the process of emancipation with 
 their learning. Confronted by the general suspicion in which Germany and 
 the modern world in general held the Jew, and convinced of the desirability 
 of complete emancipation, they consciously or unconsciously sought a tool 
 in history and evolved this argument: "The Jews may be bad, but if they 
 are it is because of your persecution; change your attitude, welcome the 
 Jews into the modern State on terms of perfect equality, and they will 
 become good." Ardent advocates of liberalism and democracy, visioning a 
 reformed society guided by beneficent rationalism, believing religiously 
 that the world in general and the Jews particularly could be improved by an 
 extension of rights, it is easy to see how they found it useful to take as black 
 a view as possible of pre-Revolutionary treatment of the Jews. The exag- 
 gerated historical picture of the horrors of the "Dark Ages" which we have 
 been examining was the result. 
 
 This view of the Jewish past, outlined by the earliest advocates of 
 political and social equality, was seized on and elaborated by advocates of 
 Jewish Reform in the nineteenth century. Eager to widen the breach with 
 the past, to demonstrate a causal relation between the treatment given the 
 Jew and his general acceptability and usefulness to society, Reform advo- 
 cates proclaimed in unmeasured terms the wretchedness of the age that 
 preceded them. They explained Jewish "peculiarities" as results of op- 
 pression. The more radical expounded the idea that to achieve a new, free 
 Jewish religion based on the Bible, the entire literature of the Diaspora must 
 be abandoned. The Talmud, which grew up in the Diaspora, did not reflect 
 Judaism's innermost spirit, they maintained, but was a mirror of the 
 "abnormal conditions" in which Jews had lived. 
 
 At the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, this 
 view, originated by the anti-nationalist leaders of Reform, was to find rein- 
 forcement, paradoxically, from Zionism. Zionism wished to reject the Dia- 
 spora in toto, on the grounds that a "normal life" could not be led by Jewry 
 elsewhere than on its own soil. So, notwithstanding their profound differ- 
 ences, Zionism and Reform both found that their positions were best sup- 
 ported by that view of history which held that before the Revolution 
 European Jewry had lived in extreme wretchedness. They differed only in 
 that the Zionists denounced the post-Revolutionary period as equally bad. 
 
 IT should be pointed out at once that this conception of modern Jewish 
 history is indispensable neither to Reform nor to Zionism. Indeed, each 
 has begun to shift its ground. Particularly among the younger intellectual 
 leaders of national Judaism one discovers a note of romantic longing towards 
 the Jewish Ghetto, its life, and its culture. In literature, the revival of 
 Chassidism, at least as a cultural force, in the writings of Martin Buber, 
 
12 
 
 THE MENORAH JOURNAL 
 
 Peretz, Berditchevsky and others, represents the new tendency. The 
 establishment of national Jewish minorities in Eastern Europe has done 
 much to reverse former animosity to Ghetto ideas of Jewish self-govern- 
 ment. As for Reform, strong wings of the movement in America and Ger- 
 many endeavor to reconcile it with Zionism. Even those who do not fully 
 adopt Zionist ideology have become far less antagonistic to Hebrew culture 
 than were their forerunners in the Sturm und Drang period of Reform. Thus 
 medieval Jewish life takes on new values for Reform, and the old need for 
 rejection of all that preceded the Emancipation disappears. 
 
 Such revaluations of the Middle Ages are part, perhaps, of a general 
 modern tendency in historical studies, reflecting changes in our modern 
 outlook. Liberal laissez faire is being more and more supplanted by a sys- 
 tem of great trusts, protectionism, Fascism, Sovietism. Growing dissatis- 
 faction with democracy and parliamentarianism has brought about a 
 movement back to a modified medievalism. This is a medievalism on a 
 higher plane, perhaps, but a medievalism just the same, of organization, 
 standardization, and regulation. 
 
 That Reform and Zionism have both begun, though timidly and slowly, 
 to reconsider the Jewish Middle Ages is encouraging. The future will cer- 
 tainly not see a reversal toward an obsolete and impossible corporational 
 system. With other national minorities the Jews claimed and are claiming, 
 not without success, the equilibrium between their full rights as citizens and 
 the special minority rights they think necessary to protect their living nation- 
 al organism from destruction and absorption by the majority, a process that 
 has often proved to be harmful both for the absorber and the absorbed. 
 
 At any rate, it is clear that Emancipation has not brought the Golden 
 Age. While Emancipation has meant a reduction of ancient evils, and 
 while its balance sheet for the world at large as well as for the Jews is favor- 
 able, it is not completely clear of debits. Certainly its belief in the efficacy 
 of a process of complete assimilation has been proved untenable. Auton- 
 omy as well as equality must be given its place in the modern State, and 
 much time must pass before these two principles will be fully harmonized 
 and balanced. Perhaps the chief task of this and future generations is to 
 attain that harmony and balance. Surely it is time to break with the 
 lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe, and to adopt a view more in 
 accord with historic truth. 
 
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