From Ghetto to Emancipation: Historical and contemporary reconsideration of the Jewish community

by David N. Myers, William Rowe

The central addressed the conference question by reported on in this book was posed by Salo Wittmayer Baron, then a young Jewish historian, in his 1928 essay "Ghetto and Emancipation". In it he challenged what he called "the lachrymose conception" of Jewish history in which the Jewish Middle Ages were all evil and Jewish post-Emancipation was all good. In asserting that medieval Jews possessed "more rights than the great bulk of the population...and enjoyed full internal autonomy" in the corporatist order of medieval civilization, he also found much to criticize in the loss of communal autonomy and the recasting of Judaism into a narrow confessional mold in the wake of the Enlightenment. In other words, how can a group seeking to preserve a measure of collective identity survive within a liberal society that values individual rights and obligations above all else? This became the basis for a conference in 1995 at the University of Scranton attended by a distinguished roster of scholars on various fields of Jewish studies from across the United States.

159 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2005

About the author

David N. Myers received his A.B. from Yale College in 1982, and undertook graduate studies at Tel-Aviv and Harvard Universities before completing his doctorate at Columbia in 1991. He has written extensively in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history, with a particular interest in the history of Jewish historiography. He has authored Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: 1995) and Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003). Myers has edited five books, including The Jewish Past Revisited and Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases.

At present, Myers is working on books on the Diaspora Hebraist thinker Simon Rawidowicz and (together with Nomi Stolzenberg) the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Yoel, New York. He is also actively involved in a major project on the history of Jews in Los Angeles. Myers has taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Russian State University for the Humanities, and visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem) and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (Philadelphia). Since 2003, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. At UCLA, Myers teaches courses in ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish history.