From Ghetto to Emancipation: Historical and Contemporary Reconsideration of the Jewish Community (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780940866720)

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.

Author: David Myers,William Rowe
ISBN-10: 0940866722
ISBN-13: 9780940866720
Publisher: University of Scranton Press
Language: English
Published: 04/30/2005
Pages: 159
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.23h x 6.17w x 0.69d