Customer Reviews

Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(1)
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This is a fascinating read for non-Jews .... maybe even for members of the tribe. It is well written and hard to put down and I find that an unusual thing to say about a history, but If more history were written this way there would be more people reading it. I bought it on Kindle, a great device with a limited catalog, and would very much like to hear it read by Goldfarb, an occasional radio presenter and reporter for NPR and the BBC.

It gave me a better understanding of European history from middle ages till the present and I will likely to re-read it. It is information rich and lends itself to some study especially by those of us who are only casually informed about the history of the Hebrew people - outside of the Bible - and European Liberalism.

Mr. Goldfarb has indeed written an excellent history of the emancipation of Europe's Jews, well-researched but adding almost nothing new to the story. He writes with the commendable style of a good journalist who avoids commentary. This is fine as far as it goes, but even in his epilogue, where he depicted individual responses to being emancipated, he seemingly leaves its beneficiaries unable to actualize that status, albeit through no innate fault of their own.

Had he shaped his narrative using the term modernity, he might have provided a coherency to the story. He opens with Spinoza, the first 'Modern' Jew, but fails to grasp the import of the word. He correctly focuses on the fact that it was Gentiles who initiated Emancipation, without overtly stating that without them there would have been no Emancipation. Jews locked inside of Ghetto walls were in no position to initiate anything (and as he also states, did not, in many cases, want to).

He makes much of the self-emancipation of Jews in Vienna, but does not attach any consequence to the fact that the society they created there was, while German-speaking, not 'German', as pointed out by the reactions of the Anti-Semites he cites.

One quibble: Mr. Goldfarb translates all German newspaper names into English every time, but from French only at the first occurence. In addition, he does not translate Alliance Israelite Universelle at all, assuming that his audience is like him, conversant in French. This is confirmed in his bibliography, which includes sources in French, but nothing in German (even if in translation). Perhaps that is an explanation for his usage of 'The Jewish State' as the English translation of 'Der Judenstaat', when in fact it should be 'The Jews' State', not quite the same thing.

'Emancipation into What?' might have been a better title, but the author never asked the question, and so this book remains limited to telling a story without a point.

What an interesting, and for me a revealng and well written book. I admit I knew far too little of this period in my tribe's history. Clearly, it is about only a slice of the greater story of the "emancipation" of the proletariat in Europe at the time, but a very important and large slice. This book is easy to read, hard to put down and very well constructed.

Like Goldfarb's story of his ancestor leaving Odessa and making it to NY, my forbears left the Poznan region in Prussia (at the time) around 1850 and went to live in the slums of Whitechapel in East End of London and then eventually on to Australia. The report on Heine's visit and impression of poverty of Jews living in Poznan was a revelation for me. I always figured Whitechapel was a hell hole but perhaps it was an improvement on Poznan!

However, this book also made me think of the emancipation of blacks in the USA and the rough road they have travelled. There are parallels here in regard to the continuing struggle to make it into the mainstream and the undercurrent discrimination from which they still suffer. We now have a black US President, albeit not of those same roots, but what will it take for full "freedom" in the land of the free?

The other striking point is the interesting disparity in the comments from Amazon readers. We even have one person managing to read into Goldfarb's text an admission to Jewish culpability for the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror! Sounds a bit like the split in the German community under Bismarck. Surely this is "finding facts" to support a predisposition.

It's odd how such a good book could be so willfully misunderstood or misrepresented by
some of the Amazon reviewers. While agreeing that the history is fascinating, Emancipation is not a history
of the Enlightenment, nor does it claim the Enlightenment for the Jewish people. If, like
one reviewer her, you believe the enlightenment to be a thing of evil that has corrupted the
precious bodily fluids of Christendom, you should consider that even Creationism is a Jewish
creation, in the broadest sense.

It's also not up to the author to chart the progress of the Enlightenment to Modernism or any other
destination, which might be interesting but would hardly be germane.

Emancipation, is, as its title says, about the setting free of a people within a so-called
advanced society, and as much as their effect on that society, the bigger question of how
effective, valuable, and viable assimilation of a minority is for the society considering such
things. In other words, the metaphoric resonance to our own Christendom's (which may be said
to include our assimilated Jewish population)attitude toward the Islamic minorities is pretty clear, very important, and very cleanly laid out.

If you think the last 225 years has been a downhill slope, and are awaiting rapture to help you escape,
this certainly isn't the book for you. But if you appreciate the slightly off-center view of an
important foundation of our era, it certainly ought to be.

Even among the well educated, very few people know the history of the Jewish people in Europe. The author has done an amazing job of writing a very readable, interesting and insightful accounting of this time. My hat is off to him. This is an excellent book.

I am married to a Jewish woman, I have been to Israel several times, many of my good friends are Jewish. I knew nothing. Thank you Michael Goldfarb.

This book betrays the author's admission in the acknowledgments that its original research was Google-generated: hey, let's see if we can make a book following the progress of Jews out of the ghettos, relying entirely on already published material. There are many revelations for the layman but one has the sense that the foundation is lacking and that the scholarship is shaky and selective. The fact that there are no original German works cited in the bibliography clearly indicates the limitations of the work. The first half of the book is better and more compelling, the second half more episodic. The periodic preoccupation with Zionism and the vision of a Jewish state in the second half further gets in the way, with Theodor Herzl an implied hero but not enough documentation of his role. In fact it is ultimately not clear in what way emancipation led to revolution and renaissance, but it's a lovely conceit.

For years, decades, centuries, Jews have denied with vigor and outrage that their forefathers played a significant role in or bore any real responsibility for the horrors of the French Revolution (contrary to the contentions of Nesta Webster, among others). In "Emancipation", however, author Michael Goldfarb positively revels -- derives enormous vicarious pleasure -- in Jewish involvement in and contributions to the so-called Enlightenment; in the introduction and promulgation of the poisonous ideas and toxic habits of being that have brought woe and wreck and ruin to Western Civilization and that have contributed so mightily to the dismantling of Christendom. I must say that I read this section of the book with a kind of fascinated horror. The rest of "Emancipation" is more of the same, but it loses its eclat. After all, how many times can one read about this or that Jew manfully lifting off the boot heel of the bumpkin or bully to stun and dazzle the world with sunburst brilliance? Ernest Hemingway once unfavorably described Gertrude Stein as being awfully patriotic about sex (referring to her lesbianism). Well, Goldfarb is awfully patriotic about religious or blood identity. It's a disservice to him, to his readers, and to history.

I won't gainsay that Goldfarb addresses pivotal historical events and that he's a good writer. But his is a narrow, idiosyncratic, almost monomaniacal perspective. And what a great pity that is.