Emancipation Reconsidered: 1550–2000

Prof. Dr. David Sorkin
Lucy G. Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History, Yale University

Abstract:
In the mass of scholarship on the process of the Jews' "emancipation," that is, gaining the equality of citizenship, there has not been a comprehensive synthetic study that accounts for the entirety of Europe let alone the Ottoman Empire and the Atlantic world.  In this lecture David Sorkin will present a typology of emancipations, including the "three regions" of Europe and a fourth pattern in the Ottoman Empire.  He will also highlight the  singular characteristics of emancipation in Central Europe, namely, the states of the German Federation, the Habsburg Empire and Wilhelmine Germany.