Introduction

The year 1492 has often been invoked as the critical marker of the dawn of modernity. The year commemorates the beginnings of two journeys, one in which the Americas were "opened up" and the new world was discovered; the other in which a flourishing Jewish community was expelled per royal decree from Spain. Both journeys brought about multifaceted, contradictory, and unforeseeable outcomes. On the one hand, immeasurable suffering was inflicted on those who lost their freedom and livelihood through the expulsion; on the other hand, the groundwork for a new interconnected world of commerce and exchange was created. And at the same time that the Jews of Spain lost their heritage and culture, their fate gave birth to a new culture and language rooted, so to speak, in the historical experience of uprootedness.

This nexus of discovery and expulsion represents a paradigmatic experience of what we—retrospectively—perceive to be the experience of modernity, particularly the dramatic social and economic transformations that we associate with the birth of the modern¹: the rise of the natural sciences, the ascendancy of reason and rationality, the redefinition of the role of religion, the birth of the modern city, and the emergence of participatory systems of rule. At the same time, these phenomena were, of course, accompanied by the disenchantment of the world, the instrumentalization of reason, the loss of spirituality, the atomization and alienation of society, and the rise of totalitarianism. Modernity can hardly be seen as the marker of progress alone; it has always been accompanied by violence and suffering. Thus, it is more precise to speak about the dialectic of modernity, the hopes and catastrophes that simultaneously gave rise to its progressive and regressive strands.²

Following their expulsion, European Jews no longer enjoyed the kinds of privileges and protections that were afforded them in the Middle Ages as "service nomads," to use Yuri Slezkine's helpful concept—that is, a group whose role was mainly the delivery of goods and services.³ While this role as social and economic mediators was clearly defined during the Middle Ages, the beginnings of the modern era witnessed the rise of a questioning of their function within European Society. Over the course of the centuries that followed, both Jews and non-Jews began to grapple with what it meant to belong and participate in a society. The birth of the "Jewish question" is to be found here.⁴ For Jews, the question entailed how to hold onto a religious tradition defined by an extraterritorial bind to written Jewish law that assured them their social function during the Middle Ages. For non-Jews, who were no longer dependent upon Jewish mediation, the Jewish question meant how to deal with a large cultural and religious minority in the face of pressures from the Church and state.

As the famous debate between Moses Mendelssohn and Christian Wilhelm von Dohm brought to the fore, the Enlightenment was infused with the Jewish question, and the Jewish question was infused with the Enlightenment.⁵ This reciprocal interaction was crystallized following the French Revolution when citizenship was detached from religious belonging. In France, emancipation resulted in full—although admittedly short-lived—civil equality for Jews. While Jewish emancipation remained subject to contestation and debate during this period, reforms ebbed and flowed throughout the nineteenth century with regard to Jewish civic equality.

With the redefinition of the role of Jews in European society and the granting of civil rights, the tension between a commitment to Jewish cultural memory and the demands of acculturation as a condition of social integration became steadily accentuated. Perhaps the best exemplar of this tension can be seen in the life and work of Heinrich Heine. Born to an acculturated German-Jewish family, Heine decided to convert to Christianity in 1825 in the hope of receiving his "ticket of admission to European society."⁶ Soon after, Heine realized that even baptism could not resolve the Jewish question. As he lamented to his friend Moses Moser in October 1826 while traveling to the North Sea: "It is very clear to me that I am most longingly forced...