Das Europaische Zeitalter der Juden (review)

These two volumes represent the second edition of Friedrich Battenberg’s important survey of the history of the Jews in Europe published a decade ago. With great breadth, useful historical context, detailed indexes, and impeccable organization and clarity, this overview is an invaluable teaching tool. The volumes are more than mere synthesis; combining as they do a wide range of historical work on the subject with Battenberg’s own impressive scholarship in a number of areas, such as the legal position of the Jews in medieval and early modern Germany, this work will be of interest to established scholars in a variety of fields as well.

Battenberg begins by noting the recent interest in the history of the Jews, par ticularly in Germany. Two motives, he maintains, for this interest are the Holocaust and the relationship of the history of the Jews to the general problem of the history of minorities. Battenberg contends that the world history of the Jews unfolded in three phases: the Oriental period (including the Hellenistic and Babylonian periods) ending in the tenth century with the decline of the Babylonian academies and the rise of Spanish Jewry; the period of European Jewry stretching from the tenth through the middle of the twentieth century; and finally, the period of American and national, including Israeli, Judaism.

Chapter 2 reviews the beginnings of European Jewry, focusing on the settlements in Spain and Italy before the tenth century (including Visigothic Spain and the growing independence of Spanish Jewry from the Babylonian academies); Chapter 3 addresses the beginnings of Frankish Jewry during the Merovingian and Carolingian periods and through the Rhenish communities during the crusades. Chapter 4 details the develop ment and expulsion of the Jewish communities from England and France in the high and later Middle Ages, while Chapter 5 focuses on the urban Jewry of the Holy Roman Empire until the fourteenth century—here Battenberg frequently supplies greater detail than in other sections. Chapter 6 examines late medieval Judaism in middle and western Europe, with sections on Sepharad and a look at attempts at centralization that were both internal and external to the Jewish communities, and Chapter 7 Jews between the Reformation and Counter Reformation, in which the burgeoning communities of eastern Europe are first treated in detail. Volume I is rounded out with a chapter on middle Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. This chapter includes a good deal of useful context and more extensive information on Jewish demographics, and reveals some of Battenberg’s own research strengths.

Volume II begins with a chapter devoted to important contextual information related to general European developments, Jewish religious custom and observance, communal structure—as evident in particular communities selected—, and social structures, including the increasing polarization of Jewish society and the increasing number of impoverished Jews. Chapter 2 traces the external and internal ruptures of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including the Chmielnicki massacres, Lurianic kabbalah—based almost exclusively on the work of Scholem and taking little account of recent literature—, resettlement in England, and the intellectual and communal challenges reflected in da Costa and Spinoza in Amsterdam. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the long eighteenth century, including Haskala, Chasidism, and the beginnings of Emancipation. The remainder of Volume II follows traditional lines of interpretation, examining the crisis and conservative reaction of the first half of the nineteenth century (Chapter 5), assimilation and the course of Emancipation (Chapter 6), struggles within Judaism, including the reform and neo-orthodox movements (Chapter 7), the origins of modern antisemitism (Chapter 8), and the origins and development of Zionism (Chapter 9). Chapter 10 reviews the history of the Jews during the First World War and in the Interwar period, Chapter 11 the rise of the Nazis and World War II, and finally and briefly, Chapter 12 the effects...