History of the Jews (modern times)
The history of the Jews in modern times encompasses the history of Jewish communities and minorities from the Reformation to the present. The history of the Jews in modern times developed very differently according to continents and individual country situations. This overview article focuses on developments in Europe , from the dispersal of the Sephardi (16th century) to the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The history of the Jews in Europe ruled by National Socialism is dealt with primarily in the time of National Socialism and the Holocaust ; the history of the Jews in Germany and the history of the State of Israel also have their own articles.
overview
The upheavals of the Reformation in the 16th century changed the situation of the Jews in some regions of Europe. The importance of Hebrew literature for European intellectual life had already grown since the Renaissance , in which some Bible manuscripts of the Masoretes were rediscovered. In addition to the Tanach , the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud and other Jewish literature were increasingly studied, which helped Judaism to gain a certain reputation. Martin Luther's 1543 request to expel the Jews or to impose compulsory work on them was not followed by the Protestant princes. Under the influence of Protestant competition, the anti-Judaistic ritual murder legend also temporarily receded in Catholic countries.
In the age of the Counter Reformation and the denominational wars, which culminated in the Thirty Years' War , Jews were partly tolerated regionally in return for high taxes, partly persecuted as alleged carriers of the plague or allies of the respective religious enemies. With the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, however, the understanding grew in Europe that questions of faith cannot be decided by war. While the major churches found a compromise, religious minorities continued to face severe pressure. New ideas of tolerance did not come from the churches, but from religious marginalized groups and enlightened philosophers, e. B. John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu . He was the first to demand equality between the Jewish and Christian religious practices. Anti-Jewish polemics were now rare and were sometimes even banned: such an anti-Jewish pamphlet by Johann Andreas Eisenmenger .
In the 18th century, the idea of human rights developed from natural law . This enabled the Jewish emancipation to come into the long-term focus of enlightened princes and citizens. The increasing tolerance came u. a. in plays such as Lessing's play Nathan the Wise , where the Mosaic, Christian and Muslim religions were in principle equated ( ring parable ). Humans were no longer judged according to their religious affiliation, but according to their usefulness for the state. Several prominent advocates of mercantilism , however, continued to be hostile to the Jews (e.g. William Petty , Johann Joachim Becher ). It was Jewish apologists themselves who advocated more rights for Jews with utilitarian arguments, such as B. Simone Luzzatto , whose writings influenced influential thinkers like Montesquieu.
The conditions for Jewish communities developed very differently under the changing social conditions. A center of autonomous Jewish life had emerged in Eastern Europe since the crusades of the 13th century and the plague pogroms of the 14th century ; further centers emerged after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497; Sephardic dispersion) in the Ottoman Empire (since 1517), in the Netherlands (since 1581), in Nieuw Amsterdam (1626) and in England (abolition of immigration - and settlement ban from 1650).
Diaspora under Christian rule
In Spain, Jews were officially persecuted from 1391 and had to choose between execution and forced baptism. The persecutions became particularly sharp when, with the introduction of the Inquisition in 1480 under Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, not only the Jews were targeted, but also those who had converted to Christianity around them To save lives, which, however, secretly remained true to their old faith. A large number of these Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who were compulsorily Catholic, fell victim to the Inquisition and died at the stake. At the instigation of the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada , from March 31, 1492, Alhambra Edict , all Jews were expelled from Spain. In 1497 she was expelled from Portugal.
Some of the displaced Sephardim initially settled in Brazil. However, since only the Marranos were allowed to stay there and persecution by the Inquisition was soon introduced in the overseas colonies, many Jews left the country again. In 1654 it was Brazilian Marranos who first founded a community in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (now New York City ). In between, they have colonies in northern Argentina, Suriname, Colombia (Antioquia) and México. These groups are still recognizable in their Jewish way of life and cultural elements, not least the maintenance of the language, Ladino , with the typical voseo (vos instead of usted).
The majority of the Sephardic Jews fled to the Ottoman Empire, Holland, Germany, Italy or Greece. The Jews who fled to Italy were of great importance for the further development of cultural history in Europe, as they had a decisive influence on the development of the Renaissance thanks to their profound knowledge of ancient authors and ancient philosophy.
However, the largest Jewish community in Europe was in Constantinople , later Istanbul , in the 16th century . The immigrating Marranos met an already existing living Jewish population here: In addition to the Greek-speaking Romaniots - as the Byzantines called themselves - a smaller group of Ashkenazi Jews lived here , a large group of Eastern European Jews who had fled the persecution from Eastern Europe to the Ottoman Empire , as well as a small community of Karaites that produced important representatives.
In Germany, the Marranos played an important role in the emergence of the Jewish Enlightenment and in general in the emancipation process within the Jewish population in the 18th century. Most of these Marranos did not come to Germany, especially Hamburg, from Amsterdam and Antwerp until the beginning of the 17th century. They were descendants of the Conversos , who originally fled to the Netherlands from Spain and Portugal , and who had returned to Judaism there as one.
After the Protestant Reformation, some countries in Europe became more tolerant of the Jews. The first signs were in England, where the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell offered Jews immigration from 1650. Influential men like the philosopher John Locke and the missionary Roger Williams also invited them to settle in the English colonies of North America. In France, the National Assembly gave Jews the right to vote in the course of the French Revolution in 1791.
Most of the Ashkenazi Jews who had fled the plague pogroms to Eastern Europe at the time of the Crusades and the various plague epidemics in Central Europe settled in Poland and Russia. By 1648 their number in Poland exceeded 500,000, maintaining their autonomy within the kingdom and making the country a center of Jewish life. Between 1648 and 1658 there were pogroms in Ukraine, which began after the uprising of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnyzkyj . See also Shabbtai Zvi .
The collapse of the Polish state and the partitions of Poland at the beginning of the 19th century meant that from now on the originally unified Jewish population of Eastern Europe lived in different areas of political influence and developed differently. Part of the Jewish population had become citizens of the Habsburg Empire and Prussia as a result of the partition. But the far greater part now lived in tsarist Russia, where settlement was not only limited to the so-called Paleon of Settlement , but the Jews were also politically almost without rights.
Since the middle of the 19th century, the situation of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe deteriorated rapidly. There were numerous pogroms in Russia, which reached their peak towards the end of the century and flared up again and again until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Between 1890 and the end of World War I, around two million Jews emigrated from Russia to the United States as a result of the pogroms. While an estimated 2,000 Jews lived in the United States at the time of the North American War of Independence around 1780, their number had risen to almost 250,000 by 1880. During the next forty years another three million Jews entered, mostly from Eastern Europe. The great river did not dry up until 1924 with the introduction of immigration restrictions. After 1933, the United States was an important refuge for Jews from all over Western and Eastern Europe fleeing the terror of National Socialism. Even so, not all Jews were accepted into the United States. Some refugee ships were turned away and had to turn back.
Other colonies of former Eastern European Jews had also sprung up early on in Canada, South America (especially Argentina) and Palestine.
enlightenment
The Enlightenment ideals that emerged among the European educated classes during the 18th century had contradicting effects. On the one hand, the individual was respected as a “human being” regardless of religion and origin, but on the other hand, people were unwilling to recognize groups that had grown over time and did not intend to give up their identity. Jews who wanted to be accepted into society but wanted to remain Jews at the same time were suspected of hypocrisy. While Lessing's ideal of tolerance respected human identity (“Are Christians and Jews more likely to be Christians and Jews than humans?”, In: Nathan the Wise), Herder demanded that the Jews adapt so that they “live according to European laws and to Contribute the best of the state ”.
In addition to the fear that the Jews could, if they preserve their identity, form a state within a state, anti-church efforts also came into play. Deists and opponents of religion tried to attack the foundations of the Christian churches by claiming that the Old Testament was a Jewish forgery. Numerous anti-Semitic stereotypes were revived and brought up by leading thinkers: "an ignorant and barbaric people who have long combined dirty avarice with despicable superstition" ( Voltaire ). Fichte saw no other option than "cutting off their heads at night and putting others on, in which there was not a Jewish idea either."
Other endeavors were also aimed at “improving” the Jews. It accepted responsibility for the persecution, isolation and discrimination of Jews. The integration models developed (e.g. by CWDohm ) were intended to reduce disadvantages in education and work, but were shaped by the old prejudices. They also always came down to minimizing the factors that distinguished the Jews from their environment.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a reform movement of Judaism based on the Jewish Enlightenment, Haskala , emerged in Germany , which triggered a religious renewal that still continues today, especially in North America. Israel Jacobson , court factor of Jérôme Bonaparte , was the first to establish a reform-oriented school synagogue in Seesen (and later in Kassel ) in 1810 . Congregations formed in Berlin and Hamburg and built reform synagogues, which they called temples .
Emancipation in Europe and its failure
Since the French Revolution in 1789, Jews in Europe gradually received civil rights and were increasingly given equal legal status. They were now more or less recognized citizens who just belonged to a different religion. In Germany they felt like German citizens of the Jewish faith. Many Jews converted to Christianity. In some cases, Jewish families were also raised to hereditary nobility, for example the Oppenheims or the Hirsch auf Gereuth family , who were raised to hereditary nobility in Bavaria as early as 1815. The Rothschilds were raised to the hereditary status in Austria in 1822; in England , Nathaniel de Rothschild, the first practicing Jew, was raised to the rank of lord in 1885 . They showed their commitment to Germany with their participation in the Wars of Liberation from 1813 to 1815, the Franco-German War 1870/71 and the First World War . In the course of the 19th century, the Jews almost completely adapted to their Christian environment and were considered almost equal citizens. They were members of fire brigades or rifle clubs or provided mayors. The Christians also partially accepted the religious customs of the Jews. For example, they took part in the inauguration of synagogues or - like the city of Oberkirchen in 1854 - postponed market day when it fell on a Jewish holiday. The Jews remained in the minority; they made up less than two percent of the total German population. But the number of doctors, legal scholars, painters, poets, musicians and directors with a Jewish background was disproportionately high. The composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , the labor leaders Karl Marx , Wilhelm and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg , the doctor and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud , the physicist Albert Einstein are just a few personalities with a Jewish background, not infrequently atheists and disapproving and alienated towards religion and that Jewish community life. These people enlivened the German-speaking intellectual and cultural life beyond national borders up to the present day. Among 40 German Nobel Prize winners by 1933, eleven were from a Jewish background. In the First World War, Jewish officers and soldiers also fought ( Jewish census ) and some were awarded high medals, albeit disproportionately.
See also
literature
- Julius Höxter : Source texts on Jewish history and literature. Marix, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-86539-198-8 .
- Eli Bar-Chen, Anthony Kauders (ed.): Jewish history. Old challenges, new approaches. Utz, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-8316-0291-3 .
- Arno Herzig : Jewish History in Germany. From the beginning to the present. Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-39296-2 .
- Shmuel Ettinger: From the 17th Century to the Present. The Modern Age. In: Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson (ed.): History of the Jewish people. From the Beginnings to the Present Volume 3. Beck, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-406-07223-2 .
- Jacob Katz: From prejudice to destruction. Anti-Semitism 1700–1933. Beck, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-406-33555-1 .
- History of the Jews in the Middle Ages from the North Sea to the Southern Alps. (annotated map series), published. by Alfred Haverkamp , Hahn, Hannover 2002, ISBN 3-7752-5623-7 (= research on the history of the Jews ; Section A: Treatises; Volume 14/3; 105 maps).
- Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson (ed.): History of the Jewish people - from the beginnings to the present. (Authorized translation by Siegfried Schmitz), 5th, expanded edition. Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-406-55918-2 .
- Thomas Brechenmacher . Michal Szulc: Modern German-Jewish History. Concepts - Narratives - Methods. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-17-021417-0 .
Web links
- Federal Agency for Civic Education and the German Historical Museum: Jewish Life in Germany 1914–2005
- Jewish life in Europe beyond the metropolises
- Historicum.net: Jews in the history of the early modern period
credentials
- ^ History of the Jewish People, edited by Ben-Sasson, Beck 1995