62nd Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture by David Sorkin

David Sorkin, the Lucy G. Moses Professor of History at Yale University, is the author of The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought, and The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna. He will give the 62nd Leo Baeck Memorial lecture, entitled “Emancipation, Then and Now,” based on his research for the forthcoming book, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries.

About the lecture

For all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that they are only part of—and indeed reactions to—the central event of that history: emancipation. In his new book and in this lecture, David Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, Jewish Emancipation tells the ongoing story of how Jews have gained, kept, lost, and recovered rights in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Israel.

Emancipation, Sorkin shows, was not a one-time or linear event that began with the Enlightenment or French Revolution and culminated with Jews' acquisition of rights in Central Europe in 1867–71 or Russia in 1917. Rather, emancipation was and is a complex, multidirectional, and ambiguous process characterized by deflections and reversals, defeats and successes, triumphs and tragedies. For example, American Jews mobilized twice for emancipation: in the nineteenth century for political rights, and in the twentieth for lost civil rights. Similarly, Israel itself has struggled from the start to institute equality among its heterogeneous citizens.

By telling the story of this foundational but neglected event, Sorkin reveals the lost contours of Jewish history over the past half millennium.

The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture is endowed by Marianne C. Dreyfus and Family, the descendants of Rabbi Leo Baeck