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The history of the Jews in Europe is compelling from the sociological as well as the cultural standpoint.

As Professor (emeritus) Leonard Glick of Hampshire College describes the situation in the Middle Ages, "Far from being just one of many groups in a 'multicultural' society, Jews were the one group who stood wholly and obviously outside the mainstream: they were not an other people;they were the other people."1 Robert Bonfil makes a similar point. Whereas Muslims could look to kindred states for protection, and heretics could find no toleration, "During the Middle Ages, the Jews were the only group with absolutely no political power to whom Christians accorded the right of theoretical and practical dissent." He goes on to observe that the continued existence of antisemitism even in the absence of Jews suggests that Christians "considered Jews and Judaism as a necessary part of their Christian endeavor to define their own cultural and religious identity." 2

Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the Jews were a sort of barometer of modern Western civilization. Virtually every intellectual and social upheaval--the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialization, the First World War, and the rise of communism--brought in its wake renewed controversy regarding the status of the Jews. The debates about the Jews were debates about what it meant to be a European, a subject or citizen--even a human being.

  
     
 
Gallery: a connection between European and Middle Eastern history
 
  Religious and sentimental attachment to the ancient homeland endured, but the persistence of antisemitism gave rise to political Zionism in the late nineteenth century.  
     
 
 
  In the course of the nineteenth century, the European Great Powers became increasingly involved in the affairs of the Middle East.
Above: Austro-Hungarian soldiers praying at the Western Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem during the First World War, when the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires were allies. Access to the Wall was then limited to a narrow alleyway. 		 

 

  The Ottomans surrender Jerusalem to British forces, December 1917. It was a most welcome development for the Entente in the wake of the disasters of Passchendaele and Caporetto. In June, Prime Minister Lloyd George had asked General Allenby to "to take Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the nation." In November, the government issued the Balfour Declaration, in which it announced that it viewed "with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people," a charge that became part of the League of Nations mandate for Palestine assigned to Great Britain in 1922. The Great War lent an impetus to both Arab and Jewish national liberation movements, which some members of each regarded as sympathetic and compatible.  
 
 
     

 

sources

1. Leonard B. Glick, Abraham's Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), x.

2. Robert Bonfil, "Aliens Within: The Jews and Antijudaism," in Thomas A. Brady Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), vol. 1, Structures and Assertions: 263, 265.

 

  
 
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last updated 21 August, 2002
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copyright notice © 2002 Jim Wald, Hampshire College contact Jim Wald