Judaism

The Enlightenment virtue of religious toleration, paired with the hope of political equality, shaped debates over Jewish equality and political rights during the Romantic Era. Antisemitism was engrained in the literary tropes of the Romantic Era just when the development of the reading public’s understanding of the realities of Jewish life was urgently needed. Modern nationalism and democracy often led to regressive legislation against Jewish participation in politics and civil society. The struggle for the political emancipation of the Jewish people reached a crisis as individual Jews, seeking to escape poverty, began to venture out of their insular communities, both urban and rural, to seek new opportunities offered by the expansion of global capitalism. As the men began to mix with non-Jews, a tiny number of women, raised in the new secularizing milieu, attained the education, skills, and sensibilities that would enable them to join erudite society and its nascent literary culture. While most Jewish women remained deeply involved in their synagogues, some assimilated through the conversion of their parents to Christianity, while others chose to convert for personal reasons. Other Jews, many of them the descendants of those who had been forcibly converted during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, were swept up in the poorly understood eighteenth-century Sabbatarian movements that rolled across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Nine entwined developments are of special note: Christian Hebraism, Restorationism, the Hebrew Christian movement, Jewish Messianism, Hasidism, the Jewish Enlightenment, Reform Judaism, Modern Orthodoxy, and Zionism.