ABSTRACT
During the 130 years from 1750 to 1880, world Jewry proceeded along two different tracks. For Jews in western Europe, most of central Europe, and the New World, this was an age defined by the search for and attainment of civic equality, the gradual entry of Jews into mainstream society, and the desacralization of Jewish life through cultural enlightenment. In the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and in the eastern reaches of the Habsburg Empire, traditional Jewish life remained largely intact, buttressed by a surrounding conservative polity and society. Yet even in these regions, Jews were affected in varying degrees during the nineteenth century by internal changes and by the changes emanating from the west. Throughout the Jewish world, disparate political, cultural, and social changes elicited a broad range of Jewish responses that varied between the different states and even within each state. By the second half of the nineteenth century, each Jewry had developed a particular balance between the world of Jewish tradition and the changing world of the nineteenth century, characterized by a distinct spectrum of religious observance and belief, varied forms of Jewish communal organization, and distinct tensions between traditionalists and progressives.
