ABSTRACT
European Jewish patriotism from the French Revolution until the Holocaust was symptomatic of the emerging liberal state and its strengths and weaknesses: its moral idealism and emphasis on education and progress, its tolerance, energy and enterprise; and its vulnerability to prejudice, xenophobia, and its unleashing of demonic, destructive powers. Jews benefited from the adoption by the state of inalienable Enlightenment principles of natural rights: liberty and equality as well as legal protection of property and security; and from the immense opportunities created by the industrialized secular national state. Yet, the liberal state was created to serve human self-interest, to protect people from one another, and was potentially the enemy of liberty. Intolerance of Judaism, as of all religion, was often expressed in the grudging emancipation of Jews as individual human beings, as if they were ‘emancipated’ from their ancient tradition and community. Yet, to many European Jews, with their history of hatred, discrimination, and violence at the hands of Christian Europe, it seemed after 1789 almost as if the Messianic age had come. No Jewish community refused emancipation.
