ABSTRACT
Modernization and legal development are not particularly modern problems. The Jewish communities in Western and Central Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries offer a model for reflecting on the larger issues under consideration at the time, as well as their abandonment of legal pluralism for the modern (secular) unitary law of the nation-state. In broad terms, this period was a time in the West in which the older feudal structures of law were being set aside in favor of new models of governance, often based on notions of “nationality” and the expression thereof in the political structure of the “nation-state.” The original idea was that each “people” or “ethnic group,” however these might be defined, constituted a distinct “nation,” meaning a community of people sharing a common history, culture, language and set of cultural traits (which we might deem a “tribe” in modern ethnographic terms). An urgent issue was to adduce how such “nations” related to the political entity of the state, since simple geographic location or fealty to a particular ruler was part of the old feudal order.
