ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses three kinds of Jewish political identity: assimilationism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The chapter traces the ambivalences running through Jewish assimilationism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism and examines the unimaginably violent contradictions Jews at times had to face in the modern period. The Enlightenment had served as an intellectual springboard for the 100-year struggle for Jewish emancipation that took off in the last quarter of eighteenth century and came to some sort of temporary fruition in the last quarter of the nineteenth. It sought to overcome the subordinate position Jews occupied in the old European order, when they were generally designated as a separate nation within their various host nations. They left most Jews in poverty, externally vulnerable to persecution by Church, state and people, and internally vulnerable to the power of Jewish rabbinical and financial elites. The Enlightenment itself was uneven in its attitudes toward Jews but it presaged the construction of a society based on equal citizenship.
