ABSTRACT
The dramatic religious and political upheavals that swept through Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries forever changed this part of the world. It also saw a major exodus of Jews from Western Europe to the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The Enlightenment began with a revolution in scientific thought in the late seventeenth century. The growing popularity of Jewish religious studies among Christian theologians helped change intellectual attitudes towards the Jews in the eighteenth century. The upheavals that swept France between 1789 and 1815 forever changed the status of Jews throughout Europe. Napoleon I, who did not like Jews, was driven partly by complaints from Alsatian farmers who had borrowed vast sums from Jewish moneylenders to purchase estates from aristocrats who had fled the country. By the late nineteenth century, racial anti-Semitism was widespread throughout Europe. But it was most pronounced in Germany, Austria, France, and Russia.
