A group of distinguished historians makes the first systematic attempt to compare the experiences of French and German Jews in the modern era. The cases of France and Germany have often been depicted as the dominant paradigms for understanding the processes of Jewish emancipation and acculturation in Western and Central Europe. In the French case, emancipation was achieved during the French Revolution, and it remained in place until 1940, when the Vichy regime came to power. In Germany, emancipation was a far more gradual and piecemeal process, and even after it was achieved in 1871, popular...

The present volume is the latest in a distinguished series, published under the auspices of the London Leo Baeck Institute, that addresses the issues of emancipation, assimilation and acculturation. It presents the work of an international group of scholars who approach these topics from a variety of innovative perspectives. The thread running through the diverse contributions, as indicated by the volume's title, is that of normality, clearly a close relation of emancipation and acculturation. Throughout the period from the Enlightenment to the 1930s, it can be argued that German-speaking...

Founded in May 1955 in Jerusalem by German-Jewish intellectuals who had survived the Holocaust - among them Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, Gershom Scholem, and Robert Weltsch - the Leo Baeck Institute of Jews from Germany (LBI) has been engaged in preserving the legacy of German Jewry by collecting material, doing research, and presenting historical narratives. Published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, the present volume is the first to reconstruct the LBI's fascinating history, from its beginnings as a memorial community of surviving German Jews to its present status...