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...