The first popular history of the Emancipation of Europe's Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--a transformation that was startling to those who lived through it and continues to affect the world today.

Freed from their ghettos, Jews ushered in a second renaissance. Within a century Marx, Freud, and Einstein created revolutions in politics, human science, and physics that continue to shape our world. Proust, Schoenberg, Mahler, and Kafka redefined artistic expression.

Emancipation reformed the practice of Judaism, encouraged some to imagine a modern nation of their own, and...