Geschichte der Juden im östlichen Europa 1772–1881

Israel Bartal's book examines the transformation of East European Jewry between 1772 and 1881 and discovers the roots of Jewish modernity. 

In the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of Jews in the world lived in the area between the Baltic and the Black Sea. With late absolutism, an era of profound transformation commenced. It led to the dissolution of traditional Jewish autonomy and forced integration into the surrounding non-Jewish environment, coupled with the formation of a national Jewish sense of identity. Israel Bartal, Professor for Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, investigates the history of the East European Jewries from the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century down to the pogroms in the eighteen eighties in the czarist Russian Empire. The book presents the historical narrative of a large ethnic minority, distinctive by dint of its culture and social institutions, and challenged to deal with centralized state power. The study offers a key to understanding that point of rupture in the complex transition from Jewish pre-modernity to a modernity that ultimately remained incomplete.