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How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance
Simon & Schuster
November 2009
On Sale: November 3, 2009
432 pages ISBN: 1416547967 EAN: 9781416547969 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
For almost 500 years the Jews of Europe were kept apart,
confined to ghettos or tiny villages in the countryside.
Then, in one extraordinary moment in the French Revolution,
the Jews of France were emancipated. Soon the ghetto gates
were opened all over Europe. The era of Emancipation had
begun. What happened next would change the course of
history.
Emancipation tells the story of how this isolated minority
emerged from the ghetto and against terrible odds very
quickly established themselves as shapers of history, as
writers, revolutionaries, social thinkers, and artists.
Their struggle to create a place for themselves in Western
European life led to revolutions and nothing less than a
second renaissance in Western culture. The book spans the era from the French Revolution to the
beginning of the twentieth century. The story is told
through the lives of the people who lived through this
momentous change. Some are well-known: Marx, Freud, Mahler,
Proust, and Einstein; many more have been forgotten.
Michael Goldfarb brings them all to life. This is an epic story, and Goldfarb tells it with the skill
and eye for detail of a novelist. He brings the empathy and
understanding that has marked his two decades as a reporter
in public radio to making the characters come alive. It is
a tale full of hope, struggle, triumph, and, waiting at the
end, a great tragedy. This is a book that will have meaning for anyone interested
in the struggle of immigrants and minorities to succeed. We
live in a world where vast numbers are on the move, where
religions and races are grinding against each other in new
combinations; Emancipation is a book of history for our
time.
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