Jews and Modernity: Beyond the Nation

The conference "Jews and Modernity: Beyond the Nation" approaches the history of the Jews beyond the nation-state from a micro and a macro perspective. The individual papers will highlight different aspects of the complex relationships between transnational and local Jewish identities. The focus will be on Europe and North America after 1750.

Is modern Jewish history simply the sum of different national histories? How do we assess and balance modern Jewish history’s European, transatlantic, and transnational dimensions? Most scholarship in the field of modern Jewish history treats Jewish life primarily within the sphere of the nation-state. No doubt, the nation-state did play a key role in the processes that transformed Jewish life since the late 18th century: it was a trailblazer of Jewish emancipation, defined expanding national cultures and provided the delimiting framework for education and careers. Jews, in turn, identified strongly with the nation-state, yet clearly Jewish history transcended the national paradigm. Thus this conference will focus on mutual relationships between local, regional and transnational Jewish identities in the modern world.

The importance of the transnationalJewish Diaspora has been widely acknowledged. Already in antiquity Jews built highly developed and far-reaching networks for the exchange of economic and cultural goods. And indeed, for the period up to the mid-18th century Jewish history has been treated largely within an international context. However, most historians for the period after 1750 keep within the confines of the nation-state, neglecting (with a few exceptions) transnational Jewish relationships. Nor have scholars of the Jews in late modernity thought through the relationship between the Jews’ position within early modern internationality and their new role in the nascent nation-state. How, this conference will explore, did Jewish networks and spheres of communication reposition themselves during the transformation from early to late modernity?

It is ironic that the historiography of a diverse and far-reaching Diaspora still moves primarily within the paradigm of the nation-state, although the latter’s salience has been increasingly questioned. Scholars in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies increasingly deal with transnational issues. Research on supra-national and multiethnic empires has simultaneously widened and sharpened the focus of global history as a newly emerging field.

The mutual exchange between colonies and the metropole, intra-colonial relationships and the emergence of an international cultural sphere cannot be treated within the confines of the nation-state. The history of the Jews offers many case studies for this range of themes: Jews played an important role in opening up the Atlantic world, Jewish trading networks connected the Mediterranean with the Western hemisphere and the Muslim world. International Jewish organizations in the fields of education and philanthropy like the Alliance Israélite Universelle, were precursors of today’s global NGO's. The history of Jewish immigration to North America from Central and eastern Europe illustrate impressively the importance and the persistence of close transnational links between Jews in the New and Old worlds.

A second focus of the conference, which is closely related to the transnational theme, aims in the opposite direction, towards the exploration of Jewish local and regional identities. The construction and the longue duréeof such identities could support the project of the nation-state but also weaken it. It is no coincidence that historians of the fissiparous German lands have stressed the importance of local and regional difference. But even for France, the centralized modern nation-state par excellence, influential scholarly works have shifted the perspective to the regional level. Accordingly, this conference intends to follow the "regional turn" in recent historiography: By leaving the ghetto, Jews became not only Germans or Americans, French or English, but also Frankfurters, Chicagoans, Parisians and Mancunians. An indication of the importance of Jewish local identities in the 19th and 20th centuries are the many local histories of Jewish communities, especially in the German-speaking parts of Central Europe and in the United States. Strong local affiliations of Jews were not one-sided love affairs. Jews often acted as respected local insiders, even when they had to defend themselves against widespread anti-Semitic stereotypes as outsiders on the national level.