Introduction

The cosmopolitan dimensions of Jews and Judaism become obvious in relation to nationalism. In France, Germany and Britain emancipation and cultural acceptance were offered conditionally: exchange a corporate Jewish identity for a French national identity (or a German, or a British) and assimilate entirely into the Christian public culture. Clermont-Tonnere, a French advocate for Jewish emancipation, could not have stated the issue more clearly: ‘One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation but one must give them everything as individuals’. The whole premise of Christian von Dohm's influential argument of 1781 for emancipation required Jews to undergo a moral transformation in order to become acceptable to the German nation; only after experiencing Bildung and Kultur (education and culture) could the bearded, Asiatic, circumcised strangers with peculiar religious practices become real Germans. Britain's first gesture toward emancipation resulted in a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic hatred as the so-called ‘Jew Bill’ of 1753 that eased naturalization procedures for Jewish immigrants had to be withdrawn after popular protests. That Britain was the least unfriendly European country suggests the extent of the prejudice against Jews and how remote European culture was from realizing the cosmopolitan ideal. The murderous campaign against Jews in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1953 was conducted with the circumlocution ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, a phrase that originated in the second half of nineteenth-century Europe. At first accused of being culturally backward ‘wandering Jews’ cursed and punished by God for killing Jesus and then, after emancipation, blamed for being overly sophisticated cosmopolitans too at ease with modernity, European Jews found their Christian neighbours distressingly ambivalent. British Jews were comparatively fortunate in relation to their continental cousins because in the United Kingdom a murderous anti-Semitic movement never gained strength for three reasons, according to Todd Endelman: the British ruling class was not hostile to Jewish participation in commerce, banking, trade and finance; the British anti-modernists never became powerful and British xenophobia spent itself in oppressing dark-skinned people in the empire rather than scapegoating Jews.