When did modem Jewish history begin? The early architects of Jewish historiography, and their successors, suggested the second half of the eighteenth century as the turning point which ended the ‘Jewish Middle Ages’. That period, marked by the French Revolution on the one hand, and by the work of Moses Mendelssohn on the other, is pictured as ushering in a new era involving fundamental changes in Jewish culture and political status. On this convention rests the common claim that, ‘the period known as “early modem” in Western Europe was, for most Jews, a continuation of the Middle Ages’. In the book under review, Professor Jonathan Israel of the University of London attempts to show that the early modem period was an essentially new phase in Jewish history, and to draw a firm dividing-line between the medieval and early modem epochs. The beginning of the early modem era is to be dated in 1570 and the period came to an end in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

The author's central claim is based on a clearly expressed criterion for the evaluation of the Jewish historical experience, namely, the ‘significance’ or the ‘impact’ of the Jews on the economy and culture of Europe. On this basis he identifies a profound change beginning around 1570 and reaching a ‘high point’ in the period between 1650 and 1713. It was in the second half of the seventeenth century that Jews had the most profound and pervasive significance ever in European history. This heyday of jewish influence came to an end during the eighteenth century which the author depicts as a period of decline.

In the first chapter, entitled ‘Exodus from the West’, it is stressed that the Iberian expulsions of the late fifteenth century (Spain 1492, Portugal 1497, Navarre 1498) were part of a broader European trend which saw the banishment of numerous Central European Jewish communities during the same decade (Geneva 1490, Mecklenburg and Pomerania 1492, Halle and Magdeburg 1493, etc.; the 1495 expulsion from Lithuania is not mentioned). A further wave of expulsions, during the mid-sixteenth century, was more ‘ideological’ and systematic because of the tensions generated by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. This second phase came to an end in 1570.