Jacob & Esau offers a new Jewish European history transcending the cosmopolitan and nationalist antipodes of traditional historiography. By focusing on cosmopolitan émigrés, Jewish European history has thus far made the Jews emblematic of Europe but excluded traditional Jewish culture, which remains the provenance of Jewish Studies. Cosmopolitans, like Habermas, have idolized the Zionist Scholem and his Kabbalah scholarship, but the premises of cosmopolitan and nationalist histories alike are equally incompatible with Jewish Europeanness. Neither recognizes traditional Jews as Europeans or acknowledges Jewish pluralism: Jews are either cosmopolitan or Zionist. European space must be opened for traditional Jews. In this book, rabbis and secular intellectuals, Jewish and non-Jewish, appear, side by side, as Europeans inhabiting a shared intellectual universe, addressing, from divergent perspectives, European problems. Both European historians and Jewish Studies scholars encounter in this book Jewish cultures that they normally find inaccessible but may now become a shared research field. Over the last century, Heine, Marx and Freud became European legends. Historians can now help “Europeanize” the rabbis and set an example for European integration that welcomes cultural pluralism.