THE MIDDLE of the eighteenth century was a major turning point in the history of the Jews in Europe. Under the influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, many rulers now began to initiate attempts, carried still further by their constitutional successors in the nineteenth century, to transform the Jews from members of a religious and cultural community into ‘useful’ subjects, or, where a civil society had been established, into citizens. This attempt to change the legal, social, and economic status of the Jews was part of a wider process affecting the whole of society that Karl Polanyi has described as ‘the Great Transformation’. There were two aspects to this transformation: economic and political. We now see the industrial revolution as the culmination of a much longer process that should probably be dated back to the effects of European overseas expansion from the fifteenth century. The end result of this revolution was urbanization, the development of industry, the increasing importance of the bourgeoisie, and the displacement of the landed aristocracy as the dominant economic and political stratum.

The political transformation was accomplished in two stages. The first was the end of the idea of monarchy by ‘divine right’ and the philosophical discrediting of the religious character of the state, leading to the idea of religious toleration. It was John Locke, one of the most persuasive advocates of religious indifference, who argued that a Christian state was a contradiction in terms and that the government should be religiously neutral, except where a religion had harmful consequences for society. Under these conditions, a new form of political legitimacy was needed and emerged in the form of enlightened autocracy. Yet, though the political philosophy of the Enlightenment stressed the value of religious toleration and called for the abolition of discrimination against minority religions, it was also resolutely hostile to all forms of particularism, including Jewish autonomous structures, which it regarded as feudal relics.

The second stage in the political transformation saw the consolidation of representative government, that is of governments that were dependent on the support of the people, however defined, a process that resulted ultimately in the triumph of representative democracy based on universal suffrage.