“Jewish emancipation”—the term itself started to come into common use after the achievement of the Catholic emancipation in England in 1828—is a weighted phrase. Like the corresponding Roman legal concept, it connotes the release of Jews from previous bondage into a state of freedom. As such it has represented a major stage in the struggle of liberal forces for the attainment of equality of rights for all men and was the dominant factor in the political and legal evolution of modern Jewry. From that standpoint modern Jewish history has often been equated with the progress of legal equality. In fact, most historians have dated its beginning with the emancipatory legislation of the French Revolution, that is, with the proclamation by the French National Assembly in January, 1790, of the equality of rights of Sephardic (Spanish-Portuguese) Jews and of the Ashkenazic (German-Polish) Jews in September, 1791. So widely accepted was this periodicization that it was considered an expression of American nationalism when, some three decades ago, two American Jewish historians, Max L. Margolis and Alexander Marx, pushed back the inception of that period a few years to the era of the American Revolution.