The study of Jewish emancipation has long dominated modern Jewish historio - graphy. In The Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 1780‒1870 Polish historian Artur Eisenbach provides a masterful account of this process in the lands of par - titioned Poland. The book is a work of grand synthesis, which securely places the situation of the Jews in Poland in the context of pan-European developments in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Eisenbach employs a classic Marxist approach to explain the course of Jewish emancipation in Poland. He argues that emancipation, or the removal of traditional restrictions, and granting the Jews equal civil and political rights, can only take place within the context of the transformation of society from feudal to ‘modern’. Thus, emancipation can only occur when the serfs are free, the nobility loses its privilege, and the bourgeoisie becomes strong enough to forge a liberal ideology and demand hegemony in society. Unfortunately, social, economic, and political realities in Poland precluded emancipation until the 1860s. Eisenbach laments the fact that anti-Jewish restrictions prevented the integration of the Jewish and Christian bourgeoisie in Poland. Since Jews were such a numerically significant part of the urban economy, the absence of such integration meant that the Polish bourgeoisie remained small, traditional, and ineffective. Only with the end of feudal privilege and the beginning of a modern, capitalist society in the late 1860s could the Jews in Poland be emancipated.

In some ways it is utterly refreshing and not at all surprising to see such commitment to the Marxist paradigm. After all, the Marxist approach does have much to recommend it. Jewish emancipation did result in large measure from the transformations of society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the Marxist approach in the pure form in which it is presented here is overly simplistic and too deterministic, and ignores other factors that contributed to the emancipation of the Jews in Europe.

Eisenbach presents emancipation as resulting only from the dismantling of a society based on privileged estates. He regards the opposition of the Polish nobility to Jewish emancipation as inevitable, given the desire of the nobles to maintain hegemony. In other countries, however, the nobility accepted Jewish emancipation while still retaining its privileges.