Jewish Citizenship and the State in the Modern Era

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Modern Jewish political history abounds with the notion of citizenship. Scholars of the Jewish diaspora routinely ask how citizenship was given to Jews, how it was taken by states and empires, and how Jews organized politically on behalf of their own equal citizenship rights. Often through the framework of Jewish emancipation, these historians have successfully argued that the process in which Jews gained and lost rights marks a critical analytic for understanding the development of the modern diaspora. Furthermore, as Maurice Samuels and others have shown, state bodies across the modern world had vested interests in the citizenship statuses of their Jewish populations.

Much of this scholarship, however, has restricted itself to a limited definition of citizenship. Jewish political historians largely consider citizenship to be a narrow political right, where Jewish emancipation marks the endpoint of citizenship struggles. As a result, these scholars have written off the process in which Jews in the modern era continued to renegotiate their citizenship statuses, even in supposedly “post-emancipation” societies. In the United States, for example, where Jews were given full federal rights in 1790, Jewish political historiography remains critically underdeveloped. Likewise, European Jewish scholars often locate the fulfillment of Jewish citizenship in years like 1871 or 1917, dismissing the ongoing politics by German or Russian Jewry on behalf of their continued political, legal, and social rights.

Building off the work of modern legal theorists like Linda Bosniak, whose work demonstrates the “pliable” and capacious nature of citizenship, this panel asks how Jewish citizenship was constantly being remade and redefined in the modern era. Taking a transnational approach, it argues that Jews continued to renegotiate their citizenship statuses in modern societies undergoing political change. On both sides of the Atlantic—and often in dialogue with their counterparts on either side—Jews debated and politicized on behalf of equal citizenship rights, and continued to do so as governments and their Jewish constituents evolved.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Politics

Chair

• Jessica Marglin, University of Southern California

Individual Presentations

• Lawyers and Emancipation Politics - David J. Sorkin, Yale University

• Slavery, War, and the American Jewish Citizenship Reformer - Jacob Morrow-Spitzer, Yale University

• The Jewish Comparison in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Citizenship - Lila Berman, New York University

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 09