Liberalism and the Jews: an international history

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Liberalism was the dominant ideology of the 19th century and has served as one of the principal common elements in Western political culture ever since. This Fellowship will launch an ambitious new research agenda that explores Jewish liberal activism as an international phenomenon for the first time. Equally concerned with liberalism and with modern Jewish history, it will promote cross-fertilisation between these fields.This research will generate a book, "Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights"; a comparatively framed article; and a workshop exploring the distinctive place of Jewish women in liberal internationalism. These activities complement a Visiting Fellowship program directed by the PI exploring 'Liberalism, Jews, Anti-semitism: the Dialectics of Inclusion c.1780-1950' and culminating in a major international conference. Both the conference and workshop will lead to collaborative publications. Jews and the Jewish question lay at the heart of many issues that preoccupied liberals: from capitalism and its impact on traditional societies, through religious toleration, civil rights and secularism, to problems of national identity and racial hierarchy in an age of empire, internationalism and globalization. Repeatedly, Jewish businessmen, politicians, journalists, lawyers, society hostesses and social reformers emerged as key figures during moments of liberal ascendancy: from the 1848 revolutions, through 'liberal era' Germany and Austria, to Edwardian England, Giolitti's Italy and the New Deal. Examples include Viennese revolutionary leader Adolf Fischhof; Italian Prime Minister Luigi Luzzatti; Hugo Preuss writer of the Weimar Constitution; international feminist and social reformer, Alice Salomon; and US Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis. Later, Jewish economists, lawyers and philosophers like Ludwig von Mises, Hersch Lauterpacht and Isaiah Berlin, all of whom reached maturity between the wars, helped redefine liberalism in the 20th century. Some strands of this story are familiar, but the overarching importance of this dynamic - over such a long timeframe, in such a wide variety of geographical and political contexts - remains obscured. Focusing on Jews as liberal actors, not just objects of the liberal imagination, this project breaks new ground in several key respects.First, the emphasis on Jewish liberal activism undercuts an assumption that lies at the heart of existing scholarship on liberalism, namely that liberalism was a product of Christian Europe. It therefore promises to illuminate 'presentist' debates about the nature of liberal universalism and, by extension, the origins of human rights. How does our view of Western liberalism as a political tradition change, once we appreciate how far it was constructed from the margins?Second, this project addresses the problem of Jewish integration in European and American political life from a new angle. The historiography of modern Jewish politics has engaged primarily with socialism and zionism. Even historians interested in Jewish liberal activism have approached this largely from a Jewish-rights perspective. This optic is too limited to address the political careers of leading liberal politicians, whose impact and agendas were not defined by their Judaism, although it was rarely incidental to them. Such figures may be the subject of individual biographies, but the connections and parallels between them remain unexplored, as do the broader liberal and Jewish networks that underpinned their activity. Third, the project brings new work on liberalism that reflects the global and imperial turns into conversation with older work on liberalism and the Jews, rooted in local and national contexts. Sitting at the interface between the historiography of Western liberalism and modern Jewish history, it promises to make a transformative impact on both fields.