A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939

In an ambitious and comprehensive text, Vital (The Future of the Jews, etc.) tells the history of European Jewry from 1789, the year France became the first European nation to grant full citizenship to its Jews, to 1939, when Hitler sought brutally to answer the still unresolved question of how Jews were to live in Europe. Vital details all the upheavals experienced by Europe's different Jewish communities: the promises and perils of assimilation; the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, during which the previously insular Jewish world opened itself to the influence of the larger European culture; the mass emigration of Eastern European Jews to Western Europe and the United States; the formation of the Zionist movement. He rightly devotes much space to how Jews were attracted to radical ideologies, particularly socialism and Zionism, and to how Jewish leaders interacted with European decision makers. While Vital, who worked in the Israeli government before pursuing a distinguished academic career, is sympathetic toward his subjects, he doesn't shrink from unflattering portrayals--such as his description of the embarrassed snobbery that cosmopolitan French, German and British Jews displayed toward Eastern European Jewish immigrants. With barely restrained anger, he details how an emerging Jewish leadership was unable to combat growing anti-Semitism in the 1930s: Zionist leaders, he writes, ""formed a wasting asset in German Jewry's hour of greatest need."" This is a huge book, and Vital's prose is not likely to make a reader's passage through it any easier. Yet it is a distinguished work of history, notable for its determination to show how both Jews and non-Jews coped with the many issues that arose as a previously isolated people strove to join--or, in some communities, to remain separate from--the emerging continental society of Europe. Photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)