Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

TWO The Rise of Modern Racism(s)
“Emancipation” is the central theme of both black and
Jewish history in the nineteenth century. There were of
course obvious differences between suddenly liberating a
people from chattel servitude and the normally gradual
and piecemeal elimination of the special taxes, residential
restrictions, public stigmatization, and limited communal
autonomy that set Jews apart from Christians in Europe
before the late eighteenth century. But if we define emancipation
inclusively as the process of elevating the civil and
political status of an entire ethnic or racial group from legal
inferiority to equal citizenship, comparisons can be made.
As already suggested, both emancipations gained great impetus
from the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth
century. The white or gentile reformers who were
active in both crusades—the abolitionists of Britain, the
United States, and France, as well as the liberal nationalists
who championed Jewish emancipation in various European
countries—aimed, at least in theory, at the obliteration of
difference through the acculturation and assimilation of the
Other. They tended to have a low opinion of the actual
cultural and moral condition of those whose freedom they
advocated and whose “elevation” they sought. But unlike
true racists they attributed these deficiencies to an oppressive
environment rather than to nature.
Jewish emancipation from the status of social and political
pariahs confined to ghettos took place throughout western
and central Europe between the late eighteenth and late
nineteenth centuries. 43 The process was relatively painless
in England and France, at least until the Dreyfus affair led
to a dramatic spasm of antisemitism in France around the
turn of the century. But in the German-speaking states and
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