Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance

French Jews gained full citizenship during the Revolution, and as Napoleon conquered territories across Europe, ghetto gates were thrown open and Jewish emancipation became an unstoppable force, writes NPR correspondent Goldfarb. Emancipation set off an explosion of Jewish achievement, and Jews played an increasingly important if still conflicted role in Europe. For instance, Heinrich Heine, who converted to Christianity in 1825 to further a law career, worked out his Jewish identity crisis through poems that mirrored the national identity crisis of his young German contemporaries. When Damascus Jews were tortured during an 1840 blood libel, the Rothschilds successfully interceded, involving the British Parliament and forcing a French prime minister to resign. The forced baptism and abduction of the Bolognese Jewish child Edgardo Mortara helped catalyze the movement for Italian unity, while the Dreyfus affair ultimately led to the creation of Israel. Goldfarb's history of European Jewish persecution and assimilation (after Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace ) is lively and perceptive, but also becomes unfocused and uneven, biting off more than it can chew as he tries to fathom the meaning of emancipation, its causes and its price. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.)