Jacob & Esau
Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire

Accommodates both the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with traditional Jews and their culture.

Malachi Haim Hacohen (Author)

9781316510377, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 January 2019

752 pages, 10 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 3.8 cm, 1.32 kg

'A short review can hardly begin even to gesture towards this magisterial work's sheer breadth and depth and intellectual vigour. Readers must discover it for themselves.' Walter Moberly, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

Jacob and Esau is a profound new account of two millennia of Jewish European history that, for the first time, integrates the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with that of traditional Jews and Jewish culture. Malachi Haim Hacohen uses the biblical story of the rival twins, Jacob and Esau, and its subsequent retelling by Christians and Jews throughout the ages as a lens through which to illuminate changing Jewish-Christian relations and the opening and closing of opportunities for Jewish life in Europe. Jacob and Esau tells a new history of a people accustomed for over two-and-a-half millennia to forming relationships, real and imagined, with successive empires but eagerly adapting, in modernity, to the nation-state, and experimenting with both assimilation and Jewish nationalism. In rewriting this history via Jacob and Esau, the book charts two divergent but intersecting Jewish histories that together represent the plurality of Jewish European cultures.

List of figures
Acknowledgments
A note on transliteration from Hebrew to English
Introduction: Jewish European history
1. Writing Jewish European history
2. Rabbinic Jacob and Esau, Pagan Rome, and the Christian Empire
3. Esau, Ishmael, and Christian Europe: Medieval Edom
4. Waning Edom? Early Modern Christian-Jewish Hybridities
5. Jacob and Esau and Jewish emancipation, I: 1789–1839
6. Jacob and Esau and Jewish emancipation, II: 1840–1878
7. The Austrian Jewish Intelligentsia between empire and nation, 1879–1918
8. Imperial peoples in an ethnonational age? Jews and other Austrians in the First Republic, 1918–1938
9. Jacob the Jew: Antisemitism and the end of emancipation, 1879–1935
10. Esau the Goy: Jewish and German ethnic myths, 1891–1945
11. Typology and the Holocaust: Erich Auerbach and Judeo-Christian Europe
12. Postwar Europe: Austria, the Congress for cultural freedom, and the internationalization of European culture
13. A post-Holocaust breakthrough? Jacob and Esau today
Epilogue: the end of postwar exceptionalism.

Subject Areas: Judaism [HRJ], European history [HBJD]