Describes and analysis the process in which Jews, isolated in ghettos, made their way toward mainstream European Life.
"Katz has illuminated with delicacy, calmness and deep insight a revolution in European Jewish life that does at the same time bring the unfamiliar historical experience of modern Jewry to bear on the evolution of modern European history."—Times Literary Supplement
Out of the Ghetto is an account of the developing interrelationship between the Jews and their Gentile environment unique in its breadth and objectivity. He presents the story of Jewish emancipation as a whole, from both Jewish and non-Jewish points of view. If the results of the Jewish emancipation process differed from country to country, the forces effecting the changes were identical—the upheaval of the French Revolution, the loosening of bonds between church and state, and the ideas of the Enlightenment. It was those humanistic ideas which made possible the Jew’s transition from the ghetto to partial inclusion in society at large and which attracted Jewish intellectuals to the “secular knowledge” of languages, mathematics, philosophy, and the wider world beyond their ancient learning.
Jacob Katz was professor of Jewish social and educational history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
