Emancipation, assimilation and Jewish identity - a podcast by BBC World Service

For 500 years the Jews of Europe were kept apart, legally segregated in ghettos. Then at the dawn of the 19th Century Jews were emancipated and overnight what it meant to be a Jew in the world changed. Michael Goldfarb looks at how this historic event changed Jewish identity and the world in which Jews lived.

In interviews with prominent members of his community in three different countries - a Rabbi, a musician and educator, and an organiser for eastern Europe’s rebuilding Jewish communities, he explores the rapid changes of identity in a group of people who lived an essentially unchanged existence for more than half a millennium.

Emancipation changed the practice of Judaism and brought new ideas to the arts. It created controversy within the Jewish community about how far one should assimilate, and hatred outside the Jewish community among those who did not want Jews to assimilate at all. This reaction would create an ideology - anti-Semitism, which would ultimately lead to the near annihilation of Europe’s Jews.

(Photo: Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion. Creddit: Bernard Bisson/Sygma/Getty Images)

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