Liberalism and the Jews: an international history

Liberalism was the dominant ideology of the 19th century and has served as one of the principal common elements in Western political culture ever since. This Fellowship will launch an ambitious new research agenda that explores Jewish liberal activism as an international phenomenon for the first time. Equally concerned with liberalism and with modern Jewish history, it will promote cross-fertilisation between these fields.

This research will generate a book, "Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights"; a comparatively framed article; and a workshop exploring the distinctive place of Jewish women in liberal internationalism. These activities complement a Visiting Fellowship program directed by the PI exploring 'Liberalism, Jews, Anti-semitism: the Dialectics of Inclusion c.1780-1950' and culminating in a major international conference. Both the conference and workshop will lead to collaborative publications.

Jews and the Jewish question lay at the heart of many issues that preoccupied liberals: from capitalism and its impact on traditional societies, through religious toleration, civil rights and secularism, to problems of national identity and racial hierarchy in an age of empire, internationalism and globalization. Repeatedly, Jewish businessmen, politicians, journalists, lawyers, society hostesses and social reformers emerged as key figures during moments of liberal ascendancy: from the 1848 revolutions, through 'liberal era' Germany and Austria, to Edwardian England, Giolitti's Italy and the New Deal. Examples include Viennese revolutionary leader Adolf Fischhof; Italian Prime Minister Luigi Luzzatti; Hugo Preuss writer of the Weimar Constitution; international feminist and social reformer, Alice Salomon; and US Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis. Later, Jewish economists, lawyers and philosophers like Ludwig von Mises, Hersch Lauterpacht and Isaiah Berlin, all of whom reached maturity between the wars, helped redefine liberalism in the 20th century. Some strands of this story are familiar, but the overarching importance of this dynamic - over such a long timeframe, in such a wide variety of geographical and political contexts - remains obscured.

Focusing on Jews as liberal actors, not just objects of the liberal imagination, this project breaks new ground in several key respects.

First, the emphasis on Jewish liberal activism undercuts an assumption that lies at the heart of existing scholarship on liberalism, namely that liberalism was a product of Christian Europe. It therefore promises to illuminate 'presentist' debates about the nature of liberal universalism and, by extension, the origins of human rights. How does our view of Western liberalism as a political tradition change, once we appreciate how far it was constructed from the margins?

Second, this project addresses the problem of Jewish integration in European and American political life from a new angle. The historiography of modern Jewish politics has engaged primarily with socialism and zionism. Even historians interested in Jewish liberal activism have approached this largely from a Jewish-rights perspective. This optic is too limited to address the political careers of leading liberal politicians, whose impact and agendas were not defined by their Judaism, although it was rarely incidental to them. Such figures may be the subject of individual biographies, but the connections and parallels between them remain unexplored, as do the broader liberal and Jewish networks that underpinned their activity.

Third, the project brings new work on liberalism that reflects the global and imperial turns into conversation with older work on liberalism and the Jews, rooted in local and national contexts. Sitting at the interface between the historiography of Western liberalism and modern Jewish history, it promises to make a transformative impact on both fields.

This Fellowship aims to make a major contribution to well-established historical debates and the principal outcomes of this research are therefore primarily aimed at the academic community. But this research also strikes at the heart of key questions about Jewish history and the nature of Western liberalism that are highly relevant to contemporary debates about the balance between particular identities and 'universal' values in Western liberal democracies, about secularism, and about the place of Jews in European society past and present. In order to highlight the relevance of this research to a broader public, I shall engage with a range of audiences at a number of different levels, and from a variety of angles.

1. This research has important implications for current debates about civil and religious liberty both in Britain and more generally. I will build on my track-record of producing and publicising academically rigorous work that is accessible to the general public, and secure a contract with an academic publisher with a 'trade' presence. Harvard University Press, which published my prize-winning biography of Sir Moses Montefiore as a cross-over title of this kind, has expressed an interest in publishing my next book as well. Publishing with Harvard, Oxford or a publisher of similar standing will help me secure high-profile review coverage for the book. This will make it easier to disseminate my ideas and explore their relevance to our contemporary world for a broader public, for instance through one or two strategically placed newspaper articles highlighting the key role religious and ethnic minorities have played in universalising Western liberalism from within. Podcasts of the final workshop, and a 'key-note podcast' giving the big picture will be made available to the general public.

2. This research will make an important contribution to Jewish cultural life both in Britain today and internationally. Both my book and the questions it asks are likely to be of particular interest to an educated public already interested in and engaged by the Jewish past and, more specifically, to members of the Jewish community. I will use existing contacts in Britain and the U.S. to engage this more specific demographic through public lectures, adult education activities, and newspaper articles designed to entertain, to inform and to disseminate the underlying themes of this research.

3. This project, which considers Jewish liberal activism as an international phenomenon, resonates differently in different national contexts. In Britain, it can help us to understand the role of immigrant Jews from Ferdinand de Rothschild M.P. to the pre-eminent international lawyer Herscht Lauterpacht in forging connections between British liberal culture broadly conceived and its continental and trans-Atlantic counterparts. This research can therefore be a prism through which we reimagine our national past in less parochial and more cosmopolitan ways, with obvious relevance for pressing contemporary debates about immigration and the relationship between Britain and Europe. There is the potential here for a really significant impact through knowledge exchange with the heritage sector, in collaboration with institutions such as the National Trust property Waddesdon Manor or the Jewish Museum in London, and I am actively exploring these possibilities.