Emancipation and Poverty
Subtitle: The Ashkenazi Jews of Amsterdam, 1796-1850 (St. Antony's Series)
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: February 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780312227760
Subjects: History Of Jews; History; History - General History; History: World; Judaism - History; Western Europe - Benelux; Europe - Scandinavia; General; Jewish - General; 19th century; Amsterdam; Emancipation; Jews; Legal status, laws, etc.; Netherlands
Description: "During the first half of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam contained one of the largest Jewish communities of Western Europe: between 22,000 and 25,000 Ashkenazi Jews made up 10 percent of Amsterdam's total population. The fact that two-thirds of these Jews were poor separates the history of the Dutch Jews from that of the other European Jewish communities. This book is the first comprehensive study examining the impact of emancipation on the lives of Amsterdam's Jews.

It demonstrates that emancipation failed to provide this Jewish community with similar rights and opportunities as non-Jews.

It also uncovers some relatively unknown territory regarding Dutch-Jewish history: the ambiguities and limits of establishing a Dutch-Jewish community around 1600, the legal and social disabilities which ensued as a result of the influx of impoverished Ashkenazim during the seventeenth century, and details of the lives of the Jewish poor living in nineteenth-century Amsterdam."--BOOK JACKET.