Jacob & Esau Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire

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.

Malachi Haim Hacohen is Professor and Bass Fellow at Duke University, North Carolina. He serves as the Director of the Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. His book Karl Popper – The Formative Years, 1902–1945 (Cambridge, 2000) won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association and Austria's Victor Adler State Prize.