Causes Of The Jewish Revolution Of 1848

Over the course of history, the Jewish culture has endured many cultural hardships. When Nationalism began to rise in Europe, the treatment of Jews became harsh. Amos Elon describes this transition for Jews in his novel The Pity of it All. “For all their irony and skepticism, the Jews of Germany never ceased in their effort to merge German and Jewish identity...their overriding desire was to be complete Germans.” (Elon, 8). The major concerns in Jewish history throughout the ages have been assimilation and acculturation. Acculturation and assimilation are two very important concepts that describe the cultural effects on both minorities and majorities. While these concepts are very similar, there are slight differences between

The Working class that made up around 80% of society had little or no bargaining power with their employers resulting in the continuation of unfair working hours, bad wages, and unsanitary and hazardous working conditions. The workers could not even fight for their rights in the political system as only the rich were eligible to vote.

Thus, it was believed that conflicting classes existed because individuals developed an appropriate sense of class-consciousness (Buckler 740). This consciousness is very obvious when looking at the mindset of the middle-class owners. They were primarily focused on production and gave little thought to the environment of their workers. As a result, most early factories contained extremely unpleasant work conditions. Mills and factories were dangerously loud, and they were sweltering hot in the summer while poorly heated in the winter. Work days consisted of endlessly long hours and holidays were rarely granted. Furthermore, no laws or unions stood protecting the early urban proletariat workers. Despite these horrid conditions, the proletariat workers were desperate for jobs and were entirely dependant on their employers. Also, because of class-consciousness, they came to accept their positions in society as grueling factory workers. On top of terrible work conditions, the Proletariats’ living conditions were less than satisfactory due to the rapid population increase in urban cities. Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the continent’s population was rural. However, by mid-nineteenth century, half of all Europeans lived in cities and worked in the new industrial factories instead of farms. This transformation of Europe from a rural to urbanized society depressed the living standards of workers to horrendous levels. In doing so, however, it

The middle class consisted of moderately successful merchants, shopkeepers, and accountants. The skilled blue collar workers had little freedom to negotiate and their working conditions deteriorated markedly

In New York, United States a new wave of Jewish refugees is going to create a new American identity among society. To the skepticism of the grand percent of the Jewish community, America was indeed the gateway from dictatorship, prejudice, persecution, and death to Jews. An impressive 85% of Jews have experienced or witnessed anti-Semitic remarks at some point in their lives, according to a poll by the World Zionist Organization’s International Center for Countering Anti-Semitism. During the early 20th century, Jews are going to experience hardships in their daily life that will force them to evacuate or adapt to new rules. Peter Knight expresses in his book that during the nineteenth century American Jews “rarely [experienced]

* Jewish people were getting tired of being oppressed, and decided to rebel against the germans because it was rumored that the germans were going to deport jewish people from the Warsaw ghetto.

Despite the continuation of capitalism, the middle class successfully emerged as the dominating class in our society. As Lewis Corey states, “Workers were becoming capitalists, the capitalists becoming workers.” Industrial capitalism spawned a middle class, molded the exact same way that Marx predicted in his major work.

Throughout the decades and centuries in American history, the Jews have undergone various events and experiences that have affected them positively and negatively. In the article of “The Periodization of American Jewish History”, Jacob Marcus goes to the roots of Jewish foundation. He says that American Jewish history is divided into four periods. The four periods are the Spanish-Portuguese, the German, the East European, and the American periods. The Spanish-Portuguese Jews moved into America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During these times, the Jews did not have full religious and economic rights, and as a result, the Sephardic Jewish community failed to thrive. The situation was like this until 1776, the year that the Declaration of Independence was signed. The Jews received economic opportunities along with fair civil and religious rights. By this time, lots of German and Polish Jews immigrated to America, outnumbering the Sephardic Jews. The German and Polish Jews made their own communities and synagogues, and they became dominant between 1841 and 1920.

The beginning of the 1960’s for American Jewry showed no difference in motivation than the previous decade. The choices made over the next two decades accurately convey a path for the emergence of two types of Jews in America. In a New York Times article written in 1962, Rabbi Rosenblum expresses his concern for Jews during this time. He says, “What we Jews wants is what others desire, just to be let alone to enjoy life liberty, and happiness along with our neighbors.” It marked a point of realization that if Jews uniformly wanted to assimilate without conflict, this could be achieved. The question however still remained whether this could be done while also retaining a Jewish identity. If the choices of the fifties did not offer much foresight into this question, the decisions of the sixties and seventies solidify this concern when “American Jews saw the sixties open with a promise of

Technological innovations replaced people with a specific skill with semiskilled or unskilled factory workers . This gave opportunities to Americas lower class that they didn’t have before. They had a chance to move upward from unskilled to skilled positions. While many of the middle and upper classes didn’t work many hours or do much physical work and his salary might have been upwards of 1600, skilled factory workers would only make about 600 at best and work long hours in difficult conditions. The middle class was a term introduced in the century dictionary in 1889. It reflected the new awareness that the American society had a hierarchy. Professionals were the backbone of the new middle class. Cahiers, clerks, government employees mostly

Despite 2,000 years of continuous residence, Europe’s Jews were rarely given complete citizenship status in their own countries. Their social and religious distinctiveness made them persistent targets for economic, social and personal persecution. The increased participation of the Jews in the economic and social life of 19th and 20th century industrial Europe intensified anti-Semitism. The Nazi policy of racial hatred amplified and manipulated these patterns of persecution, ultimately adding one deadly tenet that all Jews must be eliminated.

A consequence of the financial and social change in the eighteenth century, the Haskalah rose as the development that conveyed the European Enlightenment to the Jewish world. Its supporters, the alleged Maskilim, were dynamic in different fields in reasoning, instruction, culture, financial aspects, governmental issues as well as religion. Change achieved the individual European Jewish people group at different circumstances and in different ways.

Jews in the 19th Century During the 19th the status and position of European Jews changed

In the years just after World War II, Zionism (the desire to rebuild a Jewish national presence in the Promised Land) became a popular Jewish cause all around the world. Many Jews who were not practicing Judaism at all with religion became involved with the establishment of the State of Israel. Even today, many years after the successful founding of the State of Israel, there are Jews whose only real tie to Judaism is their belief in Zionism and their support for the State of Israel. They are joined by many Jews who are members of synagogues and support a modern Jewish religious movement, but who also find their prime identity as Jews in the Zionist cause.

The end of the 19th century brought with it the rise of Arab nationalism and Zionism, which called for the existence of a permanent Jewish State. Herzl’s 1896 manifesto “The Jewish State”, popularized the idea of Isaac’s promised land and influenced the Jewish peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia to proclaim Israel their own. The Jewish people took their first steps