In this special to stltoday.com, Repps Hudson reviews “Emancipation” by Michael Goldfarb. Goldfarb will be in St. Louis Wednesday.

Michael Goldfarb

When • 1 p.m. Wednesday

Where • St. Louis Jewish Book Festival, 2 Millstone Campus Drive

How much • $12 or included in festival series ticket

More info • 314-442-3152; stljewishbookfestival.org

By Repps Hudson/Special to the Post-Dispatch

‘Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance’

By Michael Goldfarb

Published by Simon & Schuster, 408 pages, $30

In “Emancipation,” Michael Goldfarb set out to answer two questions: First, why was there an explosion of intellectual and cultural achievement in Europe as Jews were liberated from laws that had kept them in ghettos? And second, what price did they pay?

Once liberated from their confined quarters in France, Germany, Poland, Italy and elsewhere, Jews spread the revolutionary idea of individual freedom through their writings, speeches and salons.

But one price, the former NPR correspondent wryly notes, was the wrath of the Nazis. In 1933, the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, foreshadowing the Holocaust, told the German people that “the year 1789 is being expunged from history.”

The reference is to the beginning of the French Revolution, when some European Jews were first assured of their right to associate freely, own property and all of the other “rights of man.”

A few years later, the French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, sought to turn France into the freest country in Europe, in part to attract Jews who would strengthen the empire with their ideas, art and commercial skills.

Centuries of being kept apart from the larger society had reinforced Jewish learning and law, including study of the Torah and the Talmud, a most demanding intellectual regime for most young men. Many accepted this order. But others fought back and, when emancipation spread through more of Europe in the 19th century, they were brimming with energy to explore the intellectual life of cities like Berlin, Paris and Vienna.

Jews from Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud created their own unique way of understanding the world. Thus the system of Franz Kafka, who was psychologically tortured by an unreasonable father, “was to take the confusion and uncertainty and create a world of nightmarish anxiety that was not specifically Jewish,” Goldfarb says. “Anyone who took the time to read his stories, regardless of their background, could understand what he was saying.

“In Kafka’s world, ordinary men wake up after a bad night’s sleep having turned into bugs. They are condemned to death for crimes they had no idea they committed.”

Is there a better metaphor for modern life?

My sole complaint with Goldfarb’s masterful effort is that he doesn’t trace the origins of the European anti-Semitism that kept Jews bottled up in isolated misery for centuries. Many readers may understand that it goes back to the crucifixion of Jesus by “Christ killers.” What they may not realize is the role religion and authority played in maintaining this repressive arrangement.