The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture

The scope of research devoted to the entrance of European Jews into the modern civic realm has expanded steadily in the last two decades. Historians have turned their attention to communities formerly considered only marginally important because of their small size, their location at the periphery of Europe's most significant political and cultural developments, or their failure to correspond to the models of emancipation and enlightenment derived from the historical experience of French and German Jews. This new direction in Jewish historical writing has generated an ever-increasing body of social–historical data and is marked by a growing emphasis on regional factors, particularly urban–rural differences, and a new appreciation for class and gender as categories of analysis. The result—a more highly nuanced picture of modernization—has firmly discredited the dominant Germanocentric perspective favored by previous generations of historians. Now, thanks to the publication of Lois Dubin's outstanding book, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste, our understanding of the forces that shaped modern Jewish society and culture has been advanced appreciably. Dubin has succeeded in producing a balanced reassessment of much of the conventional thinking about periodization, modernization, and the role of Haskalah and Emancipation.