Producing the "Jewish problem": othering the Jews and homogenizing Europe

Expulsions and massacres of Jews bookend modernity. Climaxing, but not ending, with the great expulsion of Sephardi Jews from Spain in 1492, and from the Spanish possessions of Sardinia and Sicily by January 1493, the Jews were almost expunged from what we think of as Western Europe by the middle of the sixteenth century. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes, the expulsion from Spain was “emblematic, the quintessential symbol of a process through which, step by step, the Jewish presence was virtually eliminated from Western Europe and the global locus of Jewish life shifted from West to East.”1 However, by the end of the sixteenth century Jews were being allowed back, and sometimes invited back, into the areas from which they had been expelled—now, though, under quite different circumstances. One of the most important of these, as we shall see, was the gradual formation of the state system, the development of the modern state from its origins in what is now called the Absolutist state. From this time on Jews lived more or less uncomfortably in Western Europe, with ongoing questions about allegiance and assimilation, but preponderantly on the edges of Europe, in Eastern Europe, where they were more prone to pogroms, until the Holocaust.