Colonialism and the Jews (The Modern Jewish Experience) Highlight

Stoler’s description of French and Dutch policies and attitudes toward their colonial subjects can be easily mapped onto attitudes and policies toward Jews in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Emancipation was granted on a quid pro quo basis. Cultural and economic regeneration—that is, mastery of the host society’s language, the adoption of reigning cultural mores, and a movement from the traditional practice of peddling to livelihoods in crafts and agriculture—were considered either preconditions for citizenship (as in the German states) or immediate and necessary outcomes of the attainment of citizenship (as in France). For Jews in post-Napoleonic Prussian Poland, as for Indo-Europeans in colonial southeast Asia, citizenship was granted on a case-by-case basis, the result of a rigorous yet arbitrary examination procedure. Proposals made in the late nineteenth century by colonial officials to establish agricultural colonies for the regeneration of the Indo-European poor had their parallel in the era of enlightened absolutism, when reformist bureaucrats in Prussia, Austria, and Russia championed, and at times established, colonies to train Jews in productive labor.