Jewish Identity and Civilizing Processes

Approaches the question of why anti-Jewish feeling has persisted for so long in Europe and has had such devastating effects in the heart of Western modernity by using the insights of Norbert Elias, the eminent sociologist who lived through the Weimar Republic, escaped to Britain when Hitler came to power, and died in 1990 at the age 93. Traces the history of European Jewry from the role of Jews in the developing commercial arrangements of the early Middle Ages, through to their isolation in ghettoes and their emancipation into the modern world, and the shock of a new and virulent anti-Semitism in "civilized Europe." Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.