To the Editor:

Jacob Katz’s essay, “Emancipation and Jewish Studies” [April], repeatedly associates the process of emancipation with the legal status of the Jewish people. Whether it is the recognition of “the right of Jewish residency” or “the granting of political and social equality,” Jewish emancipation is associated with a legal recognition by a government of its Jewish constituency.

In actual fact, emancipation gained ground more by precedents set by life than by legal enactments. Very often Jews enjoyed most rights of citizenship in 18th-century Western Europe and in the British crown colonies without their being promulgated in specific laws. . . . Far more important than the corrective legislation that was passed in 1857 was the right granted to English Jews to be eligible for such offices as Privy Councillor, Secretary of State, Keeper of the Seal, and even Prime Minister (if there had been no concomitant obligation for the Prime-Minister-elect to hold a seat in Parliament), all the while that the Parliamentary disability of English Jewry was being discussed.

Only at the end of his essay does Mr. Katz diverge from the path of stressing the legal precedents associated with Jewish emancipation. In its stead there is a stress on the social acceptance that underlies the legal precedent. Indeed, while the number of departments of Jewish studies that have recently been established in American universities is impressive, the public opinion that has brought this phenomenon into being may be even more important. If the reasons cloister around the need “to accommodate the sensibilities of the local Jewish communities” and not to delve more deeply into the science of Judaism, then the rejoicing over the growth of Jewish-studies departments needs to be subdued. This latter approach of Mr. Katz could have been applied to his accounting of the early history of emancipation. Such an approach would have yielded a more accurate depiction of the development of Jewish emancipation. . . .

(Rabbi) Herbert A. Yoskowitz
Beth El Congregation
Baltimore, Maryland

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Jacob Katz writes:

Herbert A. Yoskowitz takes my article as an opportunity to enlarge upon the many-sided problems of Jewish emancipation, while I limited myself to a very specific point. I wished to reexamine the thesis of Zunz that formal, political emancipation would not guarantee equality unless it was followed up by the acceptance of Judaism as a worthwhile subject of study in the academic world, and I found this thesis confirmed in the light of the historical experience of a century and a half. Thus my article deals with what happened after formal emancipation had been achieved, and I took no stand on the controversial issue of where, when, and through what causes emancipation had been brought about or what the relative importance of the factors involved had been. These are difficult subjects on which I have expressed my view elsewhere, admittedly with less confidence in my ability to dogmatize about them than Rabbi Yoskowitz shows.