David Sorkin, Lucy G. Moses Professor, offers alternative perspectives to the predominant post-liberal or nationalist interpretation of modern Jewish history.
He first examined the formation of Jewish culture in the German states, which he came to understand as a “subculture.” The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987) won the Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Literary Award for History. In a commissioned study of Moses Mendelssohn’s Jewish thought, he emphasized the neglected Hebrew works. Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) has been translated into French, German and Italian. In the Sherman Lectures delivered at Manchester University (UK) he used comparison to remove the “Haskalah” (Jewish Enlightenment) from its conventional parochial setting. Those lectures were published as The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000). He crossed confessional boundaries and national borders to reconceive the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion in The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008), which was featured in a New York Times’ “Beliefs” column (October 11, 2008, A21). He recently published, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (2019), in which he argues that the attainment of civil and political rights or equality is the principal event of modern Jewish history. He is currently writing a history of emancipation politics, a critical yet neglected subject.