Written in 1907, this ambitious survey traces two millennia of Jewish life across European lands, from the merchants who followed Roman trade routes to the fraught debates of the modern era. Abbott examines how Jews have been tolerated, taxed, expelled, and murdered across different centuries and regimes, while somehow maintaining a distinct identity that refused to dissolve. The book centers on what contemporaries called 'the Jewish Question', that persistent European puzzle of how to absorb a people who were neither fully foreign nor fully belonging. Abbott writes with an early twentieth-century liberal sensibility, deploring persecution while attempting to explain its logic, documenting pogroms and proclamations, emancipation and backlash. The work is very much of its era: dated in its historiography and assumptions, yet valuable for capturing how educated readers of the pre-Holocaust era understood this long, troubled relationship. For readers interested in the intellectual context that preceded the twentieth century's catastrophes, this book offers a window into the questions Europe was asking about Jewish difference before those questions exploded into horror.
