Convener: Professor Yaacov Yadgar
Speaker: Professor Abigail Green
Isaiah Berlin famously described the new state of Israel as the "last child of the European Risorgimento". This paper seeks to unpick that claim by exploring the relationship between the revolutions of 1848 and the foundation of the State of Israel exactly one hundred years later. The paper will set the ideological connection that directly links Zionism to the revolutions through the work of Moses Hess, and through the affinity early Austrian Zionists felt with the ideas of Adolf Fischhof, alongside the personal connections that linked so many of key figures within international Jewish politics in the first half of the twentieth century to the revolutionary caesura: Zionists, such as Louis Brandeis, Nathan Straus, Henrietta Szold, and Victor Basch (president of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme from 1926-1944), but also anti-Zionists like Lucien Wolf, Paul Nathan (founder and Vice-President of the Hilfsverein Deutscher Juden) and, in an ambivalent position, the President of the JCA Franz Philippson.
Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Brasenose College. Her latest book is Jewish Country Houses (edited with Juliet Carey, and out with Profile Books and Brandeis University Press in November 2024). The paper emerges from her current project Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights.
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