How can we conceptualize the sheer diversity of Jewish experience in the nineteenth century? An earlier generation of historians turned to the Zionist national narrative, with its emphasis on the unique historical destiny of the Jewish people and the unity of their experience through the ages. Thus the Jerusalem School saw modern Jewish history in terms of the catastrophic impact of the nation-state on traditional Jewish communal and religious structures, as a result of emancipation, assimilation, and their by-product, secularization.1 The opposition between ‘modernizers’ and ‘traditionalists’ in the Jewish world is a fundamental tension within this narrative – a tension only resolved by the Zionist movement, which promised a fusion between the aspirations of the modernizers and the ethnoreligious cultural identity of the traditionalists. This version of Jewish history has been attacked for homogenizing a wide range of experiences and contexts. Most obviously, it privileges the history of European Jewry at the expense of the Jews of Muslim lands.2 Even within Europe, the viability of this overarching narrative has been brought into question by revisionist historians who emphasize not the common European encounter with modernity but the plurality and diversity of the Jewish world.3
