Political Emancipation and Modern Jewish National Identity

Following the rise of liberalism and nationalism during the nineteenth century, Jewish national identity varied across countries. While Western European and American Jews mainly came to think of themselves as nationals of their country of citizenship, a growing number of Eastern European Jews claimed to be a separate nation with a legitimate claim to self-government. Comparing the evolution of Jewish identities across North America and Europe and leveraging a regression discontinuity design based on the differential treatment of Polish and Russian Jews under Tsarism, I find that their divergent national identities responded to the extent to which Jews were politically emancipated in the country where they lived over the long century that followed the Atlantic Revolutions. Social and economic modernization played a weaker role, suggesting the need to think about national identity formation as endogenous to political and constitutional transformations marking the birth of the contemporary era.