Humanities, and Whitney Humanities Center fellowships, as well as a National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Emancipationists: Nineteenth-Century Jews' Campaign for Citizenship, with the following results:
The Page 99 Test does in fact work. Page 99 describes two editors of the French Jewish newspaper, the Archives Israélites (1840), Samuel and Isidore Cahen, who were father and son. Samuel founded the newspaper as an organ of French Jewish politics. He was an advocate of the economic and moral "regeneration," as well as religious reform, central to the emancipationists' effort to gain equal rights. He understood this agenda to be a form of “self-emancipation.” Isidore, editor from 1860, continued the campaign for self-emancipation but was more politically radical than his father, promoting general as well as specifically Jewish political issues e.g., "democratic liberties."Learn more about The Emancipationists at the Yale University Press website.
The father-son editors exemplified the transition in leadership across the nineteenth century. Samuel studied at a Yeshiva but in secular subjects was a self-educated "maskil" or Jewish enlightener. Isidore attended a prestigious lycée and then one of the most élite universities, the École Normale Supérieure.
The newspaper they created played multiple roles in promoting and defending the Jews’ rights: providing news and information that shaped an informed Jewish public as well as suggesting new activities and institutions to further their cause. For example, Isidore used the paper’s pages to suggest the establishment of a self-defense organization and was then one of the founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860).
The Page 99 Test: Jewish Emancipation.
--Marshal Zeringue