Emancipation and Poverty

"During the first half of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam contained one of the largest Jewish communities of Western Europe: between 22,000 and 25,000 Ashkenazi Jews made up 10 percent of Amsterdam's total population. The fact that two-thirds of these Jews were poor separates the history of the Dutch Jews from that of the other European Jewish communities. This book is the first comprehensive study examining the impact of emancipation on the lives of Amsterdam's Jews. It demonstrates that emancipation failed to provide this Jewish community with similar rights and opportunities as non-Jews. It also uncovers some relatively unknown territory regarding Dutch-Jewish history: the ambiguities and limits of establishing a Dutch-Jewish community around 1600, the legal and social disabilities which ensued as a result of the influx of impoverished Ashkenazim during the seventeenth century, and details of the lives of the Jewish poor living in nineteenth-century Amsterdam."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.