Lecture by Wim Klooster (Clark University)
Thursday, April 10, 2025 |3:15 pm
Library of the CJS | Beethovenstraße 21 | 8010 Graz
The age of revolutions is often presented as the cradle of modernity, an era in which many countries begin to introduce elements of democracy and establish equality before the law. In Jewish history, the age of revolutions is merely a stage in the long road towards Jewish emancipation. Whereas most studies of Jews during this age cast them in the role of victims or beneficiaries, this lecture looks at them as agents, trying to advocate for changes in their own condition, but also contributing to the revolutions more generally. Among the issues they debated were the fate of Jewish communal autonomy and the implications of legal equality for assimilation.
Wim Klooster is Professor and Robert H. and Virginia N. Scotland Endowed Chair in History and International Relations at Clark University. He has published widely on Dutch colonialism, smuggling, Jewish history, and the age of revolutions. His books include „The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (translated into Chinese and Russian)“ and „Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History“. He is also the editor of the three-volume „Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions“ and coedited „Jewish Entanglement in the Atlantic World.“