Jonathan Israel

Jonathan Irvine Israel was born in London on January 22, 1946.[1] He earned a first-class bachelor’s degree at Queens College, Cambridge, in 1967, pursued graduate study at St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1967 and 1970, and studied at Colegio de México in 1968–69.[1]

He is Jewish.[1]

Israel began his academic career with a research fellowship at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 1970 to 1972, followed by lectureships at the University of Hull and University College, University of London.[1] At University College London he was a lecturer from 1974 to 1981, a reader from 1981 to 1985, and professor of history from 1985 to 2000.[1] He became professor of modern European history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2001.[1] He also served as honorary secretary of the Jewish Historical Society of England from 1974 to 1979, belonged to the Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, and became editor of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in 1990.[1][2]

His research ranges across European and European colonial history from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, including the Dutch Golden Age, Spanish imperial strategy, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, radical thought, and the Enlightenment.[1] A reference entry characterizes him as a prominent historian of Jewish and world history during the mercantilist period, approximately 1550–1750, with particular attention to the Netherlands, its trading empire, and the role of Jews in mercantilism.[2]

Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 treats the early modern period as a major new phase in Jewish history. Its account traces a reversal of conditions in western and central Europe in the late sixteenth century, followed by growth in Jewish population and activity and changes in Jewish society and institutions.[5] The book connects these developments to an expanded and more varied Jewish role in European civilization. Its first edition, published by Oxford University Press in 1985, jointly won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History in 1986; an updated third edition with a new introduction appeared in 2020.[5][6]

In the interpretation summarized in the introduction to The Cambridge History of Judaism, Israel argued that the religious conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation opened space for more religiously neutral state policies, including mercantilism. He linked Jews’ commercial usefulness to new freedoms and opportunities, including resettlement in parts of western Europe from which Jews had long been excluded, and described the development as a kind of collective “first Jewish emancipation,” distinct from the later emancipation of Jews as individuals.[4] He also emphasized 1650–1713 as a high point of Jewish influence, connecting demographic change, autonomous Jewish self-rule, and commercial networks.[4]

His research also addresses Sephardic trading networks. Jonathan Karp credits Israel’s studies of the Sephardic trading diaspora with helping spur an “economic turn” in Jewish studies and describes them as wide-ranging and meticulous.[7] In this account, Israel showed how Sephardic merchants connected religious spheres, maritime empires, and the Americas with the Old World.[7] Scholarship on this work contributed to subsequent conferences and publications, including a 2003 Johns Hopkins University symposium on Jews, conversos, and crypto-Jews in the age of mercantilism, which included Israel’s work as well as that of students and critics.[7]

Israel’s publications include Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico: 1610–1670 (1975), The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World: 1606–1661 (1982), Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (1989), and Empires and Entrepots: The Dutch, the Spanish Monarchy, and the Jews, 1585–1713 (1990).[1] His The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 presents an integrated history of the United Provinces’ emergence as a great power and its subsequent decline, placing politics, religion, thought, and society in context.[8] His later work includes a three-volume history of the Enlightenment that reviewer Allan Arkush describes as nearly 3,000 pages.[3]

Israel’s work on Jewish thinkers and political ideas includes the article “Political Concepts in the World of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam during the Seventeenth Century: The Problem of Exclusion and the Boundaries of Self-Identity,” published in 1989 and later issued in Spanish and French versions.[9]

His 2021 book Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx: The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights examines Jewish revolutionary activity and political thought from 1650 to 1850, including Spinoza, the early Haskalah, Moses Hess, and Karl Marx.[10] It addresses Jewish emancipation, social and political reform, and universal rights. The publisher’s description presents Israel’s argument that radical ideas in the early Marx were influenced by an intellectual legacy connected to the Radical Enlightenment, and that Jewish marginalization and the pursuit of emancipation related to theories of legal and social reform.[10]

A central feature of Israel’s account of the Enlightenment is its division between Radical and Moderate currents. In his framework, Spinoza inspired the Radical Enlightenment, while Locke and Newton were major influences on the Moderate Enlightenment. He associates the Radical current with democracy, equality, individual liberty, and secular morality, whereas the Moderate current sought a balance between reason and tradition and broadly accommodated the established order.[1][3]

In his review of Israel’s work, Allan Arkush describes Israel’s account as tracing a Spinoza-inspired movement from the mid-seventeenth century across Europe and the Americas for more than a century. Arkush says Israel interprets the French Revolution as an attempt to put Radical Enlightenment principles into practice, including resistance to religious authority, autocracy, and oligarchy.[3] Arkush also characterizes Israel’s distinction as one between a Radical current that treated reason as the guide to life and rejected tradition, and a Moderate current that sought a balance between reason and tradition.[3]

Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 places the crucial period earlier than accounts centered on the era of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It emphasizes late-seventeenth-century Dutch thinkers, including Franciscus van den Enden and Frederick van Leenhof, and the influence of Spinoza.[1] This approach presents early modern Dutch thought as central to the development of modern ideas rather than as a prelude to a later Enlightenment high point.

Israel’s research helped establish a substantial place for early modern Jewish history within broader accounts of European society. The introduction to The Cambridge History of Judaism credits European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism with encouraging a more positive and balanced interpretation of the period, treating it as an essentially new phase rather than merely an extension of the Middle Ages.[4] The book’s continuing publication, including an updated third edition, and its prize recognition reflect its standing in the field.[5]

His work also contributed to wider changes in Jewish studies. Karp credits Israel’s scholarship, alongside that of Derek Penslar, with helping spur an economic turn that brought trade, commercial networks, and economic structures more fully into the study of Jewish history.[7] Israel’s attention to Sephardic merchants, Jewish life in mercantile Europe, and connections across trading worlds has been part of that development.[7]

Israel’s writing on the Enlightenment likewise shaped discussion of how modern democratic and egalitarian ideas emerged. His work gives Spinoza and the Radical Enlightenment a central role and connects those ideas to later political revolutions and Jewish thinkers.[3][10] The extensive scope of his three-volume history of the Enlightenment and the continuing debate over its arguments have made his framework an influential point of reference in scholarship.[1][3]

Several elements of Israel’s interpretations remain debated. Critics have questioned whether his account gives too much weight to mercantilism and the Court Jew as explanations of Jewish modernity, particularly because those phenomena were not generally present in major eighteenth-century Jewish centers in the Ottoman Empire.[11] The broader disagreement concerns how far Jewish history should be explained through external European conditions and how much weight should be given to internal Jewish cultural and intellectual developments.[4]

Arkush challenges aspects of Israel’s account of Jewish civil rights in the early United States, citing examples of state-level religious freedom and successful petitions that, in his view, qualify the claim that the American Revolution had limited emancipatory effects.[3] He also questions whether the Moderate Enlightenment’s contribution to emancipation receives enough attention in Israel’s interpretation of the French Revolution.[3]

Arkush further describes Israel’s interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn as unconventional: Israel suggests that Mendelssohn may privately have accepted Spinoza’s one-substance doctrine and argues that Mendelssohn’s political program aligned with the Radical Enlightenment. Although Arkush says the interpretation is close to one he has advanced himself, he notes that it differs from the longstanding scholarly consensus surrounding Mendelssohn’s public reconciliation of Judaism and Enlightenment philosophy and doubts that Israel’s view will displace that consensus.[3] These disputes concern particular historical interpretations rather than the basic fact of Israel’s extensive scholarship on early modern Jewish history and Enlightenment thought.