Modernity—modern values, modern institutions, and modern politics—have served as both a blessing and a curse for the Jewish people. The granting of citizenship through Emancipation gave Jews an equality and freedom they had not experienced before in the Exile. No longer would Jews in the West merely be tolerated. They would be citizens. The downside to Emancipation was that integration and acculturation were replaced by assimilation and loss of Jewish identity.
As well, modern political national movements in Europe inspired the rise of Zionism and the founding of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel. This would not have been possible before the onset of modernity, Jewish Enlightenment embodied in Haskalah, and European nationalism. Yet, at the same time, modernity spawned new forms of racial anti-Semitism that would prove the most deadly in Jewish history, leading to Auschwitz and Babi Yar.
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