MODERN JEWISH HISTORY - Essay Example

The process of Jewish assimilation involved the cultural assimilation and social integration of the Jews. The Jews used to earlier live in their own tightly integrated community and would hardly integrate with the rest of the cultures in the world. However, during the age of enlightenment, the Jews started integrating themselves with the social surrounding of other cultures in order to assimilate themselves with the east and the western parts of the world. The primary reason as to why the Jews assimilated to different parts of the world, including South America and the Caribbean was to attain nationality in such countries as a way of integrating themselves with various cultures of the world.

This phenomenon happened in slow stages, although by the end of the 19th century the Jews had placed themselves with various European and South American cultures, thus socializing with them and attaining their citizenship. This paper shall now address the methods adopted by the Jews to assimilate themselves with rest of the world. When the world was on the journey of renaissance, the Jews had their own place in history. They used to live with each other in a closed nit group and would seldom interact with the rest of the cultures. . However, Christians, Muslims and other orthodox sects regarded this as disrespect to their culture.

Since the Muslims were involved in social integration with Christians, there was a sense of acceptance for them from the European world. However, the Jews never met the same fate since they did not bother to socialize with the remaining class of people. This turned out to be a fallacy for them since they were not looked in the correct perspective from the outer world. The Jews were always a tiny minority since the time their religion came into existence. The Jews were the worshippers of a single God, and the fact that they were such a tiny minority did not allow them to socially integrate with other cultures, as they thought that if they would then the importance of their religion would go down as opposed to Christians and the Muslims, who were much bigger in numbers in comparison to their Jewish counterparts.

The struggle to preserve their culture, the language along with their custom was the biggest stumbling block for the Jews in their attempt to socialize with the rest of the world. Those who moved within the European vicinity and adopted the European culture were met with much criticism. The conservative Jews, thus leading to an internal conflict among the Jews as to who were the purists, regarded them as outsiders. The conservatives always opposed the idea of integration, and this led to a break in the fragmentation of Jewish culture.

The conservatives never accepted the liberals, and the liberals found it hard to integrate with the socially demanding European cultures consisting of Christians and Muslims, who were in much greater numbers, thus posing a threat to their identity,