From the French Revolution to the 1860s, the Jews of western and central Europe experienced political emancipation. Unencumbered by ties to an agrarian way of life, many Jews also experienced economic prosperity and social mobility during the following decades of industrialization and urbanization, as they seized the opportunities that a period of rapid change offered. However, late nineteenth-century Europe also witnessed the emergence of radical protest movements by those who bore the cost of modernization. Such movements were usually anti-Semitic, as the Jew was an easy symbol of all that these people perceived to be the ills of modern society: urbanization; democratization; disruptive social mobility; and a large-scale, impersonal market economy undermining the livelihoods of tradesmen, artisans, and peasants. The adoption of the Jew as such a symbol was facilitated by a ready-made and widespread negative Jewish stereotype fostered by centuries of religious anti-Semitism. A racist brand of...