This book offers the first comprehensive history in any language of how Jews became citizens in the modern world. For all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history as to overshadow another central aspect of Jewish history: emancipation. This book seeks to reorient Jewish history by describing how Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-16th century to the beginning of the 21st, it tells the ongoing story of how Jews have gained, kept, lost, and recovered rights in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the U.S. and Israel. Emancipation was not a one-time or linear event, but rather a complex, multidirectional, ambiguous process characterized by deflections and reversals, defeats and successes, triumphs and tragedies. The story of this foundational but neglected event reveals the lost contours of Jewish history over the past half millennium.