One of the cultural communities that underwent a process of cultural and political consciousness-raising after the onset of Romanticism was Europe’s Jews. Although this group was highly literate and had an advanced state of civic self-organization, its “cultivation of culture” is not easily covered within the scope and analytical parameters of this Encyclopedia: Jews were culturally, linguistically and geographically highly dispersed, and political ambitions were either focused on autonomous state-formation outside Europe (Zionism) or on an empowered identity within the framework of Europe’s existing states. The Parisian self-styled "Sanhedrin” convoked by Napoleon in 1806 asserted that modern Jewry constituted only a religious and moral community, not a nation; that Jews were bound by the political mores and the laws of the countries where they resided; and that it was their duty to regard the countries of which they were citizens as their fatherland.

This was to change over the next century as anti-Semitism grew more virulent and more widespread across Europe. Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat of 1896 and the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, are usually linked to this rising tide of anti-Semitism. The French Dreyfus affair had started its grinding course in 1894, and coincided in time with the anti-Semitic pogroms that in various Russian cities had become more widespread and frequent after 1880. Dovetailing with Alexander III’s anti-Jewish legislation (the “May laws” of 1882) and culminating in the Kishinev/Chişinău and Odessa pogroms of 1903-05, they gained notoriety across Europe and indeed in America, where an enormous influx of Jewish migrants from Russia had been settling and Jewish public opinion was becoming more powerful. Similar notoriety had been achieved by the slightly earlier Berlin anti-Semitism controversy of 1879-81 (commented upon as far afield as in Tbilisi, in the journalism of Ilia Čavčavadze). It had been sparked off by Treitschke’s attacks with their fateful statement that “the Jews are our misfortune” (Die Juden sind unser Unglück, subsequently a Nazi motto); meanwhile in Austria, anti-Semitism was turned into a party-political platform by Georg von Schönerer in his Programm der deutschnationalen Antisemiten (1882).

In response to such intensifying anti-Semitism, proto-Zionist calls for Jewish empowerment were “in the air” in the years leading up the Herzl’s Der Judenstaat of 1896. In 1882, Leon Pinsker, future president of a Hovevei Zion (“Friends of Zion”) association, published a manifesto for Jewish autonomy (Autoemancipation!, 1882). In that same year 1882 a Zionist conference took place in Focşani, for which the ground had been prepared by the French-Romanian periodical L’Israélite roumain/Israelitul român, founded in Bucharest in 1857 by Iuliu Barasch (1815–1863) and Armand Lévy. Lévy (Précy-sous-Thil 1827 – Paris 1891) was a strenuous activist for an international peoples’ liberation, and adept of Michelet. He was also a friend of Mickiewicz, to whom he acted as secretary during that poet’s mission to Istanbul during the Crimean War. For the many Jewish members of the anti-Russian Polish Legion stationed there he ensured religious rights such as Sabbath observance. He developed the idea, partly after speaking to local rabbis, that the political turmoils of the time might signal an impending liberation of Jerusalem, and planned an (unrealized) Jewish Legion alongside the Polish one. These ideas he imparted to his Romanian contacts.

Paris, and in particular Masonic life in Paris, provided the meeting-ground for Lévy and other Jewish activists from different backgrounds. After moving to Paris, Moses Hess (Bonn 1812 – Paris 1875) joined a lodge in 1858 of which Adolphe Crémieux (Nîmes 1796 – Paris 1880) was also a member. Hess was a social revolutionary who had fallen foul of Marx because he saw history as driven by racial/national rather than class conflicts; he reacted against the anti-Semitism of his time by developing an activist Jewish stance. His Rom und Jerusalem: Die letzte Nationalitätsfrage (1862) advocated an Italy-inspired Jewish risorgimento involving a return to Israel. Crémieux campaigned against civic disabilities affecting France’s Jewish citizens, and against ritual-murder scare-stories – notably the notorious “Damascus affair” of 1840, which had the same galvanizing effect on Crémieux that the later Dreyfus affair was to have on Herzl. He became the first president of the Alliance Israélite universelle, founded in 1860.

The Jewish nationalism evinced by men like Lévy, Hess, Crémieux, Pinsker, and Herzl, while often inspired by other national movements of the period, wholly followed a social-political or emancipatory, more rarely a cultural agenda, and involved little or no “cultivation of culture”. Traces of a Jewish “Romantic Nationalism”, noted separately, are more diffuse and take shape in the climate of the repercussions of the Haskalah movement in Central and Eastern Europe and the establishment of Leopold Zunz’s Wissenschaft des Judentums movement and its East-European, Yiddish counterpart, the YIVO.

In Western Europe, the climate of Romantic philosemitism is a contributing factor – one salient instance being the Hebrew Melodies written in collaboration between Byron and the composer Isaac Nathan (Canterbury 1790 – Sydney 1864). Patently inspired by the Irish Melodies of Byron’s friend Tom Moore (and similar spin-offs such as Felicia Hemans’s Welsh Melodies), the Hebrew Melodies were written by Byron on biblical themes – a well-known item being “She walks in beauty” – and set to music by Nathan in a musical idiom derived from synagogue usage (Nathan’s Polish-born father had been cantor in Canterbury).