"Most historians pinpoint Moses Mendelssohn's intellectual revolution in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century as the decisive event that spawned Jewish modernity in the West. Todd M. Endelman takes issue with this Germanocentric orientation, however, counterarguing that the modernization of European Jewry encompassed far more than an intellectual revolution. By concentrating on the actual social and religious behavior of English Jews, Endelman demonstrates that the acculturation of Anglo-Jewry during the Georgian period moved at a more rapid pace than elsewhere in Europe. This was due largely to a constellation of political, social, and religious developments that set England apart from the rest of Europe in the eighteenth century. As such, Anglo-Jewry as a whole enjoyed a degree of toleration not to be found on the Continent."--BOOK JACKET.