In 1492, the Spanish Catholic Kings issued a decree banishing the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula allowing converts to stay. Three hundred years later, the French Revolutionary Parliament accepted Jews as legal citizens ushering in the era of Jewish emancipation. This course explores three centuries of radical changes that triggered the rise of new political and religious treatment of and attitude toward Jews. Students will focus on the early modern era of mercantilism that reshaped the Jewish community economically and culturally; on the legalization of the process of readmission of Jews to urban centers from which they were expelled in medieval times; on the spread of Jewish mysticism and the rise of Jewish religious revivalist movements; on the impact of French Enlightenment on the rise of modern Jewish thought; the formation of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish identity; and on the revolutionary upheavals in Netherlands, Britain, and France that triggered the process of emancipation that bolstered Jewish integration into the fabric of European society. Students will look at the early modern European history through the eyes of the previously alienated minority, the attitude to which started to change.