In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach used Christian typology – the view that Old Testament events and figures, like the Patriarch Jacob, presaged Christ – to construct a Judeo-Christian European history. Yet, Jacob & Esau is as much a Jewish as a Christian topos,and, using them as a barometer of Jewish-Christian relations, this book provides an alternative history. In rabbinic discourse, Esau embodied the Roman Empire, and Jacob’s struggle with him was that of the Jewish nation against the Roman Empire. Over the centuries, Jewish attitudes toward the imperial legacy changed, and a story begun with hatred ended in modernity with love for the Habsburg Monarchy, which traditional Jews viewed as inheritor of Rome. With Jewish emancipation In modern Europe, Jacob & Esau portrayed new forms of Jewish-non-Jewish relations. The intelligentsia created international networks that negotiated between Jewish life and European national cultures, and Jacob & Esau registered their in-between existence. Nation-states and continental empires offered divergent options for Jewish life: acculturation and national integration as against cultural autonomy in a multinational state. Two World Wars and the Holocaust sealed the fate of both options, but post-Holocaust acceptance of the Jews signaled the collapse of the Jacob & Esau typology, and opened up a shortterm prospect for Jewish European historiography.