The Effects of Emancipation

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGES in Germany between the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna fundamentally transformed the situation of the Jews and of the universities. As a result of the radical social reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the old estate-based society dissolved, and legal emancipation in most German states liberated Jews from their fomer status of tolerated protected Jewry (Schutzjudentum) and turned them—in the words of the Prussian Emancipation Edict of 1812—into “(regular) inhabitants” (Einländer) and “citizens” (Staatsbürger). In the context of constitutional improvements, some of the severe professional restrictions were also partially repealed in the expectation that changes in the professional composition of the Jews and the shift away from trade would have a particular reformative and assimilatory effect. Under these conditions, emancipation laws could not but facilitate a dramatic increase in the number of Jewish students and they awakened professional hopes among Jewish university graduates in particular. These hopes that would prove only too soon to be illusory in the wake of the conservative backlash after 1815.

Given the territorial fragmentation of Germany, we cannot speak of a general Jewish emancipation. Rather, individual states varied so considerably in their policy towards the Jews that, in the pre-1848 era, full emancipation could exist alongside medieval protected Jewry, even though most states adopted a middle path in their Jewish legislation. Discussion of Jewish emancipation had begun in Germany in the 1780s and stood entirely under the influence of the Enlightenment idea of “moral improvement,” an idea that later also influenced the reform edicts of Emperor Joseph II. The incipient reforms undertaken in Prussia after the death of Friedrich II (Frederick the Great) remained at a standstill. Fundamental changes to Jewish legislation in Germany only occurred after 1791, once revolutionary France had granted its Jewish population full emancipation and this legislation also became the reigning law in several German territories in the Napoleonic period. Areas temporarily affected by French emancipation legislation included the Left Rhine territories ceded to France, the Grand Duchy of Berg, the Kingdom of Westphalia, and also briefly the Hanseatic cities after 1810.