Perspective is everything in history, and I want to open my comment on the three essays in Part V with an observation about their common perspective. The authors' common framework and point of departure is the institutional, legal, political, economic, and social history of the Holy Roman Empire from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Their common narrative is the gradual integration of the Jews into the structures of the Holy Roman Empire during the last three centuries before emancipation. The common conclusion is that the empire's Jews were a “minority” in the modern sense and that their integration into a gradually secularizing society was a good thing. I first comment on each essay in detail, before looking at the common questions they raise and the research agendas they suggest.

Christopher Friedrichs's story (Chapter 17) is the most coherent, partly because his theme is limited to three leading free cities - Frankfurt am Main, Worms, and Hamburg - whose Jewish communities benefited from their multiconfessional atmospheres. He argues convincingly that the Jews both participated, as other townsfolk did, in civic and supralocal politics through petitions and legal suits, and conducted their own internal political life, the procedures of which are “strikingly reminiscent of the procedures followed by German city councils of the same era.” His argument rests heavily on his procedural view of politics as “primarily a process of conflict resolution.”