The history of the gradual acceptance of the Catholics and Jews demonstrates two extremes of the experience of religious minorities in Hamburg. The Catholics were tolerated almost exclusively because of the city's perennial dependence on their patron, the Holy Roman Emperor. Political and diplomatic factors predominated, while the economic considerations, which had led to the initial acceptance of Catholic merchants in the period around 1600, diminished in importance as the community lost its mercantile character. Social isolation and poverty, rather than wealth and status, characterised the Catholic community after about 1630. In the case of the Jews, who lacked an official Imperial or princely patron, economic factors were of crucial importance; they continuously played an important economic role, even though the character of the community changed considerably with the decline of the original Sephardic element and the increasing predominance of the Ashkenazim. For the Jews supplied skills and trades which did not on the whole compete with those of the citizens of Hamburg, and which made a valuable contribution to the urban economy. It was the recognition of this fact which stimulated the efforts of the 1730s and 1740s to find a more satisfactory solution to the synagogue issue.

Attitudes to neither group, however, ever went substantially beyond the desire for a more clearly defined legal relationship.