In 1811 Jonas Ludwig von Hess looked back on the history of the Jews in Hamburg and claimed that since the seventeenth century there had been a clear forward progression from persecution and rejection to something approaching assimilation. The Senate, he wrote, had always taken pains to defend the Jews and ‘through words and deeds has always brought home to their enemies… that Jews are also human beings’. The way in which this was done was significant. For the Senate had simply isolated the community, encouraged it to lead a separate existence. Gradually the populace accepted the Jews and then ignored them; the clergy too desisted from their former aim of damning and persecuting the Jews and now only prayed for their conversion. The Jews, in short, had not been tolerated in the enlightened sense of that word. For, as Hess pointed out, such a toleration would have demanded close enquiry by the Christian authorities into the complex religious affairs of the Jews. Instead, successive contracts had sought to limit their religious freedom as much as was humanly possible, so that the authorities had only to concern themselves with outright abuses rather than petty transgressions of the law.

Hess's views were in many ways typical of his generation. Long after toleration for Christian minorities had ceased to be an issue, the question of the Jews continued to exercise the minds of his contemporaries and tax their powers of historical imagination.