In April 1909 Emil Schüler, a Jew of Lippstadt, a small town in Catholic Westphalia, died. The passing of this otherwise unremarkable man was noted in a number of newspapers because Schüler was known to be both a good “Israelite” and a loyal supporter of the Center Party—a party denounced as “ultramontane” by its enemies and acknowledged even by its friends to have a constituency almost entirely Catholic. The Jüdische Rundschau commented, however, that it considered this Lippstadt Jew's political allegiance “absolutely worth considering,” opining that recent proceedings in the Reichstag had shown that at least the religious interests of Jews found better representation within the Center than with, for example, either Liberalism or Social Democracy.