Aaron Salomon Gumpertz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and the First Call for an Improvement of the Civil Rights of Jews in Germany (1753)

Abstract

Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden of 1781 is generally believed to be the first call issued in Germany for the improvement of the Jews' civil rights. This commonly held belief is mistaken. Following in the footsteps of Volkmar Eichstädt's Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Judenfrage of 1938, Jacob Toury called attention to the Schreiben eines Juden an einen Philosophen nebst der Antwort (in what follows: Schreiben), a pamphlet published anonymously in Berlin in 1753, which is “the first German composition on the Jewish question” calling for complete equality of the status of the Jews in Germany. Toury shed important light on this work but was unable to identify its author. Subsequent historiography took little notice of the Schreiben, perhaps because its author, and hence the context in which it was composed, remained unidentified. In this article, I show that the author of the Schreiben is the Berlin physician and early maskil Aaron Salomon Gumpertz, also known as Aaron Zalman Emmerich (1723–1769) and that his friend, the noted poet, playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), was directly involved in its publication. This identification should give Gumpertz and his Schreiben the place they deserve in German history and in the history of the Jews in Germany; at the same time, it enhances our appreciation of Lessing as a central figure in promoting the rights of Jews in Germany.