Jude oder preußischer Bürger? Die Emanzipationsdebatte im Spannungsfeld von Regierungspolitik, Religion, Bürgerlichkeit und Öffentlichkeit (1780–1847)

Abstract

The period between 1750 and 1850 was a time of profound social and political transformation in which ‘the legal, social, cultural, and knowledge orders that had structured people’s lives for many generations rapidly lost meaning’ (Simone Lässig in a Discussion Forum on the ‘Vanishing Nineteenth Century in European History’, Central European History 51, 2018). The resultant unravelling of traditional institutions and cultural norms had a strong effect on the Jews in German-speaking Central Europe. This is particularly evident in late eighteenth-century Prussia, which saw both the formation of the Jewish Enlightenment and the emergence of wide-reaching public debates on the civic improvement of the Jews, initiated by Christian Wilhelm Dohm in 1781. A plethora of recent studies have already examined the development of these debates during the 1780s and 1790s. This enormously useful book by Anne Purschwitz adds to existing scholarship by taking a broader view of the Prussian public debates on the ‘Jewish question’ from their inception in 1781 throughout the Vormärz era until 1847.