The Role of Religious Minorities in European Nation Building Processes around 1800: The Discussion Concerning Citizenship for the Jews in Prussia

Religion, ritual and mythology : aspects of identity formation in Europe / edited by Joaquim Carvalho (Thematic work group) 940 (21.) 1. Europa - Civiltà I. Carvalho, Joaquim CIP a cura del Sistema bibliotecario dell’Università di Pisa This volume is published, thanks to the support of the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission, by the Sixth Framework Network of Excellence CLIOHRES.net under the contract CIT3-CT-2005-006164. The volume is solely the responsibility of the Network and the authors; the European Community cannot be held responsible for its contents or for any use which may be made of it. Volumes published (2006) I. Thematic Work Groups I. II. III. IV. V. VI. Public Power in Europe: Studies in Historical Transformations Power and Culture: Hegemony, Interaction and Dissent Religion, Ritual and Mythology. Aspects of Identity Formation in Europe Professions and Social Identity. New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society Frontiers and Identities: Exploring the Research Area Europe and the World in European Historiography II. Transversal Theme I. Citizenship in Historical Perspective III. Doctoral Dissertations I. F. Peyrou, La Comunidad de Ciudadanos. El Discurso Democrático-Republicano en España, 1840-1868 Cover: António Simões Ribeiro and Vicente Nunes, Allegories of Honour and Virtue (detail), University of Coimbra, Biblioteca Joanina, ceiling of the central room. Photo © José Maria Pimentel © Copyright 2006 by Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press Lungarno Pacinotti, 43 56126 Pisa Tel. 050 2212056 – Fax 050 2212945 info-plus@edizioniplus.it www.edizioniplus.it - Section “Biblioteca” ISBN 88-8492-404-9 Manager Claudia Napolitano Editing Francesca Petrucci Informatic assistance Michele Gasparello The Role of Religious Minorities in European Nation Building Processes around 1800: The Discussion Concerning Citizenship for the Jews in Prussia Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile University of Potsdam Mit dem vorliegenden Artikel werden zwei Zielsetzungen verfolgt. Zum einen werden kurz vier Trends oder Entwicklungen der jüngeren historischen Forschung bzw. der Aufklärungsforschung in Deutschland vorgestellt: (1) Die sogenannte „topographische Wende“, d. h. die kulturräumliche Differenzierung von Aufklärungsbewegungen und die damit verbundenen methodologischen Vorgaben, wie z. B. die synchrone Betrachtung von Gleichzeitigkeiten (anstatt traditioneller „großen Erzählungen“ von diachron aufeinander folgenden Epochen) oder die Verbindung ideengeschichtlicher Fragestellungen mit ihrer materialen (institutionellen, sozialen, medialen) lokalen Basis. (2) Die Kulturtransfer- bzw. Kulturvergleichsforschung, d. h. die Erweiterung des Bezugsrahmens über den traditionellen nationalgeschichtlichen Rahmen hinaus. (3) Die Erweiterung des historischen Bezugsrahmens über den europäischen Kontext hinaus zu globalen Fragestellungen in der sog. „Neuen Weltgeschichtsschreibung“ und schließlich (4) die Betrachtung der Aufklärungsepoche des 18. Jahrhunderts als Gründungsgeschehen der Moderne und die Untersuchung der Wirkungen der Aufklärung in den Staatsbildungsprozessen des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts. Anschließend wird jeweils skizziert, wie sich diese methodischen Vorgaben auf einen bestimmten historischen Gegenstand, nämlich die Debatten um die Staatsbürgerschaft der Juden in Preußen um 1800, anwenden ließen. This chapter has two goals: on the one hand it deals with the historical program of citizenship for religious minorities, in this case the Jewish minority in BrandenburgPrussia around 1800, which is also an important part of the Prussian nation building process after the breakdown of the ancien régime in 1806. In addition I shall present some general methodological and heuristical trends of recent German historiography, foremost Enlightenment research. Thus I will briefly present four trends and innovations of contemporary research; these methods then will be applied to the historical subject mentioned above. Religion in Secularization and in Nation Building 200 Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile The topic is particularly significant for two reasons, when we take into account historical and contemporary issues surrounding the unification process of Europe: first, it is of the highest importance that in the debates about the emancipation of the Jews the question of citizenship is inextricably linked to questions of cultural and religious identity. That means that the progressive contributors to that debate call for civil rights for the Jews as Jews – and they do not presuppose the traditional condition of assimilation by or even conversion to Christianity. In other words, in addition to the common human rights of life, peace, property, freedom, justice and so on, the human right of cultural identity is one basic demand of those representatives of the Enlightenment. Next, the debate about emancipation of the Jews is a transnational (and, of course, also prenational) debate concerning the whole of Europe in which the standards of treating a minority, which is discriminated against as “non-European” (with the argument that they are “non-Christians”), are discussed. Maybe it is a lesson of history that this minority in the 19th and early 20th centuries was one of the main representatives of European high culture. The “Topographical Turn” The concepts of “Topographical turn” and “Area Studies” are being used more and more in historiography to examine synchronic and spatial phenomena of culture opposed to the diachronic approach of the great narratives of traditional historiography. One important work which paradigmatically exemplifies that method and which has been discussed in the last years in Germany is Karl Schlögels “Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit”1 [“In Space We Read History”]. Schlögel’s main area of interest is 19th- and 20thcentury Russian history: for example Schlögel looks at the inhabitants of one single house at a particular time on a particular street in St. Petersburg. But his method can be applied to other areas of history. For example, we can differentiate individual Enlightenment centres in the 18th century as well as different cultural/spatial manifestations of the Enlightenment. Berlin in the 18th century was a very specific cultural place, characterized by the density of different cultures: German, French, Jewish, Polish. It is this cultural hybridity that is a significant property not only of Berlin but more or less of all of Central and Eastern Europe, where modern state building processes were slower, more heterogeneous and more complex than in France or Great Britain. In his recent doctoral dissertation Matt Erlin describes this hybridity of 18th-century Berlin as follows: “The real significance of representation of late 18th-century Berlin lies in their explicit or implicit engagement with […] hybridity, a hybridity that challenges commentators to develop new frameworks for conceptualizing the origins and implications of modern urban phenomena”2. The politics of tolerance and settlement of people from different countries with different religions has a long Brandenburgian tradition since the Great Elector who tried to compensate for the losses in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) with a proactive  The Role of Religious Minorities in European Nation Building Processes around 1800 201 policy of Peuplierung [Populization]. From the beginning, the politics of tolerance in Brandenburg-Prussia was granted to Christian (Lutherians, Calvinists, Catholics) and non-Christian denominations. For example, Friedrich II stated in the middle of the 18th century: “Alle Religionen seindt gleich und guth, wann nuhr die leute, so sie profesieren, Ehrlige leute seindt, und wen Türken und Heihden kämen und wollten das Land pöplieren, so wollen wir sie Mosqueen und Kirchen bauen.” [“All religions are equal and good, as long as the people who profess to be honourable indeed are so. If Turks and heathens came here to populate the country, we would want to build mosques and churches for them”]3. But especially during the reign of Friedrich II there was a gap between the official doctrine and ideology of tolerance, and the concrete Realpolitik. In particular, the policies against the Jewish minority were full of restrictions and discrimination. It was thus not by chance that this contradiction was laid bare to the public by the reform elements within the Prussian bureaucracy only at the end of Friedrich’s reign in the 1780s. Before this, the discourse was conducted only in the field of literature: for example by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his play The Jews in the 1750s (and later in Nathan the Wise). And many of the reform treatises are dedicated to the prince and designated king Friedrich Wilhelm II, for example Mirabeau’s Lettre remise à Fréderic Guillaume II, roi régnant de Prusse, le jour de son avènement au trône [Open Letter to Friedrich Wilhelm II]4 or Christoph Goßlers Versuch über das Volk. Zum Besten der Armen [An Essay about the People: For the Benefit of the Poor]5. Indeed, at the beginning of the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm II there are some improvements for the Jewish citizens: for example Markus Herz was called as the first Jewish professor to the Prussian Academy of Science. But this springtime of reforms ended suddenly with the King’s fear of a supposed danger of revolution after 1789 (see also part 4). Although, by our modern standards, the official Prussian immigration politics concerning the Jews would then seem restrictive, Berlin was becoming at the end of the 18th Century a European Centre of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala). Until then Berlin had been, compared e.g. to traditional cities of Jewish culture as Frankfurt/M. or Prague, a completely unimportant place6. This change of significance is expressed for example in the foundation of the first Jüdische Freyschule [ Jewish Public School] (1778), the founding of groups such as the Gesellschaft der Erforscher der hebräischen Sprache [Society for Hebrew Language Research] (1782) or the Gesellschaft der Freunde [Society of Friends] (1792), as well as the debut of the first Hebrew enlightenment journal HaMe’assef (Der Sammler [The Collector]) in 1783, from 1787 edited in Berlin). The best known institutions of Jewish-Prussian culture are, of course, the Jewish salons which were a meeting place for almost the whole Prussian cultural elite – gentiles as well as Jewish citizens; noblemen as well as bourgeois. In its social structure the Berlin Jewish community can be characterized by mainly two groups: on the one hand, there are the wealthy bankers, merchants and proto-industrialists, who are often direct successors of the so called “court Jews”, like Ephraim Veitel, Isaac Daniel Itzig, Lazarus Bendavid or Saul Ascher. They represent the class Religion in Secularization and in Nation Building 202 Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile Fig. 1 Migration of Jews to Berlin in the 18th Century, from M. A. Meyer et al. (eds.), Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, vol. 1, Munich 1996, p. 280. of the upper “bourgeoisie” in Berlin. A far larger part of the Jewish community, however, are poor immigrants from all over Central and Eastern Europe. The living conditions of this second group are expressed in literature, for example in Salomon Maimon’s autobiography “Description of my Life” (Salomon Maimons Lebensbeschreibung)7. Not only for these discussions on ‘civic improvement’ for the Jews are the enlightened circles and societies of the highest importance; it was in this milieu that new forms of class-transcending interaction in the public sphere8 were constituted. In the Berlin “Mittwochsgesellschaft” [the Wednesday Society] for example the most important contributors were meeting weekly – Moses Mendelssohn, as well as Christian Dohm or even the French visitor Mirabeau. And the main points of the discussions in the “Mittwochsgesellschaft” were immediately published in the “Berlinische Monatsschrift”. Concluding points: as a melting pot, Berlin can be seen as the concrete background of multicultural experiences on which the discussions about citizenship for the Jews take place. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s term one could say the city is the field in which specific forms of habitus are developed. The topographical approach thus allows to link questions of the history of ideas with those of the history of institutions, social formations, and the media.9  The Role of Religious Minorities in European Nation Building Processes around 1800 203 “culTural Transfer research” (Kulturtransferforschung) This kind of research has been developed since the 1980s, especially in works concerning the Franco-German relationships in history. Historians to be named here are Michel Espagne, Michael Werner, Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Etienne François. They all try to expand or even replace the national paradigm of historiography with the examination of transnational processes, relationships, hybridities. These processes of transfer can be examined on different levels: as transfers of knowledge, of technology, products, books, and of course ideas10. The achievement of citizenship for the Jews in Europe is a typical case of a transfer process where different agents all over Europe were involved. The debate can only be adequately understood if one takes into consideration the whole of Europe. Authors from different countries who were living in different historical-social systems took part in it: for example, the early Enlightenment figures Manasseh ben Israel with the Rettung der Juden [Salvation of the Jews]11, or John Toland with his Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain12; the champions of the Jewish enlightenment, of course, such as Moses Mendelssohn, Lazarus Bendavid, David Friedländer, Naphtali Hirz Wessely and others; parts of the clergy in the Austrian and Prussian “Enlightened Absolutism“ such as Joseph von Sonnenfels, Christian Dohm, Heinrich Friedrich Diez, Christoph Goßler, Kaspar Friedrich von Schuckmann, Wilhelm von Humboldt; and last but not least French Revolutionaries like Mirabeau. The discussion I am examining started with pogroms against the Jews in Alsace who sent a Mémoire sur l’état des Juifs en Alsace to Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin and asked him for help because he was a well-known philosopher. Mendelssohn ordered the Prussian clerk Christian Dohm to write an enquiry on this topic. Dohm then published in 1781 the political program of citizenship for the Jews under the title: Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden [Concerning the Civic Improvement of the Jews]. In his Mémoire, the anonymous author demands not only the elimination of all employment restrictions, through which the Jews are strictly limited to trading in a very restricted class of goods. Touching on the contemporary discussions about “Natural Rights”, he then calls for rights of cultural identity, autonomy of the Jewish community and free practice of religion. He links this to an appeal for tolerance and cosmopolitism: because, as he maintains, to be part of a religion has nothing to do with birth, education or tradition but only with the free decision by a rational and reasonable individual. So in the Alsatian Mémoire we can already find many of Dohm’s arguments, for example Dohm’s main point against the current prejudices against the Jews, that they are not based on natural characteristics but only on the consequences of the history of antiJewish politics of European governments: “Alles, was man den Juden vorwift, ist durch die politische Verfassung, in der sie itzt leben, bewirkt, und jede andre Menschengattung, in dieselben Umstände versetzt, würde sich sicher eben derselben Vergehungen schuldig machen”. [Everything that people accuse the Jews of is a consequence of the Religion in Secularization and in Nation Building 204 Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile political circumstances in which they live. Any other group of people forced into the same conditions would end up in the same unfortunate state]13. The fact that Christian Dohm, as a Prussian clerk and colleague of the Minister Graf von Herzberg (and thus as a half-official speaker of the Prussian government), could go to the public with such theses under the broadly known anti-Jewish attitude of the king at all, is due to the competition between Prussia and Austria over hegemony in the territory of the old Holy Roman Empire. Thus, according to the ruling ideology of ‘enlightened absolutism’ in both states, this was a contest to see who was more reformist. So it is then not by chance that shortly before the Dohmian Treatise some plans were published by the Habsburg Monarch Joseph II, in the context of his “Josephenian Reforms”, concerning the improvement of the situation of the Jews in Austria. For example, on 13 May 1781 the emperor published suggestions on how to “make so many members of the Jewish nation more useful to the state“ by abandoning “all humiliating and spiritually repressive laws which force Jewish people to an unnecessary difference in clothing and other externals”14. In addition to that, the Jewish subjects should be allowed to work in agriculture and professional trades, which had been forbidden to them up till then15. In the Prussian press these suggestions are immediately celebrated, for example in the article by Naphtali Hirz Wessely under the title Worte der Wahrheit und des Friedens an die gesammte jüdische Nation. Vorzüglich an diejenigen, so unter dem Schutze des glorreichen und großmächtigsten Kaysers Joseph II. wohnen. Aus dem Hebräischen [Words of Truth and Peace to the Entire Jewish Nation. Foremost on Those Living under the Protection of the Glorious and Most Mighty Emperor Joseph II. From the Hebrew]16. For the harbingers of the Prussian Enlightenment, this public celebration of the traditional enemy, Austria, becomes one important strategy to make their own government act17. Moses Mendelssohn himself took part in the debate in early 1782, when he published together with Markus Herz a translation of the English original of Manasseh ben Israels’ Rettung der Juden. The translation contained a foreword where Mendelssohn and Herz point out the parallels between the appeal by the Amsterdam Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel to Oliver Cromwell in 1651 to give sanctuary to the Jews and their own situation. Mendelssohn and Herz try to show that, despite all the progress in the enlightened 18th century, many anti-Jewish prejudices were still virulent and that the danger of persecution campaigns remained undiminished. The transfer of the debate back to France, where it started in Alsace, is first of all the work of Honoré Gabriel Victor Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau. Mirabeau stayed in Berlin from January 19, 1786 to April 17, 1786 and again from July 21, 1786 to January 19, 1787 as a secret agent of the French Secretary of Foreign Affairs to report on the political tendencies in the context of the expected death of Friedrich II and the foreseen succession. Here he actively took part in the discussions of the “Berlin Enlightenment”, was a guest member of the “Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft” and was in almost daily contact with his main adviser, Christian Dohm. Immediately after his Berlin stay Mirabeau then published his work Sur Moses Mendelssohn, sur la réforme politique des juifs: Et en particulier sur la révolution tentée en leur faveur en 1753 dans la Grande Bre-  The Role of Religious Minorities in European Nation Building Processes around 1800 205 tagne18, which contains in the first part a biography of Moses Mendelssohn, and in large sequences of the second part an adaption of Dohms “Bürgerlicher Verbesserung”. With this work, Mirabeau is the initiator of a debate in France about the civic improvement of the Jews, which for example leads to the competition of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Metz concerning the question Est-il un moyen de rendre les Juifs plus utile et plus heureux en France? (1787). In their essays, all three prize-winners follow the Mendelssohn/Dohm/ Mirabeau-theses: Abbé Grégoire with his Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs19, Adolphe Thiéry with the Dissertation sur cette question: Est-il des moyens de rendre les Juifs plus utile et plus heureux en France?20 and the Jewish immigrant Zalkind Hourwitz, who came from Poland to France via Berlin, with his Apologie des Juifs21. But even more importantly, during the French Revolution, Mirabeau was the speaker of the Third Estate and played an important role in the implementation of the constitution in France, which for the first time in European history gave full civil rights to the Jews (28 January, 1790: citizenship was granted to Jews, 27 September 1791: all Jews could become active citizens)22. On the other hand this did not go unnoticed in Prussia: given the proclamation of human rights in the French Revolution, in Prussia there also were totally new possibilities to further the aim of civic improvement of the Jews. It was mostly the Jewish heralds of the Enlightenment in Berlin who translated and published the French developments in this field for Germany, for example Lazarus Bendavid Sammlung der Schriften an die Nationalversammlung, die Juden und ihre bürgerliche Verbesserung betreffend. Aus dem Französischen [Collections of Works Concerning the Jews and their Civic Improvement for the French National Assembly]23, David Friedländers translation of the Antwort der Juden in der Provinz Lothringen auf die der Nationalversammlung von der sämmtlichen Stadtgemeinde zu Straßburg überreichte Bittschrift [Response of the Jews in Lorraine] in the “Berlinischen Monatsschrift”24 or Moses Hirschel Apologie der Menschenrechte. Oder philosophisch kritische Beleuchtung der Schrift: Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden [A Defence of Human Rights. Or a Philisophical-Critical Examination of the Work: Concerning the Physical and Moral State of the Jews]25. And when Napoleon then started his invasion of Europe and brought the French constitution to Germany too, Christian Dohm worked as a minister for Napoleon in the occupied Kingdom of Westphalia to implement the Code Civil. In Prussia, Dohm’s former pupil Wilhelm von Humboldt, who led during the whole time an intense correspondence with Dohm, fought for civil rights for the Jews in Prussia as well, rights which were, at least to some extent, given to them during the Prussian reforms in the “Edict of Emancipation” (Emanzipationsedikt) on 11 March 1812. europe and The non-european world The general trend of contemporary historiography towards a “New Global History” also has an impact on Enlightenment research. Two examples of this expansion of perReligion in Secularization and in Nation Building 206 Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile spective are the works of the historian Jürgen Osterhammel26 and the recent collection of essays by Felicity A. Nussbaum27. As Hegel had already stated, the global perspective was not of such importance for German history because, unlike for example Portugal, Spain, France, Holland or England, during the Ancient Regime the German principalities never had colonies. As Hegel puts it, the German journeys went into the unknown continent inside us instead of into foreign and far away continents. Starting with the coincidence of the events around the crucial year 1500 – the discovery of America and the appearance of Luther, Hegel asserts (not free of the prejudice of the German Kulturnation): “Während die übrige Welt hinaus ist nach Ostindien, Amerika, – aus ist, Reichthümer zu gewinnen, eine weltliche Herrschaft zusammenzubringen (…) ist es ein einfacher Mönch, der das Dieses, das die Christenheit vormals in einem irdischen, steinernen Grab suchte, vielmehr in dem tieferen Grabe der absoluten Identität alles Sinnlichen und Äußerlichen, in dem Geiste findet, und dem Herzen zeigt”. [While the other nations are going to East-India, America to get rich and become powerful.., it is a simple monk who finds all this in the spirit and the heart]28 It is interesting, in this context, that the prejudices and stereotypes against the Jews are in many respects similar to those against Moslems in our day and age. The Jews were depicted as being religious fanatics with strange religious rites, funny clothes, beards and hairstyles, and it was held that they tend to violence and even blood murders. This parallel can be also shown also by the fact that the discourse of Jewish emancipation is part of the academic subject of Orientalistik (not ‘orientalism’ in the sense of Edward Said). For example, one of the most famous anti-Dohmean and anti-Jewish articles in the debate stems from the most important professor of Orientalistik of his time, Johann David Michaelis. In his reaction to Dohm’s Bürgerlicher Verbesserung in the 19th part of the Oriental and exegetic library (Orientalische und exegetische Bibliothek)29, a journal which was edited by Michaelis himself, Michaelis tries to ‘prove’ all the traditional prejudices against Jews as scientific facts. The long 18Th cenTury Whereas in earlier historiography, talk was often of the “long 19th century“ (from the French Revolution to the beginning of World War I), currently one hears more and more of the continuity of the developments of Enlightenment in the late 18th century and the modern nation building processes in early 19th century. The social developments up to the Revolution of 1848 can then be seen as a manifestation, popularisation, and continuation of the Enlightenment (see for example the works of Rudolf Vierhaus and Jürgen Osterhammel)30. For the historical situation in Prussia, this thesis of continuity is obvious: not only the Prussian Reforms continued and completed Friedrich the Great’s reforms but also the agents of both reforms were the same. It is interesting here to see how historical progress is more a thing of “long durée” than of single events. And, at least in the case we discuss here, they develop more under the surface, in the continuity of the Prussian administra-  The Role of Religious Minorities in European Nation Building Processes around 1800 207 tion, than through decisions of the crown. It was already mentioned that Friedrich II, in contrast to his self-description as ‘enlightened’, had many prejudices against Jews. If the “Age of Enlightenment” in Prussia is then what Kant defined as the “Age of Friedrich the Great”, Jewish emancipation processes took place after that age. Nonetheless it should have become clear that they have their roots in that period. Also the successor of Friedrich, Friedrich Wilhelm II had not fulfilled the expectations which people had of him (see part 1). On the contrary, already in the year 1791 all public debates on the topic were outlawed; in the same year it was forbidden to deal with all topics concerning Human Rights, and on May 7, 1792, the reform of civic laws for the Jews was suspended. In the course of the national movement of early Romanticism, there was a rising anti-Semitism leading up to Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Grattenauer’s polemic article: Wider die Juden. Ein Wort der Warnung an alle unsere christlichen Mitbürger [Against the Jews. A warning to all Christian citizens] from 1803. By a police act of September 20, 1803, and by a Cabinets-Ordre in Ansehung der Druckschriften wider und für die Juden[Orders of the Cabinet considering publications against and in support of the Jews] of October 1, 1803 the whole debate was closed by the state31. It was only after the collapse of the Ancien Régime and the Napoleonic occupation that it was possible again to deal with this subject, from 1808 onward. Now the reform project was supported again by many Denkschriften which led to the Emanzipationsedikt of March 11, 181232. The more conservative faction in the Prussian clergy, like Leopold von Schroetter, maintained many restrictions on Jewish citizenship: for example he demanded that the Jews absolutely erase (vertilgen[plow under]) their cultural identity and assimilate to the Christian majority. On the other hand the liberal faction around Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich von Schuckmann called for full civil rights for Jews. It is exactly this group – including Wilhelm von Humboldt’s mentor Christian Dohm – that had initiated the debate 30 years before in the 1780s. noTes 1 2 K. Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, Munich 2003. M. Erlin, Berlin’s Forgotten Future. City, History, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany, 2004, p. 169. W. Schulze, Einführung in die Neuere Geschichte, Stuttgart 2002, p. 214. H.-G. de Riquetti comte de Mirabeau, Lettre remise à Fréderic Guillaume II, roi régnant de Prusse, le jour de son avènement au trône [Open Letter to Friedrich Wilhelm II], Berlin 1787. C. Goßlers, Versuch über das Volk. Zum Besten der Armen [An Essay about the People: For the Benefit of the Poor], Berlin 1786. Ch. Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung in Berlin. Eine Bewegung aus Migranten und Autodidakten, in I. D’Aprile (ed.), Europäische Ansichten. Brandenburg-Preußen um 1800 in der Wahrnehmung europäischer Reisender und Zuwanderer, Berlin 2004, pp. 192-194. S. Maimon, Salomon Maimons Lebensbeschreibung [Description of my Life], Berlin 1793. J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Neuwied 1962. Religion in Secularization and in Nation Building 3 4 5 6 7 8 208 Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 G. Lottes, ‘The State of the Art’. Stand und Perspektiven der ‚intellectual history’, in F.-L. Kroll (ed.), Neue Wege der Ideengeschichte. Festschrift für Kurt Kluxen zum 85. Geburtstag, 1996. H.-J. Lüsebrink (ed.), Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbruch Frankreich – Deutschland 1770 bis 1815, vol. 1-2, Leipzig 1997. Manasseh ben Israel, Rettung der Juden [ Salvation of the Jews], 1651. J. Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain, 1714. Ch. Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, Berlin-Stettin 1781, p. 35. Die “so zahlreichen Glieder der jüdischen Nation dem Staate nützlicher zu machen”, indem “alle demütigende[n] und den Geist niederschlagende[n] ZwangsGesetze, die den Juden einen Unterschied der Kleidung und Tracht, oder besondre äußerliche Zeichen auflegen” abgeschafft werden. G. 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Abbé Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs, Metz-Paris 1789. A. Thiéry, Dissertation sur cette question: Est-il des moyens de rendre les Juifs plus utile et plus heureux en France?, Paris 1788. Z. Hourwitz, Apologie des Juifs, Paris 1788. C. Jones, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution, London-New York 1990, pp. 255 f. L. Bendavid, Sammlung der Schriften an die Nationalversammlung, die Juden und ihre bürgerliche Verbesserung betreffend. Aus dem Französischen [Collections of Works Concerning the Jews and their Civic Improvement for the French National Assembly], Berlin 1789. D. Friedländers (trans.), “Antwort der Juden in der Provinz Lothringen auf die der Nationalversammlung von der sämmtlichen Stadtgemeinde zu Straßburg überreichte Bittschrift” [Response of the Jews in Lorraine], “Berlinischen Monatsschrift”, October 1791, pp. 365-392. M. Hirschel, Apologie der Menschenrechte. 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