from the enlightenment to the state of israel 443
has not always been used for state interference in Jewish religious
affairs. But, with the state maintaining the rabbinical seminary in France
from 1830, and the institution of the grand rabbinate from 1845, eman-
cipation may seem to have been purchased in part by the loss of religious
autonomy.^4
Jews in the German communities conquered by Napoleon, such as
Frankfurt and the Hanseatic cities, were granted emancipation on
French insistence, but despite (or because of) Jewish agitation for civil
rights at the Congress of Vienna, the fall of Napoleon produced an anti-
semitic backlash in many German states, encouraged by a romantic
notion of a Christian Teutonic culture in which Jews could play no part
unless – and often even if – they renounced their Judaism. In August
1819 a series of rioters, united under the rallying cry ‘Hep! Hep!’, attacked
Jews in Würzburg. The violence, though concentrated in Bavaria, Baden,
Halle and Württemberg, where it also involved rural areas, spread to
cities as far away as Copenhagen to the north, Danzig and Cracow to the
east and Graz to the south. The causes of the riots were partly economic,
after famine in rural areas in 1816 had left peasants indebted to Jewish
merchants and moneylenders. But there was also resentment at the new
freedoms of Jewish financiers, and the houses of the Rothschilds in
Frankfurt came under particular attack. The response of the states was
to withhold emancipation from the Jews in order to prevent such resent-
ment and disorder, and the following decades witnessed a struggle by
German Jews, who were increasingly middle class and drawn to the
large cities, especially Berlin, for equal civil and political rights. Jews
took part in the revolution of 1848– 9, identifying themselves with the
wider movement in Germany for the creation of a free, democratic and
liberal German state. In the new German Reich established after the
Franco- Prussian War of 1870, German Jews became in most respects
full citizens, although still with formal limitations on any role in
government and, in practice, no access to the highest academic posts in
the new universities or to officer posts in the army.^5
In this latter restriction French society at the end of the nineteenth
century remained conspicuously more open than its German counter-
part to Jewish participation in the state at the highest levels. Hence the
shock to all European Jews at the condemnation to life imprisonment
for treason in January 1895 of Alfred Dreyfus, a wealthy assimilated
Jew who had become an officer on the French general staff council.
Dreyfus was convicted on the basis of forged documents which appeared
to show that he had passed a secret military paper to the military