linked to the reform of Judaism and Jewish life. Indeed, the line of demarca-
tion in the debate over Jewish emancipation in central Europe and in Jewish
responses to this debate was between Jews in the German states, on the one
hand, and in the Habsburg Monarchy and the Italian states, on the other.
For German Jews, the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 brought an end to
Jewish emancipation in 1815. After 1815, neither German Jews nor
Habsburg Jews nor Italian Jews were emancipated, and both lobbied for the
next half-century for legal equality and were emancipated within a year or
two of each other. There was, however, a crucial difference. German Jews
were struggling to overcome the loss of emancipation, a traumatic moment
that neither Habsburg Jews nor any other Jews had ever experienced. In
addition, German nationalists became increasingly wary of admitting Jews
into the ranks of the German nation. Not surprisingly, German Jews were
far more self-conscious about the image of Judaism, Jewish identity, and
Jewish life than any others. The difference between lobbying to attain eman-
cipation and to reattain it would be at the heart of the difference between
German-Jewish efforts to reform Judaism and the efforts of Jews in the
Habsburg Monarchy and Italy.
German Jews, non-German Jews, and the reform
of Judaism
The loss of emancipation elicited three responses from German Jews. For
some, the only recourse to the loss of emancipation was apostasy. These con-
versions were not out of religious conviction, but for practical reasons, hence
they came to be known as “dry baptisms.” Among those who opted for dry
baptism were Abraham Mendelssohn, the son of Moses Mendelssohn, who
converted his children, Fanny and Felix; Heinrich Marx, a successful lawyer
who, after being disbarred following disenfranchisement, converted his eight
children to Christianity, including most famously his son Karl; and the
German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who called his conversion “a ticket of
admission to European civilization.”
Some German-Jewish intellectuals responded to the loss of emancipation
in a project that came to be known as Wissenschaft des Judenthums(the scien-
tific study of Judaism). They believed that by subjecting all facets of
Judaism to intense academic scrutiny, the rational, ennobling, and citizen-
ship-worthy aspects of Jewish identity could be separated from the
irrational, ignoble, citizenship-impeding aspects. This project laid the basis
for what eventually came to be known, and is still known, as the academic
field of Jewish studies. As a means of gaining emancipation, though, this
endeavor had limited impact.
More important, Wissenschaft des Judenthumsprovided the tools for newly
emerging religious movements, notably Reform Judaism and Positive-
Historical Judaism, to distinguish between the essential and the non-essential
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 155