In retrospect, the experience of the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine in revolution-
ary and Napoleonic France anticipated several key aspects of the debate over
Jewish emancipation in central Europe. For unacculturated, religiously tradi-
tional Jews, legal emancipation would come at a price. Henceforth, these
Jews would be expected minimally to give up corporate autonomy and aban-
don Yiddish in favor of the vernacular; in some places, notably in Prussia and
in other German states, the price would be much higher: Jewish assimilation
qua conversion as a prerequisite for emancipation.
An exchange in 1831, for example, between the Protestant theologian
Heinrich Paulus and the German-Jewish journalist Gabriel Riesser under-
lines the disparate views of the conditions for emancipation. For Paulus,
nothing short of conversion would entitle Jews to citizenship. “As long as
Jews believe that continued existence must be in accordance with the
Rabbinic–Mosaic spirit, no nation could grant them civil rights.” Riesser
invoked the separation of religion and state to oppose this claim: “Religion
has its creed, the state its laws. ... The confusion of these principles leads to
misunderstanding, thoughtlessness, and falsehood.” In addition, proponents
of emancipation would divide over whether emancipation should be given to
Jews as a way to facilitate Jewish acculturation and integration, or whether
emancipation should be given to Jews only after they had already met the
term of emancipation.
The rise of nationalism after mid-century as an increasingly overarching
element of political and social policies added a corollary to the debate over
Jewish emancipation: did being worthy of citizenship necessarily qualify Jews
to be admitted into the ranks of the nation? This issue apposed the question
of Jewish emancipation with the ability of a nascent national movement to
absorb a population of unacculturated Jews without undermining itself. This
concern was voiced, for example, by the Hungarian statesman István
Széchenyi. Though a proponent of eventual Jewish emancipation, as late as
the 1840s he was deeply concerned that the newly revived Magyar culture
lacked the fortitude of more developed people like, say, the English, to man-
age the impact of Jews entering the mainstream. “The English lake,” he
claimed, “ could easily absorb a bottle of Jewish ink. Yet the same bottle of
ink would ruin the Hungarian soup.” By the 1860s, when Magyar culture
had begun to challenge Viennese culture, Jewish emancipation was easier to
imagine without dire consequences to Magyar culture. Thus, by the 1860s
the conditions attached to emancipation had diminished from radical assimi-
lation and religious reform that Széchenyi and Lajos Kossuth demanded
during the 1840s to the less demanding embrace of the Hungarian language
and literature by the 1860s.
These issues would elicit varied responses from Jewish intellectuals and
communal leaders. The more far-reaching the price of emancipation, the more
Jewish ideologues were willing to give up in order to be emancipated. Thus,
for German Jews the struggle for legal emancipation became singularly
154 The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880