Jewish History (2016) 30: 257–284 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017DOI: 10.1007/s10835-017-9264-2

Lost to History: The Writings of Elias Birkenstein

EDWARD BREUERDepartment of Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, IsraelE-mail: ebreuer@mail.huji.ac.il

Abstract Elias Birkenstein (ca. 1778–1854), an early nineteenth-century German Jew whoadvocated for sweeping religious reforms, was largely ignored by his reform-minded contem-poraries and forgotten by later historians. This essay will first survey the political and religiousaftermath of the Congress of Vienna, especially the new expressions of anti-Jewish hostilityand the Jewish responses they engendered. Against this backdrop, Birkenstein’s writings, in-cluding some that were initially published anonymously, are examined in detail, underscoringtheir radical nature. The essay demonstrates that, despite their evident familiarity with thesewritings, other Jews refrained from addressing the most provocative aspects of Birkenstein’sarguments. It endeavors to elucidate some of the substantive and contextual reasons for thereluctance to confront Birkenstein and for his subsequent disappearance from the pages ofhistory.

Keywords Reform Judaism · Emancipation · Anti-rabbinic literature

Elias Birkenstein was born ca. 1778 in Rosenberg, a village in rural Baden.His upbringing and Jewish education were, by his own telling, traditional,and, hoping to prepare their son for a commercial position, his parents alsohired a Christian teacher to provide him with a general education. Birken-stein apparently had little interest or success in business and became a privateteacher of Jewish children instead. He first taught in Bockenheim, a town justbeyond the city limits of Frankfurt am Main, then moved northward to ruralOberhessen in or around 1817. He served as a private teacher in a cluster ofvillages and small towns centered around Battenberg, although he also seemsto have been something of an itinerant tutor plying the rural communities ofHessen and the northern Rhineland. In 1826, the Jewish communities aroundBattenberg formally hired him as their teacher; around this time, he mar-ried Blümchen Katz, a woman twenty-five years his junior, and had a son. In1831, he moved back to the Frankfurt region and took a position as the Jewishteacher in Bürgel, a small community just outside Offenbach, where a secondson was born. He was forced into retirement in 1848 and died in Bürgel in1854; he and his wife were interred there in the old Jewish cemetery.1

1I have pieced together the basic outlines of Birkenstein’s biography from Heinrich EduardScriba, Biographisch-literarisches Lexikon der Schriftsteller des Grossherzogthums Hessen,

258 E. BREUER

His career as a small-town Jewish teacher would not merit particular at-tention were it not for the fact that Birkenstein was an early and stridentadvocate of pedagogic and religious reform. He was also an active writer,publishing over a dozen short treatises, books, and essays, all of which madehis views accessible beyond the small communities in which he lived. Inhis writings of the late 1810s and early 1820s, he echoed many of the argu-ments being marshaled in support of the modernization of Jewish life in thecities and larger Jewish communities of German lands. He called for an over-haul of Jewish education in line with enlightened pedagogic approaches. Heemphasized the teaching of the fundamentals of Judaism in ways that werecommensurate with contemporary values, especially the cultivation of rea-son and a broad exposure to worldly knowledge. He was especially attunedto the need to foster moral development and systematic thinking among Jew-ish children as the only way to attain true piety and a meaningful religios-ity.2 One concrete example of this was his eschewal of the traditional barmitzvah practice of reading publicly from the Torah, which he derided asrote learning and meaningless performance. In its stead, he organized con-firmation speeches, orations imbued with sincere expressions of faith.3 Healso objected to the indecorous behavior that marred synagogue prayer andlamented the poor aesthetic quality of the services, which he condemned aslacking genuine spirituality. Birkenstein emphasized the need to pray in one’smother tongue in order to fully engage the heart and mind and embraced thenotion of regular sermons that edified the soul and enlightened listeners as tothe true meaning of the word of God.4

The importance of these early nineteenth-century calls for change in andof themselves rested mainly in their geographic provenance: with the excep-tion of the Westphalian territories under direct Napoleonic rule, almost all

2 vols. (Darmstadt, 1831), 1:25–28; C. Lammert, Die israelitische Gemeinde Bürgel am Main(Offenbach, 1924), 22–23; and J. Lebermann, “Ein ‘aufgeklärter’ jüdischer Lehrer in Hessenin 19. Jahrhundert u. sein Wirken,” Israelit, September 2, 1926, 13. I have also benefited fromdocuments and information graciously provided by Birkenstein’s great-great-grandson, thelate Rudolf Cohn. The details gleaned from these sources are not altogether consistent, andmuch remains obscure.2See Elias Birkenstein, Patriotischer Aufruf eines treuen Israeliten an die Fürsten Deutsch-lands (Büdingen, 1816), 22–28, and Freimüthige Gedanken über den Geist des Judenthums(Marburg, 1818), 50–51.3Elias Birkenstein, Rede bey der Confirmation eines jungen Israeliten (Frankfurt and Leipzig,1818), 4–5. Similar confirmations took place earlier in Dessau, Wolfenbüttel, and Seesen. SeeM. L. Kohn, “Einige Blicke auf die Bemühungen der deutschen Israeliten in Hinsicht ihrerKulturbeförderung,” Sulamith 3, pt. 1, no. 1 (1810): 11–12; and Michael Meyer, Response toModernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Oxford, 1988), 39–40.4See Birkenstein, Patriotischer Aufruf, 18–20, and Freimüthige Gedanken, 56–61.

LOST TO HISTORY 259

the discussions of early pedagogic and religious reform have focused on ur-ban centers with relatively large and well-established Jewish communities.5

Birkenstein worked on and published most of his early writings while livingin a rural, isolated region too small, or perhaps too poor, to hire a rabbi. Theappearance of these reform-minded ideas in the German hinterland wouldappear to add an important dimension to our understanding of the processesof modernization among the Jews of Germanic lands.6

However, even a cursory examination of Birkenstein’s writings revealseducation proposals far more radical. Birkenstein argued for the total exclu-sion of Hebrew from Jewish education and for much the same reasons sawno reason to retain it in the liturgy.7 He was even more vehement with regardto the study of the Talmud and rabbinic literature and their “nonsensical, piti-ful explanations of Scripture”; exposure to such contorted and degeneratetexts had a detrimental effect on the nurturing of young Jewish minds andserved as an impediment to true enlightenment.8 One particular concern thatconjoined his passion for proper instruction and his antipathy for traditionalteachings was the education of young women: he decried their exclusion, in-sisting that it was based on a rabbinic view of women that was as baseless asit was harmful.9

To be sure, Birkenstein was not entirely alone in fostering such views inthe 1810s, but the historical context is again instructive. Only a few yearsearlier, in response to the Prussian deliberations leading up to the emancipa-tion decree of 1812, David Friedländer had expressed similar views regardingHebrew education and its use in Jewish prayer, and he too had little use forthe study of rabbinic literature in the Jewish school curriculum.10 But, eventhough Friedländer was a wealthy Jewish communal official in Berlin withstature and power, his call for reform steered cautiously away from stridentexpressions of antirabbinic animus, and he never called for an outright ban

5On the Jews of Westphalia and early reforms, see Meyer, Response to Modernity, 34–43.6Birkenstein was, in fact, not alone, as attested by the writings of two other early nineteenth-century reform-minded Jews in small communities: A. L. Rosenthal, a teacher and associateof Birkenstein’s in Giessen, and Hirsch Cohen Rapaport, a rabbi in the Paderborn region ofPrussian Westphalia.7See Birkenstein, Patriotischer Aufruf, 16–21, and Freimüthige Gedanken, 59–61. These ar-guments were repeated, in much the same language, in Elias Birkenstein, Über die moralischeVerbesserung der Juden nebst einer Entlarvung des Rabbinismus (Marburg, 1822), 14–16.8Birkenstein, Patriotischer Aufruf, 6, 22–24, and Moralische Verbesserung, 11–12.9Birkenstein, Freimüthige Gedanken, 53–54. On the early calls for the education of Jewishwomen, see Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany,1800–1870 (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 34–40.10David Friedländer, Ueber die, durch die neue Organisation der Judenschaften in preußi-schen Staaten nothwendig gewordene, Umbildung (Berlin, 1812), 20–21, 29, 39–40.

260 E. BREUER

on the teaching of the Talmud. His immediate circumstances were, in anyevent, markedly different from those of Birkenstein in every regard, whichonce again underscores the latter’s historical uniqueness.11

But this was not all. Birkenstein also had quite a bit to say about a verybroad range of Jewish religious practices, and in his calls for reform he waswell ahead of other of his contemporaries. Certain dietary restrictions, hesuggested, originated with Moses in an effort to distance the Israelites fromcruel or insensitive behavior. The sages, however, misunderstood and misin-terpreted Moses’s teachings, which sought nothing more than the inculcationof good social and ethical habits, and they derived dietary prohibitions thatwere unnecessary, if not ridiculous.12 Birkenstein took a similar approachto circumcision, stating that it originated in the ancient world as a medi-cal provision whose physical benefit also served to distinguish followers ofthis God from others. But, where the health issues were no longer relevantand monotheism abounded among rational people, “it was no small follythat Jews retained circumcision,” especially given the risks and the cost.13

In its place, he advocated a public religious ceremony—for both males andfemales—during which the newborn was blessed and welcomed into thecommunity and the parents expressed their heartfelt thanks to the creatorand committed themselves to raising a responsible child.14

Birkenstein also devoted considerable attention to the purity laws as theyapplied to menstruating women and specifically their immersion in a mikvehor natural body of water following menstruation. Once again, he suggestedthat what Moses instituted as a sound health measure rooted in Middle East-ern climate conditions was then inappropriately applied to vastly differentconditions. He also claimed something more than this: that, while Moses hadspoken of the need for purification, he had said nothing about complete im-mersion in a body of flowing water, which again underscored the rabbinicpropensity to make things up. Birkenstein’s real concern with regard to thisparticular rabbinic move was the deleterious consequences it had on women’shealth since women living in areas without a mikveh—presumably the kindof rural area in which he lived—were forced to use creeks or small rivers fortheir monthly ablution, even in the dead of winter, something that ultimatelyaffected their health.15

11On Friedländer’s pamphlet, see Steven Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlight-enment, Family, and Crisis, 1770–1830 (Oxford, 1994), 134–37.12Birkenstein, Moralische Verbesserung, 96–108. The subject is also touched on in Birken-stein, Freimüthige Gedanken, 11–12.13Birkenstein, Moralische Verbesserung, 70–75 (quote 75).14Ibid., 77–79.15Birkenstein, Freimüthige Gedanken, 2–4, and Moralische Verbesserung, 79–83. See alsoElias Birkenstein, Gründliche Belehrung über das Baden der Judenweiber (Marburg, 1826),

LOST TO HISTORY 261

Birkenstein scattered his criticism of traditional practices in other direc-tions as well. He described the aliyot to the Torah as lacking purpose andcontributing not a little strife and tension to public worship.16 He viewedthe wearing of tefillin as pointless and no longer relevant.17 He depicted themyriad Sabbath laws as creating deep discomfort, and he ridiculed the ab-surd consequences of their application.18 The Yom Kippur rituals in general,and the opening recitation of Kol Nidre in particular, come in for no smallamount of mockery and criticism.19 Birkenstein also drew attention to thedisadvantageous position of women with regard to the laws of inheritance.20

Given the content and context of Birkenstein’s writings, the most intrigu-ing historical question is the near silence surrounding these provocative state-ments. One can find discussions of Birkenstein and his writings in the generalGerman review periodicals of the era, but he appears to have been almost en-tirely ignored by his fellow Jews. It is equally curious to see how a historianof German Jewish life like Isaak Marcus Jost, who wrote expansively and ingreat detail about modernization and reform in the first half of the century,referred to Birkenstein’s writings only in passing.21 Other late nineteenth- orearly twentieth-century histories, including those specifically focused on theReform movement, never mention him.22 It may be that Birkenstein is justone of those figures lost to history, an individual who deserves attention asa kind of footnote to the vagaries of history and historical writing, but littlemore. But there is more to the story, however, and some good historical andpolitical reasons for Birkenstein’s fate.

which is entirely devoted to this subject. And see generally Thomas Schlich, “Medicaliza-tion and Secularization: The Jewish Ritual Bath as a Problem of Hygiene (Germany 1820s–1840s),” Social History of Medicine 8 (1995): 423–42, esp. 426–27.16Birkenstein, Patriotischer Aufruf, 21.17Birkenstein, Moralische Verbesserung, 90–94.18Ibid., 40–48.19Ibid., 50–59.20Ibid., 83–88.21See the midcentury volumes devoted to German Jewry of the early nineteenth century: IsaakMarcus Jost, Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten von 1815 bis 1845 (Berlin, 1846), pt. 1, pp. 63–64, and Culturgeschichte zur neuern Geschichte der Israeliten (Berlin, 1847), 37.22This is true of S. Bernfeld, Juden und Judentum in neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1898);C. Seligmann, Geschichte der jüdischen Reformbewegung von Mendelssohn bis zur Gegen-wart (Frankfurt, 1922); Emanuel Schreiber, Reformed Judaism and Its Pioneers (Spokane,WA, 1892); and David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1907). Morerecently, Birkenstein was mentioned in two notes. See Michael Meyer, “Alienated Intellectu-als in the Camp of Religious Reform: The Frankfurt Reformfreunde, 1842–1845,” Associationfor Jewish Studies Review 6 (1981): 61–86, 84 n. 59, and Response to Modernity, 427 n. 122.

262 E. BREUER

I

The late 1810s—the very years in which Birkenstein began to publishactively—were a fraught and complicated time in the German lands. Therise and fall of Napoleon and the subsequent emergence of the German Con-federation in 1815 left a great deal of political uncertainty in its wake, in nosmall part because of the intrinsic weakness of the federalist concord andthe relative independence of the German member states. These events servedto sharpen the political divides and the intensified jostling between liberals,conservatives, and adherents of romanticism as to how German society couldadvance. The structural weakness and the ideological jostling gave rise toand were in turn leavened by a nascent German nationalism. Amid all this,a small number of liberal-minded representatives to the Congress of Viennasought to enshrine universal legal rights for Jews, but failed. The determi-nation of the civic status of the Jews was thus retained by individual statesand local authorities, with uneven and largely unhappy results.23 The broaderdebate that had been initiated by Christian Wilhelm von Dohm in 1781 re-garding the possibility and desirability of Jewish integration was left open,with no small degree of frustration for its advocates.24 And, given the degreeof social, economic, and cultural integration attained by growing numbers ofGerman Jews, the events of 1815 left many questions in their wake.

It was at this fraught moment that the debate concerning the status of theJews was ignited and intensified by an essay titled “Ueber die Ansprücheder Juden auf das deutsche Bürgerrecht” [On the claims of Jews to Germancivic rights] written by Friedrich Rühs (1781–1820), a professor of history atthe University of Berlin.25 The essay, which argued against extending legalequality to the Jews, appeared in February 1815 while the deliberations atthe Congress of Vienna were still ongoing and the issue of the Jews was yetto be determined. Although it appeared in an obscure and short-lived aca-demic journal, readers took immediate note of its aggressive stand againstthe integration of the Jews. Saul Ascher (1767–1822), an outspoken and

23The broad contours of this era are well discussed in Thomas Nipperdey, Germany fromNapoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 237–313;James Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989), 391–450; and Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, “Legal Status and Emancipation,” in German-Jewish History in Modern Times(4 vols.), ed. Michael Meyer (New York, 1997), 2:7–49, 27–36.24Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 2 vols.(Berlin and Stettin, 1781).25Friedrich Rühs, “Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden auf das deutsche Bürgerrecht,” Zeitschriftfür die neueste Geschichte, die Staaten- und Völkerkunde 3 (1815): 129–61. Rühs was a coed-itor of the Zeitschrift.

LOST TO HISTORY 263

independent-minded Jewish writer, swiftly penned a condemnation.26 Justas quickly, German Christians unsympathetic to the Jewish cause applaudedRühs and encouraged him to disseminate the essay more broadly, and a re-vised and expanded version was soon published in small book form.27 Thiselicited an appreciative review by the noted Heidelberg philosopher JakobFries (1773–1843), who amplified Rühs’s arguments even while differing onsome of his proposals. Sensing the political moment, Fries also republisheda revised book version of the review titled Ueber die Gefährdung des Wohl-standes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden [On the danger ofthe Jews for the welfare and character of the Germans].28 Before 1816 hadended, more writers jumped into the fray with treatises on both sides of theissue, including Jewish writers who did not hesitate to castigate Rühs andFries with a good measure of ridicule and scorn. Rühs, for his part, produceda second book that struck back at one of his more relentless Jewish critics,Michael Hess.29 This particular round of the debate concerning Jewish rightscarried on fairly intensely for another few years, right through the Hep Hepriots of 1819. It was against this background that Birkenstein published hisearliest writings.

In order to appreciate the polemic that was playing out before an expand-ing audience of readers, it is important to take brief note of the substanceof the arguments. Like other German Christians of his generation, Rühs wasconvinced that the future of the German states hinged on the removal of oldsocietal structures and impediments, including certain distinctions of class orestate that would stand in the way of national unity.30 The Jews, according toRühs, were precisely that kind of entity: they were a nation, even a state, untothemselves, “tied by origin, conviction, duty, faith, language and inclination”to each other far more than to the people among whom they lived. Positing theindivisibility of Germanness and Christianity, Rühs underscored the impossi-bility of the Jews becoming members of “another state” without renouncing

26Saul Ascher, Die Germanomanie: Skizze zu einem Zeitgemälde (Berlin, 1815).27Friedrich Rühs, Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht (Berlin, 1816).The preface explaining the circumstances of this reprinting was dated November 1815. Allcitations are taken from this edition.28See Jakob Fries, review of Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht,by Friedrich Rühs, Heidelbergische Jahrbücher der Litteratur 9, nos. 16–17 (1816): 241–64,and Ueber die Gefährdung des Wohlstandes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden(Heidelberg, 1816).29Friedrich Rühs, Die Rechte des Christenthums und des deutschen Volks (Berlin, 1816).Hess’s criticism will be discussed below.30Rühs, Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden, 32. See the insightful discussion of Rühs in JonathanKarp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe,1638–1848 (Cambridge, 2013), 194–99.

264 E. BREUER

Judaism: “nobody can serve two masters.” Rühs buttressed his argument byasserting two claims: that, contra Dohm, what was deemed offensive aboutJews resulted not from Christian mistreatment but from elements intrinsic toJudaism and that no amount of enlightenment (and here he referred to thelikes of Mendelssohn and Ascher) could drive these qualities out. Judaismcould not alter its essence, and those Jews who had abandoned its tenetswere “something in between Christians and Jews,” having created an “unten-able natural religion, an ethical code of convenience and profit, contrived bythem in foolish arrogance.” As long as Jews remained committed to Judaism,they were irredeemably beholden, in “reverence and blind obedience,” to the“grotesque and mindless kind of learning with which their Rabbis exercisedand destroyed their mental powers.”31 Conversion was their only salvation.

Fries shared much the same concern regarding the integral unity of the“German nation” and posited a similar problem regarding the unassimilabil-ity of the Jews, although he offered a more secularized perspective that em-phasized the damage that Jews caused as a “commercial caste.” He too spokeof the German Volk as Christian in essence, but he tended to see this in moreuniversalist-Kantian terms of morality and ethics. As such, he looked to theJews not for conversion but for a fully internalized sense of brotherhood withGermans. The choice facing the Jews, as far as Fries was concerned, camedown to this: since it was Jewish religion and doctrine that shaped them as adistinct people and state, they needed to rid themselves of their harmful sep-aratism by uprooting the “infamies of the Talmud” and completely eschew-ing “the abomination of the ceremonial law and rabbinism.”32 The Jews, asJacob Katz put it so succinctly, had to emancipate themselves from their tra-ditions.33 Failing this, they ought to be expelled.

The Jewish reactions to these treatises were varied. Ascher, dismayed atthe emergence of German nationalism as a new impetus for anti-Jewish mea-sures, immediately grasped the centrality of the German-Christian nexus inRühs’s thinking and its far-reaching repercussions. In positive—and, in ret-rospect, wishful—terms, he would insist that the age was surely “so far ad-vanced that we do not divide humans into breeds and races.”34 In the main,his response was heavily laden with sarcasm and ironic bemusement, ev-idently convinced that it was enough to draw attention to the self-evidentabsurdity of the new mania for Germanness.35 Other than touching briefly

31Rühs, Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden, 4–6, 24.32Fries, Ueber die Gefährdung, 21, 23.33Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA,1980), 82. See also the broader discussion in ibid., 74–91.34Ascher, Die Germanomanie, 38.35The tone and tenor of Ascher’s writing was well captured in Peter Erspamer, The Elusive-ness of Tolerance: The “Jewish Question” from Lessing to the Napoleonic Wars (Chapel Hill,

LOST TO HISTORY 265

on the Mendelssohnian notion of Judaism as revealed law,36 Ascher focusednot on Jews and Judaism but on the nature of Germanomania itself. Rühs andhis ilk, he sensed, were interested only in the convenience of Judaism as anantithesis to their political-religious vision of a new Germany.37

Other Jews, perhaps wary of attacking German nationalism head-on, fo-cused their responses elsewhere. Sigmund Zimmern (1796–1830), a law stu-dent at Heidelberg who had attended Fries’s lectures, charged anti-Jewishwriters with confusing cause and effect; like Dohm, Zimmern argued that thesocial and economic separatism ascribed to the Jews was the direct result ofcenturies of deprivation and maltreatment at the hands of Christians.38 Thedisparaging claims regarding the Jews and Judaism were either false and un-founded, based in part on plain distortions, or patently unfair.39 But Zimmernspent relatively little time responding to Fries’s defamations of rabbinic Ju-daism. Envisioning an enlightened and reformed Judaism that would be en-tirely commensurate with a modern progressive state, he simply noted thedegree to which rabbinic authority and a general adherence to Jewish lawwere already waning.40 His response, in essence, was to suggest that a gentleand patient attitude on the part of the German states would bring about thedesired change among Jews far more effectively than exclusion and threatsof expulsion.

Two other Jewish responses came from educators associated with the Phi-lanthropin school in Frankfurt, Jakob Weil (1792–1864) and Michael Hess(1782–1860). After challenging the historical and economic claims advancedby Rühs and Fries, Weil analyzed their assumptions concerning the rela-tionship between religion and state with the aim of underscoring their in-consistency and speciousness with regard to Jewish citizenship.41 Jews, by

NC, 1997), 126–27. See also Karen Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars against Napoleon:History, Culture and Memory (Cambridge, 2015), 113–15. Leopold Zunz had also written abrief response to Rühs that used irony and sarcasm as its primary weapons. In Ismar Schorsch’stelling, Zunz declined to publish this attack partly because of its susceptibility to misinterpre-tation. See Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism(Hanover, NH, 1994), 219–20.36Ascher, Die Germanomanie, 57–60. See also Pierre James, The Murderous Paradise (West-port, CT, 2001), 117–19.37Ascher, Die Germanomanie, 14.38Sigmund Zimmern, Versuch einer Würdigung der Angriffe des Herrn Prof. Fries auf dieJuden (Heidelberg, 1816), 10–11 and passim.39Ibid., 8–9.40Ibid., 22–23, 39, 43.41Jakob Weil, Bemerkungen zu den Schriften der Herren Professoren Rühs und Fries über dieJuden (Frankfurt, 1816), 34–35, 57–59. Although this book was published anonymously, Weilwas recognized as the author even in his lifetime. See Jost, Neuere Geschichte, 57.

266 E. BREUER

any reasonable reckoning, could not be said to form a separate state,42 and,since the confessional realities of German lands precluded a narrow theolog-ical definition of Christian, what remained was a Christian ethic sufficientlyuniversal—not to mention rational and enlightened—that surely applied toJudaism.43 Weil also devoted more attention than Zimmern to what Rühsand Fries had to say about Judaism and rabbinic sources. Speaking repeat-edly about the ignorance and intellectual dishonesty of their selective cita-tions with the clear intention of shaming them, he pointed to their relianceon the distinctly unscholarly and misleading collection of rabbinic sourcescompiled by Johann Andreas Eisenmenger.44 Weil, to be sure, had no inter-est in defending rabbinic Judaism in toto. His position, rather, was to insistthat an honest reckoning with rabbinic teachings would prove that they posedno barrier to Jewish civic equality.

Hess produced the longest and most systematic response. SubjectingRühs’s tract to a page-by-page critique, and combining elements of Zimmernand Weil, he dismissed the claims of Jewish separateness and the supposedsubmission to rabbinic authority and denied that rabbinic Judaism yielded aclash of religious and civic obligations.45 Of those who challenged Rühs, hewas among the clearest and most insistent in declaring that Judaism was to beregarded as only a confession.46 He, too, drew attention to Rühs’s utter igno-rance of rabbinic and medieval Judaism and his use of Eisenmenger’s fabri-cations and distortions.47 What really exercised Hess was Rühs’s hypocriticalview of religious change and progress; the very possibility of advancementthat informed the history of Christianity was denied the Jews and Judaism.48

Contrary to Rühs’s assertion that an enlightened Judaism was some grotesquedistortion of the assumed principles of rabbinic Judaism, Hess highlighted thesubstantive advances of German Jews as proof of Judaism’s true nature andtheir suitability for civic equality.49

42Weil, Bemerkungen, 37. Weil pointed three times to Jews serving as soldiers, emphasizingthe fact that Jews fought in the national armies of their countries of residence against theircoreligionists. See ibid., 3–4, 37, 64.43Ibid., 57–59. Weil, like Zimmern, seemed somewhat reluctant to make the point that a broadnotion of Christian ethics would owe a great deal to Judaism.44Ibid., 5–6, 12, and, more broadly, 12–20. The reference is to Johann Andreas Eisenmenger,Entdecktes Judenthum (Frankfurt, 1700).45Michael Hess, Freimüthige Prüfung der Schrift des Herrn Professor Rühs (Frankfurt, 1816),7–9, 71. It was this critique that prompted Rühs to respond in Die Rechte des Christenthumsund des deutschen Volks.46Ibid., 55–57.47Ibid., 20, 33, 63, 66–67.48Ibid., 9–10, 46, 65–66.49Ibid., 55–58, 73.

LOST TO HISTORY 267

II

Not widely noticed was another, altogether different Jewish entry into thefray. Patriotischer Aufruf eines treuen Israeliten an die Fürsten Deutsch-lands [A patriotic call from a sincere Israelite to the princes of Germany]appeared in early 1816, with the author identified only as “E.B.” and withno discernible hint as to provenance. This slim thirty-two-page tract madeno direct reference to the political questions of the moment.50 The authorwas certainly concerned with the integration of Jews into German society,but what he offered in this regard was a paean to enlightened religion and ed-ucation, calling for a Judaism of true spirituality and godliness as a first steptoward a lasting brotherhood of Christians and Jews. Setting out to reversethe perceived religious and moral decline of the Jews, and echoing Rühs andFries, he was adamant that it was “absolutely necessary that the teachingsof the Talmud and the Sages among [his] coreligionists be eradicated [aus-rotte].”51 In order to illustrate “the harmful influence that the Talmud hascaused and still causes in [his] nation,” he offered a half dozen examplesof rabbinic literature (or its medieval appropriation) showing that “vulgarconcepts . . . and superstitions of all kinds are very frequently found in theTalmud.”52 For good measure, he referred his readers to other “well-known”books that would buttress his contention, including the writings of ChristianHebraists with ambivalent views of rabbinic literature and the hostile work ofEisenmenger.53 Patriotischer Aufruf then turned to the woeful state of Jewisheducation as a casualty of the perniciousness of rabbinic Judaism, but hereit proclaimed its firm belief in the Jewish future. Resting his hopes on thesalutary effect of an enlightened education, the author called on governmentauthorities to intervene by strictly regulating Jewish schools, banning He-brew and the Talmud, and introducing textbooks that inculcated values morein line with the spirit of the times.54

The reactions to Patriotischer Aufruf were telling. The only known Jew-ish response appeared quickly, and it came not from the likes of Weil andHess but from another, little-known resident of Frankfurt named Elias Aron

50Although it appeared in 1816, one contemporary writer suggested that Patriotischer Aufrufhad been submitted to the publisher the previous year, which might explain the absence ofany reference to Rühs and the renewed political debate. See Johann Jakob Kromm, Moses undJesus: Ein Wort für unsre Zeit, veranlaßt durch Elias Aarons Schloß “Brief an seinen FreundMenzico. . .” (Büdingen, 1816), 22–23n.51Birkenstein, Patriotischer Aufruf, 5–6.52Ibid., 6–7.53Ibid., 16. The Hebraists he cited were Johann Jacob Schudt and John Lightfoot.54Ibid., 27–30.

268 E. BREUER

Schloss (1750–1834).55 His slim tract, written as a fictional letter, followedPatriotischer Aufruf in ignoring the broader political issues, but it also paidno heed to the call for a thoroughgoing reform of Judaism and Jewish edu-cation.56 Instead, it castigated the author of Patriotischer Aufruf for his han-dling of rabbinic texts, facetiously suggesting that it must have issued froma Christian masquerading as an “enlightened” Jew.57 With no small amountof pique, Schloss showed how the texts had been woefully misunderstoodor distorted, pointing out their true, salutary meaning and, cognizant of aChristian audience, their consonance with New Testament teachings. Oncehe was done ridiculing Patriotischer Aufruf, he vented his exasperation at thepatently unfair criticisms to which Jews were subjected.58 It was in this con-text that he cited Rühs’s writing as well as another anti-Jewish work that hadrecently appeared, excoriating both for drawing their rabbinic material fromEisenmenger.59 Schloss’s point was clear, even if merely implied: Patrioti-scher Aufruf was indistinguishable from contemporary anti-Jewish writings,and it deserved the same denunciation.

The Christian reviews, written after Schloss’s tract had appeared, were al-together different.60 They praised Patriotischer Aufruf for its dispassionateand honest portrayal of the problems affecting Jews and Judaism, applaudingthe Jewish author for his determination in drawing his brethren away from

55Elias Aron Schloss was the son of Aron Schloss, a rabbi in Offenbach in the 1780s. Hisonly other known publication was Ueber Betteljuden und deren Abschaffung; mit einem Blickauf den Judenleibzoll, in einem Sendschreiben an den Herrn . . . W. Breidenbach (Frankfurt,1806).56Elias Aron Schloss, Brief Elias an seinen Freund Isaac Menzico: Zur Beleuchtung der kürz-lich anonym erschienenen Schrift betitelt: Patriotischer Aufruf eines treuen Israeliten an dieFürsten Deutschlands (Rodelheim, 1816). One has the impression that Schloss was an enlight-ened traditionalist, uninterested in any reform-minded portrayal of Judaism, and content withmerely asserting the sages’ wisdom without being drawn into a full-blown defense of rabbinicJudaism.57Ibid., 4.58Ibid., 36.59Ibid., 37–48. The second book was Die Juden und ihre Gegner: Ein wort zur Beherzi-gung für Wahrheitsfreunde, gegen Fanatiker (Frankfurt, 1816), which had appeared anony-mously. A second edition later that same year indicated that the author was Gerhard Friedrich,a Lutheran minister also based in Frankfurt.60Review of Patriotischer Aufruf, Allgemeiner Anzeiger der Deutchen, no. 171 (June 29,1816): 1781–84; Kromm, Moses und Jesus, 22–52 (a detailed critique of Schloss); and re-view of Patriotischer Aufruf and Moses und Jesus, Neue theologische Annalen 1 (April–May1819): 347–50. This last review was interesting in that it addressed an aspect of PatriotischerAufruf that others had ignored, namely, the call for government intervention in banning theteaching of Hebrew and the Talmud. It was the opinion of this reviewer that such matters werebeyond the reach of government authority and were best left to the Jewish communities toregulate.

LOST TO HISTORY 269

rabbinic Judaism and toward the shining light of true religion. Noting thatthere were always those who remained blindly mired in the past and stoodin the way of progress, they excoriated Schloss’s reaction for its crude slan-der and argued that such Jewish writing only confirmed the inanities of theTalmud. In Moses und Jesus, a book-length response, Johann Jakob Krommspecifically criticized Schloss for ignoring Patriotischer Aufruf ’s call to em-brace truth and enlightenment, taking Schloss’s narrow focus on rabbinictexts to be indicative of the very backwardness that was at issue here. In-terestingly, these reviewers did not exhibit the kind of overarching hostilityto Jews and Judaism being advanced by Rühs and Fries. The impression theyconveyed was of an openness to the kind of redeemed Judaism advanced byPatriotischer Aufruf, denuded of all rabbinic accretions, and fully primed forthe dawning of a new era.

III

No one initially appears to have connected Patriotischer Aufruf with ananonymous treatise published in 1818 and titled Freimüthige Gedanken überden Geist des Judenthums, oder der Talmud in seiner Blöse als Quelle dergröbsten Missbräuche [Forthright thoughts on the spirit of Judaism; or, TheTalmud exposed as the source of the worst abuses].61 The author of this bookidentified himself only as “a citizen of the world” and made every effort toconceal his religion, although one contemporary writer presumed—correctly,as it happens—that he was Jewish.62 The book opened, curiously enough, bydenouncing the practice of Jewish women’s immersion in a mikveh. It seizedon the fact that women living in regions that lacked adequate facilities had nochoice but to immerse in rivers or lakes even in inclement weather, therebycompromising their health.63 Beyond women’s health, the author’s real tar-get was the source of such needlessly harmful religious practices, namely,rabbinic Judaism and its distortions of Scripture. He went on to excoriaterabbinic teachings as the greatest impediment to Jewish integration into thestate, a problem compounded by a propensity to haggling and petty tradeand lack of engagement in useful economic activity. He cited liturgical texts

61Freimüthige Gedanken appeared in late 1818 and even attempted to obscure the place ofpublication and publisher by printing “Germanien, in allen Buchläden,” on the cover. A catalogof new books, however, listed the publisher as Krieger in Marburg. See Verzeichniß neuerBücher, die vom Januar bis Juni 1819 wirklich erschienen sind (Leipzig, 1819), 41.62Zeitung für die elegante Welt, vol. 19 (1819), in its Intelligenzblatt of October 19, 1819(no. 31) (unpaginated).63Birkenstein, Freimüthige Gedanken, 2–4.

270 E. BREUER

and other writings in order to demonstrate the Jewish sense of superiorityand the condescending view of non-Jews.64 Then, working his way throughdozens of passages in the Talmud, he cited examples of rabbinic foolishnessand stupidity, even blaming Jews for introducing their harmful superstitionsto Christians.65 Along the way, he also paused to lash out at contemporaryJewish educators who produced schoolbooks in German and in modern stylebut nevertheless perpetuated all that rabbinic gibberish.66 He ended this sec-tion by referring readers to Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judenthum for moreexamples, adding that those interested in seeing the emergence of a “new Ju-daism” would do well to learn from it.67 The second half of the book turnedto the subject of Jewish education and worship, stressing the need for Jewsto undertake serious reforms in both areas in line with the enlightened prin-ciples of the age. Instead of wasting their time with rabbinic inanities, Jewishyoung people—women no less than men—needed to be educated by well-trained teachers who would focus on values designed to produce moral anduseful members of society. Jews would also do well to pray only in a lan-guage they understood (i.e., German) and to focus exclusively on universalreligious values. Such reforms would enable them to appreciate that Scrip-ture really demanded nothing more than to stand before God in spiritual andmoral sincerity.

Freimüthige Gedanken garnered a little attention.68 A brief book noticethat appeared within a year applauded the author for encouraging the re-finement of the Jews. It surmised that the author was “himself an Israelite,”presciently noting that only a Jew could combine familiarity with the Talmudwith a warm attachment to that nation.69 The book also received a regularreview in the prestigious Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung. This review did notconcern itself with the issue of authorship, although it did compare the bookto other German Christian writings on the Jews by pronouncing it to be com-paratively lacking in clarity and organization. The reviewer clearly acceptedits arguments as true and legitimate, although he noted that they were “alsovery exaggerated.” He also remarked that a radical reformation of Judaismalong the lines proposed by the book meant that its adherents would effec-

64Ibid., 5–8.65Ibid., 24.66Ibid., 41. He specifically singled out M. H. Bock, Emunat Yisrael, oder Katechismus derisraelitische Religion (Berlin, 1814).67Birkenstein, Freimüthige Gedanken, 46–47 (see also 33).68The unknown religious affiliation of the author might well have been a factor in the publicreception of the book. For those who assumed Christian authorship, Freimüthige Gedankenwas hardly notable among the anti-Jewish writings that appeared after 1815.69Review of Freimüthige Gedanken, Intelligenzblatt (Zeitung für die elegante Welt), Octo-ber 19, 1819.

LOST TO HISTORY 271

tively cease being Jews, pointing to a gradual and voluntary turn to Christian-ity. The upshot of this was cast in distinctly political terms: while the writerhad no issue with Jews gaining full civic rights, he stressed the concomitantJewish assumption of all obligations and duties.70

Among Jews, Freimüthige Gedanken was ignored, with the exception oftwo references—as an “excellent work” and as being “highly acclaimed”—by none other than Elias Birkenstein. In the first of these, an essay that ap-peared above his name in the popular Allgemeiner Anzeiger der Deutschen,Birkenstein struck a less strident tone than he had in Freimüthige Gedankenbut nonetheless reprised its main argument: that rabbinic Judaism and the Tal-mud in particular disfigured the purity of Mosaic teachings and that modern-day adherents of the Talmud were shackling Jews to its irredeemably harmfulteachings.71 The second publication was a small schoolbook, written in thequestion-and-answer style then in pedagogic vogue, that set out lessons to bederived from the Ten Commandments. This book generally stuck to its pos-itive focus on the inculcation of proper faith and morality, but it too insistedthat banning the Talmud was necessary in order to guide students from blindfaith toward enlightenment, true knowledge, and spiritual refinement.72

IV

Birkenstein’s writings of 1820–21 focused on educational reform and per-haps for this reason did not relate to the synagogue reforms then being un-

70Review of Freimüthige Gedanken, Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung, no. 192 (August 1819):1534–35. The reviewer was apparently objecting to certain unspecified Jewish exemptions.71Elias Birkenstein, “Die Zweckmäßigkeit des religiösen israelitischen Vereins zu Frankfurtbetreffend,” Allgemeiner Anzeiger der Deutschen 60, no. 276 (1820): 2969–75 (for the ref-erence to Freimüthige Gedanken, see ibid., 2971–72). The article was signed “Elias Birken-stein, israelitischer Lehrer in Echzell,” Echzell being a community sixty kilometers to thesouth of Battenberg without a community-run school where he seems to have taught privately.(In Moralische Verbesserung, 68, 143, Birkenstein denounced the rabbi of nearby Friedbergin terms that suggested some familiarity, adding further evidence that he had spent time in thisregion.) Birkenstein penned this essay with the aim of drawing attention to an “israelitischerVerein in der Stadt Frankfurt a.M.” and its similar efforts to expose the backwardness and er-roneous teachings of the Talmud. There is, however, no evidence of such a Jewish association,at least not in any formal or institutional sense, and the reference remains unclear.72Elias Birkenstein, Die zehen Gebote katechetische erklärt zunächst für die israelitische Ju-gend (Marburg, 1821), reprinted in Sammlung Vermischer Aufsätze zur religiöse und sittlichenVerbesserung der Juden, ed. Elias Birkenstein and A. L. Rosenthal (Marburg, 1823), 40–48.(The texts reprinted in the Sammlung Vermischter Aufsätze retained their original page num-bering.) For the reference to Freimüthige Gedanken, see Birkenstein, Die zehen Gebote, ix–x.Die zehen Gebote was reviewed in the Allgemeines Repertorium der neuesten in- und aus-ländischen Literatur für 1821, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1821), 4:396–98. The review appeared in asection titled “Israelitische Literatur.”

272 E. BREUER

dertaken in Hamburg, namely, the establishment of the Neue israelitischeTempelverein and the subsequent opening of its synagogue in October 1818.But Birkenstein was cognizant of these developments and was very muchencouraged by them, and in 1822 he published a 150-page treatise that wasan unprecedented manifesto for Jewish reform. This work, Über die moralis-che Verbesserung der Juden nebst einer Entlarvung des Rabbinismus [On themoral improvement of the Jews, with an unmasking of rabbinism], left no as-pect of Jewish life untouched.73 He reprised his call to remove all Hebrewand rabbinic texts from the Jewish school curriculum and replace them withsubjects commensurate with enlightenment and morality. The harmful effectof rabbinic teachings was a central concern and a refrain that ran through thework, which denounced them in the harshest of terms: nonsensical, intoler-ant, immoral, superstitious, and shortsighted. In the midst of this, Birkensteinmade sure to suggest two other books for further reading: Eisenmenger’s En-decktes Judenthum and a certain Freimüthige Gedanken.74

At the same time, and more hopefully, Birkenstein applauded the Tempeland referred numerous times to Seckel Isaac Fränkel’s defense of the newHamburg prayer book against the objections raised by the local rabbinate.75

But Birkenstein went far beyond the Hamburg synagogue reforms and of-fered a long list of normative religious practices that needed to be abandonedor radically recast, including circumcision, dietary laws, mikveh, and the Dayof Atonement.76 In the final section, he lashed out in a different direction,excoriating “so-called learned Jews” for perpetuating Jewish ignorance. Hespecifically criticized Wolf Heidenheim at length for his popular multivol-ume Sabbath and holiday prayer books, accusing him of performing a grossdisservice by handsomely—not to mention profitably—repackaging the im-moral nonsense that constituted traditional Jewish prayer.77 He ended thebook by reiterating his call for government intervention in Jewish schools,without which Jews would never manage to extricate themselves from theirbackward traditions and undertake the necessary reforms.78

This remarkable statement on behalf of religious reform was not with-out its problematic features. For all its daring and scope, MoralischeVerbesserung was not a systematic treatise in any sense of the word. Instead

73Moralische Verbesserung was published in Marburg. Birkenstein signed the preface “Bat-tenberg, June 1822.”74Birkenstein, Moralische Verbesserung, 38.75Seckel Isaac Fränkel, Schutzschrift des zu Hamburg erschienenen Israelitischen Gebetbuchsfür die Mitglieder des Neuen-Tempelvereins nebst einer Beleuchtung des Rabbinismus (Ham-burg, 1819). See Birkenstein, Moralische Verbesserung, 32, 38–39, 108–9, 122–23.76Birkenstein, Moralische Verbesserung, 40–48, 50–59, 70–79, 83–88, 90–94, 96–108.77Ibid., 126–39.78Ibid., 125, 148–50.

LOST TO HISTORY 273

of principles or criteria to guide the proposed changes, Birkenstein oftenmade do with incredulity and mockery. The quality of the writing itself, asone review would point out, ranged so noticeably between base and excel-lent language that the author was presumed to have made use of unspecifiedsources.79 And, indeed, a careful examination reveals that Birkenstein madeliberal and unattributed use of others’ work, splicing anything from a fewsentences of Johann David Michaelis to a dozen pages of the controversialrationalist Karl Friedrich Bahrdt.80

Given the general debate over Jewish integration then unfolding in thewestern states of the German confederation and the concomitant beginningsof Jewish reform, Moralische Verbesserung was sure to attract attention, andit did. Within a year and a half of its appearance, the book was reviewed in atleast three well-known periodicals, and, not entirely surprisingly, it was citedin one of the endless political debates over Jewish rights in the lower chamberin Baden.81 All these German Christians took Birkenstein to be stating theobvious: that Jewish education and Judaism more broadly were in decrepitcondition and in need of immediate reform. Although they never emphasizedthat his treatise had been written by a Jew, they certainly regarded it as anatural and even expected Jewish entry into the ongoing debates. Two of thereviews, in fact, were placed next to other recent publications on the Jews,ranging from hostile to sympathetic.82 A third review, appearing once again

79Review of Moralische Verbesserung, Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 21, no. 120(June 1824): 478–80, 480.80I have thus far succeeded in finding three instances of such borrowing (and there are almostcertainly more): (a) cf. Johann David Michaelis, Mosaisches Recht, 6 vols. (Frankfurt, 1778),4:216–17 (sec. 206), to Birkenstein, Moralische Verbesserung, 48–49; (b) cf. Karl FriedrichBahrdt, Ausführung des Plans und Zweks Jesu (Berlin, 1784), 181–95, to Birkenstein, Morali-sche Verbesserung, 18–27; and (c) cf. Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Scherer, Bibelcommentar zumHandgebrauch für Prediger, Schullehrer und Layen (Altenberg, 1799), 75, to Birkenstein,Moralische Verbesserung, 71–72. There is also evidence of his use of the Deutsche Ency-clopädie (24 vols. [Frankfurt a.M., 1778–1807], 17:246) and the writing of Thomas AugustScheuring (see below). Most of this plagiarized material related to the ancient world and pre-sumptions regarding the original context and meaning of biblical practices.81Verhandlungen der Stände-Versammlung des Grossherzogthum Baden 1823 (Karlsruhe,1823). For the reference to Moralische Verbesserung, see ibid., 110 (part of a January 27,1823, session).82The first review of Moralische Verbesserung appeared in Allgemeines Repertorium derneuesten in- und ausländischen Literatur für 1822, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1822), 4:382–83, in asection titled “Schriften für und wider die Juden” that included books ranging from an anti-Jewish screed of Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky’s that even the reviewer found extreme to acollection of Jewish sermons delivered in Cassel by Moses Mordechai Büdinger. The secondreview—the one appearing in Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung—was printed in a sec-tion titled “Vermischte Schriften” and preceded by reviews of two books by Johann GeorgDiefenbach, one arguing for the appointment of university professors of Jewish theology to

274 E. BREUER

in the Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung, was different on two counts. First, it con-textualized Moralische Verbesserung in Jewish terms rather than the Germandebate over the Jews: it appeared immediately after a brief notice regardingthe Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums, the new periodical editedby Leopold Zunz on behalf of the Berlin Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaftder Juden, and the reviewer segued to the book as a turn from scholarshipto a more “frequently discussed subject.” The review was also different inthat it challenged a central aim of the book: it called for the authorities to re-move legal impediments to integration without involving itself in regulatingJewish education, arguing that government involvement would arouse Jewishresentment and work against the desire to draw Jews closer to Christianity.83

Among Jews, Moralische Verbesserung was met with silence. Whetherout of frustration at being ignored by other Jews or encouraged by the mod-icum of attention he was beginning to receive from some non-Jewish states-men and writers, Birkenstein joined with a like-minded teacher, A. L. Rosen-thal of Giessen, to republish some of his writings as a collection dedicated tothe religious and moral improvement of the Jews.84 This collection includedRede bey der Confirmation eines jungen Israeliten, the collection of confir-mation speeches delivered under Birkenstein’s tutelage in Oberhessen; Diezehen Gebote, his catechism on the Ten Commandments; and MoralischeVerbesserung. To these were added Noch ein Wort über das Verhältniss derJuden zum Staate, a twenty-eight-page essay with a preface almost as long,written in the autumn and winter of 1822–23 and published in this collectionfor the first time. There are indications in the text that Birkenstein intendedto publish it anonymously and pass it off as a work of a Christian writer, buthe evidently changed his mind.

Noch ein Wort über das Verhältniss der Juden zum Staate was Birken-stein’s most political work, and it filled out the programmatic contours of histhinking in clear and explicit terms. The essay was occasioned by a debateregarding Jewish rights that took place in the summer of 1822 in the lower

further the assimilation of young Jews. Another journal editor, Heinrich E. G. Paulus, listedthe book under “Neue Bücher.” See Sophronizon 5 (1823): 129.83Review of Moralische Verbesserung, Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung, no. 211 (August 1823):1684–85. This German reviewer would not be the only one to link Moralische Verbesserungwith the Wissenschaft des Judenthums in the pages of this periodical. A decade later, Moralis-che Verbesserung was referred to in a review of Leopold Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichenVorträge der Juden (Berlin, 1832). See Anton Theodor Hartmann, “Jüdische Alterthümer,”Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung, no. 210 (September 1833): 1674.84Birkenstein and Rosenthal, eds., Sammlung Vermischter Aufsätze. Only one of the five itemspublished in this collection belonged to Rosenthal, a book titled Das Opfer der Israeliten thatwas also published concurrently as a separate work. See Das Opfer der Israeliten (Marburg,1823).

LOST TO HISTORY 275

chamber of the Grand Duchy of Baden. The outcome of the deliberation wasto deny the Jews the removal of remaining legal disabilities, and the decisionwas predicated on the fact that the Christian legislators did not deem the Jewsto be sufficiently rehabilitated to warrant complete legal equality. That is, asone scholar put it, they “expected the Jews to pay for emancipation in thecoin of a ‘political and moral self-improvement.”’85 Jews attentive to suchproceedings and the debates that ensued in the popular press were frustratedby the premises of this position, even though a growing number of them hadalready internalized some measure of its terms.86

Birkenstein’s response to reports of the deliberations in Karlsruhe—and,indeed, to the broader question of how the German states were to relate to theJews—was to offer a full-throated endorsement of the Baden assembly.87 Hedevoted the first half of the essay to describing, from the Bible on, the Jews’sense of superiority and their deep-seated national pride. They believed thatGod cared only for them and that their historical mandate in the diasporawas to maintain their separateness. The latter half of the essay turned to thequestion of what was to be done, and again Birkenstein was unequivocal. In-sofar as the Jews remained in the clutches of their rabbis—depicted as univer-sally ignorant, superstitious, and hypocritical—there was no chance for realchange. The solution lay with the German authorities, who alone could de-liver the Jews from their ignorance by imposing a modern education on theirchildren, imbuing them with enlightened values that would prepare them formembership in European society.88 The preface repeated much of the sameargument, but it added an important dimension by attacking what had becomea stock Jewish argument that had originated with Dohm: that the perceivedshortcomings of the Jews, especially their ignorance and intolerance, resultedfrom their long-standing exclusion by Christian societies.89 Birkenstein, likeRühs, Fries, and other writers opposed to granting the Jews full civic equal-ity, would have none of this reversal of cause and effect. The truth, he argued,was that Christians had always tried to enlighten the Jews and improve their

85Christopher Clark, “German Jews,” in The Emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and Protes-tants, ed. R. Liedkte and R. Wendehorst (Manchester, 1999), 122–47, 140. See also ReinhardRürup, “Die Emancipation der Juden in Baden,” in Emancipatiton und Antisemitismus (Göt-tingen, 1975), 37–73, 52–53.86See David Sorkin, “The Impact of Emancipation on German Jewry: A Reconsideration,” inAssimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. J. Frankel and S. J.Zipperstein (Cambridge, 1992), 177–98, 184.87Elias Birkenstein, Noch ein Wort über das Verhältniss der Juden zum Staate, in Birkensteinand Rosenthal, eds., Sammlung Vermischter Aufsätze, 1, 13.88Ibid., 13–28.89Ibid., v.

276 E. BREUER

lot. The cause of Jewish ignorance and intolerance was the unrelenting gripof rabbinism and its manifold depravities.90

In the opening to the preface, as Birkenstein was explaining the purposeof the work, he acknowledged that much had been written about the Jewsin the past five years, and he did not hesitate to make use of this literaturein this work. He cited explicitly from “the excellent Fries” and from themore obscure Kromm91 and toward the end of the preface also offered hisreaders a short list of recommended readings that included books hostile tothe Jews by Ludolf Holst and Gerhard Friedrich as well as Rühs’s Ueberdie Ansprüche der Juden.92 The fourth item on his list was FreimüthigenGedanken, and, in case anyone missed it, he also drew the reader’s attentionto this “acclaimed” work elsewhere in the short treatise.93 Beyond these ex-plicit citations, Birkenstein made use of this material without attribution, aswhen he drew details and sentences from Rühs’s argument about how Jewshad been relatively well treated in the premodern era. But perhaps the mostegregious case was his use of a published 1819 memorandum written byThomas August Scheuring and addressed to the Bavarian Diet, a work thatargued vehemently against the emancipation of the Jews on account of theirutter foreignness and unassimilability.94 At least two pages and numerous

90Ibid., viii–xvii.91Ibid., 12. Recall that Kromm had defended Patriotischer Aufruf against the attacks ofSchloss.92Ibid., xvii–xviii. Birkenstein was referring to Ludolf Holst, Judenthum in allen dessenTheillen, aus einem staatswissenschaftlichen Standpunct betrachtet (Mainz, 1821); andFriedrich, Die Juden und ihre Gegner. More than any other book published in these years,Judenthum in allen dessen Theillen focused a great deal of attention on the reform-mindedand enlightened Jews in an effort to determine whether they represented the beginnings of asustained rehabilitation. Holst’s answer was negative. See ibid., 115–16. On Holst, see Katz,From Prejudice to Destruction, 92–94, 154.93Birkenstein, Noch ein Wort über das Verhältniss der Juden zum Staate, 10 (where the workis referred to as “mit so vielem Beifalle gekrönt worden ist”), 15. A long paragraph fromFreimüthige Gedanken is also cited in the preface. See ibid., iii.94Thomas August Scheuring, Das Staatsbürgerrecht der Juden: Eine unpartheiische Würdi-gung in Beziehung auf die . . . Ständeversammlung in Baiern eingereichte Vorstellung(Würzburg, 1819). Note that Scheuring’s work was announced in July 1819 shortly beforethe outbreak of the Hep Hep riots in Würzburg, which spread from there to other Germanregions. The relationship of the literary-political agitation in general and Scheuring’s workin particular to the anti-Jewish violence is discussed in Jacob Katz, “The Hep Hep Riots inGermany of 1819: The Historical Background,” Zion 38 (1973): 62–117, and From Prejudiceto Destruction, 97–104; and Stephan Rohrbacher, “The ‘Hep Hep’ Riots of 1819: Anti-JewishIdeology, Agitation, and Violence,” in Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in ModernGerman History, ed. C. Hoffmann, W. Bergmann, and H. W. Smith (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002),23–42.

LOST TO HISTORY 277

sentences in Birkenstein’s Noch ein Wort über das Verhältniss der Juden zumStaate were copied verbatim from Scheuring’s work.95

V

It is not clear when Birkenstein’s contemporaries made the connection be-tween the signed and the anonymous works—including the FreimüthigenGedanken—but by 1823 the ideas being advocated by this Jewish educa-tor were available for all to see.96 Birkenstein went on to publish three moreshort and medium-length works and two articles in the next five years97 andmore in the 1830s, but for the most part he simply repeated the same well-worn themes of his early writings (not to mention the regular citation of hisown publications). By the time his collection appeared, however, the die hadbeen cast: with one exception, to which we will soon turn, Jews ignored himentirely.

In attempting to plumb the silence surrounding Birkenstein’s writings, onemust begin with the most obvious question: Was it possible that his fellowGerman Jews were simply unaware of his writings? The answer is plainly no.Birkenstein’s writings, whether published anonymously or under his name,had appeared on booklists announcing recent publications, and MoralischeVerbesserung was promptly reviewed in respectable periodicals that circu-lated throughout the German states.98 The reviews of this work and the ear-lier Die zehen Gebote were placed alongside reviews of other Jewish publi-cations, as, for example, the writings of Gotthold Solomon and Eduard Kley

95Compare Birkenstein, Noch ein Wort über das Verhältniss der Juden zum Staate, 1–3, 6–9,11–12, to Scheuring, Das Staatsbürgerrecht der Juden, 6–7, 10–11, 19–21, 23.96Scriba’s Biographisch-literarisches Lexikon listed all the writings discussed above in hisentry on Birkenstein.97Elias Birkenstein, Die Judenbekehrer und Mystiker (Siegen, 1824), Gründliche Belehrungüber das Baden der Judenweiber (1826), and Eine gründliche Darstellung über dasErziehungswesen der Juden und ihren moralischen Standpunct (Marburg, 1827). (The pref-ace of Die Judenbekehrer und Mystiker was signed “E.B.”; a review two years later iden-tified Birkenstein as the author. The preface of Gründliche Belehrung über das Baden derJudenweiber was again signed “E.B.” Eine gründliche Darstellung über das Erziehungswe-sen der Juden is signed only a “coreligionist of the Jews,” but the preface refers the reader toBirkenstein’s Noch ein Wort über das Verhältniss der Juden zum Staate.) In his Biographisch-literarisches Lexikon, Scriba included all three books in his list of Birkenstein’s publications.In addition, Birkenstein published two signed articles: one in the Westphälishen Anzeiger,no. 52 (1828), which I could not obtain; and a shorter version, “Über Bildung der israeli-tischen Jugen, besonders in sittlicher Hinsicht,” J. P. Rossel’s allgemeine Monatschrift fürErziehung und Unterricht 10 (1828): 320–28.98These periodicals were decidedly not regional publications that circulated largely in Hessenor the North Rhineland; some were edited and published in cities such as Leipzig and Ros-tock. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to plumb the nature of book and periodical

278 E. BREUER

and the Jewish periodicals Jedidya and Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft desJudenthums.99 In other instances, Birkenstein’s work was, as we have seen,reviewed alongside the pro- and anti-Jewish writings of German Christiansas part of the ongoing debate over Jewish integration. In both cases, his workwas ensured exposure: in light of the political climate of these years, the Jew-ish intelligentsia were highly attuned to what was being written about Jewsand Judaism and how they—not to mention their own writings—were beingperceived. Although this might suggest only familiarity with the existence ofBirkenstein’s works, it is hard to imagine that some Jewish readers would nothave made the effort to see those books for themselves, especially given thepolitical and religious nature of the issues they addressed. But we also knowwith certitude that his work was in the hands of Jews living in the relativeproximity of Frankfurt and Mainz and as far away as Tarnopol, Galicia.100

Given what Birkenstein had to say, he could not have gone unnoticed, es-pecially among those who endeavored to modernize Jewish education andsynagogue life.

If so, we are left with the admittedly tricky historical task of explain-ing the Jewish reticence to engage Birkenstein. A first step in this directionshould be to distinguish between various ways in which his writings wereread and how such readings aligned with broader historical realities. One canimagine—and this is surely an understatement—that a Jew applauding thelikes of Rühs, Fries, and their ilk was going to be viewed as reprehensible.In light of what Birkenstein was saying, it is tempting to suggest that theJewish silence surrounding his work was something of a calculated response,an intuitive sense that the less attention given him the better. This supposi-tion can, however, be countered by the fact that what rendered Birkenstein’sself-identification with those who wrote “against the Jews” so obnoxious wasalso what made it dangerous: here was a Jew admitting everything claimed byRühs and other anti-Jewish writers. For Jews, such an admission must havecreated further discomfort when Zimmern, the early vocal critic of Rühs and

circulation in early nineteenth-century German lands, some insight into the publication anddissemination of print materials among Jews and non-Jews would shed useful light on someof the questions raised here.99Gotthold Solomon (1784–1862) and Eduard Kley (1789–1867) were preachers in the Ham-burg Tempel; the latter was also the director of the Hamburg Freischule. See the review ofDie zehen Gebote in Allgemeines Repertorium . . . für 1821; and the review of MoralischeVerbesserung in Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung.100See the discussion of Schloss above and that of Michael Creizenach below. A copy ofMoralische Verbesserung was among the books bequeathed by Joseph Perl, a leading maskilin Galicia, to his son. The book subsequently appeared on an official list of restricted booksthat his son was prohibited from selling. My thanks to Rachel Manekin for providing me withthis information.

LOST TO HISTORY 279

Fries, abandoned his community and answered the call for conversion whileBirkenstein remained a Jew and an advocate for Jewish reform.101 Insofaras Birkenstein’s reforms and political views were linked with the project ofmodernization, his writings surely made fellow Jews squirm, not least be-cause of the modicum of appreciation he received from non-Jewish writersand statesmen.

Another factor to consider was Birkenstein’s relationship, or lack thereof,with other Jewish advocates for change. Birkenstein, as we have seen, tookrather sharp and uncompromising positions on educational and religious mat-ters, and he was prone to lash out against those who assumed the mantle ofreform but upheld the integrity of rabbinic Judaism.102 On the other hand, heoften went out of his way to applaud progressive-minded Jewish educatorslike Hess and Joseph Johlson in Frankfurt or Fränkel and the Tempel re-formers in Hamburg.103 One cannot help but notice, however, that for all hisadmiration for their work, his references to them convey a sense of distance,yielding not a hint of personal familiarity or contact. In fact, his laudatoryreferences to other reform-minded Jews may have been part of the problem,for, while praising them, he also consistently misrepresented their work orignored their central claims. To begin with the obvious, his praise of Hessand others completely ignored their contempt for Rühs and thus glossed overtheir radically different notions of Jewish integration. In a less apparent anddifferent vein, Birkenstein singled out Johlson among other Frankfurt edu-cators “who have joined to expose the errors of the Talmud doctrine” eventhough Johlson’s textbook for schoolchildren presented rabbinic Judaism andits literature in respectful terms.104 He also spoke appreciatively of Fränkel’sSchutzschrift, and cited some of its biting attacks on contemporary rabbis andrabbinism, but ignored the fact that its author sought to base the Hamburgsynagogue reforms on the teachings of the sages themselves, which wereportrayed as flexible and reasonable.

101In his “Ein ‘aufgeklärter’ jüdischer Lehrer in Hessen,” Lebermann stated that Birkensteinhad at one time taken steps to convert to Christianity. It should be noted, however, that Leber-mann’s work was also tendentious and in some details wrong. The fact remains that Birken-stein never converted, as evidenced by his Jewish burial, nor did he convert his sons, who livedsomewhat active Jewish lives and married other Jews.102His criticism of Bock and Heidenheim has already been noted.103Joseph Johlson (1777–1851) taught at the Frankfurt Philanthropin and penned a numberof popular Jewish elementary schoolbooks. Birkenstein also wrote appreciatively of DavidFränkel (1779–1856), the director of the Franzschule in Dessau, and Joseph Wolf (1762–1826), one of Fränkel’s teachers; they were also coeditors of Sulamith. See Birkenstein, Rede,7, and Moralische Verbesserung, 2.104Birkenstein, “Zweckmäßigkeit,” 2975.

280 E. BREUER

Political considerations aside, it may well be that the vastly different han-dling of rabbinic literature was a further factor in explaining the silence sur-rounding Birkenstein’s works. This is suggested by the one Jewish responsethat Birkenstein managed to elicit, which came in the form of a review of the1823 Sammlung Vermischter Aufsätze.105 The review appeared in the Geistder Pharisäischen Lehre, a short-lived monthly periodical edited and largelywritten by Michael Creizenach (1789–1842), at that time the Oberlehrer ofthe Jewish school in Mainz.106 The context here is important, for Creizenachenvisioned this publication as something akin to the Zeitschrift für die Wis-senschaft des Judenthums.107 Like the Berlin publication, the Geist der Pha-risäischen Lehre sought to engender a fair and sophisticated discussion of Ju-daism generally and rabbinic Judaism in particular, and Creizenach also paidattention to the nineteenth-century handling of these subjects. With regard tothe latter, the first monthly issue carried a review of Ludolf Holst’s Judenthumin allen dessen Theillen that opened by noting its “violent and passionate at-tacks on Judaism.” Adopting a tone of cutting sarcasm, Creizenach laid bareHolst’s basic presumption: that, while the likes of Dohm or Abbé Henri Gré-goire were hoodwinked by Jewish deceitfulness, one could thankfully relyon Rühs and Fries for their unflagging devotion to the truth. Creizenach wenton to point out other failings and the general unfairness of the argumentsemployed, ending with quiet exasperation at Holst’s dismissal of the accom-plishments of even the most enlightened Jews.108

Two months later, Creizenach reviewed Birkenstein’s Sammlung Vermi-schter Aufsätze. He began by praising the first text, Die zehen Gebote, forlaying out, “in comprehensible language, all the obligations that bound theIsraelites as humans and as citizens.” But, turning to the remainder of the col-lection, his appreciation faded. “The other essays are consistently addressedin a very hostile tone against the Israelites, whose faults are condemned withmore than nonpartisan severity,” he wrote, adding: “There are so many Chris-tian writers who unkindly accuse the poor descendants of Abraham, that the

105Recall that this collection included Moralische Verbesserung and Noch ein Wort über dasVerhältniss der Juden zum Staate.106Geist der Pharisäischen Lehre appeared in Mainz in six monthly numbers between Januaryand June 1824 and then ceased publication. Michael Creizenach would go on to write the firstreform-minded analysis of Jewish law, Schulchan Aruch oder encyclopädische Darstellungdes Mosaischen Gesetzes, 4 vols. (Frankfurt, 1833–40).107“Vorwort,” Geist der Pharisäischen Lehre, January 1824, 6. On the Berlin Verein für Culturund Wissenschaft der Juden and the Zeitschrift, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 205–10.108Review of Judenthum in allen dessen Theillen, by Ludolf Holst, Geist der PharisäischenLehre, January 1824, 52–62.

LOST TO HISTORY 281

cooperation of Israelite writers is truly not required.”109 He went on to saythat there was no denying the Jews’ many deficiencies but that these neededto be addressed in a more empathetic and friendly manner rather than theharsh, accusative tone adopted in the collection. The authors, in fact, wereunfair to contemporary Jews in blaming them for all that was objectionablein the Talmud since this was a text that very few knew or understood. Beyondthis, the review had little more to say, save a strenuous objection to Birken-stein’s criticism of Heidenheim, which Creizenach dismissed as a baselessattack on a truly learned scholar.110

Given Creizenach’s motivation in publishing Geist der PharisäischenLehre, this relatively temperate handling of Birkenstein’s writings was decid-edly curious. Creizenach clearly took a more positive approach to postbibli-cal Judaism and Jewish literature than did Birkenstein, yet he said nothingregarding Birkenstein’s unequivocal condemnation, especially in light of hisopen identification with writers like Holst, whose book Creizenach had re-viewed critically. Creizenach, tellingly, does something similar with regardto Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten, whose third volume took up the histori-cal advent of rabbinic Judaism. In Jost’s handling, the Rabbinismus of lateantiquity was described as the product of a small-minded and manipulativeclerical elite, little interested in the pursuit of truth or the ennoblement of thespirit.111 In decidedly negative terms not unlike those employed by Birken-stein, Jost spoke of rabbinic Judaism as being irredeemably degenerate at itshistorical core. Yet, although Creizenach was familiar with Jost’s work,112 hedid not mention or challenge its antirabbinic animus. What we find, in otherwords, is that while Creizenach was quick to challenge hostile German Chris-tian depictions of rabbinic Judaism, the Jewish hostility to rabbinic Judaismgarnered a different reaction, one that was muted, if it appeared at all.

This pattern went well beyond Creizenach. Other reform-minded Jewshad begun in these very years to lash out against “degenerate rabbinism” orthe need to “battle against the Talmud, to destroy its corrupting influence onour age.”113 Most of these antirabbinic statements were, as Ismar Schorsch

109Review of Sammlung Vermischter Aufsätze, Geist der Pharisäischen Lehre, March 1824,219–20. Creizenach referred to Birkenstein and Rosenthal as the authors of the collection eventhough his comments applied to Birkenstein and not to Rosenthal’s single contribution.110Ibid, 220–21.111See Ismar Schorsch, “Ideology and History in the Age of Emancipation,” in HeinrichGraetz, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Ismar Schorsch (NewYork, 1975), 1–62, 6–7.112Geist der Pharisäischen Lehre, [April?] 1824, 273.113See Sinai [Siegfried] Ucko, “Geistesgeschichtliche Grundlagen der Wissenschaft des Ju-dentums,” in Wissenschaft des Judentums im deutschen Sprachbereich 1 (1967): 315–52, 326,331.

282 E. BREUER

has pointed out, specifically aimed against contemporary rabbinic culture, orat least that of more recent centuries, and were not construed as an attack onrabbinic Judaism itself. This was evident in Fränkel’s Schutzschrift, as it wasin the writings of the young Leopold Zunz.114 But neither Fränkel, Zunz, norother Jewish writers at the time who asserted at least some measure of thesages’ creativity and profundity challenged Jost’s sweeping condemnation.Taken together, these writings of the late 1810s and early 1820s yield someserious divisions regarding classical rabbinic Judaism, an early manifestationof some seminal questions that would shape Jewish thinking in the 1830s andbeyond. But, in these early years at least, Jews seemed unprepared or unwill-ing to raise this issue in debate. So while Birkenstein did little more thanparrot a series of pernicious Christian writings by Eisenmenger and Rühs—arguments that Jews readily denounced—his work was read differently whenread as a Jewish criticism, especially among the small coterie of Jewish mod-ernizers who had their own critical issues with the rabbinic establishment.

A somewhat parallel phenomenon may also explain the lack of any re-action to Birkenstein’s call for sweeping religious reform of all manner ofJewish life. Setting aside the linkage of such reform with his denunciationof the Talmud and his views regarding civic inequality, it would appear thatBirkenstein was writing at a moment when there was little desire to take upa debate on Jewish practice beyond the Tempel reforms. The reform-mindedJews whom Birkenstein had lauded were attempting to advance a moderatemix of educational, cultural, and religious change, all of which pertained tothe public lives of Jews, and much of which has been aptly described as moreaesthetic than ideological.115 Birkenstein was simply at odds with the pro-gressive consensus of the historical moment. There were, to be sure, Jewswho had already abandoned the traditional practices like dietary laws andmikveh that Birkenstein had scorned, but they had done so without recourseto historical claims or public justification.116 If anything characterizes thisparticular juncture, it is that reform-minded Jews, including those with littleor no commitment to traditional practices, were not interested in fostering adebate on personal ritual observances. Here, too, the historical context wouldseem to have played a role in the silence that greeted Birkenstein’s writings.

114See Schorsch, From Text to Context, 213–14, 221–22.115Meyer, Response to Modernity, 23–61; David Sorkin, The Transformation of GermanJewry, 1780–1840 (Oxford, 1987), 79–104.116Note that, even when such justifications were broached, as they were in Friedländer’s letterto Teller, the arguments were passed over in silence. See Sendschreiben an Seine HochwürdenHerrn Oberconsistorialrath und Probst Teller zu Berlin, von einigen Hausvätern JüdischerReligion (Berlin, 1799).

LOST TO HISTORY 283

VI

In the mid-1830s, Jewish writers would initiate a sustained and serious dis-cussion of rabbinic texts, and, by the 1840s, a wider debate over Jewish ritualobservance would follow. If, at the time of publication, Birkenstein’s writ-ings were at odds with the historical moment, this would appear to have beenmuch less of an issue in the decades that followed when Creizenach, Zunz,and the early Reformer and Wissenschaft scholar Abraham Geiger made theirimportant contributions. Their writings were, however, far more sophisticatedand substantive than anything Birkenstein could ever muster. Birkenstein, forhis part, continued to publish with much the same tone and tenor as he hademployed earlier, often simply rehashing the same arguments, not to mentionthe same well-worn references to his own writings, especially FreimüthigenGedanken.117 His historical moment—if, indeed, he had ever had one—hadclearly passed him by; his writings had simply become irrelevant.

When, at midcentury, Jost updated his Geschichte der Israeliten by addinga multivolume study of the Jews of the first half of the nineteenth century, hebegan by surveying the political and legal events of the 1810s and the impactof Rühs and Fries as well as the German Jews and Christians who challengedthem. In this context, seemingly for the sake of completeness, he also noted afew “individually insignificant” writings and in a footnote cited PatriotischerAufruf, “written by E.B., a Jew,” as well as the responses of Schloss andKromm.118 In the third volume, a Culturgeschichte that covered the earlyreform controversy and the emergence of Wissenschaft des Judenthums, heincluded a wide-ranging survey of writings on classical Judaism, in the midstof which he included the following: “Some evildoers, allying themselveshypocritically with the enemies of Judaism and revealing its nakedness un-der the guise of noble self-examination, also came forward with hostile pre-sentations [of ancient Jewish literature], whose nature they considered onlyfrom the most sordid side; they did so without having the slightest knowl-edge of the true character of the works which were being judged and of thehistorical development of some admittedly dubious outgrowths.”119 A foot-note, with its text reference after the phrase “noble self-examination,” listedFreimüthige Gedanken, Moralische Verbesserung, and the Sammlung Ver-mischter Aufsätze. Here, in one sentence, was everything that Birkenstein’scontemporaries would find objectionable: his alignment with notorious anti-Jewish writers and the patently unfair, not to mention uninformed, handlingof rabbinic texts. But, despite the fact that Birkenstein had signed his name

117See, e.g., Elias Birkenstein, Der Jude gezeichnet und gestochen (Marburg, 1834), 26–27.118Jost, Neuere Geschichte, 63–64.119Jost, Culturgeschichte, 37.

284 E. BREUER

to two of those works, Jost included only his initials. Just why he opted notto mention him by name is unclear, but the effect, intended or not, was tofurther ensure that Birkenstein would remain buried in history.

Acknowledgments Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the German are my own.My thanks to David Bernay for his invaluable assistance at the early stages of this researchand to David Bollag for his help deciphering a number of German passages.