Jewish Emancipation in a German City: Cologne, 1798-1871.

By Shulamit S. Magnus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. xii plus 336pp. $49.50).

Among the excellent illustrations in her book, Shulamit S. Magnus shows a souvenir map of Cologne and its environs from the late nineteenth century. Drawings of the cathedral, the Rathaus, and other tourist sites border the map, but it also features the Cologne synagogue, the prominence of which dwarfs a local Bismarck monument. The artifact of popular culture evinces the degree to which Cologne's Jews had become a self-evident component of city life by the 1870s, a status that was unthinkable at the onset of the century. By situating the struggle for Jewish emancipation in Cologne within the larger frameworks of statebuilding, capitalism, liberalism, and Protestant-Catholic relations, Magnus has crafted a valuable case study of Jewish-German relations in nineteenth-century civil society.

The study's analysis of emancipation is divided into four periods: the period of French rule, 1798-1814, which introduced civil rights with significant qualifications; Prussian rule from 1815 to 1840, a period characterized by official and local antisemitism and resistance; the 1840s, a decade that witnessed widespread advocacy of Jewish civic equality; and, finally, the period 1850-1871, which established a new Jewish assertiveness in cultural and political affairs. Spliced into this political plot are sections and chapters of social research that trace the migration, occupations, education, upward mobility, and growth of Cologne's Jewish community.

The zeal with which Rhinelanders agitated for Jewish emancipation is characterized as dramatic, for prior to the 1840s, widespread antisemitism and bureaucratic resistance to Jewish affairs pervaded Cologne's public life. Although French occupation promised a new era in modern secular citizenship, decrees issued by Napoleon in 1808 tempered the optimism. These laws reorganized Jewish religious life under state auspices and required from Jews a special license (Judenpatent) to conduct business or to resettle in a new town or region. Although emancipation was not revoked, Magnus writes, "it seriously compromised Jewish equality" by conferring on Jews "a degraded civil status" (43). Moreover, this legal status would remain intact in the Prussian Rhineland until 1845, even though the laws lapsed in France in 1815. The sustained use of the Judenpatent articulated both traditional cultural prejudices against Jewish character and economic fears of unrestricted Jewish access to equal commercial privileges. The dispute that ensued in the 1820s between the City Council and the Prussian government over the control of the licenses is portrayed as a battle over local and centralized political power which made Jews both "strategic and genuine targets" (75).

The political movement for Jewish emancipation that emerged in the 1840s, Magnus argues, hinged on a number of factors. Both Catholicism's status as a minority religion in Prussia and the strident evangelical views of the Hohenzollern court swayed Catholic and Protestant Rhinelanders alike to advocate separation of church and state. For some intellectuals, such as editor-author Karl-Heinrich Bruggeman, Jewish emancipation acted merely as a means to criticize the Prussian state. Yet for others, Jewish civic equality formed the core of any principled liberalism. The attitudes of such liberais as Gustav Mevissen and Hermann Beckerath provoke Magnus to distinguish Rhenish liberalism sharply from Badenese liberalism, which harbored a number of antisemitic resentments. But the most prominent reason lies in socioeconomic change. Cologne's leadership in developing the region's industrial capitalism played the critical role in the "business of equality." Many entrepreneurs promoting unfettered capitalism were Protestant nouveaux arrivees seeking to dismantle barriers imposed by the entrenched dominance of Catholic patricians. The new business elite thus saw Jewish businessmen as "kindred spirits," a viewpoint strengthened by their business connections to the Oppenheims' banking establishment, which underwrote many of the region's new commercial and industrial enterprises. Impressed by the bourgeois respectability and material wealth of Cologne's well-to-do Jews, the city's business class showed an increasing tolerance toward Jews. The "religious-neutral" ground of capitalism produced a Judeophilic pragmatism among liberal businessmen: "Jewish equality was good business, good politics" (135). While this may smack of opportunism, Magnus interprets it differently. Common material interests, which intertwined Jewish and Christian business communities, produced a pragmatic foundation for emancipation, "more reliable than self-sacrifice and more complex than simple self-interest." "It was built on identification with Jews," she continues, "a startling novum in Rhenish, and German, history"(124-25).

Magnus further emphasizes the role of Jews in carving out their new roles and identity in nineteenth-century public life. "Jews," she writes, "were not passive recipients of changed attitudes" (221). While featuring Abraham Oppenheim's indispensable role as advocate, Magnus also strives to show how the general efforts of Jews to become "solidly middle class" and to acculturate with German bourgeois society "laid the groundwork for change in Jewish policy" (220-21). Yet Magnus balances her argument of cultural assimilation with an equally important thesis of Jewish persistence to retain cultural identity. Her most persuasive evidence comes from the postrevolutionary period, when Jewish leaders attained the right to teach Jewish religion in state gymnasiums, thus establishing parity between the Jewish religion and the Protestant and Catholic faiths. Further underscoring the Jewish community's attainment of prestige and social recognition was the inauguration of the new, centrally located synagogue in 1861. The synagogue's Moorish style flaunted both the "pride of Jewishness" and the social confidence to project such difference. In contrast to Hannah Arendt and Asher Ginzburg, Magnus concludes that emancipation did not come at the expense of effacing cultural identity.

Some criticisms must accompany this positive review. The discussion of Protestant-Catholic relations in Cologne, an important element in portraying the new constellations of economic and political power, could have been more sharply developed. Characterizing the friendship between Peter Heinrich Merkens and Ludolf Camphausen as a model of the new Protestant-Catholic "coexistence" certainly does not serve the author well, since both were Protestant (122). Referring to the Hambach Fest as the "Hamburger Fest" also deflates the reader's confidence in the author's analysis of pre-March liberalism (135). And although Magnus delineates with care the bureaucratic struggle between municipal and state officials over control of Cologne's Jewish community, her material only derives from the provincial level. Because the Prussian state archive in Berlin was not consulted, the reader never learns of the state's assessments at higher levels, which are certainly germane to the story. Further, a fuller analysis of how Cologne Jews enmeshed themselves in Cologne's dense network of associational life was needed. Finally, the book would have benefited from a brief epilogue of how Cologne's Jews fared after the 1873 crash that inaugurated a new era of antisemitism. The thesis that Jewish-Christian relations were on firmer ground because of pragmatic materialism is appealing, but one wants to know how, in the end, Cologne's experience differed from other major centers in the subsequent era of political antisemitism and mass politics.

The great strength in this study is Magnus's close attention to the differing forms of anti-Jewish behavior and her sharp analysis of why antisemitic attitudes changed over time. Her nuanced arguments point up the need for exacting research to understand the contingencies that both hindered and aided the goal of Jewish civic equality. Her careful social dissection of Cologne's Jewish-German relations, which highlights the importance of local context, invites more precise comparisons of German liberalisms, and I hope it will provoke future urban studies of relatively neglected Jewish centers, such as Breslau, Frankfurt a.d.O., and Leipzig. Finally, this study cautions us on a number of levels against the utility of analytically vague, overarching pronouncements on nineteenth-century German antisemitism.

James M. Brophy University of Delaware