Ever since the publication of Dohm’s _Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden_ (On the Civil Improvement of the Jews) in 1781, which argued for Jewish political equality on humanitarian grounds, more and more voices joined those demands. Prominent among them was David Friedländer, a friend and disciple of Moses Mendelssohn. One of the leading figures of the Berlin Haskalah, he worked towards establishing equal legal status for Jews in Prussia. Friedländer did not accept the given view of his times, the (...) antithesis of Jew and German. For him only the antithesis Jew–Christian existed and even that he tried to reconcile by finding common ground in a religion of reason, the groundwork of which he laid out in an Open Letter in 1799. What he proposed at that time may have been illusionary, but it certainly met with approval in enlightened Jewish circles. Friedländer therefore not only stands for those who dared to break with the traditions, but also for the generation of those who consciously aimed at the denationalization of traditional Judaism – and thus decided in favour of the confessionalization and the Germanness of the Jews. (shrink)

This article deals with the essay „How everything will be“ („Wie alles sein wird“), written in the spring of 1943 by the scholar Hans-Joachim Schoeps in exile in Sweden. This is an annotated publication of the entire manuscript, in which the Jewish refugee and intellectual imagines how he might experience his post-war return to his native Germany.

This essay shows how Jewish identity in pre-1933 Germany defined itself and how the widely known concept of German-Jewish symbiosis came into question after the organized murder of the European Jews. The search for a German-Jewish legacy in postwar Germany as well as in the countries in which the Jewish émigrés found a new home will be explored. Moreover, the Eastern European cultural roots of Jews who migrated from Russia to Germany in the 1990s will also be discussed.

The following article aims at investigating the influence of the Haskalah on Wilhelm von Humboldt's reform plans. The argument is that Moses Mendelssohn and his student David Friedländer indeed had contact with Wilhelm von Humboldt. Nevertheless, their influence was not direct, but rather indirect. The article shows that Mendelssohn and Friedländer inspired some of Wilhelm von Humboldt's ideas.