The End of The Ghetto
Frankfurt was one of the last cities in Europe to allow the Jews to leave the ghetto. For this reason, the Frankfurt city council was generally anti-Jewish. In 1769 the council responded to a Jewish petition to leave the ghetto on Sunday afternoons as
... an example of the unbounded arrogance of this people, who expend every effort to take all opportunities to set themselves up as equals to the Christian citizens.
In 1779 the drama Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Lessing, a fervent plea for religious tolerance, was published. The Frankfurt town council immediately banned the book and any copies found were confiscated. Frankfurt's Jews intensely lobbied both the Emperor and the German Parliament in Regensburg for an improvement of their status, which had not changed significantly following the Patent of Toleration issued by Emperor Joseph II. However, the lobbying efforts of the Jews were in vain. Only the war between France and the coalition of Austria, England and Kingdom of Prussia brought liberty to the Jews.
In 1806 the French appointed Grand Duke of Frankfurt Karl von Dalberg ordered that equal rights be granted to all religious creeds. One of his first acts was to repeal the old municipal law forbidding the Jews from walking on a main ring road, the Anlagen. When a new school was built for the Jewish community, the Philanthropin, he donated a large sum of money. Despite von Dalberg's efforts, Frankfurt issued a new set of Jewish regulations in 1807 that attempted to reestablish the ghetto. Finally in 1811 Dalberg's Highest Regulation, for the equality of civil right of the Jewish Municipality eliminated the requirements to live in the ghetto and abolished all special Jewish taxes. However, the Jewish community had to pay a lump sum of 440,000 Guilder.
Read more about this topic: Frankfurter Judengasse
Famous quotes containing the words the end of, the and/or ghetto:
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“The Germans are always too late. They are late, like music, which is always the last of the arts to express a world condition,—when that world condition is already in its final stages. They are abstract and mystical.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)