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 end, the and/or ghetto:
“Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“I often wish for the end of the wretched remnant of my life; and that wish is a rational one; but then the innate principle of self-preservation, wisely implanted in our natures, for obvious purposes, opposes that wish, and makes us endeavour to spin out our thread as long as we can, however decayed and rotten it may be.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“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)