I

1It is perhaps presumptuous to speak of «German Jewry» at a given point in time as vague as «Mid-Nineteenth Century». For, at least until 1867, there existed no entity that might rightly be called «German Jewry». Even during the Revolution of 1848/49, when for the first time unification of all the Germans seemed to be in the making and many Jews got very busy taking up active parts in the proceedings, even then there was no unity or unanimity amongst them.

2Small wonder then, that before and after that abortive revolution – while there were 37 different German principalities and governments – one easily could make out at least twice that number of different shades among the Jews living on German soil.

3Demographically speaking, there were large communities, whose membership started just then to grow by leaps and bounds (Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg); and quite apart and different from them – and still exceeding the numbers of all the Jews in the big cities – there were the rural Jews, dispersed through many of the agricultural belts of Germany; and between them, and in many respects different from both extreme groups, were the small- and middle-town Jews, then probably still the largest sector of the Jewish population. Moreover, in most of the German principalities, a certain number of not-yet-settled vagrants or transmigrants put in their seasonal appearances, serving as targets for charity, but seldom accommodated as brethren amongst brethren – although in the end becoming totally extinct by the final stage of German-Jewish coexistence about 1870.

4From a politico-geographical viewpoint, one may distinguish between the pious south-German village-Jews of Bavaria and the Palatinate, Württemberg and Baden, living under a more or less harsh system of socalled «educational» Jew-laws. Yet, proceeding in a North-Westerly direction, one could already find in Mannheim or Heidelberg, and still more in Worms or Frankfurt, clusters of «modern» Jews, who prided themselves on the degree of their identification with the life and culture of their non-Jewish neighbours. Similar was the outlook of the city-dwellers among the Rhineland-Westphalian Jews, who – parallel with those of Worms and Frankfurt – had already tasted the sweet fruits of emancipation, albeit by the grace of Napoleon or his German minions. But after 1815 they again were denied the equality of rights that had been theirs for five or ten or twenty years. This loss was not taken lightly, and was much resented by most Jews.

5To this group, grieving over their abortive emancipation, one may safely add the Jews of the North-German Ports and Free Hansa-towns: Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg – the latter being Jacob Bernays’birthplace in 1824, when the first emancipation of its Jewish citizens was a thing of the past and of an uncertain future.

6A geographical differentiation would not be complete without mentioning the Eastern Provinces of Prussia, and especially the formerly Polish Grand-Duchy of Poznan, whose 80 000 Jews constituded the foremost central European Jewish mass-settlement and proved an almost inexhaustible reservoir of deep-rooted Jewishness, that was to replenish not only German westernized Jewry, but soon also the Jews throughout the Anglo-Saxon world beyond the oceans.

7This characterization of Poznan Jewry as a reservoir of Jewishness already touches upon another aspect, under which the differences throughout the ranks of German Jewry became only too clearly visible. It was the degree of Jewishness and Germanness and the problems of their definition and interrelation.

II

8Generally speaking – Jewishness was strongest in the East, in the Catholic south, and also in the rural communities of the remainder of Germany. Would-be Germanness was strongly emulated in the western areas that had already, although only temporarily, been emancipated, and also in the other big cities and the university-towns. Sociologically speaking, the intellectuals and the well-to-do bourgeois strata developed (or at least demonstrated) a greater affinity to German culture and German politics than did the middle and lower strata which had to struggle hard to make ends meet. In short – students and the (still not very numerous) free professions, teachers at modern Jewish schools, spokesmen for the large-town communities and other new Jewish organizations (as far as such were at all founded in the reactionary period after the Congress of Vienna) – in all a small and only slowly growing percentage of the total Jewish inhabitants of Germany, – took the stage as protagonists of thourough Germanization between 1815 and 1847. But even in 1850 or thereabouts, still more than half of German Jewry adhered to the traditionnally prescribed way of life.

9Today, it is common to equalize Germanization with de-Judaization and to think of that small and sharply defined group of well-educated and/or well-to-do Jews, who were willing to pay the price of total Germanization and Europeization in the debased coin of apostasy from Judaism.

10Although this group of renegades was not at all insignificant and tended to grow in later decades, it never was, in itself, a threat to the existence of Judaism in Germany. Above all, nobody was in fact coerced to leave Judaism if he chose to pay with his career by adhering to it.

11Thus, in the last resort, the decision about continued adherence to Judaism or apostasy was mostly an individual problem, conditioned by the outward circumstances of life, but lastly fought out in one’s own conscience. Thus, Isaak Bernays, Jacob’s father, fought his decisive battle in the pages of «Der Bibelsche Orient», in which his propensity to early Christanity shines through certain passages, while Jacob Bernays, the son, was confronted with the problem of conversion when the question of a professorship arose. He chose Judaism. But his brother Michael preferred to cut himself off from a community that had lost its meaning for him, in spite of his father the Chacham and in spite of his brother Jacob, or possibly just because of both their steadfastness and intransigency.

III

12True, people like Michael Bernays could adduce the opinion that Jewish intellectual and spiritual development had begun to stagnate, boding ill for the future of German Judaism as a spiritual force.

13Religious indifference grew by leaps and bounds and on the other hand, a sharp decline of Jewish learning had set in. This stagnation was not in fact reactivated by the exertions of a «handful of youngsters in the Berlin’Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums’». The association’s endeavours amounted to very little at the time, except for the works of Leopold Zunz and I. M. Jost. It was only later that the next generation of «Science of Judaism» declared themselves spiritual heirs to the «Kulturverein». Especially the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau. Bernays’ second place of teaching, and later its sister-institutes of Berlin, Budapest and Vienna, began to evoke a certain response among the public. Ultimately they found a slowly but steadily increasing echo in the more staid circles of German-speaking Jewry, within the German boundaries and especially abroad.

14Meanwhile, since mid-century, Jewishness in Germany no longer meant the all-permeating rule of Jewish Law, and did not even involve active participation in Jewish Learning at «shul». For many «modern» Jews, «shul» had become a temple, a synagogue, to which one went for «worship» in a style that was to prove the attendants worthy of participation in European culture and – of emancipation.

15Those endeavours to reform Jewish worship were preceded by reformprojects in Jewish education – the latter encouraged or even sponsored by several German governments who had adopted an «educational» approach to emancipation. But there still were more than enough steadfast defenders of the old Jewish ways, upholders of the Law and all its surrounding fences, for whom any innovation in the Jewish sphere of life was simply forbidden by the Law. In fact, many of those old Jews were even willing to forego emancipation, if its price threatened to become a burden on their conscience.

16For the latter group, the term «stereodox» (starrgläubig) seems to have been coined by Jacob Bernays himself, in order to challenge the attitude of that wing and confront it with genuine «orthodoxy» (Rechtgläubigkeit). Bernays meant the tenets of his father, the Chacham Bernays, which were conservative and even uncompromising, when he felt he could safely take the risk toward his challengers. But on the whole, the Chacham was not in principle adverse to innovations and worked for them especially in Hamburg’s Talmud-Thora school. In this school Jacob began his educational career, which lead him through Meir Isler’s private preparatory school, to the famous Hamburg Johanneum – and from there to the University of Bonn – all the time living in strict accordance with Jewish Law.

17It may he that Jacob Bernays’ concepts of orthodoxy, as understood from his father’s deeds and teachings at home and at school, did not entirely fit those of his later Principal in Breslau, R. Zacharias Frankel and his motto: «Progress through Preservation». But as Frankel did not show overmuch enthusiasm for the «craze of emancipation», there was at least so much common ground between them.

18Both Bernays and Frankel did have their mental reservations with regard to emancipation, even when propounded by men like Gabriel Riesser. At first Jacob Bernays felt a kind of juvenile hero-worship for him. But soon he termed Riesser an heterodox antagonist of his father, both in the Hamburg community and in the Talmud-Thora-School, where he wanted to speed up the Chacham’s conservative educational policies and introduce a quick modernization. Needless to say, the Chacham resisted such heterodox proposals.

19Heterodox Jews – that is, proponents of Reform Judaism-might have accepted some of Jacob Bernays’ later definitions of Judaism (and of Isaak’s first ones in Würzburg University), except for their strict adherence to the coercive power of Jewish Law. In short, Reformers, and Riesser amongst them, accepted only rational tenets and wanted to establish an aesthetic worship, in a Jewish Church of pure monotheism, without the least traces of irrational traditions or national by-work. What they did, they did in good faith, and in accordance with what they termed the requirements of progress and of emancipation.

IV

20The Chacham Isaak Bernays lived long enough to see full emancipation granted in Hamburg, not the least thanks to Riesser’s exertions. But his son, Jacob, living since 1844 in Bonn and then in Breslau and again in Bonn, came under Prussian Jurisdiction and stayed there until his death. And the unalterable fact was that Prussian Jewry, during the whole existence of that Kingdom, never gained full emancipation – not to speak of full integration within the State.

21Although the famous Prussian Edict of March 1812, erroneously termed by the Jews «Edict of Emancipation», in its first paragraph indeed declared them inhabitants and citizens of the State, most of its 38 other paragraphs served to perpetuate all their remaining disabilities, turning them in fact into strictly second class denizens.

22The same attitude prevailed 35 years later, in the Jew Law of July 1847, although some of its most vicious provisions were rejected by the United Prussian Diet.

23The Prussian Jew Law of 1847 included, among other placeboes for the withheld emancipation, a paragraph enabling Jews to teach at nondenominational universities mostly mathematics, medicine and the sciences. Yet, even this concession was made subject to an enquiry into the attitude of the whole academic establishment in Prussia towards the «Jewish Question». All professors individually, all faculties, each by itself, and every one of the seven senates had to answer whether they were for or against the selective proposals for Jewish universityappointments. On the Senate level Berlin. Königsberg and – important for Bernays – also Bonn went on record in favour of Jewish appointments. On the individual level, Bonn’s professors voted for Jewish appointments in the highest proportion of all Prussian universities (i. e. 79% in favour), and also a majority of the general Bonn faculty assemblies favoured appointments of Jews.

24What the real cause of this round robin was, is obscure, since the Prussian Landtag had already accepted the Jew Law as a whole, and – what is more – the Lower House had spontaneously added an amendment to the academic paragraph, proposing the establishment of a chair for Jewish Theology at one of the Prussian universities.

25Although since 1837 many of the best German Jews had dreamed of a faculty of Jewish Science, or at least of a chair of theology; now, when there existed a legal opportunity for establishing a Jewish faculty, nobody came forth with plans or money or even the readiness to get involved. For – as the main aspirant to the chair, Leopold Zunz, put it – the steps of the Messiah were approaching, the revolutionary events of 1848 were making themselves felt. Even in Prussia, the Ministry of Education announced in July 1848, without further prompting, the opening of all university lectureships to Jews. Curiously enough, Bernays was involved in it as a precedent.

26Jacob Bernays himself, after a short visit to his father, arrived at Bonn, just during the days of street-fighting in Vienna and Metternich’s flight from there (13/14 March). He was at that historic date accorded his doctoral degree, summa cum laude.

27But even as a new academic dignitary – or because of his being one – he remained sceptical of the political upheaval, although he harvested the first fruits of it. He was granted ministerial permission for Habilitation in Bonn as Privatdozent in classical philology – and that already in June, i. e. a month before the general announcement of Jewish acceptability as university-lecturers in Prussia. He started teaching in November. As his subject he chose the fifth book of Aristotles’ Politics. Because, as he explained, it treated revolutions and new constitutions, and ought to be more easily understood in days of upheaval than in the tranquillity of political stagnation.

28With Bernays’ Habilitation, Bonn was again at the forefront of liberal academic policies. What was so special about its firm alignment with the struggle for emancipation – general and individual alike?

29Bonn had passed only in 1814 from the rule of Napoleon to that of Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. It was not overmuch permeated by French revolutionary thought, but had not been entirely uninfluenced by it. Indeed, the founding of a Prussian University there in 1818 may be regarded as an afterthought, an appendix to the Prussian reforms of 1807/1812, whose character was circumscribed by the names of Stein, Hardenberg and Humboldt – the latter being responsible for the founding of the new university of Berlin in 1810 and within its precints, for the new secular ethos of «Wissenschaft», that in the Prussian reform-period had begun to permeate the universities. Those new institutions of higher learning were meant to be a true universitas litterarum, instead of a corpus ecclesiasticum, as before. Now, Wissenschaft was conceived as liberated from religion, and interdenominational in character, at least with regard to Catholics and Protestants. Thus, universities fashioned after that pattern, like Berlin and Breslau, had two theological faculties, one Catholic and one Protestant. As a liberal afterthought, in 1818, the University of Bonn was cast in the same mould, although by then a renewed spirit of reaction had made itself felt in Prussia. It may be that the decision of the Landtag of 1847 to allow the establishment of a Jewish chair for theology followed that pattern.

30Liberal Bonn attracted a certain number of Jewish students, and from 1819 to 1848 about 70 were enrolled in the Philosophical Faculty, amongst them candidates for the rabbinate, natural scientists, and philologists, like Jacob Bernays. But Bernays was by no means the only student whose later career was to lend lustre to the name of the new university. He was preceded by Abraham Geiger and Samson Raphael Hirsch, who befriended each other as students, only to fall out between themselves as exponents of the struggle between Reform-Jewry and NeoOrthodoxy; Hirsch being drawn also into controversy with the Chacham Bernays on the true directives for a Jewish Neo-Orthodoxy.

31Older by one semester than either Hirsch or Geiger was the brilliant Orientalist Salomon Munk, who could not find an appointment in his native Prussia and had to seek consolation and a livelihood in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. And one should not forget one of the first Jewish students in Bonn, and perhaps the most widely known of them all, Heinrich Heine, in 1819 still reading law and dreaming of Jewish regeneration and militant reformation, perhaps even being a little influenced by the Chacham Bernays of Hamburg; while later-on he left-first Judaism and finally also Germany – in order to find a precarious refuge as a German poet in Paris.

32One trait may have been common to Heine and Jacob Bernays, although they never exchanged opinions: both did not find in the revolution of 1848 the same vigour as in the Great French Revolution of 1789. Although geographically more extended – wrote Bernays – it lacked the power to change the prevailing order in a decisive manner. That means in reality that Jacob Bernays preferred to remain a passive spectator in what he termed «God’s Performance» (Gottesspiel).

33In this he for once differed from his father: the Chacham Bernays was openly enthusiastic about the political progress in the offing, and he even publicly advocated the election to the First National Assembly of his antagonist in community matters, Gabriel Riesser. He seemingly was not aware of the interconnection between political and religious liberalism, while his son, Jacob Bernays, perceived the possible religious consequences of political liberalism and was not overwhelmed with what he saw. Indeed, it was one of the tragicomic features of Jewish history in XIX century Germany, that consequent liberalism (in the person of Eduard Lasker) created the constitutional opportunity for shattering the common frame of a United Jewish Community (1876), thus enabling Samson Raphael Hirsch and his followers to break away and legally erect a new framework of «Separatist Orthodoxy».

34It is not known whether Jacob Bernays foresaw such a development. His comments upon the political events of his time were scattered and mostly oblique, and became rarer with the years.

V

35To a certain degree, Bernays’reticence was an outcome of his exposed position as one of the first Jewish university lecturers in Germany, and the first ever in Bonn. This appointment constitutes, as mentioned, one of the first concessions of the Prussian government to the revolutionary movement. Only later, it found its legal expression in the Prussian Royal Constitution of December 5.1848, embodying absolute equality for all citizens without regard to their religion. Yet, even the Royal Prussian word was not final and could be reversed by another one. In May 1849, and especially in January 1850, the constitution was amended and thereby utterly changed in its character. One of the achievements of 1848, the separation of Church and State, and with it full Jewish emancipation, was again made illusory by a new constitutional paragraph (§ 14, January 1850), which renewed the preeminence of Christianity as the guiding principle in Prussian statehood.

36Thus, during the reactionary period in Prussia, the universitas litterarum again stood in danger of becoming a corpus ecclesiasticum, a vocational school for the training of civil servants, teachers, dignitaries of the Church and higher officials – whose education could not safely be put into Jewish hands – according to the King and his Ministers of Culture and Education.

37For Bernays, this meant that any advancement in Bonn was precluded on that principle. When he steadfastly refused an offer by his friend, Christian v. Bunsen, to embrace Christianity and thus secure a professorship in Bonn, there remained at first only emigration to Britain or – as deus ex machina – an offer from the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, where he was to teach German and the Classics, which he accepted, being thus enabled to teach also as lecturer at Breslau University. He remained there until the end of 1865, when the incipient German unification brought about a definite liberal change in attitude and legislation, even in the Prussian Government of Count Bismarck. Certain changes in this direction had begun to make themselves felt throughout Germany as early as 1858. But in Prussia, the so-called «Liberal Era» brought only little and slow betterment for the Jews.

38Proof may be found in the (generally repressed) fact, that the ultimate emancipation of German Jews in 1869 was not a Prussian law. It emanated from the North German Federation, and was accepted two years later, together with the whole North-German constitution, by the newly emerging German Reich, without Prussia’s express ratification of its egalitarian and non-religious character. Bismarck’s left hand had given it, but his right did not strain to welcome it to Prussia or to act there in accordance with its spirit.

39Thus, it was the ultimate that was to be expected from the Prussian Ministry of Education when in 1865 it consented to Jacob Bernays’second appointment at Bonn University. Nobody begrudged him the directorship of the University Library; but as a faculty-member, he was only accorded an associate professorship. No other appointment ever came his way. Nevertheless, he was glad enough – as was his friend and colleague of Breslau University, Theodor Mommsen, now finally appointed to Berlin – to leave Breslau’s «Great Sahara» behind him and return to Bonn.

VI

40Anyhow, in his new position at Bonn, although barred from a full professorship, Bernays had become exalted above, and independent of, his Jewish background. Now he was no longer a mere product of German Jewry at Mid-Century. He had advanced to a status that made him a visible factor in Jewish life, a status from which he easily could have become a public leader of German Jewry – had he so wanted.

41But he literally fled the public scene. After the untimely death of his father, the Chacham Bernays (1849), he had refused an invitation to serve as Rabbi of the Hamburg community in his father’s stead. In Breslau, he almost took no active part in the life of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and even refrained from joining most of the public prayers there. In his later days in Bonn he not only kept aloof from public Jewish activities, but he even did not pay his respects to Ludwig Philippson, one of the central public figures of German-Jewish life. Philippson, then already almost blind, had retired to Bonn from his Rabbinate in Magdeburg, only to become more active in his role of the Grey Eminency of the Jewish world, especially as editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, the most influential Jewish paper of that period. Philippson, a generation older than Bernays, and himself somewhat of a Classical and Jewish scholar, did not undertake the first step. Bernays probably did not even feel inclined to do so. He had his small circle of friends and colleagues, and refused to take the lead in Jewish issues of the day, or to comment upon them, even when expressly asked to do so.

42One cannot escape the conclusion that what he saw in his Jewish surroundings after 1849 was not at all to his liking, and he wanted no part in it. In short: he personally had opted out of German-Jewish communal affairs. Possibly he thought his twelve years of lectureship at the Breslau Seminary long enough as a community-service. And he was by no means the one and only Jewish personality to shrink from activity. The revolution and its reactionary aftermath simply fostered such an estrangement.

43Emancipation had again been within reach, and even realized during the short heyday of general revolutionary fraternization, only to be smothered again in reactionary prevarications. As an outcome, some of the best seem to have arrived at a mood of resignation and of stoicism with little regard to communal achievements. Yet, there were also other reasons, emanating from the development of German Jewry after 1848 – from the militant orthodox S. R. Hirsch on the right wing to Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim representing the extreme left position – which precluded mutual understanding. In between, Z. Frankel and L. Philippson, each by himself, tried in vain to establish a juste milieu, a rallying point for the moderate groups of the center, Frankel with a more orthodox, Philippson with a liberal slant; and even they did not find it possible to join forces, or to induce Jacob Bernays to declare for one of them, although he had been geographically near to Frankel in Breslau and to Philippson in Bonn.

VII

44Perhaps one reason was that the active Jewish protagonists recruited themselves from an ever shrinking circle of people. For the interest in Jewish religious and communal life was on the wane – the more so, since with the beginning of the «Liberal Era» about 1858, a new spirit had been ushered in. There was renewed politico-social fraternization and a lessening of the isolation in which the Jews had lived during the decade following the revolution. Now, in the agitated period of wars and of German unification, it was again possible, as during the days of the 1848 revolution, to be a German Liberal of the Jewish persuasion. Liberal politics (and later also socialist politics) were widely embraced as a substitute for religion (Ersatzreligion). Party-meetings turned into social events, where Jews appeared on an absolutely equal footing with nonJews, especially when they did not hold back their contributions to the party coffers.

45Amongst those Jews who personally became active and tried their luck in politics, some achieved fame and public acclaim. They all, like E. Lasker, L. Bamberger, R. Kosch or H. B. Oppenheimer, spurned purely Jewish organizations. In their eyes this was separatism, and contrary to the best interests of Jewish integration in Germany.

46Later on, when after 1875 a renewed wave of anti-semitism made itself felt and shattered the idyllic years of German-Jewish coexistence, apologetics became a new component in Jewish life, and even those of the aforementioned politicians who were then still alive and active, raised their voices against «the shame of the century» (Friedrich III). Antisemitism thus grew into a factor of renewed Jewish organizational endeavours. Jews became intent on achieving a united apologetic front of the various religious groupings, but during the lifetime of J. Bernays such attempts were at the most only partially successful.

47From all this, Jacob Bernays held himself aloof. His Jewishness had become as individual as that of Moses Mendelssohn a hundred years before him: he accepted as common Jewish denominator the firm upholding of tradition even in its ritual rigidity. This was for him the hard, time-hallowed shell of Jewishness. But as to the core within – was he something of a mystic like his father? Was he a «Hellenistic Jew», as he himself wrote in a letter to his teacher, mentor, colleague and friend, Friedrich Ritschl? Was it an aestheticized attitude, intent upon introducing «the beauty of Japheth into the tents of Sem» (so his Hebrew epitaph, chosen by his apostate brother Michael)? If beauty – then Bernays’ part of it was an inner beauty only. The outside of his life was drab, dreary, grey, without a trace of Dionysian exuberance. Perhaps a trace of Elysian serenity might sometimes be observed, but it seldom carried beyond his most private conversations or correspondence.

48Be that as it may, one fact remains beyond doubt: Bernays added to the Jewish-German backdrop of his life one glitter of achievement: a Jewish philologist of world renown, a Jewish professor within the antiJewish Prussian establishment. The rest was his own private world of contemplation. Small wonder then, that even his comments on German events were rather rare and remained fragmentary.

49His reticence (which was perhaps no more than prudence during the reactionary years from 1850 to 1858) became still more marked since 1865, when in the foreshadow of German unity, he had returned almost triumphantly to Bonn. Even then, amongst the national upheaval of war and unification, he remained critical and rather sceptical.

VIII

50It seems that his personal experiences had nurtured his conviction that Prussian Berlin as Metropolis of a United Reich would – through Bismarck’s Machiavellian policies – become more like Rome or Sparta, but not like Athens, and Germany would fare accordingly. Since 1864, he spoke in his letters not only of the Royal Prussian Mail, or Royal Prussian Police, but especially of the Royal Prussian War. And during the war of 1870/71 he warned that the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was only the prologue to a dreadful tragedy that would inexorably develop from it. On this, he was in accord with a handful of left-wing Jews, people like Johann Jacoby, Leopold Sonnemann and his Frankfurter Zeitung.

51But he had seceded from the general Jewish consensus, which enthusiastically hailed the unification of Germany and the full emancipation of the Jews within its boundaries; for with all this, the patris of the Jews seemed safe, and their patriotism knew no bounds in war or peace.

52Bernays in his last years seems to have had no illusions with regard to the benefits of unity, of emancipation and of the overwhelming patriotism that blinded the eyes of so many German Jewish patriots to many finer points of ethics and law, nay even of common sense and levelheadedness that were being overruled by the govememental machinery of the Mighty Reich.

53Already in 1848, Bernays had remarked that in ancient Greece the idea of Unity had not been conducive to cultural development; to this he had added the query, whether perhaps the same might not hold true for modern Italy and modern Germany. With such a query, he was quite out of step with German Jewry as a whole. Consequently, he was also out of step with his Jewish contemporaries when he obliquely refused to recognize the blessings of unity and emancipation.

54He, like Phocion and other Greek philosophers in his last published work, could not find his place in the political parties of his community; thus, they retreated from public life because «they could not persuade themselves to sacrifice their peace of mind on the altar of their patris». In other words, Bernays, too, was not prepared to sacrifice his innermost liberty, his cosmopolitanism, for what rights the Prusso-German fatherland might grudgingly accord him. Moreover, he kept himself convinced that the Jews were indeed a special community, which had developed by God’s providence outside natural and historical categories. Hence their continuous swaying between extreme particularism and the broadest cosmopolitanism; a trait that certainly was not the best recommendation for emancipation and integration in a monolithic society – which Imperial Germany wanted to become.

55In any case, he himself had already totally abandoned the German public scene, for during the war of 1870/71 – in his exchange of letters with Theodor Mommsen – he reiterated his decision to keep silent in the face of the developments, because «every word is being misinterpreted that is not consonant with brutal race-hatred, lurking behind the mask of patriotism» (als Patriotismus maskierter roher Rassenhass). Six-seven years later, his pessimistic outlook was to be fully vindicated. Jews had become the object of a hate-campaign that is generally termed modern anti-semitism.

56At first it was not purely a racial movement. Wilhelm Marr’s race war between Jews and Germans did not yet convince the broader public. It was a Christian brand of anti-semitism, personified in Court-chaplain Adolf Stocker, that first appealed to the masses. But soon, intellectuals like Heinrich von Treitschke abandoned their former Jewish party-friends and colleagues and accused them of not having paid the price of emancipation, for they had not entirely broken the last shackles of their Jewishness. Treitschke was, as is well known, especially incensed by Heinrich Graetz’ historiography, that seemed to him full of Jewish national pride – which Treitschke condemned as gross tactlessnes (to say the least) in the new German Reich.

57In the ensuing public dispute, Bernays remained silent, as before, and did not even say one word in aid of his former colleague at Breslau, Heinrich Graetz. But Theodor Mommsen tried to bring Treitschke to his senses and defend Graetz. Yet, he made matters worse than before and mortally wounded his erstwhile friend Bernays.

58For even the intransigent Liberal Theodor Mommsen – although advocating «the Gospel of Tolerance» with regard to the Jews, and allowing time for their full Germanization – even he saw as the last aim of emancipation the final integration of the Jews in the German-Christian world. The only reservation attached to this by Mommsen reads: «Whosoever… be prevented by insurmountable obstacles in his conscience» will have to act accordingly. This sentence was possibly added with an eye to Jacob Bernays. But Bernays, not at all pacified by such ambiguity, felt himself betrayed after 25 years of friendship with Mommsen, and his consequent silence became one of bitterness.

59During his whole life, and at least since his student years, Bernays had hoped to prove that a coexistence between Christians and Jews was indeed possible on German soil. He hoped to prove it in the spiritual realm of Classical culture, in the political realm of modern European secular statehood, and within the private bonds of friendship and understanding. Yet, now came his friend Mommsen and wanted to exact from the Jews the usual «entrance-fee into a Great Nation».

60It might be argued that Bernays had foreseen such a development and that his marked reluctance to engage in Jewish and/or German politics was an outcome of the singularity of his position and of his fear of retribution that must follow the all-too-quick and all-too-profuse bloom of emancipated German Jewry. In one of the Passover-Nights (in the seventies), when the then famous writer Berthold Auerbach was a guest at Bernays’table in Bonn, the talk turned to the fact that already once in the long history of Jewish diaspora the Jews of Spain had been entirely free and well integrated. To which Bernays pensively added: «But they were pushed back – and could that not happen again in History»? To live in anticipation of such a repetition of fate – that seems to have been an integral part of the true Jewish background of Jacob Bernays.