HAIFA, Israel — In the middle of the nineteenth century a Jew was first appointed a judge in a European state. This happened in Germany, in Hamburg. The appointed judge did little judging, but managed to govern. He was more like a charismatic ruler than a cold-blooded judge. He was more like a bold fighter than a judicious lawyer. The historian Shimon Dubnov wrote of him: “Not admitted to the bar, he devoted himself to a higher calling: he became the advocate of the oppressed people.”
Gabriel Riesser (1806 – 1863) was born in Hamburg and descended from a rabbinical family: his grandfather and father, Lazarus-Yaakov as well as his maternal grandfather, the famous Rabbi Raphael ben-Yekutiel Cohen, were both exceptional Talmudists. Riesser received a secular upbringing, while studying Hebrew and the Tanakh under his father’s guidance. Upon graduation, Risser was asked to be baptized in order to become a private docent. He declined and as a result did not get a teaching position at the university, which was a blow to the young lawyer who dreamed of a scholarly career. Risser’s response was to take on the “adorned with the flowers of martyrdom” of the struggle for Jewish emancipation.
Riesser opposed assimilation in his essays On the Situation of the Followers of the Mosaic Religion in Germany (1830) and The Defense of the Civil Equality of the Jews Against Dr. Paulus’ Objections (1831). He called for a struggle against Judophobia in the Christian-German state. He condemned career, self-serving baptisms of Jews, these “marriages of convenience to the church.” Riesser’s attitude toward the Jewish question was expressed in a response to the Heidelberg theologian Paulus, who in 1830 published an anti-Jewish book, The Jewish National Identity. Paulus argued that as long as Jews would adhere to their religious laws, they were a segregated nation, not “state citizens” tolerated on special terms. Riesser replied: “The Jewish question is solely a question of religious freedom, the freedom to practice one’s religion without putting on the mask of another’s, the dominant one, in order to obtain civil rights. If we are a nation, where is our fatherland? Do German Jews have another homeland outside Germany? Expelled from it, can they resort to the defense of their special state? Yes, the Jews were a nation, but they have long ceased to be one since the bastions of Jerusalem collapsed and the people of Judea were scattered in the Roman Empire.”
As a German by nationality, Riesser rejected the “guarantee” of Germanization proposed by Paulus: “There is only one baptism that ordains nationality, and that is baptism with blood in the common struggle for the freedom of the fatherland. […] The powerful sounds of German speech, the songs of the German poets lit and nourished in our breasts the sacred fire of freedom. A whiff of freedom, carried over the German fields, awakened our sleepy dreams. […] We want to belong to the German fatherland. It can and must demand from us everything that it has the right to demand from its citizens. We will gladly sacrifice everything to it, only not faith and loyalty, not truth and honor, for the heroes and wise men of Germany did not teach us to become Germans through such sacrifices.”
As ideologue of the Haskalah movement, Riesser advocated “a spiritual union of Judaism and Germany,” stating that “the Jew who prefers a non-existent state [Israel] to the real Germany should be taken under police surveillance: not because his views are a danger to society, but because he is clearly mentally ill.”
After the July Revolution of 1830, Riesser began to talk about the emancipation of the Jews as an opponent of the authorities. It is not only the Jews alone, according to Riesser, who are oppressed, but also the peasants and workers. Everywhere there is the brutal domination of a privileged minority, against which the Jews must unite with the liberal and enlightened elements of German society.
In 1832, Riesser founded a weekly newspaper, The Jew. Its chief contributor was himself, responding not only to the issues of the day, but also to the question of Jewish emancipation being discussed at the time in Germany. The future judge acted as a biblical prophet. Condemning the baptism of the Jews as a solution, he predicted, “Believe me, hatred will find its prey as easily as the angel of death. Hatred will recognize its victim, no matter what name it hides under.”
Through vigorous advocacy for the cause of the Jews, he forced the Senate of Hamburg to repeal restrictive laws against the Jews. The Senate of Hamburg’s concession to Riesser cost the Jews dearly: shopkeepers and merchants, afraid of Jewish competition, staged a demonstration against the Senate, accompanied by a Jewish pogrom. Again the era of restrictive laws prevailed. After this setback, Risser changed the nature of his magazine: he began to fight only for civil and political freedom and ceased to engage in religious disputes.
It was not until 1843 that Riesser succeeded in entering the bar, where he became widely known as a defender of the right and an extraordinary orator. Before entering the bar, due to antisemitic sentiment in Hamburg, Riesser left his hometown and moved to Frankfurt (1836), where he wrote the Jewish Letters (1840-1842), imbued with love for the Jewish people and which brought him popularity throughout Germany. He became the most famous Jew in Germany.
Riesser was particularly energetic in the days of the March Revolution of 1848, when, not forgetting the Jews, he campaigned for the pan-German cause. On April 1, 1848, he made his first political speech in parliament. Elected the same year to the Frankfurt Parliament from Lauenburg, Riesser took his place among the members of the Liberal party and soon became one of its leaders and was elected vice-president of the Parliament. He was the initiator of a proposal to add § 13 to the German constitution, stating that religion could not be an obstacle to the equality of civil and political rights.
Riesser’s oratorical gift can be felt in one of his speeches in a Jewish assembly, which was greeted with thunderous applause: “I myself lived in the extremely unpleasant conditions of Hamburg, the place of my birth. Until recently, I could not even dream of working as a night watchman. We are not immigrants – we were born here – we have no other homeland: either we are Germans or nobody. Anyone who disputes my right to Germany as my homeland disputes my right to my thoughts, feelings, and language, even to the air I breathe. Therefore, I must defend myself against such people as I would defend myself against a murderer. The time of the assassins had not yet come, but the clock of History was already counting down the years to It.”
With the advent of reaction, Riesser went on a journey and returned to Hamburg in 1850, where the spirit of liberalism prevailed. In 1859 he was elected vice-president of the Hamburg municipality. In October 1860 Riesser was appointed a member of the Supreme Court of Hamburg and “proved by himself the triumph of the cause to which he had devoted his whole life.” He was the first Jewish judge in Germany. His judicial record was modest, but in his short life he managed to be a political leader.
Condemning crude forms of assimilation, Riesser glorified it in its cultural manifestations, without thinking that idealistic assimilation was no less dangerous for Jewry than pragmatic assimilation exchanged for equality. He wrote: “We have a Father in heaven, but we also have a mother: God, the father of all things, and Germany, our mother here on earth.” The pathos of loyalty to the German homeland led to a rebirth of the Jewish people’s loyalty to its values. Emancipation could give Jews equal rights as individuals. To recognize the Jewish community as equal to the Christian community was a hopeless project. Assimilation was therefore an inevitable consequence of emancipation.
Emancipated Jews, or Jews seeking emancipation, sacrificed their national rights for civil rights. Over the years that followed, Jews accepted the restoration of rights, not always respected, as a favor bestowed by the dominant nations for national depersonalization. Equality was understood by most of the Jewish masses in Europe as likening themselves to the dominant nations and borrowing their culture.
Riesser’s work was a condensation of romantic dreams of how good it would be if the German people understood, appreciated, and accepted the Jews into their fold. He did not foresee the unification of Germany after the victorious Franco-Prussian war and the result was the emergence of the “blood” Judophobia of Wilhelm Marr, Eugene Düring and Heinrich von Treitschke, who expressed racist ideas in scholarly formulations. As Marx demanded, the emancipation of the Jews began to turn into emancipation from the Jews.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education.