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Debate in the Parliament of the Duchy of Nassau on a Motion for the Complete Emancipation of the Jews in the Duchy (1846)

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published by the Jewish board of governors for the Simmern district: "One does not want (by excluding [them] from military service) to offer them the dreary prospect that their descendants would [become] what their ancestors were in dark times and through dark times: a race without courage, without self-esteem, without national feeling, nothing but a burden on both the state and themselves." If the Jews prove that they are ready not only, as Article 16 of the Federal Acts imposes on them, to fulfill all civic duties, but that they also regard it as an insult to their honor when the state wants to relieve them of the duty of shedding their blood for it, have they not honestly fulfilled the stipulation toward which this very article guarantees them citizenship rights in all the confederal states? Have they not thereby provided the most convincing proof that our contemporary German Jews have joined the German nationality with heart and soul and [that] laws that are valid for completely different Jews no longer apply to them? . . .

But it is no less true and irrefutably certain – according to the declarations of the Jewish Sanhedrin (largely composed of Orthodox rabbis) which assembled in France in 1806, from the decisions of the German Rabbinical Assembly in Braunschweig and Frankfurt, to which two Nassau rabbis were sent as delegates, and no less from the declarations of their zealous opponents – that the Jewish religion in every era has imposed on its believers observation of the laws of the state as one of the highest obligations. Gentlemen, go over the textbooks of the Jewish religion that underlie their religious instruction in Germany, and you will become convinced that they contain nothing that is not in complete agreement with the precept of love and the requirements of the state and of civilization. Here, too, experience is on the side of the claims of the Jews. No Jew refuses to perform military service on his holidays. On their holidays, it goes without saying, Jewish civil servants are going to be no less exempted from the professional work that the state imposes on them, and will want to be even less. Anyway, the contemporary German Jew is just as little the same as [one] from the Middle Ages as the contemporary Protestant Christian would be [in agreement] with Calvin and Melanchton for burning Servet or the Catholic [Christian] for the Inquisition. Thus, religion and politics, experience and civilization testify in favor of the motion which I hereby have the honor of directing to the Chamber: That the same eminent government is beseeched to submit a law which abolishes the exceptional laws existing against the Jews of Nassau and [which is] based on the foundation of granting them, in exchange for fulfillment of the same duties, the same civil and political rights as all other citizens of the state. [ . . . ]

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