GHDI logo

H.E.G. Paulus Opposes the Emancipation of the Jews in Baden (1831)

page 4 of 7    print version    return to list previous document      next document


If, as is currently the case, all members of Jewry who have become protected members of society in particular states endeavor to achieve further equality, then legislative wisdom can only reflect upon how it can make it possible for the Jews themselves to manage to create greater equality on their own, without the compulsion of religious conviction.

Here, initially, nothing seems more necessary than the renewal, and at the same time the faithful implementation of existing ordinances, so that at least those native-born Jews – in villages and in cities – utterly abandon the haggling that constitutes a kind of livelihood for most of them and makes them hated and noxious among their fellow citizens, and that they are only allowed to pursue the usual legal ways of earning a living common among the other citizens with whom they want to become equal. Whoever fails to submit to these necessary ordinances would have to know in advance, legally and irrevocably, that, after a set time, he would be making himself liable to the loss of protected membership in society. For there is nothing surer than the fact that the haggling of these cohesive nationals, in retail and wholesale, is as unbearable for citizens of the state as a gradual but artificially continued bloodletting.

[ . . . ]

Shall I, in closing – for the followers of Moses – pronounce the final judgment quite rabbinically? Moses already said: Thou shalt not sow thy field with dissimilar kinds of seed! Neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee! (3. Mos. 19, 19) Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together. (5 Mos. 22, 10) – Thus, already 3,000 years ago, the Oriental legislator expressed that dissimilar things should not be forcibly made equal. The followers of Moses should at least have given Him and his wisdom a hearing and, first and foremost, as a national matter, applied all of the legal means at their disposal to make themselves similar in a good way.

For us, who think and speak according to western logic, two decisive points illuminate and form the basis of our reasoning:

first page < previous   |   next > last page