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

In the following excerpts, Heidelberg professor and theologian H.E.G. Paulus (1761-1851) speaks out against the emancipation of the Jews in Baden. According to Paulus, on account of their religious laws and economic activities, Jews belonged to a distinctive foreign nation, and were thus ineligible for citizenship rights. Only adaptation to the standards of Christian religion and behavior would make their integration possible.

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At the outset, I shall summarize in a few words the primary viewpoint from which this matter – an important one for all honest followers of religion – should be regarded. This [viewpoint], however, is usually obscured by a false conception of religious tolerance: as long as Jewry actually believes it has to be Jewish in a rabbinic-Mosaic sense, then it cannot receive citizenship rights in any other nation, for it wants to remain an isolated nation and considers it a religious duty of its own to always remain a nation separated from all the nations under which it has found protection.

But, understandably, in no nation can a person who wants to continue belonging to another nation (and who believes he must keep doing so) either reasonably seek or retain the rights that presuppose that that person belongs not to another nation, but to the nation of that particular country. Jewry, however, scattered across the entire globe, wants everywhere to be this very same Jewish nation, isolated from all nations, marrying only among itself and bound to many peculiar foreign laws.

Therefore, it – Jewry as a social association – can no longer be aided to anything more than protection for subjects, and at the very most to protected membership in society, if it cannot, for the time being, factually accept and sufficiently prove [without leaving its religion, which it neither shall nor may be moved to do by any kind of advantage] that it no longer has reason and will to persist in its own nationality, in other words, to really, actually give this up and show – demonstrably! – that in every country every Jewish inhabitant belongs only to the nation of that particular country and no longer to the general One Jewry, as a necessarily isolated, self-preserving people of God.

[ . . . ]

13. That which (emancipated) Jewish associations and families, long since lifted from state subservience, contribute to the state in taxes is for protection – of their persons, their businesses and property, as provided to them by courts, police, and the military. – But how, by paying a contribution for protection, not higher than [that paid by] all others, should one be given the right to be more than a protected member [of that state], to even be a judge for others, a fellow legislator, member of government and administrative offices? This is the difference between a protected member of society and a full citizen.

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