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

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19. According to Moses and Ezra (Chapt. 9, 10. Neh. 13, 2, 25), no Jew can marry a non-Jew or give his daughter to any such foreigner (goy) as a wife. – And yet their defenders want to say: They are putting themselves on an equal footing with us in every aspect of civic life, and therefore, by fulfilling equal duties in life, they also earn égalité of rights.

20. Only when they are capable, among themselves, of giving up everything whereby they – N.B. [nota bene] in civic affairs – differentiate themselves from us through Jewish law (not: religion), do they render themselves equal and may desire that we legally acknowledge this equality (N.B.: once it exists).

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3. Suggestions for Improvement
The above-mentioned historical overviews show how it became possible for a people whose former country- and state-constitution appears to have been violently demolished – irretrievably so for eighteen centuries now – to persist nevertheless, even in a state of dispersion among all other peoples, as an isolated nation opposed to every other nation in its laws and customs, and to believe in having to persist this way for the sake of religion. The roots of this evil and its development must be recognized before Jewry, which is suffering mainly because of this, can be persuaded by arguments to move toward the recovery that depends upon it itself.

The Jews would gladly be put on an equal footing with the other nations under which their people are now born and [into which they] are admitted to the duties and rights of protected citizens. But the dissimilarity owing to which those dispersed everywhere [i.e., Jews] continue to assert their isolated nationality cannot, for the most part, be abolished by ordinances of governments; it can truly only be abolished by their own determination. And if those who want to remain different by way of laws and customs nevertheless make the claim for equal footing with state citizens as regards civic duties and rights, then the incorrectness of their desire and the impossibility of making a concession regarding the difference in which they persist lies with them.

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