Werner Mosse Memorial Lecture 2003

Monday, 17 March 2003

Peter Pulzer (Leo Baeck Institute London/All Souls College Oxford)
Introduction

Prof Jonathan M. Hess (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity

In his lecture, Jonathan Hess examined visions of large-scale Jewish economic and cultural domination around 1800, offering a profile of public perceptions of the Berlin Jewish elite in this period. His lecture focused on reactions to David Friedländer's notorious proposals of mass baptism in 1799, showing the connections between Friedländer's contemporaries' perception of the threat of a Jewish entry into the Church and the wave of popular antisemitic pamphlets that flooded the German book market in 1803.

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