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our breast the holy fire of freedom. We want to adhere to the German people, we shall adhere to it everywhere.’ Riesser summarised his philosophy, the spiritual marriage of Judaism and Germany, in a rhymed device: Einen Vater in den Höhen, eine Mutter haben wir, Gott ihn, aller Wesen Vater, Deutschland unsere Mutter hier. (We have one father in heaven and one mother - God the father of all beings, Germany our mother on earth.) He was by no means in favour of abandoning Judaism as he understood it; on the contrary, he never for a moment considered baptism, the easy way out chosen by so many of his contemporaries, and this despite the many bitter disappointments he suffered as a Jew. Riesser had to leave Altona because he was not permitted to pursue his professional work as a lawyer in his native town. He was refused a teaching position in Heidelberg, and in Hesse, where he went next, he was even refused citizenship. But like many other of Germany’s step-children he did not give up the struggle; the inner alliance of the liberal Jew with German civilisation (as one historian has put it) had become so firmly rooted within a few years that his instinctive answer to any setback, to him individually, or to the community, was to seek deeper and closer assimilation.
    But why should Jews have wanted to remain Jews? During this second stage of transformation Judaism became a religion of universal ethics and it was not readily obvious why they should be so reluctant to give up what divided them from their Christian neighbours. Jewish spokesmen provided various explanations: some argued, in the true spirit of the Enlightenment, that religion was the individual’s private affair. Others, like Riesser, maintained that Christianity as well as Judaism was in urgent need of reform and purification; Christianity’s record in recent centuries had not exactly been that of a religion of love. It had ‘throttled generations and drowned centuries in blood’; by what moral right could it demand the baptism of the Jews? But a critique of Christianity did not necessarily involve an attachment to Judaism. Free-thinking attitudes spread among those who came after Mendelssohn, and the third generation was even more remote from established religion. A leading orthodox rabbi wrote in 1848 about the young Jews of his time, that nine-tenths of them were ashamed of their faith. Statements like these abound; they were perhaps not meant to be taken literally but they indicated a general trend. Of Mendelssohn’s children all but one changed their faith, and many of his pupils, too, converted. David Friedlaender, the most important among this group, enquired in a public manifesto published anonymously about the possibility of a mass conversion of leading Berlin Jews and their families. This overture was rejected, for Friedlaender had some mental reservations (‘Christianity without Jesus’, his critics claimed); subsequently he retreated with some of his friends into Reform Judaism. Others, less scrupulous, discarded their reservations and embraced Christianity. For baptism, as Heine said, was the entrance ticket to European civilisation, and who would let a mere formality stand between him and European civilisation?
    The dilemma facing that generation of Jewish intellectuals is highlighted in the life stories of the ladies who established the great literary salons in Berlin and Vienna: Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, Dorothea Schlegel, Fanny Arnstein - to name the most prominent hostesses of the age. They entertained statesmen and generals, princes and poets, theologians and philosophers. Some of these noblemen were of doubtful provenance, and the character of some of the ladies did not always conform to the standards of the age. But the happenings in their salons were on the whole highly respectable: the aristocracy found in their houses luxury, intelligent conversation, a lively cultural interest, and above all a social and intellectual freedom