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to sentiment and tradition. Rationalism was out of date; it had become far more important to be a patriot and a gentleman than a good citizen of the world. The Romantic Age put heavy emphasis on faith and mystery and the Volksgeist ; how could one belong to the German people without sharing also its religious experience?
    The number of educated Jews in Germany was increasing by leaps and bounds; despite all the restrictions, Jews succeeded in entering many professions that had been closed to them before. Some became booksellers, and since bookselling and publishing were closely linked in those days, they also entered journalism in force and thus, through the backdoor, politics. German Jews could still not be judges, army officers or university professors unless they adopted Christianity. But they no longer lived in a social ghetto and this created problems which had not existed before. A hundred years earlier there had been a great deal of fraternising with the non-Jewish world at the top of the social pyramid, among the court Jews, and at the bottom, among the beggars and the underworld. Now, with the rise of a substantial Jewish middle class, the attitude towards its surroundings became a major issue. Jettchen Gebert in Georg Hermann’s novel of that name provides an illuminating account of the way of life, the beliefs and the behaviour of this new Jewish bourgeoisie in the Berlin of the 1820s and 1830s. There was still a seemingly insurmountable wall between the beautiful young heroine and her non-Jewish lover (the fact that he belonged to the bohème was an additional complication). ‘It was bound to come’, is the constant refrain: Jettchen, the family decided, had to marry the good provider, the crude, unromantic ‘typically Jewish’ cousin from the small town in Posen with whom she was not at all in love. But as the family saw it, traditional ties and social conventions had to be respected. Jason, Jettchen’s favourite uncle, is a free-thinker who does not have the courage of his convictions and who, with all his irony and criticism, does not break away from the family.
    Others were less timid; this was the beginning of the period of inter-marriage as a mass phenomenon, of which Fontane wrote in 1899 that few people now remember it, because it was regarded as a perfectly natural thing - no one made any fuss about it. The Jasons of 1825 were all Hegelians, at least for a while; they were influenced by the master’s views; Judaism, Hegel wrote, was the world of the wretched, of misfortune and ugliness, a world lacking inner unity and harmony. These Jews were ashamed of their origins: a cousin wrote to Rahel Varnhagen that he liked to study in Jena because there were so few Jews around. Börne, in a letter to Henriette Herz (with whom he was in love), reported from his university that a few Jews of good family were studying there, but that it was remarkable how anxious they were to hide their origins: ‘One never sees two Jews walking together, or even just conversing.’ One of the Jewish periodicals of the day (Orient) wrote that the Berlin Jew was blissfully happy if he was told that there was nothing ‘specifically Jewish’ about him. With the growing social and cultural differentiation inside the community, the more educated were often ashamed of their less fortunate co-religionists who were less assimilated than themselves but with whom they were nevertheless identified in the public mind. ‘They are a miserable lot,’ Heine wrote about the Hamburg Jews, ‘you must be careful not to look at them if you want to take an interest in them.’ Lassalle, the future Socialist leader, who belonged to a still younger generation, put it in even stronger terms: he loathed the Jews, ‘the degenerate descendants of a great tradition who had acquired the mentality of slaves during centuries of servitude’. True, from time to time Lassalle, like the young Disraeli, had visions of grandeur, of leading the Jews towards