Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

later in the newly unified Germany of Bismarck there was
significant opposition to carrying emancipation to the logical
outcome of full equality. By the late nineteenth century,
political movements to reverse the process had arisen in
Germany and Austria. 44 One reason that Germany in particular
had a more persistent “Jewish question” was that it had
more Jews than its neighbors to the west, but they were still
a minuscule minority of the population—about 1 percent
in 1900. Although Jews were granted limited rights in some
German principalities and cities during the 1820s, it was not
until the convening of the all-German Frankfurt Assembly
in 1848 that the principle of full Jewish equality was proclaimed.
But the Frankfurt Assembly was an abortive, revolutionary
effort to unify Germany on a liberal basis. In 1849
the lower house of the Bavarian Parliament passed a bill
equalizing the civil status of Jews in the kingdom. But a
great popular outcry against Jewish emancipation impelled
the upper house to reject the bill in 1850. 45 A second-class
citizenship that permitted some official discrimination was
the best that most Jews could hope for in most of the states
of a still-divided Germany in the 1850s and 1860s. When
Germany was unified by Bismarck, full citizenship was
granted to Jews, first throughout the North German Federation
in 1869 and then in the entire Reich in 1871. But some
restrictions based on religion persisted in the member states
of the federation: in Prussia, for example, unconverted Jews
could not serve the state as military officers, diplomats, bureaucrats,
or even schoolteachers. Throughout the Reich,
Jews who had not become Christians were often denied access
to civil service positions, university professorships, and
military commissions. 46
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