page_title: Unification of Germany
section_title: Integrating the Jewish community
hierarchical_section_title: Unification of Germany / Beyond the political mechanism: forming a nation / Integrating the Jewish community
caption_attribution_description: Niederwald Memorial, near Rüdesheim/ Germany
context_page_description: The Unification of Germany into the German Empire, a Prussia-dominated state with federal features, was officially proclaimed on 18 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in France. The new state replaced the German Confederation, a loose association of sovereign states, and the highly decentralized Holy Roman Empire. Princes of the German states, excluding Austria-Hungary and its House of Habsburg-Lorraine, gathered at the ceremony to proclaim William I of Prussia and the House of Hohenzollern as German Emperor, following the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War.
  A confederated realm of German princedoms had been in existence for over a thousand years, dating to the Treaty of Verdun in 843. However, there was no German national identity in development as late as 1800, mainly due to the autonomous nature of the princely states; most inhabitants of Holy Roman Empire territories, outside of those ruled by the emperor directly, identified themselves mainly with their prince, and not with the emperor or the German realm as a whole.
context_section_description: The Germanized Jews remained another vulnerable population in the new German nation-state. Since 1780, after emancipation by the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, Jews in the former Habsburg territories had enjoyed considerable economic and legal privileges that their counterparts in other German-speaking territories did not: they could own land, for example, and they did not have to live in a Jewish quarter (also called the Judengasse, or "Jews' alley"). They could also attend universities and enter the professions. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, many of the previously strong barriers between Jews and Christians broke down. Napoleon had ordered the emancipation of Jews throughout territories under French hegemony. Like their French counterparts, wealthy German Jews sponsored salons; in particular, several Jewish salonnières held important gatherings in Frankfurt and Berlin during which German intellectuals developed their own form of republican intellectualism. Throughout the subsequent decades, beginning almost immediately after the defeat of the French, reaction against the mixing of Jews and Christians limited the intellectual impact of these salons. Beyond the salons, Jews continued a process of Germanization in which they intentionally adopted German modes of dress and speech, working to insert themselves into the emerging 19th-century German public sphere. The religious reform movement among German Jews reflected this effort.
  By the years of unification, German Jews played an important role in the intellectual underpinnings of the German professional, intellectual, and social life. The expulsion of Jews from Russia in the 1880s and 1890s complicated integration into the German public sphere. Russian Jews arrived in north German cities in the thousands; considerably less educated and less affluent, their often dismal poverty dismayed many of the Germanized Jews. Many of the problems related to poverty (such as illness, overcrowded housing, unemployment, school absenteeism, refusal to learn German, etc.) emphasized their distinctiveness for not only the Christian Germans, but for the local Jewish populations as well.
caption: In this close-up of the Niederwald Monument (see long shot above), Germania towers 40 metres (131 ft) above the town of Rüdesheim. She holds a crown in her right hand and carries a sword at her side. The Niederwald Germania was erected 1877–1883.
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