The Salons of Jewish Women and Their Liberalizing Influence
THEY were aided in their Liberal tendencies by a remarkable group of emancipated Jewesses, who introduced into Germany the vogue of the political Salon after the manner of Madame Roland and Madame de Staël. They were mostly from the Berlin Circle, which had arisen around Moses Mendelssohn, and carried his tendencies towards rationalism and culture to extreme limits. His two daughters Dorothea and Henriette, and their friends Henriette Herz and Rahel Lewin, created salons to which were attracted some of the more liberal spirits of the cultured world of Berlin. Dorothea Mendelssohn ultimately married Friedrich von Schlegel and became one of the Muses of the German Romantic School. Publicists of distinction like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich von Gentz formed, with Dorothea and others of her circle, a "Bond of Virtue" (Tugendbund) which according to all appearance was named on the principle of locus a non lucendo. Rahel, "the little woman with a great soul," as Goethe called her, was even a more striking personality. She numbered, among her friends, men of such different types as Schelling and Schleiermacher, the Prince de Ligne, and Fichte, Schlegel and Gutzkow, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Frederick the Great's nephew, and Fouqué, Gentz, and the Humboldts, and she finally married Varnhagen van Ense. She was the first to appreciate, in its full extent, the multiform genius of Goethe, and helped the rise to fame of Boerne, Heine, and Victor Hugo. She was undoubtedly the most striking personality among the women of her age in Germany, and she is nowadays regarded as one of the chief forerunners of the Feminist movement.[C]
These salons had an air of cultured Bohemianism, which attracted many men of rank in Mid-Europe who were beginning to be repelled by the exactions of social gathering in which all associations were determined by armorial bearings. A similar salon was held in Vienna by Baroness von Arnstein, in whose mansion all the diplomats of the Congress of Vienna met as on neutral ground. Such gatherings, while helping to liberalize good society in Mid-Europe, also brought the position of Jews to the notice of the ruling classes and, in many cases, aroused a determination to repair their wrongs. You cannot accept a man socially yet refuse him the most elementary rights politically.[D]
The Liberal Leadership of Heine and Boerne
THE Revolution of 1830 brought into European prominence the two most brilliant members of Rahel's coterie, Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine. Both had made their mark as litterateurs in the preceding decade, but Boerne's "Letters from Paris" and Heine's "French Conditions" (contributed to the Augsburger Zeitung) drew the attention of all liberal Germany to the new hopes aroused by the downfall of the absolutist monarchy in France. Henceforth they were the dominating voices in arousing among the German Liberals the hope of similar liberty, while in France itself they helped to make known to French culture the deeper currents of German thought and literature. In particular their brilliant wit and incisive sarcasm set the tone for the feuilleton literature of all Mid-Europe. By their very isolation they were enabled to regard men and affairs with a certain detachment, and both wrote with an iridescent insolence which can only be described by the Jewish technical word Chutzpah. Treitschke complained of their frequent irreverences and flippancies but in both respects Heine, "the wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire," was merely following in the footsteps of his predecessor, and Boerne, like Diderot, knew that the most effective weapon against authority is sarcasm.
Under the leadership of Heine and Boerne a whole school of liberal journalists arose in Germany and Austria, many of them Jews like Saphir and Hartmann, and they gave a tone to Mid-European journalism which has lasted to the present day. They thus helped to internationalize Liberalism of the French form, with its rather vague and indefinite strivings after liberty, equality, and fraternity, as contrasted with the Liberalism of the English type dominated by Jeremy Bentham, which aimed at constitutional, economic, and social reforms of a definite character. Young Germany, as represented by Heine and Boerne, left the latter type of Liberalism severely alone.
Yet in the struggle for constitutional liberty, which led to the revolutions of 1848, Jews took a considerable part on the more practical side. Everywhere during that critical year Jews had a hand in the upheaval against absolutism.[E]
Among the Conservatives: Stahl and Disraeli
BUT Jews were not altogether unrepresented among the Conservative forces, counting indeed two of the chief leaders, F. J. Stahl in Prussia and Benjamin Disraeli in England. Disraeli's is the better known name, but it is probable Stahl was equally influential. Stahl is described by Sir A. W. Ward in the Cambridge Modern History, xi. 395, as "the intellectual leader of the conservative aristocratic party and the most remarkable brain in the Upper Chamber. . . . He largely supplied the ruling party with the learning and wealth of ideas on which to found their claims. Their organ was the Kreuzzeitung, and the party was called by its name." Bluntschli calls him, "after Hegel the most important representative of the philosophical theory of the State. He, in many ways, advanced political science by his dialectical and critical ability in founding new points of view." (The Theory of the State, p. 73). But Stahl's historic influence will probably rest on his connection with Bismarck at the formative period of his career, when the future chancellor was also a member of the Kreuzzeitung party.