A political writer and statesman, Dohm was the first major visionary of Jewish emancipation in Germany. In his treatise Uber die burgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improvement of the Jews [1781]), he formulated a systematic plea for granting Jews equal rights and thoroughly integrating them into the political, cultural, and economic life of European states. His ideas unleashed heated debates in the German press from the 1780s and into the nineteenth century. Translated into French in 1782, Dohm’s essay also played a role in shaping the French debates over Jewish emancipation before and during the Revolution.
The son of a Protestant pastor and from the northwest German town of Lemgo, Dohm studied at Leipzig and Gottingen Universities, where he began contributing reviews and articles for a variety of periodicals. In 1776, he and a Gottingen colleague launched the Deutsches Museum (German Museum), one of the most prominent political journals of the period. A great admirer of both British “public spirit” and the brand of enlightened absolutism cultivated in Prussia, Dohm was eager to play a more active role in the political world. In 1779, he secured a position working in the Prussian capital as an archivist in Frederick the Great’s Ministry of War. After publishing his plea for Jewish emancipation and other notable works, he rose quickly in the Prussian civil service, was ennobled by Frederick William II in 1786, and spent twenty years in various diplomatic postings.
Dohm first became interested in the Jews’ legal status as a result of his friendship with the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who felt that an argument for Jewish emancipation would be more effective if it came from the pen of a non-Jew. Dohm, like so many other Enlightenment intellectuals, saw contemporary Jews as morally and politically degenerate, but he rejected all theological explanations for their supposed corruption. Arguing from a secular and political perspective, he contended that the character of the Jews resulted solely from their treatment at the hands of Christians and could thus easily be reversed by a state-sponsored program of moral and political regeneration. Eager to make them “useful” citizens, he proposed a holistic program of “civic improvement” that included granting Jews immediate civil rights, requiring them to perform military service, and moving them away from trade and into the more “honorable” and “productive” fields of agriculture and the crafts. Although he anticipated that they would reform Judaism as a result of emancipation, he did not make rights contingent on religious reform, and he showed much more tolerance toward Judaism as a religion than many of his peers. For the most part, both intellectuals and state authorities in the German states adopted Dohm’s project of regenerating the Jews yet rejected his recommendation that they be given rights unconditionally. German Jews did not gain complete political equality until 1871.
——Jonathan M. Hess
See also Alsace; Emancipation; Fichte, J. G.;
Michaelis, Johann David; State-within-a-State
References
Hess, Jonathan M. Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002).
Vierhaus, Rudolph. “Christian Wilhelm Dohm:
Ein politischer Schriftsteller der deutschen Aufklarung.” In Begegnung von Deutschen und Juden in der Geistesgeschichte des 18. Jahrhun-derts. Edited by Jacob Katz and K. H. Rengstorf (Tubingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1994).
World History
