ted itself in a far more
intense form in these countries than elsewhere. This was apparent even
before the emancipations of 1848. Towards the middle of the 18th
century, a limited number of wealthy Jews had been tolerated as
_Schutz-Juden_ outside the ghettos, and their sons, educated as Germans
under the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and his school (see JEWS),
supplied a majority of the leading spirits of the revolutionary
agitation. To this period belong the formidable names of Ludwig Borne
(1786-1837), Heinrich Heine (1799-1854), Edward Ganz (1798-1839),
Gabriel Riesser (1806-1863), Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864), Karl Marx
(1818-1883), Moses Hess (1812-1875), Ignatz Kuranda (1811-1884), and
Johann Jacobi (1805-1877). When the revolution was completed, and the
Jews entered in a body the national life of Germany and Austria, they
sustained this high average in all the intellectual branches of
middle-class activity. Here again, owing to the accidents of their
history, a further concentration became apparent. Their activity was
almost exclusively intellectual. The bulk of them flocked to the
financial and the distributive (as distinct from the productive) fields
of industry to which they had been confined in the ghettos. The
sharpened faculties of the younger generation at the same time carried
everything before them in the schools, with the result that they soon
crowded the professions, especially medicine, law and journalism
(Nossig, _Statistik des Jud. Stammes_, pp. 33-37; Jacobs, _Jew.
Statistics_, pp. 41-69). Thus the "Semitic domination," as it was
afterwards called, became every day more strongly accentuated. If it was
a long time in exciting resentment and jealousy, the reason was that it
was in no sense alien to the new conditions of the national life. The
competition was a fair one. The Jews might be more successful than their
Christian fellow-citizens, but it was in virtue of qualities which
complied with the national standards of conduct. They were as
law-abiding and patriotic as they were intelligent. Crime among them was
far below the average (Nossig, p. 31). Their complete assimilation of
the national spirit was brilliantly illustrated by the achievements in
German literature, art and science of such men as Heinrich Heine and
Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882), Felix Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy)
(1809-1847), and Jacob Meyerbeer (1794-1864), Karl Gustav Jacobi the
mathematician (1804-1851), Gabriel Gustav Valentin