The focus of this book is the complex network of relationships between Jews and Protestants in the bourgeois educational culture of the 19th century, as it emerged in particular from the 1840s to the disputes over the anti-Semitic theses of the historian Heinrich von Treitschke 1879-81. While anti-Semitic patterns became more and more influential among educated Protestants, educated Jews tried to defend their position in the bourgeois educational culture. Not only did they for the first time seek an offensive defense against contemporary anti-Semitism, they also created one of the most influential Jewish identity constructions of the modern age: the idea of Jewish universalism.
