It was easy for progressive scholars, writers and thinkers to see the state as a partner in the enlightened project, because the sovereign himself was a renowned champion of its values. Immanuel Kant’s suggestion that the phrases ‘age of enlightenment’ and ‘age of Frederick’ were synonymous was no pious platitude.13 Of all the monarchs of eighteenth-century Europe, Frederick came closest to personifying the values and outlook of enlightenment. He joined a Masonic lodge in 1738, while he was still crown prince. He was, as we have seen, a sceptic in religious questions and an exponent of religious tolerance. When asked in June 1740 whether a Catholic subject should be permitted to enjoy civic rights in the city of Frankfurt an der Oder, he replied that ‘all religions are just as good as each other, as long as the people who practise them are honest, and even if Turks and heathens came and wanted to populate this country, then we would build mosques and temples for them.’14 He gathered about him some of the leading figures of the French enlightenment. Voltaire in particular, with whom Frederick sustained a long if intermittently fractious conversation, was for many years the foremost literary star of the enlightenment and his close association with the Prussian king was famous throughout the continent. Frederick’s own writings were composed in imitation of the sparkling but cool and detached tone of the contemporary French masters.
Then there were those early sovereign acts by which Frederick revealed his readiness to translate ideas and convictions into practice. On his accession to the throne, he ordered that the journal Die Berlinischen Nachrichten was no longer to be subject to censorship, and that the rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff, who had been driven away from the University of Halle by the Pietists in the 1720s, should be recalled forthwith.15 Even more striking was his decision, against the advice of the leading Prussian jurist of the era, Samuel von Cocceji, to suspend the use of judicial torture in his lands. Torture was still widely used by the European judicial systems to secure confessions from suspects. In 1745, Zedler’s Universallexikon, one of the canonical encyclopaedias of the German enlightenment, defended the use of torture as an investigative tool, and the practice was retained in the Theresiana, the great codex of Austrian law published in 1768.16
But on 3 June 1740, only three days after his father’s death, Frederick ordered that torture was no longer to be used, except in a small range of extreme cases involving crimes against king or country, or instances of multiple murder where robust interrogation was required to secure the identity of unknown accomplices. In a further order of 1754, Frederick extended this ban into a blanket prohibition, on the grounds that torture was not only ‘cruel’ (grausam) but also unreliable as a means of getting at the truth, since there was always the danger that suspects would implicate themselves in order to avoid further torture.17 This radical measure left many judges and legal officials complaining that there now existed no means of extracting a confession – the queen of proofs under all the ancien régime legal systems – from recalcitrant offenders. A new evidential doctrine had to be improvised to cover cases where there was a plenitude of evidence, but no confession.
Frederick also reduced the number of crimes punishable by death and made a small but significant change to the arrangements for execution by the wheel. This gruesome practice involved breaking the body of the offender on the scaffold with blows from a cartwheel and expressed a characteristically early-modern understanding of public executions as a quasi-religious ritual centred on the scourging of the malefactor in preparation for his or her departure into the afterlife. Frederick ordered that in future executions of this kind, the offender was to be strangled by the executioner out of view of the crowd before the application of the wheel. His intention was to preserve the deterrent effect of the punishment while doing away with the infliction of unnecessary pain.18 Here, as in the case of torture, a rational assessment of the utility of the practice was coupled with an enlightened distaste for acts of cruelty (for, if you strip the religious dimension from the torments meted out to the offender, nothing remains but cruelty). These achievements should not be downplayed – in 1766, it was still possible in France for a youth found guilty of blasphemy and the desecration of a wayside shrine to have his right arm hacked off and his tongue torn out before being burned at the stake.19
Frederick even granted refuge in Berlin to the radical Spinozist Johann Christian Edelmann. Edelmann was the author of various tracts arguing, among other things, that only a deism purged of all idolatry could redeem and unite humanity, that there was no need for the institution or sacrament of marriage, that sexual freedom was legitimate, and that Christ was a man like any other. Edelmann had been driven out of some of the most tolerant states of the German lands by hostile Lutheran and Calvinist establishments. During a brief visit by Edelmann to Berlin in 1747, the local Calvinist and Lutheran clergy attacked him as a dangerous and offensive sectary. He even attracted the hostile notice of Frederick for his principled opposition to royal absolutism and his dismissive (printed) remarks about Voltaire’s eulogy celebrating the king’s accession. Yet he was permitted to make his home in Berlin – even as his works were being furiously condemned across the length and breadth of the German lands – on the condition that he ceased to publish. In May 1750, as Edelmann whiled away his time in Berlin (under a false name to protect him against reprisals by Christian fanatics), there was a massive burning of his books in the city of Frankfurt/Main under the auspices of the Imperial Book Commission. With the entire magistracy and municipal government in attendance and seventy guards to hold back the crowds, nearly 1,000 copies of Edelmann’s books were tossed on to a tower of flaming birch wood. The contrast in tone and policy with Berlin could hardly have been more conspicuous. Frederick had no objections to Edelmann’s religious scepticism, his deism or his moral libertinism. The Prussian capital, he observed in a characteristically back-handed quip, already contained a great many fools and could surely accommodate one more.20
Frederick was thus – unlike his French counterpart Louis XVI – a plausible partner in the project of enlightenment in the Prussian lands. Indeed for many within the literary and political elite, the monarch’s legitimate personal claim to enlightenment bestowed a unique meaning upon the relationship between civil society and the state in Prussia. We saw in chapter 7 how the personal reputation of the king suffused political discourses in Prussia during and after the Seven Years War. At that time, patriot publicists argued that love of the king could transform mere subjects into active participants in the public life of the fatherland.
In his landmark essay of 1784, Immanuel Kant argued that the convergence of authority and enlightenment in the same sovereign person utterly transformed the relationship between political and civil liberties, for, where the monarch was enlightened, his power constituted an asset, rather than a threat to the interests vested in civil society. The result, Kant argued, was a paradox: under a truly enlightened sovereign, moderate constraints on the degree of political liberty might actually ‘create a space in which the people may expand to the fullness of its powers’. The famous formula Kant placed in the mouth of Frederick: ‘Argue as much as you will about whatever you choose; but obey!’ was not presented as the slogan of a despot. Rather it encapsulated the self-transforming potential within an enlightened monarchy. In such a polity, public argument and public criticism – a conversation, in short, between civil society and the state – ensured that the values and objectives of the state itself would ultimately merge harmoniously with those of the people, so that the duty to obey ceased to be a burden upon the subject.
For once the [… ] inclination and commitment to free thinking has germinated and taken root, this gradually exerts its influence upon the outlook of the people (steadily reinforcing its freedom of action) and ultimately upon the principles of the government itself…21
This vision of a virtuous political convection, in which the ideas of enlightened luminaries first leavened the dough of civil society before communicating themselves to the org
ans of government, was not entirely detached from reality. Government in Prussia was in general far more consultative than we are inclined to think. Virtually all major legislative initiatives were the result of extensive negotiations or discussion with local interests. Sometimes this was conducted through the medium of the Estates, as in the protracted consultations over restrictions on the sale of noble landed property, sometimes through local town or district officials who were themselves in consultation with a wide range of locals, and sometimes through informal networks of experts, such as jurists, for example, or businessmen. None of this was especially ‘enlightened’; it was an essential, though underemphasized, part of the gathering of opinions and information that made government possible. What changed in the later eighteenth century was the emergence of a network of enlightened activists who claimed to be trustees of the public interest, as well as partners and critics of the sovereign power.22 It was a claim that the government came largely to accept. In 1784, when Frederick II embarked on a thoroughgoing legal reform that would culminate in a new and comprehensive law code for the Prussian lands, he chose to submit early drafts of the new code to the judgement of public opinion. Initially this denoted a fairly narrow circle of leading jurists and constitutional lawyers, as well as various ‘men of practical wisdom’. But the net was later greatly widened through the institution of a public essay competition, a technique that the government borrowed from the older generation of patriotic-beneficial voluntary societies.23 This remarkable step revealed a surprising confidence in the virtue of intellectual competition and demonstrated the king’s tacit acknowledgement that public opinion was now, as one of his senior officials later put it, ‘a mighty tribunal’ judging each act of government.24
There may not have been freedom of the press in Prussia – in the sense of a generalized legal right to the public expression of opinions – but censorship was sufficiently mild to permit lively and robust political debate, both in print and in speech. The Scottish travel writer John Moore, who visited Berlin in 1775, later recorded his impressions of Prussia’s capital city:
Nothing surprised me more, when I first came to Berlin, than the freedom with which many people speak of the measures of government, and the conduct of the King. I have heard political topics, and others which I should have thought still more ticklish, discussed here with as little ceremony as at a London coffee-house. The same freedom appears in the booksellers’ shops, where literary productions of all kinds are sold openly. The pamphlet lately published on the division of Poland, wherein the King is very roughly treated, is to be had without difficulty, as well as other performances, which attack some of the most conspicuous characters with all the bitterness of satire.25
PRUSSIA’S JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT
In the 1770s, the Jewish community of Berlin was the wealthiest and most acculturated of the German states. At its core was an elite of military contractors, bankers, merchants and manufacturers. The houses of the wealthiest families were located in the most fashionable areas of the city – Berlin was the only court city in the German lands where Jewish residents were not confined to a ghetto. In 1762, the banker Daniel Itzig bought a small palace in the Burgstrasse, right on the bank of the river Spree, and converted it into an elegant two-winged residence. Here he assembled a superb collection of art treasures, including Rubens’s Ganymede, works by Terborch, Watteau, Joseph Roos and Antoine Pesne, and a ‘large view with many figures by Canaletto’.26 Nearby, on the corner of Poststrasse and Mühlendamm, was the three-storeyed palace of the court jeweller and mintmaster, Veitel Heine Ephraim. Designed by the master builder Friedrich Wilhelm Diterichs and decorated in the rococo style with columns, pilasters and elegant balconies with gilded railings, the Ephraimpalais is still a landmark in today’s Berlin.
Itzig and Ephraim, like most other members of the Jewish financial elite, were men who had made their fortunes through collaboration with the Prussian state. Both were members of the business partnership entrusted by Frederick II with managing Prussia’s coin supply during the Seven Years War. When war broke out in 1756, the king resolved to fund his campaigns with a coin inflation. Prussia had no native silver to speak of and thus had to import all its coin bullion – a business that had traditionally been in the hands of Jewish agents. By reducing the proportion of silver in the Prussian coinage, he would be able to extract a ‘mint charge’ in the form of the unused silver. Frederick had always made more intensive use of Jewish financial managers than his predecessors and he obliged a consortium of Jewish bankers and bullion merchants – including Ephraim and Itzig – to accept responsibility for minting the debased coins. The profits generated by this enterprise – amounting to about 29 million thalers – made a significant contribution to the king’s war costs.27 By the end of the hostilities, the Jewish mint managers – together with an array of other Jewish businessmen specializing in the supply of war provisions – were among the wealthiest men in Prussia.
These were the most prominent members of the Jewish minority in Prussia, but they were hardly typical. Jewish life in Prussia was a study in contrasts. While a small minority enjoyed great wealth and legal privilege, the majority were weighed down by onerous restrictions. In 1730, Frederick William I issued a General Jewry Regulation that restricted Jewish trade, forbade Jews to practise in guild-controlled artisan crafts or to peddle wares in the cities, and prohibited them from purchasing houses. The trend towards ever-tighter state regulation continued during the reign of Frederick II. The elaborate Revised General Code of 1750 divided the Jews of Prussia into six discrete classes. At the top was a tiny minority of ‘generally privileged’ Jews who could purchase houses and land and operate commercially on the same footing as their Christian fellows. In special cases, members of this class might even be granted hereditary citizenship rights. The ‘privileged protected Jews’ of the next class, however, could not choose their place of residence and could pass their status only to one of their children. The third class of ‘unprivileged protected Jews’ comprised practitioners of specific professions – opticians, engravers, painters, physicians – deemed useful enough to justify conditional residence permits. Class four encompassed community employees, such as rabbis, cantors and kosher slaughterers, and entailed no hereditary rights. The fifth class comprised ‘tolerated Jews’ enjoying the patronage of a Jew in the upper three classes, as well as the non-inheriting children of Jews of the second and third classes. Class six, the least of them all, covered the private employees of Jewish businesses and households; residence permits in this class were dependent upon contracts of employment.
Confronted with the Jews, the king’s famed enlightenment narrowed to a purely instrumental rationale. Frederick was determined to use them as revenue-generators and was prepared for that purpose to grant extremely wide-ranging freedoms to the most useful of his Jewish subjects. Indeed he pressed Jews into those sectors of the economy where entrepreneurial ventures were most sorely needed – the bullion trade, iron foundries, cross-border commercial operations in peripheral regions and various branches of manufacture. He also raised special taxes and levies on Jewish subjects and required them to purchase surplus figurines from the Royal Porcelain Manufacturies – these items, reluctantly accepted in the 1770s, became the cherished heirlooms of later generations.
Underlying the superficially utilitarian measures of the state were social tensions and a lively vein of prejudice. Part of the pressure for state regulation came from the Christian corporate oligarchies of the Prussian towns, who pelted the central and provincial administrations with endless complaints and petitions against the commercial activities of the Jews.28 Jews in Prussia, as in all the German lands, were caught in the crossfire between the state and the local communities. In seeking to settle new Jewish residents or to protect their enterprises, the state ran into concerted resistance from town guildsmen and shopkeepers who feared Jewish competition and were hostile to the economic innovations pioneered by the newcomers. Here, as in other sphe
res of action, the authorities had to tread a careful line between grassroots opinion and the larger interests of the state.
This is not to suggest that the king himself was free of prejudice. On the contrary, Frederick was almost as hostile to the Jews as his father – who described them as ‘locusts’ – had been.29 In his Political Testament of 1752, he denounced them as the most dangerous of all sects, declaring that they harmed Christian trade, and arguing somewhat hypocritically that the state should make no use of their services. These views were reiterated in the Testament of 1768, despite the close and productive collaboration of the war years.30 Jewry regulations consequently carried a discriminatory symbolic charge. Jews were subject to a ‘body tax’ otherwise levied on cattle; they were constrained to enter and leave the capital city by one of two gates. Unlike any other minority group in Prussia, they could be punished on the basis of collective liability. A cabinet order of 1747 stated that the elders of each Jewish community were co-responsible for any robbery involving a member; the same applied to losses incurred through bankruptcies and penalties imposed for receiving or concealing stolen goods.31
Although the wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs have tended to dominate the historical record, the great majority of Jews in the Prussian lands were very modest individuals. Large-scale commerce of the sort practised by Ephraim and Itzig was the domain of a tiny elite. The small Jewish trader or Hausierer working from door to door was a far more frequent and familiar figure. Those Jews who did not possess letters of protection allowing them to trade in an open shop or stall were restricted to itinerant dealing in second-hand goods. The proportion of Prussian Jewry in this position rose steadily as the successive trade restrictions of the early and mid eighteenth century pushed many formerly prosperous merchants into marginal sectors of the economy.32 Their ranks were continuously swollen by the illegal immigration of Jews from Poland, many of whom were poor and obliged to live from very marginal forms of itinerant employment. Attempts to close the eastern borders to these economic refugees failed to have any appreciable effect. Repeated ordinances against ‘beggar Jews’, issued in 1780, 1785, 1788 and 1791, indicate that this migration, doubtless aggravated by the partitions of Poland, remained unchecked at the end of the century.33 The Pietist missionary agents who worked from the Institutum Judaicum in Halle from the 1730s onwards often encountered gaggles of ‘poor travelling Jews’ who were unable to pay the gate tax and gathered before the walls, trading in small portable items such as prayer books or calendars.34
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