Where there were no rights, privileges had to be bought. While the court Jews were the favourites of kings, the protected Jews were the protégés of town councils. Many Jews found it possible to evade laws of domicile by residing in one place and trading in another. Nor could they be effectually excluded from the fairs of the i8th century. Peddling had been forced on the latter by the action of the gilds which were still powerful in the i8th century on the Continent. Another cause may be sought in the Cossack assaults on the Jews at an earlier period. Crowds of wanderers were to be met on every road ; Germany, Holland and Italy were full of Jews who, pack on shoulder, were seeking a precarious live lihood at a time when peddling was neither lucrative nor safe.
But underneath all this were signs of a great change. The i8th century has a goodly tale of Jewish artists in metal-work, makers of pottery, and (wherever the gilds permitted it) artisans and wholesale manufacturers of many important commodities. The last attempts at exclusion were irritating enough; but they differed from the earlier persecution. Such strange enactments as the Familianten-Gesetz, which prohibited more than one mem ber of a family from marrying, broke up families by forcing the men to emigrate. In 1781 Dohm pointed to the fact that a Jewish father could seldom hope to enjoy the happiness of living with his children. In that very year, however, Joseph II. initiated in Aus tria a new era for the Jews. "By this new departure (19th of October 1781) the Jews were permitted to learn handicrafts, arts and sciences, and with certain restrictions to devote them selves to agriculture. The doors of the universities and acade mies, hitherto closed to them, were thrown open. . . . An ordi nance of November 2 enjoined that the Jews were everywhere considered fellow-men, and all excesses against them were to be avoided." "The Leibzoll (body-tax) was also abolished, in addition to similar imposts which had stamped the Jews as outcast, for they were now (Dec. 19) to have equal rights with the Christian in habitants." The Jews were not, indeed, granted complete citizen ship, and their residence and public worship in- Vienna and other Austrian cities were circumscribed and even penalized. "But Joseph II. annulled a number of vexatious, restrictive regulations, such as the compulsory wearing of beards, the prohibition against going out in the forenoon on Sundays or holidays, or frequent ing public pleasure resorts. The emperor even permitted Jewish wholesale merchants, notables and their sons, to wear swords (January 2, 1782), and especially insisted that Christians should behave in a friendly manner towards Jews (Graetz)." The Mendelssohn Movement.—This notable beginning to the removal of "the ignominy of a thousand years" was causally connected with the career of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786; q.v.). He found on both sides an unreadiness for approximation:
the Jews had sunk into apathy and degeneration, the Christians were still moved by hereditary antipathy. The failure of the hopes entertained of Sabbatai Zebi (c. 165o, q.v.) had plunged the Jewries of the world into despair. Despite all this, one must not fall into the easy error of exaggerating the degeneration into which the Jewries of the world fell from the middle of the 17th till the middle of the 18th century. For Judaism had organized itself ; the Shulltan aruch of Joseph Qaro (q.v.), printed in within a decade of its completion, though not accepted without demur, was nevertheless widely admitted as the code of Jewish life. If in more recent times progress in Judaism has implied more or less of revolt against the rigors and fetters of Qaro's code, yet for 25o years it was a powerful safeguard against de moralization and stagnation. No community living in full accord ance with that code could fail to reach a high moral and intellectual level.
It is truer to say that on the whole the Jews began at this period to abandon as hopeless the attempt to find a place for themselves in the general life of their country. Perhaps they even ceased to desire it. Their children were taught without any regard to out side conditions, they spoke and wrote a jargon, and their whole training, both by what it included and by what it excluded, tended to produce isolation from their neighbours Moses Mendelssohn, both by his career and by his propaganda, for ever put an end to these conditions ; he more than any other man. Two results emanated from Mendelssohn's work. A new school of scientific study of Judaism emerged, to dignified by the names of Leo pold Zunz (q.v.), and many other scholars. On the other hand Mendelssohn by his pragmatic conception of religion (spe cially in his Jerusalem) weakened the belief of certain minds in the absolute truth of Judaism, and thus his own grandchildren (including the famous musician Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy) as well as later Heine, Borne, Gans and Neander, embraced Christianity. Within Judaism itself two parties were formed, the Liberals and the Conservatives. Holdheim (q.v.) and Geiger (q.v.) led the reform movement in Germany and at the present . day the effects of the movement are widely felt in America on the Liberal side and on the opposite side in the work of the neo orthodox school founded by S. R. Hirsch (q.v.). Modern semi naries were established first in Breslau by Zacharias Frankel (q.v ) and later in other cities. Jews, engaged in all the profes sions and pursuits of the age, came to the front in many branches of public life ; the names of Rathenau and Einstein are well known.