I am reading a very important book "The People Speak! Anti Semitism and emancipation in Nineteenthe Century Bavaria" by James F. Harris.
I thunk it's giving me a central question to anchor my paper I will be writing. Where did Maier Zunder come from and what motivated him? For occasional readers, Maier Zunder (1824-1901), my great great grandfather came from Bavaria in 1848, moved to New Haven CT and lived a fruitful accomplished life, establishing a successful business, founding a being president of a bank, serving 24 years on the School Board, founding a B'nai Brith lodge. On and on. More and more. A busy busy man.
This book describes conditions for Jews in Bavaria during the nineteenth century and it's not prtetty. The Jewish degree of 1813, designed to give many citizenship rights to Jews also included many limiting provisions including restriction of occupations, restriction of marriages, restriction of residence, restriction of organizations. At the time, proponents saw it as a means of 'Christian Social Engineering', a way to improve the lot of Jews, make them more civilized. I haven't read all of it and I know things get unstable in the 1840s. Given this constriction of your future, one can see why young Bavarian Jews would want to emigrate to the US. Maier Zunder would never ever had the commercial or service activities in Bavarian. In the US, he could use his broad array of talents freely.
America truly was the land of freedom and liberty.
Map taken from page 12, used without permission showing the areas of Bavaria after the Napoleonic wars. Maier Zunder came from Furth, near Nuremburg in the left upper middle; in Middle Franconia.
Have I mentioned that I'm going to Connecticut to do research next week?
No comments:
Post a Comment