the Congress of Vienna had returned to Prussia the provinces in which the poor Jewish masses had lived for centuries, and nobody but a few intellectuals who dreamed of the French Revolution and the Rights of Man had ever thought of giving them the same status as their wealthy brethren – who certainly were the last to clamor for an equality by which they could only lose.fn32 They knew as well as anybody else that ‘every legal or political measure for the emancipation of the Jews must necessarily lead to a deterioration of their civic and social
