Peter Haas

fact quite straightforward. As I have just noted, the issue of the new rabbis’ relation to the old legal tradition, the halakhah, was of central concern. But theories about the origin and nature of law had special urgency at this time in the German -speaking lands of central Europe because of the area’s struggle to define itself as a nation-state with its own distinctive cultural, religious and social norms. In other words, as the diverse peoples of German -speaking Central Europe were coming gradually to a common idea of nationality, they found themselves contending with the diversity of their political and economic cultures. The various German legal patrimonies would have to coalesce into a coherent system. While it was clear to nearly everybody that the old medieval legal structure would simply have to go, it was hardly obvious what would replace it. But it was apparent that whatever did replace it would have to be authentic to the nation, or Volk. So it turns out that the reformers of Judaism were facing very much the same obstacle as the creators of modern Germany were in theirs. That is, just as people of German nationality were trying to define themselves and their nationality, so were Jews within that population. In fact, the debates in both the general German and the Jewish communities reached a sort of peak in the 1840s, signaled by the revolutions of 1848 on the one hand and the Reform“synods” on the other. My point is that not only did Jews define themselves in the larger context of nationalistic self-definition in central Europe , the terms of semantics and syntax of the debates crossed social and national lines.

In significant part, the development of the philosophy of law (Rechtsphilosophie ) in the German -speaking lands was provoked by Napoleon's attempt to remake France , and then the rest of Europe , in line with Enlightenment rationality and liberal political principles. One major legal development was, of course, the dissolution in 1806 of the Holy Roman Empire . In the wake of this collapse, the German lands were reorganized as a series of more or less independent kingdoms (Bavaria , Wiirtemberg, Hanover, Saxony ) or Grand Duchies (Baden,