Lessing in seiner bedutung fur die Juden. Vortrag am 21. Januar 1879

In German. 46 pages. 156 x 120 mm. Yellowed, fragile paper. Rubber stamp impression of a defunct German library on first and last page. Marbled boards.Slight damage of title page. Two leaves detached. The author, Emil Lehmann (1829-1898), was a lawyer, politician, and advocate of an extreme form of Reform Judaism, and of Jewish emancipation in Saxony. Lehmann was a descendant of Behrend Lehmann, the Court Jew. He sat on the Dresden city council from 1865 to 1883 and from 1875 to 1880 was a member of the Progressive Party in the Saxony Diet, being the only Jew there. Colleague of and successor to Bernhard Beer in the fight for emancipation in Saxony, he was for several decades president of the Dresden congregation and was one of the founders of the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund and the Centralverein. He fought the rising movement of antisemitism, which was inspired by A. Stoecker. In a series of newspaper articles and pamphlets Lehmann pleaded for a radical religious reform, stressing the elements common to Judaism and Christianity, and for removing the dividing ones such as circumcision and Jewish holidays. He promoted these ideas in articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and other Jewish periodicals. Lehamn was no idiot, but he did not realize that Jews will never be able to placate the billion Anti Semites out there no matter what they do. …