Introduction

Jewish-German history

Work materials for the „Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im fränkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273" from Bresslau's nachlass.

Harry Bresslau’s contribution to the Berlin anti-Semitism debate clearly outlines his position regarding his Jewish identity. He understood himself as a German with Jewish roots and considered the German-Jewish community in the greatest part as an element of German society. For this reason, it seemed quite logical to him to publish source material on Jewish-German history after the model of the MGH editions.

In 1885, the "Historische Kommission für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland" (historical commission for the history of the Jews in Germany) was founded with Harry Bresslau as its first chairman. As he records in his autobiographical „Selbstdarstellung“, the commission was formed in affiliation with the German-Israelite Gemeindebund (community association) in the last years of his membership at the Berlin university and included, besides himself and three delegates of the Gemeindebund, the historians Hermann Bärwald from Frankfurt, Ernst Dümmler, Ludwig Geiger, Otto von Gierke, Wilhelm Wattenbach, Julius Weizsäcker from Berlin and Otto Stobbe from Leipzig. Bresslau notes that under his direction the commission published five issues of the journal "Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deuschland", a volume of regesta up to the year 1272, and three volumes with editions of important Hebraic sources supplemented with German translations. He himself had contributed importantly to these publications by supervising the work on the regesta and by writing a number of articles for the journal as well as an introduction to the edition of sources on the persecution of the Jews during the age of crusades in which, as he concedes, he was led astray by mistakes in the text and came to the wrong conclusions. Finally, in 1902 he had written a short prologue to the regesta on which Julius Aronius had been working prior to his death, concluding thereby his own participation in the project, which had de facto come to an end several years previously for a number of reasons (Selbstdarstellung, S. 59f.).