Andreas Nachama

Berlin was for centuries the center of Jewish life in Germany. Settlement, pogroms, trials against Jews, burnings at the stake and expulsion characterized its history from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Only after the Thirty Years' War did a new era begin. The eighteenth-century Berlin of Moses Mendelssohn was a city of Jewish emancipation and simultaneously a center of enlightenment. In this period and the generations that followed, Jewish Berliners and immigrants made important contributions to the city's economy.… (meer)