16 - Jews in Ecclesiastical Territories of the Holy Roman Empire

Summary

At first glance, an investigation of “Jews in ecclesiastical territories” does not necessarily promise meaningful scholarly reward. Publications of the later eighteenth century regarded these territories as the embodiment of backwardness. In 1785, Philipp Anton von Bibra, a canon of Fulda, called for an inquiry into the current state of the ecclesiastical territories in the Holy Roman Empire. The information he collected from respondents amounted to a devastating assessment. When these territories were secularized in 1803, an act which abolished ecclesiastical states in Germany, it aroused little sustained opposition.

One of the harshest critics of the ecclesiastical territories was the legal scholar and former secretary of state of Hesse-Darmstadt, Friedrich Karl von Moser, son of the famous scholar of constitutional law, Johann Jakob Moser. In Uber die Regierung dergeistlichen Staaten in Deutschland, published in Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig in 1785, the younger Moser described the problem as follows:

If one wants to shed light on the deficiencies of ecclesiastical government, then one has to realize that many stem from the religious and hierarchical system of the Catholic Church, and, therefore, are common to both ecclesiastical and secular Catholic governments. Other deficiencies, however, owe their cause to the origins, longevity, incurability, and, if you will, the inviolability derived from the inherent constitution of ecclesiastical rule.