In 1776, Moses Isaacs died in Berlin. Along with Isaac Daniel Itzig and Veitel Heine Ephraim, Isaacs had made a fortune during the Seven Years' War minting coins and supplying the army. Isaacs left behind an estate of three-quarters of a million talers in gold, most of which was organized into a family trust extending to the life of the grandchildren. The only stipulation Isaacs placed on his will was that should any of his five surviving children convert to Christianity, they would forego their share of the inheritance. The first of Isaacs's children to convert were his two daughters, Rebecca and Blümchen, who both proceeded to marry noblemen. In 1780, their two unconverted brothers appealed to King Frederick the Great to uphold their father's will and exclude the two defecting sisters from the inheritance. The king ruled in agreement with the brothers more out of loyalty to the deceased Isaacs than out of an aversion to Jewish conversion to Christianity. Whatever his motives, the sisters felt they had been treated unfairly, and so in 1786 they sued in the civil courts to have the anti-conversion clause of the will declared invalid. The first court's decision was in their favor. This court ruled that the anti-conversion clause was inappropriate in a Christian state, insofar as the clause interfered with the inheritance rights of Christian subjects, in this case the two newly Protestant Isaacs daughters. But later that year a higher court reversed this decision, judging from the viewpoint of the Jewish parents, not the Christian children.

Consideration of political life in modern Germany has often centered on two main issues: classically, the vicissitudes of the national state; more recently, the impact of the creation of an industrial society on existing structures of power and on the position of ruling elites. Without denying the centrality of these questions, an exclusive focus on them can obscure the importance of other factors in German political development, both in their own right, and in the way they mediated the experience of state-building and industrialization to different sections of the population. Two such relevant factors are regionalism and confessional identity.

In a conversation with Charles Hardinge aboard H.M. Yacht Victoria and Albert in April of 1907, King Edward VII raised the question of inviting Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit England. In 1904, the British monarch had paid a state visit to Germany, and now he felt the time had come to return his imperial nephew's hospitality. Hardinge relayed the King's suggestion to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey. “The King thinks that this invitation should be greatly appreciated by the Emperor William and the German people,” the undersecretary wrote, “and would tend to improve the relations between the two countries without giving our friends any real cause for suspicion or alarm.” While Hardinge was unenthusiastic about the idea of the Kaiser coming to Britain, he nonetheless conceded that “this visit has to be paid sometime or other,” and supposed that it might “mitigate any ill-feeling” created by the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Russian entente.