They explore how Jewish communities settled along the Rhine under Frankish and medieval rulers, survived cycles of expulsion and violence including the Crusades and the Black Death pogroms, and gradually built livelihoods as traders, doctors, and financiers who were excluded from land ownership and the guild system.
Along the way they examine the Reformation's impact on Jewish-Christian relations, the Enlightenment-era friendship between Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Lessing, and how the French Revolution and Napoleon's armies spread the idea of Jewish civic equality across the German lands.
The episode also looks at the 19th-century process of emancipation, the amicable social relations between Jews and Christians recalled by memoirists of this period, and how the deep, centuries-old entanglement of Jewish and Christian life made the antisemitism of the later Nazi era so emotionally devastating for German Jews.
