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for this involved administering the Christian formula of the oath. But the gains greatly outweighed the setbacks. For the Jews the 1850s and 1860s were a happy period. They attained full civil equality in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in Italy and in Scandinavia. In 1858 the first British Jew entered Parliament, and after 1870 Jews could attend English universities. On the continent there was little public antisemitism, and the spirit prevailing in the Jewish communities was one of genuine optimism. They shared in the general prosperity, and some amassed great riches. But much more significant was the emergence of a strong middle class; from hawking and other forms of small trade the Jews streamed into more substantial forms of business, industry, and banking, and above all into the free professions. In Berlin they constituted in 1905 less than 5 per cent of the population but provided 30 per cent of the municipal tax revenue; in Frankfurt on Main 63 per cent of all Jews had in 1900 an income of more than 3,000 marks; only 25 per cent of the Protestants and no more than 16 per cent of the Catholics reached that level. Jewish urbanisation continued at a rapid pace. The Berlin Jewish community, which had numbered about 3,000 in 1816, rose to 54,000 in 1854 and in 1910 to 144,000. The growth of the Vienna community was even more striking: from 6,000 in 1857 it increased to 99,000 in 1890; during the next twenty years it again almost doubled, rising to 175,000. In absolute terms the communities continued to grow almost everywhere, but relative to the general population their percentage decreased in Germany from 1.25 in 1871 to 0.9 in 1925; with growing prosperity the birth-rate declined. The number of conversions reached an all-time low in the 1870s; the outside pressure, the drawbacks and inducements which had previously driven Jews to embrace Christianity, were much weaker now. Mixed marriages on the other hand became more frequent; they occurred most often in the upper-middle class, but were also a common practice in all sections of the Jewish population. On the eve of the First World War there was one mixed marriage for every two among Jewish partners in Berlin and Hamburg; in 1915 (admittedly not a typical year) there were actually more mixed marriages in Germany than marriages between two Jewish partners. Similar trends were apparent all over central Europe; in Hungary, where mixed marriages had been officially banned up to 1895, their rate subsequently rose to almost one-third. In Copenhagen it reached 56 per cent in the 1880s and in Amsterdam 70 per cent in the 1930s. The decline and probable disappearance of west and central European Jewry figured prominently in the writings of the sociologists well before 1914.
    The history of the Jews in central and western Europe during the second third of the nineteenth century was thus one of continuous political and social progress. Two Jews, Crémieux and Goudchaux, were members of the French Republican government of 1848; Achille Fould became Louis Napoleon’s minister of finance. The Frankfurt Constituent Assembly counted five Jewish deputies and several more who were of Jewish origin. Individual Jews attained cabinet rank in Holland in 1860 and in Italy in 1870; Disraeli was baptised while a youth but in the eyes of the public he remained a Jew. Jewish politicians and voters alike gravitated to the liberal, left-of-centre parties because these had led the struggle for full equality before the law. Some, however, found their field of action among the Conservatives and not a few joined the emergent Socialist parties.
    More significant even than the appearance of Jews on the political scene was their great cultural advance. There was a major invasion of secondary schools and universities, and within a few years the proportion of Jews in these institutions exceeded by far their proportion in the population. Out of a hundred Christian boys in Germany only three went to a gymnasium,