Christian Wilhelm von Dohm

File:Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm (2).jpg

Christian Wilhelm von Dohm; portrait by Karl Christian Kehrer (c.1795)

Christian Wilhelm von Dohm (German: [doːm]; 11 December 1751 – 29 May 1820) was a German historian, diplomat and political writer. Dohm was a staunch advocate for Jewish emancipation. In 1781, he published a two-volume work entitled Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden ("On the Civil Improvement of the Jews"), which argued for Jewish political equality on humanitarian grounds.

Biography

Dohm was born in Lemgo, the son of Wolrad Dohm, pastor St. Mary's Church and his wife Anna Elisabeth (née Topp). His mother was the daughter of the mayor of Lemgo at that time. Both parents died before he was seven years old, so he grew up under the guardianship of his relatives and spent his childhood in various pastors', teachers' and cantors' households in Lemgo.

As a high school student, he attracted attention through intensive and varied literary studies in the private libraries of his relatives, including the bookshop of Christian Friedrich Helwing (1725–1781), his future father-in-law, which was affiliated with the Meyersche Hofbuchdruckerei. Through his fellow student Lorenz Benzler, he won the lifelong friendship of the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim from Halberstadt.

He had to sue the Lemgo magistrate for permission to attend university. He first studied philosophy and theology in Leipzig, then law in Göttingen and Kassel. In the process, he became well acquainted with the imperial constitution. During his studies in Göttingen he published geographical works. In 1774/75 he was editor of the Encyclopädisches Journal. From 1776 to 1779 he was professor of cameral and financial sciences at the Collegium Carolinum in Kassel. He was co-editor of the journal Deutsches Museum, which existed from 1776 to 1791. Dohm shared editorial responsibility with Heinrich Christian Boie. Boie was responsible for the literary and literary-critical part of the journal, Dohm for the historical-political part. While Boie increasingly advocated literary newspaper supplements, the Enlightenment philosopher Dohm insisted on political contributions. The temporary attempt to resolve the imbalance by each having sole responsibility for one issue led to very different editions. Dohm left the editorial board in 1778.

His admiration for Frederick II led Dohm to seek employment in the Prussian civil service. He entered Prussian officialdom in 1779, first as archivist in Berlin. He later became a privy councillor of war in the Prussian foreign ministry and secretary at the secret state chancellery in Berlin. In 1786 he was ennobled (untitled nobility), gaining him the nobiliary particle von before his surname. From 1786 to 1794, he was envoy and plenipotentiary minister in Cologne and Aachen. Dohm played an important role as defender of the Liège Revolution between 1789 and 1791. He lived in Halberstadt from 1794 and was present at the Rastatt Congress in 1798/99. In 1804, he was president of the Eichsfeld-Erfurt chamber of war and domain, and in 1807 he became a royal Westphalian state councilor. From 1808 to 1810 he was Royal Westphalian envoy in Dresden and since 1810 private citizen and writer.

Dohm was a member of the Masonic lodge Zum gekrönten Löwen in Kassel, a member of the Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft (Society of Friends of the Enlightenment), and married Anna Henriette Elisabeth (1762–after 1808), née Helwing. The couple had a daughter and two sons. His relationships with important personalities of his time such as Gleim, Herder, Lavater, Garve, Engel, Sulzer, Lichtenberg, the Baron vom Stein and Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling shaped Dohm's life.

Dohm was also a member of the Halberstadt Literary Society, which existed from 1785 to 1810.

In 1797, he became an honorary citizen of the Hanseatic City of Bremen because, as a Prussian envoy, he supported Bremen's neutrality and the preservation of its independence in various negotiations.

In 1806, he founded the Höhere Töchterschule in Goslar, today's Christian-von-Dohm-Gymnasium. From 1808 he was a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Dohm died on his Pustleben estate near Nordhausen on 29 May 1820.

Writings

As an Enlightenment advocate of civil rights for Jews, Dohm became known throughout Europe primarily through his writing on Jewish emancipation Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1781), which was the first work of its kind. He got the idea for it from Moses Mendelssohn, who tried in this way to pass on a request for help Jews in Alsace. This work, financed by Cerfberr, was an attempt to lay a rational foundation for the emancipation of the Jews. It was widely praised by the Jewish communities in Berlin, Halberstadt, and Suriname.

Dohm attributed the negative characteristics widely attributed to the Jews at that time to the legal restrictions under which they lived, not to any alleged peculiarities as a people or as a religious community. According to Dohm, the existing Jewish orders forced the Jews into a way of life that was the cause of anti-Judaism and the cause of hostility and contempt shown to the Jews. He wanted to grant Jews equal rights and thus educate them to become useful citizens. In this way, he influenced representatives of human rights such as Mirabeau, through whose commitment the French National Assembly decided in 1791 to grant equal rights to French Jews.

In 1796, he wrote that if the education of the working classes had been less neglected in France, "the Revolution would certainly have taken a different and better course there". He asserted that a nation that knows how to read and write correctly is less likely than another to be led into demagogy and panic and to sink into extremism and violence.

The French occupation of a large part of Germany led to the introduction of the Napoleonic Code and thus to the legal equality of the Jews. In Kassel, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm placed himself at the service of the Napoleonic state. Under his impetus, a decree was promulgated in January 1808, proclaiming the total civil and civic equality of the Jews of Westphalia.

Works

• Frederick II, Über die deutsche Literatur. Die Mängel, die man ihr vorwerfen kann, ihre Ursachen und die Mittel zu ihrer Verbesserung (1780; translator)
• Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1781–83)
• Denkwürdigkeiten meiner Zeit oder Beiträge zur Geschichte vom letzten Viertel des achtzehnten und vom Anfang des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts 1778 bis 1806 (1814–19)

References

• Sorkin, David (2019). "Bureaucrat, Laboratory, Emperor." In: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries. New Haven: Princeton University Press, pp. 61–71.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 

External links

• Works by Christian Wilhelm von Dohm at Gallica