ABSTRACT
Hamburg, Germany’s dominant port city for centuries, also contained one of the largest, richest and culturally most productive Jewish communities of the German-speaking lands. The supposedly cosmopolitan and open environment of this major German entrepot provided a stable legal framework which protected the economic interests for all minorities but failed to deconstruct social and political barriers that prevented Jews from participating fully in the city’s formation. At the centre of the investigation is the question of how Jewish-non-Jewish interactions developed between the settlement of the first members of the minority in the late sixteenth century and the onset of the Nazi period.
