ABSTRACT
The controversy came to a climax in the summer of 1880 with two developments. The first was the circulation of a Petition to support restrictions on the freedoms and rights of Jews. The Petition took the form of a plebiscite, collecting signatures of 267,000 citizens from all over Germany. The other development was an interpellation in the Bundestag, a request to interrupt the normal course of business to discuss a pressing issue, namely, the Jewish question. Another important issue debated in the summer of 1880 was Jewish immigration. The antisemites descried what they saw as an enormous rise in Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. That there was such an increase in immigration was questioned by Salomon Neumann, who attempted to demonstrate through statistical tables that there had been no such increase, in fact a decrease. Treitschke, one of the first to complain about Jewish immigration, found it difficult of reply to Neumann’s statistics. An important publication from the summer of 1880 was Ernst von der Brüggen articles describing the Ostjuden and their significance for the antisemitism controversy.
