A study of the rise of modern Jewish consciousness in Ludwig August Frankl's "Jews in the east" /

In the history of Austrian Jewry, the year 1848 marked a crucial turning point. Although there had been a rapid succession of changes in the lives of Jews in Central Europe, 1848 was a definitive beginning on the road to "modernity" from which there could be no turning back. Ludwig August Frankl was a distinguished representative of this generation of Jews living in the Habsburg realm. He believed in the revolutionary ideals of 1848, and yet was paradoxically not a radical. He was, rather, a representative of that now often forgotten group of Jews who believed in an evolutionary path to modernity that seemed to offer the logical and triumphant culmination of a hundred years of cultural assimilation. Modernity became their identification and their aspiration, and also led to a new perception of their own Judaism. Ludwig August Frankl brought the elements of this new identity to his mission to found the first secular Jewish school in Jerusalem in 1856, the Laemel School