Jakob Friedrich Fries
"On the Danger to the Well-Being and Character of the Germans Presented by the Jews" (1816)

....For about forty years now Prussian scholars, in particular, have defended the Jews in face of the antipathy shown them by the common people.  Some were motivated by friendship for noble individuals belonging to this people; others, by their fervor for enlightenment and against narrow-minded attachment in particular, positive forms of religionl still others, because they had become dependent on rich, individual Jews.   Yet, the spirit of this debate was cosmopolitan and characterized by a general love of man, whereby each individual held his fellow to be his equal.  But precisely because of this last, very noble motivation, many misunderstandings continue to be debated, two of which we wish to mention here.

The first concerns the prejudice that the Jews were persecuted by us with blind rage and unjust religious zeal during the Middle Ages as well as down to the present.  This, Herr Ruehs has incontrovertibly disproved.  To be sure, die to the more coarse manners of an earlier age, people alternated between rash, superstitious patronage and cruel excesses in their behavior toward the Jews.  Princes almost always favored them too much, while cruelty originated from the common people.  This cruelty, however, was not due to an inexplicable hatred for those who lived by deceit -- those insidious, second-hand dealers and exploiters of the common people.  The idea that the Jews were excessively oppressed in civic matters derives from this [erroneous belief that the Jews were treated with blind hatred].  If they were only to receive more civic rights, it is held, they would thus improve themselves.  Ruehs has clearly shown that the opposite is true by using examples from history.  Both in Germany and abroad the Jews had free states where they enjoyed every right, and even countries where they reigned -- but their sordidness, their mania for deceitful, second-hand dealing always remained the same.   They shy away from industrious occupations not because they are hindered from pursuing them but simply because they do not want to.

.....

Judaism is the sickness of a people who are rapidly multiplying.  Jewry will acquire power through money wherever despotism or distress engenders oppressive taxation; wherever oppressive, public ransoms become necessary; wherever the well-being of the citizen is so endangered that indebtedness on a small scale grows ever worse.  Finally, the Jews also gain power where many unproductive countries are wasteful.  The idle, stagnant capital of these countries is devoured by the Jews like worms gnawing on rotting matter.

Jakob Friedrich Fries, Ueber die Gefaehrdung des Wohlstandes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden (Heidelberg: Mahr und Winter, 1816), pp. 9-11.  Trans. here by M. Gelber; Contained in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 258-259.