Hep-Hep riots
The Hep-Hep riots from August to October 1819 were pogroms against Ashkenazi Jews, beginning in the Kingdom of Bavaria, during the period of Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation.
The devastating riots took place during a period of heightened political and social tension, shortly following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the great famine of 1816-17, and on the eve of the repressive Carlsbad Decrees.
[2] In many German cities, emancipation of the Jews had only begun in recent years, after centuries of living in the countries of Central Europe as non-citizens with restricted rights.
The status of Jews varied throughout the 36 independent German states and free cities; some had revoked the recent Napoleonic era emancipation edicts, others maintained them officially but ignored them in practice.
In most German territories, Jews were excluded from posts in public administration and the army and forbidden to hold teaching positions in schools and universities.
[3] Jewish representatives formally demanded emancipation at the Congress of Vienna (1815), and German academics and politicians alike responded with vicious opposition.
In the Rhineland, which had reverted to Prussian control, Jews lost the citizenship rights they had been granted under the French and were no longer allowed to practice certain professions.
[4][7] Another hypothesis suggests that it is an acronym from the Latin "Hierosolyma est perdita" ("Jerusalem is lost"), said (without verifiable evidence) to have been a rallying cry of the Crusaders.
[13] The riots swept through other Bavarian towns and villages, then spread to Bamberg, Bayreuth, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Koblenz, Cologne and other cities along the Rhine, and as far north as Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck.
In Heidelberg the police were tardy in their response, but two professors and their students took the law into their hands and prevented a bloody pogrom.
"How corrupt people really are and how inadequate their sense of law and justice not to mention their love of humanity – is clear from the fact that there was no indignation expressed at these incidents, not even in the official papers ....
[17] The riots intensified already existing tensions between Christians and Jews in Germany, as well as internal discord and self-analysis within the German-Jewish community.
[17] Rahel Varnhagen, another Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote to her brother: "I am infinitely sad on account of the Jews, in a way I have never experienced before.... What should this mass of people do, driven out of their homes?
