Ernst Chain

About Berlin

# Berlin Berlin in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a city of extraordinary intellectual ferment and rapid transformation, first under Prussian rule and then, after 1871, as the capital of a unified German empire. The city's climate—cold winters, moderate summers—and its position on the Spree River made it a commercial and cultural hub that drew talented people from across Europe and beyond. The Jewish community there grew from a modest presence to become one of Europe's largest and most culturally vital, numbering in the tens of thousands by the early twentieth century; Berlin Jews were notably integrated into the city's life, prominent in law, medicine, philosophy, and the arts, yet simultaneously anxious about their belonging. For Torah learning and Jewish thought, Berlin became a crucible where traditional Jewish scholarship encountered modern philosophy, science, and literary criticism, creating new forms of Jewish intellectual life that would reshape Jewish identity across the globe. The city was home to a flourishing press of Jewish newspapers and scholarly journals, a network of yeshivas and study circles where ancient texts were debated in modern languages, and synagogues of striking architectural ambition—particularly the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburgerstrasse, its golden dome a symbol of Jewish confidence in the city's future, built in 1866 and standing as a beacon of Enlightenment-era Jewish aspiration.

In Berlin at the same time

Adolf von Baeyer, Emil Fischer, Jacobus van 't Hoff, Emil von Behring, Paul Ehrlich, Walther Nernst

Across the traditions, in Berlin at the same time

• Moritz SteinschneiderJewish
• Hermann CohenJewish
• Dovid Tzvi HoffmanJewish
• Bernhard JacobsohnJewish
• Julius TheodorJewish
• Eduard BanethJewish
• Pope Pius XIIChristian
• Jacob Nachum EpsteinJewish