The scientific fields, on the other hand, provided a new domain with fewer established hierarchies.
This came at a good time for the Jews in Germany. Influenced by the Enlightenment, many had begun to break away from strict religious observance and social isolation. They became more involved in German civilization, widely viewed at that time as among the most advanced in the world. At the same time, they retained a tendency toward scholarship, an important value in Jewish culture. Judaism encourages inquiry and disputation, and so contemplating shifts in scientific thinking about the universe did not particularly threaten the Jewish worldview. Bringing the long Talmudic tradition of abstract thought to the new methodology of scientific reasoning and research, many Jews were attracted to fields such as mathematics and theoretical physics.
For most of the nineteenth century, the anti-Semitism still found in many sectors of German life was primarily religious rather than racial. Among those Jews who had become completely secular and assimilated into German society, there were some who chose baptism in an attempt to solve this problem, reasoning perhaps that they could ignore one religion as easily as another. However, the economic depression that hit Germany in the 1870s led to resentment of successful people of Jewish extraction, regardless of their religious observance or lack thereof.
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