The leading Jewish historians of the 20th century have assumed axiomatically that the defining feature in the organization of pre-modern Jewry was the system of communal autonomy, whereby Jews internally governed their own religious, educational and civil society. The Triple Community of Hamburg, Altona and Wandsbek, founded in 1671 as federation of three closely neighboring Jewish communities, was in its early years by all accounts a classic example of communal autonomy. This dissertation traces how the system of Jewish legal autonomy in Hamburg became contested in the mid-eighteenth century. It challenges the traditional view of the relationship between the Jews and early-modern German states, showing that state intervention was not simply the result of raison d'etat, absolutist or otherwise, but happened also at the behest of individual Jews as they responded to larger social and political changes.

Using court records from Hamburg as well as Yiddish- and Hebrew-language source from the Jewish community's internal archive, the dissertation shows how individual Jews living in Hamburg began to challenge the specific decisions of the rabbinic court as well as attack the court's constitutional legitimacy to discipline its members. They complained to Hamburg's Senate that the rabbinical court was abusing its power and often asked the secular government to intervene and force the rabbinic court to reverse its decisions. Through close readings of these complaints, this thesis demonstrates how these Jews presented themselves as citizens of Hamburg, a designation which they claim trumped the Jewish community's legal claims over them. It is argued that this change in self-perception was related to real changes in Hamburg's political relationship to the Jews, which integrated them more fully into the civic family. This suggests that some Jews in Hamburg were trading solidarity with the Jewish community for the benefits of membership in the body politic, even before the campaign for political emancipation in Germany began in the final decades of the eighteenth century.