 Another direction was offered by the movement Wissenschaft des Judentums.Groups such as "Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden" (Association for Culture and Science of the Jews) attempted to place secular Jewish culture on par with Western European culture.Founded around 1819 by Eduard Gans, Heinrich Heine, Leopold Zunz and Michael Beer, it was an attempt to provide a construct for the Jews as a people in their own right, and sought to validate their secular cultural traditions as being on an equal footing with those of the German people.