Table of Contributors    Table of Contents    Return to
Encyclopedia Home Page  Struve, Gustav (1805-1870)  Gustav
Struve as Jewish Rights Activist  Despite Gustav Struve's
prominence in histories of the German revolutions of 1848-49 as
one of the main military and political leaders of the three
uprisings in Baden, and as one of Germany's most renowned
radical liberal activists of the pre-revolutionary decade, his
ideas about Jewish-Christian relations have never been discussed
by historians. Indeed, Struve's religious attitudes in general
have received only cursory, and often inarticulate, attention in
the extensive literature devoted to his political efforts. Yet
religious issues were of primary concern to Struve in the years
before the Baden revolutions--he was an active member of the
dissenting German-Catholic congregation in his home town of
Mannheim--and, although his specific interest in Jewish issues
dropped away, religious matters in general continued to
preoccupy him throughout his post-revolutionar