Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums

Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (until May 1903: Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums) was a Jewish German magazine devoted to Jewish interests, founded in 1837 by Ludwig Philippson (1811–89), published first in Leipzig and later in Berlin. In 1860 it had a circulation of approximately 1,500. It was read not only in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands but also in Eastern Europe, and continued to appear until 1922.

At the time of its founding several Jewish journals had recently been launched in Germany – Sulamith (1806-1843), Jedidja (1817-1831), and Abraham Geiger's Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für Jüdische Theologie (1835-1847), as well as the Unparteiische Universal-Kirchenzeitung (1837), of Julius Vinzenz Höninghaus, which had a Jewish section edited by Michael Hess and Isaac Markus Jost – and Philippson recognized that none had kept pace with the needs of the times. He aimed to produce a journal for the intelligent lay person that would both advance knowledge of Jewish history and plead the cause of the Jews of his day.

The first number of the paper appeared May 2, 1837, and was published by Baumgärtner in Leipzig with the subtitle "Unparteiisches Organ für Alles Jüdische Interesse in Betreff von Politik, Religion, Literatur, Geschichte, Sprachkunde, und Belletristik" (Impartial Organ for All Matters of Jewish Interest Pertaining to Politics, Religion, Literature, History, Philology, and Belles-lettres). During the first two years the paper appeared three times per week. For a year and a half a supplement was published three times a month, devoted to literature and homiletics. In the course of 1839 it was first published twice weekly and then eventually became a weekly.

Isidore Singer, writing in 1906, highlighted the paper's editorial independence, noting that it had not ever received a subsidy from any Jewish body, and that during the revolutions of 1848, "when the publication of nearly all other Jewish journals was interrupted, the Allgemeine Zeitung braved the storm and spoke out plainly in the political turmoil." According to I. M. Jost, who devoted a chapter to the journal in his Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten (1847), the Allgemeine Zeitung "became epoch-making in Jewish history by attempting for the first time to give a general view of the life and conditions of the Jews."

...
Wikipedia