This German-language text from 1831 was the introduction to the first edition of the statutes of a Hamburg sick-care society, which seem not to have been preserved. However, it also preceded the revised statutes of the same association from 1836, and is discussed below in this context. The introduction lays out the values and the principles of the association, called most generically Association for Sick-Care Verein für Kranken=Pflege. The association was a modern voluntary association that had left behind the religiously motivated framework of early modern Jewish hevrot fellowships or confraternities and had adopted Enlightenment and bourgeois or middle-class values.
In fact, neither the introduction nor the statutes themselves state that this sick-care society was established by Jews or for Jews. Rather, the introduction informs us that “members of the merchant order” founded the association for merchants who were “individuals of the educated classes” (p. 1). However, the names of the signatories of the 1836 preface and the fact that the document is housed today in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem suggest that the association had at least a largely Jewish membership. Some of the signatories have distinctly Jewish names, such as David J. Levi, and others, such as Siegmund Robinow and J. M. Warburg, belonged to well-known Jewish families in Hamburg, associated with the Reform Temple.