In 1834, following several anti-Jewish excesses in Hamburg, the Jewish jurist and native, Gabriel Riesser, commissioned by the Committee for the Improvement of the Civil Conditions of Israelites  Comité zur Verbesserung der bürgerlichen Verhältnisse der Israeliten, wrote “Denkschrift über die bürgerlichen Verhältnisse der Hamburgischen Israeliten” [“A Memorandum Concerning the Civil Conditions of the Israelites of Hamburg”], which was presented to the Council as a petition. In this document, comprising 120 printed pages, the author raised various problems in connection to the citizenship right  Bürgerrecht [citizenship right in the city]: The right of self-government; the precondition for acquiring civil rights was inherited real property, the swearing of a citizen’s oath, and the one-time payment of “Bürgergeld” [citizenship fee]; members of the nobility were excluded from this; until 1814 citizenship was granted exclusively to members of the Lutheran church [see: Helmut Stubbe-da Luz, “Bürgerrecht,” in: Franklin Kopitzsch / Daniel Tilger (eds.), Hamburg Lexikon, Hamburg 1998, p. 92.], which he linked to a historical survey. The present excerpted text from the memorandum summarizes the essence of Riesser’s argument on behalf of equality of status for Jews. He here advocates the “full legal equality of all citizens, without distinction of faith” as an important prerequisite for the well-being of the state.