The daughter of a rich Jewish merchant, as a girl plain-looking and without talent of any description, she grows up in her father's house in Berlin at a time when as yet the Jews had none of the rights of citizens. At the age of twenty-five she has already become an influential member of the best society of the capital, and from the age of thirty till her death her house is the intellectual centre of Berlin, and one of the intellectual centres of Germany. Her great attraction was her perfect originality and unconventionality. All human beings desire and love to see themselves mirrored in the mind of a greater human being, all crave for sympathy, all would fain be understood. And those who approached Rahel--princes and nobles, diplomats and philosophers, poets and scientists--felt instinctively that this young girl with the slight, graceful figure, the beautifully formed limbs, the thick, waving hair surrounding a face with an expression of suffering, but with a deep, steadfast look in its dark eyes, was worthy of their confidence, and this for the one and sufficient reason, that she was innocent of all prejudices. She gladly associates with a charming hetæra like Pauline Wiese, Prince Louis Fredinand's friend; is her and her cynical husband's and her princely lover's confidante. She has a sincere regard for a reactionary sensualist like Friedrich Gentz, warmly congratulates him when he, at the age of sixty, wins the affections of Fanny Elsler, sees in him the distinguished prose writer and the politician who had been of national importance at a critical moment. Human beings are to her, in Goethe's sense, natural products. That she, with her strict personal morality and Liberal tendencies, should have been able to rise to such a height of freedom from prejudice and gain such a wide horizon, was primarily due to her having been born in a sort of sanctuary outside the pale of society, that is to say in the house of a wealthy Berlin Jew. In intolerant, stiff old Prussia, the alien, despised, hooknosed money-lenders had sat behind their counters for some centuries, with no thought for anything but money--piling thaler upon thaler, buying bills, and lending money even to princes. With all their wealth they were ignorant, orthodox, superstitious. But during the period of enlightenment the influence of Moses Mendelssohn thoroughly aroused them. Their piety became a noble rationalism, and they comprehended the meaning of knowledge and culture. By the close of the eighteenth century they were giving their sons a perfectly new training, and society was also beginning to look upon these sons as men to whom reparation for a wrong was due.