The revolutionary outbreak of 1830 in France spread into Germany; but the extreme Liberal party did not now advocate, as before, the entire social and political equality of the Jews with their fellow-citizens. Hatred of dogmatic teaching seems to have overpowered every other consideration; and as the dogmatism of the Jews has always been one of their most marked characteristics, the Rationalist leaders, among whom Bruno Bauer was conspicuous, clamoured for their suppression as a religious community, and the withdrawal of civil rights and privileges from them. The orthodox Jews did not lack able and zealous champions; but, as has been already intimated, it was not from Christians only that they encountered opposition. As some nominal Christians in Germany, and certain others who could hardly claim the title of Christian at all, had dealt with the historical records and theological dogmas of the Gospel, so did nominal Jews deal with those of Judaism. ‘In the Synagogue, as in the Church,’ says Da Costa,[224] ‘everything that was national and Israelitish, all that was supernatural and beyond the reach of unassisted human reason, was furiously attacked and rejected.’ It was not merely that novelties were introduced into the ancient Hebrew liturgy and synagogue service, that organs and music were imported, and sermons preached in the German language, and new prayers interpolated, and old prayers excluded, but the fundamental doctrines of their faith were questioned and discredited. One party proposed to abolish the Jewish Sabbath, substituting the Christian Sunday for it. Another openly declared that they looked for and desired no Messiah to come. Another more insidiously averred that they did indeed believe in the future advent of the Hope of Israel, but He was not a Person, but simply the representative of ever-advancing enlightenment and benediction—one who always had been and ever would be coming, but who would never come until the perfection of humanity had been reached. But a theory like this would be more embarrassing to the Jew than its counterpart was to the Christian. Rationalists might declare the Incarnate God to have been a personified myth, an ideal Being, in whose reputed words and acts Christian ideology found embodiment. But there were His words, which no man could have spoken; and there were His acts, which no man could have performed; there were His predictions, which the history of the world since His day had made good, and which nothing but Divine Wisdom could have uttered. The Jews had nothing of this to sustain them, and it cannot surprise us that many among them found no shelter in such a sea of doubt, except in embracing the Christian creed. Hence, in all likelihood, the number of conversions which are reported to have taken place in Germany at this period. Da Costa reports them as having amounted to five thousand in twenty years.