Simon Erlanger
Numbering just under eighteen thousand, Jews constitute a tiny fragment of Switzerland's population of 7.7 million. Nevertheless, Swiss public discourse is preoccupied with things Jewish. This goes back at least as far as the first centralized Swiss state. The Helvetic Republic, founded in 1798, fell apart largely over the issue of Jewish emancipation. This issue remained at the very center of the Swiss political discourse up to 1868 when, under U.S. and French pressure, Switzerland granted equal rights to the Jews. Having benefited from foreign intervention, Jews in Switzerland have come to symbolize unwanted change and foreign influence. Moreover, the special, bottom-up character of the Swiss body politic, with its semiautonomous cantons and communities, has enabled medieval stereotypes to survive into modernity. The medieval image of the Jew as the religious Other has thus transformed into the image of the Jew as the essential Other against which, for most of the twentieth century, Swiss identity was defined.
