The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815) fundamentally altered the relationship of the German people to the German Jew. After 1815, for the first time in the long history of the German Jew, the opportunity was presented whereby the German Jews hoped to discover a healthy accommodation with German society at large and thereby put an end to the recurrent process of persecution and death. In the social and political flux that followed the year 1815 the German Jew grasped at the hope of equality and found it to be an illusion. Within the span of little more than one hundred years the edifice of hope and equality was to come crashing down in ruins before the reality of the Nazi nightmare. Leopold von Ranke and the Jewish Question examines the life and thoughts of one man, the historian Leopold von Ranke, 1795-1886, to find some clues to this problem and the understand why equality was so difficult to find.