Eduard von Simson

Origins and early life

Eduard Simson was born in Königsberg on 10 November 1810 into a Jewish merchant family, and was baptized a Protestant at thirteen, in 1823, together with his parents — a conversion this fiche states plainly, as the price of the academic and public career that Prussia closed to Jews.

Work and career

He studied law at Königsberg, Berlin and Bonn, became professor of Roman law at Königsberg at twenty-three and a judge of its high court, and in 1848 was elected to the Frankfurt National Assembly, the first parliament of all Germany. Its president from December 1848, he led the deputation that carried the imperial crown to Frederick William IV of Prussia in April 1849 and heard the king refuse it; a generation later, in December 1870, he led the deputation of the North German Reichstag to Versailles that offered the title of emperor to William I, and this time the crown was accepted.

In between he presided over the Erfurt Union Parliament of 1850 and the Prussian House of Deputies, and he was the first president of the Reichstag of the North German Confederation from 1867 and of the German Empire from 1871 to 1874, the impartial chairman of a parliament of monarchists, liberals and socialists.

Later years

In 1879 Bismarck made him the first president of the Reichsgericht, the supreme court of the Empire, at Leipzig, where he served until 1891; he was ennobled in 1888, presided over the Goethe Society, and died in Berlin on 2 May 1899 — the grandson of Jews of Königsberg who had presided over the birth of German unity.