Between Jewish Posen and Scholarly Berlin

The life of Philipp Jaffé (1819–1870), from his youth in Posen; his studies with Leopold von Ranke and career – as a close friend of Theodor Mommsen – at the pinnacle of historical scholarship in Berlin, first at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and then, after his feud with Georg Heinrich Pertz, with his unprecedented 1862 appointment, while still a Jew, to a Berlin professorship; and on to his baptism in 1868 and suicide in 1870, was a life of transition between East and West and between Juda