Otto von Bismarck

He united Germany by three wars in eight years—with Denmark, with Austria, with France—and in 1871 the empire was proclaimed. Unification brought the Jews of Germany full legal equality: the law of 1869 of the North German Confederation, extended to the whole empire in 1871, abolished all confessional restrictions on office. His banker and long-standing financial agent was Gerson von Bleichröder, who managed his private affairs and found the money for the war of 1866 when parliament would not vote it.

And immediately the reverse. Equality arrived together with a new antisemitism: the very word Antisemitismus appears in Germany in 1879, at the height of the "antisemitism dispute", and Bismarck, while not supporting it, did not seriously hinder it.