In a sidebar to the Bauer Controversy the rationalist Protestant theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany (1807–1876) accused Orthodox Jews of traditionalism and even ritual murder. In the name of humanity, he rejected the Torah as ancient barbarism and promised emancipation only to Reform Jews. Abraham Jakob Adler and other rabbis objected indignantly, seeing in Ghillany the return of the Middle Ages and demanding emancipation as Jews. What remained unnoticed, was that his texts also contained fierce polemics against acculturated Jews. The subject is Ghillany’s antisemitism and the Jewish identity of his critics, both at the transition from pre-modernity to modernity.