Heinrich Heine
After his father's business failed, Heine was sent to Hamburg. His uncle in Hamburg was a very successful banker, so Heine started learning banking, but he soon dropped it. Then Heine started to study law at the universities of Göttingen, Bonn and Berlin but was more interested in literature than law. He nonetheless took a degree in law in 1825. At the same time he decided to convert from Judaism to Protestantism because of the severe restrictions on Jews in the German states. Only Christians were allowed to have certain businesses or to be clerks of the state. Jews were also forbidden to become university professors, a particular ambition at the time for Heine. Heine himself said, his conversion was "the ticket of admission into European culture".