History of the Jews (46 page)

When war came, especially the new kind of total war inaugurated by Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, the need to win it—or just to survive—took precedence over ideology, religion, race and tradition. The Jews, with their extraordinary capacity to get their hands on scarce supplies and raise cash in a bleak and hostile world, soon made themselves indispensable to all sides. When the Swedes reversed the Catholic tide, and most of German Jewry fell under Lutheran rule, they began by penalizing the Jews with forced loans. But within a year, Jews were operating as principal contractors to the Swedish army. As with the Habsburgs, they supplied food, munitions and, above all, horses. Moreover, the Lutheran commanders found, as had the Catholic Habsburgs, that as the Jews were second-class citizens and often a persecuted minority, they were content to be paid in credit, protection and privileges—the last enabling them to make the cash for themselves. In due course, as more and more European powers intervened in the struggle, the Jews of the Rhineland and Alsace, of Bohemia and Vienna, supplied them all. In Emmerich, occupied by Dutch troops, Solomon Gomperz became rich by selling them food and tobacco. In Alsace, the Jews sold Cardinal Richelieu’s army horses and fodder. All these services brought privileged status in return. Richelieu, who controlled the entire maritime effort of France, gave the Portuguese
marranos
special status in the ports, though it was obvious they were Jews, not Christians. In 1636 Ferdinand
II
issued orders to his commanders that the Jews of Worms were not to be subjected to forced loans or billeting, or harassed in any way. In fact it was rare for either side to conscript Jews for service. Not only the imperialist commanders but the Swedes and Lutherans too strictly forbade any looting of Jewish quarters. Hence it is a curious fact that, during the Thirty Years War, for the first time in their history, the Jews were treated better, rather than worse, than the population as a whole. While Germany underwent the worst harrowing in its history, the Jews survived and even prospered. As the historian Jonathan Israel has put it: ‘There is not a scrap of evidence to show that central European Jewry declined at all in size during the Thirty Years War.’
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In the closing stages of the war, court Jews were acting as provision-contractors for entire armies, though the first actual contracts for them to do so date only from the 1650s. Moreover, they were found to be just as useful in peacetime as in war. They became a permanent part of the absolutist princely state, raising the money for the gigantic baroque palaces and planned capital cities which were its hallmarks, and launching the mercantilist economic policies which kept it afloat. Jewish loans financed the great Karlskirche in Vienna
and the splendid Schönbrunn Palace of the Habsburgs. Some Jews acted as virtual chief ministers to German princes, helping them to effect the concentration of political and economic power in the palace from which the Jews, as well as sovereigns, benefited. There were a score or more famous dynasties of court Jews. Three generations of the Gomperz family served the prince-bishops of Munster, five the Hohenzollerns. The Behrends served the court of Hanover, the Lehmanns Saxony. From another professional court family, the Fuersts, Samuel Fuerst was court Jew to successive Dukes of Schleswig-Holstein, Jeremiah Fuerst to the Duke of Mecklenburg and Israel Fuerst to the court of Holstein-Gottorp. The Goldschmidts served several German princes and the Danish royal family too. Indeed, German Jews, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, were active at Scandinavian courts: the de Lima and the de Casseres families served the Danes, the de Sampaios the Swedes. The Kings of Poland employed the Lehmanns and the Abensurs, the Kings of Portugal the da Costas, the Kings of Spain the Bocarros.
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Jewish skill in raising and deploying huge sums of cash played a decisive role in two of the greatest military confrontations of the second half of the seventeenth century: the Habsburgs’ successful resistance to the advance of Turkey into Europe and their subsequent counter-offensive; and the great coalition which halted Louis
XIV
’s attempt to dominate the Continent. Samuel Oppenheimer (1630-1703) played the leading role in both. He was Imperial War Purveyor to the Austrian monarchy during the 1673-9 struggle against France, and in Austria’s struggle against Turkey from 1682 he got the sole contract to supply her armies. He produced the uniforms and rations for the troops, paid their wages, supplied and fed their horses, ran the hospitals for their wounded and even built rafts to transport guns, horses and men down the river-systems. It was he, as much as anyone else, who saved Vienna during the frantic siege of 1683 when the emperor fled; it was he who played a decisive role in the siege and capture of Budapest (1686) and Belgrade (1689-98). In 1688 Oppenheimer was called on to equip and pay the armies raised to resist Louis
XIV
’s invasion of the Palatinate, so that for some years he was running the finances of a two-front war, marshalling the resources of a vast network of Jewish financial families, throughout Germany and the Netherlands, to raise the cash.

Court Jews had all kinds of titles—
Hoffaktor, Hofjude, Hof-provediteur, Hofagent, Kabinettfaktor, Kommenzienrat, General-provediteur
and many others; the great Oppenheimer seems to have been called
Oberhoffaktor
in peace and
Oberkriegsfaktor
in war.
They enjoyed great privileges: easy access to the sovereign, the right to travel anywhere, any time they liked; exemption from the Jewish courts and usually from local courts too, instead coming under the jurisdiction of the princely court, the
Hofgericht
. They constituted a distinct class not only in general but in Jewish society: it became rare for court Jews to marry any other kind. Thus virtually all of them were interrelated. These alliances did not always work. Oppenheimer’s nephew, Samson Wertheimer, became his greatest rival and enemy. But as a rule it was the family links which made the Jewish system for raising and transferring vast sums so efficient.

Moreover, the family principle tended to reinforce the Jewish principle in the lives of these men who straddled two worlds. The court Jew was tempted to assimilate to the glittering aristocratic societies he served. Some were awarded the right to have coats of arms, in addition to their official titles. They were allowed to wear swords or carry pistols; to ride on horseback and keep carriages; they and their womenfolk could dress as they pleased. Most important of all, they could live as and where they wanted. They could buy a house outside the Jewish quarter or even in a town where Jews were banned—thus Oppenheimer won the right to live in Vienna not only for himself but for an estimated one hundred families related to or dependent on him. But few of these men, at any rate in the seventeenth century, were keen actually to break away from the Jewish community. Although their way of life might be remote from the ghetto, they served their fellow Jews with their money and their negotiating power. They knew that the family network and the Jewish embrace was their only refuge in time of trouble. They could not trust the Christian law. The Christian mob was always ready to spring. Princes were usually volatile and faithless. Even if one were loyal, he might die and then a court Jew’s enemies would fall on him like wolves.

Oppenheimer’s experience was instructive. No one ever rendered greater services to the Habsburgs. Yet when the Peace of Nijmegen (1679) left him owed 200,000 florins, the Austrian Treasury refused to pay and even a personal appeal to the emperor secured only part-repayment. In 1692, by which time he was owed 700,000 florins, the Treasury brought false charges against him and he was forced to buy his freedom by producing half a million. Two years later he was owed the colossal sum of five million, and this later rose still higher. Yet during the brief peace, 1698-1702, when there was less need for his services, the mob was allowed to attack and plunder his house in Vienna. The authorities eventually acted and hanged two of the rioters, but when the old man died in 1703 the state repudiated his
debts. As Oppenheimer had himself borrowed hugely to finance his loans, this gave Europe a taste of its first modern financial crisis, and the Habsburgs had to go cap in hand to the old man’s competitor, Wertheimer, to get out of the mess they had created. But the heirs were never paid and the estate had to be auctioned off sixty years later.
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Another member of the family, Joseph Oppenheimer (
c
. 1698-1738), who tried to assist the new Duke of Württemberg from 1733 to establish an authoritarian state based upon ducal control of the economy, was a tragic victim when the duke died suddenly four years later. Oppenheimer was arrested the same day, charged with subverting the rights of the community and embezzling its revenues, convicted and hanged. His body was publicly exhibited in an iron cage. The rise and fall of Oppenheimer, also known as Süss or ‘Jud’ (Jew) Süss, acted as a warning to Jews who put their trust in gentiles and was later the subject of a famous novel by Leon Feuchtwanger.

It was significant that Oppenheimer, who had virtually ceased to be a Jew during his prosperity, returned to strict orthodoxy during his imprisonment, refused baptism as a condition of reprieve, and died confessing his faith. A contemporary print shows him clean-shaved. Some other court Jews shaved their beards but most refused. An Elector of Saxony, who employed some twenty Jewish families around his court, offered 5,000 thalers to one patriarch to shave his beard. But the man refused and the elector, in his fury, called for scissors and cut it off himself. Samson Wertheimer not only kept his beard but dressed (as the courtiers said) ‘like a Pole’. Most court Jews, while marrying only among themselves, served their local Jewish communities, often acting as
shtadlan
(official negotiator). The great Samuel Oppenheimer had agents roaming through Hungary, Slovakia and the Balkans, ransoming poor Jews captured in the Austro-Turkish wars, and resettling them in secure communities. The Jew at court, however wealthy or powerful, knew he was never really safe and he did not have to look far to find Jews who were in desperate trouble.

In 1648-9, the Jews of south-eastern Poland and the Ukraine were struck by catastrophe. This episode was of great importance in Jewish history for several reasons, as we shall see, but its immediate impact was to remind Jews everywhere of the fragility of their position and the power and fury of the forces which could strike them without warning. The Thirty Years War had put growing pressure on the food-exporting resources of Poland. It was because of their Polish networks that Jewish contractors to the various armies had been so successful in supplying them. But the chief beneficiaries had been the Polish landlords; and the chief losers had been the Polish and
Ukrainian peasants, who had seen an ever increasing proportion of the crops they raised marketed and sold at huge profit to the ravenous armies. Under the Arenda system, whereby the Polish nobility leased not only land but all fixed assets such as mills, breweries, distilleries, inns and tolls to Jews, in return for fixed payments, the Jews had flourished and their population had grown rapidly. But the system was inherently unstable and unjust. The landlords, absentee and often spendthrift, put continual pressure on the Jews by raising the price each time a lease was renewed; the Jews in turn put pressure on the peasants.

In the Ukraine the injustice was particularly resented since both sets of oppressors, Catholic nobles and Jewish middlemen, were of a different religion to the Orthodox peasantry. Some Jewish leaders were sensitive to the wrongs of the peasants and aware of the danger to the Jews. At a council of rabbis and communal leaders held at Volhynia in 1602, Jewish lessees were begged, for instance, to allow the peasants off work on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays as a sign of goodwill: ‘Let not [the Jews] be ungrateful to the Giver of bounty, the very bounty given; let the name of the Lord be glorified through them.’
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But many Jews were not in a position to exercise benevolence, being sub- and sub-sub-lessees, forced to grind the peasants in order to pay their own rents. They put their trust in cannon. Jews and Poles alike fortified the towns; synagogues were built with embrasures and had guns mounted on the roof.

The Ukrainian peasants finally rose in the late spring of 1648, led by a petty aristocrat called Bogdan Chmielnicki, with the help of Dneiper Cossacks and Tartars from the Crimea. His rising was fundamentally aimed at Polish rule and the Catholic church, and many Polish nobles and clergy were among the victims. But the principal animus was directed against Jews, with whom peasants had had the most contact, and when it came to the point the Poles always abandoned their Jewish allies to save themselves. Thousands of Jews from the villages and
shtetls
scrambled for safety to the big fortified towns, which turned into death-traps for them. At Tulchin the Polish troops handed over the Jews to the Cossacks in exchange for their own lives; at Tarnopol, the garrison refused to let the Jews in at all. At Bar, the fortress fell and all the Jews were massacred. There was another fierce slaughter at Narol. At Nemirov, the Cossacks got into the fortress by dressing as Poles, ‘and they killed about 6,000 souls in the town’, according to the Jewish chronicle; ‘they drowned several hundreds in the water and by all kinds of cruel torments’. In the synagogue they used the ritual knives to kill Jews, then burned the building down, tore up the sacred
books and trampled them underfoot, and used the leather covers for sandals.

We do not know exactly how many Jews died. The Jewish chronicles say 100,000 were killed and 300 communities destroyed. One modern historian believes most of the Jews escaped and that the massacres were ‘less a major turning-point in the history of Polish Jewry than a brutal but relatively short interruption in its steady growth and expansion’.
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The chroniclers’ figures are certainly exaggerated, but the tales of the refugees had a profound emotional effect not only on Polish Jews but on Jewish communities everywhere.
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