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“Grandfather attended a performance of Lessing’s ‘Nathan the Wise’ in 1855. This work, in which such comprehensive humanity and religious tolerance are expressed, seemed to have made such a lasting impression on him that he moved from the extreme orthodoxy of his youth to an absolute freedom of religious thought and tolerance.” So wrote Louise Heidelberg in her biography of her grandfather, the Mannheim and Lorsch entrepreneur Lazarus Morgenthau. Lessing had initially published the play privately in 1779, and a first – non-public – performance took place in Mannheim. The Jewish philosopher and Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn served Lessing as the model for Nathan. In fact, the Enlightenment and state tolerance soon had an effect on rural Jewry as well. Above all, because economic opportunities could be exploited, such as land acquisition and relative freedom of trade. In 1911, Moritz Mainzer explicitly attributed the improvement in the living conditions of his Lorsch ancestors to the reform process begun by Erthal in 1784. However, nothing changed for the Jewish precariat, the many wandering Jews without letters of protection. Where they were tolerated, they depended on the charity of their fellow Jews. During the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation, Jews also fought for their personal freedoms. They were again disappointed by the states of the German Bund. In 1848, their representatives in the Frankfurt National Assembly then vehemently advocated civic equality. Gabriel Riesser, a lawyer and publicist in Hamburg and Frankfurt, and Johann Jacoby, a physician from Königsberg, who told Prussia’s Frederick William IV to his face during an audience in the revolutionary year, became famous: “That is the misfortune of kings, that they do not want to hear the truth.” But it was not until the Reich Constitution of 1871 that Jews throughout Germany finally gained unrestricted civil rights.

 

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Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal was the first German duke to initiate the emancipation of Jews in the German territorial states. Erthal had been Elector of Mainz since 1774 and, as a representative of enlightened absolutism, corrected the line of his reactionary predecessors. Nevertheless, it took until after the death of Maria Theresa (1780), who had still banned Jews from Prague in 1744, for her son, Emperor Joseph II, and with him the archchancellor of the empire, Erthal, to finally dare to extend their reforms to the Jews. In the Electorate of Mainz, Erthal issued three general rescripts of the medieval Jewish order in 1783/84. Printed ordinances and decrees of the Mainz government were transferred to a Kopialbuch in the Lorsch office (since 1782). The decree of February 17, 1784 was of a fundamental nature. Electoral land law now applied to Jews (Jews among themselves had possessed a certain autonomy, with the rabbi as the first instance). Participation of Jews in provincial assemblies (mainly for tax estimation) became obligatory, as did bookkeeping in German, teacher examinations, and German examinations as a prerequisite for the granting of letters of protection. The issuance of death certificates became obligatory. Equality with Christian subjects was achieved in marriage licenses, the free exercise of trade (outside the guilds), but above all in the free choice of schools at all state schools, the unrestricted purchase of land and houses, and thus the freedom of settlement. On September 27, 1784, Erthal had to clarify: “…and order that the Jewish children should in no case pay more in school fees than the Christian children, and that the school teachers should see to it that the Jewish schoolchildren are not treated with indignity, but with equal consideration.”

 

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The collections of Berthold Rosenthal are a stroke of luck. After the Mannheim teacher was forced into retirement by the Nazis in 1933, he searched the municipal archives in Baden and Hesse for records of rural Jewry. As if he suspected that much would be lost, he noted down thousands of genealogical data in school notebooks, even after 1938 and a stay in a concentration camp in Dachau. The memorbuch, which he found in the Lorsch synagogue, was also unique for Rosenthal. Similar to a monastic necrology, the Jewish Memorbuch is a register of the dead commemorating the deceased on anniversaries. It is kept under the almemor (lectern) of the synagogue. Hence its name. Rosenthal noted the data of 19 persons from the years 1758 to 1850. Since there were several more deaths in the community during this period, either only certain persons were recorded, or the genealogist noted a selection. For two persons their effected donations are recorded. One tragic incident, in which an entire family was wiped out in 1831, was recorded by Rosenthal in the original Hebrew of the preacher of the time. Samuel Mainzer, his wife Chawa and their daughter Esther had been murdered by their Christian neighbor and tenant. The murderer, a Hessian gendarme, committed suicide. As a result, the crime has never been publicly investigated. All three victims were buried in a common grave, which is unusual. Their fate was engraved on the stone, but was forgotten the more it weathered. Only after translation of the copy of the Memorbuch, which in its recording of this deed is reminiscent in its diction of the medieval Nuremberg Martyrology, are details known again. Berthold Rosenthal and his wife managed to escape to America in 1940. He was able to save his records.

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“My father had cigar factories in Mannheim, and also in Lorsch and Heppenheim, and at times employed more than a thousand people.” So begins Henry Morgenthau Sr.’s biography. After coming to America from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus made history in international diplomacy, American domestic politics, and in the criminal justice system there. They amassed a fortune in Manhattan real estate, advised presidents, pushed the New Deal, uncovered the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, fought wars in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and built a dynasty of public service on the foundation of their private wealth. In the words of former Mayor Ed Koch, they were “the closest thing to a royal family in New York City.” Like the Morgenthaus, the Lorschs had based their wealth in the Electoral Palatinate. The first head of Mannheim’s Jewish community was Samuel Lorsch. When he went to Mannheim around 1660, he took the name of his place of origin as his family name, as did all Jews who had answered the call of the Elector. As court Jews, the Lorschs followed Karl Theodor to Munich 100 years later, when he took the Wittelsbach throne there. Finally, the banker Heinrich Lorsch emigrated from there to America in 1850. His son Albert became a gold, currency and diamond trader. In Maiden Lane, in what is now Manhattan’s Financial District, he built one of the city’s first high-rise buildings in 1894. From its walls, the Lorsch name was visible for far and wide. Diagonally opposite the Lorsch Building was the Lawyer’s Title Insurance & Trust building of Henry Morgenthau Sr. Today, the entire area is built up with real estate belonging to the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

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German immigration to America began around 1840. By the end of the century, more than 8 million people had left their homeland. Jews too saw their opportunities, whether because of crop disasters or the failed 1848 revolution, but mainly because of the still unfulfilled equal rights in the states of the German Bund. Not everyone stayed on the East Coast; many moved on to the young states of the Midwest. The example of three native Lorschers shows entrepreneurial and social success that was not possible for Jews in their homeland to this extent. Jacob Rohrheimer came to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1847. He founded a cigar factory and became involved in the community. The old people’s home he helped start still exists today. Simon Mainzer emigrated in 1868. He started a textile business with his brother-in-law Julius Houseman. Houseman later became a congressman for Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives. Julius Krakauer came to New York as a child in 1853 and became a musician and composer. He, his father, and his Heppenheim-born brother David established a piano factory. Under Julius’ leadership, Krakauer Pianos became a leader in the industry.

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Ferdinand Oppenheimer: from Kleinhausen to Strasbourg.
With the onset of industrialization, the children of rural Jews sought their fortunes in cities, especially those with strong Jewish communities. In 1872, after the Franco-Prussian War, Ferdinand (Feist) Oppenheimer, born in Kleinhausen in 1846, went to Strasbourg with his brother-in-law Isaac Adler. The two had married two sisters from the Goldschmidt family in Worms. In Strasbourg, they founded a leather factory that was to grow into the largest in Europe. In 1905, at the death of their co-founder Ferdinand Oppenheimer, A&O already had over 1,000 employees.

Babette Mainzer and family: Lorsch, Frankfurt, London.
Babette Mainzer (1831 – 1896) was one of 14 children of Mei’r ben Baruch (Maier Mainzer, 1803 – 1850). Only three of her brothers remained in Lorsch, she herself married the banker Jacob Löwenstein from Frankfurt. Before her husband founded his own business, he was an authorized signatory in the Schwarzschild banking house on Frankfurt’s Rossmarkt. Babette’s son Leopold became a banker like his father. In 1893, Leopold Löwenstein went to London. There he changed the family name to Layton. Lepold was married to Caroline Hirsch, a granddaughter of the Frankfurt founder of Neo-Orthodoxy, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Caroline’s sister Rahel (1870-1953) was the first woman to hold a professorial title in medicine in Germany (Prussia). Rahel Hirsch lived with the Laytons in London after their emigration in 1938. The Laytons were friends with the Frankfurt Rothschilds. This relationship proved helpful in the evacuation of 28 German Jewish boys and girls who were rescued from the Rothschilds’ estate in Frankfurt and brought to England with the help of Ralph and Julian Layton. It was not the only rescue operation carried out by the two brothers, the grandsons of Babette Mainzer-Löwenstein.

 

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Unlike in the cities, where Jews were confined for centuries to their own neighborhoods and alleys on the edges of the city walls, rural Jews enjoyed relative freedom of settlement in the villages. Because of their professions – most were merchants – they took up residence directly in the center of the communities. In Lorsch, this was initially in Stiftstrasse and Römerstrasse in the 18th century. At the latest with the connection to the railroad (1869) they bought houses in Bahnhofstraße, which developed into the local commercial center. With 3,300 inhabitants, the Jewish population share reached its high point in Lorsch at that time with 2.8%. Twelve Jewish families lived in Bahnhofstrasse and in the adjacent Kirchstrasse and Rheinstrasse. Words from the Jewish market language were adopted into the Lorsch dialect. Jewish traditions and customs were familiar to the neighbors and a sukkah in the courtyard of the rural property was a natural sight.

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Besides the executive board, the teacher, preacher or cantor (and in former times also the kosher shepherd) was the most important person for the religious community. Salomon Abraham is the first teacher of the Lorsch community that is known by name, which had already existed for more than 100 years. The community paid a salary and provided an apartment with a garden. Many children were born here. In the second half of the 19th century it became increasingly difficult for the small Jewish rural communities to find teachers and preachers. Often only applicants from Eastern Europe, from Russia or from Habsburg Galicia applied for the small salary. Frequently, they brought family members with them, who settled here and married into the German communities. The Jaffés came from what is now Lithuania. Mendel Jaffé was the uncle of his two Lorsch-born successors, Abraham and Josef Jaffé. Pogroms in the Czarist empire and better opportunities for career advancement increased migration from East to West until after the First World War. One consequence was the deportation of repatriates by the Nazi state.

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The diaries are unique. They prove the close cooperation between Catholics and Jews since the introduction of the Rentenmark. With the Nazi seizure of power, the decline of the Jewish community becomes comprehensible here. The books reveal individuals of whom there is no record in other sources. The receipts and expenditures of both communities can be traced, from church collections to the purchase of palm branches for the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. Three journals have been preserved. They had to be submitted annually to the tax office. There is no evidence of a state-imposed abandonment of this practice under Nazism. The crises of the 1920s show the declining financial strength of the Lorsch Jews. In 1931 and 1932, some of them fell behind with their payments to their own community. After 1933 and with the boycott, only the most necessary expenditures were made. These included the teacher’s salary and running costs such as electricity. Precentor and reader services were no longer taken on from outside, but were done by the congregation’s own members – for a small fee. Bills can now only be paid in installments. The balance of a savings bank account for current expenses melted down to zero. The dissolution of the community after 1938 must have been reflected in a fourth volume for which there is a carryover. This volume is lost.

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Court factors were the financiers of the princely houses. They occupied a special position, enjoyed freedom of establishment and were at the top of the Jewish society. In the 17th and 18th centuries, some of them gained enormous importance. The most famous and historically most negatively portrayed court factor (especially by the National Socialists) was Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (“Jud Süß”), born in Heidelberg in 1698, who fell victim to judicial murder in Stuttgart in 1738. As early as 1384, wealthy merchant Jews had enjoyed tax privileges in the Starkenburg Oberamt. Moses Löb Isaak zur Kann (born around 1690 -1761) was the richest resident of Frankfurt’s Judengasse in the 18th century. His family owned the “Stone House” of the alley. He had pushed through the construction of the city palace against the Frankfurt City Council and after the intervention of his father-in-law Samson Wertheimer (court factor at the imperial court in Vienna). Moses Kann’s family had become wealthy by leasing the salt mines of Orb and Soden in the Electorate of Mainz and the tobacco monopoly in Hesse-Darmstadt. He himself was court factor appointed by both courts and at the same time chief rabbi in Darmstadt, as well as Klaus rabbi and head of the Talmud school in Frankfurt. From 1728 to 1739, Moses Kann leased the Seehof manor near Lorsch from the Electorate of Mainz for 2,700 gulden a year. Mainz had drained the former Lorsch Lake at the beginning of the century and relied on the agricultural development of the area. Kann and his subtenants planted special crops such as hops and tobacco, and operated an oil mill, a brewery and a distillery. Fourage, i.e. hay, grain and oats were delivered to the court in Mainz via the Rhine. These beginnings later developed into the Lorsch filial village of Seehof, which would cease to exist already in 1856.