Abraham Drach

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Abraham Drach (* before 1630; † August 14, 1687 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a merchant and banker and head of the Frankfurt Jewish community for twelve years .

Life

Abraham Drach belonged to one of the richest and most important Jewish families in Frankfurt. Isidor Kracauer described him as a talented businessman who knew how to use favorable economic cycles through forward-looking thinking and was respected by Christian and Jewish contemporaries from all social classes for his talent in dealing with people and his honesty. He was regarded as a court factor on the Hamburg and Amsterdam stock exchanges, as well as in some royal houses. As a representative of the Frankfurt Jewish community , he conducted important negotiations at the imperial court in Vienna. From 1660 he was head of the Jewish community together with Theodor Oppenheim for twelve years, although he did not have to be elected by electors because of his great merits as an advocate at the imperial court.

In Frankfurt between 1669 and 1686 he was involved in bitter disputes with Isaak Kann for supremacy in the Jewish community, which went down in the city's history as the Drach-Kannsche turmoil . Although he finally won the legal dispute in 1686 on the basis of an imperial mandate in which Kann was sentenced to the payment of 100,000 Reichstalers , he was unable to obtain compensation for the economic damage he had suffered and died a year later embittered and internally broken. His tombstone in the old Jewish cemetery in Battonnstrasse has been preserved.

Drach married Sische in 1638 , who died in 1639. He had seven children with his wife Sorlen , who was married in 1641 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical entry on the website of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt (accessed on September 29, 2014)
  2. ↑ a b Entry in the Jewish gravestone graphics (accessed on September 29, 2014)
  3. ↑ Selma Stern: The Court Jew in the Age of Absolutism: A Contribution to European History in the 17th and 18th Centuries , Mohr Siebeck, 2001, pp. 176–177, limited preview in the Google book search
personal data
SURNAME Drach, Abraham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Merchant and banker and head of the Frankfurt Jewish community for twelve years
DATE OF BIRTH before 1630
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 1687
Place of death Frankfurt am Main