Benjamin Veitel Ephraim

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Benjamin Veitel Ephraim (* 1742 in Berlin ; † 1811 there ) was a royal Prussian court factor , diplomat and entrepreneur . He was a successful army supplier under the Prussian kings Frederick the Great, whose nephew Friedrich Wilhelm II. And his son Friedrich Wilhelm III.

Life

He was the son and heir of the Prussian court factor Nathan Veitel Heine Ephraim , who helped Frederick the Great to finance the Seven Years' War a . a. by producing counterfeit coins (so-called Ephraimites ). In 1757 Benjamin was sent to the Leipzig mint by his father . In 1761 he moved to Amsterdam , where he married and started a branch of the company. In 1764 he was granted a concession to build a silver refinery in Berlin. In the same year he acquired some valuable pictures by well-known painters such as Caravaggio , Poelenburgh and Roelant Savery . In 1767 Benjamin Veitel bought a silver smelter in Muiden from his father-in-law and took Johann Heinrich Müntz into service as a metallurgist . Two years later he fled Holland after trying to defraud an insurance company. Ephraim later claimed in his memoirs that he had returned to Berlin in 1768. Like his father, after the first partition of Poland (1772) , Benjamin also produced new, forged coins with recut stamps for the Prussian territories of Poland . Ephraim delivered grain, paid for with dividing coins .

As an extremely wealthy Jew in Prussia, Ephraim soon had many envious and enemies. But with his constant memoranda and suggestions for improvement to the Prussian government he increased the hatred of himself. For example, he made suggestions for improving the Prussian safe bills ( banknotes , which were very primitive as woodcut prints). He was thinking of secret signs that could only be recognized by experts, not by fraudsters. But any advice to make the banknotes forgery-proof was perceived as interference and criticism by the government and its ministers, especially Karl Reichsfreiherr vom Stein , who later became known as a reformer, and was rejected.

Ephraim, who as a staunch patriot of the very state to which he was not allowed to belong as a Jew, who campaigned for Jewish emancipation all his life and who met the enlightened and open-minded Berlin society in its Berlin salon, in the Ephraimpalais , met into the mill between suspected espionage , political hostility and intrigues: he was finally denigrated as a party member of the French Revolution and - on a trip back to Berlin - arrested as a French spy. As a diplomat he had previously campaigned for a compromise between France and Prussia in post-revolutionary Paris. He finally had to file for bankruptcy shortly before his death . He died a poor and outlawed man. His widow had little left of her husband's originally large fortune and art collections.

Ephraim founded an industrial school in Potsdam in connection with the manufacture of Brabant lace . In 1779, he accepted Jewish girls and women from the recently annexed Polish territories who were looking for work in his lace manufacture. By pointing out the usefulness of his 700 to 1,500 employees for the state, he managed to avert Frederick II's deportation orders.

Benjamin's brother Ephraim Veitel Ephraim (1729-1803) wrote on February 6, 1799 his will in which he founding a nonprofit mild Foundation ( Ephraim Veitel Foundation decreed), which was dedicated to the support of young people and the development of education and science. For this purpose he made a larger amount of money available, which would take effect after his death. During the Nazi era , the foundation had to be aryanized ( i.e. to have an Aryan board ) in order to continue to exist.

Guided by the philosopher and Jewish enlightener Moses Mendelssohn and the poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , Benjamin Veitel Ephraim also tried his hand at writing and wrote a drama .

During his imprisonment, Benjamin Veitel Ephraim wrote his autobiography Ueber Meine Arrest und some other incidents in my life (Berlin 1807) in the prison cell , which appeared in a second, expanded edition the following year and was later even translated into French.

literature

  • Gerhard Steiner: Three Prussian kings and a Jew: explorations about Benjamin Veitel Ephraim and his world . Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-89468-166-7 .
  • Liliane Weissberg: How quickly can you be arrested? Benjamin Veitel Ephraim, Prussia's first Jewish privy councilor, reflects on the professional risk around 1800 . In: Willi Jasper, Joachim H. Knoll (eds.): Prussia's sky spreads its stars ... Contributions to the cultural, political and intellectual history of the modern age. Volume 1. Festschrift for the 60th birthday of Julius H. Schoeps (Haskala 26/1), Hildesheim 2002
  • Helmut Caspar: Possibly safe certificates . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 9, 1999, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 92-95 ( luise-berlin.de ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ S. Stern: The Prussian State And The Jews (3 volumes): Third part / The time of Friedrichs Des Grossen. First section: Presentation , 1962, p. 389.
  2. ↑ W. Zappey: Porselein en zilvergeld in Weesp , p. 198, based on: Detailed description of the silver and copper smelters, from whom furnace ... erected in Muiden beij Amsterdam, owner of it Mr. BV Ephraim
  3. ↑ Gerhard Steiner: Three Prussian Kings and a Jew. Exploring Benjamin Veitel Ephraim and His World , pp. 28–29. Edition Hentrich, 1994.
  4. ↑ Benjamin V. Ephraim: On My Arrest and Some Other Incidents in My Life , p. 121 .
  5. ↑ Benjamin V. Ephraim: On My Arrest and Some Other Incidents in My Life , p. 128.
  6. ↑ ephraim-veitel-stiftung.de
  7. ↑ ephraim-veitel-stiftung.de
  8. ^ Ephraim Veitel Foundation . In: Berliner Zeitung , May 28, 2018, p. 10.
  9. ↑ Homepage of the Ephraim Veitel Foundation , accessed on May 12, 2020.
  10. ^ Digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3Difg5AAAAcAAJ~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D~doppelseiten%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D 2nd edition 1808.
personal data
SURNAME Ephraim, Benjamin Veitel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prussian court factor, diplomat and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH 1742
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 1811
Place of death Berlin