Esther Schulhoff

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Esther Schulhoff (* 1649 ; † April 15, 1714 in Frankfurt (Oder) ) was a Jewish entrepreneur, mint master and was the first woman to hold the coin rack in Brandenburg and in the Kingdom of Prussia .

Life

Esther Schulhoff came from the Schulhoff family in Prague, who had settled in western Germany after the Thirty Years' War and had good contacts with the German Fürstenhofen. It is believed that she was born in Bacharach .

Her first marriage was from around 1663 to Israel Aaron (d. 1673), a successful finance broker and court factor who collected taxes for Elector Friedrich Wilhelm and took out forced loans. With a princely special permit, he was the first Jew allowed to settle in Berlin. As a court Jew , Aaron was accepted into the civil service. Esther accompanied her husband on business trips and learned his business. After his untimely death in early 1673, she retained his trading privileges from the Elector and raised the three children she had had with Aaron.

Around 1677 she married the jeweler Jost Liebmann (1639–1702), who came from Halberstadt and was only court jeweler of Friedrich Wilhelm I of Brandenburg from 1668 , thus, like Aaron, supplier and lender of the court. The Liebmann-Schulhoff couple jointly advised the Great Elector on his investments in jewels. Even under his successor Friedrich III. (later Friedrich I of Prussia) these privileges were confirmed in 1688.

Jost Liebmann had received the right to run a private synagogue in the Berlin community , the Liebmannsche Schule named after him , around which a party - led by his wife Esther Schulhoff after his death - in contrast to a large part of the community rallied . At the head of her party, she fought for years the new community synagogue planned for Berlin. Her sons and sons-in-law received trade concessions and letters of safe conduct through the influence of their parents. Abraham, one of her sons, was confirmed as rabbi of Magdeburg , Halberstadt, Halle (Saale) and Bernburg in 1692 , another, Jost, was the senior elder of the Berlin community in the first quarter of the 18th century. Around 1700 Liebmann, with his fortune amounting to 100,000 Reichstaler, was considered the richest Jew in Germany.

After his death in 1702, Ester Schulhoff acquired the coin shelf from King Friedrich and from then on, as mint master, decided on the state currency and thus on the gold and silver content of the coins . This makes her one of the first women in Europe to be able to decide on the currency value and financial policy of her country. Through the deterioration of coins, she achieved private profits that were held up to her. In return, through transactions on the London and Amsterdam stock exchanges, Schulhoff had to raise funds for the king's building plans and court.

The new King Friedrich Wilhelm I condemned the magnificent projects of the father as a waste of money. Schulhoff and her sons fell out of favor at the Prussian court in 1713 when they had made a claim for 106,418 thalers after Frederick I's death . On May 7th of that year, Esther Schulhoff and her son Salomon Israël were arrested in their house and all valuables found there were confiscated. She was under house arrest until her death the following year, before she waived her debts and went to relatives in Frankfurt (Oder) impoverished. The allegations of dishonesty brought against them turned out to be baseless.

literature

  • D. Hertz: The Despised Queen of Berlin Jewry, or the Life and Times of Esther Liebmann , in: VB Mann and RI Cohen (eds.): From Court Jews to the Rothschilds. Art, Patronage and Power, 1600-1800 (1996), pp. 67-77. ISBN 3791316249
  • Ursula Koehler-Lutterbeck; Monika Siedentopf: Lexicon of 1000 women, Bonn 2000, pp. 328–329. ISBN 3-8012-0276-3 .

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ^ Jews in Berlin, Stolpersteine ​​| Cities | Berlin | Goruma. Retrieved March 20, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Peter Stoltzenberg: The secretive mistress. Retrieved March 20, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Schulhoff, Esther
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Liebmann, Esther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prussian entrepreneur and mint master
DATE OF BIRTH 1649
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 1714
Place of death Frankfurt (Oder)