Jacob Mussaphia

Jacob Mussaphia (* 1647 in Glückstadt ; † January 3, 1701 ) was a German court Jew , mint master and financier of the dukes of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf .

Live and act

Jacob Mussaphia was a son of Joseph Mussaphia. All that is known about his mother is that she was still alive in 1676. His father died on July 22nd, 1695 in Hamburg and was buried in Glückstadt. He probably spent childhood and youth in Glückstadt and Hamburg. Since he mentioned in a letter to a Gottorf official in 1694 that he had been working as a merchant for thirty years, it can be assumed that he worked on his own account from around the age of eighteen. The log book of the Sephardic community of Hamburg names him for the first time at the end of the 1660s. Community members complained that he was trading in coins, which the Hamburg authorities could not only draw the attention of the community to him.

In November 1674 Mussaphia received the privilege of being able to settle down as a merchant in Tönning from Duke Christian Albrecht of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf . Only after his first wedding did he make use of it in 1678 and move into his own house there. When he was granted the privilege, Mussaphia was doing bills of exchange and trading grain and tobacco. In 1675 he received orders from the Duke for unspecified businesses. In 1676 he served the duke as a middleman and supplied him with silver for coinage.

During the period of the business relationship with Mussaphia, Duke Christian Albrecht had to leave his country from 1682 to 1689 because of his conflicts with the Danish King Christian V and lived in exile in Hamburg. Since he could not fall back on the income from his occupied country, he wanted to cover his money needs with the coin business and engaged Mussaphia for the first time in March, July and September 1681 and in February 1682 as a middleman and silver supplier. Mussaphia bought most of the silver he needed from the Duke's silver room in July and August. It was 1681 pieces, for which he paid more than 11,000 Reichstaler . The coins were minted in a new workshop of the Duke in Schleswig . In September 1681, Mussaphia signed a lease and became a mint master himself. The contract was already terminated in May 1682 before the planned end of the contract.

In September 1683 Christian Albrecht brought Mussaphia from Tönning to Hamburg. Sources name him here for the first time as a court Jew, which means that he not only handled the coin business for the duke, but also obtained loans for him. Between December 1683 and January 1685, the two of them signed five contracts in which Mussaphia was the silver supplier and middleman. The coins were partly struck in the Schleswig Mint , partly in Hamburg by mint master Hermann Lüders. In 1684 Mussaphia bought silver from the Duke's Chamber to the value of more than 9,000 Reichstalers. In 1686 the Duke relieved him of two contracts. In 1689 Mussaphia leased a newly established ducal mint in Tönning and appointed Hans Hinrich Lüders, a son of the Hamburg mint master, as mint master.

The coin leased from Mussaphia was outside the Roman Empire , but apparently close enough to the border to illegally melt down Reichstaler and use it for new coins. The same was true for the Danish crown. Nevertheless, Mussaphia did not move to Tönning, but stayed in Hamburg in 1689 on Christian Albrecht's orders, even after he had left the city. Here he should take care of the duke's debts. After that he apparently only traveled to the duchies for business reasons, in particular to Schleswig, to the Kieler Umschlag and to Tönning.

As a court Jew, Mussaphia became increasingly concerned with obtaining cash for the pension chamber and the war commissioner and doing financial transactions with other countries. He accompanied members of the duke's family on trips and helped bring French subsidies from Hanover to Saxe-Gotha. After a short time he was responsible for more than a third of the pension chamber's budget. The annual accounts of the Chamber contained overviews of the “Chamber Account” drawn up by Mussaphia from 1691 at the latest. Mussaphia advanced amounts for which he received instructions . Most of these were taxes from offices and states that did not have to be paid until the beginning of the coming year. He also received customary commissions and interest. He settled the business with the war chest separately and mostly received instructions for taxes from the Holstein marshes.

After the Danish occupiers had razed the Tönning fortress , Mussaphia procured the stones, lime and lead needed for the reconstruction. In 1688 he engaged a troop contingent from Braunschweig-Lüneburg for the work and brokered the 200,000 Reichstaler needed for this through Leffmann Behrens from Hanover. The repayment took ten years. For the period from 1686 to 1694, Mussaphia earned around 15,000 Reichstaler through interest, commissions and business with materials. The income from the coin business is not documented.

After Christian Albrecht's death, his son Friedrich IV took over the government. In May 1695 he exonerated Mussaphia for the services he had previously performed. He then continued and expanded his father's debt policy. In doing so, he resorted to Mussaphia's services, who provided the money to feed the duke's troops who fought in the Spanish Netherlands during the War of the Palatinate Succession . The English and Dutch paid Frederick IV for this with subsidy payments, which Mussaphia handled. In May 1697, the pension chamber's debts to Mussaphia were over 10,000 thalers. The war chest had to repay him more than 100,000 Reichstaler. In 1699, the pension chamber's debts amounted to 32,600 Reichstaler. Mussaphia had to make use of its own credit line for this, but received a total of more than 21,000 Reichstaler interest in 1697/98 alone.

Mussaphia was later able to lease the mint in Tönning again. For many years he cooperated with Magnus von Wedderkop , who developed into one of his greatest supporters. In 1698 he entrusted his son Joseph with the management of most of the business. When the siege of Tönning began in 1700 , he was probably staying in the fortress there due to coin business and was only able to leave it with difficulty. The report of a correspondent who reported to Hanover in October 1700 shows that Mussaphia has become "completely unpleasant and almost childish for age." A little later he died.

family

Mussaphia married on August 11, 1677 in Amsterdam Ribca (* 1660; † July 22, 1695), a daughter of the doctor Binjamin Mussaphia (1605-1674) from his second marriage. After the death of his first wife, Mussaphia married her sister Debora Hana on December 11, 1698, who died on December 2, 1699 in Hamburg. The first marriage had eleven children, five of whom died young and two daughters and four sons came of age. The sons included Joseph Mussaphia and Isaac Mussaphia .

Jacob Mussaphia and numerous members of his family are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Altona .

literature

• Dieter Lohmeier : Mussaphia, Jacob . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , pages 283-286.

• Dieter Lohmeier: The Mussaphia in Hamburg and Altona. Genealogy of the court Jews of the dukes of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, in: Familienkundliches Jahrbuch Schleswig-Holstein 37 (1998), pp. 78-103.

• Dieter Lohmeier: Jacob Mussaphia (1647-1701) and the beginnings of the settlement of Jews in Tönning and Friedrichstadt , in: Jewish life and persecution of Jews in the Frieslanden. Contributions to the 4th Historians' Meeting of the Nordfriisk Instituut , ed. v. Fiete Pingel u. Thomas Steensen, Bräist / Bredstedt 2001, pp. 99–112.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Dieter Lohmeier: Mussaphia, Jacob . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , page 283.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Dieter Lohmeier: Mussaphia, Jacob . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , page 284.
3. ↑ Dieter Lohmeier: Mussaphia, Jacob . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , pages 284-285.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} Dieter Lohmeier: Mussaphia, Jacob . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , page 285.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Dieter Lohmeier: Mussaphia, Jacob . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 11 - 2000. ISBN 3-529-02640-9 , page 286.
6. ↑ Illustration of the tombstone of Debora Hana in the nomination dossier for entry in the Unesco World Heritage List. Jewish Cemetery Hamburg-Altona , p. 66 (pdf, accessed on September 3, 2018)