Leopold Cassella

Leopold Cassella

Leopold Cassella (* December 8, 1766 as David Löb Caßel in Friedberg ; † March 25, 1847 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German businessman and entrepreneur.

Cassella came from a Jewish family in Friedberg who owned a stately building in the castle there. His father was court factor at the Weimar court in Frankfurt. On November 13, 1798, Leopold married Nannette Reiss , the daughter of the Frankfurt silk merchant Elias Löb Reiss , and together with his brother-in-law Isaac Elias Reiss opened the specialty goods store Caßel & Reiss in Frankfurt's Judengasse . With the abolition of the ghetto in 1806, he moved his business to Schnurgasse in the old town . In 1807 he and other Frankfurters, mainly of the Jewish faith, founded the Masonic lodge "To the rising dawn". It was the first German lodge with almost exclusively Jewish members.

On February 17, 1812 he acquired Frankfurt citizenship and changed his name to Leopold Cassella , although the company name remained unchanged until 1819 as Caßel & Reiss . On October 30, 1812, he received the production permit for a sugar refinery from Grand Duke Dalberg . He expanded his business, which he ran alone from 1820, continuously, including trading in dyes .

Since his marriage remained childless, he took Rosette Goldschmidt , his sister's daughter, into the family and raised her like his own child. In 1828 she married his authorized signatory Ludwig Aaron Gans , who had already joined the company in 1822 , and thus became a partner in the company. Together they founded the trading company Leopold Cassella & Co.

Cassella died on March 25, 1847 and was buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery on Rat-Beil-Strasse . Cassella was childless, so that Ludwig Aaron Gans continued to run Leopold Cassella & Co. as the sole owner. His sons Friedrich (Fritz) and Leo Gans and his grandsons Arthur von Weinberg and Carl von Weinberg were among the most important business personalities in Frankfurt. Cassella Farbwerke Mainkur AG emerged from their ventures in 1870 .

literature

• Friedrich Enders: Three families write Frankfurt and company history , in: Cassella-Riedel-Archiv , ISSN  0008-7440 , 70th year 1987, issue 3 (subject: 25 years of Cassella-Riedel Pharma, Frankfurt ), p. 25 ff.
• Angela von Gans, Monika Groening: The Gans family 1350-1963 . Verlag Regionalkultur, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 978-3-89735-486-9
• Wolfgang Klötzer (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Biographie . Personal history lexicon . First volume. A – L (=  publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XIX , no. 1 ). Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-7829-0444-3 .
• Franz Lerner:  Cassella, Leopold. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , p. 167 ( digitized version ).