Lippold Ben Chluchim

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lippold ben (Judel) Chluchim (* 1530 in Prague ; † January 28, 1573 in Berlin ) was court factor and mint master under Elector Joachim II Hector at the electoral court of Berlin.

Life

He was born in Prague as the son of Hluchim Lippold . After Philipp Melanchthon had explained to the assembled imperial princes the Brandenburg pogrom of 1510 as a fictitious judicial crime at the Fürstentag in Frankfurt am Main in 1539, Josel von Rosheim approached Joachim II and obtained the promise to Jews the previously forbidden settlement in the Mark Brandenburg to allow again. As a result of both encounters, Joachim II reopened the mark to Jews on June 25, 1539 and converted to the Lutheran confession on November 2 of the same year . Lippold moved with his brother and father to Berlin around 1542 on Stralauer Strasse in the Klosterviertel.

Under Joachim II.

After Joachim II. Court factor Michael von Derenburg fell victim to a robbery on April 23, 1549 when the electoral income was transferred from Frankfurt an der Oder to Berlin and had a fatal accident soon afterwards, the elector appointed Lippold his chamberlain and court factor (court Jew ), as well as head of all Jews from Brandenburg and in 1567 as mint master. As mint master, he moved the coin to Poststrasse 4 in the Nikolaiviertel (today the Kurfürstenhöfe office building ).

Due to the special position of the Jews at that time, combined with his office as court factor and thus lender of the elector, he shared the fate of many European Jews in a similarly high office: he had a special relationship with the elector, who was closer to him because of his unsecured outsider position than others, but could easily have dropped him. Lippold managed the balancing act until the elector's death and he was consistently in his favor.

Joachim II. Wanted after the Mark with him Hohenzollern had become Lutheran, for the Duchy of Prussia under the local Lutheran Hohenzollern as entitled to inherit mitbelehnt be. Since the duchy was a Polish fief at the time, it was necessary to obtain a loan from the Polish King Sigismund II at the usual financial expense at the time. This succeeded: in 1569 the king, who was also brother-in-law of Joachim II, enfeoffed him and the Berlin Hohenzollern family as an inheritance in the Duchy of Prussia. For financing - and because of the otherwise lavish courtship of Joachim II - the elector subjected the inhabitants of the mark, especially the high Jewish taxes. Joachim II did not shy away from the deterioration of coins and confiscations .

Märkische merchants who imported goods from outside the Mark had to pay for them in weighed precious metal, as the Brandenburg mint was no longer accepted abroad because of its reduced precious metal content. Joachim II, however, forbade calculating the coin at reduced rates. Accordingly, the merchants withdrew from the compulsory exchange rate by initially doing their foreign and wholesale business in foreign currency, and after Joachim II had forbidden this, paying in weighed precious metal. The elector reacted to this by prohibiting the use and possession of precious metals. Sales proceeds obtained in precious metal had to be sold to the state treasury at prescribed rates, while the devalued national coin had to be sold to the national treasury. In addition, Märkische Jews had to import expensive precious metal, which they then had to deliver to the elector at a lower cost than the cost price at dictated domestic prices. This made it impossible for merchants to import and export at cost-covering revenues. As mint master, Lippold was commissioned to enforce the coercive measures against the merchants, Lutheran and Jewish alike. The measures also included searches of merchants' houses, with any precious metal found and held forbidden being confiscated in favor of the sovereign.

Under Johann Georg

Elector Johann Georg took over debts of 2.5 million guilders from his father Joachim II, who died on January 3, 1571 . Joachim II was in Köpenick at the time with a hunting party, Lippold was also present. Johann Georg had all the houses of his father's favorites searched and sealed in Berlin and did nothing against a pogrom, in which Jews were mistreated, the synagogue at the Kleiner Jüdenhof in northern Klosterstrasse (today north of Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse) was devastated and most of the Jewish households were devastated were looted. The looters publicly burned stolen promissory notes. Significant Lutheran believers, such as the grocer Greaves, on the other hand, could rely on police protection. Johann Georg then imposed an absolute curfew on the Jews who were harassed and injured in this way.

As the alleged culprit, he incriminated Lippold, the electoral mint master and court factor, and in 1571 accused him of misappropriating sovereign income and unjust enrichment. As a court Jew, Lippold was a lender and therefore earned from the interest paid . Complaints about the amount of the interest were already made during Joachim II's lifetime, but the latter rejected the complaint. He pointed out that Lutheran lenders in Frankfurt an der Oder even charged higher interest rates, which is not surprising in view of the devaluing local currency.

Through his position at court, Lippold made wealth and (combined with his personal relationship with Joachim II) influence. But as the executor of the sovereign financial policy and confiscations as well as his unaffected wealth and influence at court, he also managed to be envious. Only after the elector's death did aristocratic, commercial and other debtors have the opportunity to get rid of the Jewish creditor. In the trial of the embezzlement, however, the court exonerated Lippold after examining all the books. On the contrary, the judges confirmed that Joachim II owed Lippold 89 thalers and 5 silver groschen.

House arrest and execution in 1573

The Brandenburg Chancellor, Lampert Distelmeyer, handed Lippold's debtors their transferred pledges and promissory notes without repayment without any legal basis. However, the opponents did not rest and Lippold, who had been placed under house arrest after three months of pre-trial detention, was not released, but rather in 1573, three days before the end of house arrest, under fictitious suspicion of sorcery and murder and, according to Section 44 of the court order, Kaiser Charles V subjected to an embarrassing trial. Lippold was aware of his hopelessness, he pleaded to spare him the ordeal and - in the hope of being executed without further ado - he 'confessed' in writing to everything that he could only imagine magic :

"He confessed that" he could banish the devil in a glass and a circle and force him to do his will, even through his help in His electoral grace closed and locked rooms come to his pleasure day and night, connected with the devil, and have revealed to him in body and soul ... that it was Peter Beninkoven and Urban Kemnitzen who taught Gifft that it would make them slow, quine and finally die. Also that rather a black rooster with magic, buried in the Müntze, that this Müntz master should not have any prosperity on the coin. ""

Under torture, he was forced to confess that he had poisoned Elector Joachim, his employer and patron. When asked during the interrogation why he had only shown him dear and good things, because only poisoned them, Lippold 'confessed' that he feared the elector's punishment for stealing a chain. In doing so, Lippold had the chain minted as Portugalösers , one of which every guest in Köpenick Castle received one as a gift from Joachim II the evening before his death.

Lippold was sentenced to death by wheeling and quartering . Before the execution on the Neuer Markt near the Lutheran St. Mary's Church , Lippold should, as prescribed, audibly repeat his confession again in public. But he found the courage to withdraw. So he was immediately dragged into the court arbor of the Berlin City Hall, which was then located on the corner of Spandau and Oderberger (today Rathaus-) Strasse, and subjected to severe torture in Spanish boots , whereupon he declared everything that had been revoked to be true. Then executioner Balzer and his servants wheeled and quartered him on the Neuer Markt without public repetition of the confession. His entrails were burned with an alchemy book, which should have served him as a source of his magic, his head was impaled on an iron bar at Georgentor (today Alexanderplatz ), his body, divided into four parts, hung on gallows on country roads in every direction outside Berlin, exposed to the carrion birds . Most of his property was confiscated.

Expulsion of the Jews in 1573

Lippold's death heralded an even more difficult time for the Brandenburg Jews, who under Joachim II had to pay higher compulsory levies and taxes than other children of the country. Johann Georg ordered their expulsion by February 1, 1573 at the latest, whereby they still had to liquidate their assets and transfer them to him. Most went to Prague, many to Poland. Johann Georg forbade Jews to settle in Brandenburg, which was only revised by the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm by edict in 1671. Lippold's widow Magdalena was left with 750 thalers in cash before she was expelled with the nine children and went to Vienna. Johann Georg had other household items, money, clothes, silver and gold utensils delivered to the children of Lippold's brother, which he valued at 316 thalers. Magdalena's request to pay her the further legally established assets of Lippold, supported by Emperor Maximilian II , to which Johann Georg replied in the summer of 1578 that he would not surrender more than what he had left her.

Friedrich II's personal physician Wilhelm Moehsen worked on the judicial crime against Lippold by reading from the court archives of the then personal physician Paul Luther , son of the reformer, based on the protocols and original documents of Joachim's death, which unanimously had a discharge on his foot combined with a sudden cold as Name cause of death, refuted accusation of poisoning.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eugen Wolbe : History of the Jews in Berlin and in the Mark Brandenburg. Kedem, Berlin 1937, p. 64.
  2. ^ Ingo Materna , Wolfgang Ribbe (ed.): Brandenburg history. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-05-002508-5 , p. 279 ( digitized version ).
  3. ↑ Joachim II had already accumulated a mountain of debt of 700,000 Reichsthalers or the equivalent of around 1,000,000 guilders by 1544.
  4. ↑ Eugen Wolbe: History of the Jews in Berlin and in the Mark Brandenburg. Kedem, Berlin 1937, p. 74.
  5. ↑ Eugen Wolbe: History of the Jews in Berlin and in the Mark Brandenburg. Kedem, Berlin 1937, p. 75.
  6. ↑ Eugen Wolbe: History of the Jews in Berlin and in the Mark Brandenburg. Kedem, Berlin 1937, p. 79.
  7. ↑ Eugen Wolbe: History of the Jews in Berlin and in the Mark Brandenburg. Kedem, Berlin 1937, p. 80.
  8. ^ Materna, Ribbe, Adamy: Brandenburg history. 1995, p. 285 with a picture of the execution ( digitized version ) and Friedrich Christoph Jonathan Fischer: History of the German trade. The Schiffarth, fishing, inventions, arts, trade, manufactories, agriculture, police, serfdom, customs, coinage and mining, the right to exchange, the city economy, and luxury. Helwing, Hannover 1792, p. 122 ( digitized version )
  9. ↑ Quote with excerpt from the court file according to Eugen Wolbe: History of the Jews in Berlin and in the Mark Brandenburg. Kedem, Berlin 1937, p. 82. Wolbe's orthography and omission as well as the original orthography of the quotation from Wolbe adopted unchanged.
  10. ^ Gerhild Komander: Johann Georg Margrave of Brandenburg.
  11. ↑ Eugen Wolbe: History of the Jews in Berlin and in the Mark Brandenburg. Kedem, Berlin 1937, pp. 87ff.
  12. ↑ Heinz Knobloch : Mr. Moses in Berlin: On the trail of a philanthropist. (= Fischer Taschenbuch. No. 12801). 3. Edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-596-12801-3 , p. 306.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lippold Ben Chluchim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Judel Chluchim; Lippold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Court factor and mint master under Elector Joachim II. Hector at the electoral court in Berlin
DATE OF BIRTH 1530
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague , Bohemia
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1573
Place of death Berlin