Veitel Heine Ephraim

Ephraim Palace

Veitel Heine Ephraim (* 1703 in Berlin ; † May 16, 1775 there ) was a royal Prussian court factor , court jeweler, banker, mint master , silver supplier and owner of a gold and silver manufacture for wire drawing in Berlin and Potsdam. In housework and in the military orphanage, he had trimmings made (silver and gold braids , braids and braids ). He also supplied food and grain to the army. Since 1750 he was active as chairman of the Jewish community in Berlin and founded a teaching institution. Ephraim and Daniel Itzig financed Prussia's warfare in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) by deteriorating coins . During the entire war, war money was produced in Magdeburg, Breslau and Königsberg.

Life

Veitel Heine Ephraim was the fifth child of the Altona- born jeweler, poor man and elder of the Jewish community Nathan Veitel Ephraim (1658–1748). Heine is actually not a name, but a Yiddish medieval expression for "son of"; So Heine or Heiman is the translation of the Aramaic bar Chaim .

Spandauer Straße, after a watercolor sketch from 1690

In 1727 Ephraim married Elke Fränkel; they had four sons and two daughters. The Ephraim family lived at Spandauer Straße 30. In 1744/1745 he became court jeweler of the Prussian King Friedrich II. They had known each other since 1738, where they met at Rheinsberg Castle . Even as Crown Prince Friedrich was indebted to Ephraim. In 1748 Ephraim leased a lace factory and had orphans in Potsdam taught how to make them. In 1750 he was appointed by the king to be the chief elder of Berlin's Jews. From 1752, Ephraim delivered silver to the Prussian mints, at that time leased to Johann Philipp Graumann .

Ephraim as a coin tenant

Ephraim Palace on Mühlendamm ; around 1830

“After Graumann's fall in early 1755, Moses Fränkel ... and his brother-in-law Ephraim were assigned the lease of the Königsberg and Breslau mints. Their success in Königsberg was so great that they were also given the lease of the mints of Aurich and Kleve under similar conditions, despite the fact that their competitors in the silver delivery, Moses Hertz Gumperts, Daniel Itzig and Moses Isaak, passionately tried to secure the lease for themselves to win himself and to bring the victorious party to the favor of the king and the mint officials through ugly intrigues. "

Annually they paid the king 5% Schlagschatz while they were granted duty and excise exemption for the material passing through, free passes and rooms for the expression. “In order to be able to pay the extraordinarily high treasure trove of 340,000 thalers a year desired by the king, the entrepreneurs were forced, given the great risk they were taking, to mint a very large number of deciduous coins, namely at a lower than the usual standard of 14 thalers on the fine mark. ”The minted coins were exchanged for better coins in Poland, Saxony and Silesia.

“In the main they used their extensive business and family relations abroad to acquire the necessary gold and silver in Holland, especially on the Amsterdam market, in England and in Hamburg by means of Hamburg and Dutch bills of exchange. Safe shopping areas were also ... Poland, Russia and Hungary, where the so-called buyers of the entrepreneurs traded in the better coins that were in circulation there and passed them on to their clients. By the year 1761, the mint tenants are said to have drawn 50 million gold from the eastern states in this way, as they themselves declared, and made it usable for the royal mint. Another way of raising money was to remelt the gold subsidien received from England and to double and triple it by mixing it with other metals. "

August d'or (1753–1756 mint Leipzig) and Neuer August d'or (1761–1763 mint Berlin with forged stamp); So-called. Ephraimite. 8 Groschen 1753, without Mmz., Leipzig, war coinage.

For this they used dubious methods on the royal order (by means of tauentzien ): a lower coin rate than the 14-thaler coin rate . Ephraim produced Polish tympfe ( Ephraimites ) for the Prussian government with the help of captured and recut stamps . The mints in Kleve and Aurich fell out in 1757 when they were occupied by the French army. When the army was in Bohemia that same year, Ephraim also minted Austrian coins.

"Since the king still shied away from the" bad and infamous money ", it was decided on the advice of General Manager Retzow, who had headed all mints since May 1756, that the new money should not be allowed to circulate in Prussia itself."

For occupied Saxony, Frederick the Great had inferior coins minted with a portrait and coat of arms of his hated enemy Friedrich August II . But the forgeries were recognized and the population rhymed: “Nice on the outside, bad on the inside. Friedrich on the outside, Ephraim on the inside. ”Not only did the citizens want to sue Ephraim for these forgeries, but also Gumpert's because forged coins were supposed to be exported to Prussia. Ephraim was detained and only released from the Pleissenburg when he 30,000 Reichstaler paid. After Gumpert's death (1758), he reconciled himself with Moses Isaak and Daniel Itzig and formed a new partnership with them. All six Prussian and the two Saxon mints (the Leipzig and Dresden mints ) were leased to this partnership, Ephraim & Co. In 1758 a fictitious collection of letters “ The Justified Ephraim. The Saxon financial system or, Historical and beurtheilende news about the past, present and future state: Besides ... a comparison of the Prussian and Saxon Oeconomie by the Jew Ephraim to Berlin to his cousin Manasseh in Amsterdam "by Jean-Henri Maubert de Gouvest published .

In 1753 the Leipzig mint was relocated to the casemates of the Pleißenburg . It was shut down in 1765 because it was no longer needed. Hauer, Daniel Adam: copper engraving (29 × 40.3 cm plate edge), peep box sheet - therefore reversed!

At the beginning of 1759 the Graumann coin footer was abandoned in Prussia too; was produced in 19 thalers feet for Prussia and 30 thalers feet for Saxony, Poland and Silesia ${\displaystyle {\tfrac {3}{4}}}$. Ephraim and his son Benjamin Veitel Ephraim fled to Hamburg and Copenhagen in September 1759, but were soon able to return to Berlin. From 1760 he also worked as a collector of Saxon war contributions. "Ephraim & Sons achieved a further advantage by delivering the silver, which, as a result of their many foreign connections, they could buy cheaper than was provided for in the contracts."

As a reward, Ephraim and Itzig received the rights of Christian merchants in 1761. In 1762, Ephraim was the first Jew to buy a piece of land in Berlin on Schiffbauer- and Mühlendamm . Overall, his property in Berlin is said to have been worth 400,000 thalers. In 1764 he began operating a smelter not far from his farm on Schiffbauerdamm, where counterfeit money was melted down to buy silver .

Wilhelmplatz in Berlin, pen drawing of the planned development looking north; on the left the gold and silver manufacture leased from Ephraim in 1762

Ephraim as head of the poor

The magnificent town house, the Ephraimpalais , was completed in 1766. The king had given the monoliths supporting the balcony to his favorite from the Count's Brühl castle , which was destroyed during the Seven Years' War. The palace, which is richly decorated with columns and putti , was demolished in 1935 due to the widening of the Mühlendamm and only rebuilt between 1985 and 1987 at almost the same location, but in a new location at Poststrasse 16 ( Nikolaiviertel ) in Berlin-Mitte . Since 1987 serves Rococo - Palais the Märkisches Museum for exhibition purposes.

Together with Daniel Itzig, he tried to found a school for poor children in 1761, which did not work at the time. But in his will of 1774 he ordered the establishment of a Jewish educational institution ( Klaus ) for Talmud and Jewish science in Berlin, which was opened in 1783 under the name Veitel Heine Ephraimsche Lehranstalt and existed until the beginning of the National Socialist regime. It was not until October 2005 that 83 historically particularly valuable volumes from the library of this educational institution of the University of Potsdam , which had been lost in 1945 , were transferred from the estate of Rabbi Yehuda Aschkenasy in Hilversum (Netherlands).

Ephraim was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Mitte . His son Benjamin Veitel Ephraim (1742–1811) made it the furthest of all sons. But in 1809 he went bankrupt , relied on Napoleon's policy of tolerance , had problems with the Prussian government, was imprisoned as a spy in 1810 and died a poor and failed man.

literature

• Karl E. Grözinger (Ed.): The foundations of the Prussian-Jewish court jeweler family Ephraim and their traces in the present. (= Jewish culture. Volume 19). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-447-05755-4 .
• Heinrich Schnee:  Ephraim, Veitel Heine. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 546 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Harry B. van der Linden, Centrum Judaicum (ed.): Veitel Heine Ephraim. Court Jew of Frederick II (= Jewish miniatures. Volume 139). Hentrich & Hentrich , Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-95565-008-7 .
• Friedrich Freiherr von Schrötter : The Prussian coinage in the 18th century. 1910.

Web links

• Literature by and about Veitel Heine Ephraim in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature list in the online catalog of the Berlin State Library
• Ingrid Lohmann: The Jewish Free School in Berlin - an educational theory and school history analysis . ( Memento from June 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (= Jewish history of education in Germany. Volume 1).
• Bernd Oertwig : How Frederick the Great deceived his own people with fake coins. ( Memento from October 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
• Helmut Caspar: Possibly safe certificates . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 9, 1999, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 92-95 ( luise-berlin.de ).
• short curriculum vitae for the RBB document "Chronicle of Prussia"

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Selma Stern : The Prussian State and the Jews. Mohr, Tübingen 1962, pp. 160-161, 206.
2. ^ Wilhelm Treue : Economic and technical history of Prussia, p. 189
3. ↑ maz-online.de
4. ^ Schnee, Heinrich, "Ephraim, Veitel" in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 4 (1959), p. 546 f.
5. ↑ Selma Stern, p. 208.
6. ↑ Harry B. van der Linden: Veitel Heine Ephraim. Court Jew of Friedrich II. 2013.
7. ^ Schnee, Heinrich, "Ephraim, Veitel" in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 4 (1959), p. 546 f.
8. ↑ Selma Stern, pp. 233-234.
9. ↑ Selma Stern, p. 237.
10. ↑ Selma Stern, pp. 238-239.
11. ↑ Selma Stern, p. 243.
12. ↑ Selma Stern, p. 239; F. von Schrötter, p. 35.
13. ↑ Helmut Caspar: Possierliche safe notes . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 9, 1999, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 92-95 ( luise-berlin.de ).
14. ^ Anton Balthasar König: Annals of the Jews in the Prussian States, especially in the Mark Brandenburg. 1790, p. 290.
15. ↑ The Justified Ephraim, or, Historical and Judicial News ...
16. ↑ Selma Stern, p. 250.
17. ^ Hugo Rachel, Johannes Papritz, Paul Wallich: Berlin wholesale merchants and capitalists. Volume 2, 1967, DNB 457871946 , p. 312.
18. ↑ Veitel Heine Ephraim'sche educational institution (Berlin)
19. ^ Nathanael Riemer: The Judaica and Hebraica holdings of the Potsdam University Library . Postprint. University Press Potsdam.
20. ↑ Gerhard Steiner: Three Prussian Kings and a Jew. Explorations about Benjamin Veitel Ephraim and his world. Edition Hentrich, 1994, p. 221.