Veith Ehrenstamm

Veith Ehrenstamm (* approx. 1763, presumably in Proßnitz in Moravia ; † October 15, 1827 ibid), was one of the first Jewish industrialists on the territory of the Austrian imperial state .

Life

Salomon Jacob from Kolin in Bohemia came to Proßnitz in the middle of the 18th century and acquired a family position there through marriage. In 1787 he adopted the name Ehrenstamm, probably thinking of his father, Rabbi Jacob Illowy in Kolin. His skill as a businessman was changeable, towards the end of his life he went bankrupt several times and was only taken care of by his son Veith.

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, Veith Ehrenstamm crossed the border between the trader and the manufacturer and, with great difficulty, took over the cloth factory founded by Franz Plotz in Proßnitz in 1801. As early as 1804 he had 34 chairs in operation and employed 350 people. The factory survived the financial and economic crisis after the end of the continental blockade , as early as 1826 Veith Ehrenstamm wanted to connect a cotton spinning mill to it, but his death in 1827 thwarted the construction.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Veith Ehrenstamm was one of the most important suppliers to the Austrian army and one of the most versatile industrialists. He also had a decisive influence on Judaism in Moravia. The fact that he did not have the decidedly conservative spirit of his great-nephew Bernhard Illowy was also expressed in the fact that he employed the relatively liberal, later Pest chief rabbi, Löw Schwab as a tutor for his children from 1821 onwards. His four sons had no luck in the tough economic situation and lived on a large scale in Proßnitz. Three married into the best Jewish families, Jacob married the eldest daughter of the Viennese wholesaler Max Trebitsch, Leopold the daughter of Löbl Kuffner from Lundenburg and Samuel the daughter of Moses Reitlinger from Vienna. In 1829 the brothers Jacob and Adolf Ehrenstamm applied to the Vienna Mercantile and Exchange Court to have their company recorded. Six years after Veith Ehrenstamm's death, in 1833, the entire property of the Ehrenstamm family had to be declared bankrupt, which spanned 23 years. The descendants left Proßnitz and lived in Krasna (Moravia), Vienna and Hungary. Of all the descendants, the painter Eugen Felix , who was actually born as Veith Ehrenstamm in Proßnitz, was the grandson of the manufacturer with the same name, and became better known as a collector of paintings and portrait painter in Vienna.

literature

• Bernhard Heilig: Rise and decline of the house of honor stem in: Bulletin for the members of the Society of Friends of the Leo Baeck Institute 10 (1960) p. 101-122.
• Bernhard Heilig: News from the history of the house of Ehrenstamm in: Journal of the German Association for the History of Moravia and Silesia 36 (1934) p. 9-28.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Source of life data: Národní archiv Prague, death register Israelitengemeinde Proßnitz, HBMa 1700.