Court Jew: Encyclopedia II - Court Jew

Court Jew - Positions and duties

Court Jews, called also court factors, and court or chamber agents, played a part at the courts of the Austrian emperors and the German princes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and at the beginning of the nineteenth. Not always on account of their learning or their force of character did these Jews rise to positions close to the rulers: they were mostly wealthy business men, distinguished above their coreligionists by their commercial instincts and their adaptability. Court rulers looked upon them in a personal and, as a rule, selfish light; as being, on the one hand, their favorites, and, on the other, their whipping-boys. Court Jews frequently suffered through the denunciation of their envious rivals and coreligionists, and were often the objects of hatred of the people and the courtiers. They were of service to their fellow-Jews only during the periods, often short, of their influence with the rulers; and as they themselves, being hated parvenus, often came to a tragic end, their coreligionists were in consequence of their fall all the more harassed.

The court Jews, as the agents of the rulers, and in times of war as the purveyors and the treasurers of the state, enjoyed special privileges. They were under the jurisdiction of the court marshal, and were not compelled to wear the Jews' badge. They were permitted to stay wherever the emperor held his court, and to live anywhere in the German empire, even in places where no other Jews were allowed. Wherever they settled they could buy houses, slaughter meat according to the Jewish ritual, and maintain a rabbi. They could sell their goods wholesale and retail, and could not be taxed or assessed higher than the Christians.