Jewish communal education. The children of court Jews studied secular in
addition to Jewish subjects, and education was provided for girls as well as
boys. Some court Jews, such as Samson Wertheimer, were accomplished tal-
mudic scholars. In Wertheimer’s case, the combination of scholarship and
political stature earned him the dual titles of Landesrabbinerfrom the Jews of
Hungary, and Judenkaiserfrom Emperor Charles VI.
Fourth, court Jews’ exceptional status was often a source of implicit Jewish
toleration. Samson Wertheimer’s special permission to reside in Vienna,
despite the recent expulsion of Jews in 1670, extended to his entourage. Until
1848, the Jewish community of Vienna consisted largely of an amalgamation
of special exemptions to Jews like Wertheimer and their entourages.
Finally, court Jews became the natural leaders of central European Jewry, as
patrons of Jewish culture and shtadlanim. In 1700, for example, Samson
Wertheimer was able to suppress the circulation of Johann Eisenmenger’s
anti-Jewish tract Entdecktes Judenthum, even after Eisenmenger had spent a
fortune trying to win the support of the Jesuits. Beyond the small coterie of
court Jews, this leadership elite provided a model for smaller-scale Jewish
communal leaders, who modeled their tactics and their role in Jewish com-
munal life after the court Jews.
While most of the court Jews were men, their leadership model and pater-
nalistic attitude toward their Jewish constituents provided a model for lesser
Jewish leaders, male and female. An instructive example in this regard is
Glückel of Hameln. The widow of the leader of the Jewish community,
Glückel took over not only her late husband’s business but, in no small mea-
sure, his role in Jewish communal life. Though partnered by her son and then
her second husband, she used the family fortune not only to find acceptable
matches for her children, but also for the betterment of the Jewish commu-
nity. Glückel thus reveals how, in some cases, wealth and political savvy could
transcend the boundary between men and women, and allow women to take
an active role in public Jewish life.
In a larger sense, the privileged status of the court was symptomatic of the
rise of absolutism. As a political philosophy, absolutism emerged out of the
exhaustion at the end of the Thirty Years War. In the wake of this costly and
destructive war, two attempts to rethink the relationship between state and
society appeared in central Europe, by John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes
respectively. Calvin regarded the state as the only effective arbiter of religious
conflict, and he supported a strong state.
Hobbes expanded this notion in Leviathan.People, he argued, are by
nature evil and selfish, striving only to avoid pain and maximize pleasure,
even at each other’s expense. For this reason, the equilibrium state of nature,
he argued, was a chaotic and anarchic “war of every man against every man.”
Life, he concluded, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750 115