From Refugees to Royalty Sample

14 from refugees to royalty
clothing. Meyer was warned to abide by the regulations in future but escaped
further punishment.
The next mention comes from the year 1600, when a Schutzjude – a ‘protected
Jew’ – named Joseph of Messel petitioned the authorities in nearby Hanau for
permission to move there and place himself under the protection of its ruler,
Count Philipp Ludwig II. For Jews, obtaining this grant of protection from the
local sovereign was an essential condition of residency. As a Schutzjude already,
Joseph was living in Messel under the protection of Baron Heinrich von Groschlag.
We have no record of whether his petition to move to Hanau was successful.
There was a major influx of Jewish families to Messel during the eighteenth
century, so that by the time of the 1781 census one in every six households in
the village was Jewish. In 1813 there were eighty‐one Jews registered out of a
population of 663 in Messel, or just over 12 per cent. 3 To put these figures in
context, the 175,000 Jews who lived in all German states at the beginning of
the nineteenth century represented less than 1 per cent of the total population.
Confident in its strength, the Jewish community in Messel applied in 1739 to build
a synagogue in the centre of the village – one of the very first village synagogues
to be constructed in the region. The building served as a place of worship and a
Jewish school until 1830 when a new synagogue was built around the corner.
Despite these achievements, life for the Jewish community of Messel was still
restricted by fixed boundaries of exclusion and privation. Jews were treated as
an alien presence in the village, their community looked upon as a foreign colony
living side by side with the Christian majority. Jewish men were excluded from
all guild professions and thus could not engage in any form of manufacturing or
handicraft production. While some could fall back on money‐lending, the vast
majority earned a living through petty trade in old clothes, ironware and other
second‐hand goods. With all Jews forced into the same occupations, competition
was intense and margins were thin, so that only the most successful were able to
escape poverty. Crucially, most Jews were barred from owning land or property,
which made them a welcome source of rent for Christian landlords, just as their
exclusion from farming – the main occupation of Messel villagers – left them
dependent on buying food from their non‐Jewish neighbours. 4
The family that would eventually carry the name Messel to the wider world
settled in the village during the eighteenth century. The first known member of the
family is Aharon Leib Bentheim, born in 1723 and sometimes referred to as Aron
Löb. His is the older of the two tombstones in the Jewish cemetery of Dieburg.
The fact that he and his four sons all went by the surname Bentheim indicates
that the family came from the county of that name on the Dutch border in Lower
Saxony, where there had been an established Jewish community since at least the
seventeenth century. The feudal rulers of Bentheim looked on the Jews as a ready