Chapter 1 - Childhood in Mannheim

Summary

The German city of Mannheim lies at the juncture of two rivers: the Rhine and the Neckar. It was a small and rather insignificant town until the middle of the seventeenth century when Kurfürst (Elector) Karl Ludwig returned from exile in the Netherlands and built his castle there to make it his seat of power. He had been banished during the struggles of the Thirty Years War, but his sojourn in the Netherlands and his contact with England had given him a much broader outlook on the world and made him ambitious to turn his capital into a center of commerce and art. His models in building Mannheim were inspired by look¬ing west toward France. He built himself a huge Versailles-style castle at the edge of the inner city while constructing this interior city very much on a design that, more than a century later, inspired city planners in Vienna—with a broad “ring street” surrounding numbered and lettered squares filled with apartment buildings and shops. The “factories” and harbor facilities that provided the op¬portunities for the affluence of the citizens of the city were constructed outside the “residential” town.

During his exile Karl Ludwig had another experience and that was the contact with Jewish men of commerce. These meetings convinced him that only a city that provided equal rights for all its citizens can truly prosper. There¬fore, upon his return to Mannheim in 1648, he invited Jews from the Palati-nate, especially from such famous Jewish communities as Worms and Speyer, to settle in Mannheim as free citizens exempt from paying any special taxes. This Jewish community rapidly increased in numbers and in prominence, swelled by several Sephardic families (in this case Portuguese Jews who had migrated to Holland) as well as Austrian and Polish Jews, in addition to the influx of congregants from the surrounding area, especially Mainz and Frankfurt. The German Princess Lisa who visited Mannheim in 1720 wrote “The Jews seem to outnumber the Christians in this city.” While that is a gross exaggeration it was true that, because of the freedom they enjoyed without ever being segregated into a ghetto, the Jews were much more in evidence in court circles than in other parts of Europe.