In 1795, four years before his death, Daniel Itzig petitioned Frederick William II to relieve less fortunate Jews from certain discriminatory laws. The answer, delayed until 1798, came in a decree of Frederick William III, who acceded to the throne in 1797. Though his father had recognized the Itzigs as citizens, the new king and his advisors were unwilling to go farther. Remarkably enough, the monarch acknowledged that in the discriminatory laws there existed “a certain harshness and a prejudicial distinction between Jewish subjects of the state and the others; and it is to be desired as much for the honor of humanity as for the good of the citizenship that these laws should be abolished.” 46 But Frederick William III refused to repeal them, since their purpose was “to secure the other subjects of the state against the inconveniences which the reception of the Jewish nation among them involves, by virtue of the peculiar character of this nation.” The “peculiar character” was the Judaic faith and its customs, viewed officially as “running counter to the purposes of the Christian state.” 47
III
For socially mobile Jews less fortunate than Daniel Itzig’s family, converting to Christianity was an alluring means of improving their lot. Through much of the eighteenth century conversions in Berlin were rare, averaging only about three per year. But in the closing decades the number began to rise, so that in 1800 twenty-five Berliners left Judaism, a number that increased to nearly eighty per year by 1830, 48 prompting some to liken the trend of apostasy to an “epidemic of baptism” (Taufepidemie ).
Several factors explain the growing attraction of conversion. By embracing Christianity, Jewish subjects achieved citizenship, though in reality the converted were still susceptible to discrimination. While some baptisms reflected genuine spiritual convictions, others were encouraged by the proselytizing zeal of Christians. Thus, Schleiermacher likened Judaism in 1799 to a mummified religion, a “mechanical motion from which life and spirit have long vanished,” and urged the salonières Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin to convert. 49 For well-to-do Jewish women, conversion offered a means of escaping failed marriages and forging new alliances with Prussian noblemen. An early, sensational example followed the death in 1776 of Moses Isaac, a friend of Moses Mendelssohn and brother-in-law of Daniel Itzig, his partner during the Seven Years’ War. Like Itzig, Isaac had amassed great wealth, an estate of some 750,000 thalers, and received the general privilege from Frederick the Great. In 1780 two of Isaac’s daughters converted and married noblemen; in the process, one daughter, Blümchen, abandoned her husband, Joseph Arnstein (brother-in-law of Fanny Arnstein). What began as a private family scandal erupted into a public imbroglio about the decedent’s will. Moses Isaac had stipulated the disinheritance of any of his children who converted, and two of Isaac’s sons now petitioned the monarch to enforce the clause. After protracted legal actions, in which Frederick the Great and Frederick William II upheld it, the matter was settled in 1787. Despite favorable rulings, the brothers agreed to pay each sister 75,000 thalers. 50 Remarkably enough, one brother, the physician Joseph Fliess, subsequently converted to Christianity in 1804 and became Carl Friedrich Fliess. In turn, he himself was excluded from the trust along with his descendants, including those who remained Jews.
The rising tide of conversion also affected the Itzig family, but less scandalously than Moses Isaac’s issue. Daniel Itzig died in 1799 and left a fortune appraised between 700,000 and one million thalers. 51 According to his will, each offspring received 40,000 thalers, and his grandchildren, smaller amounts. In addition, a family trust was established for Itzig’s property, including the mansion, art collection, and the Bartholdy Meierei . 52 Like Moses Mendelssohn and Moses Isaac, Daniel Itzig remained true to his religion and, like Isaac, provided that descendants who converted would be disinherited. During Itzig’s lifetime none dared challenge his authority, but within a few months of his death, a nineteen-year-old grandson, Isaac Itzig, did so, evidently to advance his career in jurisprudence (professional options for Jewish subjects were then severely limited). Changing his name to Julius Eduard Hitzig, he embraced the Protestant faith in Wittenberg, Luther’s birthplace, and became a judicial officer in Warsaw, then part of a Prussian province. 53 Lea Salomon, who would marry Abraham Mendelssohn in 1804, was unimpressed by her cousin’s metamorphosis: “he could not resist the desire to be baptized under the image of this great man, and to be in some sort protected by him; and by this step toward the salvation of his soul he has obtained the worldly advantage of soon getting a place in his profession.” 54 Hitzig’s decision later earned him a withering rebuke in Heinrich Heine’s Hebrew Melodies (IV, 38–42), where the poet pondered whether the “H” meant “Holy Itzig (for Saint Itzig)?”
The eagerness to convert proved irresistible to Daniel Itzig’s grandchildren. Many were baptized during the 1820s, in some cases, including Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy, after their children—Itzig’s great-grandchildren—had changed faiths. 55 The case of Jacob Salomon (1774–1825), son of Levin Jacob Salomon and Daniel Itzig’s daughter Bella, decisively influenced Abraham and Lea’s family. Sometime near the turn to the nineteenth century Jacob added the surname Bartholdy, after his grandfather’s dairy farm 56 and then, in 1805, was baptized as a Protestant. Jacob Salomon Bartholdy now became Jacob Bartholdy. In 1809 he fought against Napoleon in the Austrian campaign; his account of the Tyrolese uprising earned Heine’s praise as a “clever, well-written book” and provided material for Karl Immermann’s tragedy Andreas Hofer . 57 After Napoleon’s defeat, Jacob served as Prussian consul to Rome, where he resided in the Casa Bartholdy atop the Spanish Steps. An art connoisseur, Jacob commissioned the German Nazarene painters to execute frescoes for his drawing room, on the Genesis account of Joseph. 58
One of the frescoes, by Peter von Cornelius, treated Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers, seemingly chosen to advance the peace after the devastation of the Napoleonic era. But the painting also bore personal meaning for Jacob Bartholdy. Upon his conversion, his mother, Bella Salomon, had disowned him, a poignant example of how the decision to change faiths could bitterly divide families. 59 Almost certainly this experience helped convince Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn to convert secretly, several years after their children had been baptized. A fragmentary letter from Jacob to Abraham reveals that the two discussed conversion; Jacob’s views ultimately prevailed:
You say you owe it to the memory of your father ; but do you think you have done something bad in giving your children the religion that appears to you to be the best? It is the most just homage you or any of us could pay to the efforts of your father to promote true light and knowledge, and he would have acted like you for his children, and perhaps like me for himself. You may remain faithful to an oppressed, persecuted religion, you may leave it to your children as a prospect of life-long martyrdom, as long as you believe it to be absolute truth. But when you have ceased to believe that, it is barbarism. I advise you to adopt the name of Mendelssohn Bartholdy as a distinction from the other Mendelssohns. At the same time, you would please me very much, because it would be the means of preserving my memory in the family. 60
Barbarism versus Bildung : Jacob placed the issue of conversion in stark terms, brushed aside his brother-in-law’s sense of filial duty, and even speculated that as an assimilated Jew Moses Mendelssohn might have pursued the same course. Jacob Bartholdy had no doubt about how Abraham Mendelssohn should raise his children.
IV
Abraham’s decision to convert may have had practical consequences for his alliance with Joseph in their Hamburg and Berlin banking firms. As early as 1812, Abraham began to add the surname Bartholdy, 61 probably in response to Jacob’s urging. On March 11, 1812, Frederick William III issued an emancipation decree, according to which new Jewish citizens were to choose fixed family names. 62 Abraham and Lea’s children became Protestants in 1816, but the parents remained Jews until October 1822, when they secretly embraced Christianity in Frankfurt. At the end of 1821, Abraham dissolved his ties to the bankin
g firm, which was liquidated and reorganized, with Joseph’s son Alexander (1798–1871) replacing Abraham. 63 Although hard evidence is lacking, Abraham’s severance from the firm may have prepared his decision to convert. A few months after baptism, he received official approval to adopt the name Bartholdy, and indeed Felix’s earliest letters bearing the signature Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy date from 1823. 64 In short, Abraham’s departure from the bank, conversion, and change in name thrice underscored his distinction “from the other Mendelssohns.”
How did the fraternal partners come to observe different faiths? Their age gap and dissimilar professional experiences provide some answers. The elder by six years, Joseph was fifteen when his father died. Moses had supervised Joseph’s education, introduced him to Hebrew studies when he was only five years old, and raised him on the philosopher’s translations of the Pentateuch. At nine, Joseph began to study the Talmud under a private tutor; at fourteen, Moses explored with him the metaphysical complexities of the Morgenstunden , specifically created for Joseph. But the son was willful and by 1783 had interrupted his Hebrew studies. (Nine years later he would found a Society of Friends, an association of “freethinking” liberal Jews committed to disseminating the “light of enlightenment” and challenging Orthodox Judaism. 65 ) Moses remained concerned about Joseph’s prospects and observed in 1785, “It is a matter of deep regret to me that I have to withhold him from the sciences in order to make him a slave of Mammon. For medicine he has no inclination; and as a Jew he must become a physician, a merchant, or a beggar.” 66
The “slave of Mammon” found employment in Berlin as a bookkeeper in the court bank, Itzig & Co. After marrying Henriette Meyer, 67 whom Zelter described as “the most beautiful feminine creature I have ever seen,” 68 Joseph worked at the bank until 1795. He then mastered his own destiny by establishing a small banking firm that employed only two clerks. 69 Two sons were born to him. Alexander, mentioned earlier, followed in Joseph’s footsteps, while Benjamin (1794–1874) became a professor of geography at the University of Bonn. 70 In 1799 Joseph allied himself with Moses Friedländer, the son of David Friedländer, and the firm, now known as Mendelssohn und Friedländer, remained in business until 1803. 71 The next year Joseph formed a partnership with Abraham.
We know little about Abraham’s early years. Clearly, when Moses Mendelssohn died, the nine-year-old had not developed as profound a filial relationship as had his brother, who was more bound to the family traditions. Nor was Abraham as advanced in Hebrew as Joseph, who had benefited from his father’s tutelage. Not surprisingly, around 1813 Joseph, not Abraham, contemplated preparing an edition of Moses’ writings. When, thirty years later—with the assistance of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy—an edition appeared in Leipzig, Joseph’s son Benjamin served as the editor, and Joseph contributed a biographical sketch of his father. 72
Abraham once referred to himself as formerly the son of his father and then the father of his son, as if to limit the paternal role to that of a hyphenlike intermediary linking two great men. Abraham saw himself as a “true Peter Schlemihl” who lacked his own shadow. 73 Like Joseph, Abraham decided to pursue banking; unlike his brother, he began his career not in conservative Berlin but cosmopolitan Paris, where he worked as a bookkeeper for Fould, Oppenheim & Co. from 1799 to 1804 and managed the banking house in 1803. 74 We do not know when Abraham arrived in Paris, but he was en route by 1797 75 so that he witnessed much of Napoleon’s Consulate (1799–1804), when the Civil Code was debated, and the reaffirmation of democratic principles of the Revolution, including religious tolerance. In 1803 Zelter recommended Abraham to Goethe as a Parisian correspondent for a new literary paper. 76 According to the music critic A. B. Marx, Abraham was an incorrigible opera patron. Though partial to Gluck, the young clerk attended the premiere of Luigi Cherubini’s Les deux journées (1800). 77 This sensational “rescue” opera, in which Savoyard peasants conceal an unjustly oppressed aristocrat in a water jug, aroused the egalitarian fervor of the time, and was reportedly based on an actual event. 78 In 1791, French Jews, unlike their Prussian counterparts, had received full rights as citizens and, observing this measure of equality may have influenced Abraham to remain in Paris, where, as he explained to his sister Henriette, he was content to eat dry bread (manger du pain sec à Paris ). 79
Nothing could dissuade “Abraham le citoyen ” 80 from his francophilia until Henriette introduced him to Lea (Lilla) Salomon (1777–1842), a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig “acquainted with every branch of fashionable information.” She “played and sang with expression and grace, but seldom, and only for her friends; she drew exquisitely; she spoke and read French, English, Italian, and—secretly—Homer, in the original language.” 81 A few early letters reveal that this polyglot was able to converse readily about Wieland, Goethe, Schiller, and the dramatist/diplomat August von Kotzebue. Marx reports that in her “resonances of Kirnberger lived on; she had made the acquaintance of Sebastian Bach’s music and perpetuated his tradition by continually playing the Well-Tempered Clavier .” 82 Among her circle was the music collector Georg Pölchau, who purchased C. P. E. Bach’s musical Nachlass , 83 and later presided over the library of the Berlin Singakademie, rich in autographs of J. S. Bach.
Henriette Mendelssohn was quick to realize the advantages of Abraham’s union with Lea (by marrying an Itzig, he would become a citizen) and encouraged him to return to Berlin: “‘Du pain sec’ is a very good thing, especially here, where it is so white; but I always fear that if you continue to work for others without the means of getting on, and notwithstanding your great talents are always dependent on caprice and obstinacy, we know it might become ‘du pain amer’ [bitter bread]….” 84 Abraham conceded and returned in 1804 to cofound the firm J. & A. Mendelssohn 85 and marry Lea on December 26. Apparently Lea’s mother forced the issue, for she disapproved of her daughter’s union with a modest clerk but was willing to commit her daughter’s dowry to support the new bank. 86 In 1805 a second firm, Gebr. Mendelssohn & Co., was launched in Hamburg, where the brothers now settled. We know little about the beginning of this business, though documents reveal that in 1806 the brothers accepted a new partner, presumably to boost capital reserves and expand operations. On September 21 they consummated a contract with the nineteen-year-old Joseph Maximilian Fränckel, son of a wealthy merchant and nephew of Joseph Mendelssohn. Fränckel became a “silent” partner, contributing 30,000 and 75,000 thalers to the Berlin and Hamburg branches respectively. Because he had not yet reached the age of majority, one Philipp Joseph Veit managed the Berlin firm in Joseph’s and Abraham’s absence. 87 Annual profits and losses were distributed among the three partners according to two formulae. In Berlin, Fränckel’s share was 7/12; that of the brothers, 1/8 for each, with the remaining 1/6 divided among all three. From the Hamburg operations, Fränckel received 1/8 of the returns, and Joseph and Abraham divided the remaining 7/8.
While the brothers established one of the preeminent Prussian banks, three of their siblings led more routine lives. Relative obscurity has cloaked Moses Mendelssohn’s second daughter, Recha, whose marriage to an agent of the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Mendel Meyer (brother of Joseph’s wife Henriette), ended in divorce. An “intellectual, clever, but unfortunately very sickly woman,” 88 Recha founded a boarding school for young girls in Altona, near Hamburg, and remained close to Abraham. Her daughter, Rebecka (Betty), converted to Christianity but returned to Judaism in 1818, in order to elope with Heinrich Beer, brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer. 89
The life of the youngest sibling, Nathan, whom Moses dubbed “Nathan the Wise,” is more fully documented. Inclined toward the natural sciences and engineering, 90 he traveled as a young man to Paris and London, where he invented mathematical instruments and improved the pneumatic pump. In 1806 Alexander von Humboldt helped fund his Berlin workshop for astronomical, geodetic, and physical instruments. Baptized as a Protestant three years later, he became Carl Theodor Nathaniel Mendelssohn. During the War of Liberation,
he served as a second lieutenant in the infantry; after the war, he married Henriette Itzig, a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, and became an inspector of an armaments factory in Neisse. In 1821 he resettled in the resort town of Bad Reinerz in lower Silesia, where, with Joseph’s backing, he established a foundry (see p. 121), severely damaged by flooding in 1827 and 1829, so that Nathan abandoned the enterprise. Tragedy and misfortune plagued him: no fewer than seven of his children died, and in 1846 his eldest son, Arnold (1817–1854), a doctor with socialist sympathies, became entangled in a bungled minor theft. A futile flight to Paris to enlist Heinrich Heine’s aid led to Arnold’s incarceration for five years. 91
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