ABSTRACT
One of the favorite themes of the baroque novelists and dramatists was the capriciousness of fate: they liked to show men upon whom fortune had bestowed fame, success and happiness suddenly plunged by a mysterious destiny into the depths of poverty and misery. The Imperial Court factor, Marx Schlesinger, one of the chief creditors of the Court of Vienna, received alms from the Jewish community in his last years. The Court Jew Ruben Hinrichsen, son of Michel the “tobacco twister,” could not get the spendthrift Duke of Mecklenburg to repay the money he had lent him. The University of Ingolstadt to which they sent their defense brief, delivered a verdict in their favor and demanded that they be set free. The government owed a large sum of money to the very upright Sulzbach Court Jew, Jacob Josef, who was Court and Cabinet factor and also Court agent and salt contractor in Bayreuth.
