ABSTRACT
Different as the Court Jews were in character, in the circumstances of their lives, in their destinies and in their temperaments, numerous as were the cliques and groups they formed and the conflicts which divided them, they nevertheless possessed something in common: their way of life, their Lebensgejuehl and their Weltanschauung. Like the nobles who led lives of magnificence in their castles surrounded by spacious gardens, so the Court Jews built or bought stately homes in which they reigned in patriarchal fashion in the midst of their numerous employees, clerks, servants, business friends, talmudic scholars and yeshiva students. The city magistrate of Mannheim bitterly complained of the fact that the Court Jews lived in the most beautiful homes in the best streets and drove about in magnificent carriages. It is therefore difficult to do justice to the character of the Court Jew, because the essential and inessential, light and shadow, appearance and reality, content and form were never harmoniously united.
