Yaakov Bashevi von Teruenburg And His Legacy

Perhaps one of the most colorful Jewish personalities that you might learn of when you join a European Jewish tour is that of Yaakov von Teruenburg. He was a well known Jewish figure in the Czech Republic, but did you know he came from somewhere else?

 (עקב בשבי פון טרוינברג), known also as Bat-Shevi, Bassewi, Jacob Shmiles or Jakub Šmilka, came to Prague with his brother Samuel from Verona, Italy, at the end of the 16th century, when Prague was the largest and most important of the Ashkenazi Jewish communities.

Early in his life he specialized in trading with silver which was the main component of the coins and currencies at his time. He ultimately became very wealthy, and stood in high favor with three subsequent Habsburg emperors: Rudolph II, Matthias and Ferdinand II. He frequently rendered financial assistance to them, particularly to Ferdinand, who needed large sums of money for the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648).

Already during Rudolph II’s reign, Bashevi was granted many unprecedented privileges. He had the right of freedom of trade, the right of free movement within the Holy Roman Empire without being subjected to the usual anti-Jewish discriminatory law – or the right not to be trialed by courts, only by the emperor himself.

In 1610 ,Matthias confirmed the privileges granted to Bashevi by Rudolph II, and also awarded him the title of the “Court Jew“ (Hofjud), which was equal to that of the minister of finance. Bashevi had thus gained the same status as other –Christian– nobles in the Austrian Empire.

Furthermore, Bashevi was in 1622 granted a hereditary aristocratic title with the “Von Treuenburg“ adjective together with the right to use the coat of arms. Jakob gained other privileges too. He could own and publicly ride a horse, use his own banner, buy houses and land across the empire and was also exempt from taxes and tolls. As a court clerk, he could also live at the royal court, build his own synagogue and pay a rabbi.

In 1616 Bashevi was elected to be the leader of the Jewish community in Prague. He continued the work of his predecessor Mordecai Maisel. Bashevi managed to expand the ghetto thus slightly easing the living conditions therein. Already in 1610, he bought a house outside the ghetto near the Church of St. Nicholas after the suppression of the Estates Uprising and obtained a permit to buy more formerly Christian houses deserted by the post-White Mountain protestant exiles. He incorporate them into the ghetto, thus creating more housing for the Jews of Prague. In 1627 he established his Great Court Synagogue. Bashevi also helped Jewish communities financially and otherwise across Europe - from Poland to Spain. The home Jewish community was protected from attacks by imperial soldiers and other forms of persecution.

However, Bashevi‘s name is most often associated with the so-called long coin affair. Ferdinand II appointed a consortium in 1622 to help the impoverished economy after the Thirty Years‘ War. Consortium members included Albrecht of Wallenstein, Charles of Liechtenstein, Pavel Michna of Vacínov, Hans de Witte and Basehvi himself. The consortium also had a monopoly on coinage and the purchase of silver in the Czech lands and abroad.

However, the consortium failed to revive the country's economy, and the plan ended with a fiasco when the currency devalued. The guilt was not on Bashevi, who provided the organization, but rather on the quiet companions who were likely to try to take advantage of the situation for their benefit. However, Bashevi was, most likely, arrested on the basis of false allegations. After forty weeks of the dungeon, he managed to flee to Wallenstein in Jičín. Here he gradually played a key role in the development and prosperity of the Wallenstein’s Friedland estate.

Jakub's dizzying career ended with the death of Wallenstein. After Wallenstein's assassination in 1634, commissioners assigned by the Imperial Chamber to liquidate Valdštejn's fortune were forced to confess that he had received a considerable sum of 40,000 gold from manhood pensions and had this amount for ten years and 6% pay interest. He was soon forced to leave Jičín to Mladá Boleslav, where he died on May 2, 1634 at the age of 64. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery there and his matzeva is still the most important one nowadays.

However, in Jičín, although only spending a year there, Bashevi managed to incredibly uplift the local Jewish community and left behind a big  legacy that is still part of the fame of that city until this very day. You can very much see it when you take a Jewish vacation to the Czech Republic!

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Created on Mar 7th 2018 01:31. Viewed 270 times.

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