Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The Schutzjuden thank Karl Theodor

And here's part of a prayer service for the 50 year rule of the late, great Karl Theodor; the date of this service, held in Sulzbach, was July 20, 1783:



9 comments:

  1. Way cool! Tried acquiring what is now Belgium so that his out-of-wedlock kinderlakh could have something to rule, which was one of the things that led to the kerfuffeleh known as the War of the Bavarian Succession (and one of the terms of the treaty was that said kinderlakh couldn't rule anything). No major battles, but thousands of soldiers died of starvation and disease, which counts for something.

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  2. I'm having difficulty with the way they write his name. What's the word spelled kuf-vav-hei-resh? And without making the obvious joke, is the last word supposed to be fürst?

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  3. It's Kurfürst, which means Elector. In those days it was written as two words, Kuhr-fürst.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince-elector

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  4. In Or HaYashar, Isaac says he fears going to Dusseldorf "as it is under the fearsome Duke of Pfalz" -- I contacted a German historian who identified said Duke as none other than Karl Theodor.

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  5. (In reference to the Get of Kleves).

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  6. Well you know how it is. You say "Fearsome tyrant," I say "אדונני החסיד."

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  7. To make things further interesting, it's not *me* saying "fearsome tyrant", it's a fellow who claims he's compelled to run for his life and can't say more.

    I'm assuming here (check a map) that "Dilsdorf" was a typo and meant "Dusseldorf."

    אבל לא בדילסדארף שהוא תחת ממשלת הדוכס האדיר מפפאלץ יר״ה

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  8. I got that (you did, after all, cite the Or Hayashar). I was just making a play on tomato - tomahto, in this case that R. Yitzchak Seligmann is saying that, and this pamphlet portrays him a little nicer. Well, technically "אדונני החסיד" does not imply "nice." Judging by his biography, he wasn't such a החסיד either.

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  9. "Judging by his biography, he wasn't such a החסיד either."

    Unless they were misnagdim in Sulzbach...

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