There is a very nice web site by Susanne Rieger and Gerhard Jochem where you can find historical records and even pictures of some of the hundreds of my Jewish family ancestors and collatoral relatives who were hops factors, hops salesmen, and hopyard bankers in Nurnberg (Nuremberg) before the Shoa. Here are some places to start:
Jewish Hops Trade in Nuremburg
home.t-online.de/home/RIJONUE/hopstrad.htm
Jewish Topography of Nuremburg
home.t-online.de/home/RIJONUE/nurem3.htm
The names you will see in my family tree or stammbaum (and on a list of Jeiwsh hops merchants at this site) include Hopf, Kohn, Erlanger, Engelmann, Bing, Ottenstein, Stern, Wolff, Reizenstein, Tuchmann, Mandelbaum, Frauenfeld, and so forth -- a veritable litany of the Askenazy Jewish merchant class of the region around Nuremburg, Fuerth, Neustadt am Aisch, and Markt Erlbach, going back to the time before the German government imposed surnames on Jews.
My earliest ancestor who had a German surname was Josef Engelmann, born in the mid 1700s, but of all the surnames in my family tree, Hopf is my favourite, because it means "hops," and this is what most my ancestors traded in, right up until World War Two -- hops for beer-making. A picture of the Nuremberg hops market in the 1880s is at
www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/nuremberg2/nurem3.html
The name Hopf entered my family as a self-chosen surname. It was some time after the German government imposed surnames, instead of allowing Jews to use their traditional Jewish patronymics, before people settled on surnames that they actaully liked and felt comfortable with. As a result, there was a lot of name-swapping going on back in the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the early years of German surnames.
My 5-great-grandfather Josef Levi Mordechai changed his name to Marx Tuchmann in 1813 and his ten-year-old daughter Gella Mordechai (born in 1803) became Karoline Tuchmann at that time. In the 1820s Karoline Tuchmann married Loeb Mandelbaum and became Karoline Mandelbaum, but Loeb was a hops-factor, not an almond orchardist, so in 1833, he changed the family name from Mandelbaum (almond tree) to Hopf (hops), and Karoline finished out her life as Karoline Hopf. She was my 4-great granmother.
There were some notable cross-marriages and inbreeding between the various branches of my family: My 2-great-grandfather Stefan Hopf (ne Mandelbaum) married my 2-great-grandmother Betty Frauenfeld around the same time that my 2-great-grandfather Josef Kohn married Betty's sister Sophie Frauenfeld, my 2-great-grandmother.
I am descended from both of those sisterly Frauenfeld lineages, because Josef Kohn and Sophie Kohn's son Max Kohn (my great-grandfather) married his cousin, Stefan Hopf and Betty Hopf's daughter Pauline Hopf (my great-grandmother) -- and their daughter, Ida Kohn, was my grandmother.
Josef Kohn, my 2-great-grandfather, is mentioned in the
Chronology of Nuremberg's Jewish history 1146 - 1945 at
http://home.t-online.de/home/RIJONUE/jtn_intr.htm#Chronology
The entry reads as follows:
"1850: Josef Kohn from the neighboring village of Markt Erlbach is allowed by the municipal authorities to settle down in Nuremberg. He became the first Jewish citizen of Nuremberg after a period of 350 years."
The Kohn family, like Hopf family, were associated with the hops trade, but being a bit more well-to-do, they operated an agricultural bank, lending money to hops-farmers, hops-factors, and hops-warehousemen.
These days, my family is a globe-spanning group of Kohns and Wolffs and Erlangers -- and none of those who survived the Hitler-time live in Nuremberg or Neustadt am Aisch or Fuerth or Markt Erlbach anymore, and none of them deal in hops.
If you believe you may be related to me, please do drop me a line. I have an old family stammbaum, and would be interested in exchanging my records for any material you might have,
--cat yronwode
copyright © 1995-2009 catherine yronwode. All rights reserved.
Send your comments to: cat yronwode.
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