Glückel of Hameln

Glikl bas Judah body (* 1646 in Hamburg, † September 17, 1724 in Metz ), known as Glückel of Hameln, was a German clerk who wrote the first woman in Germany preserved a significant autobiography.

Life and work

Glikl was the daughter of a successful, well- respected, Jewish diamond merchant from Hamburg and a businesswoman. Her father was one of the first Jews who were allowed to buy right to live in Hamburg. Her family lived in affluent circumstances, Hamburg had survived the Thirty Years' War almost unscathed and was a thriving commercial city. Nevertheless Glikl's youth was overshadowed by the then ever-present latent hatred of the Jewish community.

About 1661 Glikl was Chaijm Hameln (aka Hein Goldschmidt), an influential businessman, married. The two led a happy, cooperative marriage. Glikl was fourteen times pregnant and gave twelve children. During the plague that devastated Hamburg in 1664, she moved temporarily to her in-laws to Hameln. 1689 her husband died Chaijm, and Glikl was on his own. So they took the gold and jewelery trade her deceased husband on, in which they had but even before that worked: She was responsible for the redemption of pledges by merchants. As a result, it became a very successful business woman who acted with Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin and Metz.

She managed to increase the prosperity of the family, all her children married into a wealthy and prominent Jewish families. She supported her children and their spouses of business creation by bailed with their good name for it.

1700 married Glikl in the hope of a comfortable old age Cerf Isaac Levy Rabbi, a wealthy banker from Metz. However, its business both collapse plunged into poverty. She died in 1724, even penniless, in her daughter's house in Metz.

Glikl wrote on their lives for their children. Originally written in Yiddish memoirs are the first extant and known autobiography of a woman in Germany and were a prominent source of research for the German -Jewish history and culture.

1910, even before the First World War, were Glikl memoirs by Bertha Pappenheim, founder of the Jewish Women's League in Germany, translated from the Yiddish and published. Bertha Pappenheim was a distant relative of Glikl bas Judah body, she could be painting in 1925 by Leopold Pilichowski even in the costume of Glikl.

As an extraordinarily comprehensive example of a non -written in artistic and literary intention Yiddish text it also served as the basis of linguistic studies. The Jewish Museum Berlin devotes a chapter of the Hamburg clerk in the permanent exhibition and displays based on their life, the difficulties in front of Jewish emancipation, the integration of Jews in the nation.

"Out Looking back over the worries of everyday life that were almost overwhelming for the Jews of that time, Glückel of Hamelin appears to us as clever, strong woman who, despite the heavy blows of fate, she endured, remained upright despite the Herzeleide that she experienced. " ( Bertha Pappenheim )

Work

• Ziḵrônôt Marat Gliql Hamil ( Yiddish ). Edited by David Kaufmann. J. Kauffmann, Frankfurt am Main 1896
• Glikl. Zikhronot 1691-1719 ( Glikl. Memoires 1691-1719 ), Edited and Translated from the Yiddish by Chava Turniansky, The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History and The Ben -Zion Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2006.

Translations:

Glikl memoirs were also in Hebrew (1929 ), French (1971 ), English (1932, 1962 and 1963 ) and Russian (2001) published translation. 1941, the play Glückel of Hamelin by Margoa Winston ( pseudonym for Minnie Hannah Winer Epstein ), 1967 the novel The Adventures of Glückel of Hamelin by Paul Sharon: In the U.S., two fictional treatments of the work appeared.