Cerf Berr

Origins and early life

Cerf Berr, also known as Herz Cerfbeer of Medelsheim, was born in 1726 into an Alsatian Jewish family and became the wealthiest Jewish figure in eastern France, supplying the royal armies with grain and horses.

Work and career

From 1764 to 1788 he served as préposé général de la nation juive, the general syndic of the Jews of Alsace, and he used that position and his fortune to attack the legal humiliations under which they lived. In 1775 he obtained letters of naturalisation through the duke of Choiseul, which allowed a Jew to reside in Strasbourg, a city that had barred them for centuries. In 1784 he paid the city of Strasbourg forty-eight thousand livres to obtain the abolition of the leibzoll, the body toll levied on Jews as though they were cattle at every gate they passed.

He corresponded with Moses Mendelssohn and commissioned the Prussian official Christian Wilhelm Dohm to write On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, a book that shaped the arguments of Mirabeau, Malesherbes and the revolutionaries who voted the emancipation of French Jews in 1791. He founded a yeshiva at Bischheim in 1786 under his brother-in-law Rabbi David Sintzheim, who would later preside over Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrin.

He died in 1793 and is buried at the Jewish cemetery of Rosenwiller under an epitaph naming him a defender of his people.