This content downloaded from 169.228.100.32 on Tue, 19 Jun 2018 16:43:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Intermarriage in the Berlin Salons DEBORAH HERTZ I N 1 776, Moses Isaacs died in Berlin. Along with Isaac Daniel Itzig and Veitel Heine Ephraim, Isaacs had made a fortune during the Seven Years' War minting coins and supplying the army. Isaacs left behind an estate of three-quarters of a million talers in gold, most of which was organized into a family trust extending to the life of the grandchildren. The only stipulation Isaacs placed on his will was that should any of his five surviving children convert to Christianity, they would forego their share of the inheritance. The first oflsaacs' s children to convert were his two daughters, Rebecca and Bliimchen, who both proceeded to marry noblemen. In 1 780, their two unconverted brothers appealed to King Frederick the Great to uphold their father's will and exclude the two defecting sisters from the inheritance. The king ruled in agreement with the brothers more out of loyalty to the deceased Isaacs than out of an aversion to Jewish conversion to Christianity. What- ever his motives, the sisters felt they had been treated unfairly, and so in 1 786 they sued in the civil courts to have the anti-conversion clause of the will declared invalid. The first court's decision was in their favor. This court ruled that the anti-conversion clause was inappropriate in a Christian state, insofar as the clause interfered with the inheritance rights of Christian subjects, in this case the two newly Protestant Isaacs daughters. But later that year a higher court reversed this decision, judging from the viewpoint of the Jewish parents, not the Christian children. This second court ruled that Jewish as well as Christian parents had the right to determine who could inherit their property. Later that Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the December 1982 meeting of the Columbia University Seminar on Eighteenth-Century Culture, at the May 1984 meeting of the Columbia University Seminar on Women and Society, and at the 1982 annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies. I am grateful to Julius Carlebach, Bernard Cooperman, Shaul Stampfer, Faith Rogow, Martin Bunzl, and the anonymous referees of this journal for useful comments on an earlier version of this essay. For continuing intellectual comradeship I am indebted to the members of the New York Research Group on the History of Women in Germany. 303 “Intermarriage in the Berlin Salons.” Central European History 16, no. 4 (December, 1983).