שמשון ורטהיימר

Rav Shimshon Wertheimer (13 Shevat 5418/1658–17 Av 5484/1724) was rav of Eisenstadt and chief rabbi on behalf of the crown for Moravia and for Hungary, and at the same time the wealthiest and most powerful Jew in Austria of his day — leader and patron of the kehillah of Vienna and shtadlan before three emperors. He was born in Worms to Rav Yosef Yosel Wertheimer and learned in the yeshivot of Worms and Frankfurt am Main; one account places him in his youth in the yeshiva of Rav Aharon Teomim in Worms.

He came to Vienna in 5445/1684 and joined himself to the banker Shmuel Oppenheimer, standing in for him before the Austrian government in his absences. Leopold I gave him his confidence and his portrait; in the War of the Spanish Succession the two of them raised the money to equip and provision the imperial army, and when Oppenheimer’s affairs collapsed and he was niftar suddenly in 5463/1703, it was Rav Shimshon who held up the credit of the state. The emperor made him court factor that same year, and Yosef I and Karl VI after him confirmed his standing. Ten imperial soldiers stood watch at his door, and the people called him the Judenkaiser.

All of it he turned to the needs of Klal Yisrael. He paid a heavy ransom into the imperial treasury and thereby stopped the expulsion of the Jews of Rothenburg; with Rav David Oppenheim he helped found the Keren Yerushalayim for the yishuv in Eretz Yisrael, and he carried the title Nasi Eretz Yisrael as the man answerable for those collections. When Eisenmenger’s book against the Jews appeared in Frankfurt in 5460/1700, he petitioned Leopold and had its two thousand copies seized. After the kehillah of Eisenstadt scattered in the Rákóczi rising he persuaded its wealthier members to return and rebuild, put up for them a house and a shul still called Samson’s Schule, and had a hand in establishing some forty kehillot in Hungary. He founded and endowed a yeshiva in Frankfurt headed by his son-in-law Rav Moshe Kann, and the two of them bore most of the cost of the printing of the Talmud Bavli there between 5472/1712 and 5482/1722.

His learning never stopped. It was told of him that on the emperor’s business he took volumes of Shas and the poskim into his carriage and wrote his teshuvot on the road. He left a manuscript of derashot delivered in the shul in his own house, shailot came to him from near and far, and he presided over a beit din to which he called dayanim of the first rank. The Chavot Yair, Rav Yair Chaim Bacharach, wrote of him that since the days of Rav Ashi none like him had been found, Torah and gedulah in one place. He was niftar in Vienna at sixty-six and buried in the Rossau cemetery there.