an official declaration that he ‘obtained either in person or at his own expense, valuable information for the imperial troops, and that he made it his business to see that the army had a good supply of ammunition and clothing.’ The Great Elector also had recourse to Jews for his military needs. Leimann Gompertz and Solomon Elias were his contractors for cannon, powder and so forth. There were numerous others: Samuel Julius, remount contractor under the Elector Frederick Augustus of Saxony; the Model family, court-purveyors and army-contractors in the Duchy of Aensbach in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are well known in history. In short, as one writer of the time pithily expresses it, ‘all the contractors are Jews and all the Jews are contractors.’
“Austria does not differ in this respect from Germany, France and England. The wealthy Jews, who in the reign of the Emperor Leopold received permission to resettle in Vienna (1670)—the Oppenheimers, Wertheimers, Mayer Herschel and the rest—were all army-contractors. And we find the same thing in all the countries under the Austrian Crown.