On January 24, 1735, the
Sephardic
Hamburg merchant
Abraham de Lemos sent the petition
presented here to the Prussian King
Frederick William I.
In this document Abraham de Lemos petitions the
King for the abrogation of the marriage between his
son,
Benjamin de
Lemos, a student of medicine at the
University of Halle in
Prussia, and
the sister of his Jewish landlord. After a four year stay in
Halle, the son, without
the permission of his father, married an
Ashkenazic woman. The father’s arguments against
the marriage form the substance of the petition. The hand-written letter,
particularly in the introduction and conclusion, comply with the contemporary
petition formula. The
king had the petition sent to the
University of Halle in order
to have its opinion; however, this has not been preserved. Yet according to
later sources from the family’s history, it is evident that the
king did not dissolve the marriage of
Benjamin de Lemos. The
three page petition resides in the
Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in
Berlin.
Abraham de Lemos, Petition to the Prussian King, Hamburg 1735 (translated by Richard S. Levy), edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History,
<https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-43.en.v1> [December 07, 2024].