Tobacco was unknown in Europe before the discovery of America. However, unlike other imports from the Americas that enriched European cuisine and coffers, European society did not uniformly embrace tobacco. At first welcomed as a miracle drug and cherished as a stimulant by élite circles, it was soon condemned by religious authorities for its ‘detrimental effects’ on order and morality, and tobacco thereafter lost its exclusive and exotic reputation.

[Ed. note: Many thanks to the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy (IIJG), which sponsored the research contained in this article.]

In Europe, the ‘new vice’ was excoriated by religious reform movements that prescribed discipline and sobriety, as well as by societal forces in the early modern period that advocated self-control, restraint and moderation among citizens. 2 English King James I (1566-1625) was among the first prominent tobacco opponents after gaining the throne in 1603. In his short tract A Counterblaste to Tobbaco (1604), he condemned smoking as a “savage costume”, adopted from the “barbarous Indians” that threatened to undermine English civilization. 3 He further argued that the addictive character of tobacco destabilized the established hierarchy between husbands and wives, masters and servants — and corrupted the mores and manners of English society. 4 By his way of thinking, moral corruption would be followed by an economic decay that would jeopardize the health of his subjects, and the nation as a whole.

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A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604)

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Creation of Monopolies

England and France

Despite the overall moralizing discourse in his tract, James I allowed the importation of approximately 25,000 pounds of tobacco from the Spanish colonies and established a heavy tobacco tax to raise funds for his treasury. Two decades later, in 1624, England established a royal monopoly over tobacco. 5 In 1629, also the French statesman Cardinal Richelieu (1885-1642), another militant tobacco opponent, levied high duties on tobacco, convinced that a profitable tax would be more beneficial to the state and its subjects than inefficient sanctions against its use. 6 Neither James nor Richelieu ever succeeded in regulating or centralizing tobacco imports, or restricting tobacco sale to licensed persons.

Iberia

Portuguese Crypto-Jews gained effective control of the Spanish tobacco monopoly in the first half of the seventeenth century as a result of an economic crisis shared alike by the Spanish Crown and the community of Portuguese New Christians. 7 New Christians organized the tobacco monopoly and manned it with a hierarchically structured organization of local and provincial administrators, wholesale merchants and individual salesmen, all of whom belonging to Crypto-Jewish families. The monopoly began under a Crypto-Jewish chief tax farmer in Madrid, and continued after 1701 under the direct control of the royal treasury. New Christians continued to be actively involved in the tobacco monopoly until the final great persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition in 1725.8

Central Europe

The ‘new vice’ entered Central Europe during the Thirty-Years War (1618- 1648) via English soldiers. Although opposed by the Catholic and Protestant churches as well as traditional rabbis, tobacco was rapidly adopted by soldiers of both sides of the conflict and through them disseminated to the general population. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the countries north of the Alps began organizing a tobacco trade. In 1701, the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I published a general charter for all his provinces, where he declared that tobacco trade and production was to be a state monopoly. Like the Spanish king, he embraced tobacco as a taxable commodity and source of revenue for the crown.

Industrialization

The revenues generated by tobacco taxes did not live up to the hopes of the Emperor and his Treasury, and the Treasury decided in 1722 to set up its own tobacco factories, as was standard in the Western European countries. The first and primary factory was erected in September 1722 in Hainburg (Lower Austria) with Baußart von Sonnenfeld, a privy councilor at the Imperial Treasury, as its first director. In 1723, the Treasury expanded its tobacco bureaucracy across the Empire, establishing provincial branches of the central tobacco administration in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Upper Austria, Styria-Carinthia, Carinola and the Austrian Littoral (i.e. the area of Trieste, Istria and Gorizia). These main provincial offices erected additional factories and managed tobacco production as well as retail sale.

The erection of state-owned factories, provincial and district administration offices, all manned by properly paid civil servants was expected to be the first step toward proper organization of the tobacco monopoly in the Habsburg Monarchy. However, shortcomings on the local level resulted in corruption, rising prices and a simultaneous decrease in productquality. These shortcomings lend to an enhanced black market trade and contraband. 11

Austrian Empire, 1828

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Origins of the Habsburg-era Jewish Connection

Vienna

In response to the threat from the black market, during 1725 Charles VI (1685-1740) invited to Vienna Diego 1st Baron d’Aguilar of the Holy Roman Empire aka Moses Lopes Pereira (born Mogadouro, Portugal c. 1699-1759) to bring order to the marketplace. 12 He belonged to a Portuguese family of New Christians that had been active in the tobacco business on the Iberian Peninsula since 1653. Diego learned the business in Portugal from his father, Manuel Lopes Pereira, before moving to London in 1722, where he officially returned to Judaism, together with his family.

Given the Lopes Pereira family’s expertise in the tobacco business, Diego d’Aguilar quickly pinpointed the deficiencies in the organization of the Habsburg monopoly after his arrival in Vienna in 1725. He elaborated a plan, according to which he would lease the monopoly for the whole Monarchy for eight years (enough time for efficient restructuring), paying an annual rent beyond the profit of the best year. In return, he stipulated terms that would allow him to effectively eradicate the reigning defects and deficits. The Court Treasury dismissed the propositions; partly because of economic conservatism, partly because of anti-Semitism. They were scandalized by the idea of a Jew ruling over Austrian civil servants. Moreover, they conjured the threat of d’Aguilar ‘infiltrating’ Austrian tobacco trade with huge numbers of Jews that would considerably augment the — legally restricted — number of Jews residing in the Bohemian Lands. 14

After two months of tedious negotiations, d’Aguilar agreed leasing the monopoly for the whole Monarchy, together with a Christian companion, the Marchese Carignani for a yearly rent of 400,000 fl. during the first five and 500,000 fl. during the remaining three years. Furthermore, he and his associate Carignani had to sign a ‘Letter of Commitment’ neither to employ Jews in the administration nor in points of sale; for retail sale, they were permitted to use the services of Jews, who were legal residents of the Habsburg Monarchy, i.e. no foreign Jews. 15

Despite innumerable schemes against his person, Diego d’Aguilar tried reorganizing the monopoly according to the Iberian model and for the first time provided the Imperial Treasury with constantly growing revenue for almost 25 years. However, he had to commit himself not to employ Jews in public administration and points of sale and in the Bohemian Lands he could only hire few Jewish subcontractors. Although he had personally risen to unprecedented positions of power and authority in the Monarchy, the impact of d’Aguilar’s economic activities on the modernization process of Habsburg Jewry was thus limited. This should significantly change with d’Aguilar’s successors during the next quarter of the century.

In 1726, Charles VI ennobled Diego in gratitude for his achievements and awarded him the title Baron d’Aguilar. Thereafter, Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria (1717-1780) appointed him privy councilor to the Crown of the Netherlands and Italy, the highest bodies of foreign politics in the Monarchy, in the 1740s.13 While Diego’s Jewishness was generously disregarded in these appointments, his Jewish background was a well-known and much discussed fact that time and again thwarted his business transactions.

Moravia

In Moravia, Jacob Moses Dobruschka, who had established himself as an army supplier in Brno/Brünn in the first half of the 18th century, in 1750 began leasing the tobacco monopoly for Moravia together with his son Salomon Dobruschka (1715- 1774). One member of the Dobruschka family, Moses Dobruschka (1753-1794), [alias Franz Thomas von Schönfeld, alias Junius Frey] gained dubious fame because of his association with the false messiah Jacob Frank, and later joined revolutionary forces in France in 1792 and was executed on the guillotine together with Danton. The family employed numerous Moravian Jews as subcontractors and in retail sales, thus providing many Jewish families with a comfortable income and the opportunity for upward social mobility.

Bohemia

The founder of the Lobel Honig ‘dynasty’, (Jehuda) Löbel Hönig (Edler von Honigsberg), was born in Kuttenplan/Chodová Planá, in western Bohemia at the beginning of the 18th century. He made his money as an army supplier during the Austrian War of Succession (1740-42). In 1752, he leased the tobacco monopoly for Prague, together with his sons Israel Hönig von Hönigsberg (1724-1808) and (Aaron) Moses Honig (1730-1787), for a period of ten years. Having gained the necessary experience in Prague, the Hönig family established a tobacco company together with other affluent Bohemian Jews [e.g. Judah Löwel Baruch from Königswart/Kynžvart, who later adopted the surname Königswart (er); the entrepreneur and Court supplier Wolf Joachim Edler von Popper (1730-1795) from Prague.

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[Ed. note: Consistent with the family’s prominence in the tobacco trade, the grant of von Honigsberg arms to Israel Honig in 1797 (the first ever to a practicing Jew in Austria), contains the following blazon: Quarterly, 1 and 4, azure, upon a mountain sinople a dead lion proper, stretched upon his back, eight bees or, swarming around his open jaws; 2 and 3, gules, a bar argent, charged with four tobacco-plants proper. Crest: A lion issuant, proper, holding in the dexter paw a tobacco-plant proper.]

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The Löbel Hönig company bid for the tobacco monopoly of the entire monarchy in 1763, taking over the Moravian trade controlled up to that time by the Dobruschka family. Over the stated opposition of the Empress Maria Theresa, who favored a search for Christian leaseholders, the company secured a ten year contract in 1765. The company fulfilled the contract by creating a network of Jewish subcontractors that efficiently eradicated contraband and black marketing. This successful and profitable business model enabled the company to renew its contract a decade later, in 1775, by offering an enormous payment to the treasury of 1,600,000 florints annually. The Imperial Treasury insured compliance with the contract terms by appointing four Court commissioners to take control of the leaseholders’ bookkeeping and to remain familiar with the company’s business. affairs

Despite these restrictions on its freedom of action, the monopoly lease remained lucrative as tobacco consumption within the monarchy continued to rise. Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor decided to nationalize the monopoly in 1784, having paved the way to state control through the conditions of the 1775 contract that introduced the Court commissioners to the details of the business. Emperor secured the continuity of the enterprise by appointing Israel and Moses Hönig as directors of the national tobacco administration, without restricting their authority. Thus, Israel and Moses Hönig advanced to high-ranking state officials. How effectively this Jewish business network functioned, we learn from a complaint, filed by Count Strassoldo in 1790. Strassoldo documented that in Bohemia, 38 of 43 district leaseholders were Jews, who allegedly deprived the state and the Christian population of money and job opportunities.

Terrified by the events in revolutionary France, the Emperor ennobled Israel Hönig in September 1789, the first Jew so honored in the Habsburg Empire (see figure above). Due to their high official position and great economic power within the Empire, the Hönig family played a role in enabled upward social mobility among numerous Jewish leaseholders and subcontractors for another 25 years.

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Genealogical Notes

Among the colorful Jewish intellectual figures of the 19th Century were descendants of the early Habsburg tobacco monopolists, including the writer and journalist Ludwig August Frankl (1810 Chrast — 1894 Vienna), the American publisher, journalist and abolitionist Isidor Busch (Lodenice 1822 -1898 St. Louis) who played a major role in keeping Missouri within the Union during the American Civil War, and the painter Leopold Pollak (1806 Lodenice — 1880 Rome). All were scions of a single extended family that had made its fortune in the Habsburg tobacco trade.

Isidor Busch, Missouri abolitionist 

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Footnotes

1 Sander L. Gilman, “Smoking Jews on the Frontier”, in: Gilman, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories and Identities, 2003, p. 96.

2 Cf. Rudi Matthee, “Exotic substances: the introduction and global spread of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea and distilled liquor, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries” in: Roy Porter, Mikulaš Teich, eds., Drugs and Narcotics in History (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 24-51, p. 45.

3 Sandra J. Bell, “’Precious Stinke’: James I’s A Counterblaste to Tobacco“ in: Daniel Fischlin, Mark Fortier, eds, Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), p. 323-343, cf. p. 327.

4 Ibid., p.333.

5 Charlotte Cosner, “Control, Contraband and the Lure of the Devil’s Weed: Two Centuries of Tobacco Regulations and its Circumvention, 1600s-1700s“ on: http://www.kislakfoundation.org/prize/200101.html (retrieved 10 Dec. 2012).

6 Egon Caesar Corti, Geschichte des Rauchens: ‘Die trockene Trunkenheit’: Ursprung, Kampf und Triumph des Rauchens (Frankfurt am Main: insel taschenbuch, 1986, reprint from 1930), p. 157.

7 Carsten Wilke, “Contraband for the Catholic King: Jews of the French Pyrenees in Tobacco Trade and the Spanish Finance” in: Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History, eds. Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming Spring 2015), 27 pp.; I wish to thank the author for putting the manuscript at my disposal.

8 Ibid., fn, 8.

9 Sander L. Gilman, “Smoking Jews on the Frontier: On the Relationship between Jews and Tobacco, from the 17th Century to the Present” in: Sander Gilman, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 95-109, cf. p. 98-9.

10 Rising sales prices were partly a side-effect of introducing the monopoly. Carsten Wilke states for Spain that the monopoly caused a 250 % rise in sales prices during the 1650s. Cf. Wilke, Contraband for the Catholic King, fn. 17.

11 Retzer, Tabakpachtung, pp. 30-34.

12 Ibid., p. 120; I am infinitely indebted to Michael Silber, who has meticulously researched the life of Diego d’Aguilar, for correcting many common mistakes in the biography of this colorful figure.

13 Max Grunwald, Samuel Oppenheimer und sein Kreis. Ein Kapitel aus der Finanzgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna, Leipzig: Wilhelm Braunmüller, 1913), pp. 295-300.

14 The number of Jews legally permitted to reside in the Bohemian Lands was regulated by the so-called Familianten-Laws from 1726 that were designed to prevent the growth of the Jewish population in the Bohemian Lands; cf. Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein, Neuere Geschichte der Juden in den böhmischen Ländern (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1969), pp. 1-3.

15 ÖStA, AVA, HK, TP, Fasz. 2, 794; Notably, d’Aguilar’s letters to the Imperial Court and court commissions were written in Italian.