Wine in Judaism — more than a drink
In Judaism wine is no ordinary drink but a means of sanctification. The Sabbath is opened and closed over a cup of wine (Kiddush and Havdalah); wine belongs to the wedding, the circumcision and the four cups of the Passover Seder. This ritual centrality explains why the handling of wine is so closely regulated in Jewish religious law, the Halakhah — and why Jews in the wine country of the Moselle had a special relationship to this product long before the wine trade became one of their most important livelihoods. The great medieval scholar Rashi himself lived from viticulture; his work testifies to an exact knowledge of the vine and the cellar.
Kosher wine and Jewish law
For wine to count as kosher, two conditions must be met. First, all ingredients and processing aids must be kosher — this affects, for instance, the fining of the wine. Second, and here wine differs from almost every other foodstuff, kosher wine may be handled from the start of pressing only by Sabbath-observant Jews. This rule is rooted in the ancient concern over yayin nesech — wine that might have served idolatry. From it derived the broader prohibition of stam yeinam: wine merely touched or moved by a non-Jew. Only by heating (yayin mevushal) does the wine lose this sensitivity and may thereafter be poured by anyone.
For practice on the Moselle this meant that anyone living strictly by the dietary laws could not use the ordinary Moselle wine of the Christian growers as ritual wine. Wine of one’s own, produced under supervision, was therefore in demand in the communities. At the same time the trade in non-kosher wine was halakhically unproblematic — a Jew was free to buy, store and sell wine as long as it was not intended for his own ritual use. It was precisely this distinction that made the wine trade a field in which Jews on the Moselle could work for generations.
Jewish wine merchants on the Moselle
From the late eighteenth century, and increasingly after civic emancipation in the nineteenth, Jewish families on the Moselle found a livelihood in the wine and commission trade. The occupation suited their economic situation: it required no land — long denied to Jews — but capital, market knowledge, languages and a web of business connections. Jewish merchants mediated between the small-scale grower and the wider market: they bought up the growers’ wine, financed casks and harvest in advance, took on the risk of storage and brought Moselle wine to the auctions and into the cities. Some of the long-established estates on the Moselle, Saar and Ruwer worked with the same Jewish trading partners for generations.
How large was the Jewish share, really?
Very different figures circulate about the weight of Jewish merchants in the Moselle wine trade. It is often said that until 1939 seventy per cent or more of the Moselle wine trade was in Jewish hands. Such figures should be read with caution. It was in the interest of Nazi propaganda to make the Jewish share of the wine trade appear as large as possible in order to justify driving Jewish merchants out; figures from after 1933 are therefore tendentious. Conversely, critical wine-history scholarship has pointed out that among the roughly 180 wine villages of the Moselle, Saar and Ruwer only a modest number of named Jewish wine merchants can actually be documented.
The two findings contradict each other only in appearance. Jewish merchants were not spread evenly across the villages but concentrated in the trading centres — Trier above all, and beyond it Bernkastel, Wittlich and the great auction venues. There, in wholesale and export, their weight was considerable, even if their absolute number remained small. A sound account therefore avoids both distortions: neither the propagandistic exaggeration of an alleged Jewish domination of the wine trade, nor the trivialisation that would write Jewish merchants out of the economic history of the Moselle altogether. The truth is that at the decisive nodes of the Moselle wine trade Jewish houses were formative for decades.
The Loeb trading house
One name stands for this world like no other: Loeb. The Trier trading house associated with Sigmund Loeb and his son Otto Wolfgang Loeb was among the most important addresses in the Moselle wine trade. Otto Loeb took his doctorate in 1922 on the development of the wine trade on the Moselle, joining commercial practice to a scholarly grasp of his subject. After 1933 the family escaped persecution by emigrating to England, where Otto Loeb re-founded the house of O. W. Loeb & Co. in London. In 1972 he gave the region a lasting memorial with Moselle, written together with Terence Prittie — in the judgement of the wine writer Daniel Deckers the most passionate and informative work a German Jew has devoted to Moselle wine. The story of the Loeb family is told in detail elsewhere on this site.
Persecution and „Aryanisation“
Under National Socialist rule the Jewish presence in the Moselle wine trade collapsed within a few years. The boycott of April 1933 already struck Jewish merchants; there followed exclusion from professional associations, withdrawal of licences and finally the forced transfer of businesses to non-Jewish owners — euphemistically called „Aryanisation“, in truth coerced expropriation far below value. By 1938 the Jewish wine trade on the Moselle had been wiped out. Those who could, emigrated; those who stayed were later deported and murdered. The collapse struck not only the Jewish families but shook the marketing of Moselle wine as a whole, for with the merchants went capital, market access and foreign connections.
Traces today
Little of this history remains visible in the landscape of the Moselle — a company name in the commercial register, a gravestone in a Jewish cemetery, an entry in a memorial book. In recent years a few Moselle growers have consciously taken up the Jewish wine tradition again, producing kosher Riesling from the Moselle and Saar, in part in cooperation with Jewish communities. Such projects are no substitute for what was lost, but they keep alive the memory that Jewish life and Moselle wine belonged together for centuries. Those who wish to follow the traces further will find more material on the pages about Otto Loeb, the history and in the literature notes.