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for the Jews had been acquired. Such an acquisition was no routine matter. Land had to be purchased, and for many years European authorities had frowned on selling land to Jews; even when such transactions were allowed, the land that changed hands was often of substandard value, perhaps swampy or riddled with stones, making it unsuitable for agriculture. But the Jews of Sachsenhagen were fortunate: the land purchased for their cemetery, though outside the boundaries of the village, was flat and arable. Hops grew along the edges of the cemetery, and the soil produced sturdy oaks and elms and a healthy hazelnut bush. The oldest surviving headstone in the Jewish cemetery dates from 1787. But the oldest headstone that is marked by both German and Hebrew inscriptions belongs to Levi Goldschmidt. In Hebrew, the text reads, “Here lies a decent and God-fearing man. He was honest and just. He died at age 60.” He was my great-great-grandfather.

    The former house number 17, now number 9 Oberestrasse, where my great-great-grandfather Levi lived with his wife Johanna and their “poor man’s cow.”
    Levi Goldschmidt was born on July 18, 1799, the son of Jehuda Goldschmidt. Where he was born remains a mystery, although some evidence points south about twenty miles from Sachsenhagen to the town of Hameln. Known as Hamelin in English, it’s the site of the legendary Pied Piper, who rid the town of its plague of mice and rats and then, in revenge for not being paid for his services, rid the town of all its children. When Levi moved to Sachsenhagen is also unclear, but he bought a house there in 1834, at age thirty-five, and married Johanna Frank. Within a very short time, the Goldschmidts were among the most prominent of the Jewish families of Sachsenhagen.
    In a registry of assets for the year 1841, Levi and Johanna are listed as living in house number 17 in Sachsenhagen. (At the time, all the town’s houses were simply given numbers, regardless of the street. Today, the address is 9 Oberestrasse, the main thoroughfare through town.) In 1841, the Goldschmidt family’s assets were modest: two fruit trees and a single goat, considered in those days to be “the poor man’s cow.” By comparison, 108 of the 128 families living in Sachsenhagen had at least one cow, including all three of the other Jewish families. By theend of the decade, however, the Goldschmidt family fortune had soared; Levi had become a Pferdehändler , a dealer of horses.
    As far back as the Middle Ages, European laws prevented Jews from owning land and encouraged them to practice professions that Christians largely avoided. Scriptural strictures against lending money and charging interest led Christians to shun the financial vocations, and thus it fell to the Jews to become bankers and moneylenders. In the nineteenth century, Jews were still barred from journalism, most professorships, and the law. As late as 1905 in Europe, there was little chance that a Jew could become a judge, and even then only if he renounced his faith and converted to Christianity. Although excluded from certain professions, Jews often flourished in those they were allowed to practice, and in the European countryside, they embraced the horse business. In Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the horse trade was largely a Jewish enterprise, and in Germany, most of the prominent suppliers of horses to the well-born and well-connected were Jews. So identified were Jews with the buying and selling of horses that by the 1930s, the rise of National Socialism was accompanied by municipal attempts to expel and ban Jews from the profession.
    In much the same way that the automobile dominates our lives in the early twenty-first century, horses were nearly indispensable in the nineteenth. Urban dwellers depended on horse-drawn conveyances for transportation and commerce. In the countryside, farmers relied on horses to plow the earth and transport goods to and from