"Quite right, quite right!" shouted the whole assembly.
The Jew Abraham was the father of twelve children, all sons, and all red-haired. And each one equally resembled his father.
Yet it will be well to explain matters from the beginning.
Up till the Emperor Joseph's time, the Jews had been devoid of any family names, as once in the Promised Land.
But when Joseph II. admitted the Jews to the rights of citizens, he stipulated that they should render military service if called upon, and that they should choose a surname--and that a German one.
To this end, royal commissions were despatched on all sides which should provide the Jews with surnames. And a nice business it was! Whoever had a well-filled purse had a free choice, if it so pleased him, but woe to him who set about it empty handed, for the nickname wherewith his mocking neighbours had christened him, stuck to him pitilessly.
Because Abraham had not sufficiently opened his purse-strings, he still had to go by his nickname of "Rothesel," wherewith he was known among his neighbours.
The epithet "roth" (red), he had received from the colour of his beard, but he had been qualified as "esel" (ass), because he had done nothing more enterprising with his wife's dowry of two hundred thalers, than buy up wine with it. On this account everyone had decided he must be an ass. And everyone, on the face of it, was right. For what could a Jew want with wine? He dared not retail it, for the trading rights belonged only to the communes, to say nothing of the difficulty of transporting it over the frontier. Whence could he carry it? for in Hungary the law forbade any Jew to trade in such wares.
So that when his neighbours called Abraham an ass for laying out his money in wine when he began life, they were not far out, for he hardly earned salt to his bread by such a business.
But Abraham was in his way a student of the times. Looking ahead, he saw under the rule of the later Hapsburgs that many ancient laws, though still unrepealed, had nevertheless fallen into desuetude, and consequently that the statute forbidding Jews the commerce in wine, might follow suit. Consequently, Abraham found means of transporting his Hungarian vintages to Vienna. And as he was the first in the field his enterprise was crowned with success. Nor did he deceive the customer as to the difficulties of the Hungarian wine trade.