Shaul Bing, of Bingen

here is the long story about the father of Sorlin, Saul Bing:

The wonderful book: Palaces of Time, by Elisheva Carlebach includes a chapter dealing with how Christians set up their calendar. In this chapter, on page 126, there is a comment by the writer of a Sefer Evronot which is ms.2634 at the JTS (pages 77a-77b): “Fasnacht and Easter are always set so that at least 4 ½ weeks elapse between them, in order that they should have at least 3 meat-eating days in each month. I heard from hr”r Liwa Oppenheim, who heard from his father-in-law, Sanwel Bing z”l, who heard from a Christian priest the reason why Fasnacht sometimes falls 8 days into the month...” etc. it is pretty sure the expression “heard” in this kind of case really means “read”, and that the author who is speaking about r’ Liwa Oppenheim means that he has read his Sefer Evronot, not that he has met him in person. 

(this link: https: www.nli.org.il/he/manuscripts/NNL_ALEPH000127191/NLI#$FL26572821 should bring you to the Sefer Evronot held by HUC where that statement is written, that the father in law of Loeb was Sanwil Bing.)

the problem of Saul Bing. As we know, the important members of the community, especially the spokesmen and shtadlanim, were called by one set of names by the secular community and by at least one other name within the Jewish community. Not always, of course, but often. A good example of this is Leffman Behrens Cohen, who can be seen as Lipman Hannover, among other names, in non-Jewish records, or the equally famous Juda Berlin AKA Jost Liebmann, whose real name was Jehuda bn Elieser Lipman Goettingen. So, in any case, whether or not there was ever a Shmuel/Sanwel who in the Jewish community was called “Saul” (and it really does look like there were several in that era), our Samuel Bing was definitely known to the outside world by the name Saul Bing(en).

As if this were not complicated enough, Ettlinger, very understandably, has seen Samuel Bing as two different people. While this may very well be correct, the most likely thing is that because Samuel/Saul Bing was not one to sit in one place, and because he lived to an old age, some of the records containing that name look like they must be referring to different men. The first Ele Toldot sheet on which he is mentioned is the one for himself as Saul Bing zur Kanne =um 1538, the second is also for himself as Saul aus Bingen =um 1582. As you will see in Ele Toldot, when looking at that first sheet, combined with the information on the Kanne and Fisch house pages, Saul and his wife, Zerle, are being described as a young couple with small children, and Saul’s stepfather, Jacob Heilbronn, is an important man who often goes to (or is summoned to) other cities. Saul does the same thing (for instance, Andernacht #651 says that in August 1553 he is in Mainz on the kind of mission one would associate with a shtadlan, and #881 shows the Mainz authorities interceding on Saul’s behalf when he wants Frankfurt to allow his “son” –probably really his son-in-law - to build a house in the Judengasse , which gets put through favorably in May of 1551) so we know he is what you might call “cosmopolitan” and certainly wealthy and influential. Ettlinger’s sources were almost all records which focused directly on Frankfurt, so that a person who lived part of the time in other cities and only came back to Frankfurt from time to time to set up his children with houses and marriages ends up being less easy to pin down, even though you would expect an important person to be more identifiable.

In this case, the only reason for there to be two different Saul Bings is that there is apparently a record (I was unable to find it) which gave Ettlinger the impression that Zerle/Zirle, the wife of Saul Bing of the Kanne, was already a widow in 1539. Now, if we could look at that record and see if it actually says “widow” or whether the fact that the wife is paying the taxes has made Ettlinger conclude that she IS a widow (rather than just being in Frankfurt while Saul does his shtadlan work), we would know whether we actually have two Sauls. The good news is that several different sources make it clear that he paid for houses to be build for his children (the 1551 house mentioned above was apparently the Stege, built for his daughter, Ester, who had married Beifus z. Pforte – misread as Padua!) and that he lived elsewhere and “visited” his son, Suskind, in 1540.

Saul Bing is called “Shmuel” on the only gravestones we have for his children. This is not enough, and it is a shame there are not more stones to look at. However, since there are NO stones in the cemetery, according to both Epidat and Horovitz, where a father’s name of Shaul is given until 1650 (and the ones after that are all clearly identified), we know Saul Bing must have had a different Hebrew name. And this Saul/Samuel combination, strange as it sounds, was common at that time, amazingly. The people we believe are named after him are all called Shmuel, not Shaul.

Of course, identifying Saul’s children accurately is a huge challenge, both because we are missing gravestones for several of them, and because that was an era when the expressions “son” and “son-in-law” and even “grandson-in-law” were thrown around pretty indiscriminately in the secular records, AND because at least two of the children married into households where there was an already-existing identity problem (two Meir Cahns of the Pforte, two Gumprichts of the Baer).

So I believe we are fine with the Saul/Samuel issue, and I also believe that the only thing standing in the way of Saul “=um1538” and Saul “=um1582” being the same person is the reference to Zirle as a widow. Saul, as we have seen, was an important man and shtadlan not just in Frankfurt but throughout the area. Here he is in 1541 at a convocation in Regensburg http://reichstagsakten.de/index.php?vol=rta1541&doc=dok774&... and in Sept. 1554 he brought in funds to help cover the city’s debts, and he is the only Jew on the list (see attached pages from Frankfurter Handelsgeschichte. There is definitely a chance that he and Zirle might have divorced or separated (after all, men like this, in the Josel von Rosheim mode, had to travel constantly, and who would want to shlep wife and children all over, sometimes putting them in danger?) and a separation of convenience may have been the best option. But in either case, he probably did not expect her to die as early as she did, so he would come back to Frankfurt to check on the children and to set them up with houses, etc. The comment on the sheet for his son Gumpel =um1565 (whom Ettlinger several times calls “Gottschalk” in error – usually writing in a correction, but not every time) that Saul “visited him” in 1540 is a sign of how busy Saul was with his shtadlan-type work and confirms that he did not live in Frankfurt at the time.

From there, the only thing we can do is to try to identify which of his children’s gravestones show him as z”l, in order to narrow down when he died. But he almost certainly did not die before 1539, for all of the reasons outlined above.

One interesting sideline here is that there is a possibility that Saul Bing =um 1538 also had a son named Gumpricht =um 1565. He lived in the house of the Baer and is not the same person as Gumpricht K'Ts zum Baern =um 1560). Ettlinger must have had some doubts about him, because he is not listed as a son on Saul's E. T. sheet. However, in view of our discovery yesterday that there was a Gumpricht living in Bingen who was Moses Weissenberg's brother-in-law, and that, as we see today, Moses's business partner was Jacob aus Heilbronn, the possibility of that Gumpricht (in Bingen) being a close relative of Saul's is greatly increased.