David Hirsch Lindauer

Family Register: Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart J 386 Bü 305 Jebenhausen: Göppingen Folio 188

Biography (from "The Story of the Lindauer and Weil Families" by Moses Jacob Lindauer, transl. David Raindorf): "Part Five
I should like to turn now to the subject of our Grandfather Tobias Lindauer. He was a younger brother of Seligmann and was born on the 14th of Adar [sixth month, D.R.], 1761 in Gemmingen. After he had lived for some time in the region of Heilbronn and Ludwigsburg he came to Jebenhausen in 1783 or 1784, where he began trading in hides, skin, and horned cattle.
Later he joined Isak Wollenberg in the business of importing heavy draft horses from Salzburger Land and the Ammerland. Like his brother, Tobias Lindauer was a very devout man and was known for his sense of charity. Already as a young man he began the acquisition of a personal library that eventually grew to be quite extensive. Works from it were used by the young men of the congregation, who gathered once a week for scriptural studies. As a boy of 13 or 14 Tobias Lindauer was tutored for a length of time in Schopfloch by a well-known Rabbi of those days, so he was impressively knowledgeable. But he also had a considerable mastery of secular matters, and among his books besides many works in Hebrew there were the first volumes of the Grimm brothers' Sprachlehre (Grammar), The Children of the Serapion, Friedrich Schiller's Die Raeuber (The Robbers), and August von Kotzebue's Die deutschen Kleinstaedter (People in German Small Towns). As a very young man he even got as far as Prussia in his travels and he visited Potsdam and Berlin. Although he was redheaded he was of a friendly and steady disposition; and he was rather witty, something which his sons inherited, and which turned up again to a special degree in his grandson, [Ascher] Frank.
In those days the Jebenhaeuser Israelites lived in a group of small and low houses along the main road to Goeppingen. Bernhard Weil, Seligmann Lindauer and his brother Tobias shared one such little house, all in all 15 people in two small rooms, since a number of children had been born to both families in the meantime. The before-mentioned associate of Tobias Lindauer, Isak Wollenberg, along with his wife and daughter, also lived in this house in the beginning, because his own dwelling, having been built on unstable soil, had collapsed in a storm. Later Great-grandfather Weil and Seligmann Lindauer had a bigger house built for themselves, and then it was extended somewhat for Tobias Lindauer to likewise reside there.
At this point a very distressing situation must be told about, namely, the mortality rate among small children that was much too high. Not a single family among the Jebenhaeuser Israelites was spared this misfortune. In particular a great number of children under the age of two died of palsy (paralysis). Bernhard and Roesle Weil lost no less than eight children this way. Then another daughter died at the young age of 18. And Great-grandfather Lindauer, too, had to see four of his dear ones carried to the grave. According to the general interpretation, the cleansing [ritual] baths for women were the cause for this. The women's bath, the so-called "Tauche" [place of submergence, D.R.], was situated in those days on the other side of Dinten creek (also known as Pfuhl Creek) in a small wooden hut. The women were required every month to walk way out there and to submerge themselves in ice-cold water, even in the coldest of winter months. This certainly must have been harmful to their health. Only after this evil state of affairs had been complained about for a long time was the next-built Tauche set up with the means to warm up the water.
In the summer of 1789 Tobias Lindauer celebrated his wedding to Frommet Weil, the younger sister of Great-grandfather Weil and Great-grandmother Lindauer. This was an arranged marriage, and although they had hardly known each other beforehand, they became very happy together. She, my grandmother, lived long enough for me to still get to know her well, and a lot of what I relate in this story is what I heard from her. She was witty in a kindly way and alert and clear-headed to her very last days. She surely was no beauty in her youth, but her intelligence and wholesome nature made her likeable to everyone. She always got along especially well with her older brother, Moses, who at that time also lived in Jebenhausen; and more than once she proudly told us children how she got into a discussion with Moses once about an obscure passage in one of his Hebrew books and was able to persuade him to accept her interpretation of it. She got to see only three of her children grow up. She was a loving and loved mother and under her management her children never experienced want, in spite of many a material lack in their lives.

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Part Six

Tobias Lindauer and a dealer from Fischach once ran into great danger near the town of Goeggingen on one of their trips. It happened that a peasant child was found frozen to death upon a field and all kinds of nonsensical rumours about the cause of death began to spread about, one of which specifically claimed that wandering Jews had murdered the child, a false-hood that was already widely disseminated in the region. The two of them were surrounded in a village by enraged peasants who demanded that they confess. Because they would not confess, the armed crowd conducted them into Goeggingen to the authorities. But then the authorities almost immediately set them free again. [...]"