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=Isaak Behrens= (in Hebrew: "'Isaac Liepman Cohen"', * about 1695, † 1765)

Importance
Isaak and his less active and prominent elder brother Gumpert Behrens were the grandsons and business successors of the great court Jew Leffmann Behrends in Hannover. He was the typical third-generation member of a court Jew family, unable to  prevent the ruin of a once successful firm. His megillah is an important text in Western Yiddish.

Precarious succession
After founder Leffmann’s death in 1714, the Hannover-based banking and trading firm was still well-reputed but had little workable capital, out of which Gumpert and Isaak had to pay out their respective  shares of the legacy to a number of co-heirs. In addition they lost money through a slump in the price of jewels and suffered from the withdrawal of customers’ deposits in the wake of feverish investment in the new-fangled stocks. Their three production shops (cloth, tobacco, candles) proved inefficient. In order to keep up their credit and living standard the brothers got in high debt with Isaak’s father-in-law, the famous Halberstadt/Prussia court Jew Issachar Berend Lehmann, who had his loans secured by their ceding him IOUs and jewels.

Criminal and insolvency procedures
On the way to meeting Berend Lehmann again in order to pawn with him some remaining valuables the brothers were arrested by the Hannover ‘’Justizkanzlei’’ (Chancellery of Justice). Their financial situation was indeed precarious, and their journey was interpreted as flight from their creditors. The charge was fraudulent bankruptcy, and they were incarcerated for the following five years, during which they were tortured to be made to reveal where they were hiding the allegedly embezzled property. They confessed nothing, very probably because there was nothing to confess. At the same time the Justizkanzlei sought to bring Berend Lehmann to court, too. This led to several years of legal dispute between Hannover and Prussia over the venue for a trial against him. This prevented him from visiting Hannover and so he tried from a distance to arrange a settlement with the other Behrens’s creditors, to no avail. In several reproachful letters to the Hannoverian sovereign, King George I of Great Britain, he attempted to save them from the torture, which proved also in vain.

Release and Yiddish memoirs
In 1726 the brothers were released and banished from the electorate of Hannover. Gumpert died before 1738, Isaak survived in Danish dominated places near Hamburg and in 1738 wrote a megillah, a story of suffering and salvation to be read out at Purim, about his prison experience. . He lived to be about 70 and died with one of his seven sons, who was a doctor, in Rendsburg. Isaak Behrens was buried in the Hannover Jewish Cemetery, where his tombstone is extant. . It is one of the not too numerous documents in the Western Yiddish language of Early Modern Times German Jews.