The King for a Day

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2:11Listener discretion advised. The King of Poland had been dead for eight months and six days. The death itself had been sudden. The king, Stephen Bathory, had hidden his ill health from even his closest advisors for several years before finally succumbing to his illness on December 12, 1586. The country's nobles had spent the following eight months and six days doing one thing, trying to figure out who would be king next. Poland, in fact the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as it had been known since 1572, was not a hereditary monarchy, but an elected one. Whenever a king died, the entire nobility of Poland and Lithuania would come together for an elaborate process to select the next monarch.

3:13As you might expect, this led to several long-protracted interregna in which various factions fought, sometimes with weapons and armies, to have their families or interests represented on the throne. This time, after eight months and six days, there was a complete stalemate. The nobles had all exhausted every avenue they had to exert their influence, and still there was no frontrunner in sight. In situations like this, the law called for the selection of a rex pro tempore, a temporary king, an outsider who would then use his powerful but unbiased position to select his successor. To put it simply, they needed a tiebreaker.

4:07But no one could agree on who should fill that role. Every contender put forth was rejected by one side or the other, said to be close to either side to choose a new king fairly, or too power-hungry to give up the throne when the time came. They bickered and shouted, each jockeying over the other to be heard, but then all of a sudden, one nobleman rose to his feet. He had an idea. Years ago, this nobleman, Nicholas Radswell, the Grand Marshal of Lithuania, had found himself stranded in Padua. He had been en route to Jerusalem for a religious pilgrimage when his entourage was robbed, leaving him with no possessions, no money, and no way home.

4:59He had begged and begged on the streets for help, spending days trying to convince passers-by that, yes, he really was a prince, and yes, he really could pay them back handsomely if they only helped him home. Finally, desperate, he appealed to the rabbi of Padua, Samuel Judah Katznalenbogen, the leader of the Jewish people in the area. The rabbi believed Radswell and agreed to help him get home on one condition, that he find his son Saul, whom he had sent to Poland to be educated at a yeshiva, but whom he hadn't heard from since. Now, standing before the Polish nobility, Radswell told the story of how he had scoured every yeshiva in Poland before finally finding Saul like he promised.

5:57He was impressed with the young man's intellect and good character, and Radswell had invited him to continue his education at his palace. In the years since, Saul had become a central character at court and had garnered a reputation for his intelligence and trustworthiness. This was an obvious choice, Radswell insisted. Here was a candidate everyone already knew and trusted and who, due to his Jewish heritage, was not beholden to the politics of the powerful Polish and Lithuanian families, Saul Katznelenbogen was the perfect temporary king. And so it was decided, on August 18, 1587, for one day only, a Jewish king would rule Poland.

6:53Or would he? If any part of this story sounds a little fishy or too good to be true, that's because, well, it is. There is no historical evidence that Saul Katznellenbogen was actually elected a temporary king. But the story of the king for a day, as he would come to be known, has endured in Jewish folklore and family history. How did this fictional tale become so entrenched that some people still believe it actually happened? Well, as with most good legends, it begins with an actual kernel of truth. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Although he was not born noble, and alas, never even temporarily would be, Saul Katzenellenbogen came from an illustrious lineage.

7:51His grandfather, Mare Ben Isaac Katzenellenbogen, generally known by his Hebrew acronym, Maharam of Padua, was the chief rabbi of Padua in the early to mid-16th century. He had migrated to Padua, a city in the mainland territories of the Venetian Republic, from Germany, for his education, and married the daughter of the then-rabbi of Padua before then taking up his father-in-law's position upon his death. The chief rabbinate of Padua was a powerful position in and of itself, not least because it also made him a rabbinic authority in nearby Venice, but the Maharam's influence was also compounded by his deep scholarly knowledge.

8:42Other rabbis regularly sought him out to weigh in on Talmudic and rabbinical debates, and he wrote over 90 responsa in doing so, which continue to be influential among rabbinical scholars and historians alike. The Maharam's son Samuel Judah, or Mahasheks, followed in his father's footsteps as the chief rabbi of Padua in 1565. His own father's reputation had played a large role in his election, but he was also considered a distinguished scholar and leader in his community. He also gained esteem among non-Jews, and this is where we see the beginnings of the story that would morph into that of the Jewish king of Poland.

9:33Unfortunately, there is little to no evidence that Mahasheiks ever actually crossed paths with the Lithuanian noble Nicholas Radswell. What is true is that Radswell undertook a rather eventful pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to Syria, and Egypt between 1582 and 1584. and along the way, he got himself into several situations where he ran low on funds and needed to ask for assistance from locals. We know about Radswell's travels from a 1601 travelogue he published in Latin, in which he described his journey and the many people he met along the way. The closest thing we have to a story resembling that of the legendary encounter with the rabbi in Radswell's account is that he was truly robbed by bandits on his way to Venice, but in Ancona, not Padua.

10:34He was then aided by a merchant who lent him money to continue his journey, but only after proving his identity to the papal authorities nearby. The similarities in the accounts are striking. The doubt about his identity, a loan that helped him on his way, but so are the differences. So how did we get one story from the other? The 19th century literary historian Gustav Karpeles asserted that the merchant in the account was Jewish, seemingly without evidence, as Radswell never mentions the merchant's faith, and in fact recalls his name as Quintilio, a distinctly Italian Christian name. It's possible that Carpeles, or one of the many people before him to tell this story, both orally and in writing, conflated the merchant with one of several Jewish people whom Radzwell did encounter and discussed in his account, including an interpreter who accompanied him in Jerusalem and the famed 12th-century Jewish traveler, Benjamin of Tudela.

11:46There were also certainly many Jewish merchants in this period, especially in and around Venice, where the general acceptance of Jews' presence and the economic role they served was tempered by strict segregation, most famously in the ghetto, from which the modern English word is derived. It's possible that later historians like Harpellas assumed that the merchant was Jewish because of that, or more specifically, because the merchant in this story loaned money to Radswill. Jewish people frequently worked as money lenders in medieval and early modern Europe because the Catholic Church forbade Christians from usury, that is, charging interest on a loan, while Jewish law only prevented the charging of interest to other Jews.

12:40While Rad's will's account made no mention of interest, one can see how the kernel of truth there, a simple loan from a merchant, might have morphed and taken on a new shape over time in service of a popular story or preconceived notions. So what about Saul himself, the rabbi's son? For many centuries, we had very little to go on beyond folklore and rumor. Between 1924 and 1925, however, the historian Mare Balaban discovered a series of documents in the archives of Brest-Listovsk that finally began to shed light on the real story of the would-be Jewish king. Saul Katzenallenbogen was born around 1541 and traveled to Lithuania from his native Padua as a young man to study.

13:44He settled in Brest-Litovsk, a city now known as Brest in modern-day Belarus, and took up work as a merchant sometime in the mid-16th century. At some point he married a woman named Deborah Rivka Drucker. They would go on to have 13 children. Like his father before him, Saul seems to have enjoyed a respected reputation among Jews and non-Jews alike. In 1578, King Stephen Bathory leased him the salt flats in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, allowing him exclusive rights to sell salt, a highly valuable product at the time, in the duchy. Two years later, he was similarly granted a lease to the salt mine at Wieliczka near Krakow in Poland.

14:40Six years later, Stephen Bathory died. We might be tempted to imagine a wealthy Jewish merchant so well-liked by the king himself that the nobles couldn't have picked a better temporary king. Saul's already unlikely reign is perhaps most thoroughly debunked, however, by the fact that we already know who served as temporary king after the death of Stephen Bathory. In fact, there was a very clear system in place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for making sure the throne didn't remain empty during what were often very long Interregna. Again, the legend gets some things right. The nobility of Poland and Lithuania needed to vote to elect a new king when a king died, and the Interregna typically dragged on for months as opposing factions sought to position their favored candidates on the throne.

15:40That's all true, and this disagreement could vary in intensity, but it was very much an expected part of the process. As such, ever since the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had merged into the Commonwealth in 1572, it had been custom that the Archbishop of Gnezno would serve as the Interrex, or Between King. In 1586, that custom was followed, and we know for a fact that Stanislav Karnkowski of Ianozha, the very Catholic Archbishop of Gnezno, among other titles, served as interrex until the end of the Interregnum in 1587. The Interregnum of 1586 and 1887 was extraordinary, but unfortunately not for electing a surprise Jewish king.

16:41It ended in the election of Sigismund III Vassa, who succeeded to the throne with the support of the former queen and the Interregs on August 18, 1587. However, three days later, Sigismund's opponents contested the election and propped up Maximilian III of Austria as their choice. The shocking move resulted in a year-long war, which came to be known as the War of the Polish Succession, or the Habsburg-Polish War. Eventually, Sigismund won out and became the uncontested ruler of the Commonwealth. For Saul's part, it does not seem as though he played any major role in the election or the subsequent war, but he managed to remain in the very good graces of the Polish nobility, including King Sigismund.

17:39He would go on to serve as tax collector for the king. For his service in 1589, he was bestowed with the title of royal servant, which guaranteed royal protection of his possessions and land holdings during his lifetime. Saul also, unsurprisingly, held a good deal of influence in the Jewish community of Lithuania. Beginning in the 1580s, he served as a Parnas, or lay leader, in the Council of the Lands, a newly formed central institution of Jewish self-government in Poland and Lithuania. Jewish communities across Europe tended to be semi-autonomous, developing their own politico-religious institutions that governed the community in tandem, and occasionally in conflict, with Christian authorities.

18:34This was as much a product of Judaism's rich legal culture as it was a product of the frequent forced segregation and restriction of Jewish communities in Europe. The Council of the Lands would govern Polish and Lithuanian Jewish life until 1764. Saul played an important role in the council's management of this often tense relationship with Christian authorities. In 1593, despite resistance from the Brest-Litovsk City Council, he helped to broker an agreement that granted the Council of the Lands the right to adjudicate lawsuits between Jews, a major win for community autonomy. Saul also seems to have engaged in some patronage, a testament to the success of his business ventures and his high esteem in the Commonwealth.

19:33When his wife Deborah died, he chose to honor her by commissioning the construction of a women's gallery in the Brest-Litovsk Synagogue, a balcony space in the synagogue where women could attend services while remaining separate from the men. In the early 17th century, he founded a synagogue in Lublin, a Polish city some hundred miles southwest of Brest, where the Council of the Lands held its sessions. Both synagogues would stand until the 1940s, when they, like many others across Europe, were destroyed in the Holocaust. Unfortunately, we know very little about the end of Saul's life. It is generally believed that he died in Brest-Litovsk in 1617, at the age of about 75, although some scholars have argued that he died later, around 1622.

20:33His children carried on his respected legacy, in particular his son Mir, who became the chief rabbi of Brest-Litovsk and helped found the Council of the Land of Lithuania in 1623, which broke off from the Council of the Lands Saul had helped found. At some point, whether during his lifetime or not is unclear, Saul began to be known by the alternative name, Saul Wall, which in German means choice. The name would go on to be passed down to several generations of his descendants, to the point that as recently as the 19th century, Walls who purported to be descendant from Saul were still living in Lublin.

21:22By then, the story they told of their ancestor was not one of a wealthy merchant and leader of his community, but a king, albeit a temporary one. Denis de Samuel wanted nothing more than to have a noble title. He had the trappings of nobility, wealth, status, but unfortunately, not the lineage. And this was 19th century London. Lineage was everything. Denis dreamed of what true nobility could afford him, not just social privilege, but true political power, a seat in the House of Lords. For most other Jewish men in Britain, this might have seemed like a pipe dream, but he had seen it happen before.

22:12In 1847, Anthony Nathan de Rothschild, whose family had already been named as barons in Austria, was granted a baronetcy in the United Kingdom by Queen Victoria. Denis had worked for Anthony's father, Nathan Meyer Rothschild, some 20 years earlier as a corresponding agent overseeing his business interests in Brazil. Upon Denis' return to London in 1825, he had become involved in securing large loans for the recently independent Brazilian government. In 1844, the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, had appointed him to the Order of the Rose for his work. As nice as a chivalric order was, however, it didn't offer Denis the aristocratic privileges he yearned for.

23:08In the early 1850s, Denny's decided to find out once and for all if he really didn't have any Yikis or highborn lineage that could help him get a leg up in British society. He began by commissioning Hirsch Edelman, a Russian-Jewish scholar who had been researching and publishing documents of Jewish history from the Bodleian Library in Oxford to explore his own family history. He knew his family originally hailed from Poland, and so he also contacted the Rabbi of Krotoshkin to do the same locally. The rabbi collected as much information as he could and reported back to Dennis that he had traced his lineage back to several generations of prominent Jews in Poland and Padua.

24:02Mare Katzenellenbogen, Samuel Judah Katzenellenbogen, and Saul Val Katzenellenbogen. Denny's spirits were surely somewhat raised by this esteemed rabbinic lineage, but it was Edelman who offered him the promise of what he had really been seeking. He had come upon an incredible document dating back to the 1730s and written by Pinchas Katzenellenbogen, another descendant of Saul's. In this document, Pinchas related the story he said was passed on to him by his father of how their illustrious ancestor, Saul Wal, had once, very briefly, ruled Poland and Lithuania. He had used his one-day reign, Pinchas proudly reported, to pass laws protecting Polish and Lithuanian Jews from discrimination and violence.

25:03Dennis was delighted. He commissioned Edelman to publish Pinchas' story, along with, of course, a family history that connected Saul directly to Dennis himself. In 1853, Gedulat Shaul, or The Greatness of Saul, was published in Hebrew. Jewish community newspapers at the time indicated plans to translate the work into English, but a translation never materialized. A year later, Dennis was finally, finally named a baron by the King of Portugal. It wasn't a British noble title, and he couldn't get a seat in the House of Lords, but Dennis felt he had raised the profile of Jews in Britain, and that was good enough for him.

25:54He did, however, apply for a royal sanction in Britain to add Deval to his name, just to make sure his yiks was a matter of public record. Pinchas's 18th century account of Saul, King for a Day, Val Katzenellenbogen, as he would come to be known, was the first written record of Saul's extraordinary legend. The story had likely been circulating for some time. Pinchas wrote that his father had framed the story already as long-standing family lore, suggesting that the legend might have been formed not long after Saul's death a little over a century earlier. It was the Gedulat Shaul, though, that really brought Saul's erroneous royal reputation into the mainstream.

26:48Newspapers, particularly Jewish newspapers in both English and Yiddish, ran with the story, which featured details that were simultaneously specific and unlikely. Saul was said to have founded a bathhouse in Brest-Litovsk. Could be true, but later historians have found no evidence of that. He was, in fact, an elector of Poland, that is, a noble eligible to vote in the royal election. No, he was not. And Saul was said to have established a banking fund that promised every male descendant 50 guilders and every female descendant 100 guilders upon marriage. This, again, historians have not found any evidence for.

27:37Gedulat Shaul became the definitive version of Saul's legend, but as with all legends, it continued to take on many forms even after it was put to print. One version of the legend went further with the story, taking the story of a Jewish king to, perhaps its logical conclusion, a royal marriage. That's how all fairy tales end, don't they? In this version of the story, Saul seems to have continued to enjoy elevated status as a kind of former king, even after the end of his short reign. According to the story, Saul's power had irritated some members of the Jewish community, and so they reported to the nobles, who were at this time looking for a new wife for their newly widowed king Sigismund III, that Saul's beautiful daughter Hannah, who was technically a princess, was unwed.

28:39The nobles of the Commonwealth reportedly considered her an advantageous match and conspired to kidnap her in the middle of the night to marry her off to the Catholic King of Poland. One sympathetic noble, perhaps Radswell, warned Saul ahead of the planned abduction, And so in order to prevent the plot, Saul quickly married Hannah off to the 60-year-old rabbi of Brest-Litovsk, Zalman Shore. Seeing that their plan to take Saul down a peg had failed, those jealous members of the Jewish community continued to attempt to slander Saul to no avail. Of course, that did not happen. Or if poor Hannah was indeed married off to the aging rabbi, that wasn't how it happened.

29:31But it speaks to the depth and persistence of the myth-making surrounding Saul's story. Despite the lack of historical evidence for many of its claims, and the bounty of historical evidence contradicting many others, the legend of Saul Vol's one-day reign has endured in Jewish folklore, even as modern historians and genealogists have disproven it. Even Dennis de Samuel's claim to his lineage has been debunked. What, then, has made this story so persistent? It's possible that, as it did for Dennis, the story of Saul, the one-day king, offered Jewish communities political leverage, a means to claim that they had ancestors as important and influential as their Christian counterparts.

30:26Some scholars have argued specifically that the legend of Saul Wall may have taken root as a response to the increased intolerance towards Polish Jews. In particular, the Chmiel-Nitski uprisings of 1648 through 57, Cossack Rebellion which saw mass atrocities committed against Jewish communities across Poland. In a time of destruction and death, it must have been deeply meaningful to not only remember a member of your community who was so devoted to building Jewish spaces and supporting Jewish life, but also, perhaps, to imagine that such a devoted person could become so protected and influential, even as a Jew, that he got to be king, if only for one day.

31:23That's the story of the supposed king for a day, Saul, Vol, Katz, Nellenbogen, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about what he has in common with Nobleblood.

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33:12As Saul Vol's unlikely story wove its way into legend, becoming a valued part of Jewish folklore, it became a point of pride among generations of Jewish people to trace their ancestry back to the supposed Jewish king of Poland. Over time, and especially with increased access to documents on the internet, the family tree did become more accurate, although of course apocryphal family connections lingered. Vol himself had 13 children, so you can imagine how quickly his lineage expanded even without the help of people like Dennis DeSamuel. Now hundreds of years and many generations later, Vol's list of so-called heirs to the throne has grown vast.

34:02His descendants are said to include a variety of notable people, including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and the composer Felix Mendelssohn. But there's also a noble blood connection. Our esteemed research coordinator, Hannah Johnston, is also a direct descendant of Saul Val. She promises not to let her royal lineage go to her head. Or maybe she will so she can end up the subject of a Noble Blood episode herself. Only time will tell.