GERMANY. Frankfurt. Token 1819 (Gold, 18 mm, 2.55 g, 12 h), so-called 'Judenpfennig', a restrike from the late 19th century. Coat of arms within wreath. Rev. +I+ / .1819. in two lines within wreath. Jaeger 7 var. (copper). Joseph/Fellner 1997 var. (copper). Very rare in gold. Struck from a slightly worn dies, otherwise, virtually as struck.



The so-called 'Judenpfennige' were privately produced low-value copper coins and tokens that circulated in large quantities in Frankfurt, the Rhineland, and other parts of Prussia during the severe shortage of small change in the early nineteenth century. Their emergence was primarily an economic response to this shortage: after Prussia ceased striking small-denomination coins in 1808, merchants and the public increasingly relied on foreign coins, tokens, and even makeshift substitutes.

Contemporary records show that part of this coinage was produced at the official Darmstadt mint for the Frankfurt firm Gebrüder Heitefuss, whose owners were Christian, while many of the lighter pieces seized by the authorities were probably manufactured in England. Jewish money changers and merchants were indeed among those involved in distributing the pieces, but the surviving administrative and court records provide no basis for the later claim that Jews as a group had originated or manufactured them.

Nevertheless, nineteenth- and twentieth-century numismatic literature increasingly transformed this commercial episode into a supposedly ‘Jewish’ scheme of illicit coin production, drawing on long-standing anti-jewish and antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as usurers, profiteers, and counterfeiters. Although this attribution had already been refuted from contemporary archival evidence by the Frankfurt numismatist Ohly in 1931 (cf. F. Ohly: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Judenpfennige, in: Frankfurter Münzzeitung NF 19/20, (1931) pp. 290-294), the correction was largely ignored, while the misleading term 'Judenpfennige' remained firmly established in numismatic literature and the coin trade.

Unlike the fairly common copper pieces, the gold strikes are very rare. Their exact origin is unknown, but they were likely produced in connection with the firm of Heitefuss. The history of the 'Judenpfennige' therefore reveals less about Jewish coin production than about the remarkable persistence of antisemitic interpretations within numismatic scholarship itself.