On the night of the 23rd to the 24th of June, 1751, a wattle-and-daub wall gave way behind the shop of Schüller, a merchant in Blankenheim, in the Eifel. Come daybreak, the upper shelves stood bare: bolts of damask, taffeta, and calico, valued at three hundred thalers, had vanished. The lesser wares remained untouched. Within, the door dividing the shop from the dwelling quarters had been lashed fast with a garter. Outside, hard by the breach, lay a ploughshare and a ladder. These objects were to guide the inquest, yet one among them would become the most striking piece of evidence.
The magistrates repaired to the scene, inspected the breach, and ordered searches through the hedges and thickets. The 1889 chronicle observes that no distinct ground warranted the suspicion that fell forthwith upon the Jews residing in the region under letters of special protection. Joseph, hailing from the neighbouring hamlet of Engelgau, was sought after; his wife was apprehended on the grounds that she tarried within the county without lawful warrant. At first, she maintained her husband had been at home on the night of the theft. Presently, she recollected that he was wont to absent himself for days together without disclosing his destination. Her arrest rested as much upon her condition as upon the inquiries of the court.
Another scent led towards Bergheim. A servant in the employ of the merchant Moser had deposited a new nightcap and lengths of cloth at Kuchenheim, explaining that two travellers had delivered them into his hands before departing for Bonn. Schüller recognised certain of the fabrics at Moser’s establishment. The latter recalled that Joseph of Engelgau had arrived on the morning of June 24th in the company of two strangers and several bundles. Taking these goods for honest merchandise, he had purchased a portion thereof. His servant had subsequently borne a pack along the road to Bonn until the travellers engaged another porter.
The authorities dispatched descriptions of the suspects to the neighbouring towns. In Bonn, it was learned that the travellers had lodged in the Jewish quarter; Schüller followed their trail as far as Siegburg. There, Nathan Levish and Joseph Salomon were run to ground, in possession of the greater part of the purloined cloths. During the search of Salomon’s person, the magistrate drew from his coat pocket a piece of garter. It matched the remnant employed to bind the shop door. The chronicle records the exclamation of the Schultheiß of Siegburg: “The garter hath betrayed thee.” The token appeared to link the scene of the crime to one of the captives; it did not yet reveal the part each had played.
Two Versions of the Road
Upon the road to Blankenheim, Levish confessed his participation. He asserted, however, that he was merely a porter, drawn into the affair by Joseph of Engelgau and Salomon. His narrative began in the Low Countries, passed through Neuwied, followed the Rhine to Bonn, and thence reached Engelgau. As they drew near Blankenheim, he related, his companions bade him cast off his shoes; Salomon had allegedly threatened him when he demurred. He had then kept watch whilst the other two seized the bundles, before setting out with them once more towards Siegburg. This deposition served at once as a confession and as a design to circumscribe his own culpability.
Salomon, for his part, denied all. He maintained he had bought the merchandise from a tradesman in Neumagen for five-and-twenty pistoles. When shown the severed garter found within his pocket, he accused the sergeant of having slipped it there. He then offered divers shifting explanations regarding a customs receipt, found in his pocketbook, which appeared to confound the commercial itinerary he described. Witnesses swore to having seen him with the cloths; Schüller identified them by means of swatches cut prior to the theft. Moser and his man confirmed his passage through Bergheim. A view of the premises established that the vantage where Levish claimed to have kept watch commanded a full view of the high street.
An inquiry that appeared so unshakeable regarding goods and itineraries was nevertheless far from its conclusion. Interrogations continued at Blankenheim until the 15th of July, whereupon the records were transmitted to the High Court of Koblenz. The reporting councillor drew up a brief of one hundred and eighteen leaves. He concluded that the two prisoners had been tracked with the merchandise and that their guilt admitted of little doubt. Yet lawful procedure demanded more than strong moral conviction. Salomon still denied the charge. The penal jurisprudence of the age did not deem an accumulation of grave presumptions to be the equivalent of a confession.
The Confession Sufficeth Not
The judges ordered fresh examinations to ascertain the precise value of the fabrics and the manner of the breach. Schüller assessed the missing wares at fifty-three thalers according to the pieces he could specifically describe, and at twenty more for those he could not specify. His wife and a locksmith affirmed the presence of the ploughshare and the ladder against the wall. On November 15th, the court delivered an interlocutory decree: Levish, having confessed to the burglary, must be examined anew to name his accomplices. His own admission was held against him, yet it was not yet sufficient to convict the others.
The Koblenz court annexed to the decree instructions for judicial torture, a lawful instrument ordained to extract or verify a confession. The protocol records that Levish adhered to his deposition; the thumbscrews were briefly applied to inflict pain, and he named Joseph of Engelgau as the man who had brought the ladder. The chronicle then describes the putting of Salomon to the question, who confessed nothing. The report states that he fell into a singular slumber and returned no answer to the interrogatories. The particulars of this judicial torture are preserved in the source as procedural record; they render neither Salomon’s silence less ambiguous nor Levish’s declarations more untainted.
For Levish, the penal course was determined. He had confessed, and the confession was then regarded as the “regina probationum”—the crown of all proofs. The Count, however, caused religion to sway the sentence. Levish petitioned to be instructed in the Catholic faith; two seminarists visited him in his dungeon. In January 1752, the Count decreed that the capital sentence should be executed by the sword rather than the gallows, following his baptism. The chancery records that he was baptised and subsequently beheaded on January 20th. The chronicler remarks upon the contradiction between the sought conversion and the rigour of the punishment; he offers no testimony from Levish as to what mercy the condemned man had hoped to purchase thereby.
Salomon had endured both examinations and the question without confessing. Under the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, the penal code of the era, an accused who bore the question without yielding was, in principle, entitled to an acquittal, notwithstanding all outward presumptions. The Koblenz brief conceded that the law pointed towards his release, yet submitted to the Count an alternative course: to detain him indefinitely as a dangerous vagabond, in the name of public security. The Count approved a sentence of perpetual imprisonment. The government of Cologne contested the irregularity of the decree and refused to admit the prisoner into its house of correction, holding that no man could be condemned to a penalty unrecognised by the law.
The Door That Remaineth Closed
The exchanges between Blankenheim, Koblenz, and Cologne dragged on. The local magistrates ultimately declined to transmit the entire dossier to the councillors of Cologne. The Count maintained that judgment had been rendered and ought not to be made heavier; his commissary, Uphoff, replied that a man virtually acquitted under torture could not be committed to the gaol without lawful warrant. He proposed a formula investing the sovereign with the power to determine the duration of the detention at his own pleasure. The debate turned no longer upon stolen cloths, but upon the limits of a petty prince’s prerogative when confronted with his own tribunals and the laws he purported to administer.
For want of a suitable house of correction, Salomon was shifted between divers places of confinement. The chronicler notes that he was transferred to Gerolstein, and thence to the fortress of Dettingen. A final entry in the register, dated March 1755, closes his record at Dettingen. Its archaic phrasing does not permit one to recount with certainty the circumstances of that end. Such obscurity stands in stark contrast to the minute detail of the record: hours, receipts, bolts of cloth, transport charges, fees, and procedures are scrupulously inscribed. The fragment of garter had bound a door to a pocket. It did not suffice to render the law coherent, nor to open the door of the prison.