Samuel Oppenheimer

Samuel Oppenheimer (1630–1703) was the court Jew and military financier of Emperor Leopold I in Vienna. Born at Heidelberg, he funded the Habsburg armies in the Great Turkish War and became the emperor's Oberfaktor.

Though Vienna's Jews had been expelled in 1670, Leopold let him settle there; he founded synagogues and schools and ransomed Jewish captives of the Turkish wars. Contemporaries called him the Judenkaiser, and he undertook delicate diplomatic missions for the emperor.

Around 1700 rioters looted his house. When he died in 1703, the state repudiated its debts to his heir Emanuel, bankrupting the firm and triggering a credit crisis.