“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Jews had already achieved renown as army-purveyors. Under the Commonwealth the most famous army-contractor was Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, ‘the great Jew,’ who came to London some time between 1630 and 1635, and was very soon accounted among the most prominent traders in the land. In 1649 he was one of the five London merchants intrusted by the council of state with the army contract for corn. It is said that he annually imported into England silver to the value of £100,000. In the period that ensued, especially in the wars of William III, Sir Solomon Medina (‘the Jew Medina’) was ‘the great contractor,’ and for his services he was knighted, being the first professing Jew to receive that honor. “It was the same in the wars of the Spanish Succession; here, too, Jews were the principal army-contractors. In 1716 the Jews of Strassburg recall the services they rendered the armies of Louis XIV by furnishing information and supplying provisions. Indeed, Louis XIV’s army-contractor-in-chief was a Jew, Jacob Worms by name; and in the eighteenth century Jews gradually took a more and more prominent part in this work. In 1727 the Jews of Metz brought into the city in the space of six weeks, 2,000 horses for food and more than 5,000 for remounts. Field Marshal Maurice, of Saxony, the victor of Fontenoy, expressed the opinion that his armies were never better served with supplies than when the Jews were the contractors. One of the best known of the army-contractors in the time of the last two Louises was Cerf Beer, in whose patent of naturalization it is recorded that ‘... in the wars which raged in Alsace in 1770 and 1771 he found the opportunity of proving his zeal in our service and in that of the state.’ “Similarly the house of Gradis, of Bordeaux, was an establishment of international repute in the eighteenth century. Abraham Gradis set up large store-houses in Quebec to supply the needs of the French troops there. Under the Revolutionary Government, under the Directory, in the Napoleonic wars it was always the Jews who acted as purveyors. In this connection a public notice displayed in the streets of Paris is significant. There was a famine in the city and the Jews were called upon to show their gratitude for the rights bestowed upon them by the Revolution by bringing in corn. ‘They alone,’ says the author of the notice, ‘can successfully accomplish this enterprise, thanks to their business relations, of which their fellow citizens ought to have full benefit.’ A parallel story comes from Dresden. In 1720 the Court Jew, Jonas Meyer, saved the town from starvation by supplying it with large quantities of corn. (The Chronicler mentions 40,000 bushels.)