of the works of his Halberstadt yeshiva scholars. An unbiased approach A further step in the direction of a historically unbiased evaluation of Berend Lehmann was taken by the Berlin archivist Josef Meisl, the later founder of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. In 1924 he edited Lehmann's correspondence from the Baltic battlefields of the Northern War. They show Lehmann's extensive activities as an army contractor and his aspiration to participate in political processes (which Meisl, however, regarded as amateurish). Selma Stern A great push came into Lehmann's biography through the historian Selma Stern, who between 1925 and 1962 first dealt with the conditions of Jews in 17th- and 18th-century Prussia and then with court Jews in particular In her collection of documents his activities for the Halberstadt Jews and the Jewish community in general became more concrete. In her court Jew book she ranked him with the Wertheimers and Oppenheimers of Vienna and even with the Rothschilds of Frankfurt. She contrasted him as the "genuine" court Jew with the less well-reputed Joseph Süß Oppenheimer of Stuttgart, and thus idealised him. Anti-semitic setback The anti-semitism of the National Socialists yielded two contributions about Berend Lehmann, the first, by Peter Deeg (1938), being a caricature of him as the stereotyped "usurer", the second one, by Heinrich Schnee (1953), a one-sided portrait of him as a profiteer and a clever augmenter of Jewish influence. New eulogies In 1970, as a sort of response to these distortions, the French private scholar Pierre Saville published the first monography on the Résident Royal. With little new evidence, he strengthened the "identification offer" rôle of Berend Lehmann by painting another heroic picture of him. The American orthodox rabbi, Manfred R. Lehman, did the same in several contributions about his "possible ancestor". New Research Studies from the sources regarding Berend Lehmann were resumed in the first decade of the 21st century by Lucia Raspe and Berndt Strobach. Traces and memory in Halberstadt A building complex In Halberstadt the building complex at Bakenstraße Nr. 37, which survived the air raid on the city in 1945 and the subsequent neglect of historic architecture in East Germany, is an impressive document of Lehmann's building activity. In one of its outer walls the remnants of a pedestrian bridge across the river Holtemme (which in its day flowed openly among the houses of the Jewish quarter) testify to