Eisenstadt, today the capital of Burgenland, was the seat of the Esterházy princes and the chief of the Seven Communities, the Sheva Kehillot. Jews lived there under the princes' protection from the seventeenth century; after an expulsion in 1671 they resettled in a new quarter on the estate in 1675, and a charter of 1690 gave the community self-government in return for annual taxes.
From the 1780s the Wolf family pioneered the sale of Eisenstadt's kosher wine to regions that grew no wine of their own. The firm, later known as Leopold Wolf's Söhne, linked the wines of western Hungary with Vienna and exported them to Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, southern Germany and Russian Poland, and it became the most important business of its kind in the Habsburg lands.
In 1901 Sándor Wolf and his brother took over. The cellars ran beneath several buildings of the town and held more than a thousand barrels. Wolf was also a collector: his private museum of archaeology, art and Jewish heritage became the foundation of the Burgenland regional museum, and the Wolf house is still part of it.
In 1938, immediately after the Anschluss, the Jews of Burgenland were expelled and some 250 years of communal autonomy came to an end. Wolf was arrested by the Gestapo, forced to give up his property and collection, and escaped via Italy to Haifa, where he died in 1946. In a letter of 1945 he described his 150-year-old firm as destroyed. Of the 441 Jews of Eisenstadt, 245 survived the war.
The story shows what a kosher wine trade needed long before modern certification: a reliable source of wine made under Jewish supervision, and customers in places without vineyards of their own. Both conditions still shape the economics of a kosher run today.
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