After the rebuilding of Schneidemühl in the wake of the Great Fire of 1834 and after the elimination of the old ghetto, many Jewish families began to live on and around the town's squares and its adjoining streets. An examination of the Schneidemühl City Directory of 1896 reveals how the new Jewish burghers clustered there as a result of the commercial upswing brought about the unification of the German Reich in 1871.

Nearly one third of the houses on Neuer Markt, Mühlenstrasse, Friedrichstrasse, Posenerstrasse, Wilhelmstrasse were Jewish owned, while some had only Jewish tenants. This was Schneidemühl's Jewish heart. Of the seventy-three people listed as living on Wilhelmsplatz, fourteen belonged to the Jewish community who also owned the community centre, the Gemeindehaus, at No. 4, while No. 10 was the mikveh.

Ironically, the occupations that had been forced upon Jews over the centuries now helped them to excel—often to become leaders in their field—and to climb the ladders of success in this era of industrial capitalism. Fin-de-siècle Schneidemühl could boast of a petit bourgeoisie that then included some of the wealthiest and best-known Jewish families. Julius Edel’s Likörfabrik, or liqueur manufacturing, was already established in 1870.

There were no particularly ‘better addresses’ in the city. Siegmund Jacob who owned a house on Zeughausstrasse, was a wholesaler in grain, feeds and vegetables—a Jewish monopoly in Schneidemühl. He is said to have been one of the first in town to have acquired an automobile.

Several of the wealthy Schweriners’ addresses were on Friedrichstrasse. Isidor Sommerfeld, owner of a mill, known to have made his fortunes in timber, lived on Hasselort. The popular Dr. Emil Mislowitzer’s mode of transport had advanced over a period of two decades from simple bicycle, then horse and buggy, to a double span of white horses with soft-wheeled carriage, and sleigh in winter.

By 1904 — when there were a mere dozen automobiles in Schneidemühl — Dr. Emil Mislowitzer’s brand new two-cylinder Ford was widely admired. (Ironically, Henry Ford's anti-Semitism had not flowered yet until a few decades later)

Among the numerous Jewish businesses in the area were the Konfektion, or clothing stores, that sold ready-made and tailor-made clothes. Practically ninety percent of tailoring stores were Jewish owned, together with furriers and the universal Kurz-und Weisswaren, the haberdasheries. A business innovator was Lesser Hirsch—one of the first merchants to apply such novel business management practices as set prices and no credit; he was not to be undersold and gave discounts for cash purchases. He had also bought Julius Engel’s store on Neuer Markt 26 and later owned the popular Hill’s Hotel.

Some owners of tailoring stores — such as Schneidermeister Sally Eifert and Hugo Simonstein, or the master butchers Klein, Lippmann, Rosenthal, Rothschild and Jerochim, as well as master bakers and shoemakers — were accepted as proud members of the various guilds. Two of the town’s doctors belonged to the Jewish community; and so did four of the six horse traders, the town’s only pawnshop, not forgetting the ragman—the latter two finding themselves at the somewhat lower end of the cultural spectrum.

Isidor Schweriner, who ‘was in grain,’ retired a millionaire to Berlin in 1905, where he was known to have financed the building of a private synagogue.

These surviving calling cards (below) from the last decades of the 19th century make for interesting reading.