Affair of the false receipts

Forged receipts were fabricated and circulated throughout the Alsatian countryside: peasants indebted to Jewish creditors produced vouchers they had never received, attesting to debts that had been settled when they had not. The bailiff of Landser, François Hell, who was at that very moment publishing a pamphlet against the Jews of Alsace, was found to have been involved in the fabrication and was sent into exile. The affair provoked unrest, legal proceedings, and an inquiry by the Conseil souverain; it left communities ruined and the countryside convinced that the debt itself was the crime. It was in its wake that Cerf Berr turned to Moïse Mendelssohn, who asked Christian Wilhelm von Dohm to write his memoir on the civil improvement of the Jews.