Issachar Berend Lehmann, Berend Lehmann, Yissakhar Bermann Segal, Yissakhar ben Yehuda haLevi, or Berman Halberstadt (April 23, 1661 in Essen, Westphalia – July 9, 1730 in Halberstadt, Kingdom of Prussia), was a German banker, merchant, diplomatic agent as well as army and mint contractor working as a court Jew for Elector Augustus II the Strong of Saxony, King of Poland, and other German princes.

Lehmann's father belonged to the Jewish upper class of Westphalia, just like his brother-in-law, the court Jew Leffmann Behrens of Bochum, later established in Hannover.

Two years later his first son, Lehmann Behrend, was born and he built his first, modest abode in the Jewish quarter of Halberstadt (Bakenstraße 37, partly existent in the building complex of Little Venice).

He received authority to sell or pawn lands situated outside the main territory of Saxony and collected loans worth millions of guilders from Christian and Jewish banking partners, with the help of which the Saxon field marshal Heino Heinrich Graf von Flemming persuaded the majority of the Polish nobility into electing Augustus the Strong King "in" Poland.

[6] So, from Elector Frederic William III of Brandenburg he received the right to buy for himself in Halberstadt, in addition to the modest house he already possessed, a sizable building he thought fitting of his rank.

When in the extensive garden grounds he had a new building erected for a yeshiva (a Torah-/Talmud academy) as the nucleus of a community campus which was also to accommodate a large new synagogue, he was forbidden to carry on.

In his building ambitions he was permanently hindered by the Prussian local administration, but promoted by the Berlin Hofcammer, an institution geared to the levying of money for the King.

[11] In 1708, such activities led to the foundation of a Dresden branch of his Halberstadt business, in which his then 18-year-old eldest son, Lehmann Behrend, worked alongside himself and his brother-in-law, Jonas Meyer.

[12] This above all provoked the anti-Jewish protest of the Saxon estates (among whom the clergy and traders were particularly active), which Augustus the Strong fended off for a longtime but eventually gave in to.

Lehmann resided in a stately mansion and founded a Hebrew printing office, which was conducted by the printer Israel Abraham from Jeßnitz,[14] but failed for Christian censorship reasons.

[16] At the same time, he lost a great amount of capital, which was confiscated when his son-in-law, the Hanover court Jew Isaac Behrends, went bankrupt and Lehmann was accused of having illegally held back securities, jewels and money from the estate for him (the allegation was never verified).

He also protested in several letters to King George I, who was also the Hannoverian sovereign, against his relatives' five years' imprisonment and ultimate torture (which did not yield the expected confession of the alleged embezzlemement).

One of them was to hold money to facilitate the marriages of poor orphan boys and girls in the Halberstadt community, another was to secure the livelihood of his yeshiva scholars.

[20] Lehmann's gravestone, in the oldest Halberstadt Israelitic cemetery, is preserved, and it praises his generosity as a community benefactor and his high reputation in the Christian "palaces" which enabled him to act as a shtadlan (an advocate) of his correligionists.

This 19th-century picture of the Royal Resident as a saint and hero has recently been characterized as "not necessarily having to do with reality but being an identification offer [...] invented at the writing desks of Auerbach and Marcus Lehmann".

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.

The anti-semitism of the National Socialists yielded two contributions about Berend Lehmann, the first, by Peter Deeg (1938),[26] 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.

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 his public spirit.

There remains a doorway of a richly decorated baroque building near the museum dating from about 1730 which was taken down in 1986 (although it might have been saved), and is locally taken to have been Berend Lehmann’s Palace,[28] although there is no evidence that it was connected with him.