Isaias Hellman was born in 1842 in Reckendorf, Bavaria, a small town nestled by the Baunach River about ten miles from Bamberg. The dirt streets were windy and the houses were half-timbered or weathered stone topped with distinctive curved red roof tiles. The region’s major product was beer.
Jews had been living in Reckendorf since 1644, after the knight ruling the region invited them to stay to help repopulate the region after the devastating Thirty Years War. While the Jews knew they would have to pay a tax to live in Reckendorf—a tax not levied on its Catholic residents—they had few alternatives. Jews were not citizens and were banned from living in cities.
Two-thirds of Reckendorf’s 950 residents were Catholics and the rest were Jewish. The two groups lived together in an uneasy alliance, but there were sporadic episodes of violence. In 1692, some of the town’s Catholics killed and maimed their Jewish neighbors. In 1746, angry mobs threatened to kill the Jews because they mistakenly thought they had captured and killed a young boy.
Jewish life was tightly regulated. Jews in some parts of Bavaria were often forced to live in a particular area of town. They were required to purchase an annual letter of protection from a noble family. After 1813, authorities tried to cap the number of Jews living in any particular town. The only way a Jew who came into maturity could stay in a town is if another Jew died.
Most of the Catholics worked as farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, small-scale manufacturers, or brewers. Jewish occupations were restricted. They were not allowed to join guilds or own farmland, so Jews tended to be weavers, hops dealers or cattle brokers who bought, raised, and resold cattle. Many Jews were peddlers who bought finished goods in town and sold them throughout the countryside. Some Jews lent money or sold goods on credit to their customers, which is where Jews got their reputation as moneylenders.
The center of Jewish life in Reckendorf was the sandstone synagogue built in 1727. The rabbi would not preach from a bima, or stage, but stand in the center of a large downstairs room surrounded by his congregants. Women worshipped upstairs in a balcony. 
There was a mikvah, or ritual bath, in the basement where the water could be heated with copper pipes. In 1798, the Jews were given permission to construct a cemetery about two-thirds of a mile from town. Prior to that, they had to take their dead to a Jewish cemetery in Ebern, about seven miles away.
Bavarian law continued to restrict Jews from living where they wanted and working in the jobs they preferred. Starting in the 1840s, many Jews left Germany’s small towns and moved to the cities or to other countries that offered more opportunity.
The discovery of gold in California in 1848 encouraged many Jewish youths—including numerous Hellmans—to travel to the frontier to try their luck in a new society. Between 1840 and 1870, more than 20,000 of Bavaria’s 59,000 Jews emigrated, drastically changing rural Jewish life.