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V28 2025 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 28, Number 35, 2025, Article 23

Here are some additional items in the media this week that may be of interest. -Editor

Scottish banknotes get no respect in England despite being legal tender. In the latest indignity, a pub chain has banned their use. -Editor

SCOTTISH banknotes have been banned by hundreds of JD Wetherspoon pubs across England, it has been revealed.

Bosses at the bar chain reportedly instructed staff not to accept any Scottish £20 and £50 notes from late November last year.

The decision comes after Wetherspoon bosses were warned by the Bank of England last October that a large number of fake Scottish £20 notes were being put into circulation by organised crime gangs, according to the Scottish Sun.

The news outlet reported that some Scots have been left "embarrassed" after their Scottish notes were refused at Wetherspoon's English branches over the last year.

A spokesperson for the pub chain has since apologised for the impact the policy is having on its customers.

Eddie Gershon told The Scottish Sun that the banning of Scottish £20 and £50 notes does not apply in Scotland, along with certain towns and cities with close ties to the city.

Currency problems continue in Gaza, with moneychangers extracting high commissions. -Editor

In the shadow of war, economic collapse and severe shortages of food and other essentials, civilians in Gaza face an additional challenge in the struggle to survive: the rocketing cost of accessing their own money.

With banks closed because of the conflict and digital payments widely rejected in local markets, Palestinians are forced to rely on an informal and increasingly predatory trade in physical currency, with commission rates as high as 55 per cent.

"I get paid 2,800 shekels [$817] a month from the Palestinian Authority," said Kamel Abu Hazaa, 42, who was displaced from Jabalia and now lives in Al Nasr area of Gaza city. "But after cashing it out, I receive only about 1,350 shekels. The rest? Gone, to liquidity traders and middlemen.

"Even if I had the full amount, it wouldn't be enough. Flour costs 30 shekels a kilo, sugar is 200. The prices are insane."

Businessmen, flush with cash earned before the war began in October 2023, now control the flow of physical currency. Given the risk of storing large amounts of money while banks are closed, they offload portions of it through a chain of intermediaries, who in turn sell it at a high mark-up to desperate civilians.

Buyers receive cash after transferring funds to the traders electronically. But those who profit from the system do not consider themselves to be the villains. A small-scale cash trader operating in Gaza city said the system was deeply flawed, but insisted the responsibility lay with "big traders" who control the supply and set the rates.

While looking for other things I came across this 2016 obituary for dealer and Brasher doubloon owner Walter Perschke. -Editor

If there's a coin equivalent of the Honus Wagner baseball card — the Holy Grail for collectors — it's the celebrated Brasher doubloon, the first gold coin struck in the United States and one of the rarest in the world.

The doubloon was created in 1787 by silver and goldsmith Ephraim Brasher, whose clients included his neighbor, George Washington.

Just seven 1787 Brasher doubloons are known to exist. Chicago coin dealer Walter Perschke's was considered the finest.

When Mr. Perschke bought it for a world-record $430,000 in 1979, "It was a breathtaking event," said Jeff Bernberg of Willowbrook's Rarcoa...

"I felt that of any American coin, it probably has the most romance and the most enthusiastic interest among collectors," he said. "It had the history. It had the pizzazz. It had the marketability."

In 1979, when he bought the Brasher doubloon, it made international headlines. It hadn't been up for auction for 57 years and had last sold in 1922 for $3,000 — a record at the time.

Mr. Perschke held onto the doubloon for 35 years before auctioning it off for $4.59 million.

Here's a New York Times piece sent in by Len Augsburger. While not numismatic, the methodology behind research into the provenance of a Stradivarius violin is closely similar. -Editor

Shapreau compared images of the instrument before it was stolen with photographs taken when it went up for auction in 2000. The nicks and dings on the violin's body appeared similar on both violins.Credit...

As Germany devolved into chaos at the end of World War II, a rare violin from the famed shop of the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari was plundered from a bank safe in Berlin.

The instrument, crafted in 1709 during the golden age of violin-making, had been deposited there years earlier by the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family as Nazi persecution put assets owned by Jews in jeopardy.

For decades after the war, the family searched to no avail for the violin, known as the Mendelssohn, placing ads in magazines and filing reports with the German authorities. The violin, valued at millions of dollars, was presumed lost or destroyed.

Now, the Mendelssohn may have resurfaced. An eagle-eyed cultural property scholar, Carla Shapreau, recently came across photos from a 2018 exhibition of Stradivarius instruments in Tokyo. She spotted a violin that bore striking similarities to the Mendelssohn, though it has a different name — Stella — and creation date — 1707 instead of 1709.

"My jaw dropped," said Shapreau, a senior fellow with the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who had been searching for the instrument for more than 15 years.