When Germany's Carolingian House Brought Jews Into Their Land

 Nadene Goldfoot                                          

A family of Frankish aristocrats and the dynasty (750–887 CE) that they established to rule western Europe. The dynasty’s name derives from the large number of family members who bore the name Charles, most notably Charlemagne.  

The Franks were a member of a Germanic-speaking people who invaded the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. Dominating present-day northern France, Belgium, and western Germany, the Franks established the most powerful Christian kingdom of early medieval western Europe.

The Carolingian dynasty  was a Frankish noble family founded by Charles Martel with origins in the Arnulfing and Pippinid clans of the 7th century CE.  The Carolingian dynasty reached its peak in 800 with the crowning of Charlemagne as the first Emperor of Romans in the West in over three centuries. His death in 814 began an extended period of fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire and decline that would eventually lead to the evolution of the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire.   Charles Martel has become notorious in historiography for his role in the development of the concept of feudalism.                                                   

In the 8th and 9th centuries, the Carolingian royal house adopted a pro-Jewish policy and encouraged the settlement of Jews in its dominions with the object of developing trade.  The reputation of Jews having excellent skills as traders was already old, for they had been doing such things throughout ancient days, discovered in the Bible.  King Solomon had been buying the cedar trees from Lebanon for the Temple in Jerusalem.  Jews had been around in Germany to a small extent, possibly even brought there by the Roman army as slaves who were turned into soldiers serving in the Roman garrisons.  It was in 321 CE that the emperor Constantine issued regulations which indicate the existence of an organized Jewish community with rabbis and elders at Cologne.  It's possible that others were settled elsewhere on the Rhineland at the time.  Jerusalem and its Temple had fallen to the Romans in 70 CE and most of the survivors had either been taken prisoners or had somehow escaped, possible even before the great fall and scattered, fleeing for their safety.

The Holy Roman Empire, historiographically denoted as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, was a multi-ethnic complex of territories in Western and Central Europe that developed during the Early Middle Ages and continued until its dissolution in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars.  Germany was the center of religion, evidently.  Earlier, it was the Roman soldiers who had turned German barbarians into mercenaries and used them in their fight of taking over land.                              

    Massacre of the Jews of Metz during the First Crusade, by Auguste Migette.

Jews were found by the 9th century to be living in the principal commercial centers in Augsburg and Metz;  in the 10th at Worms, Mainz, Magdeburg, Ratisbon, etc.   The densest settlement was in the the Rhineland area in Mainz, Speyer, Worms, Cologne, where an intense intellectual life developed in the 11th century under Franco-Jewish influence.  

Persecutions started and were recorded by 1012 as in 1096,, the Crusaders had ridden through and massacred the Jews throughout the Rhineland and the adjacent areas.  From then on, the moral atmosphere changed, and at all time of unrest or excitement in Germany, the Jews were attacked.  As elsewhere in Europe,, this contributed to the process which drove them out of trade and forced them into money-lending;  the only profession Christians felt were beneath them to pursue.  

By entering Germany when being Hebrew speakers, Jews slowly started using German words by the Middle Ages mixed in with Hebrew and finally had created Yiddish.                                            

Mainz:  Jews probably lived here during the Roman Period, but records are from the 10th century when it was the principal community of Northern Europe and the main center for the diffusion of rabbinic learning.  In 1012, the Jews were expelled from Mainz, but soon returned.  The community obtained protection from the archbishop on the advent of the crusaders in 1096, but hundreds were nevertheless murdered.  In 1209, the emperor conceded to the archbishop his rights over the Jews.  A further series of massacres occurred at the time of the Black Death in 1349.  

Expulsion edicts were issued in 1438, 1462 and 1470.  

In the 10th and 11th centuries, the Jews were prominent in commerce but from the 12th, moneylending became a main occupation, being the only thing open for Jews by then.  there was an elaborate communal organization and from the 12th century, the Jews of Mainz united, for many purposes, with the neighboring communities of Spire and Worms (the group was called the SHUM after the Hebrew initials.)  

Despite vicissitudes, Mainz was a center of Jewish learning, especially of talmudic study, until the expulsion of 1473.  Jews began to trickle back from 1583 and the community was re-established.  Full emancipation came after the French Revolution.  Until the Nazi Period, its Jewish population numbered about 3,000.  The Jewish population by 1990 was 100. 

Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz, better known as Raben (1090-1170) was a codifier and liturgical poet.  The book he wrote, Stone of Help, contains much material bearing upon Jewish life at the time.  

Worms' first Jews probably arrived in the 10th century.  By the 11th, it was well established.  Emperor Henry IV, in return for financial assistance, rewarded them with substantial privileges in 1074 and 1090, granting them freedom of commerce, security of property, and imperial protection.  The community was annihilated in the first Crusade, re-established shortly afterward and again destroyed in the Black Death outbreaks of 1349. 

                                                        

                    Rabbi Solomon Yitzhak ben Isaac (1040-1105) RASHI

 Jews were expulsed in 1615, restrictions were imposed in 1641, and a massacre was carried out by the soldiers of Louis XIV in 1689.  Emancipation was conferred after the French Revolution.  Worms was a famous center of Jewish scholarship in the Medieval Period and RASHI, the famous biblical commentator,  studied there, traveling  from Troyes, France to do so.  His comments are still relevant today. Worms was closely connected to the Jewish communities of Speyer and Mainz, the 3 together being called the SHUM.  Its cemetery dates from the 11th century, while its synagogue originally was built in 1034 and is close to the Rashi chapel of 1624 and the ritual bath of 1186 (mikvah) stood until they were destroyed in November 1938, probably in an anti-Semitic frenzy.  After the war, they were reconstructed.  The Jewish community of 1933 had numbered 1,200 and had ended entirely with the Nazis.  

                                                      

Eleazar ben Judah of Worms:  His immediate family as shown on geni.com-a genealogy site, Son of Judah ben Kalonymus and wife of Kalonymus V

Husband of Dulcina of Worms
Father of Belat; Hannah and Yakov ben Eliezer
Brother of Dolsa bat Yehuda Kalonymus, V; Kalonymus VI "the Elder" ben Yehudah and Todros ben Kalonymus (Abulafia?), Nasi of Provence

                                                           

Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (1160-1238) was also a codifier, a kabbalist and liturgical poet.  

He was a native of Mainz, and his wife and 2 daughters were slaughtered by Crusaders right before his eyes in 1196. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Eleazar underwent great sufferings during the Crusades. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that on the night of 22 Kislev, 1196, he was engaged on his commentary on Genesis (Eleazar relates that he had reached the parashah Vayeshev), when two Crusaders entered his house and killed his wife Dulca (Dolce), his two daughters Belet(Belette) and Hannah, and wounded him and his son Jacob who did not escape. His wife had conducted a business in parchment scrolls in order to support the family and enable him to devote all his time to study.(This was typical.  Many Jewish wives did this.)  [1] Many of the piyyutim he authored protest at Israel's suffering and hope for redemption and revenge against her tormentors. He also recorded the deaths of his family in a moving and poetic eulogy.

 From 1201, he was the rabbi at Worms.  His works, based on the system of his master, Judah Hasid, popularized the Askenazi theory of "practical" Kabbalah, which stressed the doctrine of repentance.  He wrote down the ethical teachings that are embodied in his code, Sepher ha-Rokeah--The Book of the spice-dealer, after which he is knon as Eleazar Rokeah.  Eleazar of Worms (אלעזר מוורמייזא) (c. 1176–1238), or Eleazar ben Judah ben Kalonymus, also sometimes known today as Eleazar Rokeach ("Eleazar the Perfumer" אלעזר רקח) from the title of his Book of the Perfumer (Sefer ha rokeah ספר הרקח)—where the numerical value of "Perfumer" (in Hebrew) is equal to Eleazar, was a leading Talmudist and Kabbalist, and the last major member of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, a group of German Jewish pietists.

In doing my genealogy research, I have found that my father's family of Goldfoot/Goldfus connects to the Kalonymus family, and therefore to Eleazar of Worms!  It's an important family mentioned and magnified in Dan Rottenberg's book, Finding Our Fathers-a guidebook to Jewish genealogy.  In this book, he shows charts of Rashi's family.  He wrote that anna and Bellette, daughters of Dolce and Eleazar of Worms were killed by Crusaders, but other branches presumably continued, and it's  interesti;ng; to speculate as to who those descendants might be.  Us?  Maybe.  Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, called Maestro Calo (1286-1328) was born later in France, and also lived in Rome.  He translated many  papers from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin for King Robert of Naples. As it happened, many Mizrachi Jews wrote in Arabic instead of Hebrew like the Ashkenazic Jews.    

Resource:.   

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_dynasty#:~:text=The%20Carolingian%20dynasty%20(known%20variously,of%20the%207th%20century%20AD.

https://www.geni.com/people/Eleazar-ben-Yehudah-of-Worms-Rokeach/6000000015809475920

https://miqua.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/321-broschure-english_gesamt.pdf