When Jews Were Invited to Germany, Imagine That!

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                   

In 321 CE, emperor Constantine issued regulations which indicate the existence of an organized Jewish community with rabbis and elders living in the city of Cologne.  Jews had started to settle on the Rhineland at the time.  Jewish soldiers were found serving in Roman garrisons.  When the 8th and 9th centuries rolled around, the Carolingian Royal House had adopted a pro-Jewish policy and encouraged the settlement of Jews in its dominions with the object of developing trade.  In the 9th century, Jews were in Augsburg and Metz, and by the 10th century in Worms, Mainz, Magdeburg, Ratisbon, etc.  The densest settlement was in the Rhineland in the cities of Mainz, Speyer, Worms, Cologne, etc., where an intense intellectual life developed by the 11th century under Franco- Jewish influence.                     

it is also assumed that Jewish communities dispersed. Jews resettled in the Rhine area coming from southern France where Roman life had more or less remained intact.  The famous Rabbi, RASHI (rabbi Solomon Yitzhaki ben Isaac, was born in Troyes, France in 1040 but studied in the Rhineland.   Traveling Jewish merchants certainly would have had dependencies in Rhenish towns, even though the first branches are only mentioned in 906 for Mainz, and 960 for Worms.

                          
Pope Urban II(1042-1099) saw a change to show his leadership over European Christendom.  To the nobles, a war in the East offered a chance for adventure, booty and conquest.  Merchants of Italy saw it as a means of reopening the trade routes in the Near East that had been blocked by the Muslims.  The armies of Europe were united, so the 1st horde of Crusaders left for the Holy land in 1096.  There would eventually be 4 different groups of Crusaders from 1095 to 1291. It was in 1290 that Jews were expelled from England and weren't allowed back in till 1655.                                            

The Crusaders were traveling through the Rhineland and came across communities of Jews, realizing that they had "infidels" in their own lands, so why spare the "murders of the Lord?"  Ferociously the Crusaders attacked the Jewish sections of town after town:  Cologne, Speyer, Worms, Mainz...They left behind charred ruins and the bodies of some 5,000 massacred men, women, and children.  

                                                 

Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (1160-1238) was most likely born in Mainz. Through his father Judah ben Kalonymus, he was a descendant of the great Kalonymus family of Mainz. Eleazar was also a disciple of Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg (Judah he-Hasid), who initiated him into the study of the Kabbalah, at that time little known in Germany. According to Zunz, Eleazar was hazzan at Erfurt before he became rabbi at Worms. (I'm related to the Kalonymus family.)    

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

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 in 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 before his eyes, 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. 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.  Rabbi Eleazar is one of my family's ancestors.  

The Christian armies  captured Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, a day the soldiers went on a wild rampage of destruction, rape and slaughter.  the entire Jewish population was crowded into the chief synagogue and the building was set on fire.  The Jewish community remaining in the City of David  was burned alive.             

Worms Jewish community was annihilated in the 1st Crusade from 1096-1099.  It was created  in the 10th century. Emperor Henry IV, in return for loans of money from the Jews, , rewarded the Jews with substantial privileges in 1074 and 1090, granting them freedom of commerce, security of property, and imperial protection.  For at that time, that was all the Christians allowed them to do to support themselves;  the distasteful business of loaning money, something looked down upon by the Christians. The city went through their periods of expulsion, allowing Jews back, etc.  

                                                

Mainz was a German town where Jews lived in the Roman period, most likely taken their as slaves.  It was a principal community of Northern Europe and main center for rabbinic learning.  In 1012, the Jews were expelled from Mainz but soon returned.  They received protection from the archbishop on the advent of the crusaders in 1096, but hundreds were murdered anyway.  In 1209, the emperor conceded to the archbishop his rights over the Jews.   In the 10th to 11th century, the Jews were prominent in commerce but from the 12th, moneylending became a main occupation; showing everything else was shut down to Jews.                                                 

Old Jewish Cemetery Mainz, “New Section” of the Cemetery © Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe Rheinland-Pfalz

 A further series of massacres occurred at the time of the BLACK DEATH IN 1349. (The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic, which reached England in June 1348. It was the first and most severe manifestation of the second pandemic, caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. It caused the death of 75–200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa, peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351.  The Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe—almost one-third of the continent’s population.  They didn't know what had hit them. The Black Death of 1349 put an end to the Jewish community.   It is suspected that trading ships from the East had brought the bacteria.  No one had suspected this, however. The term Black Death was not used until the late 17th century.) Expulsion edicts were issued in 1438, 1462, and 1470.         

View from the Altpörtel tower over Maximilianstraße, towards the cathedral's west facade

Speyer  older spelling Speier, known as Spire in French and formerly as Spires in English) is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany with approximately 50,000 inhabitants. Located on the left bank of the river Rhine, Speyer lies 25 km (16 miles) south of Ludwigshafen and Mannheim, and 21 km (13 miles) south-west of Heidelberg. Founded by the Romans, it is one of Germany's oldest cities.  From 1070, the Jews practiced commerce under the protection of Bishop Rodiger who saw Jews as valuable objects, and even invited refugees from Mayence to settle there.  In 1096, the Bishop of Spire protected the Jews from the Crusaders, but some were killed, anyway.  The BLACK DEATH led to murder and expulsion.  Its significance is attested to by the frequency of the Ashkenazi Jewish surname Shapiro/Shapira and its variants Szpira/Spiro/Speyer

^[1] With the construction of Speyer Cathedral, beginning in 1032, Speyer emerged as one of the major towns along the Rhine. The first records of Jews in Speyer appear in the 1070s. They were members of the renowned Kalonymos family of Mainz, which had migrated a century before from Italy. Other Jews from Mainz had possibly also settled in Speyer.

Located in the former Imperial cathedral cities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, in the Upper Rhine Valley, the serial site of Speyer, Worms and Mainz comprise the Speyer Jewry-Court, with the structures of the synagogue and women’s shul (Yiddish for synagogue), the archaeological vestiges of the yeshiva (religious school), the courtyard and the still intact underground mikveh (ritual bath), which has retained its high architectural and building quality.

                                             

Saladin was a Sunni Muslim Kurd. He became the first sultan of both Egypt and Syria, founding the Ayyubid dynasty. Saladin led the Muslim military campaign against the Crusader states in the Levant. At the height of his power, his sultanate spanned Egypt, Syria, the Jazira (Upper Mesopotamia), the Hejaz (western Arabia), Yemen, parts of western North Africa, and Nubia.   He is described as a man whose chivalry and generosity was unequalled by any contemporary. More disturbing to the historian, Lane-Poole is so completely under the spell of his Arab sources that he claims: “...civilization, magnanimity, toleration, real chivalry, and gentle culture were all on the side of the Saracens.”                                 

Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, son of Joseph Ben Maimon of Cordova, Spain, left Spain with his family because of the Almohade persecutions  for Fez, Morocco to be with Jews there so they didn't forget their faith who had been forced to convert to Islam. The religious fundamentalism of the Almohad Caliphate lead to emigration of Jews and Christians from southern Iberia to the Christian north and North Africa, specifically Egypt. He eventually settled in Egypt.  Maimonides, his common name, also left Spain with his family is the man who developed the 613 Precepts from the Torah, laws of Moses.  He could not settle in Palestine, and was still suffering from the aftermath of the Crusades, the whole family went to Egypt and became the spiritual head of the Cairo community.                           

The Crusaders controlled Jerusalem for less than a century---in 1187 it was recaptured by the Egyptian Sultan, Saladin.  This is the man in whose court Moses Maimonides, was the Jewish physician.  Such Muslim triumphs led to the calling of new Crusades, but the European armies which marched to Palestine were weak, and in 1291, the last Christian troops were expelled from the Holy land.  

Usually, the Jewish practice of "keeping kosher" kept them well in times of illness because of their practice of keeping clean, bathing, washing hands, and food preparation.  Quite often they were accused of being the poisoner of wells, the reason of an illness since they would be free of it.  

Resource:

My People, Abba Eban's History of the Jews, Volume I  Adapted by David Bamberger

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

https://www.crusaderkingdoms.com/saladin2.html

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1636/

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2841&context=facpub

https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death