Germany / The Rhineland and Bavaria
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At the height of the Middle Ages, the Jewish community in Mainz rivaled the communities of Worms and Speyer. Few traces of this community remain. Among several stone tombs preserved in the Jewish cemetery is that of Rabbi Gershom ben Yehuda (c. 960-1028), called Meor ha-Golah (Light of the Exile). A A has replaced the old one. It was built in 2010 and is part of the Jewish Community center ...
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The independent city of Frankfurt has welcomed Jews since 1150. However, from 1460 until their emancipation at the end of the seventeenth century, the Jews were confined to Judengasse (alley of the Jews), a ghetto that became quickly overcrowded. In 1720, moneylender Meyer Amschel Rothschild, his wife, Gütele, and their eighteen children moved into one of the houses in the area. Meyer’s ...
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The small city of Friedberg possesses the deepest mikvah in Germany: seventy-two steps carved into the basalt lead the visitor to a natural spring situated eighty-two feet below the surface. At the bottom of the staircase, a stone tablet dedicated to the builder of this bath displays the date of its origin in 1260. An octogonal opening in the dome above is the sole source of light and gives ...
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The oldest vestiges of a Jewish presence in Germany are found in the Rhineland. For a long time the river constituted the western border of the Roman Empire. In the fortified cities of the frontier such as Colonia Agrippina (Cologne), the Diaspora Jews found favorable conditions in which to exercice their industrial and commercial talents. Development of Rhenish judaism Later, in the Middle ...
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Once again the capital of a unified Germany, Berlin today has the largest Jewish community in the country (11000 people). This is nonetheless far fewer than the some 170000 Jews who lived here just before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. One can well imagine that the ghosts of history will wander in Berlin for a long time to come, a city that, like Vienna, was a major economic, ...
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The synagogue of the handsome coastal town of Ostend becomes busy in the summer. It was built partly with the help of rich financiers. At one time as many as 300 families came to pray here. Among the famous Jewish figures who stayed in Ostend were Marc Chagall and Albert Einstein. Ostend is a seaside town that has been very popular with British holidaymakers for centuries, as James Joyce, for ...
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The monumental Ashkenazic Synagogue in The Hague was sold to the municipality, which put it at the disposal of a congregation of Turkish Muslims. It has since become the Al Aqsa Mosque. The Ashkenazic community in The Hague then acquired a former Protestant church in the Bezuidenhout quarter and transformed it into a . Because the maintenance costs were too expensive, however, the synagogue ...
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Belfast Synagogue holds regular Friday evening services. The cemetery of Falls Road, a few miles north of Belfast, has one of the oldest Jewish tombs in Northern Ireland, a big granit obelisk in memory of Daniel Joseph Jaffe. Sadly, the monument had been neglected and is covered with graffiti.
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Limerick’s small Jewish community (170 people) disappeared in 1904 after the only pogrom in Irish history- a pogrom with zero victims. The small of Kilmurray at Newcastle, County Limerick, has been restored and its six tombstones are perfectly preserved.
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opened in 1989 on the site of the old “Jewstown”. This was the quarter where James Joyce’s father was born. Offices were held at a local synagogue until recently. The worshipers now pray at the Dublin synagogue.
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York’s Jewish community was the victim of the bloodiest outbreaks of anti-semitism in the twelfth century. In those days the Jews were well-established alongside the merchant classes, to whom they provided financial services. However, following the death of Henry II, the protector of the Jews, and the coronation of Richard I, “the Lionheart”, anti-Jewish riots struck. The ...
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There are less than 10000 Jews living in the Yorkshire town of Leeds. They began arriving around 1840 and, in increasing numbers, between 1881 and 1905 as a result of persecution in Russia. The town had a flourishing wool industry and, in 1885, was the scene of the first spontaneous strike by Jewish workers. The inhabitants of the Chapeltown and Leylands quarters have since moved to more ...
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Oxford’s oldest synagogue was transformed into a tavern, then incorporated into one of the university’s oldest colleges, Christchurch. There is, however, a new synagogue. It was built in 1974 on the site of an older one from 1880, of which only a wall remains.
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The Jewish presence has been attested in Béziers since Roman times, but the golden age of the Jews of Béziers is undoubtedly the classical Middle Ages, when the city was nicknamed the “Little Jerusalem”, both because of the importance of its community that of the sight that one had from the plain of Orb and that resembled that of Jerusalem. Its rabbinical school was renowned, and ...
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The Jewish community of Latvia traces its origins to the middle of the fourteenth century. Numbering today some 15000 persons, it developed in the principalities of Kurland and Livonia, territories that have often changed hands. The presence here of Baltic barons contributed to the Germanization of the country and placed the Jews themselves under this cultural influence. The gradual ...
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The Jewish community of Lithuania numbers only some 6000. People It is no more than a shadow of what it once was: until the Shoah, it was a center of the Yiddish-speaking lands. In a sense, everything began here from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when European Judaism's center of gravity shifted from Germany and France to Poland and Belarus. As a reaction to the pietisitic practices ...
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In Sarajevo, where most of Bosnia's Jews lived, the earliest refugees from the Iberian Peninsula began arriving around 1565, having first stopped in Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and other regions under the Turkish domination. Belonging to the rayah (the term used by the Turks to designate non-Muslim populations under their control), as such they had a status equivalent to that of other ...
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Below the Acropolis is Athens, a marble plaque engraved with a menorah has been uncovered amid the clutter of the Agora, near a statue of Emperor Hadrien. Perhaps it used to rest on one of the ancient synagogues visited by Saint Paul, who had as little success with the Athenian Jews as the Greek philosophers had with the Areopagus.
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In the beautiful synagogue of Ahrida, one of the oldest in Istanbul, the tevah assumes the shape of a caravel symbolizing not only Noah's Ark but also the vessels that in 1492 transported the Jews banished from Spain to the shores of the Ottoman Empire. A royal edict issued in Granada, only recently recaptured from the Arabs, gave the Jews no choice but conversion to Catholicism or exile. ...
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In a medieval miniature, Bulgarian Czarina Sara figures beside her husband, Czar Alexander, a two children, Shishman and Tamara. A Jewish queen, Sara of Turvono was obliged to convert to Christianity, adopting the name Theodora. In the fourteenth century such a union shock no one in Constantinople, though it would have been inconceivable to the leaders of Rome.
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There is little evidence of a Jewish presence on the coats of the Black Sea before the arrival of Roman legions in the early second century C.E. Vestiges, coins, and inscriptions preserved in a museum in Bucharest, however, attest to the existence of Jews in the region throughout the first millennium. Near the end of the thirteenth century, the great voyager Benjamin de Tudela had already ...
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Poland represents the most illustrious and tragic chapter in European Jewish history. For centuries, this country was the most welcoming to Jews fleeing Germany, Spain, and southern Europe; the continent largest Jewish community was born here, enjoying privileges and autonomy granted by the different kings and developing an incredibly rich culture of its own. Ultimately, however, Poland wound ...
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Below the bell tower of Prague's Jewish city hall, there are two clock faces. One displays Roman numerals, and the other Hebrew letters. The hands of the first clock revolve in the normal clockwise direction while those of the second turn counterclockwise, following the customary manner of reading Hebrew right to left. Such clocks are rare, and this is the only one of its kind adorning a ...
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The history of Jews in Slovakia -dating from the sixteenth century under the protection of the Hapsburg- intersects that of their fellow believers in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Jews in these three countries experienced the same vicissitudes of discrimination, expulsions, and, in the seventeenth century, the acquisition of some civil rights. Numerous Jews from neighboring Moravia flocked ...
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At the Jewish Museum of Budapest, a replica of a tombstone dating from the third century bears the image of a menorah. This relic attests to nearly 1700 years of Jewish presence in the Carpathian basin, predating that of the Magyar tribes who broke free from the confines of the Ural Mountains during the ninth century. The modern history of Judaism in Hungary goes all the way back to ...
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Jewish settlers had to wait until the death of Austria's Catholic and very anti-Semitic Archduchess Maria Theresa and the ascension of her her tolerant son, Joseph II, to gain the right to establish communities in northern Croatia, which at the time had been Hapsburg territory for nearly three centuries.
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A Slavic land under Germanic rule for many centuries, Slovenia finally gained independence in 1991. The fate of the Jewish population here depended largely over the years on the good will of its princes. Nonetheless, the Jewish presence in the region goes back to antiquity. Archaeological digs have revealed a tomb engraved with a menorah at the Skocjan site, which likely dates back to the ...
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Portugal became an autonomous kingdom under Henry of Burgundy, a prince of French origin. His son, Alfonso I, was the first king of Portugal (1114-85). The history of its Jewish population differs from that of the Jews on the Iberian Peninsula. Alfonso was aware of the importance of the Jewish communities he had freed from the Muslim yoke and granted them his protection, putting the chief ...
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There are numerous legends surrounding the arrival of the Jews in Spain. They were propagated by Jewish and Christian chroniclers, especially in the sixteenth century. Some say they came in the time of King Solomon, following in the wake of the Phoenician sailors; others that the event was one consequence of their exile from Judaea, as ordered by Nebuchadrezzar.
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Jewish craftsmen and merchants settled in Switzerland's Roman cities between the third and fourth centuries, but the first documents that mention them date only from the thirteenth century. Throughout the following two centuries, Jews were regularly accused of ritualistic crimes on Christian children and poisoning wells.
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