Actualité
September 1, 10am at the Institut Maïmonide As part of these European days, there will be a visit to the medieval Mikveh in Montpellier (10am), followed by a tour of the medieval Jewish Quarter, including the 12th-13th century synagogal building. Finally, there will be a lecture on the theme of ‘Tibbonides, Kimhi… the contribution of Jewish families of Andalusian origin to the Occitan ...
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The Jewish presence in Newcastle probably dates from the Middle Ages. In 1234, Jews were expelled from the city. Some returned or first settled in Newcastle but it was not until the 19th century that an organized Jewish community emerged. By the turn of 1830, about 100 Jews were living there. This was the year in which land for a Jewish cemetery was purchased. Eight years later, a synagogue ...
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The town of Peyrehorade welcomed Marranos in the 16th century. Following the acquisition of land in 1628 from the Lords of Aspremont for a , these descendants of Portuguese merchants settled in a community. However, following the expulsion of 1648, many families left Peyrehorade and by the end of the century there were only about fifteen Jewish families left. However, this number increased ...
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The city of Hohenems is located in the Vorarlberg region. In 1617, a ducal charter of privileges put a dozen Jewish families who had fled to Hohenems from Burgau on an equal footing with the Christian burghers in most respects. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the community had increased to around 30 families. Eight years after Hohenems had passed to Austrian rule (1765), there were ...
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Located an hour drive from Jaen, Úbeda’s story is similar to the one of the Jewish community in Jaen. But since the accidental discovery of -maybe the most ancient synagogue in the country- the city became a not to be missed destination is Spain. The Synagogue of Water was discovered during building works carried out in several real estate properties located in the heart of the historic ...
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The presence of a Jewish community in Jaen is first recorded in 612 when a king’s edict forbade Jews to own Christian slaves. If the Jewish population reached its peak during the seventh century, there were most probably Jews already during the Roman period. The geographer Abd al Nur Al-Himyari mentions during the ninth century a mikveh in Jaen, known as Isaac bath. The walls of the ...
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The Jewish presence in Hochfelden seems to date from the 16th century. Built in 1841 and a historical monument since 1996, the synagogue of Hochfelden is a classic example of Alsatian synagogue architecture. It was preceded and even accompanied by another synagogue, built in the 17th century. Next to the synagogue was a mikveh, the former rabbi’s house and a Jewish school. The synagogue ...
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The Jewish presence in Diemeringen seems to date from the 17th century. Only 14 Jewish families lived there on the eve of the French Revolution. The community of Diemeringen was organized – synagogue, religious school and mikveh – around the rue des Juifs (today rue du Vin). The community grew mainly in the 19th century, reaching 139 people in 1870. The war, and then the rural ...
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There is proof of a Jewish community in the Middle Ages in Sicily, particularly in the towns of Palermo, Messina, Taormina and Syracuse. This prosperous community was mainly in activities of commerce until their expulsion in 1492 by Ferdinand II. Only in 1989 will be unveiled one of the most beautiful treasure of the Jewish European heritage: Syracuse’s mikvah, this oldest known ritual ...
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The Jewish community of Voivodina’s capital was, until World War II, one of the most prosperous in all Yugoslavia. Present since the city was founded in the late seventeenth century and 4000 members strong before its extermination, the community was keen on building structures to rival those of other ethnic groups in this majority-Hungarian Catholic city (it belonged to the ...
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The oldest synagogue in Canea, , lives again after a half century of neglect. Raised from its ruins by Nicholas Stavroulakis, former director and founder of the Jewish Museum of Athens, it was rededicated in October 1999. (It should be noted that its reopening was violently protested by the island’s prefect.) Etz Hayyim appears to have been the former Venetian oratory of Santa ...
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Visiting the site in Delos is quite easy throughout the summer, the island being accessible by boat from nearby Mykonos. If one place attests to the presence of a Jewish community in Ancient Greece, it is certainly that of Delos, an arid island of the Cyclades. The existence of Jews here is referred to in the Book of Maccabees, while Flavius Josephus mentions them as well. Too tiny to flex ...
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Lying atop a hill dominating the Bosporus to the north of the Golden Horn, the “European city” of Pera grew up in the middle of the nineteenth century. A place where earlier one could find the shop counters of Genoese merchants, the architecture of Beyoglu, as the Turks call it, is western. Its grand structures such as the covered passages recall those of Paris, London, or Berlin. ...
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At the foot of huge Postavarul Mountain and the Poiana Brasov ski station, Brasoc unquestionably remains Transylvania’s most fascinating city, with its citadel, ramparts, and medieval center, the latter today closed to cars. The late-nineteenth-century synagogue here was sacked during the Second World War by pro-Nazis locals. It was rebuilt in 1944 but seriously damaged again in a 1977 ...
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An important city in eastern Poland, Lublin has preserved a very picturesque old quarter that offers a glimpse of what life was like here in the seventeenth century, with a city hall in the middle of the rynek, a Dominican church, fortifications, and various city gates. Lublin also features a castle surrounded by a park plucked straight out of a tale from The Thousand and One Nights. The ...
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In 1335, King Casimir the Great founded an independent city near Kraków, Kazimierz, in which he permitted Jews to settle around Sukiernikow (Clothier) Street (now called Jozefa Street), next to the Christian quarter. They built the Stara Synagogue, a mikvah, hotel, and wedding chapel on the main street called Szeroka (Wide) Street. In the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews arrived here ...
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In the village of Drevikov, roughly sixty miles southeast of Prague, it is possible to see how Jews lived in the villages of Bohemia at the end of the nineteenth century, before their immigration to cities and industrial centers. About thirty Jewish families lived in the two-story houses on the “Jewish street” of this village. The school and small synagogue of the community, now a ...
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The capital of eastern Slovakia, Kosice is a large industrial city of 250000 inhabitants. Its sizable Jewish community was almost totally annihilated during the Second World War. The city os now home to 800 Jews. The spacious nineteenth-century is in a building adjacent to the community headquarters. The building also includes a mikvah, a kosher butcher shop, and a prayer hall. This ...
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In the seventeenth century, the Jews of Galicia and Silesia (modern-day Poland and Ukraine) were drawn to this region by trade in tokaj, a syrupy, amber-tinted wine very popular at the courts of Louis XIV and Peter of Russia. Jews gradually settled here, producing wine for Jews and non-Jews alike, and a crowd of other small trades followed subsequently. In this very Orthodox region, Hasidism ...
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Documents attest to a Jewish presence in Pesaro dating back to 1214. The expulsion of the Jews from the papal states in 1569 led numerous Jewish families to Pesaro, which became the most important center of Jewish life in the Duchy of Urbino. The annexation of the Duchy by the Pope radically changed the Jews’ situation. Three years later, in 1634, 500 Jews were forced to move into a ...
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Although there was an organized community in Tomar at the turn of the fourteenth century, indicated by the inscription on the tombstone of Rabbi Joseph of Tomar, who died in Faro in 1315, it was not until 1430 that the Jews of Tomar had the means to undertake the construction of the synagogue. A building that still stands today. It was completed in 1460. After the expulsion of 1496 the ...
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The little community of Belmonte of between 100 and 300 souls was “discovered” in 1920 by the engineer Samuel Schwarz. Its existence was revealed to the world by Frédéric Brenner’s short film The Last Marranos in 1990. The Jews of Belmonte are one of the last groups bearing witness to the precarious life of Jews hunted by an all-powerful Inquisition and Church. They lived ...
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The presence of Jews in Besalú is attested in a document from 1229 in which Jaume I the Conqueror reserves to them the function of moneylender. In 1342 the community, hitherto linked to the one in Barcelona, became independent. In those days it numbered 200, a quarter of the total population, and lived side by side with the Christians. We have no information about 1391 and its pogroms. Not ...
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The history of the Jews in Speyer reaches back over 1,000 years. In the Middle Ages, the city of Speyer (formerly Spira), Germany, was home to one of the most significant Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire. Its significance is attested to by the frequency of the Ashkenazi Jewish surname Shapiro/Shapira and its variants Szpira/Spiro/Speyer. The community was totally wiped out in 1940 ...
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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 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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It was around 1298 that the Jews settled in Pézenas, coming from Spain, Portugal and Italy. In the trade of clothes and cattle, they added the activity of the sale of wool and sheets. In 1332, a law imposed on the Jews crossing Pézenas or coming to sell there, a right of “leude” (a grant, or a toll). Jewish families disappeared from the city in 1394, during the expulsion of the ...
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The traveler Benjamin of Tudela visited Montpellier in 1165. In his travel diaries, he noted the existence of Batey midrashot kevouot le-Talmud in the city. In addition to these intellectual activities cited in a Hebrew source, Latin documents relate the presence of Jews in trade between Agde, Narbonne and Montpellier. They have a monopoly on silks and fabrics. Representatives of the Mosaic ...
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The Jewish presence in Cavaillon goes back to at least the thirteenth century. The Jews lived on rue Hébraïque, which became their obligatory residence in 1453 and has changed very little since. Permission to build a synagogue was granted in 1494, and it was probably on the vestiges of this older building that the new place of worship was built in 1772. On the second floor is the men’s ...
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In this suburb of Strasbourg one can see a fine eighteenth-century . A room dedicated to Davis Sintzheim (the first Grand Rabbi of France and director of the Talmudic school in Bischheim between 1786 and 1792) retraces the history of the Jewish community and houses temporary exhibitions. The Jewish presence in Bischheim seems to be very old. Many Jews who worked during the day in Strasbourg ...
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