Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (21 page)

Pre-modern toleration should not be confused with modern multiculturalism, equality, and the celebration of diversity as intrinsically good. Jews remained protected provided they accepted their second-class status. Diversity was feared, but also recognized as beneficial. Jews had a specific socio-economic role, assuming tasks that Christians were unwilling or unable to perform. Jews also played a cultural part as ‘the other’ reinforcing Christian group identity – often at considerable cost to themselves.

Pogroms and Extortion

Imperial protection of the Jews foundered almost immediately when Henry IV was trapped by his enemies in northern Italy and unable to prevent the first serious pogrom in German history in 1096. Proclamation of the First Crusade in November 1095 coincided with widespread suffering from flooding and famine. French preachers spread the standard accusations of Jews as usurers and ‘Christ killers’, calling on the crusaders to eradicate them as they marched to the Holy Land. Already licensed to kill by papal indulgences, the crusading army wreaked havoc as it moved east from Rouen into the Empire, where it was joined by impoverished German knights who saw a chance for plunder. Jews were told to convert or die, with many choosing suicide as the crusaders marched up the Rhine. Only the pro-imperial bishop Johannes of Speyer used force to uphold imperial protection. Once he managed to escape to Germany in 1097, Henry blamed Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz for the pogrom. Jews who had been forcibly converted were allowed to return to Judaism, despite Ruthard’s protests. Imperial protection was renewed and incorporated in the general public peace declared for the Empire in 1103.
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Frederick Barbarossa acted swiftly to prevent a repeat of the pogrom when 10,000 gathered in Mainz to take the cross for the Third Crusade in March 1188. He publicly praised loyal Jews, and when a mob threatened violence against them, the imperial marshal, ‘taking his servants with him and his staff in his hand . . . smote and wounded them, until they all dispersed’.
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Frederick II made an important adjustment when he renewed Henry IV’s legislation in 1234. As with many of Frederick’s actions, this was not as progressive as it first appears. The emperor vigorously rejected the myth of Jews committing ritual child murder, which so often provided an excuse for pogroms. Christians killed 30 Jews in Fulda after five Christian children died in a house fire at Christmas 1235. The case was considered sufficiently serious to be transferred to Frederick’s own royal tribunal, which publicly rejected the excuse of ritual murder and renewed imperial protection for all Jews early the next year. Frederick’s legislation inspired similar measures in Hungary (1251), Bohemia (1254) and Poland (1264). Unfortunately, it also incorporated Pope Innocent III’s transfer of religious animosity to secular law promul
gated a few decades earlier. Arguing that Jews inherited the guilt of Christ’s death, Innocent had imposed permanent servitude as a punishment. This aspect was expressed in Frederick’s verdict in 1236, which subordinated the Empire’s Jews as ‘servants of the chamber’ (
Kammerknechte
).
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Protection was now dependent on payment of an annual tax, known since 1324 as the ‘Sacrificial Penny’, levied on all Jews older than 12. An additional ‘crown tax’ was payable on the accession of each new king.

Imperial protection for Jews remained patchy. Three-quarters of Frankfurt’s 200-strong Jewish community died in a pogrom in 1241, while Jews joined other migrants heading east in search of a better life. Nonetheless, the situation was probably similar to that in Spain and compared favourably to England or France.
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More significantly, this persisted despite weaker royal power after 1250, providing a further indication that ‘decentralization’ should not be misconstrued as ‘decline’ in the Empire’s history. Later thirteenth-century kings sold or devolved to lords those rights to protect Jews as part of a wider strategy to buy support. Consequently, both the number of Jewish communities and their lordly protectors multiplied so that there were 350 communities across Germany by the mid-fourteenth century.

This did not immediately strengthen protection for the Jews, since overall responsibility remained with the monarch, who could switch track, as Charles IV demonstrated with fatal results. Charles assumed power in the middle of a civil war in 1346. The papal interdict against his predecessor, Louis IV, had left large parts of the Empire without Christian services by 1338, stoking anxiety that deepened dramatically with the Black Death a decade later. Charles crudely exploited his prerogatives to win support by encouraging pogroms, even offering immunity in return for a share in the spoils. Six hundred Jews died in Nuremberg, where the Marienkirche was built on the ruins of their synagogue, while only around 50 communities across the Empire survived, largely by paying huge ransoms.
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The privilege of protecting Jews (
Judenregal
) was included in the wider bundle of rights granted to the electors in the Golden Bull cementing the new alliance between Charles and the Empire’s political elite in 1356. His son and successor Wenzel repeated this shameful extortion, receiving 40,000 florins from the Swabian cities in return for allowing them to plunder their Jewish populations in June 1385, and he did this again five years later in
alliance with several princes. Meanwhile, Jews faced growing discrimination, including exclusion from long-distance trade. Again, much of this was fuelled by the Empire’s elite, who were imposing heavier taxes on Jews, who were then obliged to pass increased costs on to their Christian customers by charging higher interest on loans.
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Early Modern Protection

Nonetheless, in the longer term the devolution of protection for Jews blunted this abuse of power by widening the circle of those with a vested interest in better relations. Throughout the bad times of the fourteenth century, individual lords and imperial cities preferred peaceful coexistence. Regensburg and Ulm refused to cooperate with Charles’s measures, and while Frankfurt expelled its Jews in 1349, it allowed them to return in 1360. The community thrived, doubling across the late fifteenth century to total 250 by 1522, and then rising rapidly, reaching 3,000 or 11 per cent of all inhabitants by 1610.
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The Habsburg Albert II was the last monarch to attempt extortion and, significantly, this failed to raise much money, despite the richer and larger Jewish population.
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His successor, Frederick III, reactivated imperial protection by claiming all Jews were his immediate subjects. Frederick too hoped to raise money, but this time through the regular Sacrificial Penny, and he vigorously resisted calls from Christians to reinstitute extortion. He was criticized as too soft, and mocked as ‘king of the Jews’.
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More positive attitudes were emerging around the time of Frederick’s death in 1493. Humanists and early Protestant reformers were interested in Hebrew as a means to understand Christianity’s origins. Sebastian Münster’s book
Hebraica
sold 100,000 copies, making it one of the world’s first best-sellers. The personally anti-Semitic Maximilian I, Frederick’s successor, was dissuaded from renewing persecution by the Humanist Johannes Reuchlin, who argued in 1511 that Jews had been Roman citizens since late antiquity.

Rapid socio-economic change, passions stirred by the Reformation, and the reformers’ disappointment at failing to convert Jews to Protestantism all contributed to a more threatening atmosphere around 1530. Jews were expelled from at least 13 Protestant and Catholic territories and cities between 1519 and 1614, reducing their main communities to
Frankfurt, Friedberg, Worms, Speyer, Vienna, Prague and Fulda abbey. Anti-Semitism remained a depressing feature of rural as well as urban protest throughout early modernity. However, the continued grant of Jewish protection rights to princes created new communities in Fürth, Minden, Hildesheim, Essen, Altona, Crailsheim and the duchy of Westphalia from the 1570s. Others, like Ansbach, readmitted communities they had previously expelled. The new pattern of protection again changed the character of Jewish settlement, which now spread into the countryside from imperial cities and princely residence towns. Meanwhile, refugees from the Dutch Revolt founded the Empire’s first Sephardic community in Hamburg during the 1580s.

Jews and Imperial Law

Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576–1612) was genuinely interested in Jewish culture and banned Luther’s anti-Semitic books.
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However, the Empire’s development as a mixed monarchy proved a far more significant factor in the improving conditions. Unlike in centralized monarchies, toleration no longer depended on the whim of individual monarchs. Devolution of protection for Jews embedded responsibility within the general web of privileges and rights enshrined in imperial law. Imperial protection was renewed five times between 1530 and 1551, and became part of the general legislation passed by all imperial Estates through the Reichstag, linking the integrity and prestige of all political authorities to ensuring observance. The 1530 law did oblige all Jews to wear a yellow star. This was widely ignored and then formally overturned by the Reichstag in 1544. All forms of harassment were now prohibited. Jews were guaranteed free mobility, protection for their property and synagogues and against forced conversion, and were permitted to charge higher interest rates than Christians. Jewish self-government also secured legal recognition.
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Local authorities had to obtain permission from higher sources before expelling a Jewish community. Individual Jews remained subject to numerous restrictions, such as denial of full citizenship in cities, but could own property, including weapons, and could participate in wider aspects of the Empire, including using the imperial postal service. Imperial criminal justice remained neutral towards religion. Prejudice certainly affected judgements, but the new imperial supreme courts
created in the 1490s were concerned with adhering to formal procedures. For instance, Jewish prisoners could observe religious rituals, even where they had not requested this.
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Like peasants and other socially disadvantaged groups, Jews were able to make effective use of imperial laws to defend their rights after 1530. For example, Emperor Ferdinand I’s own supreme tribunal (the
Reichshofrat
) disregarded his anti-Semitism and upheld an appeal from the Jewish community in Worms against the city council’s decision to expel them.
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Such cases have wider significance, because the Empire’s judicial system is widely perceived as deficient thanks to a systematic late sixteenth-century campaign by Protestant zealots to discredit their Catholic opponents, much of which was accepted as fact by later historians. Precisely when some Protestant princes were complaining loudly at religious bias, Jewish communities were quietly and effectively obtaining legal protection against princely and civic persecution.
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This is best demonstrated by the notorious Fettmilch incident, the worst anti-Semitic outburst between the mid-fourteenth century and the 1930s.
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Frankfurt’s Jewish community became the scapegoats for wider problems in the city around 1600, including rising taxation, falling wages, and an increasingly oligarchical government perceived as out of touch with ordinary inhabitants. The artisan leader Vincenz Fettmilch accused Jews and patricians of exploiting the poor, inciting a mob that attacked both the city hall and the ghetto where the city’s Jews had lived since 1462, murdering 262 and plundering property worth 176,000 florins in 1612. Violence spread to Worms, where Jews were expelled. Although the outbreak had not been prevented, punishment was swift and effective. Fettmilch and six associates were executed, while legal injunctions prevented other cities from expelling their communities. Worms was forced to readmit its Jews in 1617. Overall, Jews brought 1,021 cases to the Empire’s supreme court (the
Reichskammergericht
), representing 1.3 per cent of its entire case load between 1495 and 1806, though they only numbered 0.5 per cent of the Empire’s population. Meanwhile, they were also involved in 1,200 cases before the Reichshofrat between 1559 and 1670, or 3 per cent of that court’s business.
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The Persistence of Established Structures

Protection for the Jews continued despite the upheavals of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), while the surge in violent anti-Semitism accompanying the hyper-inflation of 1621–3 did not see a repeat of the earlier pogroms. The immediate post-war decades after 1648 saw a renewed wave of expulsions, with Jews driven from ten territories and cities, including Vienna, but these were more limited than those of the sixteenth century, while many authorities now actively encouraged Jewish immigration to help repopulate their lands. Already in 1675, 250 families were allowed to return to Vienna, while that year Duisburg University admitted its first Jewish students, far ahead of institutions elsewhere in Europe.
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Territorial governments observed their legal obligations, even though they no longer derived significant financial benefit. Only Frankfurt’s Jews still paid the Sacrificial Penny in the eighteenth century, which brought the emperor a mere 3,000 florins annually, while Jewish taxes in Münster accounted for just 0.1 per cent of the bishopric’s revenue.
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The Jewish population grew faster than that of the Empire overall, rising from under 40,000 in 1600 to 60,000 by the later seventeenth century, with an additional 50,000 in Bohemia and Moravia. Although main centres were still urban, notably Frankfurt and Prague, nine out of ten Jews now lived in the countryside, either in the 30 principalities with communities or amongst the 20,000 living on the lands of the imperial knights by the late eighteenth century. The knights saw Jewish protection as a way of asserting their otherwise vulnerable autonomy. The Jewish population continued to grow faster than that of Christians, totalling 250,000 by 1800, with a further 150,000 in the lands recently annexed by Austria and Prussia from Poland.
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