The city of Speyer, on the Rhine in Germany, evokes dark memories in Jewish history. On May 3 1096, rampaging Crusaders surrounded the synagogue, intending to slaughter the town’s Jews while they were gathered together in prayer. Fortunately the synagogue was empty. The Jews had got wind of the attack, had finished their service early and fled to their homes. Nevertheless ten were caught and slaughtered as they fled. One woman committed suicide.
Speyer was the first of several Jewish communities on the Rhine to suffer at the hands of the Crusaders that month. Although it suffered less in numerical terms than the nearby communities of Mainz and Worms, the attack in Speyer marked the beginning of centuries of intermittent persecution of Germany’s Jews, culminating, as we know, in the atrocities of the Shoah.
Life in Speyer before the Crusaders arrived was relatively peaceful for its Jewish residents. A team of scholars at the Hebrew University have recently published a source book drawing together dozens of documents written by or about Jews in Northern Europe between 1080 and 13501. Few, if any, of the sources are newly discovered, but their collection in one book is valuable. They give us an insight into the details of Jewish life in the Middle Ages, insights that are often missing from history books, where the focus tends to be on headline events – on wars, calamities and the like. Several of the sources relate to Speyer in the years before the Crusader riot.
The first Jews arrived in Speyer in 1084. They had come from Mainz, a city 100 kilometres to the north, where an outbreak of fire – for which they were blamed – had destroyed the Jewish Quarter. A chronicler, Solomon ben Samson of Mainz, described their arrival into the town. He began, as was typical in those days with a biblical quote, in this case from Isaiah (33,20):
In the beginning, we came to prop up our tents, whose stakes will never be plucked up’ to Speyer. And this was because of the fire which struck the city of Mainz. Because the city of Mainz is our hometown, the place of our ancestors, the most ancient, laudable, and commendable community of all the communities of the kingdom. And the entire neighbourhood of the Jews and their street was burnt, and we were in great fear of the citizens. We decided to get out of there and to stay at whatever walled city we can find, perhaps the merciful Lord would have mercy on us. . . .
When they arrived in Speyer the Jewish refugees were received by the town’s ruler and Bishop, Rüdiger Huozmann. He sent his knights to escort them into the city and gave them an area to live in, telling them that he would fortify it with a surrounding wall, to keep them safe from their enemies.
The Bishop granted them a Privilege, a formal document allowing them to live in Speyer. He was prepared to treat them as a self-governing community and to offer them every convenience. The document suggests that his interest in welcoming Jews was economic, that it was his ambition to turn the city into a thriving mercantile centre:
Whereas I have turned the villa of Speyer into a city, I thought to increase infinitely the honour of our place if I should assemble there Jews as well. The assembled Jews I placed outside the commune and the habitation of the other town-dwellers, and enclosed with a wall in order that they should not be easily harassed by the insolence of the worst mob . . . . I also granted them the free right to exchange gold and silver, to buy and to sell anything at their will . . . I gave them a burial place in hereditary right from the church’s property . . . Furthermore, their Archsynagogue shall judge in any dispute that should occur among them and against them, just like the city tribune among the townspeople. . . They shall legally have wet-nurses and hired servants from our people. Meat of slaughtered animals that they should deem unlawful by reason of their law’s regulation, they shall legally sell to Christians, and Christians shall legally buy it. In short, out of our favour we have granted them a law that is the best law that the Jews have, in any city of the Teutonic kingdom.
Six years after Bishop Huozmann welcomed the Jews into Speyer, members of the prestigious Kalonymus family petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, asking him to confirm the Privilege. They were concerned that without the Emperor’s backing a future bishop might come along and overturn the rights that Bishop Huozmann had given them.
The new charter that the Emperor had drawn up tells us much about the vicissitudes of Jewish life at the time. He decreed that nobody, however powerful or important, may harass or injure Speyer’s Jews, nor seize their land or property. Anyone committing violence against them would be fined one pound of gold and would have to pay double damages to the victim. If the aggressor couldn’t pay they would be punished in the same way as the Emperor’s father had punished the man who had killed a Jew named Vivus; his eyes were to be put out and his right hand cut off. We don’t know who Vivus was, but he must have been a person of note if his murder was still being spoken about a generation later. If a Jew was accused of theft he or she could swear an oath saying how much they had paid for the item and they would be believed. On the assumption that laws are usually made to prevent things that were already happening, these regulations tell us a lot.
Henry IV also confirmed the Bishop’s ruling that the Jewish community had the right to establish and enforce their own laws, although, in what risked turning into a double-edged sword, if a dispute proved to be too complicated to resolve it was to be referred to the Bishop. Apart from showing that the Jewish community was more integrated into the city than the Charter implied, it also meant that if a litigant didn’t like the verdict that the Jewish courts had imposed upon him, he could take his case to the Christian authorities.. Particularly if he were wealthy enough to offer the Christian judge a bribe.
Perhaps the most important regulation in Henry’s Charter was that nobody was to forcibly baptise Jews or their children. Anyone caught kidnapping a Jew, or more commonly a Jewish child, with the intention of baptising them would have to pay 12 gold pounds to the royal treasury. Conversely if a Jew said they wanted to be baptised, they were to be interrogated for three days, to check that they weren’t being coerced. Any Jew who did go ahead and convert to Christianity was to have their possessions confiscated.
Henry’s Charter must have added to the sense of security that the Jews of Speyer felt. If it did, it didn’t last long. Six years later, the Crusaders rampaged through Speyer. Solomon ben Samson told his readers that although the new Bishop of the town came to their aid, things were never the same again:
We were saved by the Bishop Johan. Eleven people were killed and the rest of the community were saved, may His name be blessed and praised. Afterwards we came back to the city, each man to his own place. But those who lived in the upper neighbourhood could not walk to the lower neighbourhood …. because of fear of the damned enemies.
There was no happy ending for the Jews of Speyer. Not then, nor for the next 850 years. In the late 20th century, Jewish life in the town slowly began to revive. There is now a Jewish museum, a synagogue and an optimism about the future. History matters. But the future matters more.
Barzilay Tzafrir, Elisheva Baumgarten and Eval Levinson. 2022. Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Northern Europe 1080-1350. a Sourcebook. Kalamazoo: MIP / Medieval Institute Pubs. Available online under Open Access at https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_teamsdp/9/