Readings from the Torah Scroll would be included in the morning and afternoon services on Shabbos, the Sabbath or Sat.u.r.day, as well as on Mondays and Thursdays, but only when a minyan of ten men is present. The readings are traditionally chanted to a rather complex trope, so the practice has long been to have a expert in Torah trope do the readings. Because the Torah scroll contains no vowels, it is also traditional to have two others at the bimah (lectern) to check the reading and offer corrections to any error. During the reading, members of the congregation are called up to the Torah, nominally to read their portion, but in fact, merely to say the blessings before and after their portion while the reader does the actual work. The Shabbos morning reading is the longest, broken into eight sections, while the other readings are shorter, with only three. After the Shabbos morning Torah reading, the final person called up reads the Haftorah, a selection from the prophets selected to complement the Torah reading. By the seventeenth century, the Haftorah readings and the text used by the checkers would both come from printed copies of the Chumash, not from scrolls.
As a rule, was is not possible to conduct a full worship service without a minyan, a quorum of ten men over age 13. If a minyan was not present, the Chazzan could not repeat the Amidah, the Kaddishes could not be said, and the Torah and Haftorah could not be chanted. These parts of the service were simply omitted, both in the synagogue, if less than ten were present, and in private prayer. If ten men were present, whether or not they were in a synagogue, these parts of the service would become obligatory, although if there was no Torah scroll available, obviously it could not be read.
A rabbi was not required for the conduct of any Jewish worship service. Any knowledgeable Jew could lead services. Of course, as the most knowledgeable member of the community, the rabbi was likely to be called on to lead services. Synagogue services in the seventeenth century rarely contained anything resembling a sermon. In general, public preaching was dangerous because an attempt to explain the Torah in a context where a Christian might be listening could contradict some biblical interpretation of the Church, bringing down the wrath of the Christian authorities on the Jews.
Whether in public or private, the worship service was supposed to be read and not recited from memory. Every observant Jew hoped to own a copy of the Siddur, or prayerbook, along with a Chumash, an annotated copy of the Torah. Typically, many students would complete their own handwritten copy of the Siddur as part of their schoolwork in premodern times, but by the seventeenth century, printed prayerbooks were common. The standard printed form of the Chumash in the seventeenth century included Rashi"s commentary along with the Aramaic translation of Onkelos; some editions of the Chumash and Siddur were available that offered Judische Deutsch translations as well.
After the Shabbos evening service Friday night, the men would go home to their families for dinner. The women of the household were responsible for having the table ready, with specially baked bread, known as challah, and wine and candles. All cooking was required to be completed and the candles lit about half an hour before sundown, although food could remain in a warm oven or over a banked fire for as long as needed.
Both the Shabbos evening and morning services would end with making kiddush, that is, the chazzan or some member of the congregation would say bruchas over wine and then over the bread. These were said for the benefit of travelers who might be staying and eating in the synagogue, which sometimes served as a community guesthouse. Outsiders may think these bruchas are blessing the wine and bread, but they do not bless the food, they give thanks for it. In some cases, kiddush was expanded into a full meal in the synagogue.
The home was also an important center of Jewish worship. Before eating a meal, it was traditional to say a very brief brucha for the food being eaten. On Shabbat, kiddush was said, even if the men had already said it in the synagogue. The birkas or grace after meals is much longer and in the Ashken.a.z.ic world; it was generally read from a bentscher, a small book of prayers for the table, and chanted to a rollicking melody that invites a family sing-along.
In general, the Ashken.a.z.ic community had the most developed musical system, while the Ashken.a.z.ic stereotype of the Sephardic community was that their melodies for prayer and Torah trope were loud and toneless. Like other stereotypes, this is not entirely fair, but the greatest Sephardic melodies are reserved for hymns and nonliturgical music. Where the Ashken.a.z.ic worship service centered on the solo performance of the cantor, with congregational responses, the Sephardic service was more likely to include congregational singing. Some tunes span the Sephardic-Ashken.a.z.ic gap and probably date back to the Roman era and possibly before that; these include some of the melodies for the Kaddish and the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1-21), as well as the basic melodic framework of the Torah trope.
Kaballah The greatest controversies sweeping through the Jewish world of 1632 centered on the Kaballah. The term "Kaballah" refers to the received mystical tradition that kabalists insist can be traced back to Moses. Skeptics trace large elements of this tradition to Moses de Leon who lived and wrote in thirteenth-century Spain. Whether Moses de Leon was inventing, creating a new synthesis or transmitting received wisdom, his book, the Zohar, played a central role in the development of Kaballah.
Traditional Judaism imposes strict limits on who may delve into the esoteric world of mysticism. A man was not to study mysticism or metaphysics until he reached age forty, until he was married, and until he had mastered Talmud. In addition, these subjects were never to be studied alone, but were to be studied under the direction of a wise teacher. These restrictions are found in the Talmud.
Rabbi Isaac ben Shlomo Luria Ashken.a.z.i, the son of German Jews living in Jerusalem, changed much of this in the mid sixteenth century. In his early twenties, he studied the Zohar on his own while living in Egypt. While there, he had visions of meetings with the prophet Elijah.
These meetings led him to move to Safed, in the Galilee, where he joined the community of Sephardic kabalists there.
Luria became a leader of this community and was hailed as the Ari or the Lion. The Lurianic Kaballah he taught spread like wildfire after his death in 1570 and its publication by Luria"s student Chiam Vital. In short, the Lurianic Kaballah teaches an expanded version of the creation story, it gives reasons for prayer and piety, and it teaches that the coming of the Messiah is imminent.
Under Luria, the kabalists of Safed created new liturgy, weaving kabalistic elements into the service, notably the Kabalat Shabbat element of the Friday evening service, which receives the Sabbath with psalms and the beautiful hymn Lecha Dodi that uses imagery from the Song of Songs, likening the arrival of the Sabbath to the arrival of a bride at the wedding.
The kabalistic creation story begins before creation, when G.o.d was initially all that there was, indivisible, unchanging and free of all properties. Neither s.p.a.ce nor time existed in this state, known as the Ayn Sof, meaning without end. In order to allow creation, G.o.d underwent a process of withdrawal, creating the void in which creation could occur, walled off from the divine light so that we in the created universe can have free will.
Kabalists hold that the sephiros were created to channel or contain the divine energy. The Zohar identified ten sephiros, and kabalistic imagery frequently arranges these into a pattern as the tree of life. The word sephiros, p.r.o.nounced sephirot in Sephardic, has been translated as numbers, from Hebrew, or explained as a borrowing from the Greek for spheres.
The kabalistic creation story continues that the sephiros were smashed during G.o.d"s first attempt at creation, scattering divine sparks or shards throughout the universe. The creation story in the book of Genesis must therefore describe G.o.d"s second attempt. The kabalists go on to explain that the reason G.o.d created humanity was to create agents to aid in the repair of a fallen world, bringing about the original intent of creation by finding and liberating the divine sparks.
We do this by performing the mitzvot or obeying G.o.d"s commandments. Kabalistic mysticism frequently focused on contemplation of the Ayn Sof, but unlike many streams of mystical thought, the emphasis was on action in this world, reaching up to bring the divine down instead of seeking to escape this world into the divine. Kabalists taught that, when a person perfors a mitzvah, a divine spark is released, and that the release is more effective if the person performs that mitzvah knowingly and in the right state of mind.
From this teaching, kabalists concluded that we personally can play a role in bringing the Messiah, redeeming the world and bringing about the final judgement. This new teaching found fertile soil in the world of European Judaism in the early seventeenth century. It is reasonable to describe the spread of Kaballah as a wave of pietist religious revival through a people who felt helpless in the face of an obviously broken world. By midcentury, kabalistic thought had become normative throughout the european Jewish world.
Resistance to the acceptance of the Lurianic Kaballah was based on some fairly obvious grounds. Opponents held that kabalists were violating Talmudic restrictions on the study of the esoteric and that kabalists were telling a creation story that could not be found in Torah or Talmud. Perhaps the most important objection, though, is that the mystical explanation of the reason for performing the mitzvos was wrong on at least three counts.
The first problem opponents would raise is that Judaism had long held that one should perform G.o.d"s commandments for their own sake, not in order to influence G.o.d. Second, the idea that one could force G.o.d"s hand by sufficient piety struck some as sacreligious. Finally, the idea that human piety could force the coming of the Messiah has a dark side, allowing believers to hold the community responsible if the Messiah does not come. Indeed, this led some kabalists, when they became community leaders, to take an extremely rigid att.i.tude toward any lapses in personal piety within their communities.
Opponents would say that the downside of the Lurianic Kaballah was realized when Rabbi Nathan of Gaza proclaimed Shabbatai Zvi of Smyrna to be the Messiah, the fulfillment of the Messianic hopes of the kabalists. This story spread through Europe starting in 1665, and many communities were deeply divided between believers in Shabbati and scoffers. When Shabati Zvi confronted the Sultan and was forced to convert to Islam, the news embarra.s.sed huge numbers of Jews throughout Europe and shattered the faith of many.
The Sephardic World Sephardic Jews originally come from Sepharad, the Jewish name for Spain, or Al-Andalus, as it was known to Muslims of the time. During the four centuries before the Christian Reconquista, this community flourished as the intellectual center of the Jewish world, producing great poets such as Solomon Ibn Gabriol; renaissance men such as Judah Halevi, known both for his poetry and his theology, and Abraham ibn Ezra, physician, theologian and astronomer; Rambam- Maimonides-known for his philosophical and medical works as well as his theology; Ramban, also known as Nachmanides, renowned both as a physician and theologian; and Isaac Abravanel, who was court Jew to Alfonso V of Portugal and to Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragaon and Castile, as well as a theologian of note.
Prior the expulsion of 1492, Jewish life in Spain and Portugal varied from idyllic to terrible, with enough of the former to keep alive the dream of coexistence, but enough of the latter to keep this dream in doubt. The Almohad, or Berber, dynasty of the twelfth century forced many Jews and Christians to chose between flight, conversion to Islam or death; at around the same time in Christian Spain, Jews were forbidden to hold public office, and royal debts to Jews were cancelled. Christians instigated pogroms in 1391 that led to widespread forced conversions and ma.s.sacres of Jews throughout Christian Spain. The Spanish inquisition, begun in 1478, began to systematically hunt down Marannos, or secret Jews, who had publicly converted to Christianity to avoid persecution, and in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella signed their order of expulsion.
After their expulsion from Spain, huge numbers of Jews fled to Portugal, where their refuge lasted just long enough to separate them from what money they had managed to bring out of Spain. Written accounts by refugees in this period suggest that the death rate among refugees was extremely high, with shiploads of Jews turned away from port after port as they sought food and shelter.
Large refugee communities made it to the Ottoman empire, settling from Ottoman Palestine to the Balkans. Salonika became the new commercial center of Jewish life, and Tzefat (Safed) in the Galilee became a new spiritual center. Sephardic refugees also came to dominate many of the old Jewish communities of northern Africa, notably those of Morocco and Algeria.
Converseros or Marannos were followed by the inquisition wherever they went within the Catholic world. Whatever degree of personal piety they preserved, they were forced to behave in public as more Christian than the Christians. Only in Protestant or Islamic lands could Converseros "come out" as Jews.
With the Protestant Reformation and the Dutch rebellion, Marannos from Portugal found refuge in Amsterdam starting in 1593. It was a very rocky start; the first Jewish settlers were captured by English pirates before they finally made it to their destination. The first communal worship service in Amsterdam was held in 1595 at the home of the Moroccan amba.s.sador, Don Samuel Palache. In the years that followed, a small Ashken.a.z.ic community also settled in Amsterdam, but these communities had little to do with each other.
The Beit Yaakov (house of Jacob) synagogue was founded in 1596 in rented s.p.a.ce, and in 1608, a second synagogue was founded, Nevi Shalom (prophet of peace). The latter was not a peaceful synagogue; it was torn by internal dissent under Rabbi Isaac Uzziel of Fez; in 1622, Uzziel"s student, Mena.s.seh ben Israel succeeded him. The controversy under Rabbi Uzziel led to the founding of the Beit Yisrael (House of Israel) synagogue in 1618 by Abraham Farrar, a man known as a freethinker. Beit Yisrael was headed by another student of Isaac Uzziel, Rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca from about 1626 to 1638. Rabbi Uzziel and his students were all kabalists.
Jewish worship in Amsterdam was not formally legalized until 1615, when laws were pa.s.sed allowing Jewish worship and forbidding Jews to speak publicly or publish anything against the Christian religion or to intermarry with Christians. From 1615 to 1638, the Jews of Amsterdam were governed by a community council that included representatives of all three synagogues. The three congregations merged in 1638, with the Beit Yisrael building converted to a school while Nevi Shalom, with city approval, became the Sephardic synagogue.
Mena.s.seh ben Israel printed the first Hebrew book in Amsterdam in 1627, and the Amsterdam printers set new standards for the quality of their Hebrew typography, eclipsing the printers of Venice, who had set the standard up to this time.
In the 1580"s, Sephardic Jews began to settle in Hamburg, where they were welcome and treated as if they were Christians. Among them were a spice merchant, a trader with Brazil and a sugar importer. In 1603, the community was first recognized as Jewish, with an immediate demand for their expulsion. This demand was repeated by the clergy in the following decades. By 1612, the community had grown to 125, and the Senate of Hamburg issued a residence permit good for a period of five years for a cost of 1000 Marks, simultaneously forbidding the practice of Judaism. The fee was converted to an annual tax, and restrictions against the practice of Judaism began to lift gradually. In 1611, the Jewish community was allowed to appoint a rabbi; in 1623, kosher slaughter was permitted, and in 1628, they were granted a prayer hall. Jews were not permitted to live in the inner city, but were allowed to live freely in the developed area outside that. There were only a few Ashken.a.z.i Jews, with that community growing to fifteen families between 1600 and 1649 when the Ashken.a.z.i Jews were expelled. This is one of the rare cases where the Christian government authorities made distinctions between the Sephardic and Ashken.a.z.ic communities.
The Ashken.a.z.ic World Ashken.a.z.ic Jews come from Ashkenaz, the Jewish name for the Rhineland. Jewish settlement of Ashkenaz dates back to the late Roman era, but we know that there was a major influx from northern Italy between the eighth and the twelfth centuries. By the time of the Crusades, the Ashken.a.z.ic community was vibrant, spreading from Paris to Prague.
The Crusades were the first of a series of great disasters to befall this community, killing a sizable fraction of the entire Ashken.a.z.ic community. The seventeenth century was an equally severe disaster, and between the Crusades and the seventeenth century, stories of ma.s.sacre and expulsion were an everpresent element of Ashken.a.z.ic life. Most towns in Ashkenaz appear to have suffered a major ma.s.sacre or expulsion about once per century. The Rindfleisch ma.s.sacres of 1298 swept a large part of the Rhineland, as did the persecutions of the fourteenth century surrounding the Black Death. The Protestant Reformation brought yet another wave of expulsions from newly Protestant cities in the sixteenth century.
The Ashken.a.z.ic community of the seventeenth century was well connected to the larger Jewish world. For example, the false messiah David Reuveni from Yemin and his disciple Solomon Molcho from Portugal came to Regensburg to see Emperor Charles V, and emissaries of the Sephardic community of Safed, in the Galilee, came to many Ashken.a.z.ic communities to spread the teachings of the Kaballah. Jewish merchants frequently crossed the Alps from Italy, and there were also open commercial routes between Salonika in the Ottoman empire and Prague to the north. There is ample evidence of rabbis trained in Poland serving French or German communities as well as the reverse. Not too many years after the Thirty Years" war, news of the false messiah Shabatai Zvi swept north from the Ottoman world to attract attention throughout the Ashken.a.z.ic world.
Ashken.a.z.ic Communities of the Seventeenth Century In response to persecution over past centuries, many Jews had already fled east into Poland, and by the last quarter of the sixteenth century, a unique new living arrangement had emerged there. The Polish government granted a degree of autonomous self-government to the Jews that they had not seen since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. The "Council of Four Lands," as it was called, met at Lubin between Purim and Pa.s.sover in the spring, and in Yaroslav during the month of Av or Elul, and was composed of representatives of each Jewish community in Poland, Lithuania, Podolia (Polish Russia), Volhynia and Galicia. Polish doc.u.ments refer to this as the Congressus Judaicus or Seim (Diet) of the Jews. The governing structure included a supreme rabbinical court, with jurisdiction over all civil cases between Jews, as well as the congress, which had control over taxation within the Jewish community and budgetary responsibility for supporting schools and other community inst.i.tutions.
With each new hardship for the Jews of the various German states, new waves of Jews moved east, but the Ashken.a.z.ic heartland was still fairly populous until the Thirty Years" War. Outside of the heartland, there were healthy Ashken.a.z.ic communities in France, Austria and Hungary, and the Alsatian community spread south into northern Switzerland. The following brief descriptions focus on the Jewish communities within a few weeks travel from the Thueringerwald:
The Ashken.a.z.ic Heartland Worms had a Jewish community before the year 1000, and suffered the usual ma.s.sacres and expulsions, with the most recent expulsion in 1615. By imperial order, Jews were readmitted to Worms in late January 1616. The winters of 1632 and 1635 brought "pestilence," probably plague, and the taxes imposed on the community drove it into extreme poverty. Many Jews were imprisoned for nonpayment of taxes until an imperial order in 1636 cancelled the taxes and ordered their release.
Mainz or Mayence had a Jewish community in the early tenth century, but the usual expulsions and ma.s.sacres ended with the ma.s.sacre of 1349. A new Jewish community was not started there until 1583. This community grew by the addition of refugees from Frankfurt-am- Main in 1614 and from Worms after the expulsion there in 1620. In November 1620, Pappenheim stormed Mainz and gave no quarter to its residents, but the Jewish community continued, and in 1630, a rabbi was officially appointed.
Speyer had a walled Jewish quarter by the end of the eleventh century, but after the usual atrocities, there were fewer than ten Jewish families in Speyer during the early seventeenth century.
Metz had a Jewish community as far back as the first century, and this was one of the most secure Jewish communities in the region. By 1614, there were 500 Jews, and in 1624, 120 families and 600 individuals under the leadership of Rabbi Moses Cohen of Prague. At that time, the Jews had considerable freedom under letters patent granted by Henry IV in 1605, and Louis XIII enlarged these freedoms in 1632.
Ashken.a.z.ic Communities along the Main Frankfurt am Main may have had a Jewish community in 1175, and after the usual ups and downs, this grew between 1543 and 1612 from 43 to 454 Jewish families. In August 1614, Fettmilch, the leader of the town"s guilds, instigated riots that slaughtered a good fraction of the Jews of Frankfurt and led to the expulsion of the survivors. Fettmilch was tried, convicted and hanged for this crime, evidence of a sense of justice that was not typical of previous centuries.
Although 1,380 Jews survived, it was not until 1616 that the community was allowed to reestablish itself under the protection of the emperor. In 1618, there were 370 families living in 195 houses, served by two synagogues, one built in 1462, one in 1603. Jews lived under the usual economic restrictions, and at times, the interest rate was reduced to a very modern sounding eight percent. The vastly overcrowded Jewish quarter was decimated by epidemics in the winter of 1632, when the entire town was impoverished by payments to Gustavus Adolphus. Rabbi Shabbethai Hurwitz was the elected chief rabbi and Rabbi Joseph Juspa Hahn was a rising star at the time. By 1694, Frankfurt had 109 Jewish money lenders, 106 dry-goods merchants, twenty- four spice merchants, nine retail beer and wine merchants, three innkeepers and two restaurants.
Hanau saw its first Jewish settlement in the thirteenth century, with the atrocities leading up to expulsion in 1592. Count Philipp Ludwig II reopened the town to Jews in 1603 and permitted the construction of a synagogue on the Judenga.s.se. Initially, there were only ten families, but by 1707, the number had grown to 111, with a significant number being refugees from the Fettmilch riot in Frankfurt. A Christian printer in Hanau, Hans Jacob Hene, produced about thirty Jewish works in Hebrew between 1610 and 1630; he must have cut his own type, because the letter shin in his typography was distinctive. He published a Jewish prayerbook in 1628, a number of works on theology and Jewish and popular works in Judische Deutsch. Among his typesetters, we know he employed the Gunzburg family, and Mordecai ben Jacob of Prossnitz. Rabbi Menachem ben Elhanon was a noteworthy scholar in town, until his death in 1636; his school was the foundation of the yeshivah of Hanau.
Aschaffenburg, or Aschaff on some maps of the era, was home to a considerable Jewish community in the seventeenth century, but by the end of the century, only twenty members or twenty families remained. Rabbi Meir Grotwohl is the only name I can find from the seventeenth century. In addition to the town Jews of Aschaffenburg, there were Shutzjuden in many of the surrounding towns.
Wertheim readmitted Jews in 1449, and they rebuilt their synagogue in the 1590"s. In 1622, there were sixteen Jewish families.
Wurzburg expelled its Jews in 1565. As was occasionally the case elsewhere, the community moved only a short distance, settling in Heidingsfeld, just across the river Main. Heidingsfeld"s Jewish community had a charter dating back to 1498, which permitted seven families of schutzjuden to remain for a yearly payment of 120 florins. By the fifteenth century, the community had a rabbi, and with the expulsion of the Jews from Wurzburg, it became the seat of the chief rabbi for the Wurzburg region. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Jews of Heidingsfeld lived in a well-defined ghetto, probably limited to the land held by the seven charter families.
Schweinfurt closed all Jewish schools, and annulled all debts owed to Jews in 1544.
Bamberg had a Jewish community that was reestablished around 1500, although the threat of expulsion was constant during the sixteenth century. The community was devastated during the Thirty Years" War, but not destroyed; the community was wealthy enough, in 1683, to ransom itself in the face of a demand for expulsion. Their oldest surviving synagogue in the seventeenth century was a building dating back to before the expulsion of 1478, and starting in 1561, the community rented s.p.a.ce in the rear of a building for another synagogue.
Nurnberg"s Jews were expelled in 1499, and the evidence of Jewish settlement from then until 1824 consists largely of restrictive ordinances designed to suppress interaction with the Jews of Furth and to prevent resettlement. From the mid 1500"s to 1693, Jews were permitted to do business in public fairs outside the city but forbidden to enter the city. Furth, a suburb of Nurnberg, rose to importance when the Jews were expelled from the city.
The Jews of Furth at the end of the sixteenth century were privileged, living under the direct protection of the emperor, administered through the chief rabbi of the empire and subject to special taxes. The usual economic restrictions were applied, although Jews could buy and sell real estate and close contracts. By 1617, there were 1,500 Jews in Furth, with a new synagogue built on land purchased from the cathedral provost of Bamberg. The synagogue was severely damaged by Mansfeld"s troops in 1621, and Tilly used it as a prison. In 1634, the synagogue was used by the Croat cavalry as a stable. Trade between Christians and Jews was prohibited in 1623, and this prohibition was repeated in 1627, although by that time, trade was at a standstill because of the war. Furth was home to a yeshivah, headed by Menachem Man Ashken.a.z.i, who died in 1655.
Communities along the Frankische Saale Hammelberg had a synagogue as far back as 1487; in the sixteenth century, a cemetery was purchased across the Frankische Saale, in the suburb of Pfaff, now the stadteil of Paffenhausen.
A new mikvah and synagogue were built in town in the seventeenth century, prior to the expulsion of the Jews in 1671, when the Jewish community relocated to Pfaff.
The Kissengen region, now Bad Kissengen, must have had some Jewish residents during the Thirty Years" War, because there is a monument in the town hall to a bearded and helmeted man who is purported to be a Jew who helped in the defense of the town against the Swedes by casting bullets that never missed their mark. There are records of schutzjuden in the region; in 1650 and again in 1656, the butchers of Kissingen complained about compet.i.tion from Jews living in the region.
Neustadt an der Saale, now Bad Neustadt, had a Jewish community at the time of the Black Death, as recorded in the Memorbuch of Nurnberg. I can find no evidence of Jewish settlement in the seventeenth century.
Saxon communities Saxony in general had few Jews; there was a general expulsion in 1559 that included the Jews of Thuringia. Jews were forbidden to live in cities, and only at the end of the seventeenth century were they were permitted to settle on the estates of the n.o.bility. There may have been a few exceptions, however, and there is some evidence that some of the Jews expelled from the cities settled in rural areas. Most, however, would have fled to Poland.
Schmalkalden became the home to Rabbi Meir ben Jacob Schiff in 1636, a noted scholar of Talmud, Kaballah and Torah. It is likely that he settled there with a small community, most likely a community invited to fill the vacuum created by the Thirty Years" War. Similar resettlements occurred in many Saxon communities after they had been depopulated by the war. In general, the n.o.bility hoped that by settling Shutzjuden in their villages, they could increase their revenue flow.
Arnstadt expelled its Jews in 1496 and 1532, but there is evidence of two Jewish converts to Christianity in the seventeenth century, suggesting that some Jews must have been present in the region to convert.
Dessau allowed Jewish settlement in 1621, but this community was destroyed in the Thirty Years" War.
Leipzig banished its Jews in 1439, but starting in the mid fifteenth century, while no Jews were allowed to settle there, Jews were important partic.i.p.ants in the Leipzig fairs. These were held twice yearly at Easter and Michaelmas. Statistics on Jewish partic.i.p.ation at the fairs dates back to 1675, by which time, hundreds of Jewish merchants partic.i.p.ated, many from outside Germany.
An Academic Question Suppose that, in the spring of 1631, the town of Grantville, West Virginia, was plunked into the Thueringerwald. When would the first Ashken.a.z.i Jews arrive? For the sake of this discussion, I will ignore what is said in the novel 1632 and focus on the Jewish and larger worlds of the period. One thing is clear, and that is that the winter of 1631-32, with the pa.s.sage of the war down the Main valley to Frankfurt, would have let loose a flood of refugees; it also seems clear that some part of this flood would have been likely to end up in Grantville, since by that time, it would be fairly well known that Grantville treated refugees well and was genuinely serious about nondiscrimination. Here, though, I am not interested in the time of the arrival of the peak of this flood, but rather, the arrival of the first scattered Ashken.a.z.ic refugees.
Consider what the Jews of the lower Main valley knew in the spring of 1631. Taxes were extremely high everywhere in German lands, with the Jew-taxes even higher. Trade was at a standstill, inflation was out of control, and most of the Jewish community had recent memory of war, starvation or disease. There was excellent reason to leave. Lands under French rule to the east were relatively stable and home to an established Jewish community, but they were not anxious to accept poor Jewish refugees. Amsterdam was in a state of near perpetual war fending off the Spanish, but it was a haven to Jews. Some Jews were certainly traveling to these lands to the north and west.
Poland was another interesting destination. With the withdrawal of Gustavus Adolphus, Poland was largely at peace. The system of Jewish self-government was functional, so that, although there were Jew taxes, they were administered in a relatively fair manner. As a result, in early 1631, Poland would have looked very attractive.
For a Jew from Frankfurt or Aschaffenburg contemplating the journey to Poland, there would be several obvious routes. By Pa.s.sover, everyone in Frankfurt would have heard that Gustavus was on the move west of Berlin and that the Imperial army was besieging Magdeburg. Travelers would therefore avoid the route north of the Franconian highlands and the Thueringerwald. The middle route, up the Frankische Saale river would be direct, requiring crossing through the Thueringerwald, but putting the travelers on the road to Leipsig, while a southern route via Prague would be longer but probably safer.
The middle route would be likely to attract at least some Jewish travelers in the spring of 1631, with some travelers from as far south as Wurzburg likely to come this way. The economic appeal of travel through the hills of the Spessart and Thueringerwald might have been significant, since both were centers of mining and industry. The entry of new traffic along this route would stop as soon as news of the fall of Magdeburg arrived, since at that point, the Imperial troops moved south and travel across the southern Saxon plains would have become far too dangerous.
Fast travelers from the lower Main valley, those on horseback or able to afford carriages, would likely manage about 20 to 30 miles a day. If we a.s.sume they travel to the east in the week after Pa.s.sover, they would have pa.s.sed the Ring of Fire before it happened. Once past, the news of the Ring of Fire would catch up with them only slowly, and if they did hear the news, they would be unlikely to turn back. With good transportation, they would be in a position to flee any soldiers they encountered, so they would likely make it to Poland and would be unlikely to arrive in Grantville.
Slow travelers from Frankfurt and fast travelers leaving later are another story. If we a.s.sume travelers on foot or with slow carts for their baggage, they will make from ten to twenty miles a day. Travel would be even slower if they are subsisting off the land within the limits imposed on Jews by Christian law, for example by buying rags and sc.r.a.p metal to sell to the paper mills and iron foundries along the way.
That from one to three such slow-moving groups would pa.s.s through the upper Frankische Salle valley at about the time of the Ring of Fire, hearing rumor both of the fall of Magdeburg and of the Ring of Fire at some point between Neustadt and Hildburghausen seems not only plausible but likely.
This news would drive them to veer south to avoid Tilly"s mercenaries on the Saxon plains and to avoid the new and strange city of Grantville. Working through this schedule suggests that such groups would encounter rumor of the "court Jews" of this new community as they began their dodge to the south, and news that Grantville was actively recruiting refugees and attempting to impose law and order on its little corner of the world could easily reach them as they were about a day"s travel from Grantville.
The most likely avenue of approach for such a refugee group would be down the Schwarza valley, which would bring them to the border of the Ring of Fire sometime not too long before or after Shavuos. The festival would force them to camp in one place for a minimum of three consecutive nights, no matter what, and this camp will be either in Grantville, for example, at the refugee camp just being built near the power plant described by the novel 1632, or not too far outside the ring if they are on a somewhat later schedule. However this develops, by the end of Shavuos, they will have heard detailed accounts of the arrival of bands of mercenaries in the plains to the east, and there is a high likelihood that they would elect to stay in the Grantville region.
The interaction between these refugees and the new town of Grantville will be interesting, although an author contemplating writing such a story must solve the problem of including these Jews in the population of Grantville without their coming afoul of the established canon for this series.
Resources for Writers Those considering writing Jewish characters into their fiction should consult a Jewish calendar for the year they are writing so they can keep their characters" behavior in line with the Jewish liturgical year. There are excellent interactive web sites that will generate custom calendars for any year.
These calendars all show holidays, fast days, and the Torah portion for each Sabbath, as well as the connection between the Jewish and Gregorian dates for that year. It is worth noting that all Jewish months begin with the new moon, so the fourteenth of the month is always a full moon.
If your Jewish characters are moderately observant, they might study the Torah portion for the coming week. If you want to know what pithy biblical quotes they are likely to come up with, read the relevant Torah portion. Ask for the weekly sedrot to be included in a calendar generated by the Hebcal web site listed above, and then click through from the calendar to the biblical text and commentaries from several rabbinical organizations.
Look up the history of the Jewish communities of each nonfictional town that is visited. The Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1901, is entirely available on-line and has well researched entries on the Jewish communities of the world, including many small German communities.
The web site includes a search engine but it is sometimes slow. Unfortunately, for those interested in German cities, there are multiple ways to enter text containing diacritical marks, and as a result, searching for city names containing umlauts is not always easy.
Many German cities have their own historical web sites that also contain a wealth of information. True gems can be found by blind searching with Google. Try searches on the word Jews or Juden plus the city name in question; these will frequently find the Jewish Encyclopedia entry where the built-in search engine did not because Google is much smarter about umlauts.
The Jewish Theological Seminary library has an extensive web site that includes several exhibits that pertain to this era. Their exhibit on culture and costume and on the synagogues of Amsterdam includes some very useful material from the seventeenth century.
There are a few extraordinarily good works of fiction that portray Jewish life not too far before this era remarkably well. Francis Sherwood"s The Book of Splendor, set in the Prague of Rudolf II (1601), does a good job of painting the Jewish community of that time and place in relationship to the larger community. Richard Zimler"s The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon paints an intriguing picture of the Sephardic community of Lisbon in the era when the inquisition was on the rise and Jews faced the choice of fleeing or going underground.
IMAGES.
Note from Editor:
There are various images, mostly portraits from the time, which ill.u.s.trate different aspects of the 1632 universe. In the first issue of the Grantville Gazette, I included those with the volume itself. Since that created downloading problems for some people, however, I"ve separated all the images and they will be maintained and expanded on their own schedule.
If you"re interested, you can look at the images and my accompanying commentary at no extra cost. They are set up in the Baen Free Library. You can find them as follows:
1) Go to www.baen.com 2) Select "Free Library" from the blue menu at the top.
3) Once in the Library, select "The Authors" from the yellow menu on the left.
4) Once in "The Authors," select "Eric Flint."
5) Then select "Images from the Grantville Gazette."