Nuremberg memorandum

As Nuremberg Memorbuch a Jewish dead memorial book (is Memorbuch ) indicates that from 1296 in Nuremberg was established and (possibly intermittently) extended until the end of the 14th century. The manuscript is an important source for the history of the medieval Jewish communities in the Ashkenazi region and especially in Nuremberg.

Origin and structure

According to a note on the second page of the manuscript, the initiative for the creation of the Nuremberg memor book goes back to the scribe Isaak von Meiningen , who took the new building of the synagogue in Nuremberg as an opportunity to create the memorial book. This begins with a series of prayers and blessings. The pagination suggests that the Nuremberg Memorbuch in its current state is only a fragment of the original manuscript. The preserved part is divided into three parts, which in research are called Nekrolog I , Martyrolog and Nekrolog II .

The entries in Nekrologs I range from the 1280s to the 1340s and were intended to serve as a reminder of people who made a donation. In addition to your name, the amount and purpose of the donation are therefore also listed. Initially, the donations included are intended for the construction of the synagogue , later generally for the synagogue lighting, the cemetery , teaching for children and support for the sick. The entries in this part of the memorandum are usually not exactly dated.

The martyrology documents the persecution in the Ashkenazi region from the time of the first crusade in the 11th century to the plague pogroms in the middle of the 14th century. Persecutions outside the Holy Roman Empire, in France and England, are also mentioned. The first part of the Martyriology, which includes the entries up to 1298, goes back without exception to Isaak von Meiningen, who wanted to record not only the persecutions of his own time, but also the martyrs of the past centuries when creating the memorandum. In almost all of the entries, he did not explain the circumstances of the persecution, as he was primarily concerned with the memory of the deceased and not with historical documentation. The entries list the murdered fellow believers for the first few years according to the place and, as a rule, also the date, whereby these precise lists of martyrs were probably created on the basis of Jewish administrative documents. For the second part of the martyrdom, which includes the waves of persecution of the 14th century, no individual names are listed as a rule, but only the places of persecution, connected to the formula "Remember oh Lord, the murdered and burned of .." . "

The obituary II is like the obituary I donations Register of deceased persons of the Jewish community of Nuremberg and includes entries for the period from 1373 to 1392. The entries are almost always dated and include donations for the cemetery, the poor and the Jewish settlers in the " Holy Land " .

Tradition and research history

By the late 15th century at the latest, the memorandum was owned by the Jewish community of Mainz, who owned it until the 20th century. In the meantime, this led to the assumption that the donor lists contained therein could relate to members of the medieval community of Mainz - but this error was corrected in the 1890s by prosopographical investigations by Moritz Stern. During the time of National Socialism it came to England through Jewish emigrants; since then it is no longer accessible. The Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Israeli National Library ( Jerusalem ) has a photocopy of the manuscript.

The two Nekrologie parts of the Nuremberg Memorbuches were issued in 1894 and 1896 by Moritz star in a German translation, whereas an edition of the original text has not yet occurred. On the other hand, Siegmund Salfeld published an edition of the Hebrew text including a German translation of the Martyriology .

Web links

• Rainer Josef Barzen: The Nuremberg Memor Book. An introduction. In: Corpus of sources on the history of the Jews in the late medieval empire
• Entry on the Nuremberg memorandum in the repertory "Historical Sources of the German Middle Ages"

Individual evidence

1. ^ Moritz Stern, Siegmund Salfeld : The Israelite population of the German cities. Volume 3: Nuremberg in the Middle Ages. Kiel 1894-1896, pp. 95-172 and pp. 190-205.
2. ^ Siegmund Salfeld: Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches (= sources on the history of the Jews in Germany. Volume 3). Leonhard Simion, Berlin 1898 ( digitized version ).