Basel Jewish pogrom

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In the Basel pogrom on January 16, 1349, an estimated fifty to seventy Jews were violently killed in Basel . The pogrom was part of a series of persecution and extermination measures , also known as the plague pogroms , which were probably organized by the authorities in the southern Upper Rhine area around the first medieval plague pandemic . The pogrom marked the end of the first Jewish community in Basel.

First Jewish community

In the 12th century, a Jewish migration movement from the Middle Rhine area began to Alsace , to which Basel belonged culturally and economically in the Middle Ages. Jews have been documented in Basel since the early 13th century, and there was probably a separate Jewish community as early as 1200 . This had a synagogue and a cemetery in front of the city wall; a ghetto did not arise, however, rather the houses of Jews and Christians stood next to each other. As in other cities, the Jews of Basel were coin changers and moneylenders because, due to the canonical prohibition of interest on Christians and the religious-brotherhood character of the guilds, this trade was open to them as a free field of activity. Their main customers were the urban upper class of bishops and nobility , while the citizens in turn supplied the Jewish community with the industrial products of their guilds.

Nothing is known about riots like those that took place in Europe in the 13th century; but the Jews were endangered because they were exposed to anti-Judaist propaganda in Basel too , not least from the mendicant orders , which were firmly anchored in the city. In addition, the legal situation of the Jews was precarious, as they were not under the direct protection of the city authorities (bishop and nobility) as chamber servants , but rather that of the empire .

pogrom

preparation

In 1348/49, extensive persecution of Jews began in Europe . This was closely related to the first wave of plague , which, spreading from southern Europe, put the population in a state of excitement and panic, as it was accompanied by rumors of well poisoning and the like, by means of which the Jews would try to exterminate the Christians. From December 1348, when the plague had not yet occurred in Basel, the Basel Jews saw themselves clearly threatened, some fled the city because of the danger to life and limb. The Jewish cemetery was devastated around Christmas.

Riots against the Jewish communities were attacks on the emperor's protégés and questioned the credibility of the local authorities vis-à-vis the imperial bailiffs . As recently as 1345, the magistrates on the southern Upper Rhine had joined together in a state peace alliance, particularly against peasant gangs who persecuted Jews, and in 1347/48 some of the Basel nobles had to go into exile because they had attacked Jews. Material aspects played an essential role in the attacks. On the one hand, a large part of the Basel nobility had borrowed heavily from Jewish lenders; on the other hand, the privileged Eightburgers had taken up banking and had become competitors of the Jewish moneylenders. The fact that the plague pogroms spread like a seemingly irresistible conflagration opened up new possibilities for assigning blame in the case of riots hostile to Jews. In January 1349, Berthold von Buchegg from Strasbourg , representatives of the three cities of Strasbourg , Freiburg im Breisgau and Basel and Alsatian rulers met in Benfeld to discuss their behavior towards the Jews. This meeting must have been about how the authorities got rid of the Jews and how they stayed in the background, taking advantage of the latent unrest. An everyday violent lower class could be incited to riots in the medieval cities - which happened all the more easily since it was Carnival , a time that was characterized by increased aggressiveness.

execution

The pogrom began when incited gangs locked up all the Jews they could get hold of in a specially made wooden hut on an island in the Rhine; the burrow was set on fire, so that everyone in it was burned or suffocated. The number of three hundred to six hundred murder victims handed down in the sources is considered too high; the Jewish community in Basel may have numbered around a hundred, a number of victims between fifty and seventy seems more plausible. Many Jewish children were spared, but forcibly baptized and deported to monasteries. Some adults also escaped death by converting to extremis. But when the plague finally broke out in May 1349, their newly acquired religious affiliation was irrelevant. They were locked up and executed after testifying under torture that they were involved in a poisonous plot against Basel. Presumably the Jewish houses and synagogue were looted. By the end of 1349, all survivors of the pogrom had fled the city and the Jewish community had disbanded. As was probably agreed in Benfeld, the pogrom was not an isolated incident; another followed in Freiburg on January 30th, and another in Strasbourg on February 14th .

Basel had disregarded the imperial command and attacked the actually inviolable chambermaid. Contemporary and subsequent representations of the pogrom assumed that the guilds and the people had compelled the council to initiate a pogrom. The backers from the social leadership had understood how to cover up their role in the event and to anonymize the guilt. In Strasbourg there was still a trial before the Reich authorities, nothing is known about it in Basel. With the annihilation of the Jewish community, the desired goals were achieved: The Jewish assets and liens were considered to have expired, and some legal titles such as house interest had passed into Christian hands. The council confiscated the synagogue and the cemetery; After the earthquake of 1356, the former was used as a temporary warehouse for merchants' goods, and this later as a municipal workshop, which was probably directly related to the use of the tombstones as doorsteps, but above all to the repair of the city wall. A tombstone with the inscription facing down was laid as a floor slab in Basel Minster .

Temporary return to the second parish

From 1360 onwards, Jews resettled in the cities that had participated in the pogroms in 1348/49. In Basel, Jewish returnees are mentioned in documents from 1361/62. Not infrequently they took over the houses that had already belonged to Jews in the first community. Apparently the survivors or their descendants made old legal claims. In view of the impending pogrom, it may also have been possible to reach agreements with the Christian neighbors about the management and return of their properties. The thesis that the Jewish donors were brought back because of the capital requirements for the construction of the city ​​destroyed by the earthquake of 1356 is outdated. Rather, they had become generally indispensable through the growing money economy; The authorities could also have played a role in the fact that right-hand trades in financial transactions would be better carried out in a Basel court than in a foreign one. In 1365 the city received patronage over the Jews from the Reich, and a new Jewish community was probably established that year. This existed until 1397, when it dissolved within a few months. The reasons for this are unknown. There was no persecution; One can only speculate about the threat of a new pogrom as a reason for the move. Thereafter, the Jews were not allowed to settle in Basel for over four hundred years. The third Jewish community, which has not been dissolved since then, the Israelitische Gemeinde Basel , was established in 1805 as part of the religious freedom introduced by the Helvetic Republic .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ During the Bad Carnival in 1376, several people were killed when an excited crowd took up arms against the Habsburg nobility in the city during a tournament.
  2. ↑ The location of this island is unknown. It is believed to be near the Birsig - or the meadow estuary .
  3. ↑ Of the 570 Jewish gravestones that were visible all over the city in the middle of the 17th century, two thirds were in the fortification area near the work yard.
  4. ^ Israelitische Gemeinde Basel (IGB). History. In: inforel.ch. INFOREL, Information Religion, accessed on July 29, 2017 : "Today's IGB (Israelitische Gemeinde Basel) was founded in 1805."
  5. ↑ Katia Guth-Dreyfus : 175 years Israelitische Gemeinde Basel. (PDF; 21.5 MB) In: baslerstadtbuch.ch . Christoph Merian Verlag , 1980, p. 10 , accessed on August 1, 2017 : “The year the third municipality was founded, 1805, ... is not evident from a document from that year, but can be derived from later information. According to the court records of the city of Basel from 1817, the Jewish religious association in Basel appointed Joseph Meyer here in 1805 as presinger of the school (synagogue) and Schochet (butcher) from Blotzheim. The rather costly employment of a culture officer presupposes the existence of a congregation that was probably founded shortly before. "