Gravestone of Mar Jacob

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The tombstone of Rabbi Jacob was determined by the historian Adolf Kober to be the oldest known Jewish tombstone in Cologne after its inscription was deciphered . The still relatively clear inscription on the stone notes the time of death, which according to the Jewish calendar occurred in the year 4916, whereby the month Elul corresponds to the time between August 19 and September 16 of the year 1156 of the Christian calendar .

Arched frieze with a central tombstone

history

Original location of the tomb

The Judenbüchel in a section of a tranchot map from 1807/08

During his research into the medieval topography of the city of Cologne and its fields , Hermann Keussen was able to determine the first mention of the Jewish cemetery in front of the walls of the southern part of the city , the area of which was called Judenbüchel , for the year 1168. He was called at the stake at the time on the occasion of the cremation of Cathars that took place on his premises.

"Jacob the Old", son of Isaac, was also buried on this site, and his tombstone marked him with the title Mar, which was common at the time, as a rabbi.

Kober also stated that the tombstone was not removed before 1349, i.e. before the Jews were first expelled from the city, from the cemetery granted to them by Archbishop Engelbert's privilege in 1266 , since profaning the site and its tombstones had previously been unthinkable. Taking the relevant construction phase of the castle mentioned below and the time of the expulsion of the Jews from their quarter as a basis, Archbishop Wilhelm von Gennep (1349-1362) is likely to be the person responsible, who had Cologne Jewish gravestones transported to Lechenich in order to use them for the construction of his residence there To incorporate ornamentation.

Inscription of the tombstone

Horizontal inscription (rotated)

The art historian and Cologne curator Hans Vogts recognized Hebrew stone inscriptions in the arched frieze of the Lechenich castle , which he classified as the remains of misappropriated Jewish gravestones. After the end of the Second World War he sent photographs of these stones to the historian Adolf Kober , who had emigrated to the United States , and asked him for an expertise . The Hebrew text on one of the stones, that of Rabbi Jakob, was reproduced and described by Kober in 1945.

The German translation is:

“This stone was set up over the tomb of Mar, Jacob the Old;
he died in the month of Elul in 4916, the son of Isaac;
he rests in paradise. "

Arched frieze and castle section

Whereabouts of the tombstone

The stone broken from the trachyte of the Drachenfels is now walled up under several so-called Spolia . It is one of the Bogenlaibungen embedded with indicated tracery in the circulating in the amount of the final first floor sheet Fries below the crenellated twin towers of the door to the outer ward of the state Burg Lechenich.

Monument protection

As part of the overall complex, the tombstone has been a monument of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia since July 13, 1982 .

literature

  • Hermann Keussen : Topography of the City of Cologne in the Middle Ages , in 2 volumes. Cologne 1910. ISBN 978-3-7700-7560-7 and ISBN 978-3-7700-7561-4
  • Yearbook of the Cologne History Association, Volume 28. Der Löwe Verlag, Cologne 1953
  • Adolf Kober, in: On the history and culture of the Jews in the Rhineland , Ed. Falk Wiesenmann. Pedagogical publishing house L. Schwann-Bagel GmbH Düsseldorf, reprint 1985. ISBN 3-590-32009-5

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d Adolf Kober, "Notes on Jewish antiquities in the Cologne area", in: Yearbook of the Cologne History Association, Volume 28, p. 64 f
  2. ^ Keussen: Topography of the City of Cologne in the Middle Ages , Volume 1, "The Cologne Field Flurs, on the Dead Jews". Reference to: 1163 (Mon. Germ.Scr.13, 287) collis, qui Judaicus appellatur, iuxta Judeorum sepulturas, p. 316
  3. ^ Adolf Kober, "Notes about Jewish antiquities in the Cologne area", in: Yearbook of the Cologne History Association, with reference to: Robert Hoeniger , Cologne shrine documents of the 12th century . (Publications of the Society for Rheinische Geschichtskunde I), first volume (Bonn 1884–1888), p. 222: Laur. 2, I, 1.
  4. ^ Adolf Kober, Jewish Monuments of the Middle Ages in Germany, in: Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. XV, 1945, p. 24 f

Coordinates: 50 ° 48 '7.3 "  N , 6 ° 46' 2.7"  E