Judaism in Switzerland

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Synagogue in Basel

A little more than 20,000 Jews live in Switzerland today , which corresponds to approximately 0.4 percent of the total population, which makes the country the tenth largest Jewish community in Europe. Nonetheless, the exact number can only be determined to a limited extent due to the different parameters according to which people of Jewish faith or origin can be defined. The majority of the Jews listed live in the major cities of the country, namely in Zurich , Geneva and Basel , whereby around 80 percent of the Jews living in the country are also Swiss citizens.

In the Old Confederation , Jews lived in the Common Rulership of Baden under an "expensive" special statute from the early 17th century, the last time passed by the Diet of 1776. The residence of people of Jewish background was limited to the two Aargau villages of Endingen and Lengnau (with other exceptions in the western part of Switzerland , including in La Chaux-de-Fonds and Carouge ). The Helvetic Republic promoted the idea of ​​emancipation, but did not implement it comprehensively. In 1866, the Jewish citizens of Switzerland were given equal rights by a federal constitutional decision.

Today, Basel also houses the Jewish Museum of Switzerland , which, when it was founded in 1966, was the first museum of its kind in the German-speaking area after the Second World War .

history

Beginnings

Isolated archaeological finds (finger ring with menorah ) from the 4th century, which were made in Augusta Raurica , indicate that the first members of the Jewish people came to what is now Switzerland with the Romans. However, the scanty finds do not answer the question of whether the ring was the lost property of a traveling Jewish trader or a souvenir of a Roman, or whether there were Jewish families or even a religious community based in Augusta Raurica. Although Jews were also mentioned in the Lex Burgundionum , which was edited after 500, Jewish settler activity has only been archaeologically verifiable in Geneva since the second half of the 12th century .

Middle Ages and Early Modern Times

The presence of Jews in Basel is documented in 1213 when the local bishop ordered the return of a pledge that he had deposited with a Jewish moneylender. During the 13th century, Jewish communities in Lucerne (1252), Bern (1262), St. Gallen (1268), Winterthur (before 1270), Zurich (1273), Schaffhausen (1278), Zofingen and Bischofszell (1288), Founded in Rheinfelden (1290), Geneva (1281), Montreux and Lausanne ; the most important were in Bern, Zurich and Lucerne. During this time they were subjected to increasing persecution, often following the model of the ritual murder legend . In Bern in 1294, under the pretext that people with a Jewish background had murdered a boy, part of the Jewish population was whacked and the remainder expelled from the city. The boy was later venerated as a martyr under the name Rudolf von Bern .

Entrance to the synagogue in Endingen

When plague epidemics broke out across Europe in 1348 , Jews were accused of poisoning wells and burning them at the stake in many places. a. in Bern, Solothurn , Basel and Zurich. The surviving Jewish population was expelled from the country and there were almost no Jews in Switzerland until the 19th century.

18th century

An exception were the two Aargau villages of Endingen and Lengnau near Zurzach , the venue for the Zurzach trade fair , where Jews had been allowed to reside as foreign patrons since the 17th century , and where therefore almost the entire population of 553 people at the end of the 18th century Jewish population of Switzerland lived. We owe most of our knowledge of Swiss Judaism at that time to the Reformed pastor from Zurich, Johann Caspar Ulrich, and his collection of Jewish stories published in Basel in 1768 , which dealt with this people in the XIII. and following centuries except for MDCCLX. happened in Switzerland from time to time .

The French Revolution , the invasion of the French in 1798 and the Helvetic Republic ushered in the turning point towards emancipation for the Swiss Jews . In the Federal Constitution of 1848, however, the Jews were still discriminated against, because the freedom of establishment, freedom of worship and equality in court proceedings only applied to Christian Swiss.

19th century

In the course of the 19th century, the situation of Swiss Jews became increasingly paradoxical, as the French government in particular campaigned for the protection of the rights of its Jewish fellow citizens, who were still exposed to numerous forms of discrimination in Switzerland . It was not until the partial revision of the Federal Constitution of 1866 that Jews in Switzerland were granted the freedom of establishment and full exercise of civil rights, with the canton of Aargau waiting for equality at the local level in Endingen and Lengnau until 1879. Large groups in Switzerland remained anti-Jewish, which was shown, for example, in 1893 in the acceptance of a popular initiative for a ban on slaughtering . In 1894 the Dreyfus Affair began in neighboring France , which moved Theodor Herzl to his book Der Judenstaat , published in 1896 , in which he called for a separate state for the Jewish people and founded Zionism . The first Zionist World Congress took place under Herzl as early as 1897 in Basel . The fact that the congress should take place in Switzerland and not in Munich , as initially proposed , was due in part to the commitment of the Zurich National Councilor David Farbstein . After all, before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 , the congress had taken place ten times in Basel, more than in any other city in the world.

20th century and present

In a judicial process ( Bern Trial ) that took place in Bern between 1933 and 1935, the anti-Semitic protocols of the Elders of Zion were declared to be trash literature and the publisher was sentenced to a fine. The judgment of May 1935, but technical legal grounds in November 1937 conceded . As a court expert , Carl Albert Loosli was involved in the process at the time , who had already defended anti-Semitism in 1927 in the book Die schlimmen Juden! had fought.

This pass belonged to Agatha Süss. Today it is in the collection of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland in Basel .

During the Second World War , at least 30,000 people were turned away at the Swiss borders, including many Jews. After negotiations with Switzerland, from 1939 onwards, Jewish passports were marked with a "J" stamp in National Socialist Germany . In 1995, during a memorial session in the Federal Parliament in Bern, the Federal Council apologized for the first time for the practice led by Switzerland during World War II to Jewish asylum seekers at the Swiss border. The then Federal President Kaspar Villiger mentioned: "We can only bow down to those who have suffered and imprisoned because of us."

Today the Jewish population is concentrated in the big cities (Basel, Geneva and Zurich), where there are orthodox , conservative and liberal communities. The political organization of the Swiss Jews is the Swiss Association of Israelites (SIG), founded in 1904 . In 1972, the Basel Israelite Community (IGB) was the first Jewish community in Switzerland to be recognized as a public body by the canton of Basel-Stadt . In 1999, Ruth Dreifuss was elected not only as the first female, but also the first Jewish Federal President in the history of Switzerland.

Places with Jewish communities

The municipalities of Pruntrut , Yverdon , Avenches , Davos and Delsberg have dissolved due to a lack of members.

Synagogues

graveyards

Prominent Swiss Jews

The following is an incomplete list of Jewish women and men related to Switzerland (in chronological order):

Swiss «Righteous Among the Nations»

See main article List of the Righteous Among the Nations from Switzerland

Entrance to the “Garden of the Righteous” at the Yad Vashem Memorial

After the Second World War, the term Righteous Among the Nations was used to refer to non-Jewish persons who gave their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust . In Switzerland, u. a. the following people to these «righteous»:

Population development 1860–2010

According to the censuses carried out since 1860, the number of people who professed the Jewish faith (in 1860 and 1870 "Israelites and other non-Christians" were counted and in 1870 and 1880 only the local population) in relation to the total population has developed as follows:

year people %
1850 3,145 0.1
1860 4,216 0.2
1870 6,996 0.3
1880 7,373 0.3
1888 8,069 0.3
1900 12,264 0.4
1910 18,462 0.5
1920 20,979 0.5
1930 17,973 0.4
1941 19'429 0.4
1950 19,048 0.4
1960 19,984 0.4
1970 20,744 0.3
1980 18,330 0.3
1990 17,577 0.2
2000 17,914 0.2
2010 20,991 0.4

See also

literature

  • Article in the Historical Lexicon of Switzerland
  • Thomas Bardelle: Jews in a transit and bridge country. Studies on the history of the Jews in Savoy-Piedmont up to the end of the reign of Amadeus VIII (1397–1434) (= research on the history of the Jews. Volume A 5). Hanover 1998.
  • Caspar Battegay, Naomi Lubrich (ed.): Jewish Museum of Switzerland . Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel 2018, ISBN 978-3-85616-847-6 .
  • Ludwig Berger : The menorah ring from Kaiseraugst. Jewish evidence of Roman times between Britain and Pannonia. Römermuseum Augst, Augst 2005, ISBN 3-7151-0036-2 .
  • Karl Heinz Burmeister: Medinat bodase. On the history of the Jews on Lake Constance 1200–1349, 1350–1448. 3 volumes, UVK, Konstanz 1994, 1996, 2002, ISBN 3-89669-758-7 .
  • Ron Epstein-Mil: The synagogues of Switzerland. Buildings between emancipation, assimilation and acculturation. Photographs by Michael Richter (= contributions to the history and culture of the Jews in Switzerland. Volume 13th series of publications by the Swiss Association of Israelites). Chronos, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-0340-0900-3 (also dissertation at the University of Basel 2007).
  • Dietrich Gerhardt: Zurich and Süsskind von Trimberg. In: Journal for German Philology. 138, 1999, pp. 103-110.
  • Hans-Jörg Gilomen : Late medieval settlement segregation and ghettoization, especially in what is now Switzerland. In: City and Country Walls. Volume 3: Boundaries - exclusions in the city and around the city (= publications by the Institute for the Preservation of Monuments at the ETH Zurich. Volume 15.3). Zurich 1999, pp. 85-106.
  • Hans-Jörg Gilomen: The Substitution of Jewish Loans in the Late Middle Ages. The example of Zurich. In: Lukas Clemens, Sigrid Hirbodian (Hrsg.): Christian and Jewish Europe in the Middle Ages. Colloquium in honor of Alfred Haverkamp. Trier 2011, pp. 207-233.
  • Hans-Jörg Gilomen: Cooperation and Confrontation. Jews and Christians in the late medieval towns in what is now Switzerland. In: Matthias Konradt, Rainer C. Schwinges (Ed.): Jews in their environment: Acculturation of Judaism in antiquity and the Middle Ages. A publication by the Inter-Faculty Research Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Bern. Schwabe, Basel 2009, ISBN 978-3-7965-2424-0 .
  • Heinz-Peter Katlewski: Judaism on the move. About the new diversity of Jewish life in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-934658-38-5 .
  • Robert Uri Kaufmann (Ed.): Bibliography on the history of the Jews in Switzerland. Saur, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-598-11139-8 .
  • Erich Keller: Citizens and Jews: the Wyler-Bloch family in Zurich 1880–1954; Biography as a memory space (= publications of the Archives for Contemporary History of the Institute for History of the ETH Zurich. Volume 9). Chronos, Zurich 2015, ISBN 978-3-0340-1261-4 (dissertation University of Zurich 2013).
  • Claude Kupfer, Ralph Weingarten: Between exclusion and integration. History and present of the Jews in Switzerland. Sabe, Zurich 1999, ISBN 3-252-05066-8 .
  • Oliver Landolt: "How the Jews at Diessenhofen murdered a poor boy, and how it went." Allegations of ritual murder and the persecution of Jews in 1401. In: Schaffhauser Contributions to History 73. 1996, pp. 161–194.
  • Achilles Nordmann : About the Jewish cemetery in Zwingen and Jewish settlements in the Principality of Basel. Basel 1906 (special print from the magazine for history and antiquity ). Basel 1906.
  • Achilles Nordmann: History of the Jews in Basel from the end of the second community to the introduction of freedom of belief and conscience 1397–1875. Basel 1913 (special print from the magazine for history and antiquity ).
  • Achilles Nordmann: Les juifs dans le Pays de Neuchâtel. Neuchâtel 1923.
  • Jacques Picard : Helvetic. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , pp. 27-30.
  • Anna Rapp Buri: Jewish cultural assets in and from Endingen and Lengau. Regional culture, Ubstadt-Weiher 2008, ISBN 978-3-89735-493-7 .
  • Noëmi Sibold: "Turbulent times." On the history of the Jews in Basel, 1930s to 1950s. In: Contributions to the history and culture of the Jews in Switzerland. Series of publications by the Swiss Association of Israelites, Volume 14. Chronos-Verlag , Zurich 2010. (Review).
  • Christoph Schwinges (Ed.): Jews in their environment. Acculturation of Judaism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Basel 2009, pp. 157–227.
  • Augusta Weldler-Steinberg : History of the Jews in Switzerland from the 16th century to after emancipation. Edited and supplemented by Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg . Two volumes, Zurich 1966 and 1970.
  • Dölf Wild: important witnesses of Jewish living culture discovered in Zurich's old town . In: Ashkenaz. No. 7, 1997, pp. 267-299.

Movies

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Avi Hein: Switzerland Virtual Jewish Library. Retrieved February 18, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Ville de La Chaux-de-Fonds. Retrieved February 14, 2018 (fr-fr).
  3. ↑ Historique - CIG: Communauté Israélite de Genève. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 14, 2018 ; accessed on February 14, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.comisra.ch
  4. ↑ SIG / FSCI: "Swiss Jews: 150 years of equality": 150.swissjews.ch. Retrieved February 14, 2018 .
  5. ^ Jubilee - Jewish Museum of Switzerland (DE). Retrieved April 11, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Finger ring with menorah
  7. ↑ "A finger ring illuminates Jewish history - the menorah ring from Kaiseraugst." ( Memento of the original from March 6, 2009) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 6.8 MB) Augusta Raurica 05/2 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.augustaraurica.ch
  8. ^ Encyclopedia Judaica, Volume 15, p. 554.
  9. ↑ 150 Years of Equal Rights for Swiss Jews - The Long Way Out of the Ghetto in Neue Zürcher Zeitung from January 16, 2016
  10. ↑ The long path of Swiss Jews to equality in the Berner Zeitung of January 13, 2016
  11. ↑ Kosher restaurant was one of the deciding factors. Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Publications of the Independent Expert Commission Switzerland - Second World War - Volume 17
  13. ↑ Thoughts on the end of the war 50 years ago. Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  14. ^ Editing of new Germany: Switzerland: Federal Council apologizes for Jewish policy (new Germany). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  15. ^ Avi Hein: Switzerland Virtual Jewish Library. Retrieved February 18, 2017 .
  16. ↑ Christoph Peter Baumann (Ed.): Judentum in Basel . Published by INFOREL, Information Religion. Basel 2010.
  17. ↑ Zurich Synagogues