Jewelry find from Weißenfels
The Weißenfels jewelry find is a complex of five rings and several pieces of garment jewelry . They were found near Weißenfels as early as 1826 . The objects are now in Halle, State Gallery Moritzburg , State Coin Cabinet of Saxony-Anhalt.
Only a silver wedding ring can be assigned to a Jewish owner by its inscription מזל טוב ( Masal tov ). It carries an attachment in the form of a Gothic house with a stepped gable .
A second ring bears an incomplete Greek inscription “All lovers”.
Landfill
It is believed that the jewelery was deposited in connection with the persecution of the Jews at the time of the Black Death in 1348–1349. The hiding place, however, was outside the city, while similar landfills took place within the Jewish ghetto. There are therefore other options:
- the objects could have been hidden by travelers (unrelated to Weißenfels);
- they could have been dumped by Christian looters;
- they could also have been deposited later by Jews who settled in Weißenfels after the pogroms in the second half of the 14th century.
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Discovery
The site was near the St. Laurentius Hospital, to the left of the Saale and opposite the town of Weißenfels , northwest of the bridge, on the way to Freyburg . Day laborers probably discovered the objects deposited in the 14th century during earthworks in 1823. But this original context of the find has not been preserved. In 1826 the Thuringian-Saxon Association for Research into Patriotic Antiquity and the Preservation of its Monuments bought some pieces. When the site was inspected again in the same year, further objects were found. However, a "lump" of coins was lost again.
Web links
- German inscriptions online : Inscription catalog in the district of Weißenfels : No. 6, 12, 13, 14
- Anke K. Scholz: plague - pogroms - pawnbroker nurseries. A standardized interpretation scheme for late medieval treasures, PDF
literature
- Historisches Museum der Pfalz Speyer (Hrsg.): Europe's Jews in the Middle Ages . (Exhibition catalog), Ostfildern 2004
- Maike Lämmerhirt: Jews in the Wettin territories: law, administration and economy in the late Middle Ages. Böhlau Verlag Cologne, Weimar 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-13006-0 .
- Ulf Dräger: Idea Treasury. Valuables and rarities from the Moritzburg. Halle (Saale) 2011, ISBN 978-3-86105-039-1 , pp. 26-29.