Protection of Jews

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The protection of Jews was a legal principle regulating the status of Jewish minorities, which from late Roman antiquity to the 19th century determined the framework conditions for Jewish existence in the German Reich and was reflected in both ecclesiastical and secular law.

Church law

With the Christianization of the late ancient Roman Empire as a result of the Constantinian Revolution , Christianity was promoted and made the state religion at the end of the 4th century. In addition to secular legislation, the role of Judaism in the medieval Latin West was increasingly subject to the influence of the Church.

Papal guarantees of protection for Jews are first handed down from the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590–604).

Because Jews rejected the interpretation of Old Testament prophecy in relation to Christ and were regarded by the Catholic Church as murderers of Christ , they were under the general suspicion of blasphemy. Unlike heretics , however, they were not denied their right to life because, as witnesses to the death of Christ, they represent a necessary part of Christian salvation history . Various papal Sicut Judaeis bulls therefore guaranteed the Jews from the 12th to the 15th century protection from killing, expulsion and forced baptism . At the same time, according to the Vatican's Jewish policy, Christians should also be protected from the influence of the Jewish communities ( principle of dual protectorate ). For rabbinic Judaism , for its part, declared Judaism incompatible with Christianity at the Synod of Jabne in 95 AD. Jesus is a false prophet. The eighteen supplication prayer was extended to include special curses against "heretics" ("Birkat ha-minim"). Jewish Christians had to stay away from the synagogues. The mutual need for separation was expressed, for example, in the prohibition of interreligious mixed marriage under both Christian and Jewish law.

Secular law

Imperial measures in Roman times varied from relative tolerance to more hostile measures. Nevertheless, after the Christianization of the empire, Judaism remained the only explicitly permitted religion besides Christianity.

Based on the ideas in canon law, the protection of Jews consisted of a special legal status based on protection contracts between individual persons or families and the sovereign, who at the beginning of the early modern period increasingly took on a collective character in the form of regional Jewish regulations . It was in this context that the concept of protective Jews came into being , who, in contrast to non-sedentary beggar Jews, had found acceptance into an urban community. The court Jews such as Joseph Suss Oppenheimer opposed it with special privileges equipped single royal courts.

Judenregal and Jewish regulations

Socio-economic importance

Life under a special legal status was by no means special in the Middle Ages and early modern times - there was generally a pluralism of legal sources during this period. The authority to create special legal statuses (iura singularia) for certain persons or entire classes, for example by granting privileges or pardons, was part of the legitimate exercise of state authority and recognized sovereign rights. In addition to the Jews, this also applied to the clergy (privilegia clericorum), the nobility (privilegia nobilium), merchants (privilegia mercatorum) and craftsmen.

Following on from the theologically legitimized servitude in the fate of the diaspora , the Jewish shelf placed this in a context of rule and property law.

The basis was formed by time-bound theological ideas, which Jews classified as fundamentally inferior and in need of protection. Ecclesiastical and secular law each contained their own protective powers, in which the claims of the medieval powers of the papacy and empire were rooted.

In addition to the regalia in the narrower sense, the Jewish regal also contributed to the financing of the ruler's household.

Protective Jew (left, with “Jew hat”) and King in the Sachsenspiegel , 1220

Design

The Judenregal authorized the patron to issue Jewish ordinances regarding trade and passage bans, clothing and labeling obligations by wearing a Jewish costume or a yellow ring as well as body customs demands . It extended to regulations on settlement in certain residential areas ( ghettos ), taxation, the guarantee of legal protection as well as individual commands and prohibitions. The protection of Jews was handled very differently both regionally and by the individual clerical and secular princes.

The royal peace , under which a wide variety of people could be placed, has always been a source of income for the royal coffers. Jews played a prominent role in this. As early as the Carolingian era , Jews were placed under royal protection against payment of a protective interest and received duty exemptions and individual royal privileges. The Carolingians differentiated between different status groups of Jews, but they were not regarded as serfs.

In the Worms privilege of 1090, the Salians renewed and improved the protection of Jews and made them subject to the royal chamber. In 1236 Frederick II subordinated himself to all Jews throughout the Reich as royal chamberlains and granted them protection from persecution in exchange for payment of protection money. Letters of protection were no longer given by princes or bishops to individual or groups of Jews, as in the early Middle Ages, but instead they were subject to interest in the imperial chamber. This tax privilege was transferable. As a result, after 1241, tax lists in German cities also showed a “Reich Jewry Tax”. With this legal construction he tied in with the concept of regalia.

Under Rudolf von Habsburg (1218–1291) the Jewish regal was interpreted as royal serfdom, from which the right to expropriate Jews without compensation was derived. Since the interregnum in the middle of the 13th century, the king lent the Jewish regal to the rising German territorial princes. Charles IV protected the Jews in his own domain , but did nothing to protect them at the level of the empire. In 1356, in the Golden Bull , he transferred the Jewish registers to the electors . The originally personal bond with the emperor now turned into salable goods that could also be lent and borrowed. The protective instrument turned into the opposite: active “participants in economic events” became “objects of economic policy”, the tolerance of which depended on the economic interests of the owner of the Judenregal.

The letter of protection from King Sigismund of October 15, 1414 for the Heilbronn Jews , for example , stated that, as believers, they had the right to have their demands fulfilled. They were also granted the right to protection of property and physical integrity, the right to freedom of movement and the right to freedom of religion . The place of jurisdiction in secular or religious matters was the Heilbronn court or the Heilbronn rabbi. Finally, fees to the royal chamber in Heilbronn were regulated there. Extract from the letter of protection:

  • Article 2: item that we should also protect ourselves and we live and good in steady villages and on the velde, on streets and on water, and that all streets should be open ...
  • 3rd article: item that the aforementioned Jews and Judin should not pay any tribute or goods on water and on land, except for the customs that our Vorfaren Romisch keizer and kunige have imposed ...
  • 4th article: item that neither of the aforementioned jews, ir wibere or ir children should be urged to the riot.

emancipation

With the revised general privilege in the Kingdom of Prussia of 1750 and the Prussian Jewish edict of 1812 , the former protective Jews emancipated themselves to equal citizens with the abolition of serfdom and the emancipation legislation at the beginning of the 19th century.

In 1833, however, the Prussian State still divided the Jews in Posen “into naturalized Jews and protected Jews [...]. The protective Jew was not allowed to acquire civil rights in the municipalities or to move to another province. ”Naturalization (naturalization), on the other hand, was an admission“ into the local state association […]. endowed with the right or the freedoms of his nation. ”Those who were resident locally, in Latin judaeus sub protectione superiorum ,“ Jews under the protection of the authorities ” , in contrast to those who only traveled there temporarily, were designated as protection Jews.

Effects

In the middle of the 14th century there were widespread plague pogroms by the population, and in connection with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, there were also expulsions by the respective rulers, for example in 1525 in Haigerloch or 1555 in Stadtlengsfeld . The statute of Kalisch with its rules that have been stable over centuries has therefore led to constant Jewish immigration to Poland since 1264 and the typical form of settlement in Eastern Europe in the shtetl .

Due to widespread caricature images and stereotypes as well as economic competition in the cities, the legal unequal treatment also led to local power-political conflicts at the expense of the Jewish population, for example in 1349 in Strasbourg or in 1612 when the Judengasse was plundered during the Fettmilch uprising in Frankfurt am Main.

To what extent religious anti-Judaism and the Christian churches, especially the attitude of Pope Pius XII. The racist legislation in the time of National Socialism ( Nuremberg Laws ) and the historically unprecedented, historically unprecedented so-called final solution to the Jewish question through state-organized mass murder, and the nationally and anti-Semitic law , are individually controversial in Holocaust research .

The Christian-Jewish relations were in the second half of the 20th century by the declaration Nostra Aetate of the Second Vatican Council , the Jewish side with the declaration Dabru Emet was answered in the sense of a common heritage in the Old Testament redefined. The intercession on Good Friday for the Jews in the Catholic liturgy has remained controversial .

According to the principle of equality in Article 3, Paragraph 3 of the German Basic Law , nobody may be disadvantaged or favored because of their beliefs without an objective justification.

Since 1950 the Central Council of Jews in Germany has had the status of a corporation under public law . In the State Treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Central Council of January 27, 2003, with regard to "the special historical responsibility of the German people for Jewish life in Germany and the immeasurable suffering that the Jewish population had to endure in the years 1933 to 1945," a continuous and partnership-based cooperation as well as annual financial support from the Federal Republic of Germany.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julia König: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to Modern Times Dossier Antisemitism, Federal Agency for Civic Education , November 23, 2006.
  2. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Becker: The position of canon law to those of different faiths: Gentiles, Jews and heretics. In: Mutual Perception of Religions in the Late Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Era - entire volume. New treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 2009, pp. 101–124.
  3. ↑ Cf. Thomas Brechenmacher : The Vatican and the Jews. History of an Unholy Relationship from the 16th Century to the Present. Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52903-8 , p. 21 ( review by Klaus Prinz, May 2005); see. also Manuela Niesner: On the Tolerance of the Jews in Christian Society - A Latin-German Quaestio from around 1400. Mediaevistik 2007, pp. 185-214.
  4. ↑ Ulrike Heitmüller: The role of the Jews in Christian salvation history July 4, 2015.
  5. ↑ cf. Thomas Brechenmacher : The Vatican and the Jews. History of an Unholy Relationship from the 16th Century to the Present. Munich 2005. ISBN 3-406-52903-8 , p. 19 ff.
  6. ^ Norbert Scholl , Winfried Belz, Karl-Heinz Knauber: Christianity and Judentum imprimatur, Trier 2018.
  7. ↑ Birkat ha-Minim: a Jewish prayer is defunct Korrespondenzblatt, ed. from the pastors' association in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Bavaria 6/2005, pp. 89–92.
  8. ↑ Ruth Langer: Cursing the Christians ?: A History of the Birkat HaMinim Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011 (English).
  9. ^ Karl-Leo Noethlichs: The Jews in the Christian Roman Empire (4th-6th centuries) . Berlin 2001.
  10. ↑ Sabine Ullmann: Judenschutz Historisches Lexikon Bayerns , accessed on June 1, 2020.
  11. ^ Christian Kieslinger: Court Jews - Country Jews - Begging Jews. Jewish life in the early modern period. Institute for the History of Jews in Austria, St. Pölten 2002, conference report.
  12. ↑ cf. Thomas Duve: Special Rights in the Early Modern Age University of Munich, Mitteilungen 2007, pp. 37–40.
  13. ↑ Eveline Brugger, Birgit Wiedl: Between Privilege and Persecution. Jewish life in the Middle Ages in Lower Austria. In: David . ( david.juden.at , accessed on August 22, 2017).
  14. ↑ Sabine Ullmann: Judenschutz Historisches Lexikon Bayerns , accessed on June 1, 2020.
  15. ^ Ernst Tremp: Regalien. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . December 23, 2011 .
  16. ^ Karl Heinz Burmeister : Tax on Jews. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . June 26, 2006 .
  17. ↑ Felix Singermann: The labeling obligation of the Jews in the Middle Ages. A contribution to the social history of Judaism. Univ.-Diss. Freiburg i.Br., 1915.
  18. ^ Karl Heinz Burmeister : Tax on Jews. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . June 26, 2006 .
  19. ↑ cf. Norbert Francke, Bärbel Krieger: Protective Jews in Mecklenburg: their legal position, their trade, who they were and where they lived. Edited by the Association for Jewish History and Culture in Mecklenburg and Vorpommern e. V., Schwerin 2002.
  20. ^ Henning Eichberg : Minority and Majority (=  introductions. Story 2). Lit Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-643-11280-4 , p. 14.
  21. ↑ Sabine Ullmann: Judenschutz Historisches Lexikon Bayerns , accessed on June 1, 2020.
  22. ↑ Kurt Schubert : Jüdische Geschichte (=  Beck'sche Reihe 2018). Beck, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-406-39175-3 , p. 49.
  23. ↑ Eugen Knupfer (arrangement): Document book of the city of Heilbronn . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1904 ( Württemberg historical sources . N. F. 5). P. 210 No. 451
  24. ↑ Edelgard Abenstein: From "Protective Jew" to Citizen , Review by Irene A. Diekmann, Bettina L. Götze: From Protective Jew Levin to Citizen Lesser. The Prussian Emancipation Edict of 1812. Berlin 2012, in: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , March 8, 2012.
  25. ↑ a b Protective Jew. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 15 : Schiefeln – Soul - (IX). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1899, Sp. 2136 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  26. ↑ naturalize 1). In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 13 : N, O, P, Q - (VII). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1889, Sp. 441 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  27. ↑ cf. Friedrich J. Battenberg : Legal Framework for Jewish Existence in the Early Modern Era between Empire and Territory, in: Rolf Kießling (Ed.): Jewish communities in Swabia in the context of the Old Empire. Colloquia Augustana 2, Berlin 1995, pp. 53-79.
  28. ↑ cf. Johannes Mordstein: Self-confident submission. Authorities and Jewish communities reflected in the Jewish protection letters of the County of Oettingen 1637-1806. Publications of the Schwäbische Forschungsgemeinschaft 11/2, Epfendorf 2005.
  29. ↑ cf. For example, the enemy image of the "Jewish usurer" DGB-Bildungswerk Thuringia, accessed on June 10, 2020.
  30. ↑ Jakob Jorda: “Jewish municipalities in Europe in the 17th century - Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg and Vienna in comparison” Master thesis, Vienna 2017, p. 31 ff.
  31. ^ Rudolf Neumaier: Catholic Church and Holocaust: "The whole world is hoping for answers here" Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 17, 2020.
  32. ↑ cf. Secretariat of the German Bishops' Conference (ed.): About the relationship of the church to Judaism. Declaration by the German bishops Bonn April 28, 1980.
  33. ↑ Andreas Goetze: The older siblings. The Church's Relationship to Judaism: From Anti-Semitism to Discussion at Eye Level die kirche , January 29, 2017.
  34. ↑ cf. Religious regulations for Jews and Muslims Scientific services of the German Bundestag , status of April 20, 2006.
  35. ↑ Federal Law Gazette I p. 1598