Entry in the Hürben (Bavarian Swabia) municipal protocols, dated July 6, 1728:
STAA, VÖ Lit. 263 fol. 187 – July 6 1728
Considering that the protected Jew Samuel Ullman of Hürben has been dead for two years, and his daughter Bonle is engaged to Lazarus Goggenheimb of Stieling (Stühlingen), the latter has meanwhile fulfilled all official requirements and is prepared to get married promptly and will be taken under protection as of today at the dominion's discretion, on the condition that he shall humbly obey all official decrees and prohibitions and contribute his quarterly protection tax of 1 florin, 30 kreuzer, or as the dominion sees fit; thus confirmed by solemn oath.1
This record of Lazarus Goggenheimb, alias Siessel or Süssel, had remained the earliest trace of my maternal grandmother’s ancestors for many years. Siessel became the progenitor of a huge clan with descendants in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and the Middle East. But a question kept nagging me: Why would a young man in the early eighteenth century seek a wife some two hundred kilometres from home?
I was unable to find an authoritative work on the history of the Jews in Stühlingen, a German town at the foot of the Black Forest, bordering Switzerland. They had vanished after 1743. Although the Jews of Stühlingen form part of the foundation myths of the old Jewish communities in Gailingen, Tiengen, Endingen, and Lengnau – the root stock of Swiss Jewry – no bard has sung their dirge; no scholar has unearthed their secrets. The life and demise of the Stühlingen Jews from 1600 to 1743 seem to have transpired largely in a blind spot of history. The historical literature covering these circumstances and events is amazingly scant, both from an internal, Jewish and an external, gentile perspective. This gaping void begged to be filled. To learn more, I had to research it myself. But living in Canada, far from Stühlingen itself and the relevant archives, posed one difficulty, and not being a professional historian another.
To approach the problem, I oriented myself on the method Shlomo Ettlinger had employed in his “Ele Toldot” inventory of the inhabitants of the Frankfurt ghetto in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 Though the scope of my problem was infinitesimally smaller than Ettlinger’s, I would be using potent tools powered by technology and passion, and the most precious, but frequently squandered, resource: time – time unencumbered by meetings, deadlines, or other people’s priorities.
A pilot study based on limited existing primary data, together with some newer transcriptions of eighteenth century county and municipal accounting books, enabled me to develop a technique for systematically exploiting the patterns found in time, names, and locations to construct a pixelated model of the historical community. This early work was implemented on a giant spreadsheet.
I then found a researcher in southern Germany who was willing to travel to the county archives in Donaueschingen and to their provincial equivalent in Karlsruhe on a contractual basis, both for me and later on also for another interested party. Our researcher extracted dated abstracts of each entry concerning Stühlingen Jews in municipal, judiciary, and county records between 1600 and 1745. But as more and more archival transcripts started to arrive, the spreadsheet technique turned progressively impractical. It became necessary to write extensive analysis software based on a relational database. The original narrative listings were fragmented, filtered, transformed, sorted, interpreted, and reassembled.
Gradually a picture started to emerge from the mist, a picture of real people with their fortes and foibles, their occupations and relationships. Little by little, individuals coalesced into an evolving community. The Jews of Stühlingen multiplied, spread, and were finally expelled. From some 300 typed pages systematically listing abstracts drawn from 205 individual sources of dry, administrative prose, broken down into 4826 primary, dated records that refer to 190 distinct individuals who are named a total of 7538 times, it became possible to reconstruct the likeness of a long-forgotten community – a likeness no less fascinating than that of a delicate vase lovingly restored by an archaeologist, shard by shard from a pile of rubble.
Having read Jacob Katz’s Tradition and Crisis, a fundamental social history of the Jewish people at the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern period, I was overwhelmed both by its depth and its level of abstraction. I wondered whether the reality on the ground complied with Katz’s theoretical framework. It is perhaps not surprising that Katz’s deep insights explained many of the phenomena that I ultimately observed in my own study. Thus, this present research may be illustrative, in the context of rural southern Germany, of the concepts explored in Tradition and Crisis. But such a comparison also highlights that Katz’s take on Jewish law and ethics, based as it is on rabbinic literature, describes ideals and norms rather than actual behaviour. His normative description of a Jewish community’s structure and function probably corresponds more closely to the situation that existed in the shtetls of Eastern Europe than to those in rural southern Germany.
Before beginning to write a book on the Jews of Stühlingen, it seemed prudent first to determine its intended audience. As an amateur, it would be folly for me to attempt to address historians and experts in Jewish history of the Middle Ages and early modern period. They are already familiar with what I am going to write. Perhaps the methodology used to extract the community structure may be of passing interest to them. Conversely, merely to provide recreational genealogists, intent on expanding their “cousin collection,” with grist for their mill would give me little satisfaction. In my cross-hair is the intelligent reader who constantly seeks to expand her or his knowledge and understanding of the world – a person who is aware that our present circumstances are largely determined by the continuous flow of history originating from thousands of years ago.
I chose Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All as a model for this book. By sheer coincidence, it takes up where this book leaves off – in the year 1743. Whereas Elon focuses on the intellectual and social assimilation of Jews in German cities, this book studies the earlier life of Jews in rural southern Germany.
In keeping with the philosophy of evidence-based storytelling, every attempt is made to support any apparently declarative statement with references to the sources of such information; shortened citations are provided in footnotes, with a comprehensive bibliography to be found at the end of the book. Such documentation may render the prose a bit more bulky but may easily be ignored by the reader not beset by questions or doubts. This is not a textbook on “Stühlingen 101”; there will not be a test at the end. But I would like to provide sufficient information to slake any lingering curiosity. Readers are free to ignore any material they consider irrelevant.
The attribute “evidence-based” implies that every effort was made to make this complex reasoning process transparent through the structure of the report, so the reader can trace the deductive and inferential steps of the author. Every reference to a historical record is linked to the accompanying database. The interested reader can pursue further research by searching for specific dates and text by means of the database search engine.
The research strategy employed was “bottom up,” that is, reconstructing first the actors mentioned in the records, then their actions and attributes, their relationships, and from there progressing gradually to the community they formed. The writing strategy reflects exactly the opposite method: from the most general to the most specific. The description of individuals in the context of their families comes towards the end of the book.
And what do we get for all these efforts?
At the most superficial level, a descriptive list of ancestors, distant cousins, their friends, neighbours, and enemies- A potential source book for Jewish genealogists
- At the next level, an impression of what life was like in a seventeeth- and eighteenth-century rural Jewish community in southern Germany
- At yet a deeper level, a contribution towards our understanding of Jewish history in the early modern age in rural southern Germany
- An opportunity for the general reader to observe historical research in action
- At the deepest level, a promise and a warning of what the “Big Data” approach has yet to bring: an invasion of our private lives, in intimate detail, by systematically harvesting a collection of apparently trivial and innocuous pieces of information, gathered automatically any time we buy, sell, travel, email, make a phone call, walk by a security camera, or trigger a sensor in some other way.3
This report does not claim infallibility; potential sources of error are too numerous: from original and purposeful misrepresentations and misunderstandings, ambiguous oral communications, and errors in writing, deciphering, and transcription to misassociations, misallocations, and misinterpretations, anything is possible. Documents may have been lost, misfiled, or have deteriorated over the years. So while some errors in details are likely, they will probably not alter the overall picture significantly.
However, apparent scientific flaws may be turned into an educational strength: they point out to the reader where such a lengthy “assembly line” of research, from sources to conclusions, can and must be strengthened.
Footnotes -> List of References
1StAA. VÖ 263 fol.187. Author’s translation.
2Ettlinger, “Ele Toldot.”
3O’Neil, "Weapons of Math Destruction."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.