Where is Stühlingen?
Imagine you have just landed in the city of Frankfurt, the New York of medieval Germany. Travel south ('push' the map up) through Darmstadt to Mannheim, and then to what is now Karlsruhe. Turn east towards Pforzheim. Now is a good time to switch to ‘Satellite’ view. Pforzheim is situated right at the northeast corner of the Black Forest. Now follow the eastern slope of the Black Forest south. You will be passing the sites of former Jewish communities in “Weil der Stadt,” Horb, Sulz, and Rottweil. Once you see Waldshut-Tiengen, it is time to zoom in and track back. Some fifteen kilometres northeast of Tiengen, in the Wutach Valley, lies the little town of historic Stühlingen. You might have missed it without magnification. Just for fun switch back to the map-view. Now you see that Stühlingen sits flush at the border to Switzerland, right across from Schleitheim. You will meet it again later in the story. You have just travelled one of the major north–south medieval trade routes.
From the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, the town of Stühlingen and its surroundings were home to a flourishing Jewish community, which was finally expelled in 1743. According to legend, the evicted Jews of Stühlingen were among the early Jews in Endingen, Lengnau, Gailingen, Randegg, and Tiengen. The first two communities formed the early core of Swiss Jewry.
Shaped like a squeezed trapeze, the town is situated on a plateau a few hundred feet above the Wutach Valley floor and was originally encased by a wall that provided the backing for the outermost ring of houses. Two gates, one on either end of the main thoroughfare (Schlossstrasse), controlled access. The town was flanked on both sides by shallow ravines descending towards the valley, which provided a modicum of defence against invaders before the introduction of gun powder. In time of need, the ravines could be flooded, thus acting as substitutes for a moat.1 However, by the seventeenth century this area served as gardens for the inhabitants. Along the southwest corner of the town were tanning and dyeing pits fed by the little creek at the bottom of the ravine. In all likelihood, this creek also provided running water for the ritual bath of the Jews, who shared that southwest corner of the town with the tanners. The proximity of tanners and Jews was customary in the Middle Ages.2
For reasons of convenience, by the seventeenth century most houses provided direct access to their extramural backyards, thus breaching the security of the town wall. The outermost boundaries shown in the town plan representing seventeenth-century Stühlingen (fig. 2) are mere retaining partitions shoring up the garden plots.
Literature Review
Despite its pivotal role in the Jewish history of southern Germany and Switzerland, Stühlingen has been largely ignored by historians. A notable exception was Berthold Rosenthal, who is not even mentioned in the Encyclopedia Judaica. Rosenthal, a secondary-level school-teacher, self-taught historian, and genealogist, was born 1875 in Liedolsheim near Karlsruhe.3 For three years he attended teachers' college in Karlsruhe, and from 1894 to 1897 he taught Jewish parochial school in a variety of small towns. In 1901 Rosenthal attained a position as a high-school teacher in Karlsruhe. From 1914 to 1916 he served in the German army and was wounded in action. By 1933 he had been fired from his teaching position under the racial laws of the Nazi regime,4 and in 1940 he managed to immigrate to the United States. Rosenthal died in 1957 at the age of eighty-two in Omaha, Nebraska.
He is best remembered today for his avocational research into the history of the Jews in southern Germany. Between 1920 and 1940 Rosenthal visited archives all over southwestern Germany in order to carry out his research. It was the time before copy machines. He recorded all of his findings by hand in a distinctive German script, producing copious notes that measure some six linear feet in the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) archives; his notes were later microfilmed, digitized, and are now accessible on the internet as the “Berthold Rosenthal Collection.”5
Rosenthal’s magnum opus, Heimatgeschichte der badischen Juden (Regional History of the Baden Jews) attempted to defend the issue of an integral German Jewish identity against misgivings both from within and from without.6 The literal translation of his book’s title is both inadequate and misleading. “Baden” refers to the southwestern corner of Germany and now constitutes part of Baden-Württemberg, one of Germany’s federated states. But the German word Heimat — a romantic concept implying home, roots, belonging, identity, and race — has no proper English equivalent and is ideologically and emotionally charged. Published in 1927, Rosenthal's book was more didactic than scholarly, very much in keeping with traditional Jewish historiography.7 Unfortunately, the book was too little, too late to stem the tide of history.
Despite Rosenthal’s Herculean efforts, the research in his book is poorly documented. Sources are often implied rather than explicit. Nevertheless, one gets a strong impression that most statements are based on valid primary sources. In a June 1957 letter to Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg, a historian of Swiss Jewry, Rosenthal regrets that most of his notes on Stühlingen were lost in 1940 during his hasty escape from Germany.8
But, as the title implies, Heimatgeschichte does not focus on Stühlingen alone. The book is organized into major time periods, and within those, by region. Stühlingen is covered separately in the section dealing with the period up to the Westphalian Peace, and again in a section that traces the period up to the Napoleonic Wars. Within these sections, the geography extends from Heidelberg, along the Rhine, and up to Lake Constance – a wide field to cover indeed, but not enough. In addition, the appendix contains a fifteen-page essay describing one particular event in the history of Stühlingen’s Jews: the “Urfehde Affair.”9
Statutory, administrative, financial, and judicial files regarding Stühlingen are to be found mainly in the Archives of Prince Fürstenberg (Fürstlich Fürstenbergisches Archiv [FFAD]) in Donaueschingen, and in the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (GLA). Rosenthal seems to have relied mainly on the former. In particular, he made extensive use of the “Jews’ files”10 in the Politica section. But Rosenthal also copied eighteen tax-list summaries from the account books for the years 1634 to 174311 and used those as background material.
Besides the Fürstenberg archives, Rosenthal relied in his Stühlingen chapters12 heavily and uncritically on Leopold Löwenstein’s 'Nathanael Weil, Oberlandesrabbiner [chief rabbi of the Baden province] in Karlsruhe und seine Familie.' Löwenstein, in turn, had based his article largely on papers from the estate of that rabbi Nathanael (Nesanel) Weil, as edited by his son Rabbi Tiah Weil. According to these accounts, “Nathanael was the grandson of the learned and wealthy Maharam Weil of Stühlingen, the builder of the famous Stühlingen synagogue, who used wine instead of water in mixing the mortar for its construction, and who traced his own ancestry back to Morenu ha-Rav Meir of Rothenburg."13
Löwenstein has reconstructed his “hagiography” of Maharam Weil largely from the yichus letters (pedigree documents) of both Rabbi Nathanael and his son Tiah Weil. The custom of compiling pedigrees has a long tradition in rabbinic families, reaching back to biblical times.14 It says in the Talmud:
Consequently, in traditional Jewish society, the pedigree is a crucial factor in judging a man’s piety and learning. It could affect a rabbi’s career,16 one’s chances at a desirable marriage, and even the size of the dowry.17 It is essential to count among one’s ancestors many famous scholars, as well as some martyrs steadfastly clinging to their faith. According to their biographies, both Nathanael and Tiah had great difficulties in finding stable positions as community rabbis and struggled with abject poverty. Nathanael largely depended on his wife’s income as a shopkeeper. One can well appreciate the temptation to fortify their pedigrees.
In their defence, as this investigation will reveal, there were at least five distinct Marum Weils over the 140-year history of Stühlingen’s Jews, several both rich and influential. It is quite possible that the fabled rabbi Marum Weil of Stühlingen resulted from a confluence of separate myths.
Rosenthal was well aware of this problem. In a letter to Florence Guggenheim, dated August 4, 1957, he wrote:
It is then somewhat surprising that Rosenthal should accept the claims in Nathanael Weil’s biography in such an axiomatic manner. In retrospect, it is almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.
Another important contribution to the scant literature on the Jews of Stühlingen, a series of three articles in the Swiss journal of Jewish genealogy, originates from the pen of the veteran Basel genealogist and lawyer Peter Stein.19 This series is particularly useful since it meticulously itemizes internal Jewish sources relevant for the elucidation of Stühlingen’s Jewish history. Unfortunately, Stein explored only a small sample of extant external, primary sources available at the Karlsruhe archives, insufficient to resolve the complex family structure of the Stühlingen community or to trace the chronology of and reasons for certain events.
The same author, in collaboration with Werner L. Frank, has written an article on the early history of the famed Guggenheim family.20 Unfortunately, their family tree falls short, since it is not based on sufficient primary data.
But a Jewish community does not exist in a vacuum. Its situation and development cannot be understood without adequate geographic and historical background about the town hosting it. A little volume by a local historian entitled Geschichte der Stadt und der vormaligen Landgrafschaft Stühlingen, which I found in a second-hand book store in Freiburg, Germany, proved extremely useful.21 Another Stühlingen author, Gustav Häusler, wrote a history of his town in 1966, thus providing additional perspectives. 22
Today most surviving administrative, financial, and court records are stored in the archives of Karlsruhe and Donaueschingen; the rest largely fell victim to Stühlingen's town-hall fires in 1850 and 1904. As chance would have it, a few valuable manuscripts concerning the Jews survived the second fire because Samuel Pletscher,23 a journalist and writer from the adjacent Swiss township of Schleitheim, had borrowed them from the town archive in the 1890s as resources for a newspaper article. They are still in the Schleitheim township archives today.24
Two further, rather esoteric sources deserve to be mentioned as well. Both are cited in an article by David Kaufmann,25 which was dismissed by Rosenthal.26 The first is an obscure letter written in rough Latin and sent on March 7, 1659 by Jean-George Hurter, a publisher in Schaffhausen, to Jean Buxdorf Jr., a professor in Basel and collector of rare Hebrew manuscripts, mentioning that a series of valuable tomes were for sale in Stühlingen by the widow of a learned Jew who had died recently.27 The widow was in dire straits and urgently needed money. Kaufmann inferred (falsely, as it turns out) that these were the books of the “Great Maharam Weil of Stühlingen” and were for sale by his widow.
The second document is a handwritten, Hebrew list of seventeen circumcisions performed for members of an extended family between 1701 and 1704 in the local Jewish communities in and around Stühlingen. Kaufmann’s article contains a transcript of that memo; the original, which appears to be lost, was apparently a single page stuck to the end of some sheet music celebrating the inauguration of a synagogue from the private library of Rabbi Abraham Merzbacher.28 The list indicates place, date, and first names of each child and father. Of the seventeen boys four came from Lengnau, four from Stühlingen, three from Endingen, one each from Tiengen, Wangen, and Donaueschingen. Of the final three, no community is stated. Only one father in the list (#15) exhibits the family name Weil (?????), but his place of residence is not reported.
Unfortunately, we lack any personal diaries and letters, the usual sources of social history; all internal documents of the Jewish community in Stühlingen must be considered lost. However, this is not the case for the two closely related Jewish communities of Lengnau and Endingen, across the Rhine from Tiengen and Stühlingen. The two-volume History of the Jews in Switzerland29 by Augusta Weldler-Steinberg, and edited by Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg, provides a template for interpreting much of the Stühlingen archival records. Augusta Steinberg (1879–1932) had immigrated to Switzerland as a child from Buczacz (Buchach) in Galicia. She originally trained as primary-school teacher and graduated from the University of Bern in 1902 with a thesis on the history of the Jews in Switzerland during the Middle Ages. She was best known for editing the works of the German poet Karl Theodor Körner. At the behest of the Swiss Association of Jewish Communities, she began the work on the two-volume book in 1919 but died in 1932, shortly before its completion. The manuscript was eventually finalized by Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg, who had been researching the customs and history of the Jews in the villages of Endingen and Lengnau, and the book was published in 1966.
This survey of available sources regrettably sheds no light on the individual Jewish inhabitants of Stühlingen. The dominance of the given names Schmul, Jackhlin, Jossel, Leheman, and Marum, as well as their many variations, cloud the picture. Based on the existing literature, we cannot interpret the events that led to the ultimate expulsion of the Jews. And, finally, the identity of the great Maharam of Stühlingen, the synagogue builder who used wine instead of water to mix the mortar, still remains a mystery.
In order to further this research, we have no choice but to systematically analyze extant administrative, judicial, and accounting records pertaining to Stühlingen’s Jews from the archives of Donaueschingen and Karlsruhe – a monumental task. Details of that investigation will be discussed in chapter 2. The results of the analysis will then be described and discussed in the light of the pertaining literature.
Footnotes -> List of References
1Brandeck, Geschichte der Stadt, 143.
2Gilomen, “Spätmittelalterliche Siedlungssegregation.” 7.
3Rosenthal, “LBI, Guide to the Papers of Berthold Rosenthal.”
4Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums
5Rosenthal, “Guide to the Papers of Berthold Rosenthal.”
6Derman, “Constructing a German-Jewish Heimat.”
7Bell, Jewish Identity. 1–18.
8Rosenthal, Berthold Rosenthal Collection, reel 13, frame 721.
9Urfehde means “oath of truce,” an act used in medieval law to settle a conflict. See ch. 4, p. 30.
10FFA, Judenakte, Politica.
11Rosenthal, Berthold Rosenthal Collection, reel 4, frames 712–30.
12Weil, Korban Nesanel.
13Löwenstein p. 4. Morenu ha-Rav Meir of Rothenburg refers to Rabbi Maharam of Rothenburg (1215–93), one of the greatest medieval Talmud scholars in Germany.
14Cf. Exod. 6:14.
15BT, Bava Metzia 85a 5.
16Klausner, “European Rabbis", p. 14.
17Salsitz and Kaish, “Three Homelands” 117.
18Rosenthal, Berthold Rosenthal Collection, reel 13, frame 651 [in German].
19Stein, “Die Juden zu Stühlingen und ihre Nachkommen”; Stein, “Die Juden zu Stühlingen und ihre Nachkommen, 2”; Stein, “Die Juden zu Stühlingen und ihre Nachkommen: Nachtrag.”
20Frank and Stein, “Digging for the Copper-Guggenheim’s Origin.”
21Brandeck, Geschichte der Stadt.
22Häusler, Stühlingen:Vergangenheit und Gegenwart.
23Marti-Weissenbach, “Samuel Pletscher.”
24Samuel Pletscher Collection.
25Kaufmann, “Zur Geschichte der Familie Dreyfuss,” 424.
26Rosenthal, Berthold Rosenthal Collection, reel 13, frames 689–90.
27Johannes Georgius Hurter to Johannes Buxdorf, March 7, 1659, MS G I 63, fol. 130, University Library Basel.
28Merzbacher and Rabbinovicz, "Ohel Avraham."
29Weldler-Steinberg and Guggenheim-Grünberg, Geschichte der Juden in der Schweiz.
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