The Jews, apparently, were not pleasant neighbours. Mayor, town manager, and council requested Count Prosper Ferdinand in 1701 not to renew the protection letter in order to relieve the town of the Jewish burden. The Jews had abused the common pastures excessively, letting all kind of sick cattle graze and infect others.1

Thus Brandeck, in his town history, reflects the residents’ vestigial perception of their Jewish denizens, a perception that survived in the population’s collective subconsciousness for over two hundred years.

Physical fights were frequent, both between Jews and between gentiles and Jews. Sometimes they led to medical consequences. For example, in 1677 Johann Schölderlin wounded Callmele Jew and had to pay 12 fl. penalty plus the medical expenses [R4704].

By 1624 the town council had already applied to the count to have the Jews banished and to confiscate all their silver [R1576]. In 1682 the town complained that the number of Jews by far exceeded the permitted number [R1281]. Two years later, Father Maurus of Ofteringen complained about the large number of Jews in his village [1342]. A Jewish woman was fined for washing the laundry in her house [R1342]. In 1722 the entire Jewish population was fined for its apparent lack of respect while the church bells were rung Saturday night [R3009]. The following year, Faistel (G1.4.1.1) was fined for working on a Sunday [R3741]. A large group of Jewish men were fined for straying from the common road while welcoming a newly arriving bride groom [R803].

Stühlingen documents indicate a steady background of petty crime perpetrated by Jews during the second half of the seventeenth century. Every single one of the sixty-seven commercially active Jews between 1650 and 1700 received at least one fine or punishment or was sued. Marumb (G1.3), the most successful merchant, was by far the most frequently castigated, with thirty-six violations recorded. He seems to have owed his success, at least partially, to sharp business practices. For the half century after the Thirty Years’ War, we lack comparable data to determine whether these crime records represent general lawlessness resulting from the social upheaval, or whether such crime was specific to the Jewish population.

In retrospect, it is difficult to determine whether the negative image the Jews left behind in Stühlingen is the result of a structural cultural conflict, or whether it was caused by the Jews’ behaviour. It is clear that the Jews were not welcome in Stühlingen when they first arrived there at the end of the sixteenth century. They were permitted to settle for financial rather than compassionate reasons, and they were burdened correspondingly. The rulers, rather than the citizens themselves, benefited from accepting the Jews. Since the town boundaries of Stühlingen were fixed, new immigrants had to compete with the existing population for the limited housing space. Extant merchants and butchers resented the added competition; the townspeople may have welcomed a loan from the Jews when they needed it, but they resented the requirement to pay it back. The Catholic Church and the clergy, who set the social norms locally, were hostile to Jews for dogmatic reasons.

Whether, and to what degree, characteristics and behaviour of social groups are determined by nature or nurture has kept anthropologists and sociologists disputing for centuries. Émile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, has introduced such terms as “anomie” and “alienation” to describe a state of social disengagement.2 The field is heavy in theories and light in quantitative, empiric evidence, but the following idea carries a fair degree of plausibility: when a group perceives the social contract as biased against them, group members may be less likely to voluntarily adhere to it. Observational studies from the fields of racial segregation and organizational behaviour lend some credibility to this hypothesis.3 However, in our population we also observe a certain disregard for intragroup norms, for example, in respect to trading in stolen goods. Thus, social deregulation seems to have been more diffuse rather than specific.

Katz argues that the social segregation of Jews in the Middle Ages and early modern period was caused both by external enforcement and internal choice, that Jews considered themselves as “temporary residents” wherever they were, “waiting for the final call.”4 The episode around the news of the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi could support such an interpretation.5 The mindset of feeling like temporary residents could also explain why Jews made little effort to integrate with the host population. But this same attitude can also have a protective effect. If one accepts that one’s physical, economic, and social circumstances are of a tentative, transitory nature, sudden environmental or historic upheavals appear somewhat less of an existential crisis. Such an attitude might have made the Jews of Stühlingen better prepared to cope with their impending eviction and dispersion.

Over the past quarter millennium, society has come such a long way – whether through assimilation of the Jews6 or by general society's progress towards a humanist multiculturalism – that today a Jewish congregation and a Catholic charity can work closely together to support a Muslim Syrian refugee family.

Footnotes -> List of References

1Brandeck, "Geschichte der Stadt und der vormaligen Landgrafschaft Stühlingen," 89–90.

2See Olsen, “Durkheim’s Two Concepts of Anomie,”

3Bullough, “Alienation in the Ghetto,”; Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara and Melián-González, “The Role of Anomia,”

4Katz, "Tradition and Crisis," 14.

5Zevi, see ch. 9, p.91.

6Elon, "The Pity of It All."

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