After the existing secondary sources on the Jews of Stühlingen had been exhausted, the time came to search for primary data. Not unlike a camera, whose lens characteristics and settings define the image it records, the specifics of primary data sources will largely determine the resulting aspects and col-our of the historic object that is being examined.

Since primary, internal Jewish documents such as protocols, diaries, and letters are nonexistent, we have to rely on external sources. Two major repositories exist: the municipal protocols for Stühlingen from 1600 to 1745 in the Baden-Württemberg State Archive, Karlsruhe, and a motley collection of documents, account books, and court records from the Fürstlich Fürstenbergisches Archiv (Archives of Prince Fürstenberg), Donaueschingen. The Karlsruhe archive is well organized; its finding aids are accessible on the internet, most conveniently through the German Digital Library.1 The Donaueschingen archive, on the other hand, can only be explored on site. Unfortunately, many valuable, early documents relating to the history of the Jews in Stühlingen had been confiscated and removed from the Donaueschingen archives by the Imperial Hapsburg authorities in the course of the Pappenheim succession controversy.2 By their very nature, extant sources will emphasize taxes, commercial transactions, failed deals, conflicts, offences, and misdemeanors. Community and family life, friendships, and personalities will be all but invisible.

As the method for my investigation I chose prosopography, as defined and described by Lawrence Stone in 1971.3 But the current study violates some of Stone’s conditions. The group of subjects examined here is situated at the bottom rather than at the top of the social ladder. Many data items are arbitrary rather than systematic. But since much of the data is drawn from tax rolls, sequential municipal and court documents, the representation of our sample is defined. Yet, the method provides astonishing insights.

In my initial work, I found some Karlsruhe records that a German researcher, Friedrich Wollmershäuser, an experienced genealogical investigator, had transcribed from the Karlsruhe archive for a fellow genealogist, Werner Frank. Mr. Frank generously allowed me to use the nineteen pages of extracted records, which covered selected time periods. These records enabled me to perform some simple analyses, develop a method, and run some pilot studies. The results were promising, and I hired Mr. Wollmershäuser to work through the Donaueschingen records, systematically summarizing record by record in German. Preliminary results based on this data were presented at the Thirty-second IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Paris, 2012 and published in Avotaynu4

As result of this publication, I was contacted by yet another fellow genealogist, Steven Guggenheim, who was looking for his ancestors in Stühlingen and the neighbouring town of Tiengen. Graciously, he granted me full access to all of the records that Mr. Wollmershäuser was to extract for him, mainly from the Karlsruhe archive, aiming for an almost complete collection of available records. Whereas the records were abstracted for me in German, records abstracted for Werner Frank and Steven Guggenheim were translated into English on the fly. Fiscal constraints did not allow the systematic collection of digital images.

I ended up with a total of some three hundred pages of well-structured record summaries as MS-Word documents, covering the period from 1604 to 1745. The percentage of missed records cannot be estimated. The translation from old German into current English introduced further noise. The degree of subjectivity, introduced by not having set criteria for the selection of records to be transcribed and by the act of summarizing, cannot be estimated. Similarly, it would have been preferable to separate the step of transcription from that of translation. For practical reasons, Mr. Wollmershäuser was not able to transcribe all the records in one continuous run. Instead, he sent a number of parcels, often months apart and not necessarily in chronological order, over a period of three and a half years, thus complicating numbering and the assembly of information. The amount of accumulating data precluded manual analysis by spreadsheet. It became necessary to develop proprietary software.

The collected data listed a series of dated events and situations involving named individuals. Unfortunately, Social Insurance numbers had not yet been invented in the seventeenth century. Nor did most people carry distinctive family names for the first half of the investigated period. Even the common name for a given person varied greatly, depending on period and recorder. Jews spoke a dialect that differed from that of the local officials. While most Jews were literate in Hebrew, few could write or spell in German. The oral transmission of names added another complication; in the documentation Jewish names were largely spelled phonetically.5

A male Jew firstly carries a religious name (shem ha kodesh) for primary use in the synagogue. It is usually a biblical name, further differentiated by the biblical name of his father. A secular name kinnui), or moniker, served for everyday purposes.6 In secular documents and records, one would only find the moniker or one of its variants. The situation is further complicated by familial naming patterns. In a small community, only a small subset of common biblical names would be found repeating over and over. Typically, a firstborn son would be named after his patrilineal grandfather. Often, the second son would carry the name of his matrilineal grandfather. As a result, the religious name will not uniquely distinguish coexisting individuals. Biblical name and moniker correlate somewhat, but not perfectly. For example, people with the biblical name Judah may be called by the monikers Judele, Jüdele, Leib, Lew, Löw, Leman, or Lehemann. In general, the major variant, that is, Judele, Leib, or Leheman, stays constant, but details in pronunciation and spelling may vary both over time and by recorder. This complexity is illustrated, for example, with Jacob (Jäggle) Bloch, the patriarch of the Bloch family (C2), who appeared at different times and in different documents under the moniker Jäcclin, Jäckle, Jäggle, Jägle, Jagli, Jägli, Jäglin, Jeckhle, Jegele, Jegg, Jeggle, Jegglin, Jögle, and Klein Jeggle.

At times when more than one individual with the same base name exist, a variety of attributes differentiate the moniker further. Relationships such as “son of,” “son-in-law of,” and “brother of” are often added. Alternatively, when individuals with a similar base name differ by generations, one may be designated “junior” (jung") or “senior” (alt or der Alte). When that does not suffice, physical attributes can be added, such as “the fat” (dicker), “the tall” (lang), or “the bent” (krumm). In the case of protection privileges, the mention of a father’s name usually indicates that the protection has been acquired through filial entitlement.

For the purpose of this study, we have defined a unique “formal name,” consisting of the biblical name, followed by the commonest moniker in parentheses, followed by the patronymic where available, followed by a family name where known or reconstructable, plus further discriminating attributes when necessary. For example, one of the most prominent Stühlingen Jews is known by the formal name Nathan (Sandel) ben Meir Weil. In other words, Nathan, the son of Meir, with the secular name of Sandel, belongs to the Weil family.7 Another colourful personage was Meir (Marum Dicker) ben Samuel Weil,  i.e. the Fat, and yet another, Joseph (Lang Jossel) ben Samuel Gugenheimb.

To be consistent, monikers were mapped to their corresponding religious names using the standard dictionary of Ashkenazic given names.8 Except for a few unusual situations, this method worked most of the time. One possible exception was the moniker Jegele. which, according to Beider, corresponds to the name Yechiel. But in the Stühlingen records it was used interchangeably for the same individual who usually was also called, “Jeckle,” “Jackle,” “Jäckele,” and “Jagglin,” all of which correspond to the name Jacob.

The task of identifying distinct individuals from the stream of constantly changing moniker variations was made even more difficult by the recurrence of identical first names within a given family. For example, in the different branches of the Gugenheimb family there were at least six Josephs: (i) Joseph (Josephle) ben Jacob (1628–56); (ii) Joseph (Josel) ben Marum (1681–1718); (iii) Joseph ben Kalonymos (1693–1711); (iv) Joseph (lang Jossel) ben Samuel ben Seligman (1703–45); (v) Herr Joseph Guggenheim from Vienna (1700); and (vi) Joseph Guggenheim, Sandel's (Nathan ben Meir Weil above) son-in-law (1703–40). The years in parentheses represent the first to last mention of a live person, rather than the years of birth and death. But many individuals were referred to many years after their death, particularly in estate matters.

The transcribed records showed almost perfect format consistency, a requirement for the five-step computer analysis used:9

1.  Preprocessing: Individual records were distinguished by a date or a page number; section headers do not begin with a date, a simple integer (page number), or a leading blank after a carriage return. Line continuations were given sixteen leading blanks after a carriage return; in this case the carriage return, followed by fifteen blanks, were deleted globally. Underlines, bold attributes, and blank lines were removed; editorial comments by the transcriber were also erased. 

2.  Parsing: Section headers were filtered out and stored in a first table. Prose was broken down into individual records, beginning with a date and/or a page number. Records were stored in a second table and tagged with the appropriate section-header index and the date. Where the record started on a page number only, the date of the previous record was carried over.

3.  Fractionating: This was the back-breaking, largely manual part of the work. For each record, the monikers were identified and individually entered into a third table if they were new. The relationship between a specific moniker and a record, together with flags and category attributes, were entered into a fourth, linkage table. Especially important records were flagged, and any sign that the person was deceased (e.g., mention of heirs, widow, etc.) was flagged as well. The type of activity or event was classified in one of fourteen categories. A comment field allows for additional specifications. Fortunately, after an initial learning period, the program recognized repeating monikers in the prose and selected them automatically. We call these linkage records ‘events.’

4.  Filtering and Sorting:Events were sorted by date and then filtered by moniker. For a given moniker, we tried to construct the likeliest formal name and checked if this name already existed. Subsequently, events were linked to this formal name in batches (highlight and click). A number of patterns helped in this process: identical monikers in a given time window; same location, same position in tax list; mention of family links (e.g., brother of, father of, daughter of, etc.); estate settlements, etc.

5.  Matching and reassembling: Once some key moniker patterns had established an identifiable person, remaining events were scanned for partial patterns that fit this person, and these events were also tagged with the same identity. Sometimes the emergence of a new pattern necessitated the release of some events from a person to whom they had already been assigned, thus resulting in an iterative process. 

Steps 3 and 5 introduced yet another large source of subjectivity.

The process yielded 4826 dated records, ex­trac­ted from 209 sour­ce do­cu­ments and bro­ken down fur­ther in­to 10,040 in­di­vi­dual events, that is, da­ted items lin­ked to a spe­ci­fic mo­ni­ker. Events do not co­ver the pe­riod from 1600 to 1750 even­ly (see fig. 3).

Undoubtedly, many of the event at­tri­bu­tions to spe­ci­fic per­sons are in­cor­rect, and 22% of events la­cking an at­t­ri­bu­tion is dis­appoin­ting. With a mas­sive ex­pen­di­ture of ef­fort it should be pos­si­ble to im­prove these de­fi­cien­cies. But is it worth it? It might pro­vide us with a few more in­te­res­ting de­tails, but it is un­li­ke­ly to chan­ge the over­all pic­ture.

Unfortunately, primary sources mentioned males almost exclusively. Nevertheless, it was possible to identify some 46 wives and daughters either by name or at least by that of both husband and father.

Despite the large number of events processed, a final yield of 190 identified men and 46 women appears paltry (see table 1). Never the less, it is reassuring that almost 80% of the 10'042 identifies events could be allocated to identified persons.

Table 1. Allocation of events.

The method employed resulted both in high redundancy and blind spots. Women, children, and other dependents remain largely invisible. Rabbis, cantors, teachers, and ritual slaughterers were rarely covered by a protection list and were captured in this study only if people engaged in business or fell afoul of the law. Family names started to appear in 1649 for Weil/Weyl, 1662 for Meyer, 1679 for Gu­ge­num/Gu­genheimb, 1680 for Bickert/Pickert, 1692 for Bloch/Blokh, and 1704 for Bernheimb. These names could then be assigned retrospectively to patrilineal ancestors and their other descendants in turn. For thirty-six out of the 190 individuals no family name could be identified.

Regarding actual dates of birth and death, we can only make educated guesses. When a man set up his own household, he had to start paying protection tax. That occurred usually in the age window from twenty to thirty years old. However, some people started to do business – or got into trouble already as teenagers – and were recorded. Conversely, a dead person did not pay protection tax, but the name may still appear in various posthumous business matters and estate proceedings for many years. Unmarried men not engaged in business may remain invisible.

As discussed above, most of the 4826 records are only summaries of more extensive proceedings. The entire reference apparatus presented here can thus be used as an index for further in-depth research.

Identified persons and their family relationships are illustrated as family trees in the searchable database.

Besides the Stühlingen Jews proper, we also list Jews from Endingen, Gailingen, Lengnau, Randegg and Tiengen who had a letter of passage (Geleitbrief) allowing them to do local business, and Jewish visitors from further afield..

Ultimately, it does not really matter which Jew lived in which house. But the mental discipline required to squeeze every last drop of information from dry archival material fuelled the distillation of data into knowledge.

Footnotes -> List of References

1Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/.

2Tumbült, “Das Fürstlich Fürstenbergische Archiv,”

3Stone, “Prosopography.”

4Bloch, “The Jews of Stühlingen.”

5Mordstein, Selbstbewusste Untertänigkeit, 101.

6Beider, A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names, 1.

7It appears that the spellings of the family name Weil or Weyl are equivalent.

8Beider, A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names.

9Data was stored in a relational database, first in Microsoft SQL-Express, later in MYSQL; analysis software was written first in C# and later in Java by the author.

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