In August 1598 the Jew Isaak of Stühlingen, an old, prosperous merchant and moneylender, was suddenly arrested on adultery charges.1 Whether the charges were merited or not is unclear, but they found their way into a contemporary satirical Yiddish song, part of a Purim (Carnival) parody collection.2 Isaak was thrown into the dungeon of Hewen Castle, residence of the new ruler of Stühlingen, “Hereditary Marshal Konrad von Pappenheim.” Isaak had been under protection (Schutzjude) in Stühlingen since the middle of the sixteenth century.3 He was married and had at least four sons. On September 16 1598 his son Mayer and his brother-in-law wrote a letter to the count, who was himself under house arrest in Tübingen at the time, complaining about the arrest and arrest conditions. In response, the count produced a letter by Hans Jacob von Opfenburg, his bailiff, stating:
If the Jew claims to be held in a harsh and nasty gaol, he is lying. He occupies a comfortable room like a beautiful chamber, bright with lots of light and a cosy bed; I wouldn’t mind having such a pleasant apartment for myself. He is not sick, as he claims; he is just malingering. He is very deceitful. His meals are brought to him by the Jews from their houses.4
Pappenheim also instructed his sheriff to pay special attention that none of Isaak’s property would leave the county. Next, Isaak’s son Mayer, resident in Dortmund, petitioned Emperor Rudolf in Prague, who responded favourably to the plea. But Pappenheim did not give in easily. After spending a year in jail, Isaak was ready to accept a fine of 12,000 fl.5 and swear an oath of truce (Urfehde).6 He was released on 8,000 fl. bail, which he promptly skipped. Isaak found refuge in the little town of Aach near Constance.
Next in Pappenheim’s cross-hair came Mayer, Isaak’s son. Pappenheim’s henchmen caught him riding through the county with his daughter, after they had visited Mayer’s elderly mother in October 1699.7 When the henchmen did not find any hidden treasures, they accused Mayer of travelling without wearing a Jew’s patch and threw him in jail. Isaak’s business books and other documents, which Mayer’s daughter had intended to bring to her grandfather, were seized. Several appeals again went to Prague while Mayer sat in jail. Again the emperor came down on the side of the Jews. But Pappenheim simply ignored the emperor’s interventions. These events graphically illustrate the limits of power and will in implementing the pledged imperial protection of Jews. After almost two years in jail, a 200 fl. fine, 4000 fl. bail, and court costs, Mayer was finally released from his incarceration in Engen.
In August 1601 Isaak refused to follow a summons from Pappenheim’s court. This time the count went after Isaak’s second son, Abraham (Frohm), because he had absented himself from Stühlingen for over a year while pursuing the defence of his father and brother. Abraham’s wife was also accused of witchcraft. But this time the judges did not follow Pappenheim’s charges.
By 1602 Isaak had died,8 but that did not yet slake the count’s thirst for vengeance. He accused Isaak’s family and the Jewish community of not burying Isaak in the Stühlingen Jewish cemetery, and claimed that they had secreted the body somewhere in the forest. Pappenheim threatened to search for it to have it exhumed. Isaak’s heirs were summoned into court and threatened. Fortunately, witnesses attested that Isaak had been given a traditional Jewish burial in the Tiengen Jewish cemetery. The count now prepared to evict the Stühlingen Jews. But before the eviction became effective, the imperial marshall, Count Konrad von Pappenheim, died on July 30, 1603.9 Isaak (B1), Phol (B1.2), Manno (B1.4), and Frohm (B1.1), all mentioned in this affair, are found again in the Stühlingen records that form the basis of this current research. They are the ancestors of the Bickhert (Picard) family.
At the time of the exodus from Palestine, after the destruction of the second temple by Titus, Jews were largely farmers and skilled craftsmen.10 Prior to its destruction, the temple with its sacrificial practice was at the centre of all religious observance. Its loss was compensated by a shift in focus from physical sacrifice to the communal reading of holy books over a period of some two hundred years. This transition was accompanied by educational reforms that made basic literacy an essential component of Jewish piety.11 Literacy brought other benefits besides the ability to actively participate in religious service at a time when the surrounding gentile population was mostly illiterate.
In the early Middle Ages, European land ownership was largely tribal, gradually morphing into a feudal pattern. Most working farmers did not own the land they tilled.12 A free market in farms and other agricultural land did not exist,13 thus preventing immigrant Jews from returning to a farming existence. Over the centuries, Jews lost their farming skills and attitudes and became used to an urban lifestyle. But they remained largely unmolested up to the turn of the first millennium.
Three developments then radically changed Jewish existence: the Crusades, the AD 1240 invasion of the Mongols, resulting in intolerance and pogroms,14 and the emergence of urban craft guilds.15 The pogroms forced the Jews progressively into a pernicious dependence on protection by the German emperors. The guilds, as quasi-religious institutions, gradually excluded Jews from the skilled trades and interregional commerce. These two developments together gave the Jews the stark choice either to migrate to the largely underpopulated lands in Eastern Europe or to exchange gradually their preferred urban existence for a mainly rural one in Germany.16
The concomitant narrowing of occupational choices led inevitably to a progressive professional specialization. The only occupations left to the majority of Jews were peddling, trading in animals and grain, moneylending, and pawnbroking. In analogy to biological evolution, excessive specialization can make a population highly vulnerable to environmental changes. The economic, occupational, and social marginalization of the Jews was anchored by the Catholic Church in canons 67–70 of the Fourth Lateran Council (AD 1215).17
Initially, the emperors’ offer of protection may have been generous in intent, but it quickly degenerated into a scheme to extract more and more protection taxes from the Jews, to the point where the emperors virtually owned the Jews (Kammerknechtschaft).18 As the logistics of collecting the protection tax across the empire gradually became too cumbersome, the emperors simply subcontracted the taxation of Jews to local rulers.19 The system of Schutz- und Satzbrief (letters of protection and obligations) established itself firmly.20
Of the Jews who diffused from the cities into the country, some found their way into the region east of the Black Forest. The earliest Jewish traces were actually found in Tiengen, some twenty-two kilometres southwest of Stühlingen; in 1454 a deeply indebted knight, Willhelm of Heudorf, borrowed money from two Jews in Tiengen. His tenant farmers from the little village of Aichen in the Black Forest acted as warrantors. However, the loan default in 1488 created a great uproar.21
Despite the fact that some Jewish inhabitants helped to defend Tiengen against a a group of Swiss soldiery in 1499,22 the citizens of Tiengen appealed to their lord, Count Johann of Sulz, to evict the five resident Jewish families from the town in 1544. Instead, the count granted the Jews a letter of protection in 1546.23
Prior to the thirteenth century, Jewish concentration in cities allowed their communities access to sources of Jewish learning, such as the Talmud, in the form of rare, hand-copied scripts. However, for the scattered, rural Jewish communities in the sixteenth century, costly manuscripts did not present a feasible solution. But the recent introduction of movable print around 1450 had raised great interest among literate Jews, since it could potentially open the treasures of the rabbinic literature to any literate Jew.
In 1559 Eliezer ben Naftali Herz Treves, together with his brother Josef ben Naftali, opened a printing press in Tiengen.24 Eliezer (1498–1566) had been the chief rabbi of the Frankfurt Jewish community. He was considered an authority on divorce and rabbinic appointments but also explored Kabbalah. Eliezer saw the structural importance of books printed in Yiddish and Hebrew, but since printing was forbidden to Jews in Frankfurt, he applied to the authorities in Zurich to have Hebrew books published there. When this request was denied, he moved back across the Rhine to the little town of Tiengen where, with the permission of the count of Sulz, he managed to publish six books. In October of that same year, the local representative of the Catholic bishop of Constance reported to his superior and asked for instructions.25 Catholic authorities were concerned about the potentially heretic nature of books printed in Hebrew. Initially, the bishop chose to ignore the warning. But in 1560, at the insistence of the neighbouring Swiss town of Baden, the count of Sulz had to put an end to Hebrew printing in Tiengen.
Stühlingen and its surroundings had belonged to the counts of Lupfen since 1251. But in 1582, the last count of Lupfen, Heinrich VI, died without issue.26 Already in 1572 Heinrich had asked Emperor Maximilian II for permission to bequeath the county to the counts of Zollern, his distant relatives. But the emperor disagreed. According to law, heirless fiefdoms reverted to the emperor and could be sold to a new lord for a fortune. Waiting in the wings was Erbmarschall (Imperial or Hereditary Marshall) Konrad zu Pappenheim, a junior scion of an old noble family. On November 12, 1583 Konrad deposited the princely sum of 80,000 gold ducats at the imperial treasury in Vienna to substantiate his claim. But the transaction did not proceed smoothly, and for another twenty years the legal and political wrangling around the succession continued before Pappenheim finally received full title to the county. He was not a patient man; already in 1590 he took the castle Stühlingen by force and in turn was captured and imprisoned on orders of the emperor a year later. However, all along he acted as de facto ruler of Stühlingen, attempting desperately to recover some of his considerable investment.
The existence of a well-established Jewish cemetery in Stühlingen, as mentioned in regard to Isaak’s burial, suggests the presence of a Jewish community in Stühlingen already during the Lupfen rule. According to legend, the cemetery must have been situated on the eastern slope of the Wutach Valley, opposite to the town of Stühlingen. No trace is left today, and searches have been fruitless.27
Among the earliest records from the Stühlingen protocol book are several records dealing with the fallout of the uneven contest between "Erbmarschall, Count Konrad von Pappenheim, and Isaak, the Jew of Stühlingen. On May 5, 1604 two witnesses were questioned about some grain Isaak had supposedly loaned to the village of Untermettingen [R1442]. In September of that same year, Isaak’s son Raphael (Vohl) sued that village, submitting the business books of his late father. He was supported by his brother Menachem (Manno), a resident of Klingnau on the Rhine[R1443]. Counter claims were made one day later [R1444]
But Jews were not only living and doing business in the town of Stühlingen itself; in 1611 a resident of the village of Horheim was thrown into prison and fined 3 fl. for a deal he made with the Jew Moses (Mausch) (O1) of Ofteringen. It does not appear that Mausch had been afoul of the law (O1450) Life in the Stühlingen lands carried on: a cow was bought for 7 fl., a horse for 24 fl.; Daniel Hoz, the innkeeper in Mauchen, paid back a loan of 44 fl. to Mausch of Ofteringen in installments. But loans went both ways: a mortgage on Raphael’s (Phohl) house was passed from one mortgager to another in 1612 [R1455].
In 1613 Judah (Leman) was fined more than 1 fl. for having his laundry washed in his house [R1475]; it appears that laundry had to be washed at the river. A protocol entry from December 16, 1613 reveals an interesting fact: “The Jews were fined for cheating on their protection taxes” [R1477]. This, to the researcher, is quite unexpected, for nothing was previously known about Stühlingen letters of protection prior to 1615.
This lack of documention of protection letters does not imply that the Jews had not paid for the privilege of living in Stühlingen prior to 1615. Among the documents in the Schleitheim archives one finds a 1610 promissory note to Count Maximilian von Pappenheim (etc.), certified with the great seal of Stühlingen, in which the Jews named Phal (B1.2), Marum (Z16), Phrom (B1.3), Meyerle (C2.1), and Leman (R1) acknowledge a residual debt of 1000 fl. to the house of Pappenheim, to be repaid in annual installments at Easter time. It is likely that this promissory note was in fact the precursor of the 1615 letter of protection, although it contained none of the usual restrictions and obligations.28
Early proceedings from both Stühlingen and Tiengen suggest that Jews lived not only in little towns but also in surrounding villages. In the sixteenth-century, branches of the extended Weil/Weyl family were scattered among villages on the southeastern slope of the Black Forest. Subsequently, they migrated towards larger villages and small towns.
Footnotes -> List of References
1Rosenthal, "Heimatgeschichte der badischen Juden," 461.
2Butzer, Hüttenmeister, and Treue, “Ich will euch sagen von einem bösen Stück ...,” 26.
3Rosenthal, "Heimatgeschichte der badischen Juden," 461.
4Ibid., 461-2 (Author's translation)
51 fl. (florin) ~ 1 ducat ~ 1/8 oz. gold.
6Dobozy, "The Saxon Mirror," 211.
7Rosenthal, "Heimatgeschichte der badischen Juden," 463.
8Ibid., 471.
9Ibid., 475.
10Abrahams, "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages," 230–44.
11Botticini and Eckstein, “Jewish Occupational Selection,” 922–48.
12Postan, "Essays on Medieval Agriculture," 3 - 27.
13Innes, “Land, Freedom and the Making of the Medieval West,” 39 - 74.
14Schneidmüller, “Eine Pfalzstadt in der Krise,” 18; Graetz, "Geschichte der Juden", 18.
15Kieser, “Organizational, Institutional, and Societal Evolution.”
16Battenberg, “Aus der Stadt auf das Land?”
17Halsall, “Medieval Sourcebook.”
18Willoweit, “Verfassungsgeschichtliche Aspekte,”
19Battenberg, “Von der Kammerknechtschaft zum Judenregal,” 70.
20Rauscher and Staudinger, “Widerspenstige Kammerknechte,” 313 – 363; Kerler, “Zur Geschichte der Besteuerung.”
21Petri, "Die Tiengener Juden," 106 - 129.
22Kayserling, “Ein jüdischer Schütze.”
23Petri, ""Die Tiengener Juden,”
24Wiener, “Zur Errichtung der hebr. Druckerei,”; Sidorko, “Eliezer ben Naphtali Herz Treves,” 457–472. The family name Treves, derived from the name of the city Trier (French Treves, eventually morphed into Dreyfuss or Dreifuss.
25Burnett, “The Regulation of Hebrew Printing in Germany, 1555–1630,” 329–48.
26Brandeck, "Geschichte der Stadt," 45–53.
27Rosenthal, “Heimatgeschichte der badischen Juden,“ 75.
28Samuel Pletscher Collection, 1610.
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