The development of the Jewish Diaspora is neither a simple nor a homogeneous problem. There are different approaches to it, be it the political, legal, cultural or religious one. Ours shall be a geographical one, to be applied to the Jewish dispersion in medieval Germany, for a number of reasons. For one there is the geographical and economic heterogeneity of the host country, or rather host countries, as the medieval German Reich included many areas outside of today’s Germany.1 Then there is the relative longevity of Jewish existence, more than five centuries, as compared to two to three centuries in England and France. Although German Jews too had to face hostility and persecutions, there was no wholesale expulsion from the medieval Reich. Finally, most of the patterns developed there were to serve Eastern European Jewry for a similar time-span, the whole of the early modern period. The German Jewish case lends itself to analysis along the lines of general development theory, with insights to be gained not only into the specific instance of Jews settling here or there, but also into the long-term conditions provided by different environments.

The question posed is the following- how was Jewish life established in medieval Germany? The most general answer is of course a two-fold one- by both immigration and internal growth.2 Going beyond that general explanation, we would like to ask why Jews settled during different periods in particular places and regions rather than in others. The first and main concern is to establish a reliable chronology and geography of the entirety of Jewish life in medieval Germany. A secondary purpose is to amend certain misapprehensions current in the literature as to the antiquity of some places of Jewish residence. Despite the renewal of popular and scientific interest in local Jewish history, the many publications of the last twenty years have produced little new material pertinent to such tasks.3 There is however the monumental “Germania Judaica,” the handbook of medieval places of Jewish settlement in Germany, the third and final volume of which is now nearing completion.4 The material assembled there serves as the data basis for the series of maps, which form the core of the present study.5 Had the maps accompanying volumes I and II of Germania Judaica been complete instead of selective ones, with intervals placed at dates that reflect turning points in settlement history rather than exterior legal events, there would have been no need for the present effort.6 Taking up a statistical approach previously employed7, we shall first preserve the findings in quantitative terms of stages and regions by and in which Jewish life expanded during the middle ages. Following that, an attempt will be made to interpret these data according to their geographical and economic logic.

Findings

What were the stages of growth of Jewish life in medieval Germany? Each symbol on maps 1-8 represents the first reference to residence of Jews in any given place. The maps thus portray new Jewish life at the moment of birth, disregarding the length or shortness of its future in each particular place. Maps 2 to 3 show also the places of residence of previous periods. Beginning with the year 1250, we have deliberately refrained from providing cumulative maps that would have called for much finer distinctions than possible at this moment.9 From that time onward, selected major places of previous Jewish residence have been marked for purpose of orientation only. Amassing all the existing places of residence would have cluttered up the small-scale maps reproduced here beyond recognition.

There are some problems with the methodology of first-time source references. For one, there are good reasons to believe that in many places Jews have indeed lived before their first appearance in written evidence. This is especially true for the period before 1300, which lacks amongst others the tax registers that later provide a very close coverage of Jewish presence. Nevertheless, for the overview intended here, the available dates of source references, although quite probably belated for many places, represent the only alternative to intuition or doubtful local traditions. A further problem is posed by places of residence evidenced only by names of origin borne by individuals recorded in other localities. In such cases a single mention, unless especially significant, has been disregarded. Multiple references however have been taken to indicate the previous dwelling of Jews in that place. Again, some degree of incertitude had to be accepted to obtain the general picture aimed at. A last question mark concerns places of residence solely indicated by inclusion in one of the Hebrew lists of “places of persecution” drawn up in medieval times to commemorate the victims.10 For a number of smaller localities of the late 13th/early 14th centuries this is the only testimony available. Despite problems of identification deriving from the peculiar way some place-names are rendered in Hebrew, such information has been uniformly accepted at face value.

Map 1 details the places of Jewish residence established from their earliest emergence in the sources around the year 950 and up to the eve of the massacres of the First Crusade in 1096.11 Earlier references to roving Jewish merchants in the Carolingian period have not been taken to indicate the presence of settled Jewish life.12 The second interval (map 2) has been set at 1200, the end of a long period of reconstruction when Jewish settlement entered a new phase of expansion. Following that, 50-years intervals coincide very well with the major events shaping the settlement history of the Jews. The period ending in 1250 (map 3) sees the demise of strong kingship in Germany and the beginning of a time in which territorial princes and town governments were to be the real bearers of power over the Jews.13 The next period (map 4) ends just two years after the first great supra-regional wave of persecution, the “Rintfleisch” massacres of 1298, which affected an until then unprecedented number of communities.14 Map 5 closes with the watershed of the Plague massacres of 1348-9, which wiped out most of the Jewish communities in German lands.15 Attention is directed to the symbol designating on map 6 the not too numerous communities spared during the pogroms of 1348-49 Between 1350 and 1400 (map 6) Jewish life was reconstructed in a great number of places, a process carried on into the 15th century (map 7). However, by 1400 a new series of expulsions set in, and intensified around 1450.16 The final date for map 8 is 1523, the closing year of Germania Judaica III, after the last expulsions from towns and the onset of the definite transformation of medieval urban Jewry into a predominantly rural one.17

Stages

A first indication of the pace and dimensions of development can be gathered from the following table. To remind us, the totals represent numbers of newly settled by Jews in each period. For a long time Jewish life in Germany was a small-scale affair, a matter of mere five communities established between the mid-10th and the mid-11th century.18 Indicating a lengthy period of formation, there were to be no new foundations during the first half of the 11th century, with eight more in its second half.19 However, as witnessed by the documentation of the 1096 massacres, by the end of the 11th century these few places had come to harbour sizeable communities, reaching in Mainz and Worms a total of a 1000 souls and more. Taking into account the small dimensions of even the most important towns of the period, Jews must indeed have been a very important part of early town populations. After the bloodletting and forced conversion of the Crusade massacres of 1096 life was re-established in all the places affected.20 This must have absorbed most of the energies, for during the whole first half of the 12th century there were only five new localities settled.21 The pace picked up around and after 1150 with eleven additional ones.22 This still linear progression becomes an almost geometrical one during the 13th century, peaking in the first half of the 14th century.23 By then Jewish settlement also reached its farthest geographical extent, a fact to be addressed later when we shall want to explain these dynamics in terms of regional economies.

One might venture at this point that the spate of new foundations in the early 14th century was not just an indication of the astonishing vitality of German Jewry. It was also connected to the onset of waves of persecutions. They began in 1287 with the so-called “Guter Werner,” a ritual murder libel that affected 22 places of residence in the mid-Rhine area24; followed by the “Rintfleisch” movement of 1298 in Franconia, with at least 129, possible 146 communities hit after an initial host desecration libel25; the “Armleder” and “Judenschlager” of 1336-1338 in the Rhine area, Alsace, Hessen and Franconia, with 64 places affected26; the host desecration libel of Deggendorf (1337) which spread to 21 places in Bavaria; and a similar libel originating in Lower Austrian Pulkau, which affected 25 places of Jewish residence.27 In all these places Jews were not only attacked, but the survivors also expelled. The first half of the 14th century, even before the great persecutions of the Plague period, was thus marked by increased forced mobility, which in turn translated into new places of settlement. Emigration was an option already contemplated28 and put into practice by small groups of scholars who moved to the Holy Land29. As a major phenomenon however, directed mainly towards nearer northern Italy, it became wide-spread only towards the close of the 14th century.30

The logic of dislocation as a trigger for the establishment of new places of residence comes fully into its own in the second phase of Jewish settlement history, the one lasting from 1350 to the close of the middle ages. Chart 2 shows the development, again in terms of totals of new places of residence occupied during half-century intervals.

In the turmoil and bloodshed of the Plague years only 58 Jewish communities could enjoy a continuous and uninterrupted existence (map 6, full squares), all of them situated in the east, in Upper and Lower Austria, Carinthia, Styria, Slovenia, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Saxony.31 Of the more central places only Regensburg remained undisturbed.32 Most Jewish communities, that is at least 415 places definitely accounted for by name, were affected by the massacres and expulsions of the Plague period. Although no total figures are available, there appears to have been much bloodshed. In many places whole communities, numbering not infrequently hundreds of souls, were wiped out.

There were however survivors, in numbers unknown but sufficient to be mentioned in nearly every case of places re-settled in the years immediately following the Plague period. Such places tended to be, in the first years, major localities previously inhabited by Jews.33 By the end of the 14th century, communities had been re-established in most of the more important towns.34 Jews also settled, again or for the first time, in medium-sized or small places. By the end of the 15th century there were over a thousand localities in which Jews had resided. But even less than in the preceding period does that impressive number represent accumulative growth, of one place after the other added to a growing list. Rather, it portrays a shifting population and forced mobility, for by circa 1400 a series of expulsion had set in which would continue right up to the close of the middle ages.35 There were still major towns which would host a Jewish community over the time-span of a generation or more.36 The town of Speyer for instance had Jews all through the later middle ages. Nevertheless, they were frequently expelled, for shorter or longer periods, in 1371, 1405, 1430, 1435 and again in 1534. For the greater number of places though Jewish presence was extremely short-lived and transient, sometimes spanning just a single year or little more.

The communities of the later middle ages were also much smaller in population numbers than their forerunners of the pre-plague period. More than half of the places of residence for which there are population numbers housed no more than one to two Jewish families. Close to 30% had no more than ten families, and only less than 5% twenty families or more. This would usually mean around 300 souls, a far cry from the communities numbering up to and over 1000 people in the pre-plague period. The largest places, Vienna with around 900 people around the year 1400, Regensburg with 600 people in 1519 and Prague with the same number in the year 1522 already reflect the outcome of earlier expulsions.37

Geography and types of settlement

Unmistakably visible in map 1, the early medieval Jewish communities were all located in the most important centres of German economic and political life. To put it differently, all important urban centres, whatever their function, had by circa 1100 acquired Jews. They were present in the major archbishoprics (Köln, Trier, Mainz, Magdeburg) as well as in episcopal towns (Worms, Speyer, Bamberg, Merseburg), all of which however were at this point also economic centres in the making. Regensburg on the Danube was the gateway to trade with south-eastern Europe, as were Magdeburg and Prague to the northeast. Prague was also a political centre in its own right, quite possibly possessing a Jewish merchant population earlier than any place in Germany. The case of Halle, a centre of salt extraction, is not quite clear. However, these eastern communities were but outposts. The substantial growth of Jewish life, as indicated by community development and the formation of intellectual-religious traditions, took place in the west, along the Rhine river.38 This exactly accords with the general shift in German politics, economy and culture from the Ottonian north-eastern core regions of the 10th century to the 11th century Salian and 12th century Staufen regions in the west.39

The western orientation is even more accentuated in the 12th century (map 2). There is one further outpost in the north-east (Meiβen) and one in the extreme south-east (Vienna). Apart from these the accretions of the period are situated in the west, in the central Rhine region, increasingly in royal towns rather than in episcopal seats, thus adding yet another meaning to Otto of Freising’s dictum about this region being the Staufers’ “vis maxima regni.”40 This focal region is sending off a branch along the Main river axis towards central Germany. With the Jews as an important element of commerce and trade, the expansion of their settlement appears to be exactly paralleling the geographical directions of the general yet still uneven process of urbanisation. By the first half of the 13th century (map 3) there are further additions along the Rhine river, branching off now also to the west into the Netherlands and to the north-east into Westphalia. This indicates the possibility that the Jews settling in these regions were in some way connected to the manifold economic pursuits developing around the Bruges-Novgorod transit route.42 There is considerable growth on the upper Rhine and on to lake Constance in the far south, and there are some additional communities along the river Danube as far as Austria. For the first time Jews appear in the (geographically) central areas to the north and south of the Main river, in Thuringia, Hessen and Franconia. A considerable number of communities becomes visible in Swabia to the south of the Danube, and single ones in Silesia, Bohemia (besides old-established Prague) and Moravia.

In the second half of the 13th century (map 4) the concept of isolated eastern outposts has been invalidated by the course of events. As the single communities of the earlier period now become centres for smaller outlying ones, Jewish regional structures make their appearance in different zones.43 A new settlement area formed in Carinthia, located on the trade routes leading from Austria to the Adriatic. Another new region opening to Jewish settlement is the Baltic coast. The North Sea coast however was to remain, now and later on, without a Jewish presence. There are numerous new settlements in Westphalia, Thuringia and Saxony, along the Mosel and west of the lower Rhine towards the Low Countries. But the main additions, and they are very numerous ones, amass in the central regions of Germany, in Hessen, Franconia and the Palatinate (Württemberg). With no good regional economic histories available, it is difficult to explain this growth in exact local terms. But this was the high tide of urbanisation in Germany. The number of towns in central Europe has been estimated at 1500 in the year 1250, three times as much as a hundred years earlier. Until 1300 their number doubled again.44

The half century between 1300 and 1348 (map 5) marks the high tide of Jewish settlement in medieval Germany, reaching a geographical extent unmatched again until the 19th century. Except for the Northern Sea shore there was no region without Jewish communities. Major and dense accretions occurred in the Alsace, Mosel and Rhine areas of the west, in Franconia, Hessen, and Thuringia in the centre, Brandenburg and Saxony in the north-east, Baden and Swabia in the south. Bavaria was now fully open to Jewish settlement. A remarkable concentration took place in the east, in Silesia, and in the south east, in Lower Austria and Moravia. The geographically continuous Jewish life in the two latter regions suggests that they must have been a single economic area, connected to Silesia in the north where Jewish expansion appears to parallel the development of town life.

The density of Jewish life attained by ca. 1300 is also visible in the emergence of regional customs (minhag) increasingly taking the place of the older locally confined ones.45 In the west there were two regions of minhag, the one of Cologne and the lower Rhine (“galil tahton”–the lower region) and the one of the famous “Shum” communities of the central and upper Rhine (Speyer, Worms, Mainz–“galil elyon”–the upper region). Moravia, Bohemia, Austria (including Regensburg), Saxony (the area of the Magdeburg archbishopric, Merseburg, Naumburg and the Saxon-Wettin territories), Thuringia (Erfurt and adjoining Wettiner territories), Nürnberg-Weiβenburg-Rothenburg, Swabia (centered in Ulm), Switzerland (Zürich and Bern), Franconia (Hochstift Würzburg, Schweinfurt and additional places) each developed customs of their own.

There was thus an ongoing dynamism obviously connected to the processes of urbanisation and monetarisation, a slightly delayed yet structurally identical process to the “commercial revolution” of Southern Europe.46 It carried Jewish life into yet new regions, as well as filling the previous settled ones with a dense, although varied web of communities. There is as yet no general way of accounting for the exact economic reasons which pulled Jews to this rather than to that region. Recent studies have however pointed to the early development of money-lending in wine-growing areas exceptionally prone to short-term economic fluctuations and consequently very much in need of credit facilities. This has been proven for the middle-Rhine area and the Alsace47 and independently suggested for the cluster of Jewish settlements in Lower Austria-Southern Moravia48. It probably holds true also for Mainfranken and the Lake Constance region.49

However, as has been pointed out, by now there was also dislocation, with Jews fleeing places and areas of persecution in search of more hospitable ones. There is no proven way yet to weigh one factor against the other–the pull of economic opportunity as against the push of violence and discrimination. One possible approach however lies in the beginnings of a change which has normally been seen as marking the end of medieval Jewish life in Germany, that is the early 16th century shift from a purely urban to a rural settlement structure.50 Despite some faint early references to Jews active in the rural surroundings of towns in the Rhineland51, there is little doubt that up to the period now under consideration Jewish life had been conducted in a primarily urban environment. To some degree already in the second half of the 13th and definitely in the first half of the 14th century, some of the new places of residence were to be of a partly rural character, such as markets, while others were outright villages.52 This is still a rather minor phenomenon, as less than a tenth, 50 out of a total of 769 new places of residence, could be identified as villages proper. The number of markets has yet to be determined, a difficult task given the varying definitions of such places in the research literature. This incipient rural/small town Jewry is found mostly in the central and southern parts of Germany, in the Alsace, Württemberg and Franconia. These parts had seen very dense settlement by Jews between 1250 and 1350. So it might be that this was the tail end, so to speak, of an urbanisation process which by then carried over into rural areas. In Bavaria the market-places serving as residence for the Jews were in general substitutes for more sizeable towns, which barely developed in this region. At the same time, such incipient ruralisation can also be interpreted as a Jewish reaction to the onset of persecution, which of course centered in the towns.

Map 6 for the years 1348 to 1399 marks a new stage in the settlement history of German Jewry, an almost total wiping of the slate. Only in the Austrian ducal and Bohemian royal territories of the east, in Upper and Lower Austria, Carinthia, Styria, Slovenia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, and to a smaller part in the north and north-east, were Jews effectively protected by the political powers, for reasons mostly fiscal.53 In all other places Jewish life had to be re-established again, in stages which have already been elaborated. Unlike the prolonged process of settlement prior to 1348 which slowly moved from west to east, this reconstitution took place simultaneously in all areas of Germany, as starkly portrayed in map 6.

By 1400 there were again Jews in all German territories, in some regions in almost as dense concentrations as on the eve of 1348, in others more thinly spread. However, despite the impression given by maps 7 and 8, the accretions of the 15th century cannot be viewed as real additions. For one, whole regions such as Austria, Bavaria or Silesia were emptied by expulsions (in 1420, 1438-42, 1450, 1453 respectively). Significant numbers of new foundations are only found in the politically fragmented central and southern regions, such as Hessen, Franconia and Württemberg, as well as in the Alsace. But here too new foundations can sometimes be identified as resulting directly from expulsions from nearby towns, distributing more sizeable populations amongst a number of smaller places. Such places of refuge would typically be villages, sometimes also suburbs of the town concerned. They were ruled by lords more interested in getting revenue from Jewish settlers than in following the anti-Jewish policies of near-by town governments. A typical case would be the town of Nördlingen and the cluster of villages settled by Jews after the expulsion of 1507, despite efforts by the town to make the counts of Öttingen refrain from authorising such foundations.54 A similar case can be made out in the Alsace, where Jews are found in villages since the mid-15th century.55 The settling of smaller places around a major town even before the expulsion is apparent in Franconia, where Nürnberg was surrounded by a great number of Jewish places of residence during the later 15th century (see map 8), a time of increasingly stringent legislation levelled by that town against her Jews.56 This might be viewed as some sort of pre-emptive short range emigration placing many Jews in a situation quite typical of the conditions of the 16th century- unable to get residence permits in the towns, they would live in near-by villages, but carry on their trade during daytime in town. The ruralisation yet barely discernible in the pre-Plague period was thus becoming a prominent feature in the 15th century. It involved around 25% of all the places of Jewish residence counted during the later middle ages, in a broad belt from the Alsace in the west across the Rhine Palatinate, Baden and Württemberg, Swabia, Hessen and Franconia57–exactly the regions in which a rural life style was to become the typical form of Jewish existence of the early modern period.

Until about 1300 there was thus a close fit between general and Jewish population history, the latter being an outrider of the former. The growth of Jewish settlement, besides serving as an outstanding illustration of the vitality of medieval Jewry, up to that period provides us with an excellent tool of analysis, yet little used, for the development of local and regional economies increasingly characterised by mutual interdependence and market ties mediated by the use of coined money and credit. It can pinpoint, in time and space, the emergence in a given place or region of a demand for trade and credit services strong enough to warrant the establishment of a settlement of Jewish traders and money-experts. By 1300 however, this analytical tool ceases to be of use. Increasingly, the patterns of Jewish settlement were shaped by other forces, mainly the complicated interplay of popular anti-Judaism with the rivalries of royal, princely, noble and urban interests. If the early and central middle ages of German Jewry can be likened to the age of European expansion, its later middle ages were surly an age of adversity. Inner and outer colonisation gave way to a special type of Wüstung, towns and regions depopulated of their Jewish component, most of which were only to be repopulated, under very different circumstances, in the 19th century.

* I thank the Fritz von Thyssen–Stiftung, Cologne, Germany, for its generous support of the research project of which the present study is part. It was initially prepared as a paper for the session “Diasporas” organized by Natalie Davis and Yosef Kaplan at the 18th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Montreal September 1995. It has been discussed with colleagues and students, all of whom I thank for their comments, in Budapest, Vienna and Konstanz.

1 Namely almost all of Switzerland and Austria as well as parts of the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Poland and Russia.

2 For literature on immigration see Michael Toch, Jewish Migrations to, within and from medieval Germany, in- Sara Cavaciocchi (ed.), Le Migrazioni in Europa. Secc. XIII-XVIII (Atti della XXV Settimana di Studi, Istituto Francesco Datini, Prato), Firenze 1994, pp. 639-652, here pp. 639-41. As to internal growth in the formative period, there are no direct demographic indicators, but see the discussion of cultural growth by Abraham Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz- Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900-1096), Jerusalem 21988 (Hebr.). Some insights can be gained from the demographical study, which is however beset by serious methodological problems, of Kenneth Stow, The Jewish Family in the Rhineland in the High Middle Ages- Form and Function, in- American Historical Review 92 (1987) pp. 1085-1110.

3 The notable exception, of which frequent use has been made here, are two dissertations written under the supervision of Alfred Haverkamp at the University of Trier- Franz-Josef Ziwes, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im mittleren Rheingebiet während des hohen und späten Mittelalters, Hannover 1995; Gerd Mentgen, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im mittelalterlichen Elsaβ, Hannover 1995. Additional studies from Trier are reported to be completed or near completion, but have not yet been published.

4 Germania Judaica, vol. I- Von den ältesten Zeiten bis 1238. Ed. by M. Brann/I. Elbogen/A. Freimann/H. Tykocinski, Tübingen 21963. Vol. II- Von 1238 bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts. Ed. by Z. Avneri. 2 parts, Tübingen 1968. Vol. III- 1350-1519. Part 1, ed. by A. Maimon, Tübingen 1987. Part 2, ed. by A. Maimon/M. Breuer/Y. Guggenheim. Tübingen 1995. Part 3, ed. by A. Maimon/M. Breuer/Y. Guggenheim, Tübingen 1997/8 (in press). Volumes I and II are based exclusively on printed sources and literature, while vol. III builds on systematic investigation of archival sources and is thus much more thoroughly researched. But here too the coverage is uneven, with archives in Eastern Germany, and Eastern Europe being mostly inaccessible to the Israeli and West-German researchers who assembled the source material prior to 1987.

5 I thank Yaakov Guggenheim of the editorial board of Germania Judaica III for sharing with me some material which has not made it into print. I am even more indebted to him for letting me use some of his studies, the intellectual property of which is designated by Guggenheim, Unpublished Writings.

6 A map more refined than the ones presented here has indeed been prepared by Prof. Haverkamp and his students at Trier, but not yet been published. For an overview of further cartography see Mentgen (note 3), pp. 26-28, and Ziwes (note 3), p. 17.

7 Michael Toch, Siedlungsgeschichte der Juden Mitteleuropas im Wandel vom Mittelalter zu Neuzeit, in- Alfred Haverkamp/Franz-Josef Ziwes (eds.), Juden in der christlichen Umwelt während des späten Mittelalters, Berlin 1992 (Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung Beiheft 13), pp. 29-39.

8 The maps have been designed by the author and executed by Mrs. Tami Sofer of the Laboratory for Cartography, Dept. of Geography, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

9 What can be cartographically achieved in limited regional studies has been astutely demonstrated in the maps appended to Ziwes and Mentgen (note 3), as well as by Alfred Haverkamp, Erzbischof Balduin und die Juden, in- F.-J. Heyen (ed.), Balduin von Luxemburg, Erzbischof von Trier–Kurfürst des Reiches 1285-1354, Mainz 1985, pp. 437-483, here pp. 480-2.

10 The most important of the medieval memorial lists have been edited and translated into German by Sigmund Salfeld, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches, Berlin 1898.

11 The latest major assessment of the events of 1096 is Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade, Berkeley/Los Angeles 1987. The anniversary year of 1996 has produced a crop of new studies.

12 I find myself in disagreement with some scholars who have used the decisions of ecclesiastical synods as evidence for an early (that is Carolingian, sometimes even Merovingian) presence of Jews in central Europe. In other cases the reasoning behind very early datings is outright speculative, as for instance in the following- “Es ist kaum denkbar, daβ in Bischofsstädten wie Trier, Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Köln und Würzburg Juden zum Teil schon im 9. Jahrhundert nachweisbar sind und für den Königsort Aachen gleiches gilt, an einem kaum weniger attraktiven Königsort wie Frankfurt hingegen bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts keine Niederlassung stattgefunden haben sollte”- Johannes Heil, Vorgeschichte und Hintergründe des Frankfurter Pogroms von 1349, in- HessJBLG 41 (1991) pp. 105-151, here p. 108, note 16. None of the places mentioned had any Jews in the 9th century. As shall be argued, the logic of urbanization is not appropriate for the early middle ages but fits the 12th/13th centuries very well.

13 For the political history of the period see Michael Toch, The Hohenstaufen, Welf and Habsburg in Germany, 1197-1308, in- David Abulafia (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History of Europe, vol. V, Cambridge 1998 (in press). The standard study of the establishment of urban power over the Jews has still not been superseded- Herbert Fischer, Die verfassungsrechtliche Stellung der Juden in den deutschen Städten während des 13. Jahrhunderts, Breslau 1931/Aalen 1969. As to princes, see now Klaus Lohrmann, Judenrecht und Judenpolitik im mittelalterlichen Österreich, Wien 1990.

14 The latest and authoritative analysis is Friedrich Lotter, Die Judenverfolgungen des “König Rintfleisch” in Franken um 1298. Die endgültige Wende in den christlich-jüdischen Beziehungen im Deutschen Reich des Mittelalters, in- ZHF 15 (1988) pp. 385-422.

15 The authoritative work on these events is František Graus, Pest, Geiβler, Judenmorde. Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit. Göttingen 1987; see also Alfred Haverkamp, Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes im Gesellschaftsgefüge deutscher Städte, in- Alfred Haverkamp (ed.), Zur Geschichte der Juden im Deutschland des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Stuttgart 1981, pp. 27-93.

16 For the late-medieval persecutions and expulsions in Germany see shortly Michael Toch, Die spätmittelalterlichen Verfolgungen, in- Germania Judaica III/3 (note 5, in print) which takes issue with the major study of the topic- Markus Wenninger, Man bedarf keiner Juden mehr. Ursachen und Hintergründe ihrer Vertreibung aus den deutschen Reichsstädten im 15. Jahrhundert, Wien/Köln/Graz 1981.

17 Michael Toch, Aspects of Stratification of Early Modern German Jewry- Population History and Village Jews, in- Ronnie Po-chia Hsia/Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), “In and Out of the Ghetto”. Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, Cambridge 1995, pp. 77-89; Michael Toch, Die ländliche Wirtschaftstätigkeit der Juden im frühmodernen Deutschland, in- Monika Richarz/Reinhard Rürup (eds.), Zur Geschichte der Landjuden in Deutschland, Berlin 1997/8 (in print).

18 The time sequence is- Mainz around or slightly before 950; Magdeburg 965; Merseburg 973; Worms and Regensburg around 980.

19 Trier and Köln after 1050; Speyer before 1084; before 1096 Halle, Prague (where there is however some indication of Jewish presence already in the 10th century), Xanten, Bonn and possibly also Bamberg.

20 The evidence for this is mainly an internal one from the activities of the scholars of the period- Grossman, Early Sages (note 2).

21 1119 Würzburg; around 1130 Koblenz; 1146 Bacharach and Königswinter near Köln; 1147 Aschaffenburg.

22 Around 1150 Kaiserslautern, Strasbourg, Frankfurt/Main; followed by Andernach, Duisburg, Münzenberg, Meissen, Vienna, Neuβ, Boppard, Bingen.

23 This was first noted by Haverkamp, Erzbischof Balduin (note 9), p. 443.

24 The latest on this is G. Mentgen, Die Ritualmordaffaire um den “Guten Werner von Oberwesel” und ihre Folgen, in- JbWLG 1995, pp. 159-198.

25 See Lotter (note 14).

26 On this the latest are Ziwes, pp. 238-43; Mentgen, pp. 350-60 (both above, note 3).

27 See Friedrich Lotter, Hostienfrevelvorwurf und Blutwunderfälschung bei den Judenverfolgungen von 1298 (“Rintfleisch”) und 1336-1338 (“Armleder”), in- Fälschungen im Mittelalter, vol. V, Hannover 1988, pp. 533-583, here pp. 567-571.

28 See the famous affair of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg’s attempted emigration to the Land of Israel in 1286- Israel Yuval, Meir ben Baruch aus Rothenburg (um 1220-1293), “supremus Magister”, in- Manfred Treml et al. (eds.), Geschichte und Kultur der Juden in Bayern. Lebensläufe, München 1988, pp. 21-24; see also the Hebrew letter of invitation sent in 1329 by an Ashkenazic Jew living in Spain to an acquaintance in Germany, which is called a “country of persecution”. There one’s life is in constant danger and living in it is against God’s command- Aron Freimann, Country of Persecution, in- Julius Gutmann (ed.), ‘Ha-soker’ 2 (Budapest 1934), pp. 37-38 (Hebrew).

29 Elchanan Reiner, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage to Eretz Israel 1099-1517, Ph.D. Thesis Jerusalem 1988 (Hebrew).

30 Toch, Jewish Migrations (note 2), pp. 644-647.

31 This is to correct the number of 33 given in Toch, Siedlungsgeschichte (note 7), p. 30. Also the total number of Jewish places of residence given there on p. 29 as 1038 needs to be corrected to the total of 1022 contained in chart 2.

32 An attempt, not very satisfactory, to explain this fact in terms of a specific openness of the city has been presented by Alois Schmidt, Die Judenpolitik der Reichsstadt Regensburg im Jahre 1349, in- ZBLG 43 (1980) pp. 589-612.

33 The data given by me in the article cited above (note 7), p. 30, need to be corrected. The communities re-established were- 1349- Heidelberg, Nürnberg, Schweidnitz; 1350- Breslau, Guhrau, Osnabrück, Nordhausen, Graz, Speyer, Villach; 1351- Hildesheim, Hof, Koblenz; 1352- Eger; 1353- Trier, Worms; 1354- Berlin, Bingen, Eltville, Erfurt, Feldkirch, Guben, Hagenau, Landau, München, Naumburg, Ulm, Zürich; 1355- Amberg, Augsburg, Bensheim, Cochem, Hersbruck, Hersfeld, Ingolstadt, Weinheim, Oppenheim.

34 The time sequence for (selected) major places is- 1356 Mainz; 1357 Nördlingen; 1359 Aschaffenburg; 1359 Heilbronn; 1360 Andernach and Frankfurt/Main; 1363 Magdeburg; 1364 Leipzig; 1365 Bamberg; 1368 Halle; 1369 Strasbourg; 1370 Rothenburg ob der Tauber; 1371 Hannover; 1372 Köln; 1375 Bern; 1375 Konstanz; 1376 Würzburg; 1407 Pilsen.

35 For details see Toch, Verfolgungen (note 15).

36 For this and the following the groundwork is laid in Toch, Siedlungsgeschichte (note 7).

37 For population numbers see Germania Judaica III (note 4), entries Wien. Regensburg, Prag.

38 Grossman, Sages (note 2), passim.

39 For the political history of the former period see Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800-1056, London 1991; for the later period see Alfred Haverkamp, Medieval Germany, 1056-1273, Oxford 1988, and Horst Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages c. 1050-1200, Cambridge 1986.

40 Otto von Freising, Gesta Friderici seu rectius Cronica, I, 12, ed. Adolf Schmidt/Franz-Josef Schmale, Berlin-Darmstadt 1965, p. 152.

41 This aspect is at the heart of the argument of the study of Ziwes (note 3), esp. pp. 15-61. See also Haverkamp, Erzbischof Balduin (note 9), pp. 443-4.

42 Michael Toch, Jüdische Gemeindebildungen und Fernhandel an der Straβe von Brügge nach Novgorod im Mittelalter, in- Ferdinand Seibt (ed.), Transit Brügge–Novgorod. Eine Straβe durch die europäische Geschichte, Essen 1997 (exhibition catalogue; in print).

43 Using Christaller’s concept of “Zentralorte”, this process has been discussed in detail for the central Rhine region by Ziwes (note 3), pp. 65-97. For a most interesting approach to spatial structure based on interior Jewish sources see Stefan Rohrbacher, Medinat Schwaben. Jüdisches Leben in einer süddeutschen Landschaft in der Frühneuzeit, in Rolf Kiessling (ed.), Judengemeinden in Schwaben im Kontext des Alten Reiches, Berlin 1995, pp. 80-109.

44 Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung. Das Reich im späten Mittelalter 1250 bis 1490, Frankfurt am Main-Berlin 1989, pp. 100-101.

45 Here I follow Guggenheim, Unpublished writings. The groundwork for the study of Jewish custom has been laid by Israel Ta-Shema, Ashkenazi Jewry in the Eleventh Century- Life and Literature, in- Ashkenaz. The German Jewish Heritage, ed. by Gertrud Hirshler, New York 1988, pp. 23-56; idem, Early Franco-German Ritual and Custom, Jerusalem 1992 (Hebrew).

46 Roberto Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350, Cambridge 1976. See also Michael Postan (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. II, 2nd ed., Cambridge 1987; and Herbert Kellenbenz (ed.), Handbuch der Europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Stuttgart 1986.

47 Ziwes, Studien (note 3), pp. 40-41, pp. 233-237; Mentgen, Studien (note 3), pp. 557-574.

48 By Viennese colleagues of the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung whom I challenged to explain the logic of this assemblage which cuts across political and linguistic borders.

49 For the dense credit operations in the two latter regions, although without direct recourse to viticulture, see- St. Jenks, Judenverschuldung und Verfolgung von Juden im 14. Jahrhundert- Franken bis 1349, in- VSWG 65 (1978) pp. 309-356; Wolfgang von Stromer/Michael Toch, Zur Buchführung deutscher Juden im Spätmittelalter, in- Jürgen Schneider (ed.), Wirtschaftskräfte und Wirtschaftswege. Festschrift für Hermann Kellenbenz, vol. I, Stuttgart 1978, pp. 387-410; Hektor Ammann, Die Judengeschäfte im Konstanzer Ammann-Gerichtsbuch 1423-1434, in- SVGBodensee 71 (1952) pp. 37-84; Karl-Heinz Burmeister, medinat bodase. Bd. 1- Zur Geschichte der Juden am Bodensee 1200-1349, Konstanz 1994.

50 See the works cited above, note 17, and the studies in Kiessling (ed.), Judengemeinden (note 43), pp. 53-180.

51 Irving Agus (ed.), Urban Civilization in Pre-Crusade Europe, Leiden 1965, vol. I, pp. 97-9.

52 This point was first suggested to me by the study of a fragmentary Hebrew account book from the Bavarian market-town of Straubing- Michael Toch, Geld und Kredit in einer spätmittelalterlichen Landsehaft. Zu einem unbeachteten hebräischen Schuldenregister aus Niederbayern (1329-1332), in- DA 38 (1982) pp. 499-550.

53 Germania Judaica III/3 (note 4), entries Böhmen, Österreich, Schlesien (in print).

54 Germania Judaica III (note 4), entry Nördlingen. On this region of Landjuden in the early modern period see now Kiessling, Judengemeinden (note 43).

55 Germania Judaica III (note 4), entries Epfig, Batzendorf, Bossendorf, Ettendorf, Gunstett, Lixhausen, Mutzenhausen, Walk, Wingersheim. For a later dating and different interpretation see Mentgen, Studien (note 3), pp. 59-76.

56 Michael Toch, umb gemeyns nutz und nottdurfft willen. Obrigkeitliches und jurisdiktionelles Denken bei der Austreibung der Nürnberger Juden 1498/99, in- ZHF 11 (1984) pp. 1-21.

57 Toch, Siedlungsgeschichte (note 7), p. 37.