Medieval Synagogue of Bratislava

OVERVIEW

The story of Medieval Synagogue of Bratislava

Pressburg, today Bratislava, had Jewish residents from at least 1251, when they first appear in the documents, and in the fourteenth century its community numbered several hundred people. Its synagogue is the earliest Jewish building in the city known from written sources. No drawing, plan or excavated remains of it are known, and the historian Tomáš Tandlich, who wrote the fullest modern study of the late-medieval community, states plainly that its outward and inward appearance are unknown.

The building had a troubled history. It is first recorded in a bull of Pope Benedict XII dated 13 November 1335, which, on a complaint from the Cistercians that its noise disturbed Mass in their neighbouring church and monastery, ordered it pulled down. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica it was rebuilt in 1339. When the Jews were expelled in 1360 their property was seized and destroyed. Families came back in 1368, and in 1399 the community was allowed to build a synagogue again, apparently in place of the one lost in 1360 and probably on the same plot. In the fifteenth century the Jews lived along Jewish Street, now Nedbalova ulica, in the north-east corner of the walled town, and the synagogue, with its school and the Jewish court, stood roughly where the Ursuline convent is today. After the expulsion of 1526 the building stood empty; by 1548 a mill had been put into it.

LOCATION

Where it stood

Historic: Jewish quarter of medieval Pressburg (Judengasse / Židovská ulica, now Nedbalova ulica), near the Cistercian monastery; exact plot unknown. Today: approximately the Ursuline convent and church, corner of Uršulínska and Nedbalova, Staré Mesto, 811 01 Bratislava (approximate).

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The Jewish community

The Jews of medieval Pressburg are first documented in 1251, and in 1291 King Andrew III granted them a charter. They earned their living mainly from trade and lending, and the Pressburg Jewish Book of 1371 laid down the rules for loans between Christians and Jews, including an oath taken with a hand on the handle of the synagogue gate for small sums. The community was expelled in 1360 and found refuge partly in Hainburg in Austria, returning in 1368, when several families bought houses at the Judenhof in the town centre. By the fifteenth century the Jews lived on Jewish Street, which ran from the Franciscan church to the Laurinc Gate and had about 25 to 27 houses with some thirty people to a house. Tandlich puts the community at 800 to 900 members in the early sixteenth century, about fifteen per cent of the town. The quarter had its own gate, closed with bars and chains only at night, and some Christian families lived there too. Jews could not become burghers and came directly under the king, paying a yearly Jewish tax of 50 gold florins collected through the Jewish prefect of Buda.

Architecture and design

Nothing certain is known about the form of the building. No view, plan or description survives, and no archaeological remains of it have been published in the sources consulted. Tandlich, writing in 2010, says that the appearance of the synagogue and of the Jewish school of Bratislava is unknown, and he uses the medieval synagogue of Vienna and the surviving late-Gothic synagogue of Sopron as analogies for what a building of this rank in a royal free town of western Hungary may have looked like. Both were modest masonry halls with a men's prayer hall, a separate women's space and adjoining rooms, set back from the street. Whether the Bratislava synagogue followed that pattern is unknown. The records show only that it was close enough to the Cistercian church in 1335 for its noise to carry into the Mass, that by the later Middle Ages it stood together with the Jewish school and served as the seat of the Jewish court, and that it was large and solid enough in 1548 for a mill to be installed in it. Its builders, size and capacity are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little is recorded about the worship held in the building. The complaint of 1335 shows that services were loud enough to be heard in the neighbouring Cistercian church, which suggests a building standing close to the monastery in the inner town. The synagogue was also a legal place for the whole town. Under the Pressburg Jewish Book of 1371, a Jewish creditor who lent a Christian less than ten pounds confirmed the debt by an oath sworn with his hand on the handle of the synagogue gate, while larger loans required an oath on the Torah. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the synagogue housed the community's school, and the Jewish court sat there. The names of a few members are known from the town chamber accounts, among them Prentl, Nastl, Heindl, Lebl, Munschl and Ysack, but no rabbi, cantor or warden of the synagogue is named in the sources consulted, and nothing is known of its furnishings or its prayer rite.

Destruction

The building was lost more than once. The papal bull of 13 November 1335, issued after the Cistercians complained to the Archbishop of Esztergom, ordered the synagogue to be demolished, and later accounts say it was pulled down soon afterwards; it was rebuilt in 1339. In 1360 the Jews were expelled from Pressburg as part of a general expulsion from the Kingdom of Hungary, and Yad Vashem's history of the community says their property was stolen and destroyed; the synagogue is understood to have been destroyed then, since the permission of 1399 was for a replacement. That later synagogue lost its congregation after the battle of Mohács, when Queen Mary of Habsburg ordered the Jews out of the town in October 1526. King Ferdinand I later claimed tax on the empty Jewish houses and synagogue, and in 1548 a mill was placed in the building. When it was finally pulled down is uncertain: Tandlich says in one place that it probably disappeared during the sixteenth century and in another that it was demolished in the seventeenth, and Yad Vashem states that a monastery was built on its site.

The community’s fate

The expulsion of October 1526 ended the medieval community. According to Tandlich, Queen Mary's decree emptied fifteen Jewish houses, whose owners included Zachariáš, Nastel, Majzera, Merkel, Lazar, Heindel, Abrahám Schuler, Hirschel, Leobl, Moše Heindl and Maindl, and the houses were sold to or given to Christian townsmen, among them a shoemaker, a cloth-shearer and the queen's own huntsman. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that King Ferdinand repealed the expulsion edict in the same year, but Jews did not return to the inner town. Most of the expelled crossed the Danube into Austria, while a minority settled below the castle on the Schlossberg, outside the town's jurisdiction. Emperor Maximilian ordered them off the Schlossberg in 1572 and most left. Only in 1599, when the Pálffy family took over the castle estate, were Jews again encouraged to settle in the Schlossberg and Zuckermandel quarters, where the early modern community and its later synagogues grew up.

The site today

The exact plot is not known. Tandlich places the synagogue approximately where the Ursuline convent now stands, at the corner of Uršulínska and Nedbalova streets in the Old Town, and the writer Patrick Comerford, reporting a local guided walk, places it at the site of the present Ursuline church, next to the vanished Cistercian cloister. The street that was the medieval Jewish Street is today's Nedbalova ulica. No part of the building is known for certain to survive. A Gothic portal at the back of the Corpus Christi chapel courtyard has been described in a travel blog as its only remnant, but no scholarly source consulted confirms this. The map pin marks Uršulínska street near its junction with Nedbalova and is approximate.

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