Medieval Synagogue of Frankfurt

הקהילה היהודית

A Jewish presence in Frankfurt is recorded from the twelfth century, and the local Jewish heritage survey on jüdische-gemeinden.de places the first settlement towards the end of the eleventh. By around 1340 the community numbered about 200 people and was among the wealthiest in the Empire. Its houses filled the streets south and south-west of St Bartholomew's: the Alte Judengasse was the main street, and the quarter ran roughly from the Fahrgasse in the east to the Heilig-Geist-Plätzchen in the Saalgasse in the west. Besides the synagogue it had a dance or wedding house in the block that later held the Leinwandhaus, a hospital, a ritual bath in a cellar later under the Neues Kaufhaus, and a cemetery outside the walls first mentioned in 1300, with a gravestone of 1272 surviving. The Jewish Encyclopedia names scholars associated with the town, among them Simeon ha-Darshan, author of the Yalkut Shimoni, Alexander Süsslin ha-Kohen, author of the Aguddah, Isaac ben Nathan, killed in 1241, and Gumprecht, a martyr of 1349.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No picture, plan or description of the synagogue from the time it stood is known. The only physical evidence came in 1874, when the city weigh house built over the site in 1503 was pulled down and a pit was dug for a new city archive. According to the account summarised on the German Wikipedia article on the Stadtwaage, citing Kracauer and the Jung and Wolff inventory of Frankfurt buildings, the workmen found Romanesque remains of the oldest synagogue, including a Romanesque window and the foundations of a basilica-like building with a round apse that held the Torah ark. These were poorly recorded and then removed. The same sources state that after each destruction the synagogue was rebuilt in roughly the same place and on a similar plan, and the regional survey on jüdische-gemeinden.de says the later building rose on the foundations of the house of worship burned in 1349. The walled forecourt called the Judenschulkirchhof is recorded in 1336. The size, seating, height and builders of any phase are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Almost nothing is recorded about worship inside the building itself. The English Wikipedia account of the Frankfurt Jewish community, drawing on the Museum Judengasse literature, describes the synagogue of the late fourteenth-century community as more than a house of prayer: Jews worshipped there, did business, swore judicial oaths and heard public proclamations, and the rabbi collected taxes owed to the community there and punished minor offences. Excavation found a deep shaft beneath it reaching groundwater, probably a ritual bath. In 1442 Emperor Frederick III ordered the Jews living by the cathedral to be moved because the singing from the synagogue was said to disturb Christian services next door, a complaint that led to the creation of the Judengasse twenty years later. The 1241 pogrom also killed the community's three rabbis and its cantor, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and was remembered in laments recited on the Ninth of Av.

הרס

The synagogue was first devastated on 24 May 1241, when Christian townspeople attacked the Jewish quarter over two days, killed about 180 Jews, plundered the synagogue and destroyed its Torah scrolls. Its second and decisive destruction came in the Black Death year of 1349. In June 1349 King Charles IV pledged his rights over the Jews and their taxes to the city of Frankfurt for more than 15,000 pounds of hellers, declaring that the city would not be liable if the Jews died. He left Frankfurt, and about two weeks later, in July 1349, every Jew in the city was beaten to death or burned and the quarter was set on fire; some Jews are said to have set their own houses alight. Older writers, including the Jewish Encyclopedia, blamed bands of flagellants. The Jewish Museum Frankfurt now describes a planned massacre in which the city council, the patricians and the guilds, with the king's tacit acceptance, cleared their debts and seized Jewish property. The plague itself reached Frankfurt only in the autumn. The synagogue was left a burned-out ruin full of rubble until 1357.

גורל הקהילה

The Jewish Museum Frankfurt says the number of victims cannot be established, though contemporary documents report the deaths of about 60 men and women; unlike in 1241, baptism saved no one. The houses and property of the dead passed to the city council under the agreement with Charles IV, and the churchyard of St Bartholomew's was later extended over former Jewish land. The plot around the synagogue lay as a rubble waste. Jews were readmitted from 1360, on worse terms: each family had to negotiate its own residence with the council, and the Jewish Encyclopedia counts only about twelve to fourteen tax-paying families between 1357 and 1379. This second community rebuilt the synagogue on the old site and used it until 1462, when the council forced all Jews into the new Judengasse outside the city wall. There a new synagogue was built in 1462-1464; it burned in the great fire of 1711, was rebuilt, replaced by a new main synagogue in 1859-1860, and that building was destroyed by the Nazis in November 1938.

האתר כיום

After the Jews moved to the Judengasse in 1462 the old synagogue stood empty, and the city painted its coat of arms on it to assert ownership. In 1503 the council chose the plot for a new city weigh house, and excavation of the synagogue's foundations began on 23 May 1503 for the Stadtwaage; the neighbouring slaughterhouse kept the name Alte Judenschule into the nineteenth century. The weigh house was replaced in 1874-1877 by a neo-Gothic city archive, which was destroyed in an air raid on 29 January 1944. A residential building of the 1950s with a café on the ground floor now stands at Weckmarkt 1, just south of the cathedral. Nothing on the site recalls the synagogue.

שמות בולטים