Medieval Synagogue of Würzburg

The Jewish community

Jews probably reached Würzburg in the late eleventh century as refugees from the Rhineland communities attacked during the First Crusade, according to Yad Vashem. In 1147 crusaders and local people attacked them; Encyclopaedia Judaica counts seven martyrs, three of them rabbis, while Yad Vashem gives about twenty dead. The bishop had the victims buried in his garden, and the community later bought the plot as its cemetery. Jews lived mainly from moneylending, currency exchange, land dealing and wine. Their quarter lay by the market: a city publication describes it as running from the Oberer Markt along Schustergasse, formerly Judengasse, and Schmalzmarkt to Langgasse, closed at night by an iron chain but without walls. In the thirteenth century the community grew with newcomers from Augsburg, Mainz, Nuremberg and Rothenburg. In 1298, during the Rindfleisch persecutions, about 900 Jews were murdered, about 100 of them refugees from the countryside. The community recovered but never regained its former standing. A charter of 1289 shows Menachem ben Natronai at its head.

Architecture and design

No description, plan or picture of the synagogue is known, and its builder, size and appearance are unknown. The written record gives only scraps. The Bavarian survey of synagogues by the Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte records the 'scola Judeorum' in 1170 in the area of the present market square. In 1230 the community bought parts of a courtyard and building plots from the Dietrich hospital, which the same survey links to rebuilding on the site; further study houses and a hostel for travelling Jews probably followed. In 1289 the community leaders referred to 'our schools', so there were probably at least two religious buildings by then. A woodcut of 1552 still labels the southern part of the market square 'Judenplatz'. The only physical remains reported are of a medieval mikveh: parts survive under the sacristy of the Marienkapelle, and further remains were uncovered in the chapel's lower level in 2006. These excavations are reported as unpublished, so the synagogue's footprint and its relation to the chapel's walls are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The Würzburg synagogue served a community that was, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one of the main centres of Jewish learning in Germany. Its yeshivah was taught by Isaac ben Moses, known from his work as Or Zarua, whose students included Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg and Mordecai ben Hillel. Joel ha-Levi and his son Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi, known as Rabiah, are also connected with the town, and Yad Vashem names Rabbi Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz among the scholars drawn to it. In the twelfth century the cantor Josef ben Nathan was known as a liturgical poet and scholar. In 1233 Salomo ben Samuel wrote a Hebrew Bible commentary in Würzburg that a Christian painter later illustrated. Little is recorded about services, seating or furnishings. At the time of the 1349 massacre the yeshivah was headed by Moses ha-Darshan, who was among those killed.

Destruction

In 1349, as the Black Death spread through Germany, the Jews of Würzburg were accused of poisoning the wells. In April of that year the townspeople of Würzburg turned on them; Encyclopaedia Judaica dates the massacre to 21 April. The Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte adds that a spring frost had ruined the vine harvest and that townspeople attacked the Jews, plundered their property and killed those they could find, calling the event the 'vine pogrom'. The only near-contemporary account is by the chronicler Michael de Leone, who wrote that the Jews barricaded themselves in their houses and set them on fire; the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 says men, women and children died by their own hand in the flames of the synagogue. Historians quoted by the city regard this as an attempt to conceal the scale of the killing. The Jewish quarter was razed. The synagogue either burned during the pogrom or was demolished soon afterwards. The bishop took the property of the dead and the fugitives, and a wooden Marian chapel was put up where the synagogue had stood.

The community’s fate

How many Jews died in April 1349 is unknown; no source consulted gives a figure. Encyclopaedia Judaica records that survivors fled to Erfurt, Frankfurt and Mainz and that the bishop seized their property. Among the dead was Moses ha-Darshan, head of the yeshivah. Jews were living in Würzburg again by 1377, and by the early fifteenth century a community had been re-formed and recovered its cemetery; a synagogue is mentioned again in 1412. This later community was small and repeatedly squeezed by heavy taxes, imprisonment and threats of banishment. It did not return to the old synagogue site, which had become church property; in 1489 its house of prayer stood in a courtyard at what is now Dettelbacher Gasse 3, and a new synagogue was built in 1446. Prince-Bishop Friedrich expelled the Jews in 1565, and Prince-Bishop Julius later confiscated the medieval cemetery. Gravestones from it were broken up or reused in buildings; 1,455 fragments recovered in modern times are kept in the Museum Shalom Europa.

The site today

The Marienkapelle, a Gothic hall church on the north side of the lower market square (Unterer Markt), stands on the site of the synagogue. A wooden chapel came first; Bishop Gerhard von Schwarzburg laid the foundation stone of the present building on 16 May 1377, and it was built with donations from the citizens and later supervised by the city council. The chapel burned in the Allied bombing of 16 March 1945 and was rebuilt between 1948 and 1961. The nineteenth-century idea that it was founded in atonement for the murdered Jews is not supported by contemporary sources. Remains of a medieval mikveh survive under the sacristy and in the lower level of the chapel; nothing of the synagogue itself is visible.

Notable names