Juifs de Francfort (Judengasse)

The Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main occupies a singular place in the history of the diasporas of Ashkenaze Judaism. For more than three and a half centuries, its members lived, prayed, traded, studied and perished within a single, narrow, enclosed street: the Judengasse, the "Jews' alley." This constrained space — one of the first established ghettos of the Empire and one of the most densely populated in Europe — paradoxically became the theater of a communal life of exceptional richness, where the most meticulous legal oppression coexisted with the brilliance of a religious, economic and intellectual culture of the first order.

According to the memorial institutions of the city, including the Museum Judengasse, the community of Frankfurt was <cite index="2-1">one of the most important Jewish quarters in Germany and a center of Jewish life in Europe</cite>. To understand the Judengasse is to hold together two apparently contradictory narratives: that of confinement and discrimination, codified in imperial and municipal regulations of relentless precision; and that of a communal vitality which gave birth to the Rothschild dynasty and to the neo-traditional orthodoxy movement. This volume aims to retrace this history in its complexity, honestly distinguishing what belongs to the established archive, what can be deduced from probable evidence, and what belongs to transmitted Memory.

Jewish presence in Frankfurt is attested as early as the twelfth century. Jews initially resided there in a dispersed manner, near the cathedral and the market square, integrated into the urban fabric as moneylenders, merchants, and craftsmen, under the status of "serfs of the Imperial Chamber" (Kammerknechte), which placed their protection — and their taxation — in the hands of the emperor.

This first community suffered two major catastrophes even before the creation of the ghetto. The first was the massacre of 1241, sometimes called Judenschlacht, during which a large part of the community perished. The second occurred during the persecutions linked to the Black Death in 1349, when the community was once again annihilated, its members accused, as throughout central Europe, of having poisoned the wells. These two devastations left a lasting imprint on the liturgical Memory of Frankfurt, preserved in the Memorbücher (books of remembrance).

The decisive turning point came in the fifteenth century. Under pressure from the clergy and the authorities, and in keeping with the policy of segregation that the Church had promoted since the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Frankfurt city council decided to gather the Jews into a single location. According to the City of Frankfurt, it was in 1462 that the Jews were compelled to settle in a newly laid-out street outside the old city walls. This date marks the birth of the Judengasse as an institution.

The Judengasse was a curved street of approximately three hundred meters, sealed at both ends by gates that were locked at night, on Sundays, and on Christian feast days. Jews could only leave it during certain hours and according to strict rules: no walking in public gardens, no frequenting certain markets, no moving about in groups abreast. The street, long the sole permitted residential thoroughfare, saw its population grow without any possibility of surface expansion — hence extreme density and the raising of houses, frequently rebuilt upward and subdivided endlessly.

This segregation was accompanied by its own legal framework, the Stättigkeit, a body of regulations fixing the maximum number of permitted families, the number of marriages allowed per year, the accessible trades (essentially lending, money-changing, second-hand commerce, and textile dealing), and the special taxes levied upon Jews. Each house bore a name and a sign — often an animal, an object, or a color — rather than a number; these names, such as "at the Red Shield" (zum roten Schild) or "at the Green House," became patronyms, giving rise to the name Rothschild.

Despite these constraints, the community developed sophisticated institutions: synagogues, mikvaot (ritual baths), yeshivot, a hospital, lodgings for travelers, charitable confraternities (hevrot), and a cemetery that remains one of the oldest in central Europe. The Museum Judengasse today preserves the archaeological remains of these structures, uncovered during excavations, and documents the material life of the alleyway. The rabbis of Frankfurt held considerable halakhic authority throughout the Ashkenazic world, and the city became a center of Hebrew printing and Talmudic scholarship.

The year 1614 constitutes one of the most dramatic and best-documented episodes in the history of the community. The uprising known as the "Fettmilch" revolt, named after the merchant and baker Vincent Fettmilch, illustrates the precariousness of the Jewish condition even within a protective legal framework. According to the Leo Baeck Institute, <cite index="7-1">Vincent Fettmilch settled in Frankfurt in 1602</cite> and led a bourgeois revolt against the municipal patriciate.

This movement, initially directed against the urban oligarchy and its privileges, turned into anti-Jewish violence. According to Brill Reference (Encyclopaedia of Jewish History and Culture), <cite index="9-1">the Fettmilch uprising, which in September 1614 turned into violence against the Jews of Frankfurt and led to their temporary expulsion, is one of the best-known cases of anti-Jewish unrest in central Europe in the seventeenth century</cite>. The Judengasse was pillaged and its inhabitants driven out.

The outcome of the event nonetheless reveals the true reach of imperial protection. According to the Leo Baeck Institute, <cite index="7-1">the Jews of Frankfurt were expelled for two years, until 1616, when the emperor intervened, retook control of the city, and pronounced an imperial ban against Fettmilch and his accomplices; imperial soldiers escorted the Jews back into Frankfurt</cite>. Fettmilch was executed in 1616. The date of the return, the 20th of the month of Adar, was established by the community as a local commemorative feast, the "Pourim de Vintz" (Vinz-Hans-Purim), in which the deliverance was celebrated with songs. Here the transmitted liturgical Memory and the imperial archive confirm one another.

It was in this cramped space that one of the most celebrated financial dynasties in history was born. Mayer Amschel Rothschild came into the world in the Judengasse in 1744. The family name itself derives, as we have seen, from the sign of an ancestral house: according to the Rothschild Archives, the name comes from the house "at the Red Shield" that the family had inhabited in the alley.

Mayer Amschel, trained in trade and passionate about ancient coins and medals, knew how to make the most of the narrow margins left by the Stättigkeit. Having become a supplier to the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, he built a banking house from which he sent his five sons to establish branches in the great European capitals — Frankfurt, London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples. According to the Rothschild Archives, it was from this modest house in the Judengasse that the expansion of a dynasty began, one that would become, in the nineteenth century, one of the most influential families in international finance.

The rise of the Rothschilds is inseparable from the place that witnessed their birth. It illustrates the manner in which the Frankfurt community, despite its confinement, remained connected to the great economic currents of the Empire and of Europe, and how the commercial expertise accumulated within the alley was able, once the legal barriers were lowered, to unfold on a continental scale. The family home in the Judengasse remained a symbolic and patrimonial point of anchorage for subsequent generations.

The end of the eighteenth century sounded the death knell of the ghetto as a physical enclosure. In 1796, the bombardment of Frankfurt by French revolutionary troops destroyed part of the Judengasse, and many Jews were permitted, for the first time, to settle outside the street. The Napoleonic occupation accelerated the movement: under the influence of revolutionary ideas, legal equality was progressively recognized, and in 1811 Grand Duke Karl von Dalberg granted — in exchange for a heavy financial compensation — civic equality to the Jews of Frankfurt.

This emancipation suffered setbacks. After the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the restoration of the free city-state of Frankfurt, certain rights were restricted, and it was not until the following decades, and finally German unification and the laws of 1864 and 1871, that full and complete equality was achieved. The Judengasse, now open and emptied of its segregative function, was gradually abandoned by prosperous families who moved into the city's new neighborhoods.

The material decline of the alleyway led to its demolition. According to the heritage sources of the City of Frankfurt, the greater part of the dilapidated and unsanitary buildings of the Judengasse was demolished during the nineteenth century, the process being largely completed in the 1870s–1880s. Almost nothing of the historic street soon remained above ground; its memory was preserved by communal institutions, archives, and, later, urban archaeology.

In the nineteenth century, as emancipation and assimilation were profoundly transforming German Judaism, Frankfurt became the home of a religious movement destined for great resonance: neo-traditional orthodoxy, or neo-orthodoxy. Its central figure was Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, born in Hamburg in 1808 and died in Frankfurt in 1888.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Hirsch was <cite index="3-1">a major Jewish religious thinker and the founder of Trennungsorthodoxie (separatist orthodoxy), or neo-orthodoxy, a theological system that helped make Orthodox Judaism viable in Germany</cite>. His doctrine, encapsulated in the formula Torah im derekh erets (the Torah combined with the way of the world), sought to reconcile complete fidelity to the Law with participation in modern German culture.

In Frankfurt, Hirsch took leadership, in 1851, of the separatist congregation Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft. His aim was to remove tradition-observant Jews from the authority of the official community, which had become predominantly Reform. According to METAhub Frankfurt and AustriaWiki, <cite index="6-1">Hirsch was the founder of the Austrittsgemeinde — the "exit community" — and one of the leading figures of the neo-orthodox movement in Germany</cite>, a doctrine which, as AustriaWiki notes, <cite index="5-1">led notably to the founding of independent communities ("Austrittsgemeinden")</cite>. The Prussian secession law of 1876 gave legal recognition to this right to leave the parent community. Under Hirsch's impetus, Frankfurt thus became the intellectual and institutional center of an orthodoxy capable of confronting modernity without abandoning its foundations — an enduring legacy of the community born in the Judengasse.

The history of the Jews of Frankfurt condenses, within a space of a few hundred meters, the essential tensions that ran through the Ashkénaze diaspora: dependence on imperial protection and its fragility, revealed by the Fettmilch uprising; the segregationist confinement of the Judengasse and the cultural vitality it could not extinguish; the brutal passage from ghetto to emancipation; and the invention of original religious responses to modernity, of which Samson Raphael Hirsch's neo-orthodoxy remains the most accomplished expression.

From this enclosed alleyway emerged a dynasty that transformed global finance and a school of thought that left a lasting mark on orthodox Judaism. The physical demolition of the Judengasse in the nineteenth century did not erase its Memory: the archaeological remains, the communal archives, and the museum institutions of Frankfurt perpetuate its remembrance. The community then faced the ordeal of Nazi persecution, which annihilated pre-war Jewish life — a History that calls for a volume of its own. But what endures, from the Judengasse, is the testimony of a humanity that, under the most extreme constraint, knew how to build a world.