The Beifus Family

To grasp the name Beifus, one must first describe the place that gave rise to it. The Frankfurter Judengasse was the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt and one of the first ghettos in Germany; it existed from 1462 until 1811 and housed the largest Jewish community in Germany in the early modern period. Its founding resulted from an imperial decision: the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt was established in 1462 by decree of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III.

The setting was one of extreme constriction. Located outside the city walls, to the east of the medieval rampart, the alleyway formed a slight curve; it measured approximately 330 meters in length, three to four meters in width, and had three city gates, locked at night as well as on Sundays and Christian feast days. Within this cramped space, the population grew ceaselessly. Initially, the Judengasse housed 15 houses, a synagogue, a hospital for foreigners, and a mikvé, for a community of 154 people, before reaching several thousand souls by the end of the eighteenth century.

The conditions of confinement served as a daily reminder of segregation. The Jews of Frankfurt were required to live apart from Christians in a single narrow alleyway called the Judengasse; the street was overcrowded, and its 3,000 Jewish inhabitants were locked inside this ghetto on Sundays, Christian holidays, and at night. It was in this crucible — where overcrowding made any conventional identification of dwellings impossible — that the system of house signs was born, the system that would give rise to Beifus.

The most original feature of the Judengasse was undoubtedly its system of identification by house signs. In the absence of street numbers, each house displayed a distinctive sign — an animal, an object, a color, a plant — and its inhabitants took their name from that sign. Many drew their family name from their houses; the pictorial representations of these names, resembling coats of arms, were engraved, painted, or embroidered on keystones and doors, on household utensils, rings, book bindings, scarves, handkerchiefs, and tombstones. These emblems followed families through time: people retained their names — and their emblems — when they moved.

The most famous example of this mechanism is that of the Rothschild family. The property was known as the "house of the green shield"; it was there that the children of Mayer and Gutle were born. The dynasty took its name from an earlier sign, the "red shield" (rotes Schild), demonstrating how directly the family name derived from the façade.

The case of the "Hase" house further illustrates the phenomenon and its genealogical fertility. The (Roter) Hase was built in 1533 for Salomon, thereafter known as Salomon zum Hasen, who paid 100 florins to acquire it; Salomon zum Hasen was the founder of a family with considerable ramifications within the Jewish community of Frankfurt, which gave rise to several highly distinguished Jewish families. It is precisely according to this model that Beifus must be read: an ancestor settled zum Beifuss, at the sign of the mugwort, whose descendants retained the house name as a patronym. The name Beifus is therefore, by its very form, the fossilized trace of a medieval address.

The name Beifus refers to a specific plant, the common mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), whose image adorned the eponymous dwelling as a house sign. This plant was not chosen arbitrarily within the imaginative world of house signs: it carried a long symbolic and medicinal heritage. Among the Greeks, mugwort was sacred to the goddess Artemis, goddess of the hunt and protector of women, honored also as a midwife and "Great Mother" — hence the botanical name "Artemisia." Popular tradition extended this association: mugwort was thus considered an aphrodisiac and a remedy for women.

One must guard here against over-interpretation: nothing indicates that the first bearer of the sign intended to claim these Greek or medical meanings. The signs of the Judengasse mingled heraldic motifs, everyday objects, animals, and plants, without any unified symbolic program governing them. In all likelihood, mugwort was first a visual sign — recognizable, easy to paint, distinct from neighboring signs — before being a sign of meaning. This is why this chapter falls under the Intersection category: the botanical and symbolic tradition of mugwort illuminates the cultural background of the name, while the archive attests only to the practical function of the sign as a residential marker. The two registers correspond to each other without merging.

On a strictly linguistic level, the very presence of this name reflects a broader phenomenon: the formation of Ashkenazic Jewish surnames from the Germanic and Yiddish substrate of the Rhenish valley. For Max Weinreich, the geographic origin of Yiddish lies indisputably in the Rhine region: Cologne, Francfort-sur-le-Main, Mayence, Trèves, Worms, Spire, and Metz. Beifus is a Rhenish name par excellence, rooted in the Germanic lexicon of this founding area.

The material history of the Judengasse was punctuated by catastrophes that could have erased its signs — and thus its names. This did not come to pass: reconstruction respected the ancient plot layout and restored the signs, ensuring the continuity of the Hausnamen. Due to the narrowness of the street and its limited access, the Judengasse was destroyed three times by fire in the eighteenth century, in 1711, 1721, and 1796.

The breadth of the administrative documentation makes it possible today to measure the effects. The builders' drawings, gathered and archived by the city council, allow for an excellent reconstruction of the former Judengasse; only ten years after the first disaster, a second fire broke out in the ghetto on 28 January 1721. This mass of archives — plans, deeds of sale, tax registers — is precisely what gives the name Beifus, like the other Hausnamen, a verifiable historical grounding rather than a legendary one: every house with a sign left a written trace.

The end of the ghetto opened the final act of this history. In 1796, the northern part of the Judengasse was destroyed during the bombardment of Frankfurt by French troops. Then came Napoleonic emancipation: following the Napoleonic occupation and the creation of the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt in 1810, the restrictive barriers enclosing the Judengasse were dismantled in 1811, allowing Jews to reside outside the boundaries of the ghetto for the first time since 1462. It is precisely at the moment of leaving the alleyway that the Hausnamen — until then tied to an address — became permanently fixed as portable hereditary surnames, carried far and wide by the families who bore them.

Placed in its proper context, the name Beifus is no isolated case: it belongs to a recognizable network of surnames arising from the same alleyway and through the same mechanism. Rothschild (house at the red shield), Schwarzschild, Adler, Strauss, Gans, Einhorn, Stern, and others all trace back to house names, particularly those of Frankfurt's Judengasse. The Beifus — mugwort — takes its place in this gallery of vegetal, animal, and heraldic signs.

Nonetheless, one must remain rigorous about the scope of this observation. Sharing a common house name does not necessarily imply a blood relationship: many took their name from their house, meaning that a single Hausname could be borne successively by occupants with no genealogical connection, as houses were sold and residents moved on. The case of the Hase illustrates this: a single house could give rise to several distinct and illustrious families. Accordingly, not every bearer of the name Beifus is automatically a biological descendant of the first "zum Beifuss"; he may be the heir to a place as much as to a lineage.

This caution takes nothing away from the name's coherence. It serves rather as a reminder of a truth peculiar to Frankfurt's Jewish genealogy: the name is there first a fact of habitation, and only then a fact of family. The spatial constraint of the Judengasse, by precluding expansion, forced an extraordinary concentration of names onto a single stretch of ground, the Memory of which the municipal archives preserve to this day. Beifus is one of the threads in this close-woven fabric, and its persistence into the present day — attested by the contemporary presence of bearers of the name Beifuß in the German-speaking world — extends, across a distance of several centuries, the mugwort sign of a house in the alleyway.

The name Beifus condenses in two syllables the full singularity of Jewish history in Frankfurt. It speaks neither of a trade, nor of a distant place of origin, nor of a paternal forename: it speaks of a house, and upon that house, a sign — the mugwort. Born in the most confined space imaginable, the 330-metre-long Judengasse, it is the product of a system in which identity, in the absence of numbered addresses, was read from façades. In this, Beifus belongs to the same family of names as Rothschild, Adler, or Strauss: Hausnamen that the emancipation of 1811 detached from their walls and transformed into hereditary surnames.

The historian will draw three lessons. First, the documentary solidity of these names, guaranteed by the construction archives and the registers of the city of Frankfurt. Next, the necessary genealogical caution: bearing the name of a house does not always equate to descending from a single common ancestor. Finally, the latent symbolic richness of the chosen sign — the mugwort of Artemis, herb of women and remedies — which endows this modest name with an unexpected depth. From the painted sign to the scattered lineage, Beifus remains the discreet and enduring witness of a vanished world: that of the alleyway where the Jews of Frankfurt made of their walls the book of their names.