Haguenau

At the heart of northern Alsace, between the state forest that bears its name and the fertile lands of the Outre-Forêt, Haguenau holds a singular place in the Jewish geography of the Rhenish region. Founded as an imperial residence by the Hohenstaufen in the twelfth century, raised to the rank of free imperial city, it welcomed very early a Jewish presence whose continuity, despite violent ruptures, became one of the foundations of Alsatian Ashkenazi life. Haguenau is one of the oldest Jewish communities in Alsace, and Jews lived there almost without interruption.

The present work seeks to retrace this long history, from the first medieval mentions to the consistorial influence of the nineteenth century, striving to distinguish what the archive establishes from what memory transmits. Haguenau is not merely a place: it is a textbook case for understanding the ambivalent status of Jews in an imperial city — protected and taxed, tolerated and expelled, indispensable and suspect. The thread of this narrative follows the upheavals of Alsatian history as a whole: the massacres of the Black Death, the fluctuations of imperial tolerance, the passage under French sovereignty in the seventeenth century, then the Revolutionary emancipation and the Napoleonic consistorial organization.

Haguenau owes its rise to the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Frederick Barbarossa had an imperial palace built there, and the city became one of the centres of Swabian power in Lower Alsace. It was in this context of an imperial city, endowed with privileges and placed directly under the Emperor's authority, that a Jewish community settled.

The Jewish presence in Haguenau is attested from the Middle Ages. As in all the Rhenish cities — Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and closer still, Strasbourg — the Jews there were chiefly engaged in pawnbroking and the money trade, activities tolerated because they were useful to imperial and municipal finances. The status of Kammerknechtschaft, or "chamber serfdom," made the Jews a fiscal property of the Emperor, who levied taxes upon them in exchange for a theoretical protection. This protection, in Haguenau as elsewhere, proved fragile the moment circumstances turned to crisis.

The Jewish settlement was part of the dense network of Alsatian communities. The history of the Jews in Alsace is one of the oldest in France, and Haguenau constituted one of its northern poles, connected to the neighbouring towns of Wissembourg, Bouxwiller and Strasbourg. The city, by its position as a crossroads and its status of imperial immediacy, offered the Jews a relatively structured framework, without thereby sheltering them from the recurrent hostilities of the late Middle Ages.

The year 1349 marks, for the whole of Alsatian Judaism, a foundational catastrophe. The Black Death epidemic, which ravaged Europe from 1348, gave rise to the accusation that the Jews had poisoned the wells and fountains in order to exterminate Christians. The accusation of well-poisoning against the Jews served as a pretext for a wave of massacres that struck the Rhenish communities one after another.

The case of Strasbourg, some thirty kilometres away, remains the most emblematic of this regional tragedy: on 14 February 1349, around twelve hundred Jews were burned in Strasbourg during the Black Death. This violence was not isolated. The Black Death of 1349 was followed by massacres and expulsions of the Jews in Alsace, and Haguenau, an imperial city of the same region, did not escape the turmoil that annihilated or dispersed the communities.

The interest of Haguenau lies precisely in the community's capacity to be reborn after this destruction. For while the Black Death brutally interrupted the first period of settlement, it did not bring the Jewish history of the city to an end. Collective memory and the sources concur in making 1349 a major caesura, but not a final term: the Jews returned, as they returned in many Rhenish towns, drawn by the financial needs of the authorities and the relative protection that the imperial city could, intermittently, guarantee them.

The fate of the Jews of Haguenau in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries swung between resettlement and renewed expulsions. The free imperial cities, jealous of their prerogatives and anxious to please the Christian merchant guilds, repeatedly pronounced the banishment of the Jews, before recalling them or tolerating their presence in the surrounding villages. This alternation was the ordinary rhythm of Jewish life in Lower Alsace.

It is within this threatened continuity that the Jewish cemetery of Haguenau takes on its full meaning, one of the oldest and most venerable in the region. Studied as early as the mid-twentieth century by scholarly journals, it was the subject of a reference notice: the Jewish cemetery of Haguenau was described in the Revue des études juives, attesting to the antiquity of the presence and the community's attachment to its dead. A regional cemetery, shared among several localities, often constituted the only permanent place of a community whose settlement remained precarious; its stability contrasts with the instability of residence authorizations.

The return of the Jews to Haguenau after a period of absence is attested by the rebuilding of a place of worship. Upon their return, the Jews of Haguenau erected a synagogue in a house at 8 rue du Sel; it was rebuilt after a fire in 1676 and served as a place of worship until 1820. This mention attests that an organized community, endowed with an urban sanctuary, existed at least as early as the seventeenth century, and that the rue du Sel then constituted the heart of Jewish life in Haguenau.

The attachment of Alsace to France, enshrined by the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) and then by the annexations of Louis XIV, transformed the legal framework of Jewish presence. Haguenau, which had been one of the ten imperial cities of the Alsatian Decapolis, gradually came under the authority of the Kingdom of France. The Jews of Alsace thus became a distinct population, governed by royal letters patent, subject to the body toll and to residence restrictions, but also recognized in a certain permanence.

The reconstruction of the synagogue on the rue du Sel after the fire of 1676 illustrates this relative stabilization under the French regime. The sanctuary rebuilt after the fire of 1676 served as a place of worship until 1820, that is, nearly a century and a half of continuous worship in the same location. This permanence distinguishes Haguenau from many Alsatian localities where Jewish life remained scattered across the villages.

In the eighteenth century, the Jewish community of Haguenau was part of the whole body of the Jews of Alsace, one of the largest Jewish concentrations in the Kingdom of France before the Revolution. The Alsatian Jews, who spoke Judeo-Alsatian — a Western Yiddish dialect tinged with Alemannic —, formed a traditional society devoted to rabbinic study and observance of the Law. Haguenau, by its antiquity and its structure, was among the reference communities of this cultural area.

The French Revolution transformed the Jewish condition. The decree of 27 September 1791 granted full citizenship to the Jews of France, ending the regime of exception that had governed them since the Middle Ages. The Jews of Haguenau, like all Alsatian Jews, thus gained civil equality, while remaining subject, from 1808, to the restrictive provisions of Napoleon's "infamous decree," repealed in 1818.

The consistorial organization established by Napoleon in 1808 endowed French Judaism with an enduring administrative structure. Haguenau was integrated into the Jewish Consistory of the Bas-Rhin, of which it remains today one of the constituent communities. Haguenau is among the communities of the Jewish Consistory of the Bas-Rhin, which inscribes the town within the institutional continuity of Alsatian Judaism since the First Empire.

The most striking sign of this new era was the erection of a monumental synagogue. The present synagogue was built in 1820, succeeding the sanctuary on the rue du Sel. This building, a witness to the integration and prosperity of the emancipated community, was the subject in 2020 of a commemoration of its bicentenary: the two hundred years of the Haguenau synagogue were celebrated by the Société d'Histoire et d'Archéologie de Haguenau, a sign of this monument's place in the local heritage. The synagogue is today protected as a historic monument, attesting to its architectural and memorial value.

Today, Haguenau preserves a notable Jewish heritage, valued both by community institutions and by cultural tourism actors. The nineteenth-century synagogue, the ancient Jewish cemetery, and the memory of the former settlements on the rue du Sel are all milestones of a centuries-old presence. The Jewish heritage of Haguenau is the subject of promotion by the tourist office of the Pays de Haguenau, which offers it as a discovery itinerary.

This permanence is all the more remarkable in that it has endured through the most brutal ruptures of history. The fact that Jews lived in Haguenau almost without interruption makes it a privileged witness to the long Jewish presence in Alsace, from the imperial era to the present day. The destructions of the Black Death, the expulsions of the modern era, and the trials of the twentieth century did not erase this continuity.

The Haguenau case thus illuminates a fundamental trait of Alsatian Judaism: its capacity to reconstitute, after each rupture, communities rooted in a territory. Fidelity to place, attested by the repeated reconstruction of sanctuaries and by the upkeep of the cemetery, reflects an attachment that goes beyond mere economic convenience. Haguenau, former residence of the emperors, was also, for generations of Jews, a homeland of memory.

The Jewish history of Haguenau unfolds as a variation on the theme of threatened permanence. Born in the shadow of the imperial palace of the Hohenstaufen, struck head-on by the massacres of 1349, reborn through the cycles of returns and expulsions, stabilized under French sovereignty and then emancipated by the Revolution, the community embodies the long trajectory of Alsatian Ashkenazi life. From the first synagogue on the rue du Sel rebuilt in 1676 to the edifice of 1820, and beyond all interruptions, Haguenau remains one of the oldest Jewish communities in Alsace.

What distinguishes Haguenau is less the brilliance of a singular event than the density of a duration. Where other towns saw their Judaism extinguished for good, Haguenau was always able to take up the thread again. The present work has sought to restore this history while weighing its sources, aware that the medieval archive remains fragmentary and that Memory often comes to fill the silence of the records. The old cemetery, the bicentennial synagogue, and the persistence of communal life within the Consistory of the Bas-Rhin remain the living witnesses of this history that nothing, until now, has been able to bring definitively to a close.