Stuttgart

The first historical mention of Stuttgart dates back to the administration of Eberhard the Illustrious, who governed the County of Württemberg from 1265 to 1325. The Jewish presence in the city is attested for the first time shortly after this period: in 1348–1349, during the massacres associated with the Black Plague, the Jews of Stuttgart suffered the same fate as those in dozens of other cities in Württemberg — they were burned [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906; Stälin, Wirtembergische Geschichte, III, p. 244]. The city chronicle establishes that a ghetto and a Judenschule — a school and place of religious assembly — already existed at that time, and that a Jew named Leo is nominally attested there [Hartmann, Chronik der Stadt Stuttgart, 1886].

After this first annihilation, traces of Jewish presence reappear from 1393 onward, with the mention of a certain Baruch Baselless. Under the joint reign of the counts Eberhard the Younger and Ulrich V the Beloved, a Jew named Moses, called Jäcklin, settled in the city with his family and servants, obtained rights of citizenship as well as letters of protection and privilege — an exceptional case in the context of the time. Whether this is the same Moses Jecklin attested in Esslingen between 1404 and 1451 remains uncertain [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. Other names appear in the archives throughout the fifteenth century: Salomon, who purchased a letter of protection for eight florins between 1435 and 1441; Lazarus, who obtained a similar one for ten florins between 1437 and 1443; Kaufman and Bel in 1459. The Jew Brein, for his part, received permission from Count Ulrich to settle in Cannstatt and to lend at interest, but under strict conditions: he could demand no more than one pfennig per pound and had no right of seizure. These scattered indices attest to the existence of small communities, though their organization is not fully documented.

A new community had formed in 1434, numbering some eight families by around 1470, equipped with a synagogue and a ritual bath (mikveh). Sometime after 1492, the Jews were expelled pursuant to the testament of Count Eberhard III, which was enacted into state law in 1498. In the early sixteenth century, Count Ulrich attempted to involve Jews in the economic development of the territory, but the attempt failed in a context of persistent resistance. Dean Phillip Bell has shown how, in fifteenth-century Germany, Jewish and Christian identities were constructed in a permanent tension between economic proximity and theological rejection [Bell, 2001]. Stuttgart fully exemplifies this pattern: circumstantial tolerances, protection contracts, expulsions, and recalls succeed one another according to the needs of comtal power, without a stable community ever becoming established.

The most famous — and most tragic — episode of Jewish presence in Stuttgart before emancipation is that of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, a financier attached to the court of Duke Charles-Alexander of Württemberg from 1733 onwards. Charged with reorganizing ducal finances, managing currency, taxes and monopolies, Oppenheimer embodied the figure of the Hofjude, the "Court Jew," indispensable to the princes of the Empire yet exposed to popular vengeance upon the disappearance of his protector. Amos Elon has analyzed this ambivalent status, where economic utility never abolished juridical and social vulnerability [Elon, 2002].

Upon the sudden death of the duke in March 1737, Oppenheimer was arrested, tried in an iniquitous proceeding and hanged publicly in Stuttgart in February 1738, his body exposed in an iron cage. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, which devotes extensive discussion to the affair in its article on Württemberg, emphasizes that the execution was motivated by the jealousy of provincial estates, the appetite for confiscated goods and confessional hatred — not by proven malfeasance [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. The affair nourished German antisemitic imagination durably: it was diverted in the twentieth century into an instrument of Nazi propaganda with the film Jud Süß (1940), which inverted the memory of the victim into a caricature of hatred. Here, tradition — the memory of a man broken by reason of state — and judicial archive answer one another to restore, against falsification, the reality of a sacrificed destiny.

The period immediately following Oppenheimer's execution is likewise documented: under the control of regents Carl Rudolf and Peter Carl Frederick, anti-Jewish laws were once again applied rigorously, and Jews were again expelled in 1739 — though their recall promptly followed, economic logic reasserting its rights [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. Court bankers Seeligmann (1741) and Ullmann (1743) thus obtained permission to reside in the city, continuing the tradition of the Hofjude in a slightly more relaxed context.

The decisive turning point for the Jewish presence in Stuttgart was the advent of the Kingdom of Württemberg in 1806, under Napoleonic auspices. On June 27, 1806, King Frederick I granted by decree to Jacob Raphael Kaulla, imperial and royal counselor, as well as to a number of his close associates, Württemberg citizenship for themselves and their descendants, in recognition of services rendered to the country during critical circumstances [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. This extraordinary concession, granted to a family of bankers before general emancipation, constitutes a precedent: the Kaulla family would exert lasting influence over all the Jews of the district, and particularly over their coreligionists in Stuttgart.

As early as 1808, the need for a synagogue in Stuttgart was felt, and a fundraising campaign was authorized. At that date, only Jews who could justify a fortune of at least twenty thousand florins were admitted to reside in the city — a condition that strictly limited access to settlement and de facto selected an affluent bourgeoisie. By an ordinance of July 18, 1819, Jewish residents were moreover required to pay twelve florins annually for protection [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. The community was also equipped with a mikveh attested as early as 1721, a sign of structured ritual life well before the official synagogue of the royal era.

The Württemberg law of April 25, 1828 on the "public affairs of members of the Israelite faith" constituted the next stage: it organized the community on an administrative basis, promoted settlement, access to professions and establishment in cities, while imposing a guardianship intended to "improve" the civil condition of Jews — a paternalistic program typical of German emancipation as described by Elon [Elon, 2002]. An Israelitische Oberkirchenbehörde — superior Israelite consistory — seated in Stuttgart coordinated henceforth all the communities of the kingdom, under the direct guardianship of the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Instruction [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. Complete civil emancipation was only achieved in 1864, then confirmed by German unification in 1871.

The German Empire opened to the Stuttgart community a period of remarkable growth, of which the synagogue on Hospitalstraße constitutes the most visible architectural symbol. The building, conceived in a Neo-Moorish style, was consecrated in 1862 — sources diverge slightly on the exact date, the article in the Jewish Encyclopedia mentioning 1862, other documents evoking 1861 [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 ; encyclopedia.com]. Designed by architect Wolf, the synagogue was equipped with an organ for which Emanuel Feist composed several unpublished hymns. The prayer book adopted by the community, freed from dogmatic subtleties, conferred upon the service a character of dignity and simplicity that made the Stuttgart community a model for many other Jewish congregations in Germany [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. This liturgical influence testifies to the resolutely liberal orientation that the Swabian Jewish community had chosen, contrary to the Orthodox current which maintained a separate Beit Midrash from 1880.

The rabbis of the community in the nineteenth century attained a prominence that exceeded the borders of Württemberg. Rabbi Maier (1794–1873) and his successor Moses Wassermann (1811–1892) were both ennobled by the kings of Württemberg [encyclopedia.com], a distinction so rare that it illustrates the degree of integration to which leading figures of liberal Judaism could aspire in this kingdom. In 1896 an annual practice was established: the rabbis of the region, Jewish teachers and choir directors gathered in convention at Stuttgart, making the capital a center of intellectual and religious life for all of Württemberg Jewry [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906].

The community participated fully in the professional and academic life of the city. Lawyer Levi and judge Kallmann sat on the judicial bodies of the district; N. Levi presided over the administrative council of the bar of the superior court of Stuttgart. At the Polytechnische Hochschule taught the Jewish professors Kaufmann, Marx and Schmidt; at the Conservatory of music, singing and dramatic art, professors Singer and Wien held regular chairs, and Gerstmann was part of the troupe of the Hoftheater [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. These data, drawn from the state of the community at the turn of the century, illustrate an integration into cultural and learned institutions that went far beyond commerce or banking. In 1903, the community register recorded 62 births, 16 marriages celebrated at the synagogue and 33 burials; the last available census at the time of the encyclopedia's publication counted 776 households for 3,015 people [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906].

The Jews of Stuttgart participated fully in the economic and cultural life of Württemberg: textile and clothing industrialists, merchants, physicians, lawyers, academics, they embodied the ideal of Bildungsbürgertum, that educated bourgeoisie to which Elon devoted his portrait of German Jews [Elon, 2002]. Nascent Zionism found an echo there as well: Württemberg was a land of establishment for various Jewish associations, between attachment to the German homeland and Jewish national awakening. The First World War, in which German Jews served massively under the flag, seemed to seal their belonging to the nation — an illusion that the Weimar Republic prolonged before the collapse.

Hitler's rise to power in January 1933 inaugurated, in Stuttgart as throughout the Reich, a methodical policy of exclusion. Saul Friedländer traced the stages of this persecution: boycott of Jewish businesses from April 1933, revocation of officials, exclusion from professions, then the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of their citizenship [Friedländer, 1997]. The Stuttgart community, like others, saw its members progressively deprived of their rights, their property, and their dignity. Otto Hirsch, a jurist born in Stuttgart in 1885, co-founder and executive director of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden alongside Rabbi Leo Baeck, strove to organize aid to the persecuted and legal resistance within communal structures — until his deportation and murder in Mauthausen camp in 1941.

The pogrom night of November 9-10, 1938 — Kristallnacht — was of extreme violence in Stuttgart: the great synagogue on Hospitalstraße was set ablaze and destroyed, Jewish businesses ransacked, many men arrested and deported to Dachau camp. From late 1941 until early 1945, Stuttgart became the assembly point for the deportation of all Jews from Württemberg. The first convoy left Stuttgart on July 1, 1941 bound for Riga, where the deported were subsequently massacred; followed in 1942 transports to Izbica and Auschwitz — four convoys between 1942 and 1943 — then to Theresienstadt, from August 5, 1942 to February 1945 [encyclopedia.com]. The remaining Jews had been concentrated in a specific district, older members of the community being evacuated to small towns and villages. Approximately one thousand Jews from Stuttgart perished in deportation or in concentration camps [encyclopedia.com]. Friedländer, in The Years of Extermination, showed how this process of annihilation unfolded in plain sight, before a society that, in its majority, turned away [Friedländer, 2008].

In the aftermath of the war, Stuttgart, located in the American occupation zone, became a major concentration point for Jewish Displaced Persons. In 1945, two displaced persons camps in the city housed more than two thousand Jews [encyclopedia.com]. Approximately twenty Jews had survived in Stuttgart itself by hiding; forty-five returned from Theresienstadt, among them Alfred Marx, and a few others came back from other concentration camps [encyclopedia.com]. A tragic incident occurred in March 1946, when a police raid on Stuttgart's displaced persons camp resulted in the death of a Holocaust survivor, revealing the tensions of the immediate postwar period. Many of these refugees aspired to reach Mandatory Palestine or America.

A new Jewish community gradually reconstituted itself in Stuttgart, at first modest, formed of survivors who remained in place and families returned from exile. It acquired a new synagogue, rebuilt in 1952 on the very site of the building destroyed in 1938, a gesture of continuity and Memory. From the 1990s onward, immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union profoundly renewed community demographics, restoring to Stuttgart an institutional, religious, and cultural Jewish life. Today, the Jewish community of Württemberg, headquartered in Stuttgart, maintains a synagogue, schools, and places of Memory, while monuments and Stolpersteine — stumbling stones — recall, in the streets of the city, the names of the victims.

Moses Jäcklin (dates unknown, active circa 1434–1470) — A Jew residing in Stuttgart under the joint rule of Counts Eberhard the Young and Ulrich V, he was one of the very rare persons of Jewish faith to obtain citizenship rights in the city, accompanied by letters of protection and privilege. He settled with his family and servants, and his case is mentioned as exceptional in medieval sources from Württemberg. His identity with the Moses Jecklin of Esslingen attested between 1404 and 1451 remains an open question. His presence testifies to the tension between circumstantial tolerance and structural exclusion that characterized Jewish status in fifteenth-century comital Germany [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906].

Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (circa 1698–1738), known as "Jud Süß" — Court financier born in Heidelberg, he entered the service of Duke Charles-Alexander of Württemberg in 1733 and reorganized the finances of the duchy from Stuttgart. An eminent figure of the Hofjude, he concentrated upon himself the hostility of the provincial estates and the people. Arrested at the duke's death in 1737, tried and executed by hanging in Stuttgart in February 1738, his body displayed in an iron cage, his fate became a symbol of Jewish precarity and then, tragically, an instrument of Nazi propaganda. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 and Amos Elon agree in seeing it as an execution motivated by jealousy, greed, and religious hatred [Elon, 2002 ; Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906].

Jacob Raphael Kaulla (precise dates uncertain, active late eighteenth–early nineteenth century) — Banker and imperial and royal counselor, he was the first Jew to whom King Frederick I of Württemberg granted, by decree of 27 June 1806, Württemberg citizenship for himself and his descendants, in recognition of services rendered to the kingdom in critical circumstances. A pioneering figure of Jewish integration in Württemberg, the Kaulla family exercised lasting influence over all Jewish communities in the district, notably that of Stuttgart, in the decades following the establishment of the kingdom [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906].

Rabbi Maier (1794–1873) — Rabbi of the Stuttgart community in the nineteenth century, he was one of the central figures of Württemberg liberal Judaism. His action helped make Stuttgart a liturgical and religious model for other Jewish communities in Germany. His stature was recognized at the highest level of the Württemberg state: he was ennobled by the King of Württemberg, a very rare distinction accorded to a Jewish religious dignitary, testimony to the degree of integration achieved in this kingdom [encyclopedia.com].

Rabbi Moses Wassermann (1811–1892) — Successor to Rabbi Maier at the head of the Stuttgart community, he continued in the same liberal vein and was, like his predecessor, ennobled by the King of Württemberg [encyclopedia.com]. Under his rabbinate, the community experienced its most sustained demographic and institutional growth, with the development of cultural and charitable associations, and the consolidation of Stuttgart's role as a spiritual and administrative center of Württemberg Judaism.

Emanuel Feist (dates unknown, active circa 1862) — Composer attached to the Stuttgart synagogue, he composed on the occasion of the inauguration of the new Moorish synagogue in 1862 several original hymns for the organ installed in the building. His musical work contributed to shaping the liberal liturgy of the community, which became a model for other Jewish congregations in Germany [Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906]. He illustrates the close link between artistic creation and identity affirmation in nineteenth-century German liberal Judaism.

Otto Hirsch (1885–1941) — Jurist and senior official born in Stuttgart, he was a major figure in the Württemberg Jewish community. Cofounder and executive director of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden alongside Rabbi Leo Baeck from 1933 onward, he organized aid to the persecuted and the defense of Jewish rights under the Nazi regime, refusing to leave Germany as long as Jews needed to be represented and protected. Arrested several times, he was deported and murdered at Mauthausen camp in 1941. Stuttgart honors his memory today with a square bearing his name.

Saul Friedländer (born 1932) — Historian born in Prague, refugee and Shoah survivor, he is the author of the standard work on the persecution and extermination of Jews under Nazism. His works, notably crowned with the Pulitzer Prize, illuminate the fate of German communities, including that of Württemberg. Though not a native of Stuttgart, he provides the historiographical framework essential for understanding the annihilation of 1933–1945 [Friedländer, 1997 ; 2008].

Amos Elon (1926–2009) — Israeli writer and historian born in Vienna, author of a synthesis portrait of the Jews of Germany from 1743 to 1933. His work restores the trajectory of ascent and disillusionment of the German Jewish bourgeoisie, a general framework to which the history of the Stuttgart community fully belongs, from emancipation to catastrophe [Elon, 2002].

The Jewish history of Stuttgart is that of a paradox: long a city forbidden to Jews, it became, in less than a century, the home of a prosperous and fully integrated community, before becoming the theater of its destruction. From medieval exclusion and the torment of Oppenheimer to citizenship granted to the Kaulla as early as 1806, from Emanuel Feist's Moorish synagogue to the deportation convoys, the Stuttgart trajectory condenses the hopes and collapse of German Judaism as described by Elon and Friedländer [Elon, 2002; Friedländer, 2008].

What the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia article had captured—a community of 3,015 souls, radiant in its liberal liturgy, represented in the bar associations, universities, and theater stages—disappeared in the convoys from 1941 to 1945. Approximately one thousand Jews from Stuttgart died in deportation or in camps; about twenty survived on site, forty-five returned from Theresienstadt. From these ashes, a community nonetheless reconstructed itself, carried by survivors, by immigration from the East after 1990, and by memory inscribed in the Stolpersteine and street names. Between the remembrance of the disappeared and the vitality of a renewed Jewish life, Stuttgart remains a place where German Judaism remembers itself, rebuilds, and bears witness.