Gesera of Vienna

A charge of host desecration brought at Enns served as a pretext for Duke Albert V to settle the Jewish question in his territories at a single stroke. A general arrest order was issued in Austria; the Hebrew accounts, which call the episode the *Gesera de Vienne*, have preserved its details.

The poorest were loaded onto rafts and abandoned to drift along the Danube. The others were imprisoned in Vienna for months, pressed to accept baptism; the children were taken away to be raised as Christians. Those who held firm were burned at the Erdberg the following spring. The accounts report that before the arrests, Rabbi Jonas and his people had locked themselves inside the synagogue and set it on fire.

The property and the debts reverted to the duke, the synagogue was demolished, and its stones used for the university. An inscription carved on a house in the Judenplatz long celebrated the event as a purification; the memorial by Rachel Whiteread stands today in the same place, on the foundations of the synagogue uncovered by excavations.