4.Jews in Germany
To get the impact of what it was like to be a Jew in Germany, it is important to have a little bit of history so I am taking a small detour to set the scene. Apart from the Dutch connection of Flora Marchand, one of my great-grandmothers, my entire family on all sides, come from Germany, my parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents, and further back, having all been born there. Following their stories gives a wide view of ordinary Jewish life in Germany before the snuffing out of such connection and its destruction.
The beginnings of Jews in Germany
Jews have lived in Germany since Roman times. For many centuries Jews were equal before the law, but there were restrictions which would wax and wane according to the political and economic environment of the time. One example is that Christians needed fewer witnesses to prove their case against a Jew in law, compared to the other way around. Jews were allowed to build synagogues and practice their religion. They would settle their differences under Jewish law, leaving the authorities out of their internal problems.
My Dad believed it was likely that the Marx ancestors could well have been living in and around the small village they came from, since or some centuries after Roman times, in the Hünsruck hills, an area to the west of the Rhine, between the Moselle and the Nahe rivers in the Palatinate, in the west part of Germany.
For many centuries the area formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, but was split up into numerous, small sovereign territories. Many other Jews arrived much later, following the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492. Others came from the East, escaping pogroms, continuing to arrive well into the 20thCentury.
The Crusades
There were substantial Jewish communities along the Rhine River. Although there were moments of mistrust and contempt which would spark riots, generally Christians and Jews lived peaceably side by side. From the 8th Century Jews were protected by the Emperor under Charlemagne and the Carolingian dynasty. This changed suddenly in 1096 as a result of the People’s Crusade, the First Crusade called by Pope Urban the Second, to restore Jerusalem and the Holy Land to Christianity. It started in France following his sermon in Clermont Ferrand, spreading down the Rhineland, with French and German Christians enacting the first pogrom of such horrific impact that even to this day, some of the martyrs are mentioned or referred to in synagogue services.
Jewish taxes and impositions
As is well documented, these massacres (that is what they were) would erupt from time to time in the following centuries. Seven years after the first pogrom, the emperor placed the Jews under his protection. However, for this privilege, he established a tax called Kammerknechte to be paid by each Jew. In addition, there was a royal prerogative called Judenregal, for granting the right to admit and tax Jews. This was a much-desired object to have, in return for tax or other services, that a Jew could provide.
As time moved on, the Judenregal was acquired by many secular and temporal lords, as well as cities, ruled by an increasingly assertive citizenry. It became the basis on which Jews could be refused entry and when allowed in, to be heavily taxed and restricted in what they could do and where they could live. It allowed the Jews to be readily and onerously exploited and ejected at will.
Country Living
Thus, until Napoleon, in most of Germany Jews lived on the margins, mainly in the countryside such as Franconia where the Stern family lived and in Gemünden where the Marx family lived. They were not able to own properties and were excluded from general society. In towns and cities they were locked into Ghettos, an invention of the Venetians in the early 16th century. Many towns and cities had Jewish streets into which Jewish families were crammed. There are famous ones such as the Judengaße (Jewish alley) in Frankfurt where the Rothschild families started.
Limited to the countryside and what was available to them, they became smallholders or butchers and bakers. Many were reduced to hawking and peddling, travelling from village to village. They used to spend the nights with local Jewish families, returning for the Sabbath to their own community. Another common employment was as cattle or horse dealers. Right up to and even in the Nazi period, in some rural areas, Jews held a monopoly on these activities. Some Jews became outlaws, being reduced to stealing and robbing from travellers to survive, belonging to groups of brigands that terrorised wayfarers across the continent well into the late 18th Century.
Jews lived on the margins of society for hundreds of years, occasionally tolerated but generally considered of no use and detrimental. It is not surprising that they maintained their own, separate language, Yiddish or Judendeutsch, and religion, encouraging the very things that were held against them by Christians.
Other restrictions on Jews
Jews were limited not only in the jobs they were allowed to have but also in access to a town. They would have to leave by early evening and often needed permits to enter. They were subject to abuse by the gatekeepers. In Berlin, the gatekeepers were instructed to throw out any Jew with no means to live. By the 18th Century, there were perhaps two hundred Jewish families who were allowed to live in the city of Berlin, of varying wealth, the remainder having been systematically excluded. Their position was so precarious that they themselves lived in fear of poor Jews, especially those escaping pogroms from the East, upsetting the delicate balance of acceptance. The Jews were segregated with little access to non-Jewish society. Even carrying a book written in German was reason enough to exclude a Jew from the city.
The Thirty Years War
Going back a bit in time, a lot of this was a consequence of what has become known as the Thirty years’ War (1618-1648). The long war caused the displacement and destruction of huge swathes of the central European population. Often considered a religious war between Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics, it was actually more to do with strategic interests, politics and structures of governance across diverse lands and dynasties of rulers.
Life for the entire general population was based on a delicate ecology. For example, a household may have a pig slaughtered at Christmas to last through the winter. And then along came the armies. The soldiers were living off the land, often billeted in homes. Rape and pillaging became endemic, disease started to spread. In the Württenberg area alone 57% of the population were lost, mainly through disease and famine. Across the German lands, approximately 20% of the total population died as a result of this prolonged war.
Although Sara Stern was born on 14th March 1862, some two hundred years later, it is these years before that shape her history. As already mentioned, Sara was born in Völkesleier Germany, a village that lies just south of the Hesse-Bavaria border and is about 50 km North of Würzburg. The nearby cemetery confirms that Jews had been settled in the area from at least the 17th Century.
It is quite possible that the ancestors of my great grandmother would have arrived in the area in the aftermath of the disruption of the Thirty Years War. We know her great, great-grandfather Meier Stern was there, and perhaps born in the village (in 1735). It could have been his grandparents who were refugees from another principality from the patchwork of minor kingdoms and fiefdoms across Germany, or perhaps from a nearby city. As we have seen, Jews were not welcome in the cities and apart from being subject to ghettos and expulsion, were heavily taxed. The town guildsman invariably hated them and limited their employment options. It must have been considered safer for Jews to spread out into the country, in small towns and villages, eking out what was probably a very poor life. Many, many Jewish communities were spread across the countryside. Bavaria, a great winner of the war, may have been an attraction for an influx of Jews where perhaps a number of Jews already were living.
Napoleon
Napoleon conquered the whole of Europe through a succession of battles from 1805 concluding at the Battle of Wagram in July 1809, against the Austrians. However, Napoleon’s navy was defeated by the English at Trafalgar and the French lost control of the seas, which also precluded an invasion of England. As a result, Napoleon created a ‘Continental system’, a massive embargo system designed to weaken and isolate England economically.
Napoleon set about establishing common and centralised, legal reforms, standardised taxations, agreed weights and measures and a more rational state bureaucracy. Don’t think that any of this was driven out of a personal desire for social reform or justice or any altruistic thoughts of benefitting society. Rather, these were practical measures imposed to support a burgeoning military campaign and to exact economic benefit from conquering.
Modern Warfare
Armies grew to enormous sizes; 600,000 invaded Russia. This was a massive amount of comings and goings, on top of new forms of economic warfare, of which the Continental System and the razing of land by the Russians as the French advanced, are but two examples. Add to this propaganda and all the paraphernalia of what would now be considered the inception of modern warfare. The different perspectives depending on whether you were a civilian or a soldier nevertheless would have been significant and formative. What was it like to be occupied? Did an army pass through and how did they survive? How did the structure of local law uphold itself during these times? Where did Jews stand regarding these wars and were they different to the populace around them? Did any of this matter to our family as they went about their daily lives?
Regarding occupation, what was the view of the town? Did they resist or acquiesce? At the end, what was the economic impact of all of this on our family? Certainly after the war, there was famine and disease and brigands of ex-soldiers threatening travellers and inhabitants alike.
Whatever the answers to these questions, there is no doubt that the Napoleonic era had an enormous effect afterwards on the growth of the bourgeoisie, their outlook, their nationalism, and our family cannot but have been affected both in their view and its effects.
Emancipation
Already from the late 1790s when Louis XVIth of France in 1791 issued a proclamation of equality of rights for Jews, Jewish emancipation became a possibility in the German states. This was however a spluttering and uneven process. Differing attitudes abounded around the relationship between emancipation and the freedoms of liberty from the French Revolution. The German Enlightenment preceded the French Revolution and therefore provided good ground for such evolution.
The force of Reason, one of the driving principles of the French Revolution, greatly influenced the intellectual and spiritual discussions in, and cultural aspirations of German Jewish circles.
In Fürth, nearby, where Sara Marx’s family lived, proposals were made at a conference in 1792 to improve the conditions of Jews. This was supported by Hardenberg, the Prussian Minister in Bayreuth and Ansbach of the time. However, this was all put on hold while war with France took over, delaying the abolition of the Jewish Poll tax. The ecstasy felt by Jews in the Rhineland areas given new freedoms and liberations with the arrival of the French, was not matched elsewhere. The Jewish poll tax or Leibzoll was abolished in Prussia and other areas following the work of some notable German Jews. However, it was not abolished until full conquest by Napoleon in 1808, for all Jews and the issue of the Imperial Decree in 1808, more of which another time.
In spite of these new freedoms, anti-Semitism was rife and there was undoubtedly blame put upon the Jews for the French success. The legacy of Napoleon was not beneficial for all Jews and there were backward steps taken as their liberation became caught up with the new history of the time and the Unification of Germany in the mid-nineteenth century.
Attributions:
The Pity of it All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 by Amos Elon published 2002 Metropolitan Books
Modified Map of Germany – original from FreeVectorMaps.com