The Jews of Stühlingen

6-3

Ralph

December 23, 2016

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Overall, the situation was no worse for the Jews than for the Christians.17 Although their sympathies, paradoxically, went more to the side of the Catholics,18 Jews tended to be treated quite decently by the Swedes and French as well. While the situation of the Swabian Jews was neither as complex nor dangerous as of that of the Jews from Vienna, Bohemia, or Frankfurt,19 the Swabians too had to lead a perilous balancing act between the warring parties. At the same time, the antagonists needed and used the Jews as go-betweens, provisioners of horses and grain, and as sources of credit.20 But both sides also considered the Jews as an almost inexhaustible source of tax revenue. The Jews of Prague, for example, paid four times the real-estate tax on houses than gentiles paid for equivalent homes.21

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Nevertheless, the Thirty Years’ War was not the unqualified catastrophe for the Jews of Europe, as one might surmise. Jonathan I. Israel summarized it thus: “The truth is that the terrible upheavals of the Thirty Years’ War mostly worked in favor of German and all Central European Jewry, appreciably enhanced the Jewish role in German life, and prepared the ground for the ‘Age of the Court Jew’ – the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century – the high-water mark of Jewish influence on Central European commerce and finance.”22

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 For Count Maximilian von Pappenheim the Thirty Years’ War proved disastrous. He was married three times. His first two wives died after one and two years respectively. His third wife, Maria Ursula, daughter of Count Ludwig zu Leiningen, lived with him for thirty-two years until her death in 1638. They had three children: Ernst Friedrich, who died in infancy, Heinrich Ludwig, and a daughter, Maria Maximiliana.23 Heinrich Ludwig was a colonel in the Swedish army but died in 1633 of a head wound, at age twenty-three, during the siege of Castle Hohenstoffeln.24 Maria Maximiliana married Friedrich Rudolf, Count of Fürstenberg, in 1631 but died four years later in 1635. Thus, after the deaths in 1638 of both Count Maximilian von Pappenheim and his wife Maria Ursula, Stühlingen County passed into the hands of the house of Fürstenberg.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0  

17 Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 224–94; Israel, “Central European Jewry,”

18 Israel, “Central European Jewry,” 9.

19 Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 238; Israel, “Central European Jewry,” 10, 12.

20 Israel, “Central European Jewry,” 17;  Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 245.

22 Israel, “Central European Jewry,” 30.

23 Schwennicke, “Europäische Stammtafeln,” #552.

24 Semler, “Die Tagebücher,” 48.