The Jews of Stühlingen

12-4

Ralph

December 28, 2016

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 This list summarizes amounts still owed to twenty-two individual Jewish merchants. The aggregates ranged from 57.20 fl. for Marx Meyer (M1.2.2) to 7923 fl. for Jonas Gugenheimb (G1.4.1.2), together totalling 36,110 fl. Six of those claims would have been insufficient to allow their owners the purchase of new protection letters elsewhere, even if they had been paid back immediately. As it happened, the local debtors were granted generous deferments for settling their debts, and no interest could accrue during this period. Conversely, neither postponements nor relief of interest were granted to the debts of the Jews.17 The other major assets of the Jews were their houses, which were to be sold in batches over the next eight years to townsfolk, with civic leaders acting as official representatives of the Jewish sellers.18

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 The official date of eviction was March 17, 1743, but seventeen, mainly elderly, Jews were given an extension until April 23 at a charge of 59 fl. per day protection fee [R1214]. The stay was extended further for eight individuals until May 1, 1743 [R1216].

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 By the summer of 1743, the Jews had left Stühlingen. We know where thirteen of them went: Marum Dicker Weyl and his son Lehmann, as well as Hewen Bickert, moved to Lengnau. Meyer and Mannes Bloch, Marum Sandel’s son Weyl, and his son Salomon moved to Gailingen. Jonas Gugenheimb and Salomon Sandel’s son Weyl moved to Randegg. Lang Jossel Gugenheimb, together with his sons, moved to Hechingen and later back to Tiengen. The whereabouts of the remaining fifteen out of the original 28 remains uncertain. Some of them may have moved to Endingen, Wangen, Worblingen, Emmendingen, and Ihringen,19 but we lack documentary evidence. It is quite possible, though, that some also joined the stream of homeless, vagrant Jews.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 The Jews who came to Stühlingen some 150 years earlier, and had brought with them the yeast that made the rural market economy rise, had ignored the age-old wisdom of the Talmud at their own peril that yeast is not necessarily a force for good.20 Yeast is a fungus after all.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0  

17See ch. 11, p. 121.

18Rosenthal, Heimatgeschichte der badischen Juden, 182.

19Schapiro, “Yeast and the Yeitzer Hara,” 1.