{"id":21,"date":"2016-11-25T14:12:31","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T18:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.papaworx.com\/Book\/?page_id=21"},"modified":"2017-02-12T08:21:18","modified_gmt":"2017-02-12T12:21:18","slug":"prologue","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/?page_id=21","title":{"rendered":"Prologue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Entry in the H\u00fcrben (Bavarian Swabia) municipal protocols, dated July 6, 1728:<\/p>\n\"H\u00fcrben<\/a><\/span>Figure 1. H\u00fcrben Protocol;\n STAA, V\u00d6 Lit. 263 fol. 187 \u2013 July 6 1728<\/small><\/span>\n

Considering that the protected Jew Samuel Ullman of H\u00fcrben has been dead for two years, and his daughter Bonle is engaged to Lazarus Goggenheimb of Stieling (St\u00fchlingen), the latter has meanwhile fulfilled all official requirements and is prepared to get married promptly and will be taken under protection as of today at the dominion’s discretion, on the condition that he shall humbly obey all official decrees and prohibitions and contribute his quarterly protection tax of 1 florin, 30 kreuzer, or as the dominion sees fit; thus confirmed by solemn oath.<\/i>1<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n

This record of Lazarus Goggenheimb, alias Siessel or S\u00fcssel, had remained the earliest trace of my maternal grand\u00admother\u2019s a\u00adnces\u00adtors for many years. Sies\u00adsel became the pro\u00adge\u00adni\u00adtor of a huge clan with des\u00adcendants in Eu\u00adrope, the Ame\u00adricas, Aus\u00adtralia, and the Middle East. But a question kept nag\u00adging me: Why would a young man in the early eighteenth cen\u00adtury seek a wife some two hun\u00addred ki\u00adlo\u00admetres from home?<\/span><\/p>\n

I was unable to find an au\u00adtho\u00adri\u00adtative work on the history of the Jews in St\u00fchlingen, a German town at the foot of the Black Forest, bordering Switzerland. They had vanished after 1743. Although the Jews of St\u00fchlingen form part of the foundation myths of the old Jewish communities in Gailingen, Tiengen, Endingen, and Lengnau \u2013 the root stock of Swiss Jewry \u2013 no bard has sung their dirge; no scholar has unearthed their secrets. The life and demise of the St\u00fchlingen Jews from 1600 to 1743 seem to have transpired largely in a blind spot of history. The historical literature covering these circumstances and events is amazingly scant, both from an internal, Jewish and an external, gentile perspective. This gaping void begged to be filled. To\u00a0learn more, I had to research it myself. But living in Canada, far from St\u00fchlingen itself and the relevant archives, posed one difficulty, and not being a professional historian another.<\/span><\/p>\n

To approach the problem, I oriented myself on the method Shlomo Ettlinger had employed in his \u201cEle Toldot\u201d inventory of the inhabitants of the Frankfurt ghetto in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span> Though the scope of my problem was infinitesimally smaller than Ettlinger\u2019s, I would be using potent tools powered by technology and passion, and the most precious, but frequently squandered, resource: time \u2013 time unencumbered by meetings, deadlines, or other people\u2019s priorities. <\/span><\/p>\n

A pilot study based on limited existing primary data, together with some newer transcriptions of eighteenth century county and municipal accounting books, enabled me to develop a technique for systematically exploiting the patterns found in time, names, and locations to construct a pixelated model of the historical community. This early work was implemented on a giant spreadsheet. <\/span><\/p>\n

I then found a researcher in southern Germany who was willing to travel to the county archives in Donaueschingen and to their provincial equivalent in Karlsruhe on a contractual basis, both for me and later on also for another interested party. Our researcher extracted dated abstracts of each entry concerning St\u00fchlingen Jews in municipal, judiciary, and county records between 1600 and 1745. But as more and more archival transcripts started to arrive, the spreadsheet technique turned progressively impractical. It became necessary to write extensive analysis software based on a relational database. The original narrative listings were fragmented, filtered, transformed, sorted, interpreted, and reassembled. <\/span><\/p>\n

Gradually a picture started to emerge from the mist, a picture of real people with their fortes and foibles, their occupations and relationships. Little by little, individuals coalesced into an evolving community. The Jews of St\u00fchlingen multiplied, spread, and were finally expelled. From some 300 typed pages systematically listing abstracts drawn from 205 individual sources of dry, administrative prose, broken down into 4826 primary, dated records that refer to 190 distinct individuals who are named a total of 7538 times, it became possible to reconstruct the likeness of a long-forgotten community \u2013 a likeness no less fascinating than that of a delicate vase lovingly restored by an archaeologist, shard by shard from a pile of rubble. <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n

1<\/a><\/span>StAA. V\u00d6 263 fol.187. Author\u2019s translation.<\/p>\n

2<\/a><\/span>Ettlinger, \u201cEle Toldot.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Entry in the H\u00fcrben (Bavarian Swabia) municipal protocols, dated July 6, 1728: Considering that the protected Jew Samuel Ullman of H\u00fcrben has been dead for two years, and his daughter Bonle is engaged to Lazarus Goggenheimb of Stieling (St\u00fchlingen), the latter has meanwhile fulfilled all official requirements and is prepared to get married promptly and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"new_page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3046,"href":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21\/revisions\/3046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stuehlingen.online\/Book\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}