Regensburg Before the Gate Closed

Most medieval Jewish communities in the German lands lived on borrowed time, and knew it. Regensburg, for a long stretch, did not. It sat on the Danube where the river trade of central Europe changed hands, and its Jews were braided into that trade so tightly that for five centuries the city found it easier to keep them than to lose them. When the loss finally came, in 1519, it was not the slow erosion that wore down smaller places. It was abrupt, total and a little ashamed of itself, which is its own kind of testimony.

The first surviving mention of a Jew at Regensburg dates to 981. By the eleventh century the community was settled enough that, alongside the great Rhineland centres of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, Regensburg counted among the oldest Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire. It was not a frontier outpost. It was an anchor.

The house of the Pietists

Regensburg was a trading city, but it was not only that. It became a serious centre of Ashkenazi learning, and its best-known figure is one of the most influential in the whole Pietist tradition: Rabbi Judah ben Samuel he-Hasid, who died in Regensburg in 1217. He was the leading teacher of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the German Jewish Pietists, and the central author behind the Sefer Hasidim, the Book of the Pious. That book is a strange and marvellous thing: part ethical manual, part folklore, part anxious meditation on sin, prayer and the hidden workings of the world. It is one of the richest windows we have onto the inner life of medieval Ashkenaz, and a man who shaped it is buried in Bavaria.

So the city held both registers at once. Down by the river, ledgers and credit and the long-distance commerce that linked the empire to the east. A few streets up, a circle of pietists worrying about the precise weight of a careless word. Regensburg did not have to choose between the two. For a medieval Jewish community, holding both was close to the whole point.

The gate closes

The end came with the death of Emperor Maximilian I in January 1519. Maximilian had been the community's shield; the city had long resented its prosperous Jewish quarter and blamed it for hard times. Within weeks of the emperor's death the city council moved. On 21 February 1519 the Jews of Regensburg were ordered out. They were made to demolish the interior of their thirteenth-century synagogue before they left, and on the cleared ground the city raised a Christian pilgrimage chapel, Zur Schönen Maria. Roughly five hundred people, the heirs of a community more than half a millennium old, were on the road within days.

There is a small, sharp grace note here. Before the synagogue came down, the artist Albrecht Altdorfer made two etchings of its interior. They are among the earliest surviving depictions of a German synagogue, and the only reason we can picture the room at all is that a Christian draughtsman thought the doomed building worth recording. The community was expelled. Its hall survives in ink.

What the ground keeps

Jewish life did eventually return to Regensburg, centuries later and on entirely different terms, and the modern city has reckoned hard with what 1519 destroyed. In the 1990s, excavations on the Neupfarrplatz uncovered the foundations of the medieval Jewish quarter beneath the square, along with a hoard of gold coins hidden, presumably, by people who expected to come back. The dig is now marked by an artwork set into the paving and an underground viewing space. You can stand on the spot where the oldest Jewish community in Bavaria did its business, and look down at the cellars it was forced to leave.

That is the proper shape of the Regensburg story. Not a tragedy with a single date, but a very long success interrupted by a short disgrace. The city was Jewish for longer than most modern nations have existed. The gate closed in 1519. The foundations are still down there, and the etchings are still on the wall.