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THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA

out to the numerous congregations of the Franconian

their circumstances limited them. Members of the flourishing congregation of Furth (1719) held the most intimate financial relations with various German courts, and busily engaged in trade and manu-

bishoprics and free cities, as a result of the inflammatory sermons preached by Capistrano and the

baptized

Jew

Peter Schwartz.

But Jews found even more

stringent conditions

facture.

elsewhere and, in spite of all they had suffered, they again made their way back to their Bavarian homes.

prosperity, as also of their misfortunes— were quite generally controlled by them.

Only the edict of 1551 demanded by the estates and issued by Albrecht V. had any lasting effect,—

A perverted legislation thus

when the Jew Josel of Rosheim, representing the German congregations, had to guarantee that Jews would never again set foot upon the soil of Upper or Lower Bavaria— an example followed in 1555 by

factors of,

Meanwhile Upper and Lower Bavaria were

for

The municipal authorities told him plainly that it could not be done, because they had guaranteed immunity to the Jews in return for the employment of their funds. In 1756 the county of Sulzbach thus harbored Jewish families, limited in number, however, to thirty and when the union of the provinces

and

at the

same

made them

time, as

it

the benewere, para-

sites upon, the communities in which they dwelt. For, whereas the treaty in 1244 and that of 1255, between the dukes and bishops of Bavaria, decreed that Chris-

Usury.

the upper Palatinate and placed upon the statutebook. An honorable exception to all this prejudice was afforded by the town of Sulzbach, celebrated

nearly two centuries free from Jews. When, during the Spanish war of succession, Jews had again surreptitiously entered the country, and had made themselves indispensable by their financial connections, the elector Maximilian Emanuel failed in compassing their expulsion, although he alleged that " it would accord with Bavaria's inherited zeal for religion and deliver his subjects from evident harm."

Capital was for the greater part in their

hands; finance and banking— the source of their



with Wilhelmsdorf and Furth for the large number of Hebrew books printed there. Its duke, Christian August, a great admirer of the Cabala, invited the Jews who had been expelled from Vienna to settle on his domain, and accorded them certain privileges, which, in view of their services rendered on the occasion of the Austrian invasion of 1541, were repeatedly confirmed and augmented.

Bavaria

might borrow from Jews at 43J per cent inthe Augsburg law, which was adopted by Munich and Ingolstadt, declared that every Jew was tians

terest,

obliged to lend upon pledges when they were of higher value than the loan asked. Such peculiar circumstances could not fail to lead to economic troubles of various kinds, to remedy which further unwise legislation was invoked. Thus the Jews suffered repeatedly from extortion by the official cancellation of debts due to them, or by arbitrary reduction of the rate of interest. In this connection the frequent financial operations of Emperor Wenzel, between 1385 and 1390, need only to be mentioned. There were, however, departments other than that of commerce in which the Jews of Bavaria distinguished themselves, in spite of all their unfavorable circumstances. It is even said that Spiritual a Bavarian Jew, Tipsiles of Augsburg, Life. invented gunpowder. Many masters of the mint were Jews physicians are found in the service of lords and even prelates. The troubadour Suesskind von Trimberg is said to have served at one time in the Wilrzburg leper hospital and in 1516 a complaint was made in Regensburg that people insisted upon engaging Jewish '





in 1777 drew the attention of the government to this class of their population, it had already dawned upon the authorities that the time had come for ideas more in keeping with the age, and that Jews might be

physicians. But the special field of Jewish scholarship was theology. That dialectical treatment of the Talmud,

made useful subjects of the state. The history of the Jews in Bavaria thus

became a

presents the curious spectacle of a well-defined body of subjects toward whose material ruin both Jewish. Church and state conspired for the Disspace of nearly a thousand years. The abilities, same spectacle, however, modified here and there by particular enactments, is presented by the history of the Jews throughout all Germany. The Jew was not permitted to hold public office; admission to schools and universities was denied him; he was deprived of the honor of bearing arms and of all burgher rights and outside of the ghetto walls he was made conspicuous by a badge. He could not help feeling himself a foreigner in a iiome which persistently treated him as one. Those who should have protected him whether the em-

known as " pilpul, " had its origin in Bavaria. Speyer seat of this learning and the home of a

school of Tosafists while the rabbis of Regensburg were celebrated as early as the twelfth century. There, too, labored the celebrated mystic Judah heHasid, author of the " Sefer Hasidim," whose contemporary, Samuel of Babenberg, was a Tosafist and the teacher of Rabbi Mbir op Rothbnbtjrg. In the fifteenth century, besides Israel of Nuremberg,

whom Emperor "

esses of the

" serf " he was called through medieval duke or other authority, who " owned " him considered him simply as an object of financial consideration and as a source of revenue. Soon, however, the Jews of Bavaria came to exert considerable influence in the sphere of finance to which

peror,

whose

times, or the

—

Ruprecht in 1407 appointed as over all rabbis, Jews, and Jew-

[chief]

German empire,"

there lived the followscholarly authors of responsa. Jacob Weil, in Nuremberg and Augs-

ing

Authors.



—

Hochmeister

burg;

and Moses Minz,

in

Israel Bruna, in

Regensburg;

Bamberg.

In the sixteenth century, besides the author of Tosafot Yom-Tob," who was also a Bavarian, lived Samuel Meseritz, the author of "Nahlat Shiba'," and Elijah Levita of Neustadt, the celebrated grammarian, and instructor of learned Christians in Hebrew and the Cabala. In the seventeenth century there were, of first importance, Enoch Levi of Furth, who was intimate with Wagenseil, professor at the "