A Short History of the Jews of Munich, Germany

A Short History of the Jews of Munich [1]


In the second half of the 13th century Munich appears to have had a sizable Jewish community; the Jews lived in their own quarter and possessed a synagogue, a ritual bath, and a hospital.

On Oct. 12, 1285, in the wake of a blood libel, 180 Jews who had sought refuge in the synagogue were burnt to death; the names of 68 of the victims are listed in the Nuremberg Memorbuch, which dates from 1296.

The Jews obtained permission to rebuild the synagogue in 1287, but for several centuries they remained few in number and suffered from various restrictions, which from time to time were further exacerbated (e.g., in 1315 and 1347).

During the Black Death (1348/49) the community was again annihilated. However, by 1369 there were Jews in the city once more, and in 1375 Duke Frederick of Bavaria granted them (and the other Jews resident in Upper Bavaria) the privilege of paying customs duties at the same rate as non-Jews.

The remission of debts owed to Jews ordained by Emperor Wenceslaus (1378–1400) resulted in Munich Jews losing all their assets. They also suffered severely in 1413, when they were accused of desecration of the Host.

In 1416 the small community was granted some privileges, including permission to acquire a lot for a cemetery; in 1432, when Duke Albert III sought to impose a special tax on Munich Jews, the results were disappointing.

The clergy succeeded in having all the Jews of Upper Bavaria expelled in 1442, and eight years later they were also driven out of Lower Bavaria, where they had taken temporary refuge. Duke Albert gave the Munich synagogue (in the modern Gruftgasse) to Johann Hartlieb, a physician, and it was subsequently converted into a church.

For almost three centuries Jews were excluded from Munich and Bavaria (although there may have been some periods when their residence was permitted, as may be deduced from a renewal of the ban announced in a 1553 police ordinance).

During the Austrian occupation, Jews were readmitted to Bavaria and some of them presumably found their way to Munich. At any rate, a new decree issued on March 22, 1715, again ordered them to leave the country.

Some ten years later, a few Jews who had business dealings with the Bavarian count began to settle in Munich, and by 1728 several Jews resided in the city. In 1729 (or 1734) the Court Jew, Wolf Wertheimer, took up residence there and was joined by his family in 1742; in 1750 all Court Jews and Jews in possession of passes granting them freedom of movement were excepted from the general ban on Jewish entry into the city. A community was formed by Jews who maintained connections with the court. Of the 20 of them in 1750, there was only one woman and a single child, which attests to the temporary and migratory nature of the settlement.

Except for these Schutzjuden, the only Jews permitted to reside in the city were those who had been commissioned as purveyors or who had made loans to the state; all others were permitted to stay in the city for a short while only and had to pay a substantial body tax (Leibzoll).

This situation continued for most of the 18th century, and it was not until 1794 and 1798 that the number of women and children in the city was commensurate with the number of heads of families. In 1794 there were 153 Jews, including 27 heads of families, 28 women, and 70 children; in 1798 the respective figures were 35, 33, and 98. Up to the end of the 18th century, Jewish women had to go to Kriegshaber to give birth to their children, and it was not until 1816 that Jews were permitted to bury their dead in Munich rather than transport them to Kriegshaber for burial.

At this time Munich Jews earned their livelihood as contractors for the army and the royal mint (see mint-masters), merchants dealing in luxury wares and livestock, moneylenders, and peddlers. Since there was no legal basis for their residence in Munich, they did not have the right to practice their religion, and every year they had to pay a special tax to enable them to observe Sukkot.

In 1805 a "Regulation for Munich Jewry" was issued (it formed the basis for the Bavarian Judenmatrikel of 1813); among other privileges, the Jews were permitted to inherit the right of domicile, to conduct services, and to reside in all parts of the city.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the number of Jews was augmented by immigrants, and by 1814 there were 451 Jews in the city. Two years later, the Jewish community was formally organized. In the same year the community was given permission to establish a cemetery, and in 1824 a permit was issued for the construction of a synagogue (dedicated in 1827).

The first Jewish religious school was founded in 1815 and a private one in 1817. The community played a leading part in Bavarian Jewry's struggle for civil rights, which lasted up to the founding of the German Reich (1871); delegates of the Bavarian communities frequently met in Munich (1819, 1821) to make common representations to the government. In the second half of the century the community grew further (from 842 in 1848 to 4,144 in 1880, and 8,739 in 1900) as a result of increased immigration from the smaller communities (especially in the last few decades of the 19th century).

By 1910, some 20% of Bavarian Jews lived in the capital (11,000). There was also a steady immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, mainly from Galicia, which lasted up to World War I.

Jews were prominent in the cultural life of Munich, a center of German arts, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, as well as being more equally represented in Bavarian political affairs than in other German states. After World War I a revolutionary government on the Soviet model was formed, in which Kurt Eisner, Eugene Levine, and Gustav Landauer were prominent. It was routed by counterrevolutionary forces, and a "White Terror" against Communists, Socialists, and Jews was instigated.

In the postwar years of economic and political upheaval, Munich was a hotbed of antisemitic activity and the cradle of the Nazi party; many Jews from Eastern Europe were forced to leave Munich. Sporadic antisemitic outbursts characterized the years until the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, when Reinhold Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler took control of the police; the first concentration camp, Dachau, was erected near Munich.

At the time, the community numbered 10,000 persons, including an independent Orthodox community and many cultural, social, and charitable organizations. Munich Jewry was subjected to particularly vicious and continuous acts of desecration, discrimination, terror, and boycotts but responded with a Jewish cultural and religious revival.

Between 1933 and May 15, 1938, some 3,574 Jews left Munich. On July 8, 1938, the main synagogue was torn down on Hitler's express orders. During the Kristallnacht, two synagogues were burnt down, 1,000 male Jews were arrested and interned in Dachau, and one was murdered. The communal center was completely ransacked.

During the war a total of 4,500 Jews were deported from Munich (3,000 of them to Theresienstadt); only about 300 returned; 160 managed to outlive the war in Munich. A new community was founded in 1945 by former concentration camp inmates, refugees, displaced persons, and local Jews. In the following five years, about 120,000 Jews, refugees, and displaced persons passed through Munich on their way to Israel. In 1946 there were 2,800.

The community increased from 1,800 persons in 1952 to 3,522 in January 1970 (70% of Bavarian Jewry). In 1966 a Jewish elementary school was opened, the second in Germany, but the postwar community was repeatedly troubled by acts of desecration and vandalism (against synagogue and cemetery). In March 1970 the Jewish home for the aged was burned down and seven people lost their lives.

During the Olympic games, which took place in Munich in 1972, Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli sportsmen as hostages. All of them died.

The Jewish community numbered 4,050 in 1989, 5,000 in 1995, and 9,097 in 2004, making it the second largest Jewish community in Germany. The increase is explained by the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Odeonsplatz, Munich

Odeonsplatz and the Feldherrnhalle

The Munich Odeonsplatz is a large and beautiful square bordered by the Feldherrnhalle (Field Marshal's Hall), the Italianesque Theatinerkirche and the Hofgarten, a former court garden.

The Feldherrnhalle consists of three arches, with at the entrance two Bayern lions. The building was designed in 1841 by Friedrich von Gärtner after the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy [1] on request of Ludwig I in honour of Bayern generals.

On 2 August 1914, Adolf Hitler attended a rally at the Odeonsplatz to celebrate the declaration of WWI.

On 9 November 1923, police stopped Hitler's attempt to bring down the Weimar Republic - the so-called Beer Hall Putsch [2] - at the Odeonsplatz. A fierce skirmish with the police left 16 Nazis and 4 policemen dead. Hitler was injured, captured shortly thereafter and sentenced to a prison term.

When Hitler was in power, a memorial to the fallen putschists was erected on the east side of the Feldherrnhalle, opposite the spot in the street where the dead had fallen and the putsch had been halted. The memorial was guarded perpetually by SS guards, and all who passed the memorial had to give the Nazi salute.

Each year special parades were held in Munich on November 9 for the commemoration of Hitler's unsuccessful Putsch. On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a wave of pogroms against Germany's Jews, known as Crystal Night or the Night of Broken Glass [3].

A Jewish view of the Wandering Jew

The Eternal Jew by Shmuel Hirszenberg (1865-1907) [1,2,3,4]

Jewish culture never accepted the legend of the Wandering Jew as historical information. However, a modern Jewish interpretation of the figure of the Wandering Jew shows how lack of knowledge has changed a fundamentally anti-Jewish (read today anti-Semitic) character to a real cultural phenomenon. In an ironic twist of view, the non-Jewish portrayal of the Jew has now been adopted by many ignorant Jews themselves:

“Been there, seen that, am the Wandering Jew…”

A painting by Shmuel Hirszenberg, a young Polish Jewish artist who had studied at the Munich Academy of Art gives an interesting illustration of how Jews themselves have ended up using this figure from medieval Christian folklore.


The legend of the Wandering Jew began to spread in Europe in the thirteenth century and became a fixture of Christian mythology, and, later, of Romanticism. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming.

The earliest known mediaeval source quoting the legend of the Eternal Jew appears in an Italian monastic chronicle written about 1223. According to this chronicle, while Christ "was going to his Martyrdom, a Jew drove Him along wickedly with these words: 'Go, go thou tempter' .... Christ answered him: I go and you will wait me till I come again". The Jew is condemned by Christ to wait, rather than to wander, until his second coming in the Last Judgement.

This version of the legend persisted with many variations in the details of the story, including different names given to the Jew up to the end of the 16th century.

The legend of the Wandering Jew appeared in print for the first time in 1602. In this version, the Jew is described as a shoemaker named Ahasver or Ahasverus. Unlike his mediaeval predecessors, Ahasverus is not condemned by Christ to wait until his second coming in the Last Judgement. Instead, he is doomed to expiate his crime by eternal wandering.

Numerous reprints and translations into several other European languages soon followed, and made the legend of the Wandering Jew widely known throughout Europe already by the beginning of the 17th century.

In the late 18th and throughout the 19th century, particularly during the rise of Romanticism, it inspired numerous literary, poetical, theatrical and even musical works, as well as dozens of graphic illustrations and popular single-leaf prints. The best known of such works is the famous series of twelve wood-engravings made after Gustave Doré's designs (1856).

A depiction of the Wandering Jew as an anti-Jewish figure was given by Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1804-1874) in his large painting The Destruction of Jerusalem. King Ludwig I of Bavaria paid 35,000 gulden for this painting, the largest sum ever paid in Germany up to then for an individual painting. The finished work was installed in 1853 in a place of honour in the central hall of the Neue Pinakothek in Munich which had been inaugurated that year by Ludwig I. It has been on display there ever since.

Kaulbach transformed the historical event of the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Romans into a visual Christian allegorical sermon according to which the destruction of Jerusalem was a divine punishment wrought upon the Jews for their rejection of Christ. The destruction of Jerusalem is seen as marking the downfall and dispersion of the Jewish people and also the end of their ancient religion, and the triumphal emergence of the new faith - Christianity. Kaulbach's interpretation follows a long tradition already apparent in the teachings of early Christian writers such as Tertullian. It was, however, in Kaulbach's work that the Wandering Jew made his first appearance in a large-scale painting, and in a representation with an even stronger anti-Jewish flavour than the original legend of Ahasverus. Kaulbach's Wandering Jew escaping from the burning Jerusalem is an allegorical reference to the dispersion of the Jews that followed the destruction of their holy city. In Kaulbach's painting the Wandering Jew, pursued by the demons of revenge, represents both the legendary Ahasverus suffering the punishment for his personal sin, and the entire Jewish people, doomed to dispersion among the nations and "to eternal darkness" as divine revenge for their rejection and condemnation of Christ.

In 1899, Shmuel Hirszenberg reacted to the anti-Jewish message of Kaulbach with his painting The Eternal Jew, which was exhibited in Lodz, Warsaw and Paris. To Hirszenberg's great regret, the artistic authorities in both Munich and Berlin refused to exhibit his work, probably because of its outspoken polemic content.

Hirszenberg transformed Kaulbach's legendary offender of Christ into a victim and a Martyr of Christian Persecution. Hirszenberg lifted the Eternal Jew from the pseudo-historical context of Kaulbach's Christian Allegory, inserting him instead into an original symbolical environment of his own conception: a forest of dark, huge crosses strewn with massacred corpses which represent Christian persecution that pursue the Eternal Jew on his desperate flight. Hirszenberg also transformed the ideal generic figure of Kaulbach's Ahasver into that of a realistically rendered figure of a contemporary, frail old Jew of the Eastern Europe Diaspora.

Hirszenberg died in September 1907, a few months after he had arrived in Jerusalem, having responded to an invitation to head the recently founded painting department of the Bezalel School of Art. The Eternal Jew, which the artist had brought with him to Jerusalem, remained in the possession of the Israel National Museum.

Designer of new WTC to build new synagogue in Munich, Germany

Designer of new World Trade Centre to build synagogue in Munich

By Michael Levitin, Telegraph [1]

New York-based architect Daniel Libeskind, the master designer of the new World Trade Centre, has announced plans to build a new synagogue in the not-always-welcoming Bavarian capital.

Notorious for its lingering sentiments about the Nazi years, Munich has been mixed up before in controversies involving Jewish remembrance, such as Mayor Christian Ude's refusal in 2004 to allow the brass-plated Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stones, to be installed in streets as individual memorials to Jews killed in the Holocaust.

This time, members of Munich's liberal Jewish community, Beth Shalom, which expects to raise between 5-10m euros for the building are confident they will see the project through.

Munich has become "a home city for the Jewish people, and we hope it will also be in the future," said Matthias Strauss who heads Friends of Beth Shalom. Far-right neo-Nazi activity persists in Munich perhaps more than anywhere in the former West Germany.

But Mr Libeskind, of Polish-Jewish descent, cited unwavering support for "a project with such exciting aspirations and profound belief".

"I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work on the development of a Reform Synagogue in Munich," he said.

Known widely for his three European Jewish museums in Berlin, Osnabrück and Copenhagen, and for the Contemporary Jewish Museum which opened in San Francisco in June, Mr Libeskind will present plans for the Munich synagogue in spring with hopes of completing the project by 2018.

Though its location is still unconfirmed, Mr Strauss said he wanted the building to go up on Westenrieder Strasse, the site of Munich's first synagogue in 1850, which was burned in the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. Two years ago, a large new synagogue, community centre and museum opened in central Munich, 68 years to the day after Kristallnacht.

Ausweis bitte !

“Can you prove that you are Jewish?” is the surprising question that I received at security control of the new synagogue in Munich [1]. The guard was politely asking me to prove that I am Jewish by showing him my identity documents.

Vigilant control in German synagogues appears necessary [2] and questioning visitors is a common measure of security [3].

Requesting identity documents to establish if someone is Jewish could be regarded as a pragmatic and indirect technique of ethnic profiling. Many Jews have easily recognizable Jewish names or surnames, and until recently Israeli identity cards even included an obligatory reference to the bearer's ethnic group [4]. Ethnic affiliation of emigrants from the former Soviet Union might also be established with a passport or a birth certificate because the Soviet governments have always regarded the Jews as a nationality [5] (ironically enough, citizens born from a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother also hold Jewish nationality).

Requesting someone to prove that he is Jewish by showing his identity documents is very different though and might appear as a quite disturbing practice for a German synagogue.

Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Germany decreed that all Jews were obliged to carry identity cards that indicated their Jewish heritage, whereas Jewish passports were stamped with an identifying letter "J" [6, 7]. It could be noted here that the new synagogue in Munich opened on the anniversary date of the Kristallnacht [8], making therefore a clear reference to Nazi Persecution of Jews in Germany. Jews in today’s Germany do not need a mention of their religion or ethnicity on their identity documents anymore.

As far as I am concerned, the answer to the initial question is very simple: no, I cannot prove that I am Jewish with my identity documents. It simply never crossed my mind that anyone would ask me to [9, 10].

Non-Separation of Religion and State in Germany

Religious freedom is constitutionally guaranteed in Germany. However, the basic principle of separation of religion and state does not exist. Public life and private life - where religion should belong - are therefore not divided.

Separation of children in school according to their religious affiliation is an official practice enforced by the German state. Children in German public schools must choose between an obligatory class in religious education and a class in ethics, where various issues of philosophy and morals are discussed. Religious education must therefore conform to the principles of the religious communities inside the State education system. The choice offered to an Atheist Jewish child is thus between being tagged by his/her schoolmates as a Jew or as unaffiliated to a mainstream religious group.

In Germany, the state collects a so called Kirchensteuer (church tax) from all registered members of tax-collecting religious congregations under public law (mainly of the Protestant and Catholic Christian faiths). These contributions amount to 8-9% of the income tax. They are used to pay the salaries of ministers, priests or rabbis – who for example administer marriage ceremonies and funerals - to pay the salaries of religion teachers in public schools, to pay community social programs - such as kindergartens and hospitals - or to pay the construction of buildings for public worship. Membership in a tax-collecting religious community must therefore be declared to the tax authorities. People who are not member of such a religious congregation must declare so in their taxation document and do not have to pay this contribution to the state. The German tax system therefore clearly categorizes tax-payers (German nationals and residents in Germany) according to their religious affiliation.

In these conditions, in is not possible in Germany to appear as a simple citizen devoid of any religious views. Expressions of hatred and discriminations against Jews have a long record in Germany, where anti-Semitism found its very culmination under the Nazi regime in a system of institutionalized racism and of deliberate extermination. It is also well established that public hostility towards atheists is not less widespread as towards any other ethnic or religious minority group. Religious separateness imposed by the German state appears to me as a dangerous and unnecessary springboard to religious intolerance. If religious freedom exists in Germany, legal religious separation policies and practices are an evident limitation to the freedom of thought.