The last journey of Lady Veruna

Germany, like Austria and Hungary, has its own Danube Bend, which is protected by monuments typical of German history and culture: on the west, Europe’s oldest brewery, and on the east, the Kelheim Liberation Monument. However, deep in Weltenburg, in the Danube wall of a Franciscan monastery, there is a third, relatively uncharacteristic monument that commemorates a completely different German history. Its Hebrew inscription is at least 800 years old, but it is still legible. Its sad origins lead downstream to the imperial city of Regensburg.

A tombstone in Hebrew  the wall of Trauntal Monastery

According to György Sajó’s reading, the Hebrew inscription reads: Tomb of Lady Veruna [?], daughter of the community leader Moshe. Died in the year 4960 [?], the second day of the month of Iyyar, Tuesday. May she rest in peace in the Garden of Eden.

I wonder what a Jewish woman’s tombstone with a Hebrew inscription is doing in the wall of a Franciscan monastery founded in the mid-15th century?

This reading of the year of the 11-line tombstone is uncertain, due to the fault line running through it. If the above reading is correct, it indicates April 25, 1200, which was indeed a Tuesday. This means that the tombstone could only be placed secondarily in the wall of the monastery, which certainly had no Jewish resident. Due to its location, the tombstone has a relatively well-explored past. A simple search reveals that Lady Veruna’s tombstone was originally located in the medieval Jewish cemetery in Regensburg. After the liquidation of the cemetery, the tombstones were destroyed and scattered just like the Jews themselves after the all-German pogroms in the 15th century. According to a list of the tombstones from the Regensburg cemetery, this one in the wall of the Trauntal monastery is the second oldest surviving example. Here, on the banks of the Danube it at least survived and was not crushed to dust, reused as building material, or met a terrible fate like the tombstone of Gutel, daughter of David of Regensburg, who died in 1336/1337 (see below).

The Jewish community of Regensburg was one of the oldest and largest in German territory, north of the Alps. The first documented mention of the presence of Jews dates from 981, but they had probably lived in the city continuously since the Carolingian era. At the beginning of the 11th century, their place of residence is also mentioned under the name “Judæorum habitacula”. From about the early 1200s, the area around today’s Neupfarrplatz gradually became the Jewish quarter, a small town within the town, encircled by the old Roman city walls. They received their privileges from the Holy Roman Emperor. They were under his protection, governed by their own council, and they also had their own seal with their coat of arms: a crescent moon and a Star of David (or, as it was called then, Solomon’s Seal) and with the inscription: חותם קהל ריגנשבורק, hotam kahal Rignsburk, “seal of the [Jewish] community of Regensburg.

In Regensburg, the city magistrate and the imperial power usually protected the Jews, primarily because of the tax revenue coming from them. This is how the city avoided pogroms. Although all the Jews in the city were forcibly baptized during the Crusades, they were allowed to return to their original faith after the intervention of the emperor. When Lady Veruna died, the Jews were still living in relative freedom within the city walls. However, starting in the 13th century, they were restricted to the Jewish quarter, had to wear distinctive clothes, and were not allowed to enter the Christian quarter on major holidays. This was ensured by the lockable gates of the Jewish quarter, supervised by the Jews themselves. We know of six such gates in the late Middle Ages. Their place is indicated by the traces of the still existing side streets that once led to the Jewish quarter. Five of the gates are no longer traceable, but one still exists today, although not in its original form. It opens from a narrow passageway at Tändlergasse 9-11. No archaeological traces of the wall have been found so far.

The Jews of Regensburg enganged in trade, money lending, and gold and silversmithing, and were considered fairly wealthy during the Middle Ages. It is no coincidence that Bavaria’s second largest coin treasure, which may have been hidden around 1387, was found in the area of the former Jewish quarter. The treasure contained 624 gold coins, most of them of Hungarian mintage from the 14th century. However, towards the end of the 15th century, when Regensburg’s economy began to decline, the city’s citizens were slowly impoverished, and a part of the craftsmen became unemployed. Religious intolerance grew in parallel with this, and the city council was more and more inclined to make Jews the scapegoat and appease social discontent by expropriating their wealth.

The location of the medieval Jewish quarter in Regensburg, around today’s Neupfarrplatz, inside the Roman city walls, on its western side (source)

However, the implementation of this encountered obstacles, as Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I took their side, since he expected serious tax revenue from the Jews, who paid taxes not only to the city, but also to the ruler, the bishop and the Duke of Bavaria. Although it is also true that, towards the end of the 15th century, they were already often unable to pay the increasing taxes. However, Maximilian died on January 12, 1519, and the people of Regensburg immediately took advantage of the interregnum and started anti-Jewish demonstrations. In addition to social discontent, the seeds of this were the common blood libels of the era, according to which the Jews kidnapped Christian children in order to use their blood for the Passover.

In February 1519, the city council sealed off the Jewish quarter to prevent bloodshed, and cannons were towed to its six gates. On February 21, a resolution was passed to expel the Jews, who were given two weeks to leave the city. The imperial commissioner Thomas Fuchs von Wallburg, whose task was to represent the interests of the emperor, i.e. to protect the Jews, also must have been involved in their expulsion. Presumably for good money, he notified the wealthiest Jews in advance, who had left Regensburg with their possessions before the decision was announced. The Jews had to evacuate the synagogue, from which the holy objects were removed to the rabbi’s house, where the Jews themselves then destroyed them, lest they fall into the hands of the Christians. The city council managed to maintain order during the exodus of the Jews, but the harsh weather in February cost the lives of two post-natal mothers. The Jews did not go far. Some of them settled in Stadtamhof and Sallern, which were practically northern suburbs of Regensburg, but stood under the authority of the Duke of Bavaria. However, later in the 16th century, they were also expelled from here, and some of them left for Tyrol or Poland.

Albrecht Altdorfer: The Gothic synagogue of Regensburg (source)

After the expulsion of the Jews, the local population almost immediately destroyed the synagogue. One of the surviving engravings of the old building was made by Albrecht Altdorfer, who allegedly also participated in the demolition. During the unprofessional demolition work, a master stonemason named Jakob Kern fell while destroying an arch, and was trapped under the debris. However, they managed to dig him out from under the ruins without a scratch, which the witnesses believed to be divine intervention. The news spread quickly, and a wooden church dedicated to the Virgin Mary was soon built on the site. Soon so many pilgrims came here from all over Bavaria that they decided to build a large stone church.

For this, additional space was needed in the narrow quarter divided by small alleys. So they began to demolish the houses of the Jewish quarter, which had been continuously expanded, joined and superimposed over the centuries. Their number in 1519 was about forty, and they housed 500 local Jewish residents and 80 students of the Talmud schools. However, the houses were so much supported by each other, that the demolition of one of them usually involved the collapse of the neighboring house. According to contemporary sources, three to four thousand people took part in the demolition work and the removal of the debris. Even the episcopal administration, the secular clergy and the monastic orders took their part in the destruction fueled by religious fanaticism. Only one Jewish house remained standing, the cheder school, which later housed the sacristan of the Neupfarrkirche until its demolition in 1857.

Das „letzte Judenhaus” in Regensburg (source)

The Neupfarrplatz is located southwest of Regensburg Cathedral. It is a surprisingly spacious square compared to the fabric of the city and the surrounding alleyways. Its central location is occupied by the Lutheran church, which began to be built just before the city’s conversion to the Reformation. The first Protestant communion took place within its walls on October 15, 1542, after the city council converted to the reformed religion, yielding to the wishes of the majority. The construction of the “New Parish Church” started in 1519, just a few days after the city council expelled the Jews from Regensburg. But the Evangelicals had nothing to do with this. Originally a Catholic pilgrimage church, dedicated to the “Beautiful” Virgin Mary, was to be built here, allegedly on the site of the destroyed synagogue, as if emphasizing the triumph of the citizens over the “infidels”.

The pilgrimage church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, built in the site of the destroyed Jewish quarter. Woodcut of Michael Ostendorfer, ca. 1520 (source)

In 1996, archaeologists excavated the unbuilt parts of the square, thanks to which the structure of the Jewish quarter could be roughly reconstructed. The most important discovery was that the Neupfarrkirche was not build on the site of the synagogue, but to the east of it. In this way, a memorial place to the former synagogue could be created. They also found the mikveh of the Jewish quarter with a 9-meter deep well, and the Jewish community house called the Brauthaus.

Archaeological research also identified the medieval Jewish cemetery that hosted Lady Veruna’s tomb. It lay outside the city wall to the south, next to the Peter’s Gate. This area is now north of the railway station, around the intersection of Albertstraße and Maximilianstraße. The land for the cemetery was purchased by the Jewish community around 1210, so Lady Veruna’s grave must have been one of the earliest burials. The cemetery, which was originally surrounded by a high wall, may once have contained about four to five thousand tombstones, of which only a hundred are known, either in whole or in fragmentary form. Despite the fact that most of them have illegible inscriptions, local historians still pay special attention to them. Their first census was also financed by the city council as early as the 18th century. Since then, the number of known tombstones has decreased to ca. sixty pieces. A public area also bears their memory in Regensburg, the Am Judenstein Street in the western part of the medieval city center, between the Holy Cross Dominican monastery and the Heart of Jesus parish church, with a large Jewish tombstone on its corner, illegible due to destruction by external forces.

Jewish tombstone. Am Judenstein, Regensburg

In 1519, the citizens of Regensburg demolished the wall of the cemetery as well, and carried away the tombstones, mainly as building material, but several of them were walled into the façades of the houses as trophies, a sign of the victory over the Jews. A Calvary with three crosses was built on the site of the cemetery. Rumor has it that most of the tombstones were used in the construction of the Neupfarrkirche, together with the construction debris from the Jewish quarter. Many tombstones may still be hidden in the walls or under the plaster of the 16th-century houses of Regensburg. Some of the gravestones probably reached, by way of the pilgrims, the more distant settlements of Bavaria and Upper Austria.

This procedure can be regarded as general during the pogroms that swept across German cities in the 15th and 16th centuries. The city of Erfurt, for example, expelled their Jews in 1453, and the tombstones of the Jewish cemetery were also used for construction and street pavement. And the “Medieval Hebrew Inscriptions: a European Database” project of the Central European University points out that the vast majority of the ca. 5000 known medieval Jewish inscriptions are Jewish tombstones of secondary use. This method would be eerily repeated during WWII, when the gravestones of many Jewish cemeteries in Nazi-occupied Poland were used to pave roads.

Among the tombstones, the most horrific fate probably befell that of Gutel, daughter of David, in which a hole was punched in the middle and used as a latrine seat in the dungeon of the Old Town Hall.

The sad fate of the tombstone of Gutel, daughter of David (source)

Lady Veruna’s ashes were scattered, but as her last journey, her tombstone went from Regensburg to Kelheim, “thanks” to the collection of trophies by the Franciscan monks from Trauntal. This is how it was able to survive, and to this day it monitors the ebb and flow of the Danube. And her memory is preserved by a somewhat more tolerant posterity in Bavaria.