Three Rhine towns once formed the heart of Ashkenazi Jewish learning
The earliest document about Jews in Germany is a Roman record from Cologne in 321 AD. Centuries later Speyer, Worms and Mainz, known together by the Hebrew acronym ShUM, became the centre of Ashkenazi scholarship, drawing students from across Europe, including the great commentator Rashi, to the Rhine.
Jews probably arrived from Roman Italy, where a community existed by 139 BC. The Cologne document of 321 shows a sizeable, organised community with the same legal standing as Jews elsewhere in the empire: some civil liberties, but no government office and limits on spreading their culture. Under the Merovingians and then Charlemagne, who sent a Jewish interpreter with his embassy to Harun al-Rashid, Jews farmed, traded and increasingly lent money, a role pushed on them because the Church barred Christians from usury. That left them both needed and resented. A special official, the Judenmeister, protected their privileges under Louis the Pious.
Around 1000 Talmudic study flourished. Gershom ben Judah, teaching at Metz and Mainz, became known as the Light of the Exile; historian John Man credits him with bringing the first copies of the Talmud to Western Europe and helping Jews adapt to European life. The ShUM communities drew up shared rules, the Takkanot Shum, and Mainz, with local bishops offering protection, grew into what Man calls the capital of European Jewry, with some 6,000 Jews by the mid-14th century.
The First Crusade in 1096 brought devastating attacks on Rhineland communities, though the bishop of Speyer shielded his city's Jews. False charges, from host desecration to well poisoning during the Black Death, recurred for centuries, and many Jews fled east, laying foundations for what became Europe's largest Jewish population. Moses Mendelssohn's era began a slow emancipation, even as the Hep-Hep riots of 1819 showed how fragile it was.
In January 1933 about 530,000 Jews lived in Germany. Nazi persecution drove around 60 percent to emigrate, and an estimated 160,000 to 180,000 German Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Immigration from the former Soviet Union after 1990 made Germany's the only growing Jewish community in Europe, levelling off at 126,000 by 2018.
Source: History of the Jews in Germany
