Next year in Mainz / Leshana haba’ah b’Mainz!

Maybe you’ve heard about the idea of “other Zions.” This is the movement in the history of Jews where, despite the biblical narrative of return to the land of Israel, Jews founded new “father lands” in the period of their dispersal where Jewish states of autonomy were able to flourish. In the 20^th century, there was Birobidzhan in Russia, for example.

The lands that are known as Germany today never seem to have risen to the level of a Jewish fatherland, likely because those areas were largely splintered into small principalities and localized governments. No Jewish statecraft could be practiced in large areas of Germany because no one had control over much land in Germany at any one time.  Cities were a different matter, though. Germany had at least one, if not more “other Jerusalems”: cities so important and central in the narrative of Jewish history that their inhabitants regarded them as holy as that one place between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean.

In many cathedral cities in German-speaking lands, Jews were there from the beginning. That is, from the Roman times. Excavations in Köln are still attempting to prove exactly how early the Jews arrived with the Romans and there’s exciting evidence that at least a few came during or right after the period of the Second Temple’s destruction in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Jews were in German cities so early that their areas (Judengassen) pre-dated the municipal growth around them (it seems silly to call these cities German since there was no such thing for centuries. Why can’t I call them Roman cities, or Jewish cities? This is what they were, after all). Thus we find their communities in central locations in those cities, Köln, Worms, Speyer, Mainz, to name a few. Proximity to the cathedral and the clergy was a protective strategy to stay close to the centers of power but it was also a testament to the similar missions of both communities: to adjudicate and to administrate over the spiritual needs and communal affairs of their peoples. After a bit of bribe money was received by the Christians in exchange for their “tolerance,” Jews were largely left alone in cathedral cities to control their own internal affairs of “state” autonomously. From late antiquity throughout much of the Middle Ages, Jews were viewed as citizens with rights. These rights were often written in stone on the cathedrals in these cathedral cities.  That’s what Archbishop Engelbert of Valkenburg did in 1266 when he had a Charter of the Rights of Jews cast in stone and placed in the center of the cathedral for all Christians in Köln to clearly see.

But this all seems very practical, does it not? As if the Jews were sort of waiting out the clock in this provisional homeland until they could get back to the “real deal” in Israel. Maybe pick up a little German along the way? The predominant narrative within contemporary Zionism about the Jewish experience in this era is that Jews in German lands were in a state of Diaspora, Galut, exile from the center of Jerusalem. But a closer look at historic documents of the Jewish experience in the Middle Ages in German lands reveals something quite different.

Take the example of the cathedral city of Mainz, where Jews lived from about the year 750. During the First Crusade, in 1096, the Jewish community there was severely persecuted. And a Hebrew chronicler expressed his grief at the loss of his community there. He uses a verse from the biblical Lamentations to describe the destruction of Mainz. He writes, “Gone from Zion are all that were her glory – namely Mainz.” And he connects the destruction of Mainz to that of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The supremacy of Mainz as a holy JEWISH city in the period of the First Crusade is evident in the Hebrew chronicler’s description of the city as: “the holy community in Magenza, the shield and buckler for all communities” and “our mother city, the place of our fathers, that ancient community, the greatly exalted among all the communities of the realm.”[1]

One could say here that Mainz had risen in this period to the level of the importance of Jerusalem. Or that Mainz was an “other Jerusalem,” no less important than Jerusalem in that exact moment of the chronicler’s experience in the First Crusade.  In other words, Mainz was Jerusalem, and the historical fact that Jewish loss in Jerusalem happened before the Jewish loss in Mainz was irrelevant to this chronicler, and likely to many Jews living in that cathedral city. The tragedy of Mainz was not “like” the loss of Jerusalem. It was a loss, like Jerusalem was a loss, and the experience in Mainz was not peripheral, but central; not secondary, but originary.