Nachbarschaft und Konkurrenz: Juden und Christen in Dörfern der Markgrafschaft Burgau, 1650 bis 1750 (review)

Nachbarschaft und Konkurrenz: Juden und Christen in Dörfern der Markgrafschaft Burgau, 1650 bis 1750. By Sabine Ullmann. [Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 151.] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1999. Pp. 563; two maps and three village charts in folder at end.)

In the century following the Thirty Years' War, the small Habsburg territory of Burgau, located in Swabia not far from Augsburg, was a center of Jewish activity in the countryside of southern Germany. Sabine Ullmann, in this publication of her doctoral dissertation, investigates the many contexts--political, legal, economic, social--which help to explain this phenomenon. She does so in a clear, straightforward, and well-organized manner, making it easy for the reader to follow her arguments.

Burgau belonged to the Habsburg administrative unit known as Farther Austria, i.e., the many fragmentary jurisdictions lying in the region between the Rhine and the Lech. Like many areas in the German southwest, it was a territorium non clausum, with overlapping rights and jurisdictions exercised by many different, and often competing, authorities. Ullmann reports that, at the end of her period, only 6.45% of the inhabitants of the Burgau were directly subject to the Habsburg emperor in Vienna. The sovereign prerogative known as Judenschutz--protection of the Jews--was a right in contention between the Habsburgs and many local powers. Both the Vienna government and the local authorities encouraged Jewish settlement, not as a matter of religious toleration, but as a means of increasing the number of taxable subjects and as a means of demonstrating the claims of each to the prerogative of Judenschutz. This created a political situation utilized by local Jews to their advantage, playing one authority against another, and creating for themselves a legal context which, if not ideal, was better than most, and always bearable.

Ullmann investigates the details of the Jewish community in four villages, Kreigshaber, Buttenwiesen, Pfersee, and Binswagen. The former two were subject directly to the Austrian regime, the latter two to local authorities. Each is investigated with respect to legal, political, economic, social, and special conditions. In the communities subject directly to the Habsburgs, Jews made up 40.6% and 57% of the population, as compared to 16.6% and 32.4% for the remaining two villages. This Jewish population engaged in small-scale trade in cattle, grain, ironware, textiles, and credit. This was true in all four villages. They provided economic links between these rural villages and the regional urban centers of Augsburg and Donauwörth. Because these Jewish merchants had a long-standing relationship with their Christian neighbors in the villages, the periodic anti-Semitic pronouncements from distant authorities, such as the city council or prince-bishop in Augsburg, found little response in the villages.

Within these Jewish communities there was considerable social and economic differentiation, and within each village the institutions of Jewish cultural life, such as the synagogue with a resident rabbi and a Jewish cemetery. Moreover, in these Judendörfern there was a parallel administration, one Christian and one Jewish, for handling local affairs and settling local disputes. This is not to say that the Jewish population was accepted as equal to that of the established Christian inhabitants, as seen in the restriction of Jewish religious ceremonies to the private sphere. Nonetheless, Ullmann concludes that "the coexistence [of the two groups] despite many sources of friction . . . between 1650 and 1750 [was] astoundingly bearable" (p. 480). No better than "bearable" to be sure, but "astounding" because unexpected in this rural context.

This well organized and soundly researched work fills a void in our knowledge about the conditions of the Jewish minority in early modern Germany. Previous investigations have focused on urban settings, understandably enough considering the importance of the Jewish communities in the cities, and the resources available. However, just as the history of Germany during this...