Hildesheim - The Jewry

Hildesheim. The Jewry. Published by the Hildesia-Verlag Erich Boxmann, Hildesheim. (Hildesia was the Latin name for Hildesheim.) The postcard was posted on 15 May 1915.

While there is a suggestion that the Jews of Hildesheim were first expelled in 1258, their presence in the city is first documented definitively for the early fourteenth century. Most of them survived the pogroms during the Black Death (1348/49) because the city’s bishop protected them. A century later, most of them left Hildesheim to evade the unusually high tax burden placed on them in the city, many of them settling in nearby Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel. Following a string of attempts to return to Hildesheim and renewed expulsions, Jews permanently settled in the city again from 1662 onwards. However, they did not return to the Jewry that originally connected the horse market and the general market in the Old City. Instead, they were required to settle in the neighbouring Neustadt (New Town), established by the chapter of the city’s cathedral in the early thirteenth century. As a general rule, from the seventeenth century onwards, streets and neighbourhoods in western Europe that bore the term Jew or some derivative of it in their name tended to be the last place one would actually meet Jews—rather than material witnesses of their absence.