History of the Jews in Cologne

[4] A partial translation of the Codex reads: "We allow all town councils to appoint through general law, Jewish people in the Curia.

"Archaeological finds indicate the presence of people from the Middle East at around this period, and among them there were Syrians, as is proved by an Aramaic inscription dug up in 1930.

The fact that the Jewish community was important is proved further by the statement in these Hebrew reports that out of Cologne there went forth "our brethren scattered over the earth support for their life and correct words of judgment".

The Cologne Council thought necessary to act preemptively in regard to this apparently Church-sanctioned refusal to repay debts and took action in 1321 to limit interest due under penalty.

[19] The same council referred in 1334 to the same letter of the pope and appealed to Archbishop Walram von Jülich for protection from a Jewish banker named Meyer of Siegburg who demanded payment of money from it.

[21] Altogether the Jews of Cologne between 1096 and 1349 appear indeed to have been relatively safe regarding life and physical condition[22] as "fellow citizens (Mitbürger)".

The Black Death had not reached Cologne until December 1349[29] However, reports of its devastating impact arrived on the Rhine from the south considerably earlier.

The Archbishop of Cologne, Walram von Jülich, who had left the city at the end of June 1349 to go to France, died in Paris after a short time.

[37] The account of the chronicler Gilles Li Muisis, which tells of a regular battle of the citizenry against more than 25,000 Jews and credits the victory to the stratagem of a butcher, is not considered reliable.

[41] Nevertheless, it was only under Engelbert III von der Mark and particularly under his coadjutor Cuno of Falkenstein that the strained relation between the archbishop and the municipality had improved enough for the protection of Jews to seem reasonably assured.

[44] Nevertheless, it is remarkable that an attempt was made immediately to re-establish a full community, rather than allowing only a few Jews to settle at a time, as was the procedure of most other large towns.

Following the medieval pogroms and expulsion of 1424, many Jews of Cologne emigrated to central or northern European countries like Poland and Lithuania, then part of the Ordensstaat of the Teutonic Order.

In Middle Ages there were in Cologne the following buildings, synagogues, mikvehs, schools, hospices and cemeteries: In 1174 a document of Saint Engelbert, at the time provost of the monastery of Saint Severin in Cologne, mentions that thirty-eight years previously Knight Ortliv had given back five jugerum of land that he had received from the monastery as a fief near the Jews cemetery, and the land had been let to the Jews against a yearly payment of four denarii and Ortliv could not have any claim on it.

[50] By excavations of the area of the Cologne Rathaus in 1953 two fully conserved tombstones were found on the northwest corner of the building in a large bomb crater.

The Jews of the Deutz community lived like all the others of the Electorate of Cologne under the legal and society conditions, that were provided by the state from the end of the 16th century through a so-called Judenordnung.

Since he presented favorable evidence of his previous conduct and also proved that he would not become a burden to the city because of poverty, permission was granted to him on March 16, 1798, to settle in Cologne.

The land was bought by Benjamin Samuel Cohen, one of the Jewish communal leaders in the early 1800s, taking advantage of a property sale by the French tax-office.

[citation needed] Due to the growth of the community and the disrepair of the prayer hall in the former Monastery of St. Clarissa, the Oppenheim family donated a new synagogue building at Glockengasse 7.

While in Medieval times the "quarter" had been built close to the synagogue in Cologne "Judengasse", by now the Jews lived in a decentralized area among the rest of the population.

The head office of the Zionist Organization for Germany was based in Richmodstraße near Neumarkt square, Cologne, and was founded by lawyer Max Bodenheimer together with merchant David Wolffsohn.

The new synagogue had a façade of light sandstone with red horizontal stripes as well as oriental minaret and a cupola covered with copper plates.

Der Itzig und die Sahra trecke fott" (translation: "The Jews are finished, they slowly leave … We laugh our heads off at Freud, the Itzik and the Sarah run away".

Local Nazi groups published lists of companies with Jewish owners to incite persecution and boycotts to drive them out of business.

It collected money, food, clothing, furniture and fuel and in winter 1937/38 the organisation supported 2,300 indigent people, a fifth of Jewish community.

Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia, "By 1938, the combination of Nazi terror, propaganda, boycott, and legislation was so effective that some two thirds of these Jewish-owned enterprises were out of business or sold to non-Jews.

In September 1941 the "Police order about the identification of Jews" obliged all Jewish people in the German Reich more than six years old to wear a yellow badge sewed to the left side of the garment.

[97] Out of Müngersdorf and Deutz were situated also prisoners and concentration camps on a factory site in Porz Hochkreuz and also in the nearby place of Brauweiler.

At the first post-war Christmas Eve celebrations in 1959, during the Swastika epidemic of 1959–1960, the Roonstrasse Synagogue and the Cologne memorial for the Victims of the Nazi regime were damaged by two members of the extreme rightist Deutsche Reichspartei, who were later arrested.

The facilities that exist in the same place, today called "Jüdisches Wohlfahrtszentrum", have their origin, as the partly conserved building of the old hospital of 1908, in one of the 18th century charitable constructions in "Silvanstraße", the Israelitische Asyl für Kranke und Altersschwache.

[101] The Union of Progressive Jews in Germany (UPJ), founded in Munich in June 1997, is a religious association with a small Jewish liberal community in Köln-Riehl, with about 50 members and calls itself Jüdische Liberale Gemeinde Köln Gescher LaMassoret e.V..