History of the Jews in Hamburg
Since the 1880s, Jews of Hamburg have lived primarily in the neighbourhoods of Grindel [de], earlier in the New Town, where the Sephardic Community "Neveh Shalom" (Hebrew: נוה שלום)[1] was established in 1652.
The Jewish Community in Hamburg, began with the establishment of Sephardim from Spain, as they were expelled from their home country in 1492, they came through stopovers in Portugal, Amsterdam and Antwerp arriving around 1577.
Different regulations applied to Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Altona which — unlike its easterly adjacent imperially free city-state and republic of Hamburg — formed part of a non-constitutional monarchy, the county of Holstein-Pinneberg.
[7] In this context Hamburg had received the Sephardim in 1590 as the natio lusitana (as supposed Catholic Portuguese), with both parties tacitly overlooking their Jewishness in the beginning.
[8] However, with the ongoing anti-Judaic debate in the republic's legislative and ruling bodies, the senate denied Hamburg's Sephardim to buy land for a cemetery within the city-state territory.
Thanks to immigration from the central eastern Europe, Altona's Ashkenzi congregation became a center of research and scholarship in Jewish teaching (e.g. Jonathan Eybeschütz, Jacob Emden), attracting hundreds of students.
[12] No wonder that the three Ashkenazi congregations, anyway intertwined by members of Hamburg's Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeinde spending their working hours and many a night intown, although officially residing and occasionally actually living in Altona and Wandsbek, established a close coöperation in 1671.
A general privilege expired with the rulers' deaths and thus Adolphus' successors Ernest, Jobst Herman and Otto V [de] all confirmed it.
In 1697 the freedom of religious practice which Hamburg's Sephardic congregation had obtained was disturbed by hostile edicts of the aldermen, and Jews were extortionately taxed (Cf.
Altona's Sephardim, like all Jews of Danish-ruled Holstein, gained legal equality on 14 July 1863 through an act of the Danish-Holsteinian government.
The Holy Community of the Sephardim of Beit Israel and the Ashkenazi Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeinde zu Hamburg became subject to the Israelite Central Consistory of France.
[17] The old Reglement der Judenschaft of 1710 regained legal validity with few modifications, e.g. Jews who had moved into Hamburg under French rule were all granted residence permits under the restrictive 1710 regulation allowing them to stay.
On 21 February 1849, adopting the legislation of the Frankfurt National Assembly, the city-state administration granted equal rights to Jews (Jewish emancipation).
The Constituent Assembly enacted the Constitution of the Free State of Hamburg of 11 July 1849, confirming the equal rights to all citizens which was the start for widespread integration.
Unlike some other states in the German Confederation the city-state did not revoke the Jewish emancipation in the following years in the restorative Concert of Europe.
On 1 February 1865 a new law abolished the compulsion for Jews to enroll with one of Hamburg's two statutory Jewish congregations (the Ashkenazi Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeinde (DIG); or the Holy Congregation of the Sephardim Beit Israel [German: Heilige Gemeinde der Sephardim Beith Israel / Hebrew: בית ישראל]; est.
[20] The worship associations had agreed that all services commonly provided such as burials, britot mila, zedakah for the poor, almshouses, hospital care and food offered in these institutions had to fulfill Orthodox requirements.
This makes these statistics uncomparable with Nazi statistics on what they called mixed marriages (Mischehen), which they claimed to be interracial marriages based on the garbled Nazi racism of a superior Aryan race,[22] however, with racial status for an individual technically fixed along enrollments of parents and grandparents with religious congregations, recorded in archives and certified in 'Aryan' certificates, regardless of her or his actual religion, let alone applying genetical research of any kind.
On 1 January 1938, after the incorporation of neighbouring cities into Hamburg in 1937, the smaller Ashkenazi congregations of Altona (Hochdeutsche Israeliten-Gemeinde zu Altona; HIG), Harburg-Wilhelmsburg (Synagogen-Gemeinde Harburg-Wilhelmsburg) and Wandsbek (Israelitische Gemeinde zu Wandsbek) merged in the DIG, on this occasion the Nazi Reich Ministry of ecclesiastical affairs forced the greater DIG to adopt a new name.
[23] The Nazi administrators took pleasure in humiliating the congregation by denying its continued use of the name Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeinde, arguing the term Deutsch (i.e. German) would be impossible for Jewish organisations, the Nazi government generally denied Jewish Germans their Germanness, Israelitisch (i.e. Israelite) were too ambiguous, the clearly anti-Semitic doctrine demanded the term Jüdisch (i.e. Jewish) and in December 1937 the Reich Ministry of the Interior objected the term Gemeinde which would be inapt, because the term also stands for a commune or municipality in German law (Gemeinde, however, means as much congregation, but there was no way to argue with the ministry),[24] so the greater DIG renamed as Jüdischer Religionsverband Hamburg (JRH; i.e. Hamburg Jewish religious association).
[25] In March 1938 the JRH was deprived its status as statutory corporation (Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts; entailing loss of tax privileges), followed by the abolition of its constitutional bodies on 2 December the same year, such as the legislative college of representatives (Repräsentanten-Kollegium), subjecting the JRH executive board directly to Gestapo orders.
Systematic deportations of Jewish Germans and Gentile Germans of Jewish descent started on 18 October 1941, logistally and technically supported by the remaining rump administration of JRH and subsequently RV Northwest, e.g. as to choosing who is put on lists, when the GeStapo demanded a certain number of people to be collected for a deportion it planned.
The few remaining employees of the RV Northwest, except for those somewhat protected by a so-called mixed marriage, were deported from Hamburg on 23 June 1943 to Theresienstadt.
[27] The Neuengamme concentration camp, established in 1938 by the SS near the village of Neuengamme in the Bergedorf borough of Hamburg, originally mostly incarcerated prisoners, regardless of their racist categorisation by arbitrary Nazi ideology, suspected of political resistance or opposition, later received inmates imprisoned for the sheer reason of being Jewish, especially by the end of the Nazi era when extermination camps were inaccessible because Allied forces had liberated them.
On 14 February 1945 a last deportation train with 124 Jews from Hamburg departed to Theresienstadt of whom 120 survived and returned in summer 1945 because their tragedy had soon been ended by their liberation in May of that year.
