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The 1901 Jewish Encyclopedia

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• Salzburg, Austria, City of
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• Salzburg

Austrian duchy (formerly a German archbishopric), and its capital of the same name. Jews, among them a physician, are mentioned in the Salzburg records as early as the ninth century. In the eleventh century there were in the archbishopric two settlements called "Judendorf" ("Judindorf" and "Villa Judeorum"). There is evidence that from the thirteenth century Jews resided at Salzburg, Hallein, Pettau, Friesach, and Mühldorf. In Salzburg and Pettau, as in Hallein in the fourteenth century, special streets were assigned to the Jews, who had their own schools and synagogues. The archbishops, to whom the Jews were subject, granted them in return for a large annual payment (Letter of Grace of Archbishop Ottolf von Weisseneck, dated June 25, 1346) the right of residence, of protection, of unrestricted commerce, and of emigrating freely from one part of the archbishopric to another. A municipal law of Pettau of the year 1376 mentions a Jewish magistrate. The ecclesiastical legislation, especially the measures of the twenty-second Salzburg provincial council, held at Vienna in 1267, contained numerous oppressive regulations concerning the Jews. In 1418 the councilpassed an order that Jewish men should wear on the streets horn-shaped hats ("pileum cornutum"), and that Jewish women should have little ringing bells ("nolam sonantem") fastened to their clothes. Other severe ordinances were published by the thirty-ninth provincial council, held at Mühldorf in 1490. But in spite of these restrictions the situation of the Jews in the archbishopric until the middle of the fourteenth century was comparatively favorable, because the secular government was mild. As instances of temperate legislation may be cited the regulations of the archbishop Frederick III. in 1328, and the municipal laws of Mühldorf, Salzburg (1368), and Pettau (1376). Where the Jews were numerous they engaged in commerce on an extensive scale, and possessed houses and estates.

The appearance of the Black Death in 1349 and the accusation of poisoning the wells brought persecution upon the Jews of Salzburg. About 12,000 of them, it is said, lost their lives in Salzburg and Bavaria. On July 10, 1404, a great number of Jews of Salzburg and Hallein were burned at the stake in Winkl on the charge of having desecrated the host.

Emperor Frederick III. for a long time granted his Jewish subjects protection and various privileges. He issued a decree of protection in 1478, when, in consequence of the proceedings against Simon of Trent, feeling ran high against the Salzburg Jews. In spite of this decree, in order to make sport of the Jews, in 1487 a wooden image of a pig nourishing Jewish children was erected at the city's expense on the tower of the Salzburg city hall. Thirty-three years later it was given a more enduring form in marble; and this monument of medieval intolerance was not removed until 1785. The severest hardship endured by the Jews of the archbishopric occurred in 1498, when the stern and unscrupulous Archbishop Leonard von Keutschach ordered their total expulsion under cruel circumstances.

From that time until the nineteenth century only traveling Jewish merchants were allowed to enter Salzburg. The last archbishop who had sovereign power, Francis de Paula, Prince of Colloredo-Mannsfeld (1772-1803), issued decrees favorable to such itinerant Jews; but in 1795 these were partially suspended. Gradually Jews again settled in Salzburg; and in 1813 the King of Bavaria, to whom the duchy had belonged since 1805, granted almost all the rights of citizenship to them. Afterward the Austrian government, which regained possession of Salzburg in 1816, revoked some of the privileges; but in 1867 it granted the Jews full citizenship.

The largest Jewish community of the duchy is that of the capital, Salzburg, where there is a new synagogue with all ritual conveniences. The community has not, however, an independent organization, but belongs to the community of Linz in Upper Austria.