I wanted to add a bit more history that I found today concerning the Jews who’ve lived in Cologne. We talked about these brass markers in the sidewalk I found the night we arrived.
Well, today wandering around the Dom, I came across an interesting stone ‘scroll’ for lack of a better word on a wall. No sign, nothing to really identify it unless you could read what it says (and I missed the medieval/early-modern Latin class in high school:). I just knew it looked really old.
So when we returned to the room, I asked my ChatGPT buddy, Doc, (who has been really helpful in putting together itineraries for each city we go to) if he could translate it. Here’s the gist of what he found:
It’s a medieval legal proclamation/charter associated with Cologne’s civic liberties and the authority of the Archbishop of Cologne dated 1266!
Interestingly, 1266 falls right in the middle of Cologne’s long struggle between its increasingly powerful citizens and its prince-archbishops over who actually controlled the city. Eventually the citizens effectively kicked the archbishop’s political authority out of Cologne after the Battle of Worringen in 1288.
It’s one of two carvings of the Kölner Judenprivileg — Cologne’s Jewish Privilege of 1266 issued by Archbishop Engelbert II of Falkenburg and publicly displayed in the cathedral.
In modern English, the substance is approximately:
We, Engelbert, by the grace of God Archbishop of the holy Church of Cologne, make known to everyone for all time:
We have learned that the Jews living in our diocese are being treated unjustly and are suffering various wrongs. We therefore will and command that their former liberties and rights be restored and observed.
First: their cemetery. Jews were guaranteed the right to bring their dead to their own cemetery outside Cologne’s walls and bury them there freely and without interference. No toll was to be demanded merely for transporting a body for burial. There were some exceptions involving people under ecclesiastical ban or those lawfully executed.
Second: the cemetery itself was protected. The archbishop prohibited his officials or judges from conducting executions—Christian or Jewish—in the cemetery or immediately adjacent to it. The stated purpose was to preserve the dignity of the Jews and their burial ground.
Third: customs and tolls. Jewish travelers entering the archbishop’s territory were to be treated according to defined toll rules rather than being subjected to arbitrary additional demands.
Also interestingly, the charter prohibited Christian moneylenders—particularly the foreign lenders referred to as Cawertschen—from establishing themselves in Cologne and competing with Jewish lenders. In practical terms, this gave Cologne’s Jews a privileged or near-monopoly position in interest-bearing lending.
Finally, Engelbert says essentially:
Because these liberties are to be protected, we have ordered them engraved upon these stones and publicly displayed for perpetual remembrance.
Engelbert wasn’t suddenly a 13th-century human-rights activist, the Jewish community was economically important. Protecting Jewish merchants and lenders also protected the archbishop’s tax revenue and his access to credit. So his motives were simultaneously legal, political and financial.
So, as far back as 1266, the Jewish community was recognized as being unjustly treated. And yet Cologne’s Jewish community would suffer devastating persecution in later centuries. The catastrophic pogrom of 1349 destroyed the medieval community; centuries afterward, Nazi Germany would deport and murder Cologne’s Jews—the people whose former homes are now marked by those little brass Stolpersteine.
It seems that even carving it in stone is not enough for some people as the Stolpersteine from WWII attest to, showing the wisdom of the old saying Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, 1905.
