Communities along the Frankische Saale
Hammelberg had a synagogue as far back as 1487; in the sixteenth century, a cemetery was purchased across the Frankische Saale, in the suburb of Pfaff, now the stadteil of Paffenhausen. A new mikvah and synagogue were built in town in the seventeenth century, prior to the expulsion of the Jews in 1671, when the Jewish community relocated to Pfaff.
The Kissengen region, now Bad Kissengen, must have had some Jewish residents during the Thirty Years' War, because there is a monument in the town hall to a bearded and helmeted man who is purported to be a Jew who helped in the defense of the town against the Swedes by casting bullets that never missed their mark. There are records of schutzjuden in the region; in 1650 and again in 1656, the butchers of Kissingen complained about competition from Jews living in the region.
Neustadt an der Saale, now Bad Neustadt, had a Jewish community at the time of the Black Death, as recorded in the Memorbuch of Nürnberg. I can find no evidence of Jewish settlement in the seventeenth century.
Saxon communities
Saxony in general had few Jews; there was a general expulsion in 1559 that included the Jews of Thuringia. Jews were forbidden to live in cities, and only at the end of the seventeenth century were they were permitted to settle on the estates of the nobility. There may have been a few exceptions, however, and there is some evidence that some of the Jews expelled from the cities settled in rural areas. Most, however, would have fled to Poland.
Schmalkalden became the home to Rabbi Meïr ben Jacob Schiff in 1636, a noted scholar of Talmud, Kaballah and Torah. It is likely that he settled there with a small community, most likely a community invited to fill the vacuum created by the Thirty Years' War. Similar resettlements occurred in many Saxon communities after they had been depopulated by the war. In general, the nobility hoped that by settling Shutzjuden in their villages, they could increase their revenue flow.
Arnstadt expelled its Jews in 1496 and 1532, but there is evidence of two Jewish converts to Christianity in the seventeenth century, suggesting that some Jews must have been present in the region to convert.
Dessau allowed Jewish settlement in 1621, but this community was destroyed in the Thirty Years' War.
Leipzig banished its Jews in 1439, but starting in the mid fifteenth century, while no Jews were allowed to settle there, Jews were important participants in the Leipzig fairs. These were held twice yearly at Easter and Michaelmas. Statistics on Jewish participation at the fairs dates back to 1675, by which time, hundreds of Jewish merchants participated, many from outside Germany.
An Academic Question
Suppose that, in the spring of 1631, the town of Grantville, West Virginia, was plunked into the Thueringerwald. When would the first Ashkenazi Jews arrive? For the sake of this discussion, I will ignore what is said in the novel 1632 and focus on the Jewish and larger worlds of the period. One thing is clear, and that is that the winter of 1631-32, with the passage of the war down the Main valley to Frankfurt, would have let loose a flood of refugees; it also seems clear that some part of this flood would have been likely to end up in Grantville, since by that time, it would be fairly well known that Grantville treated refugees well and was genuinely serious about nondiscrimination. Here, though, I am not interested in the time of the arrival of the peak of this flood, but rather, the arrival of the first scattered Ashkenazic refugees.
Consider what the Jews of the lower Main valley knew in the spring of 1631. Taxes were extremely high everywhere in German lands, with the Jew-taxes even higher. Trade was at a standstill, inflation was out of control, and most of the Jewish community had recent memory of war, starvation or disease. There was excellent reason to leave. Lands under French rule to the east were relatively stable and home to an established Jewish community, but they were not anxious to accept poor Jewish refugees. Amsterdam was in a state of near perpetual war fending off the Spanish, but it was a haven to Jews. Some Jews were certainly traveling to these lands to the north and west.
Poland was another interesting destination. With the withdrawal of Gustavus Adolphus, Poland was largely at peace. The system of Jewish self-government was functional, so that, although there were Jew taxes, they were administered in a relatively fair manner. As a result, in early 1631, Poland would have looked very attractive.
For a Jew from Frankfurt or Aschaffenburg contemplating the journey to Poland, there would be several obvious routes. By Passover, everyone in Frankfurt would have heard that Gustavus was on the move west of Berlin and that the Imperial army was besieging Magdeburg. Travelers would therefore avoid the route north of the Franconian highlands and the Thueringerwald. The middle route, up the Fränkische Saale river would be direct, requiring crossing through the Thueringerwald, but putting the travelers on the road to Leipsig, while a southern route via Prague would be longer but probably safer.
The middle route would be likely to attract at least some Jewish travelers in the spring of 1631, with some travelers from as far south as Würzburg likely to come this way. The economic appeal of travel through the hills of the Spessart and Thueringerwald might have been significant, since both were centers of mining and industry. The entry of new traffic along this route would stop as soon as news of the fall of Magdeburg arrived, since at that point, the Imperial troops moved south and travel across the southern Saxon plains would have become far too dangerous.
Fast travelers from the lower Main valley, those on horseback or able to afford carriages, would likely manage about 20 to 30 miles a day. If we assume they travel to the east in the week after Passover, they would have passed the Ring of Fire before it happened. Once past, the news of the Ring of Fire would catch up with them only slowly, and if they did hear the news, they would be unlikely to turn back. With good transportation, they would be in a position to flee any soldiers they encountered, so they would likely make it to Poland and would be unlikely to arrive in Grantville.
Slow travelers from Frankfurt and fast travelers leaving later are another story. If we assume travelers on foot or with slow carts for their baggage, they will make from ten to twenty miles a day. Travel would be even slower if they are subsisting off the land within the limits imposed on Jews by Christian law, for example by buying rags and scrap metal to sell to the paper mills and iron foundries along the way.
That from one to three such slow-moving groups would pass through the upper Fränkische Salle valley at about the time of the Ring of Fire, hearing rumor both of the fall of Magdeburg and of the Ring of Fire at some point between Neustadt and Hildburghausen seems not only plausible but likely.
This news would drive them to veer south to avoid Tilly's mercenaries on the Saxon plains and to avoid the new and strange city of Grantville. Working through this schedule suggests that such groups would encounter rumor of the "court Jews" of this new community as they began their dodge to the south, and news that Grantville was actively recruiting refugees and attempting to impose law and order on its little corner of the world could easily reach them as they were about a day's travel from Grantville.
The most likely avenue of approach for such a refugee group would be down the Schwarza valley, which would bring them to the border of the Ring of Fire sometime not too long before or after Shavuos. The festival would force them to camp in one place for a minimum of three consecutive nights, no matter what, and this camp will be either in Grantville, for example, at the refugee camp just being built near the power plant described by the novel 1632, or not too far outside the ring if they are on a somewhat later schedule. However this develops, by the end of Shavuos, they will have heard detailed accounts of the arrival of bands of mercenaries in the plains to the east, and there is a high likelihood that they would elect to stay in the Grantville region.
The interaction between these refugees and the new town of Grantville will be interesting, although an author contemplating writing such a story must solve the problem of including these Jews in the population of Grantville without their comi
ng afoul of the established canon for this series.
Resources for Writers
Those considering writing Jewish characters into their fiction should consult a Jewish calendar for the year they are writing so they can keep their characters' behavior in line with the Jewish liturgical year. There are excellent interactive web sites that will generate custom calendars for any year.
http://www.hebcal.com/hebcal/
http://www.hebrewcalendar.net/
These calendars all show holidays, fast days, and the Torah portion for each Sabbath, as well as the connection between the Jewish and Gregorian dates for that year. It is worth noting that all Jewish months begin with the new moon, so the fourteenth of the month is always a full moon.
If your Jewish characters are moderately observant, they might study the Torah portion for the coming week. If you want to know what pithy biblical quotes they are likely to come up with, read the relevant Torah portion. Ask for the weekly sedrot to be included in a calendar generated by the Hebcal web site listed above, and then click through from the calendar to the biblical text and commentaries from several rabbinical organizations.
Look up the history of the Jewish communities of each nonfictional town that is visited. The Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1901, is entirely available on-line and has well researched entries on the Jewish communities of the world, including many small German communities.
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/
The web site includes a search engine but it is sometimes slow. Unfortunately, for those interested in German cities, there are multiple ways to enter text containing diacritical marks, and as a result, searching for city names containing umlauts is not always easy.
Many German cities have their own historical web sites that also contain a wealth of information. True gems can be found by blind searching with Google. Try searches on the word Jews or Juden plus the city name in question; these will frequently find the Jewish Encyclopedia entry where the built-in search engine did not because Google is much smarter about umlauts.
The Jewish Theological Seminary library has an extensive web site that includes several exhibits that pertain to this era. Their exhibit on culture and costume and on the synagogues of Amsterdam includes some very useful material from the seventeenth century.
http://www.jtsa.edu/library/exhib/pastexhib.shtml
There are a few extraordinarily good works of fiction that portray Jewish life not too far before this era remarkably well. Francis Sherwood's The Book of Splendor, set in the Prague of Rudolf II (1601), does a good job of painting the Jewish community of that time and place in relationship to the larger community. Richard Zimler's The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon paints an intriguing picture of the Sephardic community of Lisbon in the era when the inquisition was on the rise and Jews faced the choice of fleeing or going underground.
IMAGES
Note from Editor:
There are various images, mostly portraits from the time, which illustrate different aspects of the 1632 universe. In the first issue of the Grantville Gazette, I included those with the volume itself. Since that created downloading problems for some people, however, I've separated all the images and they will be maintained and expanded on their own schedule.
If you're interested, you can look at the images and my accompanying commentary at no extra cost. They are set up in the Baen Free Library. You can find them as follows:
1) Go to www.baen.com
2) Select "Free Library" from the blue menu at the top.
3) Once in the Library, select "The Authors" from the yellow menu on the left.
4) Once in "The Authors," select "Eric Flint."
5) Then select "Images from the Grantville Gazette."
Submissions to the magazine
If anyone is interested in submitting stories or articles for future issues of the Grantville Gazette, you are welcome to do so. But you must follow a certain procedure:
1) All stories and articles must first be posted in a conference in Baen's Bar set aside for the purpose, called "1632 Slush." Do not send them to me directly, because I won't read them. It's good idea to submit a sketch of your story to the conference first, since people there will likely spot any major problems that you overlooked. That can wind up saving you a lot of wasted work.
You can get to that conference by going to Baen Books' web site www.baen.com. Then select "Baen's Bar." If it's your first visit, you will need to register. (That's quick and easy.) Once you're in the Bar, the three conferences devoted to the 1632 universe are "1632 Slush," "1632 Slush Comments," and "1632 Tech Manual." You should post your sketch, outline or story in "1632 Slush." Any discussion of it should take place in "1632 Slush Comments." The "1632 Tech Manual" is for any general discussion not specifically related to a specific story.
2) Your story/article will then be subjected to discussion and commentary by participants in the 1632 discussion. In essence, it will get chewed on by what amounts to a very large, virtual writers' group.
You do not need to wait until you've finished the story to start posting it in "1632 Slush." In fact, it's a good idea not to wait, because you will often find that problems can be spotted early in the game, before you've put all the work into completing the piece.
3) While this is happening, the assistant editor of the Grantville Gazette, Paula Goodlett, will be keeping an eye on the discussion. She will alert me whenever a story or article seems to be gaining general approval from the participants in the discussion. There's also an editorial board to which Paula and I belong, which does much the same thing. The other members of the board are Karen Bergstralh, Rick Boatright, and Laura Runkle. In addition, authors who publish regularly in the 1632 setting participate on the board as ex officio members. My point is that plenty of people will be looking over the various stories being submitted, so you needn't worry that your story will just get lost in the shuffle.
4) At that point—and only at that point—do I take a look at a story or article.
I insist that people follow this procedure, for two reasons:
First, as I said, I'm very busy and I just don't have time to read everything submitted until I have some reason to think it's gotten past a certain preliminary screening.
Secondly, and even more importantly, the setting and "established canon" in this series is quite extensive by now. If anyone tries to write a story without first taking the time to become familiar with the setting, they will almost invariably write something which—even if it's otherwise well written—I simply can't accept.
In short, the procedure outlined above will save you a lot of wasted time and effort also.
One point in particular: I have gotten extremely hardnosed about the way in which people use American characters in their stories (so-called "up-timers"). That's because I began discovering that my small and realistically portrayed coal mining town of 3500 people was being willy-nilly transformed into a "town" with a population of something like 20,000 people—half of whom were Navy SEALs who just happened to be in town at the Ring of Fire, half of whom were rocket scientists (ibid), half of whom were brain surgeons (ibid), half of whom had a personal library the size of the Library of Congress, half of whom . . .
Not to mention the F-16s which "just happened" to be flying through the area, the Army convoys (ibid), the trains full of vital industrial supplies (ibid), the FBI agents in hot pursuit of master criminals (ibid), the . . .
NOT A CHANCE. If you want to use an up-time character, you must use one of the "authorized" characters. Those are the characters created by Virginia DeMarce using genealogical software and embodied in what is called "the grid."
You can obtain a copy of the grid from the web site which collects and presents the by-now voluminous material concerning the series, www.1632.org. Look on the right for the link to "Virginia's Up-timer Grid." While you're at it, you should also look further down at the links under the title "Authors' Manual."
You will be paid for any story or factual articl
e which is published. The rates that I can afford for the magazine at the moment fall into the category of "semi-pro." I hope to be able to raise those rates in the future to make them fall clearly within professional rates, but . . . That will obviously depend on whether the magazine starts selling enough copies to generate the needed income. In the meantime, the rates and terms which I can offer are posted below in the standard letter of agreement accepted by all the contributors to this issue.
Standard letter of agreement
Below are the terms for the purchase of a story or factual article (hereafter "the work") to be included in an issue of the online magazine Grantville Gazette, edited by Eric Flint and published by Baen Books.
Payment will be sent upon acceptance of the work at the following rates:
1) a rate of 2.5 cents per word for any story or article up to 15,000 words;
2) a rate of 2 cents a word for any story or article after 15,000 words but before 30,000 words;