Dealing with the Jewish Material Heritage of Late Medieval Ashkenaz

My paper focuses on the Jewish material heritage in Late Medieval Ashkenaz. It asks the question as to what the Christians did with this heritage after they had expelled the Jews from most cities and territories in the Holy Roman Empire. Central questions of the paper are: what did the Christians do with the former Jewish quarters, houses and institutions, for example the synagogues, mikvehs, cemeteries and gravestones? Did the Christians destroy these monuments and replace them by other constructions or did they keep them? If they kept them, in which way did they recontextualize them, i. e. in which contexts and for which purposes did they use the former Jewish buildings or monuments?

Special emphasis will be placed on the possible reasons why the Christians dealt with the Jewish material heritage the way they did. It will be asked, for example, why the Christians built Jewish gravestones into various buildings such as churches or residential buildings. Did this happen for pragmatic reasons alone or did symbolic reasons play a role, as well? Did the Christians want to destroy all material traces of the Jews in order to exterminate all memories of a Jewish past (damnatio memoriae) or was the exact opposite the case: did they preserve the Jews’ material heritage in order to symbolically demonstrate the victory of ecclesia over synagoga? These questions will be dealt with by referring to examples from Southern Germany, mainly.