Jewish community of Speyer

The history of the Jews in Speyer reaches back over 1,000 years. In the Middle Ages, the city of Speyer (formerly Spira), Germany, was home to one of the most significant Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire. Its significance is attested to by the frequency of the Ashkenazi Jewish surname Shapiro/Shapira and its variants Szpira/Spiro/Speyer. After many ups and downs throughout history, the community was totally wiped out in 1940 during the Holocaust. With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 Jews again settled in Speyer and a first assembly took place in 1996.

The earliest reference to Jewish settlement along the Rhine dates from the year 321 in Cologne, and it is assumed that Jews also lived in Speyer in Late Antiquity. With the collapse of state and church administration in the Migration Period and the decline of the urban Roman lifestyle, it is also assumed that Jewish communities dispersed. Jews resettled in the Rhine area coming from southern France where Roman life had more or less remained intact. Traveling Jewish merchants certainly would have had dependencies in Rhenish towns, even though the first branches are only mentioned in 906 for Mainz, and 960 for Worms. With the construction of Speyer Cathedral, beginning in 1032, Speyer emerged as one of the major towns along the Rhine. The first records of Jews in Speyer appear in the 1070s. They were members of the renowned Kalonymos family of Mainz, which had migrated a century before from Italy. Other Jews from Mainz had possibly also settled in Speyer.

The actual history of the Jews in Speyer started in 1084, when Jews fleeing from pogroms in Mainz and Worms took refuge with their relatives in Speyer. They possibly came at the instigation of bishop Rüdiger Huzmann (1073–1090), who invited a larger number of Jews to live in his town with the expressed approval of emperor Henry IV. In his privilege or charter (Freiheitsbrief) for the Jews, the bishop wrote:

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