Swiss Jews
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 17,500 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Zurich, Geneva, Lengnau (historically) | |
| Languages | |
| Swiss German, Standard German, Swiss French, Swiss Italian, Hebrew, Yiddish | |
| Religion | |
| Judaism |
History of the Jews in Switzerland reaches back at least a thousand years. Jews and Judaism have been present in the territory of what is now Switzerland since before the emergence of the medieval Old Swiss Confederacy in the 15th century.
Switzerland has Europe's tenth-largest Jewish community, with about 17,500 Jews, roughly 0.2% of the population. About one-third of the Jewish community lives in the Zürich metropolitan area. As of 2009, there were 38 synagogues in the country.
A ring with a Menorah depiction found in Augusta Raurica (Kaiseraugst, Switzerland) in 2001 attests to Hebrew presence in Germania Superior. The Encyclopaedia Judaica mentioned a first documentation in 1214. In the Middle Ages, as in many places in Europe, they frequently suffered persecution, for example in 1294 in Bern, when many Jews of the city were executed and the survivors expelled under the pretext of the murder of a Christian boy. Another pogrom occurred among other cities in Zürich in 1249; at the location of the former synagogue at Froschaugasse 4 in the former Neumarkt quarter, a plaque was mounted.
Jews were banished from Swiss towns in the 1620s, and from 1776, they were allowed to reside exclusively in two villages, Lengnau and Oberendingen, in what is now the canton of Aargau. At the close of the 18th century, the 553 Jews in these villages represented almost the entire Jewish population in Switzerland. An important source for the situation of Swiss Jews in the 18th century is the 1768 Sammlung Jüdischer Geschichten by Johann Caspar Ulrich.
Beginning in 1603, the deceased Jews of the Surbtal communities were buried on a small Rhein river island, the so-called Judenäule ("Jew's island") which was leased by the Jewish community. As the island was repeatedly flooded and devastated, in 1750 the Surbtal Jews asked the Tagsatzung to establish a cemetery in the vicinity of their communities in the Surb valley. Once a year, the communal chevra kadisha (hevra kadishah, Aramaic: חברא קדישא, Ḥebh'ra Qaddisha, meaning "holy society") visited the graves on the island. In 1750 the Tagsatzung 'allowed' the Jewish communities of Endingen and Lengnau to acquire woodland on a small hill between Endingen and Lengnau to establish the Endingen cemetery. The cemetery has been expanded several times; based on an 1859 agreement, two-fifths of the cemetery belong to the Israelite community of Lengnau, and three-fifths to the Israelite community of Endingen.
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Wikipedia