Documents on Jewish History in Southern Austria 1438-1457

Austria has an extremely rich tradition of documents on Jewish history in the Middle Ages. The endeavour of publishing this source material, which is indispensable for research into Austria`s medieval Jewish history, as a multi-volume series of regesten (summaries of the legally relevant content) has been ongoing at the Institute for Jewish History in Austria for many years. The sources for today`s federal territory were processed up to 1437 in the course of previous FWF-sponsored projects; the project Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in Südösterreich 1438-1457 continues this work for the present-day provinces of Styria and Carinthia up to 1457. For this purpose, charters and contemporary narrative sources with a Jewish connection (persons, buildings such as synagogues, legal provisions, etc.) are being collected and processed for academic research, including numerous documents that have not yet been published or have been published without regard to the Jewish aspect. The sources will be researched for in archives and libraries in Austria and abroad, and already published sources will be integrated into the collection. The publication will consist of a chronological series of summaries; Hebrew sources will be presented in full text and translated into German. Commentaries on each source and a comprehensive index will make the summaries more accessible for research. For the period covered by the planned volume, namely the first decades of the reign of Duke Friedrich V (1440 King Friedrich IV, 1452 Emperor Friedrich III), there are hardly any source collections on Jewish history available, so that little is known about Friedrich`s early policy towards the Jewish population of Styria and Carinthia. The collection of sources will shed light on events such as the expulsion of the Jews of Graz in 1438, the routes taken by the expellees and their resettlement in 1447 better understandable and will reveal changes in the social and legal position of the Jewish inhabitants before and after the expulsion. Even less is known about the Jewish policy of Friedrich`s brother Albrecht VI, whose Styrian possessions included the Jewish communities of Judenburg and Voitsberg. The material processed in the project will provide a basis for studies on Albrecht`s Jewish policy and the extent to which it was affected by his conflict with Frederick. Large Jewish settlements apart from Graz existed in the area of Lower Styria. Israel Isserlein ben Petachja, one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the late Middle Ages, lived in Maribor from about 1435 to 1445. The expected larger number of surviving sources will provide insights into Jewish-Christian interactions such as the Styrian Jewish Court, a court with equal representation of Jews and Christians that existed in most towns, and will also make it possible to trace individual persons over a longer period of time.