Jewish lenders in Zurich

The first community and the house at Brunngasse 8

Jews are documented in Swiss towns from the second half of the twelfth century, first in Geneva, then from 1213 in Basel and subsequently in Zurich, St Gall and other towns. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland names moneylending, pawnbroking and medicine as their principal activities. It notes that they were obliged to grant loans to the inhabitants of the towns in which they lived and paid special levies such as safe-conduct fees and the Leibzoll.¹ In Zurich the first community existed from about the middle of the thirteenth century to 1349.² It lived in the area of the present Froschaugasse and Brunngasse in the Niederdorf, close to the Neumarkt, where the synagogue stood.³

The best-known testimony to this community is the house Zum Brunnenhof at Brunngasse 8. During renovation work in 1996, wall paintings were discovered in a hall on the first floor, which stylistic analysis dates to around 1330.⁴ The paintings show a round dance of men and women with musicians on the east wall, a falcon hunt with mounted figures on the west wall and an archer on the south wall, framed by a ceiling frieze, a zone of coats of arms and a painted drapery. Of an estimated 84 coats of arms, about 21 can be identified, many of them belonging to noble families of the region and the Empire.⁵ The shields bear Hebrew inscriptions that were part of the original design, identifying the families to which they belonged.⁶ Because the motifs are drawn from the secular courtly culture of the Christian environment, the city archaeologists conclude that the owners, a distinguished and wealthy Jewish family, used the same artistic language as the local elite in order to present themselves as part of the ruling class of the town.⁷

The owners of the house were the widow Minne and her sons Moses and Gumprecht. Minne, documented from 1324 onwards, appears in a contract of 1332 that records a dispute over a fence with a Christian neighbour, Johann Meis.⁸ The family’s business was lending. In 1329 Minne’s family, together with the Jew Süsskind (in the sources Susman), lent 950 marks of silver to Count Johann of Habsburg-Laufenburg, lord of Rapperswil, a sum which Wild and Böhmer convert to 4,750 pounds of pennies and compare with the value of several estates or whole villages.⁹ Moses, the son, is probably identical with Rabbi Moses ben Menachem, documented in 1347 as a schoolmaster, whose glosses on the Sefer Mitzvot Katan (the “Semak”) circulated widely under the name of the Zürcher Semak and are still consulted.¹⁰ The combination of scholarship and finance in a single family was characteristic of the Ashkenazi elite of the period and deserves emphasis: the lenders of Zurich were also the bearers of a learned religious culture of European significance.

The debtors of the first community included nobles, towns and the city of Zurich itself. Anzidei lists, for the period from 1304 to 1346, claims of a Zurich Jewess against the city of Würzburg for 100 pounds, of Zurich Jews against the Schaffhausen nobleman Walter von Eschenbach for 89 marks, and the claim of 950 marks against the count of Rapperswil. The average small claim amounted to about six pounds. The city of Zurich owed its Jews 275 pounds in 1343, 1,761 marks plus 85 gulden of interest in 1346 and, in 1348, 250 gulden to a lender called Nathan and 20 gulden to a woman called Belen. These figures show that the Jewish lenders of Zurich financed consumption and small business as well as the public expenditure of the city and the politics of regional nobles. Admission to the town was subject to a payment of ten marks of silver, with the same sum due on departure.¹¹

The persecution of 1349

The Black Death reached the region in 1348 and 1349. Across the Upper Rhine and the Swiss towns, rumours that the Jews had poisoned the wells led to massacres. The Historical Dictionary counts at least 28 Jewish communities in the territory of present-day Switzerland that were destroyed in pogroms between 1348 and 1350, noting that Bern played an active role in spreading the accusations.¹² In Zurich the members of the community were burned on 23 February 1349.¹³

The economic consequences were regulated with a cold precision. A settlement of 5 September 1349 declared all debts owed by Christians to the murdered Jews to be extinguished, provided for the sale of Jewish property to meet inheritance claims, allowed surviving women and children to retain some assets and assigned the remainder to the crown. By 1352 the survivors had accepted compensation and renounced further claims.¹⁴ The SRF account of the persecution notes that the debts Christians owed to Jews were simply cancelled and that Rudolf Brun, the first burgomaster, is said to have tolerated the persecution and profited from the confiscations.¹⁵ Whatever the degree of Brun’s personal involvement, the financial logic of the pogrom is unmistakable. The debtors of the Jews, among them the city itself, were freed from their obligations by the death of their creditors. The house at Brunngasse 8 passed to the Knights Hospitaller.¹⁶

Readmission, taxation and expulsion

Jewish lenders returned to Zurich within a few years. A letter of protection of 25 February 1354 admitted Jews again on terms which Anzidei describes as surprisingly favourable, a sign that the city urgently needed credit. Later agreements included tax exemptions of one to four years.¹⁷ The second community, which existed until 1436, lived under a regime of individual letters of protection (Schutzbriefe, Judenbriefe) which fixed the period of residence, the annual tax and the conditions of lending, and which had to be renewed regularly. The agreement of 1354 allowed Jews to sell only unredeemed or depreciated pledges. From 1377 the letters provided protection against being summoned before foreign courts. In 1404, however, Jews lost the right to testify against Christians in court, a serious impediment to the enforcement of their claims.¹⁸

The fiscal value of the second community to the city was considerable. According to Anzidei, the Jews of Zurich, who amounted to less than one per cent of the population, paid 638 gulden in taxes in 1404–1405, over ten per cent of the city’s revenue. The principal taxpayer, Lang Smaria, paid 150 gulden a year, whereas about ninety per cent of Christian taxpayers paid less than one pound. In addition the city exacted extraordinary “gifts”: 148 gulden in 1393 and 1,500 gulden in 1402. Around 1397 visiting Jews paid a guest tax of one gulden per night. A burial fee of one gulden was due in 1423 for non-resident Jews buried in Zurich. On top of these civic levies came the imperial taxes: the “golden penny” introduced in 1342, one gulden a year from every Jew over twelve with property of at least twenty gulden, and the “third penny” of 1414, one third of Jewish property, demanded by Sigismund for his coronation and wars.¹⁹

The civic records reveal a legal environment in which Jewish lenders were continuously before the courts. Anzidei’s profiles of individual lenders of the second community, among them Mössli of Nuremberg (in Zurich from 1379 to 1394) and Vifli of Villingen (1378–1400), show men who appeared before the council scores of times, were fined heavily and in one case murdered on the road.²⁰ Lang Smaria, the richest of them, bore about three quarters of all fines imposed on Jews. The volume of Jewish lending in the second community, estimated at around 20,000 gulden across some 3,000 recorded loans between 1376 and 1436, was modest compared with the first community and declined over time. The administrative procedures of the city added their own burdens: debt enforcement required appearances on Saturday, which conflicted with the Sabbath and obliged Jewish creditors to employ Christian agents.²¹

In 1423 the council decided on the complete expulsion of the Jews. Although the decision was reversed in 1424, only four families were readmitted. The final expulsion came in 1436, after which the synagogue was converted to residential use.²² From then until the nineteenth century Jews were not permitted to reside in Zurich. Repeated in 1489, 1675–1676 and 1788, the prohibitions ended only with the cantonal law of 3 March 1862, which removed the restrictions on trade and settlement.²³ In 1489 the Confederate Diet resolved to expel all Jews from the Confederation with effect from 1491.²⁴ The expulsion from Zurich in 1436 coincided with a period in which the city’s own credit instruments, annuities and pledges, had become sufficient for its needs and the Christian population no longer depended on Jewish pawnbroking to the same extent. The history of the Jewish community of Zurich is thus also a history of the substitution of one credit system for another: as the Rentenkauf and municipal borrowing matured, the city could dispense with the lenders whose services it had once solicited by letters of protection.

The memory of this community has returned to public life only recently. Today the museum Schauplatz Brunngasse operates at Brunngasse 8, where the city has opened the hall with its paintings to visitors.²⁵ A proposal of 1997 to rename the Rudolf-Brun-Brücke after Moses ben Menachem was rejected, although the city named a lane the Synagogengasse and placed a memorial plaque to the victims of the pogrom at Froschaugasse 4.²⁶ For a financial centre that has in recent decades had to confront its own role in the twentieth-century history of Jewish assets, the recovery of this medieval history carries weight. It reminds the reader that the earliest professional finance in Zurich was carried on by people whose property rights were contingent on the goodwill of the authorities, and whose claims could be extinguished by political decision.

Notes

1. HLS, “Judentum”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011376/2016-02-01/. ↩
2. Anzidei, “Zürich, die Juden und das Geld” (as above), which treats the period 1250–1349 as that of the first community. ↩
3. Wikipedia, “Neumarkt, Zurich”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neumarkt,_Zurich: the former building “Zur Judenschule” at Froschaugasse 4 housed the medieval synagogue, called “Judenschuol” in 1363. It was excavated archaeologically in 2002, and a plaque marks the site. ↩
4. Stadt Zürich, Stadtarchäologie, “Brunngasse 8”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/archaeologie/stadt/fenster/brunngasse.html. ↩
5. Dölf Wild and Roland Böhmer, “Die spätmittelalterlichen Wandmalereien im Haus ‘Zum Brunnenhof’ in Zürich”, offprint from Zürcher Denkmalpflege, Stadt Zürich, Bericht 1995/96, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/web/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/stadtarchaeologie/publikationen/aufsaetze/1997_Wild_Boehmer_MalereienBrunngasse8.pdf. ↩
6. Stadt Zürich, “Brunngasse 8” (as above), and “Brunngasse 8”, Jüdische Allgemeine, https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/juedische-welt/brunngasse-8/, which describes the 76 m² hall and the Hebrew inscriptions applied with the original preparatory work. ↩
7. Stadt Zürich, “Brunngasse 8” (as above). ↩
8. Wild and Böhmer (as above) for the documentation from 1324; Jüdische Allgemeine, “Brunngasse 8” (as above), for the 1332 fence dispute with Johann Meis. ↩
9. Wild and Böhmer (as above); Jüdische Allgemeine, “Brunngasse 8” (as above), which names “the Jew Susman” as co-lender. Anzidei (as above) refers to the same claim of 950 marks as owed by the count of Rapperswil. ↩
10. Wild and Böhmer (as above); SRF, “Judenverfolgung – ein dunkles Kapitel Zürcher Geschichte” (31 January 2022), https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/judenverfolgung-ein-dunkles-kapitel-zuercher-geschichte. ↩
11. Anzidei (as above). ↩
12. HLS, “Judentum” (as above). ↩
13. SRF (as above); Jüdische Allgemeine, “Brunngasse 8” (as above), which reports that most of the Jewish families were burned on 23 February 1349 under the accusation of having poisoned the wells and so caused the plague. ↩
14. Anzidei (as above). ↩
15. SRF (as above). ↩
16. Wild and Böhmer (as above). ↩
17. Anzidei (as above). The HLS article “Judentum” (as above) likewise records the rapid resettlement of Zurich around 1354. ↩
18. Anzidei (as above). ↩
19. Anzidei (as above). ↩
20. Anzidei (as above), who reports that Mössli appeared before the magistrates more than eighty times and was fined 600 gulden, and that Vifli was killed in 1400 by the knight Götz von Hünenberg on the Glatt. ↩
21. Anzidei (as above). ↩
22. Anzidei (as above) for 1423, 1424 and 1436; HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/, which dates the end of the community to 1436. ↩
23. Anzidei (as above). ↩
24. HLS, “Judentum” (as above). ↩
25. Stadt Zürich, “Brunngasse 8” (as above), with information on the museum “Schauplatz Brunngasse” and access to the paintings. ↩
26. Manuel Diener, “Die Moses-ben-Menachem-Brücke”, zurichstories.org (Schauplatz Brunngasse), https://www.zurichstories.org/Brunngasse8/Die-Moses-ben-Menachem-Br%C3%BCcke/index.html, on the postulate of the municipal councillor Dominik Schaub (1997), its rejection, the naming of the Synagogengasse and the memorial plaque at Froschaugasse 4. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.