Colmar, J.H. Decker, 1824.
A pogrom near Basel: one of two known copies of appeal to French Government.
Petition from the sixteen members of the Consistoire of Wintzenheim, Alsace. The signatories describe themselves as peaceable and useful citizens, distinguished by their social position and, they dare say, their probity, generally landowners and family men, all sincerely attached to their faith, their country, its laws, and its sovereign, and they claim to speak on behalf of 10,000 Alsatian Jews. The sixteen include Jacob Brunschwig and Moise Hirtz.. This time, trouble had come to the village Jews in the four southernmost counties of the Haut-Rhin, close to where France, Germany and Switzerland meet.
In Huningue, just across the river from Basel, there was a former lawyer named Adrien, disbarred for misappropriating his clients funds, and at Hirsingen there was an even more disreputable former town hall secretary named Boeglin. These two had joined forces to incite the local country-folk against their Jewish neighbors. Adrien and Boeglin had claimed to be ”Royal Commissioners” charged with announcing that the Government had determined ”to destroy an impious race” They claimed further that since most Alsatian Jews lived off usury, all debts to all Jews should be considered cancelled.
Tumultuous rallies took place all over the countryside, in places as obscure as Robentzwiller and Niederanspach. Speeches had been calculated to stir up fanaticism and greed. Petitions had been signed and resolutions passed. Finally, on the day of a fete at Durmenbach, where many peasants from other villages had gathered, a great deal of alcohol was consumed, whereupon the men charged through the streets screaming the most horrible threats and breaking into the houses of their Jewish creditors, demanding the return of any loan agreements they might be holding–on pain of death. At the subsequent hearings at the courthouse in Altkirch, the perpetrators were exonerated. Moreover, the instigators succeeded in rebutting the charge of religious discrimination, a violation of the constitution, with the contention that they had nothing against Judaism, only against Jews.
No such distinction was drawn by one of the judges, who saw fit to express the view that ”in Alsace more than anywhere there reigns the scourge of Judaism, with all the calamities that that entail”
It was against this background that the Consistoire of Wintzenheim, responsible for the Jews of the affected counties, turned to the Secretary of State for the Interior in Paris, requesting his intervention. Their address is remarkable on many levels, not only for the account of the disturbances that it provides. Especially notable is the description provided of strenuous measures that the Consistoire had taken for years to ensure that no Jews, let alone most Jews, charged exorbitant interest rates. Important, too, is the nuanced appraisal provided here for the minister of the successive advances and reversals en route to Jewish civil rights that had occurred under Louis XVIII and Napoleon before him.
Worldcat and other bibliographic utilities record one copy only, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
pp. 35. Period plain blue paper wrappers, spine starting.
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Lot #166