One of Germany’s oldest communities
Trier — Augusta Treverorum — was one of the most important cities of the Roman Empire north of the Alps and an imperial residence in late antiquity. An edict of the Emperor Constantine from 321 attests a Jewish community in nearby Cologne. Current scholarship assumes that a Jewish community also existed in Trier already in Roman times. It is first mentioned in documentary sources in 1066, in a town chronicle.
In the early 14th century around 300 Jews lived in Trier in their own quarter around the Judengasse (“Jews’ lane”) near the Hauptmarkt. Some 60 buildings formed the heart of medieval Jewish life there, with a synagogue, mikveh and community institutions.
Crusade, plague and expulsion
In the spring of 1096 Trier became the scene of one of the most severe pogroms of the First Crusade. Archbishop Egilbert at first tried to protect the community, then pressed it to accept baptism; several Trier Jews chose death instead. The plague pogroms of 1348 to 1418 culminated in one of the darkest chapters of Trier’s Jewish history. In 1418 Archbishop Otto of Ziegenhain expelled the Jews entirely from the city. Only in the 17th century — around 1610/1620 — was resettlement again possible. In 1651 the Jewish cemetery was laid out in the Weidegasse outside the city walls.
The synagogue on the Zuckerberg (1859–1938)
With legal emancipation in the 19th century the Trier community grew visibly. The foundation stone was laid on the Zuckerberg on 6 October 1857; on 9 September 1859 the new synagogue was consecrated. It was regarded as one of the most significant Jewish houses of worship in the Rhineland.
On 9 and 10 November 1938 the synagogue and its furnishings, together with the sacred objects, were demolished and plundered. One of its broken stones was used as the foundation stone for the new building on Kaiserstraße, consecrated in 1957.
The Shoah in Trier
Reiner Nolden documented the names of Trier’s victims in his Vorläufiges Gedenkbuch für die Juden von Trier 1938–1943 (Preliminary Memorial Book for the Jews of Trier 1938–1943; 1994; 2nd edition 1998). Deportations to the extermination camps in the East wiped out the once-flourishing community. One of the best-known family fates is that of the Loeb family: Otto Loeb fled to London in 1937; his parents Sigmund and Nelly Loeb went to the Netherlands in 1938, where they survived the Westerbork camp.
A new beginning after 1945
After the war a small Jewish community came together again in Trier. In 1957 the modest new synagogue on Kaiserstraße was consecrated; a stone from the old synagogue is set into the masonry. With the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union from the 1990s onwards the community grew once more. Today it numbers around 500 members; some 99 per cent of them have a Soviet background.
Research and remembrance
The Arye-Maimon-Institut für Geschichte der Juden (Arye Maimon Institute for the History of the Jews) was founded at the University of Trier in 1996/97 and is devoted to research on the Jewish history of Western and Central Europe, above all in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. It maintains a bibliography of Jewish history with more than 16,000 entries and publishes several scholarly series.
The Stadtmuseum Simeonstift (Simeonstift City Museum) documents the city’s Jewish history in dedicated sections; an online “Spurensuche” (tracing of traces), „Orte jüdischen Lebens in Trier“ (“Places of Jewish life in Trier”), opens it up multimedially. A photographic collection on the Loeb family is preserved in the city archive; a municipal podcast was devoted to their story in 2021. In 1958 the city named a street in Trier-Nord after Sigmund Loeb.