When most people hear the word “ghetto,” their minds snap straight to images from the Second World War. The Nazis, the barbed wire, the Warsaw uprising. But Jewish ghettos go back centuries before Hitler. Frankfurt am Main in Germany was home to one of the oldest, the Judengasse, or Jews’ Lane. It opened in 1462 and lasted until 1811, and for most of that time it was crowded, filthy, and locked every night like a prison. Yet it was also home to the largest Jewish community in Germany, a center of Jewish scholarship, prayer, and survival in a Christian world that often wanted them gone. The Judengasse is where one of the ugliest episodes of antisemitism before the modern age unfolded, the Fettmilch uprising of 1614. It is a story of class struggle, corruption, religion, and above all, scapegoating. And like most of history’s hard lessons, it is a story that still has something to say to us.
The Jews of Frankfurt had been around since the eleventh century, long before there was a ghetto. The emperor Henry IV granted them privileges in 1074, and for a time Jews lived in the prosperous old city alongside Christians. They even enjoyed freedoms rare in medieval Europe, like being able to travel around the city at will. But toleration in medieval Europe was always conditional. In 1241, violence exploded in what came to be known as the Judenschlacht, the slaughter of the Jews. Over a hundred Jews were killed, including those who had locked themselves inside a tower for safety, which was stormed. The synagogue was plundered, Torah scrolls desecrated. And all this took place even though the emperor had promised protection. A century later, in 1349, as the Black Death spread through Europe, Frankfurt’s Jews were massacred again. An estimated sixty were killed, their homes burned, and Charles IV, the emperor, looked the other way. In fact, he reassigned Jewish taxes to the city itself, essentially rewarding it for letting the mob do its work. It is worth noticing here that this pattern is repeated across Europe: the Jews would be useful as taxpayers and moneylenders, until they became inconvenient, and then the authorities would wink while the mob took care of things.
By 1462, the city took a more systematic approach. Emperor Frederick III decreed that Jews should be moved out of the prosperous center into a confined strip of land outside the walls. The Judengasse was about 330 meters long and only a few meters wide. Three gates locked them in at night, on Sundays, and on Christian holidays. The ghetto grew upward when it could not grow outward. By the sixteenth century, over 3,000 people lived there, stacking houses higher and higher, until the upper floors nearly touched across the street. Contemporary observers called it oppressive and dirty, and they were not wrong. But it was also a place of resilience. Frankfurt’s Jews built synagogues, study halls, and schools. They created a community life, even as the “Judenstättigkeit,” the Jewish code of residence, dictated humiliations like the yellow badge, limited marriages to twelve per year, and capped the number of families at five hundred.
If life inside was tightly controlled, life outside was precarious. Frankfurt’s Jews were locked into moneylending and trade in pawned goods because the guilds barred them from most other work. They served as bankers for craftsmen and nobles alike, which made them indispensable and resented in equal measure. Christians who borrowed from them came to hate their dependence, especially when debts mounted. The guilds, representing craftsmen and small traders, wanted limits on Jewish loans. They also wanted more political power, ecause Frankfurt’s city council was run by a patrician elite who treated commoners like subjects. Corruption was rampant. By the start of the seventeenth century, the city was in debt and its rulers had been embezzling protection money from the Jews. When this all came to light, the guilds erupted.
Enter Vincenz Fettmilch. He was a grocer and gingerbread baker, not a nobleman or a scholar, but a man who knew how to stir up resentment. Fettmilch had been a citizen since 1593, and by 1612 he had become the spokesman of the guilds. The guilds demanded lower grain prices, a public cornmarket, reduced Jewish interest rates, and more influence in government. Their complaints were not entirely wrong. The patricians had mismanaged the city for decades. But Fettmilch made the Jews the face of the problem. In 1612 he arranged for the republication of Martin Luther’s hateful tract On the Jews and Their Lies, even though Fettmilch was a Calvinist. He dug up an old edict from 1349 that had said the emperor would not hold Frankfurt responsible if the Jews perished, which some read as a license for slaughter. Whether he truly believed the Jews were behind Frankfurt’s ills or simply found them a convenient rallying point, Fettmilch understood that nothing unites a discontented crowd like a scapegoat.
The unrest dragged on for two years. In 1613, the corruption of the council was exposed. Frankfurt owed nine and a half tonnes of gold guilders, and money that should have gone to the poor had been pocketed. Fettmilch and the guilds pressed harder, occupying city gates and forcing the resignation of the council in 1614. When Emperor Matthias demanded the council be restored and threatened to put the city under an imperial ban, the situation turned explosive. The guilds had expected imperial support. When it became clear the emperor was against them, they lashed out at the weakest target available: the Jews.
On August 22, 1614, a mob of journeymen stormed the Judengasse, shouting for bread and work. They forced open the gates, fought defenders, killed two Jews and one of their own, and looted the ghetto until midnight. The Jews fled, some hiding in the Christian parts of the city, others running to the cemetery. The damage ran to 170,000 guilders, an enormous sum. The next day Fettmilch ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Frankfurt. About 1,380 men, women, and children left, many finding refuge in Hanau, Höchst, and Offenbach. For the Jews, it was another link in the long chain of expulsion and return. For Fettmilch, it was the high point of his career.
It did not last. The emperor declared Fettmilch and his ringleaders outlaws in October. By November he was under arrest. His followers melted away, and his prestige evaporated. The trial lasted into 1615, and in February 1616 Fettmilch and six others were executed in Rossmarkt square. Their fingers were cut off, their heads displayed on pikes at the city bridge, where they stayed long enough for Goethe to remark on them a century later. Fettmilch’s house was demolished, and a pillar of shame was erected in its place, listing his crimes. That is what became of the great spokesman of the guilds: a head on a spike and a name remembered in infamy.
On the same day Fettmilch died, the Jews returned. February 28, 1616 was 20 Adar on the Hebrew calendar, and under imperial guard they reentered the Judengasse in a festive procession. An imperial eagle was placed on the ghetto gate, reading “Roman Imperial Majesty and the Holy Empire’s Protection.” Their first act was to restore the desecrated synagogue and cemetery. They did not get compensation for their losses. Instead, the new Judenstättigkeit imposed further restrictions: no more than 500 families, only 12 marriages per year, and still barred from most trades. But they did win one small concession. They were permitted to engage in wholesale trade, which would become the basis for families like the Rothschilds to rise in later generations. To the Jews of Frankfurt, the return was celebrated as a holiday called Purim Vinz, named ironically after Vincenz Fettmilch. It was marked every 20 Adar, with songs and a merry march, a story of survival wrung out of humiliation.
The Judengasse lasted another two centuries. Fires in 1711 and 1721 destroyed most of it. In 1796, French bombardment effectively ended the ghetto, and by 1811 it was formally abolished under the reforms of the Grand Duke. The buildings were razed in the nineteenth century, bombed flat in the Second World War, and only rediscovered in the 1980s when construction unearthed the old foundations. Today the Museum Judengasse sits on that ground, preserving the stones of a street that once held a people both trapped and resilient.
The Fettmilch uprising shows us a pattern as old as politics itself. The guilds had legitimate grievances about corruption and inequality. But when the chips were down, they turned their anger not on the powerful patricians, but on the Jews, the smallest and most vulnerable group in the city. They thought they could erase their debts and solve their problems by attacking their neighbors. They believed a baker with populist slogans had the answers. In the end they got nothing. The patricians stayed in charge, the guilds were dissolved, and the Jews, despite everything, came back. The only real losers were the ones who followed Fettmilch into disgrace.
That is why this story matters. It is not just about one ugly pogrom in 1614. It is about the danger of scapegoating, the futility of mob violence, and the way resentment can be weaponized by ambitious men. Antisemitism was not some aberration of the twentieth century. It was woven into the political and social life of Europe for centuries. The Fettmilch uprising is a chilling example, but also a reminder of resilience. The Jews of Frankfurt endured, rebuilt, and even turned the date of their expulsion into a holiday of survival. That is the kind of history we cannot afford to forget.
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