Freiberg

Margrave Henry the Illustrious issued a "Judenordnung" in 1265, which assured the Jews in the margraviate, to which Freiberg belonged, a largely private-law equality with Christian citizens and the almost unimpeded practice of their religion.

This presupposes a considerable Jewish settlement already in the first decades of Freiberg's city foundation. The concession to possess in the synagogue (the medieval "Judenschule") a religious and legal place of its own, certainly indicates that the early medieval Jewish community in Freiberg may also have produced a flourishing religious cult tradition. The existence of a larger Jewish settlement in Freiberg, with great probability also a synagogue of its own, is finally also from the designation "Judenberg" for the area around today's Lange Straße, between Poststraße and Annaberg, which has been handed down into the 18th century.

With the beginning of the 15th century, the until then more or less peacefully regulated coexistence of Christian and Jewish population in and around Freiberg broke up. The mood towards the Jewish population deteriorated rapidly. Accusations of "usury" and religious accusations formed the pretext for blaming the emerging crisis of silver mining in Freiberg and thus of the town on a scapegoat, which was in any case only a makeshift protected "foreign" minority. In any case, the Jews of Freiberg became the first victims of the omnipresent crisis. Their property was confiscated. Finally, the mining ordinances of Electors August of 1554 and Christian I of 1589 expressly forbade Jews to reside in Saxon mining towns. From the 16th until well into the 18th century, Jews were not allowed to settle anywhere in Saxony, as in many other German towns. (Source: Excerpts from the paper: Jewish Settlement in Freiberg after the Founding of the City; see link below)