Familianten or Familianten Gesetz was the German term commonly used for the laws and the related record books which regulated the number of Jewish families in the Czech lands in the 18th and 19th centuries.
German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol (Italy), the German-speaking Community of Belgium, and Liechtenstein. It is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg and a co-official language in the Opole Voivodeship in Poland. The languages which are most similar to German are the other members of the West Germanic language branch: Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, Low German/Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, and Yiddish. There are also strong similarities in vocabulary with Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, although those belong to the North Germanic group. German is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English.
The Czech lands or the Bohemian lands are the three historical regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. Together the three have formed the Czech part of Czechoslovakia since 1918 and the Czech Republic since 1 January 1969, which became independent on 1 January 1993.
It was the avowed policy of the government to prevent any increase in the number of Jewish residents in the Czech provinces. When Maria Theresa revoked her edict expelling the Jews from these provinces (1745), it was on the condition that their number should not be increased; even her son Joseph II reasserted (1780-90) the condition. In 1787 a census was taken which showed the number of Jewish families in Bohemia (8,541) and Moravia (5,106). The number permitted in Bohemia was increased to 8,600, in Moravia to 5,400, while in Austrian Silesia 119 were permitted (patent for Moravia, Nov. 17, 1787; for Bohemia, various royal orders in 1788-89; for Silesia, Dec. 15, 1781). In Moravia the number of Familianten was distributed according to congregations, the largest being Nikolsburg with 620; in Bohemia and Austrian Silesia the Familiant was allowed to settle under the same conditions as were other Jews.
Joseph II was Holy Roman Emperor from August 1765 and sole ruler of the Habsburg lands from November 1780 until his death. He was the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Emperor Francis I, and the brother of Marie Antoinette. He was thus the first ruler in the Austrian dominions of the House of Lorraine, styled Habsburg-Lorraine. Joseph was a proponent of enlightened absolutism; however, his commitment to modernizing reforms subsequently engendered significant opposition, which resulted in failure to fully implement his programmes. He has been ranked, with Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia, as one of the three great Enlightenment monarchs. His policies are now known as Josephinism. He died with no sons and was succeeded by his younger brother, Leopold II.
Mikulov is a town in the Moravia, South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic.
The number of marriage permits issued was limited to the number of deaths among the Familianten. An applicant for a permit was required to give surety for the payment of three years' taxes, to prove that he possessed at least 300 florins, to show that he had received a school education, to pass an examination in Jewish religion according to Herz Homberg's text-book, "Bene Zion," and to give evidence that he was at least twenty-four years of age. A first-born son, a school-teacher, or a veteran of the army had precedence over other candidates. The license was issued either by the county or by the provincial authorities (Kreisamt or Gubernium).
Herz Homberg was an Austrian-Jewish educator and writer.
Besides the ordinary Familianten there were those who, in recognition of special merit, were permitted to marry as "supernumeraries". It was a rule, however, that they should be given the first license vacated by death. The law of Francis I (Aug. 3, 1797) permitted Jews who had served as volunteers in the army or who lived exclusively by agriculture or by technical skill to marry without regard to the number of established families. Those who married according to the Jewish law and without license were called Magranten (emigrants), because in order to be legally married they had to emigrate. Their weddings were called "garret-weddings". This law was abolished by the constitution of March 4, 1849, which made all civil and political rights independent of religious belief. It was, however, revived in a different form by a law of March 19, 1853, which declared that section 124 of the civil code, demanding a court license (kreisamtliche Bewilligung) for a Jewish marriage, had not been abrogated by the constitution. The difference between this and the former condition was only the abolition of the fixed number. This law was repealed Nov. 29, 1859. [1]
Francis I was Holy Roman Emperor and Grand Duke of Tuscany, though his wife Maria Theresa effectively executed the real powers of those positions. They were the founders of the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty. From 1728 until 1737 he was Duke of Lorraine. Francis traded the duchy to the ex-Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński in exchange for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as one of the terms ending the War of the Polish Succession in November 1738. The duchy and the ducal title to Lorraine and Bar passed to King Louis XV of France upon Leszczynski's death in 1766, though Francis and his successors retained the right to style themselves as dukes of Lorraine and Bar.
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One other result of the Familianten laws was that the government maintained very precise records of which families lived in which towns. The list of Familianten were collected in the Book of Jewish Familianten (also called "Mannschaftsbücher" in Moravia). Records were collected in 1799 and in 1811 and updated until about 1830. Each record comprised the name of county, registration number of the family in the whole land (based on "copulatio consensus"), the registration number of the family in the county (set up in 1725), name of the father, his wife, his sons and a few other family details.
Zecharias Frankel, also known as Zacharias Frankel was a Bohemian-German rabbi and a historian who studied the historical development of Judaism. He was born in Prague and died in Breslau. Frankel was the founder and the most eminent member of the school of historical Judaism, which advocates freedom of research, while upholding the authority of traditional Jewish belief and practice. This school of thought was the intellectual progenitor of Conservative Judaism.
Jewish emancipation was the external process in various nations in Europe of eliminating Jewish disabilities, e.g. Jewish quotas, to which Jewish people were then subject, and the recognition of Jews as entitled to equality and citizenship rights. It included efforts within the community to integrate into their societies as citizens. It occurred gradually between the late 18th century and the early 20th century. Jewish emancipation followed the Age of Enlightenment and the concurrent Jewish enlightenment. Various nations repealed or superseded previous discriminatory laws applied specifically against Jews where they resided. Before the emancipation, most Jews were isolated in residential areas from the rest of the society; emancipation was a major goal of European Jews of that time, who worked within their communities to achieve integration in the majority societies and broader education. Many became active politically and culturally within wider European civil society as Jews gained full citizenship. They emigrated to countries offering better social and economic opportunities, such as the Russian Empire and France. Some European Jews turned to Socialism, and others to Jewish zionism.
Landesrabbiner are spiritual heads of the Jewish communities of a country, province, or district, particularly in Germany and Austria. The office is a result of the legal condition of the Jews in medieval times when the Jewish communities formed a unit for the purposes of taxation. As the community had to pay certain taxes to the government, the latter had to appoint some one who should be responsible to it for their prompt collection, and who consequently had to be invested with a certain authority. The office of Landesrabbiner had no ecclesiastical meaning until the 18th century, when the various governments began to consider it their duty to care for the spiritual welfare of the Jews. Such ecclesiastical authority, owing to the strictly congregational constitution of the communities, never took root among the Jews.
Jacob Bassevi von Treuenberg was a Bohemian Court Jew and financier. Bassevi, sometimes also written Baschevi, was a son of Avraham Basch who originated from Italy. Early in his life he specialized in trading with silver which was the main component of the coins and currencies at his time. He ultimately became very wealthy, and stood in high favor with the emperors Rudolph II, Matthias, and Ferdinand II, to whom he frequently rendered financial assistance, particularly to Ferdinand, who needed large sums of money for the prosecution of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648).
Moritz Steinschneider was a Bohemian bibliographer and Orientalist. He received his early instruction in Hebrew from his father, Jacob Steinschneider, who was not only an expert Talmudist, but was also well versed in secular science. The house of the elder Steinschneider was the rendezvous of a few progressive Hebraists, among whom was his brother-in-law, the physician and writer Gideon Brecher.
The Lands of the Bohemian Crown, sometimes called Czech lands in modern times, were a number of incorporated states in Central Europe during the medieval and early modern periods connected by feudal relations under the Bohemian kings. The crown lands primarily consisted of the Kingdom of Bohemia, an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire according to the Golden Bull of 1356, the Margraviate of Moravia, the Duchies of Silesia, and the two Lusatias, known as the Margraviate of Upper Lusatia and the Margraviate of Lower Lusatia, as well as other territories throughout its history.
The Leibzoll was a special toll which Jews had to pay in most of the European states in the Middle Ages and up to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
David Friedländer was a German Jewish banker, writer and communal leader.
The history of the Jews in Austria probably begins with the exodus of Jews from Judea under Roman occupation. Over the course of many centuries, the political status of the community rose and fell many times: during certain periods, the Jewish community prospered and enjoyed political equality, and during other periods it suffered pogroms, deportations to concentration camps and mass murder, and antisemitism. The Holocaust drastically reduced the Jewish community in Austria and only 8,140 Jews remained in Austria according to the 2001 census, but other estimates place the current figure at 9,000, 15,000 and 20,000 people, if accounting for those of mixed descent.
Aryanization was the forced expulsion of Jews from business life in Nazi Germany, Axis-aligned states, and their occupied territories. It entailed the transfer of Jewish property into "Aryan" hands in order to "de-Jew the economy".
Nehemiah Hiyya ben Moses Hayyun was a Bosnian Kabalist. His parents, of Sephardic descent, lived in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where probably he was born, although in later life he pretended that he was a Palestinian emissary born in Safed. He received his Talmudic education in Hebron.
Abraham Neuda was an Austrian rabbi.
The history of the Jews in Laupheim began in the first half of the 18th century. Until the second half of the 19th century, the Jewish community in Laupheim, expanded continuously to become the largest of its kind in Württemberg. During this period, the Jewish community gradually assimilated to its Christian surroundings and its members prospered until the beginning of the Nazi-period in 1933. With the deportation of the last remaining Jews in 1942, more than 200 years of Jewish history in Laupheim forcibly came to an end.
Meyer Kayserling was a German rabbi and historian.
Herz Cerfbeer of Medelsheim was a French Jewish philanthropist. He was a contractor to the army, and employed his wealth and his influence with the French government in promoting the material and spiritual welfare of his coreligionists. The government permitted him to settle at Strasburg, in opposition to the wishes of the authorities of that city, who zealously enforced the law excluding Jews.
The history of the Jews in Regensburg, Germany reaches back over 1,000 years. The Jews of Regensburg are part of Bavarian Jewry; Regensburg was the capital of the Upper Palatinate and formerly a free city of the German empire. The great age of the Jewish community in this city is indicated by the tradition that a Jewish colony existed there before the common era; it is undoubtedly the oldest Jewish settlement in Bavaria of which any records exist.
Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races. Such laws were first introduced in North America from the late seventeenth century onwards by several of the Thirteen Colonies, and subsequently by many US states and US territories and remained in force in many US states until 1967. After the Second World War, an increasing number of states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the remaining anti-miscegenation laws were held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States. Similar laws were also enforced in Nazi Germany as part of the Nuremberg laws, and in South Africa as part of the system of Apartheid. In the United States, interracial marriage, cohabitation and sex have been termed "miscegenation" since the term was coined in 1863. Contemporary usage of the term is less frequent, except to refer to historical laws banning the practice.
The history of the Jews in Tudela, Spain goes back well over one thousand years.
The history of the Jews in Hamburg in Germany, is recorded from at least 1590 on. The Jews of Hamburg have lived primarily in the Jewish neighbourhoods of Grindel and New Town, where the Sephardic Community„"Newe Shalom" was established in 1652. Since 1612 there have been toleration agreements with the senate of the prevailingly Lutheran city. Also Reformed Dutch merchants and Anglican Britons made similar agreements before. In these agreements the Jews were not permitted to live in the Inner-City, though were also not required to live in ghettos.
The Province of the Sudetenland was established on 29 October 1918 by former members of the Cisleithanian Imperial Council, the governing legislature of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire. It consisted of German-speaking parts of Moravia, Bohemia and Austrian Silesia, and was meant to become an integral part of the newly proclaimed Republic of German Austria.
The public domain consists of all the creative works to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable.
Isidore Singer was an editor of The Jewish Encyclopedia and founder of the American League for the Rights of Man.