New museum in Munich looks at history of city's Jewish community

For nearly 300 years there were no Jews in Munich. None.

Those 300 years without one Jew is made real at Munich's newest museum, Judisches Museum Munchen (Jewish Museum of Munich), where displays are presented in both the German and English languages. The museum opened a year ago.

On the main floor of the museum a timeline stretches along one long, white wall. When visitors walk past the timeline, they can't help but feel the length of all those years without one Jew in Munich.

It seems that in 1442, Duke Albert III ordered all Jews expelled from the Dutchy of Bavaria. (That's where Munich is located, in the Bavarian portion of what is now Germany.) A handful of Jews were allowed back in 1725.

According to city records, Jews from Vienna were invited back as "court Jews," or moneylenders. Christians believed that collecting interest was a sin, but paying it was not — and, in 1725, the royalty was in need of some loans

The timeline also shows how Jews were persecuted for several hundred years before their 1442 eviction. They were blamed for everything from killing Christian babies to causing the plague. (Of course in those days no one understood how the plague was actually spread, so it was said that the Jews put a plague-inducing poison in the town's well.)

When something went wrong in medieval Munich, the townsfolk knew what to do. They gathered in a mob to burn the synagogue. Sometimes they killed a few Jews as well.

As you keep walking along the timeline, you learn there were only 20 Jews in Munich in 1750, but that in 1777, under the reign of an elector named Karl Theodor, the bans were lifted and thousands of Jews moved in. In 1871, with the unification of Germany, Jews were granted full rights of citizenship.

The stark design of the timeline, and the way it requires a bit of a stroll to view it, gives the visitor a sense of space. Your mind is freed a bit in this museum. It is almost as if you are encouraged to let your thoughts wander.

Americans who stroll along the timeline might find themselves realizing that, in 1777, we were fighting for independence from a country that treated us as second class. We might realize that Jews in Germany got citizenship at about the same time that slavery was abolished in the U.S..

There are other displays in the museum as well. The displays are few and simple and, like the timeline, all the more dramatic for their simplicity.