Floor tiles from the medieval synagogue

It is not known when the first Jews settled in present-day Austria. An independent Jewish community with a synagogue and cemetery probably did not exist until the early thirteenth century. The celebrated rabbi Izchak bar Moshe made it into a center of scholarship, and the culturally and economically flourishing community became one of the most important in the German speaking world. It came to a traumatic end with the destruction, plundering, forced baptism, torture, and persecution of the first Vienna Geserah (= catastrophe, doom). In March 1421 over 200 Jews were burnt on Erdberger Lände. The nine floor tiles are from the medieval synagogue, whose foundation walls were excavated in the 1990s. They can be visited today at our second museum site on Judenplatz, which focuses on medieval Jewish Vienna.