The Jewish Diaspora

Expulsion

Expulsion from Austria (the Wiener Gesera)

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1421Austria (Vienna) → Poland (Crown lands)

Why it happened

Duke Albert V, short of money for his war on the Hussites and pressed by anti-Jewish Vienna theologians, seized on a 1420 host-desecration charge at Enns to order the arrest of every Austrian Jew.123

The migration

On 23 May 1420 Albert V had every Jew in his lands arrested at once; the poor were driven down the Danube, the wealthy imprisoned, and children were seized for forced baptism—prompting Pope Martin V to forbid baptizing children under twelve without parental consent.4 Besieged in the Or-Sarua synagogue on the Judenplatz, some Jews chose kiddush ha-Shem, and Rabbi Jonah set it ablaze.5 On 12 March 1421 the roughly 200 survivors—by the Hebrew Wiener Gesera 92 men and 120 women—were burned on the Gänseweide at Erdberg; Encyclopaedia Judaica counts 270 dead.41 Albert then barred Jews from Austria, confiscated their property, and had synagogue stones built into the new University of Vienna.51 Austria became notorious in Jewish memory as Erez ha-Damim, the bloodstained land; expelled communities drifted east through Bohemia and Moravia toward Poland-Lithuania, which was becoming the heartland of Jewry.16

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomal (whole-genome sequencing, IBD segment analysis)Whole-genome sequencing inferred a recent bottleneck of about 350 individuals7 roughly 25–32 generations ago, followed by rapid exponential expansion.7 This population-wide signal does not identify Austrian expellees or establish that the 1421 expulsion caused the expansion.

Sources

  1. BEncyclopaedia Judaica. 2007. Austria. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (via Jewish Virtual Library) link
  2. BEncyclopaedia Judaica. 2007. Vienna. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (via Encyclopedia.com) link
  3. BKurrein V. 1931. Die Mesnerin von Enns. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden Oberösterreichs. Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 3 171–179.
  4. BKrauss S. 1920. Die Wiener Geserah vom Jahre 1421. Wilhelm Braumüller, Vienna link
  5. BBaron SW. 1965. A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Vol. 10: Late Middle Ages and Era of European Expansion (1200–1650): On the Empire's Periphery. Columbia University Press, New York
  6. CJewish Virtual Library. 2026. Poland Virtual Jewish History Tour. Jewish Virtual Library (AICE) link
  7. ACarmi S, Hui KY, Kochav E, et al.. 2014. Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins. Nature Communications 5 4835. doi:10.1038/ncomms5835