Museum Judengasse

Museum Judengasse at Battonnstraße 47 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, stands over the excavated remains of the Judengasse, the Jewish ghetto of the city. The Frankfurt council ordered the creation of the Judengasse in 1462, forcing the Jewish community to live in a narrow street outside the old walls, and the quarter continued until the end of the 18th century. The area was damaged in 1796 when French bombardment set much of the ghetto on fire, and the walls were taken down in the following decades. Foundations of several houses and a ritual bath, the mikveh, were uncovered in the 1980s during construction work for a utility building, which led to a public debate about whether and how to preserve the remains. The result is the museum opened in 1992 as a branch of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. Visitors can walk among the exposed foundations, cellars and a mikveh, while displays explain daily life in the dense quarter, the communal institutions, trade and the crowded housing. The families of the ghetto included the ancestors of the Rothschild banking dynasty, as the Rothschild founder Mayer Amschel was born in the Judengasse in 1744. The museum presents its material through archaeological finds, objects of daily life, ritual items and documents, rather than through a grand chronological story, and it frames the ghetto in the broader history of Jewish life in Frankfurt. The setting is small and atmospheric, with the building designed around the remains. It shows how a minority was segregated and also how the community built its own institutions. The museum is a good counterpart to the Jüdisches Museum on the Main, and visitors often combine the two on the same day. It is a short walk from the Konstablerwache station and the Dom, and hours should be checked on the museum website before going.