1st – 11th century: from Vindobona to Vienna

The history of the Jewish Square, which today houses the predominantly Baroque building Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit, begins when the Romans founded a legionary camp and the colony of Vindobona on this site between 15 BC and the 1st century AD.

In the immediate vicinity of the Praetorium, which at the time divided Judenplatz in two, stood the buildings of the Praetorian Guard. Relics from antiquity can still be found in the vaulted cellars of the building, which were carefully excavated during the restoration of the basement. Evidently the building at that time was well below the level of the building today. Support beams and floor fragments point to the Roman era.

On the site of today’s Viennese old town near the Danube, the Romans built a castrum, a fortified military camp, to secure the borders of the province of Pannonia, which extended as a surveillance area from Castra Regina, today’s Regensburg, to Singidunum, today’s Belgrade. The town of Vindobona in what is now the third municipal district of Vienna was connected to this. The course of the wall and the streets of the camp are still visible today in the streets of the first municipal district. The Romans remained in what is today Vienna until the 5th century. Some well-preserved remains of wall paintings and stucco fragments from the quarters of the camp commander, the legatus legionis, were discovered in the eastern part of the Jewish Square.

The castrum existed until the beginning of the 5th century when it was finally abandoned by the army. Although traces of Roman settlements also end at this time, Vindobona was probably not entirely destroyed or abandoned. A residual population continued living there until the early Middle Ages. The remaining Roman buildings were then covered up or cleared away by people stealing the stones, including Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit. Only the basement area remained.

The Berghof, a farmyard for viticulture which emerged as the core of a remaining settlement on the former Roman territory of Vindobona, became the centre of early medieval Vienna. The Berghof was located in the area of Hoher Markt, Marc-Aurel-Strasse, Sterngasse, and Judengasse, in the immediate vicinity of St. Rupert’s Church (Ruprechtskirche), the oldest church in the city still existing in its basic form, and was only 200 meters from today’s Judenplatz. It is therefore likely that this area around the Jewish Square remained inhabited. According to the sources of the poet and chronicler Jans der Enikel (ca. 1230-40- after 1302), the Berghof is said to have been under pagan rule.

12th – 15th century: From Vienna’s Jewish quarter to the bloody Geserah

Like other cities in medieval Europe, Vienna had a Jewish quarter, the relative isolation of which was by no means to be regarded as an exclusion initially. The so-called Judenstadt, the core of which was on today’s Judenplatz, known as the Schulhof until 1421, was first mentioned as Schulhof der Juden (the schoolyard of the Jews) in 1294 in its function as the centre of the medieval Jewish quarter. The Judenstadt stretched north to the Gothic church Maria am Gestade (Mary at the Shore), the west side was bordered by the Tiefer Grabe, the east side was bordered by the Tuchlauben, and the south side by the Platz Am Hof. The ghetto comprised 70 houses, arranged in such a way that their rear walls formed a closed boundary wall. These buildings were wood constructions built over the Roman foundations. The Judenstadt could be entered through four gates. The square consisted of the synagogue, the only stone building among the private and community houses and which occupied a third of the square in the west, as well as the hospital, the rabbi’s house and the Jewish school. Renowned rabbis taught and worked here, turning the city into a hub of Jewish knowledge. The Schulhof was surrounded by fifteen houses and five streets led into the square.

The rabbi Isaac ben Moses (also called Isaac Or Zarua or the Riaz) worked in Vienna from around 1260. One of his major works, known as the Or Zarua (in English “light is sown” or “the seeds of light”) is the name given to the synagogue built on Judenplatz. The area on which the building Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit stands today consisted of two wooden houses which were listed with the numbers 342A and 342 in 1421 after the abolition of the Jewish quarter. The exact function of the two buildings or who inhabited them is not documented. However, the immediate proximity to the adjacent Misrachi-Haus, today Judenplatz number 8, suggests that the buildings were community halls that belonged to the synagogue and thus most probably played a religious rather than a secular role.

With the start of the Crusades, however, anti-Jewish tendencies intensified, and the social and legal situation of the Jews, who had practically equal rights up to that point, deteriorated rapidly. Reports of alleged ritual murders of Christians, host desecration, and the poisoning of wells that caused plague incited the superstitious population against Judaism. Violent attacks increased and led to the first persecution of Jews in Austria in 1338.

At the beginning of the 15th century the situation of the Jews in Austria further deteriorated. An incisive event was the fire in the Jewish quarter which broke out in the synagogue on the Schulhof on 5 November 1406. At that time, a fire endangered the entire city. The cause of the fire remained unknown, but the Jews were held responsible. There were widespread looting and rioting against the residents of the quarter, not least because of the fire-related loss of the citizens’ valuables pledged to Jewish pawnbrokers. The prosperity and economic importance of the Jewish community were severely affected by the fire. The Jews were increasingly seen as a threat to the city.

In 1411, at the age of fourteen, Albert V (Albrecht V.)was declared to be “of age” and immediately levied draconian taxes on the Jews to cover the costs of the new court and enable the completion of the tower of the St. Stephan’s Cathedral. Due to the religiously motivated Hussite Wars (1419 – 1436), also called the Bohemian Wars, tensions escalated in the 15th century. Albert accused the Jews of collaborating with the reformatory Hussites and ordered the systematic abolishment of the Jewish communities and the expulsion of the Jews from the duchy .

The persecution of the Jews reached its climax in 1420/21 in the bloody Vienna Geserah (derived from a Jewish chronicle, the “Wiener Gesera”). On 12 March 1421, Albert V issued a decree condemning the Jews, if they did not emigrate,  to death. In addition to the “general malice” of the Jews, one of the reasons given was that the Jews were guilty of host desecration. The remaining Viennese Jews, 92 men and 120 women, were executed that same day on the Gänseweide in Erdberg in what is today the third municipal district of Vienna. The possessions left behind were confiscated, the houses either sold or given away to minions. The ghetto around the Jewish Square was torn down, the synagogue demolished, and its stones used to build the old Vienna University. The Judenstadt was thus depopulated and abolished.

The buildings, which in 1421 were listed as numbers 342 and 342A and of which the foundations preceded the building Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit, were donated by Duke Albert V to the highest administrative official of Austria, Wilhelm von Puchheim. Excavations in the 1990s revealed that the present building at Judenplatz 7 directly adjoined the Or Zarua synagogue. The excavations also revealed that the remaining buildings, built on relatively small areas, were wooden constructions. These were constructed in threshold and frame construction methods and were equipped with simple clay floors, including today’s Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit. From 1423 onwards, the Schulhof is mentioned in several sources under a new name and is henceforth referred to as “Neuer Platz” or “newy placz” (new square), until its name was again and definitely changed to Judenplatz in 1437.

After the Geserah, Vienna went down in the chronicles of the Jewish community as the “City of Blood”. More than two centuries were to pass before Jews settled in the city and in other parts of Austria again.

15th and 16th centuries: catholic rule and the first Turkish siege of Vienna

After the buildings were donated to Wilhelm von Puchheim, two new adjoining stone buildings were erected on the site of today’s Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit. The foundations, which were originally listed by order of Duke Albrecht as buildings 342 and 342A, were thus preserved in their layout. The rear building, the area of which is not visible from Judenplatz or Drahtgasse today, was donated on 11 October 1437 for celebrating a perpetual mass in the Puchheim Chapel of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Thus, a part of today’s Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit was once a church. The trinitarian dedication of the building can also be derived from this sacred building.

The noble Puchheim family not only belonged to the loyal favourites of the ruling Habsburg dynasty, but were also anxious to demonstrate their status, power and wealth with generous gifts in support of sacred architecture. Due to the relatively long distance between the Puchheim Chapel and St. Stephen’s Cathedral, it can be concluded that the chapel was intended to extend the scope of the cathedral, which was only designated as a cathedral in 1469. The Gothic ribbed vaults on the ground floor of Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit, which are still preserved today, date from the first half of the 15th century. The chapel, however, could not be preserved. With the consent of his son, the chaplain of the chapel sold the front building in 1456. Between 1456 and 1547, both buildings were once again owned by the same family.

During the renovation and restauration work by The European Heritage Project, basement rooms and accesses to two underground connecting passages were discovered and excavated. From the time of the Turkish sieges in the 16th and 17th centuries, Vienna had a network of underground corridors, cellars, and vaults. The corridors were sealed off by a concrete wall after about three meters. Since the tightening of the Vienna Building Act of 1952, many of the houses in the first municipal district of Vienna are no longer connected. According to various municipal departments, the corridors were filled in with concrete when the square was designed to ensure that the square could be driven over. There is no longer any precise topography available today for the once complex underground tunnel system of the first municipal district.

At the time of the Ottoman sieges of Vienna, there were numerous, centuries-old, robustly built cellars which were built between the Roman era and the Middle Ages. Work began in the 16th century to expand many of the cellars and connect them with new corridors for the protection and supply of Vienna.

The first Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529 was climactic in the ongoing wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian states of Europe which lasted between the 15th and 17th centuries. Ottoman troops surrounded the city of Vienna from 27 September to 14 October 1529. At that time, Vienna was one of the largest cities in Central Europe and the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy. Due to its location between the Alps and the Carpathians, it was of great importance to the Ottomans as the gateway to Western Europe, and they hoped to conquer the whole of Europe by taking the city. However, the city was successfully defended.

17th century: ” Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit” and the Second Turkish Siege of Vienna

After Vienna had been successfully defended against the Turks in the 16th century, military peace returned to Vienna for the time being. It would take more than 150 years before a second siege of the city was to take place. On 5 May 1619, the Puchheim chapel fell victim to a severe fire which destroyed several houses in the historic core of the Austrian capital. The fire was so devastating that the fire protection and building regulations of the city of Vienna were revised and tightened shortly thereafter. The building, however, was soon rebuilt The building was soon rebuilt, but without a chapel. As a reminder, the building was named Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit derived from the chapel. Whether the building was already decorated and protected by an icon of the Holy Trinity or a fresco is, however, not documented.

When the second wave of plague struck Europe, Vienna was not spared disease, misery, and death. The plague, which raged in the Austrian capital in 1678 and 1679, and ravaged large parts of the population, brought with it economic and cultural stagnation. Vienna had barely recovered from the scourges of the “Black Death” when the Ottomans invaded the city with the ambitious plan to conquer it once and for all. Fortunately, the Second Turkish Siege of Vienna in 1683 also represented an unsuccessful advance by the Ottoman Empire, as was the case 154 years earlier.

The tunnel warfare started by the Ottomans represented a major threat to the successful defence of Vienna. Since the Turkish army could not penetrate the city walls with their cannons since the walls were several meters thick and sometimes tripled, the miners were employed. For 61 days, Turkish soldiers dug a vast network of trenches and created an underground tunnel system in order to shatter the walls by means of explosions. The besieged responded by digging a system of tunnels of their own. Underground tunnels and cellar vaults had already existed in the Roman city of Vindobona, as well as in medieval Vienna, but it was only during the two Turkish sieges that a complex tunnel system was created to defend and protect the citizens. The following tactics were used: Firstly, cellars were built beneath the entire first municipal district. The existing cellars, mostly vaulted and built with fired bricks as is the case in the basement of Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit, were several meters below the ground and served as storage and cold storage rooms, hospitals, and assembly halls. Even chapels were built in this underground city. At the time, even the catacombs under St. Stephen’s Cathedral were connected to this system. Two tunnels went out from Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit: one in the direction of St. Stephen’s Cathedral and Hoher Markt, the other in the direction of the square Am Hof.

The Christian miners aimed at collapsing the enemy tunnel system by targeted counter-explosions. The tunnel warfare dominated the siege for a long time. The tide turned only due to the German-Polish relief forces under the military leadership of the Polish King, John III Sobieski, who unexpectedly came to Vienna’s aid. The Turkish army was defeated at Kahlenberg in 1683 and forced to flee. Vienna was saved.

18th and 19th centuries: late Baroque reconstruction

In 1713, Vienna was ravaged by the plague for the last time. After this fate had also been overcome and the last attempt of the Ottomans to conquer the city had been successfully countered, the population was to double in only 70 years and rise to just under a quarter of a million by 1783. As the population density increased, so did the economic upswing. The first manufactories were built in the Leopoldstadt. Sewerage and street cleaning developed, improving hygienic conditions. As a result, building activity was brisk and the city flourished.

Vienna was largely reconstructed in the Baroque style. It was the birth of the Vienna Gloriosa, the world city of the Baroque, which was to make Vienna one of the most important cultural centres of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1783, for example, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) composed his Great Mass in C Minor (KV 427) in the Haus Zur Mutter Gottes (House of the Mother of God) at Judenplatz 3-4, the present seat of the vocational school for the hotel and restaurant industry. Mozart also completed his opera Così fan tutte here in the winter of 1789/1790.

At the beginning of the Baroque period, the magnificent Böhmische Hofkanzlei (Bohemian Court Chancellery) was built in 1714 at Judenplatz 11, today the seat of the Austrian Administrative Court.

Vienna’s largescale building frenzy did not bypass Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit. The building was remodelled in the late Baroque style in 1785. The two buildings formerly at Judenplatz number 7 were combined in 1813 to form Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit after the properties belonged to the same owner again from 1796.

It is documented that in the course of the history of Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit numerous purveyors to the imperial and royal courts and later also innkeepers were located on the ground floor of the building. From 1840, however, the building Zur Kleinen Dreifaltigkeit was not economically at its best. The property was again divided up. In the 19th century, the ownership of the building was fragmented to such an extent that the proportions had to be listed in hundredths.

20th century to the present: from Lessing to the Schoah Memorial

After many changes of ownership, only one owner was registered in the 1905 land records. At the beginning of the 20th century, Judenplatz 7 had become quiet, but, decades later, Hitler’s seizure of power would not go unnoticed.

The bronze monument to Lessing standing on the Jewish Square today was created by the Austrian-British sculptor Siegfried Charoux (1896 – 1967) in honour of the German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and representative of the Enlightenment era, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781). With his drama “Nathan the Wise” in 1779, Lessing staged one of the most important German-language educational plays in the spirit of enlightened humanism. In so doing, he already took up the basic idea of the Habsburg emperor Joseph II (1741 – 1790) before 1781. In 1781 Joseph II issued the “Patent of Toleration” which extended religious freedom to non-Catholic Christians living in the crown lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, and which brought about the end of the Counter Reformation. Lessing’s idea of tolerance, as well as that of Emperor Joseph II, was to be commemorated with the bronze statue.

The Lessing monument was a commissioned work with which Charoux’s design prevailed against 82 other sculptors in 1930. The work, cast in bronze, was completed in the next two years, and erected on the Jewish Square in 1935.

Four years later, after the National Socialists seized power in Austria in 1939, the monument was dismantled and melted down since the poet was branded “a friend of the Jews”, and his enlightened writings appealing to tolerance and humanity were a thorn in the side of the new dictatorship.

Siegfried Charoux, who had been exiled to Great Britain in 1935 for fear of political persecution and who, from then on, lived and worked only in London, was once again commissioned in the 1960s with the construction of the Lessing memorial as a sign of reparation. The second version of the bronze statue, however, was not unveiled until 1968, one year after Charoux’s death, at Morzinplatz in Vienna. In 1981, it returned to its original location, the Jewish Square.

In 1995, the well-known Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005) suggested to the mayor of Vienna, Michael Häupl (*1949) that a memorial be erected to commemorate the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered during the Nazi dictatorship, the location of which was to be the Jewish Square.

In search of a long-forgotten piece of Viennese and Jewish history, a large-scale archaeological excavation project began in 1996 at what is now Judenplatz. Initial investigations revealed that the synagogue they were looking for was actually located in front of the buildings at Judenplatz 7 to 10 and that the foundations were partly destroyed, but partly still in good condition. Ultimately, expectations of finding traces of foundation walls were far exceeded when the Bimah (the traditional lectern), prayer rooms, the vestibule, the foundations of the Torah shrines, and much more were discovered. Parts of the former Roman barracks were also found at a depth of about 6 meters.

The square, which was converted into a pedestrian zone in 2000, is now a central place of remembrance of Jewish Vienna. The Baroque Misrachi-Haus in the northwest corner of the square is part of the Jewish Museum, which also exhibits the remains of the synagogue destroyed in 1421. On the square itself, the Namenlose Bibliothek (Nameless Library) is a powerful reminder of the Shoah during the Second World War which claimed the lives of more than 65,000 Austrian Jews.