The Colmar Treasure

In 1863 workmen renovating a house on the rue des Juifs in Colmar, the street at the heart of the town's medieval Jewish quarter, opened a wall and found a hidden cache of small, dusty objects. Cleaned, they turned out to be gold and silver jewellery and coins, the savings of a Jewish family who had concealed them some five centuries earlier and never returned.

The reason they never returned is well documented. When the Black Death reached the Upper Rhine in 1348, Jews across the region were accused of poisoning wells. In late December 1348 Colmar's council reported to Strasbourg that a Jewish man had confessed to such a plot, a confession obtained under torture. The town's Jews were then put to death, most by burning, without trial. Accounts give the killings as late 1348 or early 1349, and no survivors from the community are recorded. Jews had lived in Colmar since at least the late 13th century, working among other trades in the wine business, and had a synagogue and a ritual bath.

What survives is small in scale but unusually intimate. The most famous piece is a gold wedding ring, made around 1300 and before 1348, whose bezel is a tiny six-sided building with an enamelled roof engraved with the Hebrew words mazal tov. Rings of this kind are generally thought to have been used in the wedding ceremony rather than worn every day; the miniature building is usually read as the Temple in Jerusalem or the couple's new home. Its style suggests it may have been made in Italy. Around it are rings set with sapphire, onyx and other stones, a jewelled brooch of gilded silver with sapphires, rubies, garnet and pearls, an enamelled belt, gilded buttons and a small silver key, together with over 300 coins.

The coins help date the deposit. Most are silver, but the latest datable piece is a gold florin of Louis the Great of Hungary of a type issued in 1342-53, which fits a burial at the time of the persecution. The jewellery ranges from the late 13th century to the mid-14th.

Not everything reached a museum. The finders are believed to have sold some items before the whole treasure was recorded, and the Musée de Cluny in Paris acquired the bulk only in 1923, according to a French gemmological account. A few pieces are in the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar itself. The treasure was fully published only in 1999, for an exhibition in Colmar, and was shown with the Erfurt Treasure in the Cluny's 2007 exhibition on the treasures of the Black Death and at The Met Cloisters in New York in 2019-20.

Hoards like this one, and those from Erfurt, Środa Śląska, Weißenfels and Lingenfeld, are among the few physical traces left by the Jewish communities destroyed in 1348-50. They survive precisely because their owners did not.