VERDUN-SUR-GARONNE

VERDUN-SUR-GARONNE, village in the Tarn-et-Garonne department, in southwestern France. According to non-Jewish historians, particularly the Dominican Bernard Gui, 500 Jews took refuge in a tower which was besieged by the renegade Crusader group, the pastoureaux , in the 13th century and committed suicide when they realized the impossibility of escaping from their persecutors. A Jewish community existed in Verdun-sur-Garonne from before 1200 until the expulsion of 1306. When the Jews were readmitted to France in 1315, they preferred to return to the localities in which they had lived previously. A number of Jews from comtat venaissin who traded in Verdun-sur-Garonne during the 18th century were accused by the local merchants of dealing in stolen property. There was little development of a community in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the early 21st century, a small community existed in Verdun and maintained its own synagogue. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gross, Gal Jud, 546; G. Saige, Juifs en Languedoc (1881), index; N. Roubin, in: REJ, 36 (1898), 78. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jewish Travel Guide (2002), 91. (Bernhard Blumenkranz / David Weinberg (2nd ed.)