GOETTINGEN

GOETTINGEN, city in Germany. Jews are first mentioned there in the 13th century. The community, composed of a dozen families, had a synagogue and paid 4½% of the city's taxes. It was destroyed in 1350 during the black death persecutions, but in 1370 a charter giving protection to the Jews of the city was re-endorsed. In 1591 the Jews were expelled from Goettingen. Several resettled in the city at the end of the 17th century, and in 1718 Jews were given permission to acquire real property. In the university quarter their numbers were limited to three families. Some Hebrew printing took place in Goettingen. Abraham Jagel's Lekaḥ Tov was published there in 1742, and Hebrew type was also used in A.G. Wachner's Antiquitates Hebraeorum (1742–43). The community numbered 43 in 1833, 265 in 1871, 661 (1.75% of the total population) in 1910, 410 in 1933, and 173 in 1939. In 1859 there was appointed at Goettingen University the first Jew to become a professor in a German university, the mathematician moritz abraham stern . The university was noted for its biblical scholars, most of whom were champions of the documentary hypothesis, from J.G. Eichhorn and G.H.A. Ewald to paul de lagarde and julius wellhausen . When james franck , the Nobel prizewinner, resigned his chair in 1933, a number of professors demanded that he be tried for sabotage; six other Jewish professors were put on compulsory leave, among them the mathematicians otto neugebauer and richard courant , as well as nikolaus pevsner , and eugen caspary . The synagogue was burned down on Kristallnacht. In March and June 1942, 150 Jews were deported; including those who had sought refuge in other localities, 267 local Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. There were 26 Jews living in Goettingen in 1965, bolsterd in the 1990s by immigrants from the former Soviet Union. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Germ Jud, 2 (1968), 296–8; Yad Vashem Archives; PKG.