Worms

Worms, Speyer and Mainz formed a league whose Hebrew initials give the name SchUM, and between them they were the intellectual centre of Jewish Europe north of the Alps in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Their scholars produced the commentaries and legal customs that Ashkenazi practice still follows, and the young Rashi studied at Worms before returning to Champagne to write the commentary on the Talmud that has been printed on the inside margin of every page since. The synagogue in Worms was first built in 1034 and rebuilt in the twelfth century, with a separate hall for women added shortly afterwards, an arrangement that tells you something about how the community organised worship. The cemetery outside the walls, the Heiliger Sand, holds stones from the eleventh century and is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Europe.

In the spring of 1096, bands attached to the First Crusade attacked these communities on their way east. In Worms as in Mainz and Speyer, people were killed, and many killed themselves and their children rather than accept baptism, an act the Hebrew chronicles written afterwards present as sanctification of the divine name. The memorial books that recorded the names, and the laments composed for the ninth of Av, kept the event in the liturgy for centuries.

The synagogue was destroyed in 1938 and rebuilt on its old foundations in 1961. The three cities' sites were inscribed together on the World Heritage list in 2021.

Martin Luther had already been excommunicated when the emperor Charles V summoned him to the imperial diet meeting at Worms in April 1521, under a safe conduct that a good many people expected to be worth nothing, given what had happened to Jan Hus at Constance a century earlier. He was shown a pile of his own books and asked two questions: were they his, and would he recant what was in them. He acknowledged the books and asked for time to consider the second.

Returning the next day, he distinguished between his devotional writings, his attacks on the papacy and his polemics against individuals, declining to withdraw the substance of any of them, and finished by saying that unless he were convinced by the testimony of scripture or by evident reason, he could not and would not recant, because to act against conscience is neither safe nor honest. The words most often quoted afterwards, here I stand, I can do no other, do not appear in the earliest accounts and were probably added when the speech was printed.

The emperor issued the Edict of Worms, declaring Luther an outlaw whom anyone might kill without penalty and banning his writings across the empire. His own prince had him seized on the road and hidden in a castle, where he translated the New Testament into German in about eleven weeks. The edict was never enforced in much of the empire, and the failure to enforce it is why there was a Reformation rather than an episode.