Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)
A Pair of Synagogues in the Buda Castle
which was part of the foreign trade customs duty. Probably in return for lending money to the king, Henok received land, too. It was his family who first set up a mint in Buda and they played a part in the fact that Béla IV issued the Jewish charter, it was also Henok and his descendants who established the mediaeval Jewish quarter in the Southern section of the Castle Hill in what is now Szent György utca (formerly Zsidó, or Jewish street). On one side, the Jewish quarter was bordered by the city wall, but the Jewish cemetery also belonged to it, even though the latter lay outside the wall, alongside Ördög-árok, or Devil's Ditch, in the area flanked on three sides by today’s Alagút, Pauler and Roham streets. The Jews living here were allowed to use the cemetery until the recapture of Buda from the Turks in 1686. The tombstones, of which the oldest known piece bears the date 1278, remained in place until as late as the 19th century. The fact that despite their social position the Jews of Castle Hill lived in segregation was largely due to the measures taken by the Synod of Buda called together by Philip, Bishop of Ferno, the Buda nuncio of the Holy See in 1279. The decrees passed here forbade, once again, any fraternization with Jews, prescribed segregation and ordered them to wear a discriminating round red cloth badge on their breast. The first mediaeval synagogue of Buda was built at the end of the 13th century in what is Dísz tér today, and its remains probably lie hidden beneath the ruins of the former Ministry of War. This, however, could not remain in use for very long as the Jews were expelled by Lajos the Great for the first time in 1348. According to traditional historiography, the ruling was motivated by the scapegoating that followed the plague. The strict religious laws prescribing the ritual cleansing of the body must have provided some protection against the plague. That is what planted the suspicion in Christian minds all over Europe that the Jews must have brought the plague on them. The second expulsion, in 1360, is explained in the chronicles as the failure of Lajos’s attempts to convert the Jews. Although expulsion did not at that time take the form of a pogrom, the Jews' houses and the building of their first synagogue were given by the king to his barons. Newer interpretations, which take into account economic as well as monarchic and ecclesiastic history, see economic competition as a more important motive in the marginalisation of the Buda Jewry. A Pair of Synagogues in the Buda Castle A few years after their expulsion under Lajos the Great, the Jews of Buda were allowed to return and the major provisions of the Charter of Liberty issued in the 13th century were confirmed by the king. That was when the second, and in W
