Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)

A Pair of Synagogues in the Buda Castle

■ 23 Táncsics Mihály utca. Graphic reconstruction oh the great synagogue by Aurél Budai

The nobility and an angry crowd broke into Fortunatus’ palace and stole sixty thousand gold florins. Fortunatus fled toward the Danube through a back door and then down a rope thrown over the town wall. The escape, according to Béla Bevilaqua, was aided by the synagogue. Bevilaqua based his theory on archival sources before the excavations of the 1960s. According to his hypothesis, it was from the synagogue that the Jews lowered a rope to Fortunatus, enabling him to escape upwards from the Víziváros (Water Town). This version was due to the assumption, based on historical Hispanic analogies, that Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity owned several properties within and outside the Jewish quarter.

The Jews were expelled from Buda by a 1526 decree. At the beginning of the Ottoman period, the Jews were resettled in Constantinople. Little documentary evidence survives of the history of the new Jewish quarter in Buda, the Suh Hanneh, in the Víziváros. The religious tolerance by the Turks of their Jewish subjects made Buda popular with the latter.

Mordechai ha-Kohen Ashkenazi, one of the rabbis of the Buda Jews during the Ottoman period, was invited as an itinerant preacher in 1652. He published

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