We know there is a long tradition
of persecuting the Jews, in the City
of Frankfurt as in other places.
Around 1240, the records tell us,
173 were either slaughtered
or died of their own free will
in a conflagration. In 1349
the Flagellant Brothers instituted
a great massacre in the Jewish quarter.
Again, the chronicles tell that the Jews
burned themselves and that
after the fire there was a clear view from
the Cathedral Hill over to Sachsenhausen.
Thereafter the Jews only hesitantly
returned to the city on the Main.
In the mid–fifteenth century
a clothing statute is issued,
yellow rings to be worn on the tunic,
later a grey circle the size of
an apple, for the prevention of all
carnal intercourse between Christians
and Jews, for a long time to come
under the pain of death.
Then, at the expense of Frankfurt’s
high city council, in the train
of civic reform, progressive order
and hygienisation, a ghetto of their own
is built for the Jews by the Wollgraben,
fourteen houses and a new synagogue.
By Grünewald’s time, we learn,
there are twenty-three houses, and soon
the district counts more than three thousand souls
without the boundaries having been widened.
Each night—on Sundays at four in the
afternoon—they were locked up, and
might not walk into any place
where a green tree grew,
not on the Scheidewall
nor in the Ross, nor on the Römerberg
or in the Avenue. In this ghetto
the Jewess Enchin had been raised
before, not many months preceding
her marriage to Mathys Grune
the painter, she was christened
In the compendious book about the historical
Grünewald which Dr. W. K. Zülch produced
in ancient Schwabach type,
in the year 1938 for Hitler’s birthday
the story of this extraordinary union
could not be admitted. Grünewald
would have noticed this child,
remarkable, it was said, for her beauty
when she passed through the Bridge Gate
and the Preachers’ Lane on her way
to her workplace just outside the ghetto.
But there is no evidence that it was he who induced
this Anna, betrothed to him a year later,
to change her religious faith.
Rather it seems that she herself
had facilitated this step
attesting great strength of will,
or desperation, by looking the painter
straight in the eyes; perhaps
at first merely in love with
his green-colored name,
a conjunction which to the bachelor
master, who meanwhile had given up
the Mainz Court Painter’s appointment
in favour of the great Isenheim Altar
commission, will not have come amiss,
for without a household of his own
he could employ no assistant
or apprentice for his work.
When Grünewald buys a house
very close to the cathedral
on December 17th 1512
for twenty-three guilders
twelve shillings, already,
the documents record, he has taken
to wife the baptised Anna.
The much admired young proselyte,
who for the Frankfurt Christian
community, which even for her baptism
had overwhelmed her with gifts,
was no mean acquisition, and
could have founded Grünewald’s fortune.
If it fell out otherwise, for one thing
it was because the painter
who later lived as a recluse
and almost underground, himself
made impossible his recognition
by this community; and,
for another, as his pictures prove,
he had more of an eye for men,
whose faces and entire physique
he executed with endless devotion
whereas his women for the most part
are veiled, so relieving him of the fear
of looking at them more closely.
Perhaps that is why Grünewald’s
Anna grew shrewish, ill, a victim
to perverse reason, to brain fevers
and to madness.
In the end, awaiting recovery,
she is placed in hospital where
at the time of the painter’s death
still she lives on, infirm
in body and mind.