The Museum Judengasse is one of the exhibition venues of the Jewish museum in Frankfurt, the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt. Founded in 1988, it is the oldest Jewish museum in Germany. It was inaugurated by the same chancellor of that time, Helmut Kohl, on November 9, 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of the November 1938 pogrom, the so-called night of the crystals. The museum includes two different museum locations: that of the Museum Judengasse, which takes into consideration the period from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that of the Jüdisches Museum, which focuses on Jewish history and culture from the 1800s to our days. The need to divide the museum into two different exhibition venues arises from the wealth of evidence from all historical periods. In fact, in 1987 the foundations of the houses of the former Judengasse, the oldest Jewish ghetto in Europe, were found. The ghetto area was originally intended for 15 families with just over 100 members. Despite this, given the opposition of the city to its expansion, at the end of the 18th century about 3,000 people lived there, with no less than 195 houses, making it the most densely populated area in Europe. It has been described, for example, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne as extremely cramped and gloomy. Probably, Jews were already among the first inhabitants of Frankfurt during the Middle Ages, as evidenced by some documents from the 11th century. The museum traces the history of the Jews in the city, also focusing on the various pogroms they suffered over the centuries, such as that of 1241, 1349 and the following centuries.
