Page:Balthasar Hübmaier.djvu/87

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1523]
The Years of Preparation
39


quarter that helps the modern traveller comprehend what it must have been. In Augsburg one of the most interesting sights is the "Fuggerei," a section of the town endowed in 1519 by John Jacob Fugger, the Rothschild of the sixteenth century, to furnish free homes for the poor. The Fuggerei is a little walled city within the city, the gates of which are shut at night; and in this quarter are fifty-three houses, of two and three stories each, still tenanted at a merely nominal rent by poor Roman Catholic citizens of Augsburg—for the Fuggers were good Catholics, and the trust has been faithfully administered, as the founder intended it should be. But the Fuggerei is a model city quarter—clean, quiet, and orderly, while the Jewish quarter of Regensburg, by all accounts, was dirty, noisy, and unsanitary.

Although the Regensburg Jews were hard pressed by taxes and exactions of every sort, by the Emperor, the Duke of Bavaria, the bishop of the diocese, the city,—and the city tax was higher for the Jews than for the burghers,—nevertheless, through their enterprise and system they had managed to get into their hands the principal part of the