JEWS IN THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

DURING the first half of the sixteenth century most provinces in the Low Countries fell under the sovereign authority of Charles V, heir to the Habsburg possessions in the Netherlands and the county of Burgundy. Although a number of administrative and legal institutions for all the Low Countries had been, or were being, set up, especially in Brussels, Charles continued to derive his formal authority from the sovereign titles he held for each province separately. Thus he was duke of Brabant, duke of Limburg, and, after 1543, duke of Gelderland, count of Flanders and of Holland and Zeeland, sovereign ruler of Friesland, and, after 1528, of Utrecht. In practice, this meant that the sovereign's administration and legislative decisions could vary from one province to the next, and that domestic policy continued to reflect a measure of provincial autonomy. In many respects, the provincial and municipal authorities were able, whether after consultations with Brussels or with particular provincial representatives (for instance with stadtholders), to go their own way. The election in 1519 of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor did little to change this situation, even though in feudal law he became liege lord of even those provinces in the Low Countries of which he was liegeman and sovereign combined. Imperial policy decisions and developments usually had a greater influence on the German states than on the Low Countries. As emperor, Charles's role in the Netherlands was mainly formal and nominal in character.

In the Holy Roman Empire, Jews, as the only tolerated non-Christian minority, had in many respects a special, subordinate relationship with the emperor, whose particular care and protection they enjoyed. This might suggest that the Jews in the Northern and Southern Netherlands, too, would have profited from those imperial provisions that, especially under Charles V, had had so marked a stabilizing effect for Jews in the German states. In practice, however, this was not the case. The Low Countries were too remote from the German heartland of the Holy Roman Empire; the few Jews there were too unimportant, not only by virtue of their small numbers, but also because they lacked the means needed to obtain royal protection. For all these reasons, Jews in the Netherlands continued to depend on the will and whim of local rulers, a goodwill that more often than not left much to be desired.