13. Rudolf Glanz, Geschichte des nieder jiidischen Volkes in Deutschland , pp. 96 f, 236, 291, 295, 299, 312 ff.
14. Ibid., pp. 128-147. Various other sections of this book provide additional information
15. The responsa of Meir of Rothenburg , for example, dealt with the lack of a minyan in small settings, assessments for synagogal and other needs, the rights of artisans to exclude others in the same craft as the community was too small to maintain them, the rights of rabbis in communities too small to afford more than one scholar, along with other issues. Even if a community numbered a thousand, including women and children, it remained manageable. In the fourteenth century Jews were slaughtered in three hundred German communities, but many consisted of only a few families. Some population estimates are provided by Gross, Galia Judaica- Geographical Dictionary of France , Paris , 1897, Moses Shulvass, The Jews in the World of the Renaissance (Leiden : EJ. Brill , 1973), pp. 26 ff . He also discussed the separate groups within the Italian communities(pp. 57 f). A good picture of such communities in Italy has been incidentally provided by Roni Weinstein, Marriage Rituals Italian Style- A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews (Leiden , Brill , 204). He described the sub-communities that maintained their identity for centuries, quite unlike the situation in later North America .
16. B. M. K. 27b indicates that such groups existed in the third century, but there is little evidence that they continued. For a summary of the arguments on the origin of the hevrei kaddishah see Jacob R. Marcus , Communal Sick-Care in the German Ghetto(Cincinnati : Hebrew Union College Press , 1947), pp. 55 ff . And the detailed discussion in Appendix 8, pp. 248 ff. Salo Baron , The Jewish Community— Its History and Structure to the American Revolution(Philadelphia : Jewish Publication Society , 1942), Vol. 1, pp. 352-54, Vol. III, pp. 89-91 with its bibliography.
17. Nissim b. Gerondi, Responsa# 84 as cited by Moritz Giidemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der Juden in Deutschland Waehrend des XIV und XV Jahrhunderts(Vienna: Alfred Hoelder, 1888), Vol. 1, p. 50. These included a society for visiting the sick, for providing light, for the study of law, for burial, and for helping the poor.