The two hundred years from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century represented in some ways the nadir of Jewish life in the imperial cities of Germany. The great Jewish communities that had existed in so many of these cities in the Middle Ages had mostly disappeared. By 1550, the Jews had long since been expelled from Augsburg, Colmar, Cologne, Heilbronn, Lindau, Nördlingen, Nuremberg, Ravensburg, Regensburg, Rothenburg, Strasbourg, Ulm, and a host of smaller imperial cities. Nor was the wave of successful expulsions over by then: the Jews were expelled from Dortmund in 1596 and from Aachen in 1629. Increasingly, as is well known, Jewish life in Germany was centered in towns or villages of the territorial states.

But Jewish life was not entirely extinguished in the imperial cities. Major Jewish communities survived, during the early modern period, in Frankfurt, Worms, and Friedberg. A significant Jewish community - or rather, Jewish communities - emerged in Hamburg in the course of the seventeenth century. Smaller Jewish communities survived in Goslar, Speyer, and Wetzlar. By the seventeenth century, Jews began to return to some of the imperial cities from which they had been expelled, notably Regensburg. In many other cities, Jews were familiar as day visitors or temporary inhabitants in time of war.