Cologne Cologne Cologne (; , , ) is the largest city of Germany's most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and its 1,075,935 (2016) inhabitants make it the fourth most populous city in Germany after Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. The largest city on the Rhine, it is also the most populous city both of the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region, which is Germany's largest and one of Europe's major metropolitan areas, and of the Rhineland. Centred on the left bank of the Rhine, Cologne is about southeast of North Rhine-Westphalia's capital of Düsseldorf and northwest of Bonn. It is the largest city in
History of the Jews in Cologne that an attempt was made immediately to re-establish a full community, rather than allowing only a few Jews to settle at a time, as was the procedure of most other large towns. In 1424, Jews were banned from the town "for eternity". Following the medieval pogroms and expulsion of 1424, many Jews of Cologne emigrated to central or northern European countries like Poland and Lithuania, then part of the "Ordensstaat" of the Teutonic Order. The offspring of these emigrants returned to Cologne at the beginning of the 19th century and lived mainly in the area of Thieboldsgasse on the southeast