Black Death persecutions

There were a series of violent attacks, massacres and mass persecutions of Jews during the Black Death. Jewish communities were falsely blamed for outbreaks of the Black Death in Europe. Violence were committed from 1348 to 1351 in Toulon, Barcelona, Erfurt and Strasbourg among others. The persecutions led to a large migration of Jews towards the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. There are very few Jewish sources on Jewish massacres due to the plague.

Background

The official policy of the Roman Church, reasoned in part because Jesus was Jewish, was to protect Jews. In practice, however, Jews were often targets of Christian loathing. As the plague swept across Europe in the mid-14th century, annihilating nearly half the population, people had little scientific understanding of disease and were looking for an explanation.

Jews were often taken as scapegoats and accusations spread that they had caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. This is likely because they were affected less than other people,
since many Jews chose not to use the common wells of towns and cities. Jews were also sometimes coerced through torture to confess to poisoning wells.

Persecutions and massacres

The first massacre directly related to the plague took place in April 1348 in Toulon, Provence, where the Jewish quarter was sacked, and forty Jews were murdered in their homes. Shortly afterward, violence broke out in Barcelona, Spain, and in other Catalan cities. In 1349, massacres and persecutions spread across Europe, including the Erfurt massacre, the Basel massacre, massacres in Aragon, and Flanders. Around 2,000 Jews were burnt alive on 14 February 1349 in the "Valentine's Day" Strasbourg massacre, where the plague had not yet affected the city. While the ashes smouldered, Christian residents of Strasbourg sifted through and collected the valuable possessions of Jews not burnt by the fires.See Stéphane Barry and Norbert Gualde, «La plus grande épidémie de l'histoire» ("The greatest epidemic in history"), in ''L'Histoire'' magazine, n° 310, June 2006, p. 47 Many hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed in this period. Within the 510 Jewish communities destroyed in this period, some members killed themselves to avoid the persecutions. In the spring of 1349 the Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main was annihilated. This was followed by the destruction of Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne. The 3,000 strong Jewish population of Mainz initially defended themselves and managed to hold off the Christian attackers. But the Christians managed to overwhelm the Jewish ghetto in the end and killed all of its Jews.

At Speyer, Jewish corpses were disposed in wine casks and cast into the Rhine. By the close of 1349 the worst of the pogroms had ended in Rhineland. But around this time the massacres of Jews started rising near the Hansa townships of the Baltic Coast and in Eastern Europe. By 1351 there had been 350 incidents of anti-Jewish pogroms and 60 major and 150 minor Jewish communities had been exterminated.

Reasons for persecutions

There are many possible reasons why Jews were accused to be the cause of the plague. Anti-Semitism was widespread in the 14th century, and in some locales, the plague was stated to be the work of Jews as it was retribution for those dying's wicked ways. Harboring "enemies of Christ" was also given as a reason. Some commentators have argued that Jews who were not killed actually stood a better chance of surviving the plague because of greater cleanliness, sanitation, and observance of the laws of Kashrut. David Nirenberg, dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School and a specialist in medieval Jewish history, doubted whether there is credible evidence for that assertion. Another reason to discount that theory is that the plague was spread by flea bites, which would have been unaffected by handwashing. Communities that valued the jobs Jews were doing in the city more saw less persecution, and those who did not saw more.

Government responses

In many cities, the civil authorities either did little to protect the Jewish communities or actually abetted the rioters.

The attacks led to the eastward movement of northern Europe's Jewry to Poland and Lithuania, where they remained for the next six centuries. King Casimir III of Poland enthusiastically gave refuge and protection to the Jews. This is consistent with his previous edicts vis-a-vis Jews. On 9 October 1334, Casimir had confirmed the privileges granted to Jews in 1264 by Bolesław V the Chaste. Under penalty of death, he prohibited the kidnapping of Jewish children for the purpose of enforced Christian baptism, and he inflicted heavy punishment for the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. The king had therefore been previously well-disposed to Jews. He was also interested in tapping the economic potential of the Jews.

Catholic Church view

Pope Clement VI (the French-born Benedictine, Pierre Roger) tried to protect the Jewish communities, issuing two papal bulls in 1348, on 6 July and 26 September, saying that those who blamed the plague on the Jews had been "seduced by that liar, the Devil". He went on to emphasize that "It cannot be true that the Jews, by such a heinous crime, are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague, by the hidden judgment of God, has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them." He urged clergy to take action to protect Jews and offered them papal protection in the city of Avignon. In this, Clement was aided by the research of his personal physician Guy de Chauliac, who argued from his own treatment of the infected that the Jews were not to blame.

Clement's efforts were in part undone by the newly elected Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor making property of Jews killed in riots forfeit, giving local authorities a financial incentive to turn a blind eye.

Pope Clement VI's and the Catholic Church's influence over much of Western Europe proved limited; therefore, much of their attempt to protect Jews was futile. However, this was not the case in regions where the Pope had considerably more influence; for example, in Avignon, the Pope saved many Jewish lives.

Aftermath

As the plague waned in 1350, so did the violence against Jewish communities. In 1351, the plague and the immediate persecution was over, though the background level of persecution and discrimination remained. Ziegler (1998) comments that "there was nothing unique about the massacres". Twenty years after the Black Death the Brussels massacre (1370) wiped out the Belgian Jewish community.

One of the significant long-term consequences of the Black Death in Europe was the migration of Jews to Poland to escape the persecution they were experiencing in Western Europe. This is one of the major contributing factors that led to the large population of Jews in Poland in the early 20th century. Approximately 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland at the time of Hitler's rise to power.

Jewish tales of the Black Death in the early modern period

Though told for nearly 350 years, there were no written accounts of the Black Death through Jewish tales until 1696, when accounts by Yiftah Yosef ben Naftali Hirts Segal Manzpach (or Yuzpa Shammes for short) began to surface in the Mayse Nissim. Yuzpa Shammes, was a scribe and ''shammash'' (gabai or warden of a synagogue) of the Worms community for several decades. His accounts intend to show that the Jews were not idle but that they took action against inevitably becoming scapegoats. Despite Yuzpa's assertion that the Jews fought against the massacres, there are contradicting accounts that claim that there was no evidence of an "armed resistance".''Die Chronik des Mathias von Neuenburg'', 1955. "While a Christian chronicler reports that during the pogrom of March 1, 1349, the beleaguered Jews of Worms set fire to their own houses, as may have happened elsewhere, there is no evidence of armed resistance."

See also

* Timeline of antisemitism
* Persecution of Jews
* Erfurt massacre (1349)
* Black Death in medieval culture
* Black Death in the Holy Roman Empire
*

References

Further reading

* Winkler, Albert (2007)
"The Approach of the Black Death in Switzerland and the Persecution of Jews, 1348–1349,"
''Swiss American Historical Society Review,'' vol. 43 (2007), no. 3, pp. 4–23.
* Winkler, Albert (2005)
"The Medieval Holocaust: The Approach of the Plague and the Destruction of Jews in Germany, 1348–1349,"
''Federation of East European Family History Societies,'' vol. 13 (2005), pp. 6–24.

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Black Death
Massacres in Germany
Jewish German history
Massacres in France
Jewish French history
Massacres in Spain
Jewish Spanish history
14th-century papal bulls
Conflicts in 1348
Conflicts in 1349
Medieval anti-Jewish pogroms
Persecution of Jews
Antisemitism in Switzerland
Jewish Swiss history
History of Basel
History of Strasbourg
History of Europe
History of Brussels
Medieval Barcelona
Epidemic riots