Late Middle Ages

Jewish persecution and the spread of plague

In the spring of 1348, a story began to circulate in the towns of the Upper Rhine. The Jews, the story ran, had been instructed by their leaders — or by a mysterious figure identified as the Mahomet of Cairo, or by the Jewish community of Toledo — to poison the wells of Christendom. The poison was a mixture of spiders, the hearts of Christians, the consecrated host, and the blood of children. The aim was the destruction of the Christian population. The story spread from town to town in advance of the plague itself, and it was already established in the German-speaking lands before the first major outbreaks of the Black Death had been recorded there. By the time the plague reached the cities of the Rhine, the accusations were already in place, and the pogroms began within weeks.

The wider context is set out in the overview of the Black Death. The labour crisis that the plague produced is examined in How the Black Death changed the labor economy. The wave of popular revolts of the same period is treated in Peasant uprisings after the Black Death. The cult of the saints of the plague, with its own dark underbelly of folk belief, is surveyed in Late medieval plague saints and folk beliefs.

The Charge of Well-Poisoning

The charge of well-poisoning drew on a long tradition of anti-Jewish suspicion in medieval Europe. The earliest recorded charge against a Jewish community of poisoning the wells is the case of Valence in 1272, in which the Jews of the town were accused of having poisoned the local water supply. The charge was repeated at Chinon in 1321, in the context of the earlier plague outbreak of 1320, and at Guingamp in 1321, in Brittany. In each case the accused Jews were tried, and many of them were executed or driven from their homes.

The story of the Brunnenvergiftung, the well-poisoning, took its canonical form in 1348. According to the version recorded in the Chronicle of the Council of Constance by the German theologian Heinrich von Diessenhofen, the Jews of Toledo had received a letter from their leaders in the East instructing them to poison the wells of Christendom in revenge for the persecution to which the Jews had been subjected. The letter was opened by a Spanish priest, who took it to the Dominican inquisitor of Catalonia, who took it in turn to the papal court at Avignon. The story, of course, is a forgery: the letter, which circulated widely in the 1350s, is one of the most thoroughly documented forgeries of the Middle Ages. But the story was believed, and it provided a ready explanation for the otherwise inexplicable appearance of the plague.

The charge was supported by confessions extracted under torture. The first major confession was that of the Jewish community of Châtel-sur-Chlix in the canton of Bern, in the spring of 1348. The Jews of Châtel, under torture, confessed that they had received a letter from the Jewish community of Toledo instructing them to poison the wells. The confession was extracted under the supervision of a local inquisitor, and it was circulated to the towns of the surrounding region. Similar confessions were extracted from the Jewish communities of Zofingen in Aargau, of Beromünster in Lucerne, and of Müstair in the Grisons. The confessions were almost certainly false, but they circulated widely and they provided a legal pretext for the pogroms that followed.

From Châtel to Strasbourg

The first major pogrom broke out in Châtel-sur-Chlix in the spring of 1348, and within weeks similar attacks had taken place in Bern, Basel, Strasbourg, Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer, Erfurt, and dozens of other cities. The pattern was similar in each case: a mob, often led by local craftsmen or members of the urban poor, would attack the Jewish quarter, forcing the inhabitants to choose between baptism and death. Some communities were given the choice of expulsion; others were simply massacred. The community of Erfurt, one of the oldest in Germany, was burned alive in its synagogue on 21 March 1349. The community of Mainz, the largest in Germany, was forced to convert en masse in 1300 — the conversions were not formally accepted, and the community was eventually expelled in 1438 — and the converted Jews, who had lost their property and their status, were an important sub-community of the city for the next century. The community of Strasbourg was given the choice of conversion or death on 14 February 1349, and the great majority chose death, throwing themselves onto the pyres lit for them in the Jewish cemetery. Of the 2,000 Jews of Strasbourg, fewer than 100 survived. The bishop of Strasbourg, Berthold of Bucheck, was stoned by the mob when he tried to intervene.

The violence was not confined to the Holy Roman Empire. In France, Jews were massacred in Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne, Narbonne, and many other cities. The chronicler Jean Froissart recorded the massacre at Carcassonne, where “the Jews were brought out of their houses and were led to a field outside the town, where they were all burned.” In the Low Countries, communities in Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent were attacked. In Catalonia, the Jewish community of Barcelona was forced to convert in 1348, and the community of Tarragona was destroyed. In Sicily, the Jews of Palermo were expelled by the Aragonese authorities in 1348, and the Jewish community of the island, which had been one of the oldest in Europe, was effectively ended.

The pogroms of 1348–1350 were, in their way, European in scope. The historian David Nirenberg, in Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996), has shown that the pogroms of 1348–1350 were part of a longer history of communal violence in the medieval West, in which the persecution of Jews, lepers, and other minorities was a regular feature of the social life of the period. Nirenberg’s reading is now widely accepted: the pogroms of 1348–1350 were not an isolated event, but a particularly intense example of a recurring pattern. The plague provided the occasion, the social crisis provided the pretext, and the long tradition of anti-Jewish suspicion provided the framework.

The Sword and the Altar

The response of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities to the pogroms was mixed. In some cases, the local lord or bishop tried to protect the Jews, often because the Jews were the property of the lord and represented a valuable source of revenue. In Strasbourg, as we have seen, the bishop tried to protect the Jews, and was stoned by the mob. In Mainz, the archbishop allowed the conversion of the entire community, which had the effect of saving their lives but also of stripping them of their property and their status. In Cologne, the archbishop and the city council attempted to protect the Jews, and the Jewish community of Cologne survived the pogrom largely intact.

The pope himself, Clement VI, attempted to intervene on behalf of the Jews. In a series of bulls issued in 1348 — most importantly the bull Quamvis pia of 4 July 1348 — he declared that the Jews were not responsible for the plague, that those who attacked the Jews were in fact excommunicated, and that the Jews should be protected. The bull of 4 July 1348 was addressed to the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, and it ordered them to take the Jews under their protection. Clement repeated the order in a second bull, Nisi ex officii, of 26 September 1348, addressed to the archbishop of Tarragona. The bulls had little effect, since the local authorities were often the perpetrators, and the pope had no way of enforcing his will against the mob.

The bull of Clement VI is, however, a striking document, and it shows that the official position of the church was, in this case, at odds with popular opinion. The argument of the bull is interesting: the pope does not deny the existence of the plague, but he denies the connection between the plague and the Jews, on the grounds that the Jews, like the Christians, were suffering from the disease, and that the Jews were, in any case, forbidden by the Mosaic law from drinking the water of wells. The argument is, of course, theological, and it would not have carried much weight with the mobs of Erfurt or Strasbourg. But the bull is a sign that the papal court, at least, was prepared to defend the Jews, and that the defence was made on rational grounds.

The Destruction of Communities

The long-term effect of the pogroms was the destruction of Jewish life in many parts of Western Europe. In Germany, dozens of communities that had existed for centuries were never re-established. The communities of Worms, Mainz, and Speyer, the three great SchUM communities of the Rhine, were destroyed. The community of Regensburg, the great centre of Ashkenazi culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was destroyed. The community of Nuremberg, which had been a major centre of Jewish learning, was destroyed. The communities of Augsburg, Ulm, and Erfurt were all destroyed or so reduced that they did not recover their pre-plague size.

In France, the Jews had been expelled in 1306 by Philip IV and readmitted in 1315, and they were expelled again in 1394 by Charles VI. The expulsion of 1394 was the result of a long process of harassment, and the pogroms of 1348–1350 were a major step in the process. In England, the Jews had been expelled in 1290 by Edward I, and they were not readmitted until the seventeenth century. In Spain, the Jews were forced to convert en masse in 1391, in the wake of a long process of preaching and persecution, and the remaining Jewish population was expelled in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella. In Portugal, the Jews were forced to convert in 1497. In Sicily, the Jews of Palermo were expelled in 1348, and the Jewish community of the island, which had been one of the oldest in Europe, was effectively ended.

The wave of persecution that began with the Black Death thus set in motion a series of expulsions and forced conversions that effectively ended Jewish life in Western Europe until the early modern period. The history of the Jews in Western Europe between 1348 and the seventeenth century is, in this sense, a history of destruction. The great centres of Jewish learning in France, Germany, and Spain, the great yeshivot of Mainz and Worms, the great libraries of Toledo and Barcelona, the great kehillot of Strasbourg and Erfurt — all of these were destroyed or dispersed. The Jewish community of the modern period was built on the survivors of the great communities of the East, in Poland, Lithuania, and the Ottoman Empire.

Reading the Violence: Nirenberg and the Longue Durée

The pogroms of 1348–1350 have been the subject of an unusually rich historiographical debate. The older interpretation, of an isolated event driven by the trauma of the Black Death, has been replaced by a more complex account, in which the pogroms are seen as the most extreme example of a recurring pattern of communal violence in the medieval West. The work of David Nirenberg, in Communities of Violence (1996), is the most important contribution to the debate. Nirenberg argued that the persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages was not the result of any single crisis, but a regular feature of the social life of the period. The Jews, the lepers, the homosexuals, the heretics, and the witches were all, at different times, the targets of communal violence, and the violence was, in each case, a way of defining the boundaries of the community.

The application of Nirenberg’s framework to the Black Death pogroms has produced a more nuanced reading of the events of 1348–1350. The plague was not the cause of the pogroms, but the occasion. The cause was the long tradition of anti-Jewish suspicion, the social crisis of the late medieval town, and the political weakness of the Jews in the wake of the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. The plague provided the occasion for the explosion of violence, and the explosion of violence revealed the depth of the social crisis. The reading is not a complete explanation, but it is a more complete one than the older account of an isolated event.

The memory of the pogroms of 1348–1350 lived on in Jewish and Christian communities for centuries. The Jewish community of the modern period has, since the seventeenth century, marked the anniversaries of the destruction of the great communities of the West with fasts and commemorations. The Christian community has, for the most part, attempted to forget the events. The memory of the destruction of the communities of Strasbourg, Mainz, Worms, and Erfurt is, however, an important part of the history of the Black Death, and it is a reminder that the social crisis produced by the plague took many different forms, some of them tragic and violent.

References

  • Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, 1996.
  • Trachtenberg, Joshua. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism. Yale University Press, 1943.
  • Chazan, Robert. In the Year 1346: The Jews in Europe on the Eve of the Black Death. Oxford University Press, 2020. (E-book; also published as The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500, Cambridge University Press, 2006.)
  • Toch, Michael. The Jews of Europe, 1000–1500. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  • Barkey, Wolf, and Gerhild Williams, eds. Exile in the Middle Ages. University of Toronto Press, 2016. (For comparative material on medieval communities of persecution.)