The Black Death and the Blood Libels
Between 1347 and 1351 the bubonic plague swept across Europe, killing perhaps a third of the continent's population. In an age that knew nothing of bacteria or fleas, men sought human cause for inhuman calamity. The…
Biblical Narrative
Between 1347 and 1351 the bubonic plague swept across Europe, killing perhaps a third of the continent's population. In an age that knew nothing of bacteria or fleas, men sought human cause for inhuman calamity. The accusation crystallized quickly: the Jews had poisoned the wells. By the autumn of 1348 it was already circulating in Savoy; by the spring of 1349 it had become a continental conflagration. From Toulon to Strasbourg to Mainz to Cologne, Jewish communities were dragged from their homes and burnt — sometimes in their own synagogues, sometimes in specially constructed wooden houses raised on the riverbanks for the purpose.
On Saint Valentine's Day, 14 February 1349, the city council of Strasbourg ordered the Jews of the city — perhaps two thousand souls — to be assembled and burnt alive on a wooden platform in the Jewish cemetery. The chronicler Mathias of Neuenburg recorded that the plague had not yet reached Strasbourg. The killing came first; the disease came after. Property was confiscated, debts owed to the dead were cancelled, and the orphans were forcibly baptized. The pattern repeated itself in city after city: pogrom, expropriation, conversion of the surviving children.
Pope Clement VI, writing from Avignon in July and again in September of 1348 in the bulls Quamvis perfidiam and Sicut Judaeis, condemned the murders explicitly. He noted, with the cold force of evidence, that the plague struck Jews and Christians alike, and that it raged in lands where no Jews lived at all. He commanded clergy under pain of excommunication to protect the Jews of their dioceses. The bulls were read; the killings continued. The papacy could not restrain the city councils of the Rhineland.
Over and around the well-poisoning libel circled an older accusation: the blood libel — the claim that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to use their blood for Passover matzot. First formulated at Norwich in 1144 around the boy William, it had recurred at Lincoln in 1255 (Hugh of Lincoln), at Trent in 1475 (Simon of Trent), and at countless smaller places. The blood libel and the well-poisoning charge fused into a single demonological accusation: the Jew as covert murderer, the Jew as cause of plague. By 1351 perhaps two-thirds of the Jewish communities of the Holy Roman Empire had been destroyed or driven east into Poland.
It cannot be true that the Jews are the cause of so great a pestilence, since the same scourge afflicts those parts of the world where no Jews dwell.Pope Clement VI, bull Quamvis perfidiam, 26 September 1348
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Strasbourg massacre of 14 February 1349 is the single best-documented Black Death pogrom. The chronicle of Mathias of Neuenburg, the so-called Cronica Argentinensis (Strasbourg chronicle), and the surviving city council records together allow modern historians to reconstruct the political mechanics in detail. The bishop and the patrician guilds initially sought to protect the Jewish community; the artisan guilds, supported by debtor classes who stood to gain from the cancellation of Jewish loans, overthrew the council. The pogrom was not a spontaneous mob: it was a coup followed by a state-organized killing.
The economic dimension is now well established. Frantisek Graus's classic study Pest — Geissler — Judenmorde (1987) and more recent quantitative work by Sascha Becker, Yuval Voigtländer and others have shown that the geographic distribution of pogroms correlates with neither plague mortality nor proximity to the alleged route of infection. It correlates, instead, with the structure of municipal debt and the political position of artisan guilds. Anti-Jewish violence in 1348–1351 was, in measurable degree, a debt-cancellation event masquerading as religious cleansing.
The wider blood-libel tradition has been historicized by Gavin Langmuir (Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 1990), who distinguished between traditional Christian anti-Judaism (theological hostility) and the new chimerical antisemitism of the late medieval period — the projection onto Jews of acts they could not have committed and would never commit. Langmuir located the decisive shift in the 12th and 13th centuries, with Norwich (1144) and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). The Black Death pogroms are the moment when this chimerical antisemitism became continental and lethal.
Anna Foa's The Jews of Europe after the Black Death (English translation 2000) traces the long aftermath. The European Jewish population did not recover to its pre-plague levels for two centuries. The expulsions that followed — France 1394, the cities of the Empire across the 15th century, Spain 1492, Portugal 1497 — completed what 1349 had begun: the unmaking of medieval Western Jewry as a continuous geographical fact, and its reconstitution further east, in Poland, Lithuania, and the Ottoman lands.
The pogroms of 1348–1349 were not a popular spasm of fear; they were, in case after case, a political settlement of debts dressed in the language of plague.Frantisek Graus, Pest — Geissler — Judenmorde (1987, paraphrased)