The Black Death (15 page)

On the whole this reticence on the part of the tractators must be taken to indicate that they did not believe the accusations. It is impossible that they did not know what had been
suggested
and, if they had really thought that a principal cause of the plague was the poisoning of the wells by Jews, then they could
hardly have failed to say so in their examination of the subject. Their silence might imply that they thought the idea too
ridiculous
to mention but it is more likely that they shrank from
expressing
publicly an unpopular view on an issue over which people were dangerously disturbed.

For it took considerable moral courage to stand up for the Jews in 1348 and 1349 and not many people were prepared to take the risk. The first cases of persecution seem to have taken place in the South of France in the spring of 1348, and, in May, there was a massacre in Provence. Narbonne and Carcassone exterminated their communities with especial thoroughness. But it is possible that the madness might never have spread across Europe if it had not been for the trial at Chillon in September 1348 of Jews said to have poisoned certain wells at Neustadt and the disastrous confessions of guilt which torture tore from the accused.
39
Balavignus, a Jewish physician, was the first to be racked. ‘After much hesitation’, he confessed that the Rabbi Jacob of Toledo had sent him, by hand of a Jewish boy, a leather pouch filled with red and black powder and concealed in the mummy of an egg. This powder he was ordered, on pain of
excommunication
, to throw into the larger wells of Thonon. He did so, having previously warned his friends and relations not to drink the water. ‘He also declared that none of his community could exculpate themselves from this accusation, as the plot was communicated to all and all were guilty of the above charges.’ Odd scraps of ‘evidence’ were produced, such as a rag found in a well in which it was alleged that the powder, composed largely of ground-up portions of a basilisk, had been concealed. Ten similar confessions were racked from other unfortunates and the resulting dossier sent to neighbouring cities for their information and appropriate action.

So incriminating a confession settled the doubts or perhaps quietened the consciences of many who might otherwise have felt bound to protect the Jews. On 21 September 1348 the
municipality
of Zurich voted never to admit Jews to the city again. In Basle all the Jews were penned up in wooden buildings and burned alive.
40
‘In the month of November began the persecution of the Jews,’ wrote a German chronicler.
41
Henry of
Diessenhoven 
has recorded the movement of the fever across his country. In November 1348 the Jews were burnt at Solothurn, Zofingen and Stuttgart; in December at Landsberg, Burren, Memmingen, Lindau; in January, Freiburg, Ulm and Speyer. At Speyer the bodies of the murdered were piled in great wine-casks and sent floating down the Rhine. In February it was the turn of the Jews at Gotha, Eisenach and Dresden; in March, Worms, Baden and Erfurt.

In most cities the massacres took place when the Black Death was already raging but in some places the mere news that the plague was approaching was enough to inflame the populace. On 14 February 1349, several weeks before the first cases of infection were reported, two thousand Jews were murdered in Strasbourg; the mob tore the clothes from the backs of the victims on their way to execution in the hope of finding gold concealed in the lining. In part at least because of the anti-Semitism of the Bishop, the Jews of Strasbourg seem to have suffered exceptionally harshly. A contemporary chronicle puts the grand total of the slaughter at sixteen thousand
42
– half this would be more
probable
but the Jewish colony was one of the largest of Europe and the higher figure is not totally inconceivable.

From March until July, there was a lull in the persecution. Then the massacre was renewed at Frankfurt-am-Main and, in August, spread to Mainz and Cologne. In Mainz, records one chronicler, the Jews took the initiative, attacked the Christians and slew two hundred of them. The Christian revenge was
terrible
– no less than twelve thousand Jews, ‘or thereabouts’, in their turn perished.
43
In the North of Germany, Jewish colonies were relatively small, but their insignificance was no protection when the Black Death kindled the hatred of the Christians. In the spring of 1350 those Jews of the Hansa towns who had escaped burning were walled up alive in their houses and left to die of suffocation or starvation. In some cases they were offered the chance to save themselves by renouncing their faith but few availed themselves of the invitation. On the contrary, there were many instances of Jews setting fire to their houses and destroying themselves and their families so as to rob the Christians of their prey.

Why the persecutions died down temporarily in March 1349 is uncertain. It could be that the heavy losses which the Black Death inflicted on the Jews began to convince all those still
capable
of objectivity that some other explanation must be found for the spread of the infection. If so, their enlightenment did not last long. But the blame for the renewal of violence must rest predominantly with the Flagellants. It is difficult to be sure whether this was the work of a few fanatics among the leaders or merely another illustration of the fact that mass-hysteria,
however
generated, is always likely to breed the ugliest forms of violence. In July 1349, when the Flagellants arrived in procession at Frankfurt, they rushed directly to the Jewish quarter and led the local population in wholesale slaughter. At Brussels the mere news that the Flagellants were approaching was enough to set off a massacre in which, in spite of the efforts of the Duke of Brabant, some six hundred Jews were killed.
44
The Pope
condemned
the Flagellants for their conduct and the Jews, with good reason, came to regard them as their most dangerous
enemies
.

On the whole the rulers of Europe did their best, though often ineffectively, to protect their Jewish subjects.
45
Pope Clement VI in particular behaved with determination and responsibility. Both before and after the trials at Chillon he published Bulls condemning the massacres and calling on Christians to behave with tolerance and restraint.
46
Those who joined in persecution of the Jews were threatened with excommunication. The
town-councillors
of Cologne were also active in the cause of humanity, but they did no more than incur a snub when they wrote to their colleagues at Strasbourg urging moderation in their dealings with the Jews. The Emperor Charles IV and Duke Albert of Austria both did their somewhat inadequate best and Ruprecht von der Pfalz took the Jews under his personal protection, though only on receipt of a handsome bribe. His reward was to be called ‘
Jew-master
’ by his people and to provoke something close to a
revolution
.
47

Not all the magnates were so enlightened. In May 1349
Landgrave
Frederic of Thuringia wrote to the Council of the City of Nordhausen telling them how he had burnt his Jews for the
honour of God and advising them to do the same.
48
He seems to have been unique in wholeheartedly supporting the murderers but other great rulers, while virtuously deploring the excesses of their subjects, could not resist the temptation to extract
advantage
from what was going on. Charles IV offered the Archbishop of Trier the goods of those Jews in Alsace ‘who have already been killed or may still be killed’ and gave the Margrave of
Brandenburg
his choice of the best three Jewish houses in Nuremberg, ‘when there is next a massacre of the Jews’.
49
A more
irresponsible
incitement to violence it would be hard to find.

Nor were those rulers who sought to protect the Jews often in a position to do much about it. The patrician rulers of
Strasbourg
, when they tried to intervene, were overthrown by a
combination
of mob and rabble-rousing Bishop. The town-council of Erfurt did little better while the city fathers of Trier, when they offered the Jews the chance to return to the city, warned them quite frankly that they could not guarantee their lives or property in case of further rioting. Only Casimir of Poland, said to have been under the influence of his Jewish mistress Esther, seems to have been completely successful in preventing
persecution
.

An illustration of the good will of the rulers and the
limitations
on their effective power comes from Spain. Pedro IV of Aragon had a high opinion of his Jewish subjects. He was
therefore
outraged when the inhabitants of Barcelona, demoralized by the Black Death and deprived, through the high mortality and the flight from the city of the nobles and the rich, of almost any kind of civil authority, turned on the Jews and sacked the ghetto. On 22 May 1348 he sent a new Governor to the city and gave orders that the guilty were to be punished and no further
incidents
allowed.
50
A week later he circularized his authorities throughout the kingdom ordering them to protect the Jews and prevent disturbances.
51
By February 1349 the new Governor of Barcelona had made no progress in his search for those
responsible
. King Pedro grew impatient and demanded immediate
action
. In a flurry of zeal a few arrests were made, including Bernal Ferrer, a public hangman. But the prosecution in its turn was extremely dilatory. Six months later no judgement had been
passed and, in the end, it seems that Ferrer and the other
prisoners
were quietly released.

Meanwhile, in spite of the King’s injunctions, anti-Jewish rioting went on in other cities of Aragon. There was a
particularly
ugly incident in Tarragona where more than three hundred Jews were killed. Here again Pedro demanded vengeance and sent a commission to investigate. The resulting welter of accusation and counter accusation became so embittered that virtual civil war ensued. In the end this prosecution too was tacitly
abandoned
. But the King did at least ensure that a new ghetto was built and intervened personally on behalf of several leading Jews who had been ruined by the loss of their houses and documents. When the next epidemic came in 1361 the Jews appealed to the King for protection and an armed guard was placed at the gates of the ghetto.

Flanders was bitten by the bug at about the same time as the Bavarian towns. ‘Anno domini 1349 sloeg men de Joden dood’
52
is the chronicler’s brutally laconic reference to massacres that seem to have been on a scale as hideous as those in Germany. In England there were said to be isolated prosecutions of Jews on suspicion of spreading the plague but no serious persecution took place. It would be pleasant to attribute this to superior humanity and good sense. The substantial reason, however, was rather less honourable. In 1290, King Edward I had expelled the Jews from England. Such few as remained had little money and were too unobtrusive to present a tempting target. Some small credit is due for leaving them in peace but certainly it cannot be held up as a particularly shining example of racial tolerance.

*

The persecution of the Jews waned with the Black Death itself; by 1351 all was over. Save for the horrific circumstances of the plague which provided the incentive and the background, there was nothing unique about the massacres. The Jews had already learned to expect hatred and suspicion and the lesson was not one which they were to have much opportunity to forget. But the massacre was exceptional in its extent and in its ferocity; in both, indeed, it probably had no equal until the twentieth
century
set new standards for man’s inhumanity to man. Coupled
with the losses caused by the Black Death itself, it virtually wiped out the Jewish communities in large areas of Europe. In all, sixty large and one hundred and fifty smaller communities are believed to have been exterminated and three hundred and fifty massacres of various dimensions took place. It led to
permanent
shifts of population, some of which, such as the
concentration
of Jews in Poland and Lithuania, have survived almost to the present day. It is a curious and somewhat humiliating
reflection
on human nature that the European, overwhelmed by what was probably the greatest natural calamity ever to strike his continent, reacted by seeking to rival the cruelty of nature in the hideousness of his own man-made atrocities.