The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

  In Trier, where the Torah was defaced and trampled, a pretty young Jewess taunted the marauding Crusaders. “Anyone who wishes to cut off my head for fear of the Rock, let him come and do so.” To emphasize the point, the young woman stuck out her neck in defiance. Earlier, two local Jewish leaders had been killed for a similar taunt. But, according to a Jewish chronicler, the young woman “was comely and charming . . . and the uncircumcised ones did not wish to touch her.” The taunter was told she would be spared if she agreed to convert, but, fierce in her faith, like the Jews of Mainz, she chose a suicidal martyrdom.

  The pogroms in Mainz, Worms, and Trier were an early expression of a new, more militant Christianity. The

  Civitas Dei—or God State—grew out of the wave of intense pietism that swept through Europe in the Central Middle Ages. The new state’s controlling metaphor was the body: just as its various limbs fit together into an organic whole, so, too, does—or should—Christian society. Inspired by this corporatist vision, the angry sword of orthodoxy struck out at dissident minorities, such as the Albigensian heretics of southern France and the Jews. Many aspects of modern anti-Semitism date from the period of the

  Civitas Dei.

  For example, the menacing figure of the hook-nosed Jew, whom Chaucer described as “hateful to Christ and all his company,” first appears in twelfth-century paintings of the Crucifixion. The blood libel accusation, another famous anti-Semitic canard, is also a twelfth-century creation. Two days before Passover 1144, the body of a skinner’s apprentice named William was found horribly mutilated in a wood outside Norwich in East Anglia. Upon hearing that William, whose head had been shaved and “punctuated with countless stabs,” was last seen alive entering the house of a Jew, his mother, Elvira, accused the local Jewish community of the murder. Two village girls who worked for local Jewish families then stepped forward to offer corroborating evidence. The girls said a group of Jews had seized William after synagogue, gagged him, pierced his head with thorns, and bound him to a cross.

  Slowly, a legend began to grow up around the unfortunate William, who was quickly sainted for his services to Christianity. First in East Anglia, next in England, then throughout Christendom, stories circulated about the ritual murder of Christian children during Passover. In most versions of the rumor, the killings were said to be a reenactment of Christ’s crucifixion, but in one particularly strange iteration the Jews were alleged to kill Christian children to relieve hemorrhoidal suffering. Supposedly, all Jews had suffered from hemorrhoids since they called out to Pilate, “His blood be upon us and our Children.” And according to Jewish sages, the only known relief for the condition was Christian blood.

  A few years after William’s death, an apostate Jew named Theobald of Cambridge added a new charge to the blood libel accusation, one that would resonate though the pogroms of the Black Death and beyond. William, said Theobald, was the victim of an international Jewish conspiracy. “It was laid down by [the Jews] in ancient times, that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world . . . in scorn and contempt of Christ.” Anticipating another aspect of the Black Death pogroms, Theobald also placed the powerful Spanish rabbinate at the heart of the conspiracy. “Wherefore the leaders and rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain assemble together [each year] . . . they cast lots for all the countries which the Jews inhabit . . . and the place whose lot is drawn has to fulfill the duty [of killing a Christian child].” In 1934 the Nazi publication

  Der Stürmer was still recycling the blood libel accusation. The magazine devoted an entire issue to the ritual murder of Christian children.

  The early thirteenth century saw another important anti-Semitic landmark. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Church authorities decreed that “Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off . . . from other people through the character of their dress.” From this measure emerged the yellow badge of the French Crown, which became the yellow star of the Nazi state; the Judenhut of surgeon Balavigny, which looked like an upside-down saucer; the pointed green hat of Polish Jews; and the tablet-shaped cloth strips that English Jews wore across the chest.*

  As anti-Semitism intensified, petty degradations became a daily occurence for many Jews. In Turin, Jews caught on the street during first snowfall were pelted with snowballs unless they paid a ransom of twenty-five ducats. In Pisa, students celebrated the Feast of St. Catherine by capturing the fattest Jew they could find and making the local Jewish community pay his weight in sweets.

  Historian Norman Cantor thinks incompetent internal leadership may have added to the woes of the Jews. “That the Jews were victims is clear,” says Professor Cantor. “That the leadership of their intellectual elite might have made things worse has been underinvestigated.” Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham could serve as exhibit A of Professor Cantor’s point about incompetent leadership.

  Rabbi Solomon’s particular bête noire was Maimonides, the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages. In the rabbi’s view, Maimonides’

  Guide for the Perplexed and

  Mishneh Torah (a code of Jewish law) were full of Aristotelian notions, and Aristotle, the rabbi fervently believed, was bad for the Jews. Agreeing, the conservative Ashkenazi rabbinate of northern France supported Solomon’s denunciation of Maimonides. However, in Provence and Spain, regions with traditions of toleration and cosmopolitanism, the rabbinate sided with Maimonides.

  According to contemporary accounts, Rabbi Solomon was so aggrieved by the stance of the Mediterranean liberals that he turned to leaders of the Inquisition, the Church arm that enforced Christian orthodoxy, for assistance. Beyond this, the story grows murky. One Mediterranean liberal claims that, feeling aggrieved, Solomon handed over Maimonides’ works to the Inquisitors for inspection. “Behold,” the rabbi is supposed to have told the Inquisitors, “most of our people are unbelievers and heretics, for they were led astray by the words of Rabbi Moses of Egypt [Maimonides] who wrote heretical books. Now, while you are exterminating the heretics among you, exterminate our heresies as well.’”

  However, the liberal was probably trying to discredit Rabbi Solomon. The rabbi may have had an “uncircumcised heart,” as one critic charged, but he was not stupid. There is no evidence that he handed over Maimonides’ works to a hostile Church body. Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in the “spirit” of the liberal’s accusation. Intrigued by the rabbi’s complaints about Maimonides, the Inquisitors began to peruse other Jewish religious works. Predictably, it did not take them long to find an offensive one.

  In 1240, eight years after the Maimonidean controversy, a second confrontation occurred; this time, however, it was over a central text of Judaism, the Talmud, and the confrontation was between Christian and Jew. The two central figures in the affair were Nicholas Donin, a converted Jew turned Franciscan,* who brought the overlooked Talmud to the attention of the Vatican, and Rabbi Yehiel ben Joseph, who defended the book in a famous disputation with Donin in 1240.

  In most accounts of the event, Rabbi Yehiel emerges as a skilled and wily advocate. In one exchange, Donin asks, Is it not true that the Talmud insults Jesus? Yes, replies Rabbi Yehiel. The Talmud disparages

  a Jesus, but then, referring to the reigning French monarch, Louis IX, he adds, “not every Louis born in France is the king of France. Has it not happened that two men were born in the same city, had the same name and died in the same manner? There are many such cases.”

  Rabbi Yehiel also had to concede Donin’s point that the Talmud forbade Jews to mix with Christians. But, again, he was able to outmaneuver his opponent. He reminded the officials overseeing the disputation that Christian law also discouraged intercourse between the Christians and Jews. Moreover, added the rabbi, despite such injunctions, in daily life the two groups often intermingled freely. “We [Jews] sell cattle to Christians, we have partnerships with Christians, we allow ourselves to be alone with them, we give our children to Christian wet nurses
.” Although the Talmud could not have had a more clever advocate, two years after the disputation, in 1242, the work was convicted of heresy and publicly burned in a Paris square.

  During the Central Middle Ages, as knowledge about Judaism grew, Christian attitudes began to harden. Now the Jews were not merely “obstinate in their perfidy,” an old charge; they also threatened “injury to the Christian Faith.” This was a new charge, and with its suggestion of subversion it opened the door to policies the Augustinian “but” had helped to keep in check.

  Over the next half century, there were mass expulsions of the Jews in England and France, forced conversions, and mass exterminations.

  One would be accusing God of cruelty if one thought that the Jews’ steadfast bearing of suffering could remain unrewarded.

  . . . The Jews are oppressed with the heaviest taxes, as if each day they had to buy anew the right to live . . . if they want to travel, they have to pay sums to gain . . . protection . . . [and they] cannot own fields or vineyards . . . So the only profession open to them is that of usury, which only increases the Christians’ hatred of them.

  —PETER ABELARD

  The Middle Ages, the birthplace of the stereotypical Jewish nose, was also the birthplace of the stereotypical Jewish moneylender. In

  The Treasure and the Law, a story about the signing of the Magna Carta, one of the central documents of the Middle Ages, Rudyard Kipling manages to squeeze almost every medieval cliché about the moneylender into a single sentence. “Doors shut, candles lit,” Jewish moneylenders put off their rags and cringing and decide the fate of the world with their secret knowledge of that “mighty underground river,” gold. However, the desciption of Peter Abelard, father of Scholasticism and lover of Heloise, is far closer to the mark. Medieval Jews became moneylenders out of desperation, not out of a desire to run their hands through “mighty underground rivers” of gold.

  During the economic boom of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Jews’ near-monopoly on mercantile and financial skills began to dissolve, and with it, their dominance in traditional “Jewish” professions. Increasingly, international trade wore an Italian face, especially an avaricious Venetian and Genoese one, while at home commerce and finance became the province of Flemings, Florentines, Germans, and Lombards, whose reputation for unscrupulousness was legendary. For a people in need of a new profession, moneylending offered many attractions. It required neither travel nor land ownership—activities restricted for Jews. And money, being a highly mobile commodity, could easily be transported in case of expulsion. Most important of all, in the matter of interest, medieval law actually favored the Jew. Though Christians often subverted the ban, it was against canon law to loan money for a profit, but not against Judaic law. Usury was permitted as long as the client was a non-Jew.

  For a people under economic pressure, moneylending also promised the relief of handsome profits. In Burgundy a lender could charge up to 87 percent interest; in other parts of France, more than 170 percent. Thus, a loan of 140 florins taken out in 1334 by Guillaume, Lord of Drace, earned his moneylender 1,800 florins by the time it was paid off. A few Jews saw high interest rates as a way to strike back at a hated oppressor as well as to make money. “One should not benefit an idolater . . . [but] cause him as much damage as possible without deviating from the path of righteousness,” declared Levi ben Gershom. However, most of the men who became moneylenders did so out of the need to make a living. “If we are condemned to live in the midst of nations, and cannot earn our living in any other manner except by money dealings with them; therefore the taking of interest is not prohibited,” declared one medieval Jewish scholar.

  Moneylending personalized anti-Semitism in a way Church doctrine never could; it brought hatred of the Jew into the home and made it intimate, personal, and vicious.* The average peasant farmer or rustic knight knew little about Agobard of Lyon, but he knew about 90 and 100 percent interest rates and what a lien on his cattle would do to him; he also knew from rumors that if he missed a loan payment the moneylender would sell his wife into prostitution. Though many of the things said about moneylenders were clearly slanderous, loan collection is not an activity designed to bring out the best in any people. According to historian Norman Cohn, “Jewish moneylenders often reacted to insecurity and persecution by deploying a ruthlessness of their own.”

  As the Christian world grew increasingly hostile, the Jews turned to princes, kings, bishops, and city councils for protection, but these alliances had a Faustian element. Frequently a ruler, loath to raise taxes, would use the local Jewish community to “sponge” the populace. Jewish moneylenders would be allowed to charge a high interest rate and to use royal courts to collect nonperforming loans, but then the “protector” would confiscate the profits, leaving the Jews to face the resentment of the populace. Often, the alliances also had the unhappy effect of making the Jews a surrogate for the local authority. Thus, while some anti-Semitic attacks were motivated by anger over high interest rates, others were expressions of anger at a local bishop or prince who was too powerful to attack directly. As populist anti-Semitism grew, physical violence became a daily occurrence. In Speyer a mob attacked a Jewish woman named Minna, cutting off her lips and thumbs; in eastern France Jacob Tam was wounded five times on the head to atone for the wounds the Jews had inflicted on Christ.

  Pogroms also became more common. There were major outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in 1146, 1189, 1204, 1217, 1288, 1298, and 1321. The last of these, the pogrom of 1321, was notable for being a kind of dress rehearsal for the anti-Semitic violence of the Black Death. Many of the characteristics that marked the pogroms of 1348 and 1349 were also present in 1321. There were the same whispers about an anti-Christian international conspiracy and the same torch-bearing Holy Week mobs. The two pogroms also began similarly. In both cases they were ignited by accusations of well poisoning, and in both cases at first the accusations were directed not at the Jews, but at another fringe element in medieval society—lepers, criminals, and vagrants, even the English.

  For one French chronicler, the year 1321 was noteworthy mostly for remarkable meteorological events. There was a great snowfall in February, another before Lent, and later in the spring, a great rainfall. Almost parenthetically, as if such things were part of the natural order, the chronicler added that between the first and the second snowfall, the lepers of France were exterminated.

  An account by a Dominican Inquisitor, Bernard Gui, is more forthcoming. The exterminations were provoked by the discovery of a lepers’ plot to overthrow the French Crown. “You see how the healthy Christians despise us sick people,” a coup leader is alleged to have said when the plotters met secretly in Toulon to elect a new king of France and appoint a new set of barons and counts. It is not entirely clear how the plot first came to light, but by Holy Week 1321 nearly everywhere in southern France one heard the same story; the lepers, “diseased in mind and body,” were poisoning local wells and springs. Alarmed, Philip V, “the Long One,” ordered mass arrests. Lepers who confessed complicity in the plot were to be burned at the stake immediately; those who professed innocence, tortured until they confessed, then burned at the stake. Pregnant lepers were allowed to come to term before being burned, but no such stays were offered to lepers with children. In Limoges a chronicler saw leprous women tearing newborns from their cribs and marching into a fire, infants in arm.

  Almost immediately, the populace concluded that the Jews were also involved in the plot. This popular verdict was based on guilt by association. Like the lepers, who wore a gray or black cloak and carried a wooden rattle, Jews were required to dress distinctively. Additionally, both groups were considered deceitful. As an inscription at Holy Innocents cemetery in Paris reminded the unwary: “Beware the friendship of a lunatic, of a Jew, of a leper.” The two groups were also hated, although after the recent Great Famine the Jews were probably hated more because of their moneylending. There was another important connection, though no bil
l of indictment mentioned it: wealth. The Jews, who, despite their vulnerable economic position, still sat on a substantial amount of private capital, and the leper asylums, whose treasuries were flush with contributions and endowments, made lucrative targets. For the mobs, it seemed like that rare opportunity to do well while also doing good. In early June, even before the mass arrests of the lepers began, the populace struck out at the Jews. One chronicler reports that on a summer morning, a group of 160 Jews marched into a fire near Toulon, singing “as if marching to a wedding feast.” Near Vitry-le-François forty Jews slit their own throats rather than fall into Christian hands. In Paris the local Jewish community had to pay 150,000 livres in protection money; some Parisian Jews were murdered anyway.

  The French Crown was brought into the pogroms later in the summer by the alarming “discovery” of a secret covenant between the Jews, the Muslims, and the lepers. The compact first came to light at the end of June, during a solar eclipse in Anjou and Touraine. For a period of four hours on the twenty-sixth, the afternoon sun appeared swollen and horribly engorged, as if bursting with blood; then, during the night, hideous black spots dimpled the moon, as if the craters on its acned face had turned inside out. Certain that the world was coming to end, the next morning the populace attacked the Jews. During the rampage, a copy of the secret covenant was discovered inside a casket in the home of a Jew named Bananias. Written in Hebrew and adorned with a gold seal weighing the equivalent of nineteen florins, the document was decorated with a carving of a Jew—though the figure could have been a Muslim—defecating into the face of the crucified Christ.