by John Kelly
On reading a translated copy of the covenant, Philip V was horrified. The Muslim ruler of Jerusalem, through his emissary, the viceroy of Islamic Granada, was extending to the Jewish people the hand of eternal peace and friendship. The gesture was occasioned by the recent discovery of the lost ark of the Old Testament and the stone tablets upon which God had etched the Law with His finger. Both were found in perfect condition in a ditch in the Sinai Desert and had awoken in the Muslims, who discovered them, a desire to be circumcised, convert to Judaism, and return the Holy Land to the Jews. However, since this would leave millions of Palestinian Muslims homeless, the King of Jerusalem wanted the Jews to give him France in return. The guilty homeowner Bananias told French authorities that after the Muslim offer, the Jews of France concocted the well-poisoning plot and hired the lepers to carry it out.
After reading the translation and several corroborating documents, including a highly incriminating letter from the Muslim King of Tunisia, Philip ordered all Jews in France arrested for “complicity . . . to bring about the death of the people and the subjects of the kingdom.” Two years later, any Jewish survivors of the royal terror were exiled from the country.
The pogroms of 1348 were also fed by rumors of well poisoning and secret cabals, and, as in 1321, it took some time for the rumors to attach themselves to the Jews.
The first pogrom of the Black Death, on April 13, 1348, was a traditional act of Holy Week violence aggravated by the pestilence. Medieval Europeans knew that whenever bad things happened to Christians, the Jews were to blame. On the night of the thirteenth, several dozen Jews were dragged from their homes in Toulon* and murdered amid the glare of torchlight and the sound of heavy-footed tramping through the town. The next morning, as the mutilated bodies of the dead lay drying in the spring sun, rumors about plague poisons were already circulating through southern France, but as yet, the rumors had not attached themselves to the Jews. On April 17, in a letter to Spanish officials, who had written requesting information about the pestilence, Andre Benezeit, the vicar of Narbonne, asserted that the plague had two causes: unfavorable planetary alignments and poisonings. Around Narbonne, the vicar said, beggars and vagrants and the “enemies of the Kingdom of France”—in other words, the English—were helping to spread the plague with secret potions.
A week earlier, French officials had given Pedro the Ceremonious, King of Aragon, similar information. The officials claimed that the plague, which had not yet reached Spain, was spread by a poison sprinkled in water, food, and “the benches on which men sit and put up their feet.” In this iteration of the rumor, the poisoners were described as men posing as pilgrims and friars, not beggars and vagrants. Given the panicky atmosphere in southwestern Europe that spring, it is not surprising that musician Louis Heyligen had heard similar rumors in Avignon. At the end of the month, Heyligen wrote to friends in Flanders that “some wretched men were found in possession of certain powders and [whether justly or unjustly, God knows,] were accused of poisoning the wells with the result that anxious men now refuse to drink the water. Many are burnt for this and are being burnt daily.”
Later in the spring, when
Y. pestis entered Spain, a new round of pogroms erupted. In Cervera, eighteen people were killed, and in Tarrega, “on the tenth day of the month of Av,” a Christian mob yelling, “Death to the traitors!” murdered three hundred Jews. On May 17, two months after the plague arrived in Barcelona, twenty Jews died in a bizarre street brawl. After some thatch from the roof of a Jewish building fell on a passing funeral, the angry mourners attacked the building and killed several of the occupants. Despite fifteen thousand plague dead in Barcelona, in Spain as in southern France, Jews were killed for the sin of being Jews, not for contaminating wells. “Without any reason they [the Christians] injure, harass, and even kill the Jews,” concluded a 1354 report on the pogroms in Aragon.
But north of the Pyrenees, the whispers continued.
. . . rivers and fountains
That were clear and clean.
They poisoned in many places.
During the spring and early summer, several groups were auditioned for the role of poisoner, but history had already ordained who would get the role. Despite the allure of lepers, the charm of beggars, and the novelty of the English and the pilgrims, some tropism in the European soul always brought it back to the Jews.
In July the pestilence, the Jews, and the well-poisoning accusations finally joined hands in Vizille, a little market town just beyond the eastern borders of medieval France. Early in the month, nine Jews, possibly the sons and daughters of refugees who had fled to Vizille after the French Crown banned its Jews in 1322, were tried for contaminating local wells. The fate of the defendants is unknown, but that summer several other Jews in eastern France were burned at the stake for poisoning wells.
On July 6, in a papal bull, Clement VI pointed out that “it cannot be true that the Jews . . . are the cause . . . of the plague . . . for [it] afflicts the Jews themselves.” However, with death coming up every road and through every door, few people were in a mood to listen to reason. Europe desperately needed a villain—someone it could snatch by the throat and throttle in retaliation for all its weeping mothers and dead children, for the squalid, rain-soaked plague pits and the tortured cities. From Vizille the pogroms spilled northeastward across the somber French countryside toward Switzerland. In many places, rumors of the well poisonings arrived months before the plague, but that did nothing to dim their power. Marrying the Jews to the well poisonings gave people a sense of empowerment. Increasingly, in villages and forest clearings, men and women told one another: Perhaps if we kill all the Jews, the plague won’t come to our village. Even if the plague did come, with the Jews dead, at least debts to Jewish moneylenders would be canceled. Later, after the violence subsided, one chronicler would write that the “poison which killed the Jews was their wealth.”
A few resolute leaders defended their Jewish communities, but others, fearing the population would turn on them, stepped aside and allowed the crowd to vent its fear and rage.
Amadeus VI, ruler of Savoy, the region around Lake Geneva, took a middle course. Amadeus did not want angry mobs tossing Jews down wells in Savoy, as the mobs were doing in eastern France; on the other hand, he did not want to appear unsympathetic to popular feeling. Amadeus resolved his dilemma with a traditional bureaucratic maneuver—he ordered an investigation. In the late summer of 1348, eleven local Jews, including the surgeon Balavigny and a woman called Belieta, were arrested and interrogated in the Lake Geneva town of Chillon.
A transcript of Belieta’s interrogation—or, rather, interrogations, since there were two—still exists. On October 8, when she was first questioned, Belieta admitted a knowledge of, but not complicity in, the plot. At “midsummer last,” she told her interrogators, a conspirator had given her a packet of poison, but she had disobeyed his order “to put the poison into the springs,” giving it instead to a “Mamson and his wife for them to do it.”
At her second interrogation on October 18, Belieta was more forthcoming. This time she confessed that she had indeed done “as she was told”; she put poison in the “springs so that people [who] used the water would fall sick and die.” Like Bona Dies, a Jew from Lausanne, who was “racked” for four nights and four days, Belieta may have been tortured beyond endurance. The transcript of her first interrogation says she was only “briefly put to the question,” but the transcript of her second contains no such qualifiers. It is also possible that Belieta was trying to protect her son, Aquetus, another alleged “conspirator,” who was not standing up well under questioning. She may have hoped that if she confessed, the authorities would spare Aquetus; they did not.
Broken in mind and body, after being “put to the question to a moderate degree,” a few days later a distraught Aquetus told his interrogators “that by his soul, the Jews richly deserved to die, and that, indeed, he had no wish to live, for he too richly deserved to die.”
The interrogations at Chillon were an important turning point in the pogroms. Though “documentary evidence” about the well poisonings had already begun to circulate in Germany and Switzerland, both largely plague-free in the early fall of 1348, a sizable segment of educated opinion remained skeptical. Echoing Clement’s papal bull, the doubters asked, “If the Jews are poisoning wells and springs, why do they die of the plague like everyone else?” Whoever prepared the transcripts of the Chillon prisoners’ “confessions”—and the confessions were transcribed, and the transcripts widely circulated—was a master propagandist. Crisp, cogent, and richly detailed, they contained the kind of human moments and details likely to convince a sophisticated medieval reader. For example, after poisoning a spring in his home village of Thonon, surgeon Balavigny supposedly comes home and “expressly forbids his wife and children from using the spring without telling them why”: just the kind of behavior one would expect of a conscientious husband and father.
Describing a recent visit to Venice, another plotter from the Lake Geneva region, a silk merchant named Agimetus, recalls the quality of the water where “he scattered some poison.” It was “a well or cistern of fresh water near the house of the . . . Germans.” Agimetus was also given the busy schedule of an international conspirator. After leaving Venice, he hurries south to Calabria and Apulia to poison wells, then on to Toulouse for more poisonings.
The notion of conspiracy is underlined by the repetition of certain names and places in the transcripts. There are, for example, several references to meetings outside the “upper gate in Villeneuve,” a town near Montreux, where “the leading members of the Jewish community always discuss matters,” and to a bullying secret agent named Provenzal, who tells one timid conspirator, “You’re going to put the poison . . . into that spring or it’ll be the worse for you.” Another recurring character is the gentle Rabbi Peyret, who tells Agimetus, as he is about to leave for Italy, “It has come to our attention that you are going to Venice to buy merchandise. Here is a satchel of poison. . . . Put a little in the wells.”
The plot’s mysterious mastermind, Rabbi Jacob of Toledo, remains a shadowy presence in the transcripts, but, thanks to a thousand years of Christian teaching, every reader already knew what he looked like. Hooked-nosed, bent-shouldered, black-bearded, when the rabbi spoke of his plan for Jewish world domination, the “mighty underground river” of gold echoed in his voice.
In German-speaking Europe, reaction to the Chillon transcripts—and other incriminating documents—was swift and furious. “Within the revolution of one year, that is from All Saints Day [November 1] 1348 until Michaelmas [September 29] 1349, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria were burnt and killed,” wrote Heinrich Truchess, Canon of Constance.
In November, barely a month after Balavigny, Belieta, her son Aquetus, and Agimetus were executed, the first pogroms broke out in Germany. The towns of Solden, Zofingen, and Stuttgart killed their Jews in November; and Reutlingen, Haigerloch, and Lindau killed theirs in December. As January 1349 dawned cold and bright along the Rhine, it was Speyer’s turn. The Jews who did not immolate themselves in their homes were hunted down in the winter streets and bludgeoned to death with pikes, axes, and scythes. This happened so frequently, unburied corpses became a public health problem. “The people of Speyer . . . ,” wrote a chronicler, “fearing the air would be infected by the bodies in the streets . . . shut them into empty wine casks and launched them into the Rhine.” Farther down river in Basel, the city council made a halfhearted attempt to protect the local Jewish community, but when a mob protested the exile of several anti-Semitic nobles, the council lost its nerve. Basel spent the Christmas season of 1348 constructing a wooden death house on an island in the Rhine. On January 9, 1349, the local Jewish community was herded inside. Everyone was there, except the children who had accepted baptism and those in hiding. After the last victim had been shoved into the building and the door bolted, it was set afire. As flames leaped into the cobalt blue sky, the screams and prayers of the dying drifted across the river and into the gray streets of Basel.
In February, when the pogroms reached Strassburg, a bitter winter wind was blowing off the Rhine. The mayor, a tough patrician named Peter Swaber, was a man of conscience and resolve. If the Jews are poisoning wells, he told an angry crowd, bring me proof. The city council supported the mayor, and officials in Cologne sent a letter of encouragement, but in the end, all Swaber had to offer the people of Strassburg was the opportunity to act righteously, while his opponents could promise relief from Jewish debt and access to Jewish property. On February 9, a government more in tune with the popular will unseated Swaber and his supporters. Five days later, on February 14, under a dull winter sun, the Jews of Strassburg were “stripped almost naked by the crowd” as they were marched “to their own cemetery into a house prepared for burning.” At the cemetery gates, “the youth and beauty of several females excited some commiseration; and they were snatched from death against their will.” But the young and beautiful and the converts were the only Jews to see the sun set in Strassburg that Valentine’s Day. Marchers who tried to escape were chased down in the streets and murdered. By one estimate, half of Strassburg’s Jewish population—900 out of 1,884—were exterminated at the cemetery.
A few weeks later the Jews of Constance were “led into the fields at sunset. . . . [S]ome proceeded to the flames dancing, others singing, the rest weeping.” In Brandenburg, the Jews were burned on a grill like meat. “These obstinate Jews . . . heard the sentence with laughing mouths and greeted its execution with hymns of praise,” recalled an eyewitness, who says that “not only did they sing and laugh on the grill, but, for the most part, jumped and uttered cries of joy, and, thus . . . suffered death with great firmness.” In Erfurt, where the pogroms were carried out with less resoluteness, a leader named Hugk the Tall had to admonish slackers, “Why are you standing around? Go . . . look for the Jews and beat them nicely.” In Nordhausen, Landgrave Frederick of Thuringia-Meisen also had to steel the weak. “For the praise and honor of God and benefit of Christianity,” the landgrave admonished a wavering city council, burn the Jews immediately.
According to Canon Truchess, “once started, the burning of the Jews went on increasingly. . . . They were burnt on 21 January [1349] in Messkirch and Waldkirch . . . and on 30 January in Ulm, on 11 February in Uberlingen . . . in the town of Baden on 18 March, and on 30 May, in Radolfzell. In Mainz and Cologne, they were burnt on 23 August . . .
“And, thus, within one year,” wrote the Canon, “as I have said, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria were burnt. And in Austria they await the same fate for they are accursed of God. . . . I could believe that the end of the Hebrews had come if the time prophesied by Elias and Enoch were now complete, but since it is not complete, it is necessary that some be reserved.”
The Canon was more optimistic than Jizchak Katzenelson, who, before his murder in Auschwitz on April 29, 1944, wrote a poem called “Song of the Last Jew”:
Not a single one was spared. Was that
just ye heavens? And were it just, for whom?
For whom?
Chapter Eleven
“O Ye of Little Faith”
LONG BEFORE THE PESTILENCE REACHED THE RHINE, BARRELS with dead Jews inside were floating downstream to the river’s headwaters above Lake Constance. The plague did not arrive in force in Central Europe until the winter of 1348–49, eight months after the well-poisoning rumors began and six months after the first Jews were executed in Vizille. The pestilence seems to have penetrated Central Europe through the Venetian-dominated Balkans. In the Middle Ages, the Adriatic coast of Croatia was home to tens of thousands of citizen-exiles of the
ruler of “half and a quarter and of the Roman empire.” Split—or Spalato, as the Venetians called it—seems to have been the first city in the region struck. On Christmas Day 1347 or thereabouts, a Venetian galley “storm driven from the east” and equipped with enough destructive
power to obliterate the Adriatic coast from end to end visited Split. The following April, attracted by the scent of death in the spring air, packs of mountain wolves abandoned their hilly redoubts above the city and descended on Split to attack survivors.
On January 13, 1348, a second major Venetian colony, Dubrovnik—or Ragusa, as it was known—became infected. In a later outbreak of the plague, the city would gain fame as the creator of the quarantine. In the spring of 1348, Dubrovnik established another remarkable, if less imitated, custom. With total extinction looming, in early June municipal authorities ordered every citizen to make out a will. So great was the agony in the city that word of its calamity spread across the Adriatic and up the Alpine passes to Germany, where, later in the year, officials would send a letter of condolence to survivors, expressing sympathy for the “terrible mortality by which the population has been greatly diminished.” Over the summer Istria, farther north on the Balkan coast, was stricken. Then in August, after death had done all that death could do,
