The rabbinical and capitalist elite in the Jewish communities, about 5 percent of the Jewish families, had furthermore come to abandon the Aristotelian rationalism of Maimonides, and instead embrace an esoteric theosophy called Kabbalah, which originated in the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean in the first century A.D.
The Kabbalah intensified its mystical and astrological contents over time, its masters generating an air of mystery about themselves. Ordinary Jews were excluded from study of the Kabbalah. Only rabbinical families intermarried with the mercantile and banking elite were given access to it. Christians might well suspect that among the hermeneutic secrets of the Kabbalah were arcane recipes for magic, and poisons, and spells, that the Kabbalah constituted a kind of Black Magic.
The mid–fourteenth century was the beginning of the age of the witchcraft delusion that consumed Western Europe for another four hundred years. It was easy to somehow associate the Kabbalah and witchcraft and at the margin there may occasionally have been an actual connection. There is no doubt that there was a doctrinal overlap between the Kabbalah and the dualist Christian Catharist heresy in southern France, which so frightened and horrified church leaders in the early thirteenth century until the Cathars were suppressed by papal-authorized force.
If during the thirteenth century the rabbis had not withdrawn into the theosophic, astrological, and mystical shell of the Kabbalah; if they had remained loyal to the high intellectual road taken by Maimonides in the twelfth century, that of liberal rationalism and the effort to integrate Judaism with contemporary science, the way in fact taken by secular humanistic Judaism today, would that have made a difference in the treatment of Jews during the years of the Black Death? Would there have been less tendency for Christians to make scapegoats out of the Jews, charge them with spreading the plague by poisoning wells, and unleash horrible pogroms on them?
It is of course impossible to answer this counterfactual question. Since Heinrich Graetz wrote the first modern kind of history of the Jews in the 1870s, the overwhelming proportion of Jewish medieval historians have depicted medieval Christian treatment of Jews in the most negative manner. That the Jews were victims is clear, that the leadership of their intellectual elite might have made things worse has been underinvestigated.
The disturbing facts of the treatment of Jews during the Black Death remain. On May 22, 1348, King Peter of Aragon suppressed violence in Barcelona when twenty Jews were slaughtered and Jewish houses pillaged there. The wealthiest Christian burgesses tried to protect the Jews and launched a successful counterattack to repel the rioters. Royal officials also banned the preaching of inflammatory sermons in the city. Between May 17 and 19, there had been anti-Jewish riots in six additional Spanish cities.
The Jews in these places escaped by enclosing themselves within the walls of their quarters. All told, the Jews of Spain escaped lightly by comparison with those of northern Europe. Nevertheless in 1354, when an assembly of Jews met in Barcelona to form a band for the protection of Aragonese Jewry, the documents they drafted still lamented that many affluent and learned Jewish communities that had previously been safe and secure were destroyed suddenly. “A scattered flock of sheep is Israel,” writes a contemporary Jewish writer.
Elsewhere, the attempts of the authorities to suppress violence and, in some cases, actively to protect the Jews began to meet resistance. In May Queen Joan of Naples had reduced taxes on the Jews on her Provencal lands by half in view of their losses in the riots. But in June her officials were expelled from Provencal towns. Pope Clement VI’s bull of July 6, 1348, protected the Jews in Avignon and the vicinity but could not hope to be effective across the whole of Western Europe. (This is the same Clement VI who made fun of Thomas Bradwardine.) The pope was in fact a collector of Hebrew manuscripts. Nevertheless, the Jews became extremely vulnerable.
Secular rulers in various regions began to allow themselves to be swept along by the tide of anti-Jewish feelings. This began to occur in the Dauphine and in Savoy in southern France. It is likely that the limited power of the authorities in these regions made it unwise for them to attempt to contain the situation. The mountainous nature of Savoy made it an especially difficult region to govern other than by compliance with the will of the ruled, as is witnessed by its long history as a refuge for heretics.
Thus, in Dauphine when Count Hubert found that he could not keep order, he ordered the arrest of the Jews, while at the same time keeping up the pretense of pursuing those responsible for the persecutions. Between July and August pogroms spread throughout the country and Jews were thrown into the wells they had purportedly poisoned.
This was a critical stage in the persecution and not only because of the acquiescence of lay rulers. The plague moved more slowly through the foothills of the Alps, and news of its approach tended to run well before it. Two things resulted from this. The persecutions began to precede the advent of the sickness and there was time for legal processes—kangaroo courts that gave official and moral sanction to the atrocities, helping to counter the bull of Pope Clement, which had forbidden the killing of Jews without judicial sentence. Zurich in Switzerland banned its Jews in September 1348, about a year before the plague actually reached the city.
At Chillon near Geneva the attack on the Jews occurred four months before the plague arrived. This cause célèbre at Chillon was a turning point in the persecution. It is unlikely that the atrocities would otherwise have been so prolonged or intense. It was now that critical refinements were added to the story that the Jews had poisoned the water supply. The poison placed in the wells was supposedly made from the skin of a basilisk (a kind of mythical serpent), or from spiders, lizards, and frogs, or from the hearts of Christians and fragments of the Host (the wafer at the Mass).
At Yom Kippur, September 15, 1348, two Jews, Valavigny, a surgeon from Thonon (near Evian les Bains where the mineral water comes from today), and Mamson from Villeneuve (near Montreux, now a ski resort), were tortured into confession. Three weeks later Bellieta and her son Aquet were tortured, a process that was repeated ten days later until finally the tribunal had a thorough list of accusations against the families and their coreligionists.
This followed the confession of Agimet that he had allegedly gone on a poisoning tour at the behest of a Kabbalist rabbi. By November the blood libel and persecution had reached the upper Rhine, spreading into Germany. Stuttgart and Augsburg were among the first towns to be affected.
The escape of the Jews of nearby Regensburg, where 237 leading citizens formed a band to guarantee their protection, suggests that where the urban patriciate enjoyed some breadth of support among the artisans, it was still possible to quell mob violence. Compare this with Augsburg, where the burgomeister, Heinrich Portner, was heavily in debt to Jewish bankers and reputedly opened the gates to the “Jew killers,” thus setting a pattern by which the rich and powerful acquiesced in the murders as a means of eliminating debts.
By December the murders began to take on increasingly macabre and outlandish characteristics. More and more Jews took their own lives rather than wait for their killers. At Esslingen in December they shut themselves in their synagogue and committed mass suicide by firing the building.
At Speyer the populace reveled in the novelty of encasing the bodies of their victims in wine casks and rolling them down the Rhine. “The people of Speyer,” wrote a chronicler, “fearing that the air would be infected by the bodies lying in the streets or even if they burned them, shut them into empty wine casks and launched them onto the Rhine.” We may ask how they could be sure that the cadavers had no poison secreted about their persons with which to infect the waters.
In Switzerland at Basel, the river was the scene of another tragedy. The town council made a noble attempt to ban some people notable for their ferocity against the Jews from the city. This increased the anger of the populace, which forced the repeal of the ban and the exile of the Jews, who were refused any possibility of return for two hundred years. To satisfy the popular mood s
ome fugitives were rounded up and imprisoned until a house could be built for them on an island in the Rhine. There they were burned on January 9, 1349.
In Strasbourg on Saint Valentine’s Day, a Saturday, the Jews were burned. According to a contemporary chronicler, “They were led to their own cemetery into a house prepared for their burning and on the way they were stripped almost naked by the crowd which ripped off their clothes and found much money that had been concealed” (comparison with the Nazi Holocaust is obvious). The most reliable assessment is that of 1,884 Jews in Strasbourg, 900 were burned, the rest being banned from the city.
The populace then looted the synagogue, where they found the shofar, the liturgical ram’s horn. Doubts about its purpose were resolved by the conclusion that it was a means of providing a secret signal to the enemies of Strasbourg to descend upon the undefended city and destroy it.
The conflagration continued during February in at least fifteen German and Swiss towns. When the Flagellants appeared on the scene they incited new persecutions. The Flagellants were a group of monks and fanatical laymen who believed that the plague was directly the result of human sin. They proceeded from town to town whipping each other and bystanders in the streets and causing general mayhem. Bishops hated them, but found it difficult to suppress them because the people took comfort in their displays of humility.
In July 1349, in Frankfurt, the Jews fired their own houses when they were attacked and set a large area of the city ablaze. The council of Cologne had resisted the persecution of the Jews despite the visit of a deputation from Berne bringing a Jew bound in chains who had confessed to his crime of poisoning wells.
The populace responded by attacking Jews in surrounding towns, including Bonn, where the civic authorities were less forceful. But the death of Archbishop Walram on August 14, 1349, made it more difficult to keep order and forced the council to give way to popular pressure. Some of the Jews killed themselves, while others fell at the hands of the mob.
At Mainz in the same month a riot started during a ceremonial of penance, when a thief stole a purse from the person next to him. The mob turned on the Jews, who took up arms to resist. Some of the rioters were killed (two hundred, in one estimate), and this inflamed the anger of the whole community. When the Jews were finally overpowered, they set fire to their own houses, creating such heat that it melted the bells and the lead in the windows of the Church of Saint Quirn.
East of the Rhine the attack on the Jews gradually petered out. Two of the principal rulers, Albert II the Wise of Austria and Casimir II of Poland, were determined protectors of the Jews. However, not even these princes could completely stem the tide of persecution.
Jews often traded in spice or as apothecaries and many practiced as doctors, which brought down additional suspicion on their heads. But the same expertise could bring them protection from the educated and powerful, who valued their services, though this seems to have been far more effective in southern Europe than in Germany and the north. The personal physicians of both Pope Clement VI and Queen Joan of Naples were Jewish.
Part of Pope Clement VI’s favorable disposition to the Jews undoubtedly stemmed from his respect for Hebrew learning and for scientific expertise in particular. Jewish Kabbalistic mastery of astrology also made a favorable impression on the Avignon pope.
But despite his personal sympathies and bulls forbidding persecution, there were more general ways in which Clement helped to sustain the concept of Christian society that promoted persecution and expulsion. He believed as strongly as any pope in the principle of preserving the church from corrupt influences through expulsion and isolation.
In a vituperative sermon preached against Emperor Louis of Bavaria in 1346 he had declared the ruler “a putrid and infected member . . . a rabid dog, a cunning wolf, a fetid he-goat and a cunning serpent.” Expulsion from Christian society was the only appropriate recourse.
For Pope Clement, who copied the Hebrew alphabet into his commonplace book, Jewish and Christian learning were part of the same organic whole. Christendom had issued from Israel and the Jews should not be anathematized and extirpated in the same way as heretics. Such a subtle, academic distinction was bound to carry limited force.
The suspicion that powerful individuals and Christian communities as a whole cynically used the plague as an opportunity to dissolve their debts to the Jews and to recoup some of the wealth that had passed into Jewish hands has long hung over the plague pogroms. The story is in fact a complex one. The Jews were relatively small-time lenders, which made them useful to great princes, who preferred to deal with them rather than the more powerful Florentines and Lombard bankers. But the Jews were detested by a wide spectrum of local society, from minor princes to artisans and peasants.
It is true, however, that there were large amounts of money to be made from the destruction of the Jews. In Cologne the razed Jewish quarter became the linchpin of the property empire of Arnold of Plaise, one of the greatest land speculators in late medieval Germany. The archbishop and town council, who shared Jewish property within the walls, spent part of the windfall beautifying the cathedral and building a new town hall in the Flemish style. That does not necessarily mean we should interpret the disaster as simply a premeditated act of profiteering.
Some of the stories of individuals’ debts and debtors reflect the complexity of the situation. The most notorious case is that of the Augsburg burgomeister Heinrich Portner, who reputedly opened the city gates to rioters pursuing the Jews. Contemporary deeds from Regensburg show that Portner was genuinely in debt to Jewish lenders. In 1345 he had borrowed money at 25 percent. But this does not entirely provide a credible motive for the actions attributed to him. The interest rate, though high, was not excessive by the standards of the mid–fourteenth century.
More emotive than pure cash were the regalia (symbols of office and religious artifacts) that rulers and bishops sometimes pawned in order to raise funds. The Jews’ preparedness to handle these items easily touched the Christian unease over the relationship between their monetary and sacred value.
The bishops, in particular, have been thought cynical and greedy in their treatment of the Jews. While this view is justified to some extent, the position is complex, and attitudes varied dramatically between individual bishops. Archbishop Baldwin of Treves protected Jews under his direct authority and even demanded that the Strasbourg council return the properties of Jews that had been seized. But he was nevertheless in a position to profit from the persecutions.
On February 17, 1349, Philip VI, the French king, gave Archbishop Baldwin all the properties of the Jews who had been slain in Alsace and elsewhere or might yet be slain. Major sums had to be expended on securing election to episcopal sees and the Jews represented an obvious source from which these debts could be recouped. Archbishop Berthold of Strasbourg began his persecution of the Jews in precisely this way. But few clerics were as single-minded in this matter as he was.
Archbishop Walram of Cologne owed five hundred gold pieces (at least a million dollars) to the Jewish banker Meyer von Sieberg. In 1334 Walram had his creditor arrested and executed for abetting counterfeiters. His terrified widow, Judith, renounced the archbishop’s debt. When the Black Death persecutions reached Cologne, Walram’s authority helped to keep the mob pursuing the Jews out of the city, diverting it into the towns and villages of the surrounding countryside.
It was only Walram’s death on August 14, 1349, that exposed the Jews of Cologne itself to annihilation. After the elimination of the Cologne Jews the archbishop was declared heir to all their property outside the city walls and half that was within. It did not necessarily suit the great ecclesiastics any more than other rulers to eliminate the Jews altogether. They were too useful as lenders who could also be heavily taxed in return for protection. Beyond this, the great magnates who served as bishops had a predisposed dislike of popular rioting (even anti-Jewish rioting), which could turn into a general peasant or artisan revolution.
/> It is possible that popular belief that Jews were responsible for the Black Death in France and Germany was inspired or at least exacerbated by a visibly lower incidence of the plague among Jews.
By the mid–fourteenth century a variety of strictures against Jewish engagement in farming had been imposed as the Justinian Code of Roman Law became after 1150 the basis of the continental legal systems. Incorporated in the Justinian Code were imperial edicts from the late fourth century that drove the Jews off the land by prohibiting them from using Christian labor.
By the middle of the fourteenth century the now almost exclusively urbanized Jews were being segregated into distinct quarters within cities, often called the Old Jewry, and after 1500 the ghetto (which originally was the insalubrious section of Venice near iron foundries where Jews were assigned). By the time of the Black Death, Jews had also lost the place as great international merchants that they had enjoyed around A.D. 1000, giving way to Italian merchants in particular.
Segregated in their own quarters (where the Jews lived as humble artisans except for a very small elite of bankers and rabbis), the Jews were cut off from the rodents on the wharves and the cattle in the countryside, the main carriers of infectious disease. In addition, rabbinical law prescribed personal cleanliness, good housekeeping, and highly selective diets. These conditions may very well have isolated the Jews from the hot spots of plague and their practical quarantine aroused suspicion that they were responsible for the disease to which they themselves seemed immune. Of course only a general paranoid attitude to Jews among the populace could activate these suspicions into pogroms.
The Black Death pogroms against the German Jews had the inevitable effect of making them feel frightened and insecure. When Duke Casimir II of Poland not only tried to protect Jews in his domains from pogroms, but invited Jews to move eastward and settle in his vast, underpopulated domains, large numbers of Jews began to move en masse to Poland.
In the Wake of the Plague Page 12
